The big holiday releases are still waiting in the wings, but it’s not too soon to look forward to what’s coming in 2026. Amazon MGM Studios has released a new trailer for its forthcoming space odyssey Project Hail Mary , which is based on Andy Weir’s ( The Martian ) bestselling 2021 novel about an amnesiac biologist-turned-schoolteacher in space.

Weir told The New York Times that the inspiration for his novel came from a planned multi-book space opera called Zhek that he began writing after The Martian , about a potential fuel for interstellar travel. He eventually abandoned that effort and wrote the 2017 novel, Artemis , instead, but aspects of Zhek found their way into the Project Hail Mary novel.

As we’ve previously reported , Amazon MGM Studios acquired the rights for Weir’s novel before it was even published and brought on Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. (Goddard also wrote the adapted screenplay for The Martian , so he’s an excellent choice.) The studio tapped Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ( Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie ) to direct and signed on Ryan Gosling to star. Per the official premise:

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As Tesla’s profits shrink and its model lineup continues to age, the company remains focused on establishing new lines of business. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says there’s not much his Optimus robots won’t be able to do in the future—following people around to prevent them from committing crimes is the latest—despite the technology not quite existing yet.

Musk’s robotaxis are a little closer to reality, with a kind of limited service being offered in Austin, Texas, as well as parts of San Francisco. But Tesla might need to rethink its approach to safety drivers after a Tesla rideshare passenger in San Francisco took to Reddit to share a video of the operator asleep in the driver’s seat.

In fact, the safety driver fell asleep three times during the ride, which took place a little over a week ago, according to Reddit user ohmichael. In his post, which contains a 12-second clip of a man sleeping and then waking in the front seat of a moving Tesla, the poster says he contacted Tesla to report this behavior but never heard back.

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A Cloudflare outage caused large chunks of the Internet to go dark Tuesday morning, temporarily impacting big platforms like X and ChatGPT.

“A fix has been implemented and we believe the incident is now resolved. We are continuing to monitor for errors to ensure all services are back to normal,” Cloudflare’s status page said. “Some customers may be still experiencing issues logging into or using the Cloudflare dashboard.”

The company initially attributed the widespread outages to “an internal service degradation” and provided updates as it sought a fix over the past two hours.

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When the Trump administration brutally cut federal funding for biomedical research earlier this year, at least 383 clinical trials that were already in progress were abruptly cancelled, cutting off over 74,000 trial participants from their experimental treatments, monitoring, or follow-ups, according to a study published today in JAMA Internal Medicine .

The study, led by researchers at Harvard, fills a knowledge gap of how the Trump administration’s research funding cuts affected clinical trials specifically. It makes clear not just the wastefulness and inefficiency of the cuts but also the deep ethical violations, JAMA Internal Medicine editors wrote in an accompanying editor’s note .

In March, the National Institutes of Health, under the control of the Trump administration, announced that it would cancel $1.8 billion in grant funding that wasn’t aligned with the administration’s priorities. The Harvard researchers, led by health care policy expert Anupam Jena, used an NIH database and a federal accountability tracking tool to find grants supporting clinical trials that were active as of February 28 but had been terminated by August 15.

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Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company.

Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same name), the company will focus on using AI to pursue breakthroughs in research, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields that are dubbed part of “the physical economy”—in contrast to the software applications that are likely the first thing most people in the general public think of when they hear “AI.”

Bezos’ co-CEO will be Dr. Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously led life sciences work at Google X, an Alphabet-backed research group that worked on speculative projects that could lead to more product categories. (For example, it developed technologies that would later underpin Google’s Waymo service.) Bajaj also worked at Verily, another Alphabet-backed research group focused on life sciences, and Foresite Labs, an incubator for new AI companies.

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Five men have pleaded guilty to running laptop farms and providing other assistance to North Koreans to obtain remote IT work at US companies in violation of US law, federal prosecutors said.

The pleas come amid a rash of similar schemes orchestrated by hacking and threat groups backed by the North Korean government. The campaigns, which ramped up nearly five years ago, aim to steal millions of dollars in job revenue and cryptocurrencies to fund North Korean weapons programs. Another motive is to seed cyber attacks for espionage. In one such incident, a North Korean man who fraudulently obtained a job at US security company KnowBe4 installed malware immediately upon beginning his employment.

On Friday, the US Justice Department said that five men pleaded guilty to assisting North Koreans in obtaining jobs in a scheme orchestrated by APT38 , also tracked under the name Lazarus. APT38 has targeted the US and other countries for more than a decade with a stream of attack campaigns that have grown ever bolder and more advanced. All five pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and one to aggravated identity theft, for a range of actions.

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On Friday, a US District Court issued a preliminary injunction blocking the United States government from halting federal funding at UCLA or any other school in the University of California system. The ruling came in response to a suit filed by groups representing the faculty at these schools challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to force UCLA into a deal that would substantially revise instruction and policy.

The court’s decision lays out how the Trump administration’s attacks on universities follow a standard plan: use accusations of antisemitism to justify an immediate cut to funding, then use the loss of money to compel an agreement that would result in revisions to university instruction and management. The court finds that this plan was deficient on multiple grounds, violating legal procedures for cutting funding to an illegal attempt and suppressing the First Amendment rights of faculty.

The result is a reprieve for the entire University of California system, as well as a clear pathway for any universities to fight back against the Trump administration’s attacks on research and education.

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A Texas Judge has rejected a request from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to issue a temporary order barring Tylenol’s maker, Kenvue, from claiming amid litigation that the pain and fever medication is safe for pregnant women and children, according to court documents.

In records filed Friday, District Judge LeAnn Rafferty, in Panola County, also rejected Paxton’s unusual request to block Kenvue from distributing $400 million in dividends to shareholders later this month.

The denials are early losses for Paxton in a politically charged case that hinges on the unproven claim that Tylenol causes autism and other disorders—a claim first introduced by President Trump and his anti-vaccine health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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For decades—yes, literally decades—it has been easy to dismiss Blue Origin as a company brimming with potential but rarely producing much of consequence.

But last week the company took a tremendous stride forward, not just launching its second orbital rocket, but subsequently landing the booster on a barge named Jacklyn . It now seems clear that Blue Origin is in the midst of a transition from sleeping giant to force to be reckoned with.

To get a sense of where the company goes from here, Ars spoke with the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, on the eve of last week’s launch. The first thing he emphasized is how much the company learned about New Glenn, and the process of rolling the vehicle out and standing it up for launch, from the vehicle’s first attempt in January.

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