An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home.

A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.

Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 5 , officials discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a cracked window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk.

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RealPage has agreed to settle an antitrust lawsuit raised by the Department of Justice, alleging that landlords used its tools to coordinate efforts to artificially raise rental prices across the US.

In a press release , the DOJ promised the proposed settlement “would help restore free market competition in rental markets for millions of American renters.”

For years since the pandemic started, rental prices outpaced inflation, and the DOJ suspected that RealPage was the dominant force driving a market that never favored renters. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data covering a 12-month period ending this September showed rents are still rising by 3.5 percent amid an affordability crisis, leaving some US renters in fear of housing instability.

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After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up , though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey . And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

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Our explanation of the outer Solar System has revealed a host of icy moons, many with surface features that suggest a complex geology. In some cases, these features—most notably the geysers of Enceladus—hint at the presence of oceans beneath the icy surfaces. These oceans have been ascribed to gravitational interactions that cause flexing and friction within the moon, creating enough heat to melt the body’s interior.

Something that has received a bit less attention is that some of these orbital interactions are temporary or cyclical. The orbits of any body are not always regular and often have long-term cycles. That’s also true for the other moons that provide the gravitational stress. As a result, the internal oceans may actually come and go, as the interiors of the moons melt and refreeze.

A new study, released today by Nature Astronomy, looks at one of the consequences of the difference in density between liquid water and ice (about 10 percent): the potential for the moon’s interior to shrink as it melts, leaving an area of low pressure immediately below its icy shell. If the moon is small enough, this study suggests, that could cause the surface of the ocean to boil.

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Like many mushroom harvesters, I got interested in foraging for fungi during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania.

I wasn’t doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology . One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart . We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment.

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Anthropic today released Opus 4.5 , its flagship frontier model, and it brings improvements in coding performance, as well as some user experience improvements that make it more generally competitive with OpenAI’s latest frontier models.

Perhaps the most prominent change for most users is that in the consumer app experiences (web, mobile, and desktop), Claude will be less prone to abruptly hard-stopping conversations because they have run too long. The improvement to memory within a single conversation applies not just to Opus 4.5, but to any current Claude models in the apps.

Users who experienced abrupt endings (despite having room left in their session and weekly usage budgets) were hitting a hard context window (200,000 tokens). Whereas some large language model implementations simply start trimming earlier messages from the context when a conversation runs past the maximum in the window, Claude simply ended the conversation rather than allow the user to experience an increasingly incoherent conversation where the model would start forgetting things based on how old they are.

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The commander of the military unit responsible for running the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida expects SpaceX to begin launching Starship rockets there next year.

Launch companies with facilities near SpaceX’s Starship pads are not pleased. SpaceX’s two chief rivals, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, complained last year that SpaceX’s proposal of launching as many as 120 Starships per year from Florida’s Space Coast could force them to routinely clear personnel from their launch pads for safety reasons.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin and ULA have tried to throw up roadblocks in front of SpaceX. The companies sought to prevent NASA from leasing a disused launch pad to SpaceX in 2013, but they lost the fight.

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After Donald Trump curiously started referring to the Department of Government Efficiency exclusively in the past tense, an official finally confirmed Sunday that DOGE “doesn’t exist.”

Talking to Reuters , Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.

As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding.

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Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino’s new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company’s open source DNA at risk.

Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm announced that it’s acquiring the open source hardware and software company. Among the most controversial changes is this addition:

User shall not:

• translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform’s operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements …

In response to concerns from some members of the maker community , including from open source hardware distributor and manufacturer Adafruit , Arduino posted a blog on Friday. Regarding the new reverse-engineering rule, Arduino’s blog said:

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