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SpaceX and the Pentagon have been bickering about the price of using Starshield satellite service during the Iran war, according to a Reuters report published today. It appears that SpaceX asked the military for more money after it started using satellite terminals on "kamikaze" attack drones in Iran.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk claimed the Reuters report is wrong. But Musk also said the military drones initially used the commercial Starlink service instead of the government-specific network, in violation of Starlink's terms of service. Musk blamed the violation on the contractor that built the drones for the government.
The Reuters report, based on Pentagon documents and interviews with sources familiar with the pricing talks, said that SpaceX recently asked the military to pay $25,000 for Starshield access on each kamikaze drone. The Pentagon, which previously paid $5,000 for each connection, objected to the price hike but ultimately agreed to pay it, according to Reuters.
While the $25,000 charge is a monthly fee for the satellite connection provided to a satellite terminal, the terminals are being used with drones that only make one-way trips before hitting targets and detonating on impact.
Starshield is a network for government entities and is based on Starlink technology. Musk wrote in an X post today that the "Reuters article is false." But in the very same post, he seemed to confirm a dispute over how the military used SpaceX satellite technology.
"They made improper use of the Starlink civilian system for military purposes. Direct violation of terms of service," Musk wrote today, seeming to indicate that the military used the commercial Starlink system when it should have been using Starshield.
Musk said later that the drones were configured incorrectly by a military contractor. "There is a US government arm of SpaceX called Starshield, which has a different set of satellites than Starlink, which is for civilian use. The company that makes the suicide drones incorrectly used the civilian system, instead of the Starshield," Musk wrote.
The Pentagon "denied any violation of its agreement with SpaceX," according to Reuters. Starshield terminals sold by SpaceX to the military can connect both to the commercial Starlink satellite constellation and Starshield, the Reuters article said.
The drones in question are part of the Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS), which was made by defense contractor Spektreworks. We contacted Spektreworks today and will update this article if it responds.
Musk previously addressed the military use of SpaceX satellite terminals on drones on March 1, one day after the Iran war began, in response to an X post in which a user posted a picture of one of the drones that appeared to have an integrated satellite terminal.
"It is a violation of commercial Starlink terms of service to use the terminal for weapon systems. This applies to all users and is shut down when discovered," Musk wrote at the time. "There is a separate network called Starshield, which is operated by the US government. This is not under SpaceX control."
Within weeks of the US launching strikes in Iran, "SpaceX executives met Pentagon officials and argued the military was underpaying for the service," the Reuters article said.
"SpaceX argued the LUCAS drones were operating under conditions that aligned more closely with its aviation tier subscription rather than a lower priced land or mobility service. Pentagon officials argued that the $25,000 price tag—a monthly fee—was designed for aircraft, not kamikaze drones that used [a] Starlink connection for a matter of minutes or hours, according to one of the sources," Reuters reported.
The Pentagon "ultimately agreed to pay SpaceX's proposed price increase" from $5,000 to $25,000, according to Reuters. LUCAS drones give the military a cheaper alternative to traditional missiles and grew out of an effort to reverse-engineer Iranian-built drones. Each drone reportedly costs about $35,000.
Despite agreeing to the price increase, "senior officials including Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg remained uneasy about the arrangement," and Pentagon officials in April "met to revisit the pricing with Terrence O'Shaughnessy, a retired four-star Air Force general who now leads SpaceX's defense business," according to Reuters.
"Still, the Pentagon is currently considering an additional purchase of more than 3,500 Starshield terminal subscriptions, including 100 with the higher-priced aviation tier, according to Pentagon documents reviewed by Reuters," the article said. "The deal could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue for SpaceX, though Reuters could not determine whether an agreement has been finalized, or what price is being discussed."
There has also reportedly been a dispute over the price of providing Starlink mobile service to Iranian citizens who have suffered under a government-imposed Internet blackout. In January, the US reportedly smuggled 6,000 Starlink broadband terminals into Iran to help residents bypass blocks to Internet access.
Reuters reported that Pentagon officials asked SpaceX about providing Iranians with direct-to-cell service, which can keep people connected on standard cell phones without needing a terminal.
"SpaceX, which generated $11.4 billion in revenue from Starlink in 2025, proposed charging as much as $500 million to launch the capability, along with a $100 million monthly fee to operate it, according to one of the people and Pentagon documents—prompting alarm from defense officials over the price. Reuters could not determine whether an agreement has been reached," the Reuters article said.
The US and SpaceX previously had a dispute over payment for satellite terminals sent to Ukraine beginning in 2022. SpaceX initially donated terminals before asking the Pentagon to pay for ongoing service and more terminals. The Defense Department later confirmed that it was paying for Starlink service in Ukraine.
SpaceX's IPO filing last week said that revenue for its government connectivity business dropped in the most recent quarter. SpaceX's overall connectivity revenue in Q3 2026 was $3.3 billion, a year-over-year increase of $782 million. The increase was driven by boosts in revenue from consumers, large businesses, mobile partnerships with wireless carriers, and Starlink's aviation and maritime offerings. The overall revenue increase would have been higher if not for "a decrease of $175 million in our government connectivity business," SpaceX said.
While SpaceX isn't the only operator of low-Earth orbit satellites, Reuters notes that "no other company provides a comparable alternative to Starlink, which has become an increasingly critical tool in modern warfare since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022."
The Department of Defense declined to comment on its negotiations with SpaceX today, but told Ars that it "is operating in accordance with the terms and conditions of its contracts." The department also provided Ars with a statement indicating that the military is looking for alternatives to SpaceX.
"The Department of War is committed to fostering a competitive environment for commercial satellite communications and is conducting comprehensive market research to continuously monitor commercial offerings that align with government requirements," the Pentagon statement said. "We are actively engaging with industry to identify innovative solutions and new entrants, ensuring acquisitions are inclusive of a diverse range of capable vendors."
The statement added that the Space Force's "Commercial Satellite Communications Office is working on additional options with other proliferated low earth orbit partners as part of its strategy to leverage the unprecedented capabilities provided by the commercial SATCOM industry."
We contacted SpaceX and will update this article if it responds.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell responded to the Reuters article in an X post today. "The Fake News media has the story wrong, again. SpaceX remains a strong and valued partner to the Department of War. The claims in this article are simply not based in reality and do not reflect the close, effective collaboration between our teams."
Musk shared Parnell's post, calling it a "correction issued by [the] Department of War."
USC researchers built the "Musician Hand," a four-fingered tendon-driven robot that learns to play piano by ear after just two minutes of random "motor babbling" on the keys. Hearing a ~30-note melody once, it converts the audio to a spectrogram, maps sounds to the motor commands needed to reproduce them, and plays the tune back in one attempt — well enough that blind judges sometimes couldn't tell it from trained human pianists.
The work, led by Hesam Azadjou under Francisco Valero-Cuevas at USC Viterbi (published in Royal Society Interface), challenges the traditional robotics assumption that good performance requires massive data, heavy computation, and tightly controlled environments. Instead, it mimics how animals learn: perceive, guess, adapt — using minimal energy and experience.
The researchers see the same "perceptual robotics" approach enabling cheaper, faster-deployed machines that work in unpredictable real-world settings — e.g., exoskeletons that learn an individual's gait early in Parkinson's and later help restore it, or home physical-therapy robots that adapt to each patient in real time.
Security researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria have published a paper describing a side-channel attack that lets a malicious website identify what other sites and apps a visitor has open by measuring SSD access latency through JavaScript inside a standard browser sandbox. The technique, called FROST (Fingerprinting Remotely using OPFS-based SSD Timing), correctly identified visited websites with roughly 89% accuracy and running applications with roughly 96% accuracy on a test Mac, requires nothing from the victim beyond visiting the attacker's page, and works across different browsers.
FROST exploits the Origin Private File System (OPFS), a browser API that lets websites create and store files on a user's local disk without prompting for permission. Previous SSD side-channel attacks that we’ve seen require native code running through privileged kernel interfaces, but FROST eliminates that requirement.
The team disclosed their findings to Google, Apple, and Mozilla: Google said it doesn't consider fingerprinting a security vulnerability, Apple called the attack "currently out of scope," and Mozilla acknowledged the findings without implementing fixes.
The attack creates a large OPFS file on the victim's SSD, with both Chrome and Safari allowing a website to claim up to 60% of total disk space through OPFS, which on a 256GB drive is over 150GB. The file must exceed the system's available RAM so that every random 4 KB read hits the SSD rather than the OS’s page cache. When other activity generates its own disk I/O, it creates measurable latency spikes in the attacker's reads, and those timing patterns are fed into a convolutional neural network trained to recognize specific websites and applications by their I/O signatures.
Because the contention occurs at the storage level, the attack works across browsers; running the attacker page in Chrome while the victim browsed in Safari showed only a 3.38% throughput difference versus a same-browser attack.
The full fingerprinting attack was only tested on an M2 Mac Mini with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. On Linux, the researchers confirmed they could measure SSD latency from the browser, but didn’t run the full fingerprinting classification, and Windows wasn’t tested at all. The OPFS file must also reside on the same physical SSD as the monitored activity, which isn’t guaranteed on multi-drive workstations.
By far the biggest barrier to this attack is the large file size; most people will notice tens or hundreds of gigabytes suddenly disappearing, but the researchers propose mitigations, including capping OPFS file sizes to fit within system memory or requiring explicit permission for OPFS file creation. Given that Google doesn’t classify fingerprinting as a security issue, browser-level fixes are unlikely in the near term.
Now that doesn't mean Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman thinks Rust is magic:
At the Rust Week conference, the world's biggest Rust language conference, in Utrecht, Netherlands, Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman opened by saying: "I'm here to talk about untrusted data and Linux, and how Rust is going to save us." After "a long month or two on the kernel security list," he pushed that point even further: "I'm going to make even a bolder statement and say, 'You are going to save Linux.' Sorry, it's all on you."
What he was talking about was the sudden flood of serious Linux security holes being discovered, such as Dirty Frag, Copy Fail, and Fragnesia, that have come to light thanks to the latest AI bug-detection programs.
As a result, Kroah-Hartman, who has "seen every single kernel security bug ever" since 2005, said the kernel team is now issuing "13 CVEs [Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures] a day, or something, something crazy." He thinks Rust is one of the few realistic ways to slash the class of bugs that come from C's traditional error-handling and resource-management pitfalls.
Kroah-Hartman illustrated those pitfalls with real C bugs in the kernel, including a 15-year-old Bluetooth bug that dereferenced a pointer without checking it and a Xen bug where "we forgot to unlock" in an error path. "The majority of the bugs in the kernel are this tiny, minor stuff," he explained. "Error conditions aren't checked, locks aren't forgotten, unreleased memories leak, and vulnerabilities add up over time. They crash the kernel. This is what we live with in C. This is why we don't like it."
Kroah-Hartman argued that the "best beauty of Rust" is catching those mistakes at build time rather than in review. For example, when it comes to locking, he highlighted Rust's locking abstractions in the kernel: "The only way you can get access to inner pointers of structures is by grabbing that lock, and releasing the lock automatically. The compiler does it, it's guarded, the lock happens, everything's happy. You just can't write code to access these values...without grabbing the lock. The compiler will not let you."
Those properties, he argued, directly remove a huge fraction of the bugs he sees: "This is going to save us those two things. First, 60% of the bugs in the kernel right there, they're gone. Thank you." The payoff is earlier, more automated enforcement: "If this happens at build time, not review time, don't make me a maintainer who has to read your code [and] say, 'Oh, then you properly check that error value. Oh, did you properly grab the locks in the right spot?' Rust gives us that for free. This is the best thing ever."
Even if Rust vanished tomorrow, Kroah-Hartman argued, it has already forced the kernel to clean up C code and interfaces. He credited Rust's influence outright: "We stole this from Rust. Thank you. It's a good idea, so if Rust disappeared tomorrow, we have cleaned up the C code in the kernel so much and taken in the ideas. We thank you, you've made Linux better with it just by existing."
[...] Now, that doesn't mean he thinks Rust is magic. It's not. He cited one of the first Rust components merged into the kernel: QR code display logic used when the kernel crashes. "That logic was written in Rust. Famously, it had a memory bug. It was given a buffer and its size, and the rest of the st code never checked the buffer size... Could scribble all over memory, because Rust can crash just as bad as C." So, Rust "is not a silver bullet."
He's also not encouraging anyone to rewrite the Linux kernel in Rust. One attendee asked, "Do you actually encourage rewriting stuff that's already there in the kernel with [Rust]?" Greg replied: "No, we don't want rewrites, so unless you're the maintainer and owner of that file, just do it for new stuff. Leave existing C code alone, and let's evolve forward after that." He gave Binder, Android's core interprocess communication (IPC), as an example where both C and Rust implementations coexist temporarily to reach parity, after which "they're going to delete the C code, because I trust them, and they are the owners and maintainers of both those."
[...] What ultimately sold a number of core maintainers, including him, on Rust was how it "makes reviewing code easier." With CI [Continuous Integration] bots enforcing builds and Rust's type system enforcing key invariants, maintainers can "focus on the logic" rather than resource bookkeeping: "I can care about that one function. I don't have to worry about the rest of this stuff, because I assume that it works properly, because it was built properly."
Internally, he said, the top maintainers have already made their call on Rust's status: "The Linux kernel maintainers, we get together every year and talk about what the processes are doing. Last year, we said the Rust experiment is over. It's not an experiment. This is for real." The rationale: "The people behind it are real. We trust them. We know what they're doing. They've shown and put in the work to make Rust a viable language in the kernel, and we're going to make this stick. Let's go full speed ahead. And, as always," he said wryly, "world domination proceeds."
The feds are raising the alarm about a new category of threat:
In the wake of attacks on CEOs, a nationwide protest movement targeting data centers, and increasing concerns about AI job replacement, federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
More than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and fusion centers obtained by WIRED show a national shift taking place to surveil this new and worryingly broad category of people and activities deemed an emerging threat.
This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding "anti-American," "anti-Christian," and "anti-capitalism" beliefs. Earlier this month, Trump's counterterrorism czar, Sebastian Gorka, released a public counterterrorism strategy claiming that left-wing extremists are one of the three top counterterrorism priorities facing the United States.
Taken together, these Trump administration directives have commandeered the domestic surveillance apparatus to surveil and criminalize speech and assembly that challenges the ideology of the White House. A new focus on anti-technology extremism adds an unreported category to already public designations under a presidency that has heavily invested political and material capital in AI and data center proliferation.
Among the documents in the tranche obtained by WIRED is a New York Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau report that warns of widespread upheaval in response to AI adoption. Of particular note is a novel term for what the bureau purports to be an emerging extremism threat.
"The chaotic atmosphere that may result from emergent AI technology in the next five years may fuel large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest and anti-tech violent extremist activity, especially in large urban areas such as New York City," the report reads. The term "anti-tech violent extremism" does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports or guides and represents a novel grouping of a wide range of ideologies under a single extremist category.
[...] Created in the wake of 9/11, 80 fusion centers now pockmark the country and serve as go-betweens for federal intelligence agencies and state and local law enforcement. In addition to concerns about portions of the American populace disturbed by the rapid proliferation of AI, these centers are also gathering and circulating "intelligence" about alleged threats to data centers.
A Western Pennsylvania fusion center, for example, claimed that "adversarial actors, including state-sponsored entities, criminal groups, and extremists, such as homegrown violent extremists or environmental extremists, may target US data centers" and that "these actors could also exploit the strategic importance of data centers to the US economy, using them for activities like cryptocurrency mining or leveraging third-party entities, such as front companies, to gain access to US data and infrastructure."
A Turkish researcher just shared details of a sprayable radar absorbent material (RAM) designed to be applied to drones and other small uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to the Defense Blog, Yunus İnce and their small defense research firm have been working on the material, called Kürşat 3.0, for more than seven years. İnce shared test footage of the product with the publication, showing the claimed 43dB signal attenuation. This is a greater reduction compared to broadband coatings tested by academic researchers in standardized test conditions. However, the company's claims must still be validated by a third-party expert to prove that it actually works and makes it harder to detect UAVs.
Drone warfare has exploded in recent years, with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which started in 2022, showing how these cheap and tiny gadgets could effectively stop the advance of a multi-million-dollar tank column. Both sides of the conflict have wholeheartedly adopted UAVs as part of their military tactics, and militaries around the globe are devising cost-effective ways of taking down this new threat, like using lasers, microwaves, or good ol’ kinetic energy. Drone operators and manufacturers are not taking these threats lightly, with companies working to make them harder to detect via radar.
[...] A UAV’s advantage is its small size and low cost, making it cost-inefficient to produce specialized radar-deflecting designs. However, the Kürşat 3.0 could be a game-changer if other scientists can confirm that it really works. Many UAVs are so small that it’s difficult to detect them at longer distances — covering them with this “spray-on” RAM would only make it harder for defenders to detect and lock on to them using traditional radar sets.
This coating is not the be-all and end-all of drone stealth, though. That’s because most drones are built for efficiency and speed, not stealth, so they lack the required geometry to deflect radar signals. This is especially true for quadcopters, where the four exposed blades would easily reflect signals back to the radar transceiver. But because they’re often already tiny, covering them in Kürşat 3.0 spray would increase their survivability and make it harder for defenders to target them on their radar scopes.
kolie has been hard at work producing a logical line for line copy of rehash (written in perl) in Python - including warts where they affect the functioning of the software. This will ensure that the software remains maintainable into the future, and gives kolie a chance to fix some previously unknown bugs.
PyHash is currently running on dev.soylentnews.org. Please take a look and report any problems / observations / comments in kolie's journal. This software is still under development as kolie explains. If you cannot log in with your usual username/password you might have to create a new account on dev.
A newly disclosed Linux local privilege escalation vulnerability, CIFSwitch, allows an unprivileged local user to gain root access on certain systems via the Linux kernel's CIFS client and the cifs-utils userspace helper. CIFS, also known as SMB, is a network file-sharing protocol commonly used to access Windows file shares from Linux and other platforms.
Security researcher Asim Manizada disclosed the issue, describing it as a non-universal Linux local root vulnerability since exploitability depends on specific distribution configurations. A public proof-of-concept exploit is available, increasing the urgency for patching and mitigation on affected systems.
CIFSwitch exists at the interface between the kernel CIFS client and cifs.upcall, the cifs-utils helper for Kerberos-authenticated CIFS/SMB mounts. While CIFS is commonly associated with Windows file shares, Linux systems can also mount SMB shares using the kernel CIFS client.
The vulnerability arises from how CIFS uses Linux keyrings. Normally, the kernel requests a cifs.spnego key, and the system's request-key configuration launches cifs.upcall as root to handle Kerberos/SPNEGO authentication.
According to the disclosure, the vulnerability allows an unprivileged userspace process to request a forged cifs.spnego key description. The kernel failed to properly reject descriptions not originating from kernel CIFS, and the default request-key rule could still launch cifs.upcall as root.
The userspace helper then parsed attacker-controlled fields, including pid, uid, creduid, and upcall_target, as if they were generated by the kernel. By setting upcall_target=app, the helper could switch into a namespace controlled by the attacker.
The attack is particularly dangerous because account lookup through NSS can occur before the final privilege drop. In this state, a namespace-local NSS configuration and module can be loaded by the root helper, enabling attacker-controlled code to run with root privileges.
[...] The good news is that CIFSwitch does not affect every Linux system by default. The researcher lists several required conditions: a vulnerable kernel, an affected cifs-utils version, the default cifs.spnego request-key rule, enabled unprivileged user and mount namespaces, and SELinux or AppArmor policies that do not block the attack chain.
The tested stock-exploitable systems listed in the disclosure include Linux Mint 21.3 and 22.3, CentOS Stream 9, Rocky Linux 9, Kali Linux 2021.4 through 2026.1 headless, AlmaLinux 9.7 and Azure cloud image, SLES 15 SP7, SLES SAP 15 SP7, and SLES SAP 16 with SELinux permissive.
Other systems are listed as exploitable under the default policy only if cifs-utils is installed manually. That group includes Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, 20.04 LTS, and 22.04 LTS, Debian 11 "Bullseye", 12 "Bookworm", and 13 "Trixie", Pop!_OS 22.04 and 24.04, openSUSE Leap 15.6, Rocky Linux 8 GenericCloud, Oracle Linux 8 and 9 KVM images, and Amazon Linux 2023 with SELinux permissive.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/jensen-huang-urges-super-micro-to-tighten-compliance
Huang told reporters at Songshan Airport that Nvidia insists its partners follow U.S. trade rules. "We insist our partners are compliant. We hope that they will enhance and improve their regulation compliance and prevent that from happening in the future," Huang said in an address to the media.
The Taiwan case is separate from, but closely related to, the much larger U.S. federal prosecution unsealed in March. That indictment charged Supermicro co-founder Yih-Shyan "Wally" Liaw and two others with conspiring to smuggle approximately $2.5 billion worth of Nvidia-equipped servers to China through shell companies in Southeast Asia. Liaw has pleaded not guilty, and Supermicro has said it’s not named as a defendant and is cooperating with the investigation.
In the same press scrum at Songshan Airport, Huang confirmed that China is included in the $200 billion addressable market he projected for Nvidia's upcoming Vera CPU during the company's earnings call on May 20th. "H200 has been licensed to ship to China. It would be terrific to be able to serve that market. The Chinese market is very important. It's very large, of course," Huang told reporters, according to Reuters.
Despite the licensing approval, not a single H200 has been delivered to a Chinese customer. While roughly 10 Chinese firms have been cleared to purchase the chip, shipments haven’t started, and President Trump's talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing earlier this month produced no breakthrough on Nvidia chip sales.
Huang is in Taipei ahead of Nvidia's GTC Taipei event and his Computex keynote on June 1st, where he’s expected to explore the Vera Rubin platform's software stack. He described the platform as "the largest product launch, probably in the history of Taiwan," noting that each Vera Rubin NVL72 system contains nearly 2 million parts and involves around 150 Taiwanese ecosystem partners.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Blue Origin have revealed what went wrong on the third flight of New Glenn and it looks like a cryogenic leak is our culprit.
According to Blue Origin: "Prior to our second GS2 burn, we experienced an off-nominal thermal condition, and, as a result, one of the BE-3U engines didn't achieve full thrust to reach our target orbit."
The FAA's explanation was a little more detailed: "The final mishap report identified the direct cause of the mishap as a cryogenic leak that froze a hydraulic line and led to a thrust anomaly during the second stage engine burn."
The April 19 launch of the NG-3 mission started well. The first stage firing went well, and the booster made a successful landing on Blue Origin's floating landing platform, Jacklyn. However, during the second burn of the second stage (dubbed GS2), things went awry. One of the two BE-3U engines failed to achieve full thrust, leaving the payload, AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite, in a lower-than-planned orbit. AST SpaceMobile later said the spacecraft would be deorbited.
All told, nine corrective actions were identified to prevent a repeat of the problem, and Blue Origin says all have been implemented ahead of the next New Glenn launch. The FAA said it will verify those changes before the rocket flies again.
It is, however, not immediately clear what payload the company will be launching. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp showed off a video of the next vehicle being lifted onto the Transporter Erector, but gave no further details.
Like SpaceX, which will be launching the next batch of AST SpaceMobile BlueBird satellites, Blue Origin has several targets to hit. It is expected to launch an uncrewed lunar lander this year and deliver NASA's off-again-on-again VIPER mission to the lunar surface in late 2027.
NASA boss Jared Isaacman said in recent weeks that SpaceX and Blue Origin had told the agency both would have vehicles "to meet our needs" for a late 2027 rendezvous, docking, and capability test tied to Artemis III.
Approval from the FAA removes one distraction for the company. However, time is running out for Blue Origin to accomplish its goals before the end of next year.
These changes seemed to have pushed the team’s drone further, as it achieved 393 mph (633 kph or 341 kts) in its first test run. Unfortunately, physics got the better of them, as antenna geometry, the Doppler effect, and signal overload caused the drone to lose connection from the controller at such a high speed. The two did not bother attempting to recover it, as they knew that it was lost for good at these speeds. Furthermore, even if the drone lost connection right in front of the controller, it would have traveled miles at its current speed before it would have crashed.
Thankfully, they still had another drone available for testing and another set of their updated propellers. So, they set out again the following day and continued their tests. It seemed that they only had enough batteries for two test runs, and adverse weather was quickly approaching, so they had to set up quickly and get to flying. It was also a windy day, so they made one downwind flight and one upwind flight, and they just averaged the speeds between the two to get a rather fair result.
It was on the downwind test flight that they achieved their record 453 mph, which is above the 441-mph record that they initially hoped for. However, when they accounted for the 34-mph tailwind, this meant that the drone only had an actual airspeed of 419 mph (674 kph or 364 kts). For their final test run, the duo achieved 397 mph (640 kph or 345 kts) against the wind. They averaged the two runs, getting a figure of 425 mph (685 kph or 369 kts) — this might be a bit short of the more than 434 mph (700 kph or 377 kts) they hoped to achieve, but it still beats the current world record.
If you want to make your own attempt at achieving the drone world speed record, you can actually get guidance through their Drone Pro Hub website. And while they use custom propeller blades made by a professional, you can actually 3D print the body and other components at home with one of the best 3D printers you can buy.
Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has offered a definitive date for the BepiColombo mission's arrival at Mercury.
BepiColombo is a joint effort between JAXA and the European Space Agency. The mission involves three craft: A vehicle called the Mercury Transfer Module (MTM), which carries the ESA's Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and JAXA's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO).
The MTM's primary role is getting the two orbiters to Mercury, but mission boffins have used its cameras to snap images of Earth, Venus and Mercury in the seven-and-a-half years since its October 2018 launch.
The mission plan called for the MTM to swing around the Earth once and Venus twice, plus six loops around Mercury. A thruster glitch saw mission planners revise that itinerary and meant the probe would arrive in orbit at Mercury in November 2026 – eleven months later than first planned.
In a Monday Xeet from a JAXA X account dedicated to the MMO, the Japanese space agency revealed the exact date BepiColombo will arrive: November 21.
"We'll gently be captured by Mercury's gravity and enter orbit," the Xeet states, before adding that Japan's orbiter will detach from the MTM on December 10.
Mission plans assume another few weeks will pass before either orbiter gets down to work.
BepiColombo is humanity's third mission to Mercury, following 1973's Mariner 10 and 2004's Messenger. The MMO and MPO carry instruments that, it's hoped, will help to enhance our understanding of Mercury's interior and magnetosphere.
We currently know very little about Mercury because it is so close to the Sun that spacecraft must avoid being trapped by the massive gravity of Earth's nearest star, which makes navigation and ongoing operations complicated. Once spacecraft do reach Mercury, temperatures are fierce even hundreds of kilometres above the planet's surface. The ESA has used the example of a laptop that can work inside a pizza oven to illustrate the difficulties its probe will face and loaded its MPO with radiators and 94kg of insulation to protect its instruments.
The planet, our solar system's smallest and most dense, also defies observation from telescopes because the Sun shines so brightly it can damage sensitive optics.
BepiColombo's imminent arrival therefore brings hope that humanity can learn more about a planet that, thanks to its speedy orbit, is often closer to Earth than any other.
https://www.righto.com/2026/05/microcode-inside-intel-8087-floating.html
In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip was highly influential, and today most processors use the floating-point standard introduced by the 8087.
The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to accurately compute functions such as square roots, tangents, and exponentials. These algorithms are implemented inside the chip in low-level code called microcode. I'm part of a group, the Opcode Collective, that is reverse-engineering this microcode. In this post, I take a close look at the microcode for one of the 8087's instructions—FXCH—and explain how the microcode works. The FXCH (Floating-point Exchange) instruction exchanges two floating-point registers. You might expect this instruction to be trivial, but there's more going on than you might expect; the microcode uses 14 micro-instructions to implement the exchange instruction.
To explore the microcode, I opened up an 8087 chip and created a high-resolution image with a microscope. The large microcode ROM occupies a central position, holding the micro-instructions that control the chip. The microcode engine on the left steps through the microcode, handling jumps and subroutine calls. The bottom half of the chip is the "datapath", the circuitry that performs floating-point calculations; it is split into a 16-bit datapath for the number's exponent and a 64-bit datapath for the number's fractional part (also known as the significand).
1. Political Appointees Take Control of Grant Awards (§200.205). Senior political appointees, rather than career scientists or program officers, would now be required to conduct a "pre-issuance review" of every discretionary grant before it is awarded. These appointees are explicitly forbidden from deferring to peer reviewers or routinely ratifying their recommendations.
2. Peer Review Is No Longer Binding The rule explicitly states that peer review recommendations "remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding."
3. "Gold Standard Science" as an Undefined Political Test (§200.205) without defining it in any concrete or measurable way.
4. Active Grants Can Be Terminated at Any Time, for Any Reason (§200.340). The rule codifies and expands the authority to terminate active grants mid-award simply because they are "inconsistent with program goals or agency priorities."
5. DEI, Gender Research, and Related Topics Banned as Grant Conditions (§200.300)
6. Broad Prohibition on International Scientific Collaboration (§200.220)
7. "Domestic-First" Framework for Research Awards (§200.202(e))
8. Applicants Can Be Denied Based on Organizational "Affiliations" (§200.206)
9. E-Verify Mandated for All Grant Recipients (§200.303)
10. OMB Claims Direct Binding Authority Over All Agencies
There's 19 total, some might have merit with a bit of tweaking but the majority of this is flat out anti-science garbage.
A London startup trained an AI on 4.1 million recipes across seven languages
- KAIKAKU.AI published Epicure, a family of three ingredient AI models trained on 4.14 million multilingual recipes.
- The model doesn't store recipes—it stores what was learned from them, letting users navigate cooking knowledge mathematically.
- Three variants—Cooc, Chem, and Core—sit at different points on a recipe-context vs. flavor-chemistry spectrum, each answering a slightly different culinary question from the same 2MB file.
Josef Chen says he compressed all of human cooking into two megabytes. That's a bold claim. It also checks out.
Chen, co-founder and CEO of London food AI startup KAIKAKU.AI, published a paper on arXiv this week, alongside researcher Jakub Radzikowski, presenting Epicure—three AI models trained on 4.14 million recipes pulled from 11 datasets across seven languages. The result: a map of 1,790 ingredients, each described by 300 numbers, ...
[...]
Think of it as a map. Every ingredient gets a precise location based on how it behaves across millions of real dishes worldwide. The math is blunt: 1,790 ingredients × 300 numbers per ingredient × 4 bytes each ≈ 2.05 megabytes. Those numbers encode which ingredients appear together, which share flavor compounds, and which belong to the same culinary tradition. Once the model learns all that from the recipes, the recipes can go. The knowledge lives in the coordinates.
This is essentially the same trick word2vec pulled on language back in 2013, when Google researchers showed that you could do arithmetic with meaning. Epicure does that for food. Take beef, point it toward America and you'll get bread, lettuce, maybe beer. Point it toward South East Asia and the model stops thinking about burgers and grills and starts thinking about soy sauce, ginger, and sesame oil.
[...]
Epicure comes in three versions, and picking the right one depends on what you're actually asking. Cooc learns from recipe co-occurrence—what shows up together in real dishes. Chem learns from flavor chemistry—which ingredients share aroma compounds from the FlavorDB chemical database. Core is a mix between the previous two.
[...]
Why this isn't ChatGPT for food
Epicure has no general knowledge, no language generation, and no ability to hallucinate an ingredient it's never seen. It knows 1,790 ingredients. That's the whole world, as far as this model is concerned. What it gives up in breadth it gains in reliability—unlike recipe chatbots that will confidently suggest poison as a cooking ingredient if you push them the wrong way.
[...]
Practical uses aren't hard to picture. A chef asks what the East Asian equivalent of a Mediterranean ingredient looks like. A food product developer asks what minimally processed swap lands in the same flavor zone as an additive. A recipe app needs a coherent substitution when an ingredient is missing from the pantry.
The Epicure paper is a research release. The trained models are live on Hugging Face and an interactive ingredient map is publicly accessible at epicure.kaikaku.ai. They even released an MCP for your agents. Full training code is not released at this time.
I would clarify it to "All Modern Human Cooking", as the ingredients don't include woolly mammoth nor dodo. But it does have bison.