NASA acting administrator Sean Duffy made two television appearances on Monday morning in which he shook up the space agency’s plans to return humans to the Moon.

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

“They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”

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Anthropic has added web and mobile interfaces for Claude Code, its immensely popular command-line interface (CLI) agentic AI coding tool.

The web interface appears to be well-baked at launch, but the mobile version is limited to iOS and is in an earlier stage of development.

The web version of Claude Code can be given access to a GitHub repository. Once that’s done, developers can give it general marching orders like “add real-time inventory tracking to the dashboard.” As with the CLI version, it gets to work, with updates along the way approximating where it’s at and what it’s doing. The web interface supports the recently implemented Claude Code capability to take suggestions or requested changes while it’s in the middle of working on a task. (Previously, if you saw it doing something wrong or missing something, you often had to cancel and start over.)

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It took awhile, but Google’s Pixel line of smartphones has established itself as a mainstay of Android after 10 generations. The company has long operated a “Superfans” group to help promote Pixels, but now members have a slim chance to get their hands on Google’s next phones ahead of time. Google is reportedly looking for some lucky Superfans to test and provide feedback on unreleased devices, but they’ll have to promise not to leak anything.

It’s not unheard of for companies to have loyal customers help test new products, but it’s not usually big companies like Google with well-established products like Pixel. Google usually keeps its circle of hardware testers small and limited to employees. According to Bloomberg , Google is running a contest among Superfans to find 15 non-employees suited to test in-development hardware. An official document reviewed by Bloomberg describes the program as a chance to “provide feedback and help shape a Pixel phone currently in development.”

To apply, interested Superfans have to prove they are more super than the rest. They must demonstrate deep knowledge of the Pixel product family and suggest ways the phones can be improved. However, Google is asking this of its biggest supporters—people who still care enough about their smartphones to seek out a group specifically to talk about how much they care about their phones. Is Google going to get gushing praise or constructive criticism?

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All the world’s discarded phones, bricked laptops, and other trashed electronics are collectively a treasure trove of rare earth elements (REEs). But separating out and recovering these increasingly sought-after materials is no easy task.

However, a team of researchers says it has developed a way of separating REEs from waste—magnets, in this case—that is relatively easy, uses less energy, and isn’t nearly as emissions and pollution intensive as current methods. The team published a paper describing this method in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, this process involves using an electric current to heat waste magnets to very high temperatures very fast, and using chlorine gas to react with the non-REEs in the mix, keeping them in the vapor phase. James Tour, one of the authors and a professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, says that the research can help the United States meet its growing need for these elements.

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Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “ Ebbinghaus illusion ,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of context-dependent size perception. But is this unique to humans or are some animals susceptible as well? According to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, it might depend on the specific sensory environment, since the illusion relies on contextual clues to be effective.

Prior research has produced mixed results on the question of animals and their susceptibility to optical illusions, per the authors. Dolphins, chicks, and redtail splitfins seem to be susceptible, for example, while pigeons, baboons, and gray bamboo snakes are not.

Perhaps the best-known example is cats’ undeniable love of boxes and squares—the “if it fits, I sits” phenomenon documented all over the Internet. This behavior is generally attributed to the fact that cats feel safer when squeezed into small spaces, but it also tells us something about feline visual perception. Both a 1988 study and a 2021 study concluded that cats are susceptible to the Kanizsa square illusion , suggesting that they perceive subjective contours much like humans.

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Two Falcon 9 rockets lifted off from spaceports in Florida and California on Sunday afternoon, adding 56 more satellites to SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network.

The second of these two launches —originating from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California — propelled SpaceX’s Starlink program past a notable milestone. With the satellites added to the constellation Sunday, the company has delivered more than 10,000 mass-produced Starlink spacecraft to low-Earth orbit.

The exact figure stands at 10,006 satellites, according to a tabulation by Jonathan McDowell , an astrophysicist who expertly tracks comings and goings between Earth and space. This number includes dozens of Starlink demo satellites, but not the dummy spacecraft carried on SpaceX’s recent Starship test flights .

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Tesla shareholders should reject a compensation plan that could pay Elon Musk more than $1 trillion over the next decade, proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) said in a report Friday.

The plan is designed “to retain Musk and keep his time and attention on Tesla instead of his other business ventures,” but “there are no prescriptive elements within the award to ensure his focus and time remain on Tesla as opposed to his other ventures, undermining the award’s primary rationale,” the advisory firm said in a report for its clients.

The “astronomical grant value” awarded to Musk could dilute value for other shareholders “due to the extreme value and number of shares being granted,” and it is questionable whether the award “is necessary or appropriate to further align his interests [with Tesla] when he currently holds a 19.8 percent ownership stake in the company,” ISS said.

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Formula 1 held the third of its five North American rounds this past weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Unlike the races in Montreal, Miami, and Las Vegas, the US Grand Prix is held on a proper road course, one purpose-built for the task of hosting F1 a little over a decade ago.

It’s a circuit Ars knows quite well—along with some friends, I was on the turn-19 banking for the first race in 2012, and we checked out Caterham’s setup the following year; toured the F1 tech center in 2015, where the race broadcasts are directed; then learned about tires there with Pirelli in 2021. And we’ve driven it in everything from an Audi TT-S to a Corvette ZR1 to a Mocabene Vent Noir . Not to mention all the Lone Star Le Mans races we’ve attended.

The crowds now exceed even the mass of humanity that showed up for that first race. And while Miami and Las Vegas have been pitched at the “more money than they know what to do with” people, ticket prices at COTA are more reasonable (for an F1 event). As long as you don’t mind brutal heat and humidity, it can be quite a good race to attend.

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Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”

With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.

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