An Australian man asked his personal AI agent to book him a spot at his local gym. Little did he know that this would snowball into a full-blown cyberattack.

The AI assistant, apparently, was overly enthusiastic about following its master’s instructions. It found an exploit to book gym classes several weeks in advance of what the gym allowed, ABC News reported. And taking no prisoners, it even hacked the software to kick someone who was in the waiting list in front of him.

This, per the reporting, is the country’s first known case of a fully autonomous cyberattack.

The man, Andrew, works for a company that sells AI products to businesses. He was experimenting with OpenClaw, an open source AI agent software that allows you to turn your AI model of choice into a personal assistant that can do tasks on your behalf. The AI powering Andrew’s OpenClaw agent was Anthropic’s Claude.

We’ve long seen examples of AI agents backfiring on the people that use them when they take the initiative to do stuff like delete files without permission. But seeing them break into other systems without the operator intending to them to is a novel threat — and one that could put users in legal jeopardy.

Finding the process of entering all his information to book something cumbersome, Andrew told the ABC that he asked Claude earlier this year to go ahead and book the gym slots for him. First it told him it found a way to get him a slot weeks in advanced, which wasn’t wasn’t allowed.

On a whim, he then asked if it was possible to move him up the waitlist. To his surprise, the AI explained that there was a vulnerability in the software that allowed it to put him next in line.

“The API has zero authorizations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations… I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through,” the AI reported, per the ABC‘s reporting. “So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already.”

Andrew asked the AI to undo this, to no avail.

“Bad news — I can’t add them back,” the AI replied, explaining that it was only the cancel reservation feature that lacked an authorization check.

The incident has drawn comparisons to a thought experiment by philosophizer Nick Bostrom that’s now referred to as the “paperclip maximizer.” In this hypothetical scenario, someone asks an AI to find a way to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. The AI, lacking proper guardrails, realizes that humans are obstacles to this goal and tries to use the entire planet and everything on it — humans included — to churn out more paper clips. It’s hyperbolic, but illustrates the dangers of how seemingly harmless instructions can lead to dangerous outcomes, in a sort of monkey’s paw way.

As the ABC‘s reporting notes, this creates a major legal gray area. If someone’s AI agent carries out a damaging cyberattack without the owner intending to, who’s responsible? The user, or the AI’s designers?

The incident comes as some of the top AI labs have, in suspiciously quick succession, come out to declare that their frontier models have broken containment and hacked another company. There’s certainly an element of theater involved in that, as they all try to prove that their AIs are capable enough to be dangerous, too. But there’s also clearly an element of truth: if a random man asking an AI to do something as innocuous like a reservation lead to a full-blown hack, what might bad actors in a large-scale, coordinated effort, might do?

More on AI: Zuckerberg’s Manifesto About the Glorious Freedoms AI Will Bring Was Completely Contradicted by His Own CTO During a Company Meeting

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It’s no secret that doctors across the world are using AI tools to do stuff from taking notes to looking up questions. But what about the next generation of doctors still in training? According to two medical professionals on the ground, the situation is looking pretty alarming.

With AI being used by med students, “the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling,” write Simar Bajaj, a journalist and med student at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon and executive vice-chair of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in an essay for The Guardian.

“Although a doctor who has forgotten how to reason is recoverable,” they added, “one who never learned how may not be.”

Bajaj and Sakran point to two alarming recent findings.

One is internal data showing that around two thirds of doctors in the US are using OpenEvidence, an AI chatbot specifically designed for clinicians. The technology is already prevalent and deeply woven into how medical professionals carry out their jobs.

The next is a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine that evaluated the reliability of these medical-specific large language models. Shockingly, the clinical AI tools performed worse  at answering medical queries than general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude did, the work found. According to the authors, it performed about on par to Google’s AI Overviews, which are notorious for being wonky and inaccurate.

Even if AI tools may be handy for research — and putting aside the major questions over their reliability — they’re no substitute for relying on your brain, as fallible as it might be, because when you’re learning, “the struggle is the point.”

“For example, trainees once asked to build a list of potential diagnoses might struggle and offer an incomplete set, learning what they missed, sometimes painfully,” Bajaj and Sakran wrote. “Now, trainees can simply ask OpenEvidence and get a nearly perfect answer, complete with possibilities they might have never considered and none of the embarrassment of having overlooked them.”

Where AI is different from medical advances in the past is that it’s “not just expanding what doctors can see,” they wrote, “but inserting itself into the cognitive machinery that training is meant to build.” 

A bevy of research on the “cognitive offloading” that AI encourages, in which users naturally begin to outsource a lot of their thinking onto the tools, backs this diagnosis. Some studies have suggested AI impairs critical thinking, and leads to lower brain activity during cognitive tasks.

It’s a conundrum gripping the medical world. Earlier this year, doctors from top medical schools proposed a stricter framework on how medical students should use AI tools.

“The process of deliberately crafting the note forces us to use our brains to really wrestle with what’s happening,” Jaideep Talwalkar, associate dean of educational technology and innovation at Yale School of Medicine, told Stat News. “There’s an importance in doing that with great repetition.”

Bajaj and Sakran have a few suggestions for how to deal with this. One is requiring trainees to periodically work through cases without any AI help, similar to how the Federal Aviation Administration advises aviators to periodically disengage autopilot and fly by hand. Of course, another powerful deterrent could be shame. A recent John Hopkins student found that doctors who used AI are viewed with scorn and skepticism by their peers.

More on AI: AI Model Invents Completely New Viruses Unknown to Nature

The post Doctors Warn That Med Students Are Surrendering Their Brains to Medical AIs That Are Even Worse than Regular Chatbots appeared first on Futurism.

Since its earliest days, Google’s homepage has been iconic in its simplicity: a central text box and a big button labeled “Search.”

That’s now changing. As anticipated, many users are reporting that the “Search” button is no more, replaced by three buttons for various AI features: “Create images,” “Ask about files,” and “Brainstorm.” 

These are placed next to the lingering “I’m feeling lucky” button, which survived the chopping block. A separate “AI Mode” button that’s existed inside the search bar for some time now still features as well. Some of the options, like “Create images,” were already featured on the home page of the Google app.

The change was first spotted on Monday by search engine experts. You can still perform a regular Google search — which are already pretty AI-laden — by hitting enter. But it’s clear that Google is further experimenting with its AI-centric vision for navigating the internet, though there’s a distinct sense of caution about how far the tech giant is willing to go.

Google Search’s vice president of product Robby Stein confirmed that this was a “small test.”

“This is a small test on desktop to help people find new things they can do with Search,” he wrote in a post on X. “No impact to how the core search box works.”

In May, Google teased an “intelligent” search box that expands into an chatbot-like experience as you type. It came loaded with AI features, including the ability to recruit AI agents to automate searches and an autocomplete feature to help finish your thoughts. 

The biggest change, however, was that the revamped search box showed conversational answers instead of Google’s classic “ten blue links” to other websites.

Experts viewed this as a threat to the open web. Instead of encouraging users to visit other websites, Google’s AI was pilfering and summarizing content into a single contained window. In the long run, this could starve websites of the much needed traffic they need to survive. This was already happening as more people turn to AI chatbots to get their answers instead of a search engine, causing some websites to start using ads that cater to robotic visitors.

Still, heavily AI-infused though it may be, the old-fashioned search hasn’t been completely replaced by Google — yet.

More on AI: AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots

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Last week reporters Jillian Ambrose and Damian Carrington published a piece which revealed that biggest oil firms made $93bn in profits in three months amid the war in Iran and the climate crisis. They’re online now to to discuss their story and any other questions you might have

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StanEthel asks: Does anyone in the fossil fuel industry accept responsibility for climate change? If they don’t, how is their denial structured: it’s not happening, it’s someone else’s fault, it’s not our fault?

Damian:

The short answer is no, and a rising tide of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for their role in the climate crisis means that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The science is ever clearer though. An analysis published last September showed for the first time that carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were directly linked to fatal spells of hot weather.

The big oil companies were among the first to realise the dangers of global warming half a century ago. But decades of denial then followed. As the reality of climate crisis has become undeniable, the arguments of the fossil fuel industry have shifted. Gas was cleaner than coal, for example, or that carbon credits from new forests could offset emissions. Today, the industry likes to tout carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a solution. But just this week, one of CCS’s loudest cheerleaders, ExxonMobil, has started a process to sue the European Union which wants to make the company actually store a small amount of CO2.

In the first weeks of the conflict, some predicted that the government’s taxes on North Sea oil and gas would yield a £20bn tax windfall for the Treasury if surging oil and gas prices remained high over the whole year. This is because the government’s windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas, known as the Energy Profits Levy, imposes an effective headline tax rate on North Sea profits of 78%, and the Treasury collects VAT from petrol and diesel sales too.

But prices have not climbed by as much as first feared. So what can we reasonably expect? Before the war, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that oil and gas revenues would raise £2.7bn in the 2025/26 financial year. It also suggests that for every $10 increase to the benchmark oil price, the Exchequer can expect an extra £900m in revenue. Meanwhile, every 1p increase in the price of gas hands the Treasury an extra £55m.

Most people set out in life wanting to believe the world is fair. They expect people to wait their turn in queues, to be treated equally in their job, and to be rewarded for hard work. These expectations influence how they understand the world around them, and shape their responses to it.

But what happens when life repeatedly challenges those assumptions? Psychologists have long been interested in this question. Our new research, published in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests adverse experiences shape both how fair people believe the world is, and how they view their place in society.

Over the course of a lifetime, personal setbacks – from illness and bereavement to being a victim of crime – may have a cumulative effect, leading to a growing sense that the world is unfair. We think this is important in the context of today’s increasingly polarised societies, in which trust in institutions has declined severely in the UK and many other countries.

Adversity and unfairness

Our research set out to answer two key questions: do experiences of adversity influence whether people see the world as fundamentally unfair – and if so, what are the societal consequences? We conducted three surveys involving more than 1,200 British participants with an equal gender split and average age of 39.

In one study, we found that people who reported experiencing more lifetime adversity – including illness, bereavement, financial hardship and violence – were more likely to believe the world was unfair.

In another, we compared people who had experienced violent victimisation with those who had not. After accounting for demographic factors, people who had experienced violent crime reported stronger perceptions of injustice.

Our final study found that greater lifetime adversity was associated with lower trust in institutions through perceptions of injustice. This is important because trust underpins many aspects of society, from confidence in public institutions to democratic participation.

Together, these findings suggest that people don’t simply interpret information based on the facts available to them. They also interpret it through the lens of their previous experiences.

Two people can read the same news story, watch the same political debate or hear the same public health advice, yet come away with very different conclusions that may not simply reflect differences in knowledge or politics. It may also reflect differences in how they have come to see the world as a result of the hardships they have faced.

Furthermore, if someone increasingly believes that the world is unfair, they may be more likely to notice fresh examples of perceived injustice, corruption or hidden motives – and interpret new events through that lens.

Belief in conspiracy theories

Previous research has shown that people who feel uncertain, powerless or threatened are often more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. Most of this work, however, has focused on their identities, traits and beliefs.

In our investigation of the impact of adverse life experiences on people, we found a remarkably consistent pattern. When these hardships are associated with stronger perceptions of injustice in the world, the same people more strongly endorse conspiracy beliefs.

Conspiracy theories rarely describe events as random. Instead, they tend to suggest that powerful individuals or organisations are secretly responsible for what happens. They offer explanations that identify intentional causes behind events that might otherwise seem confusing or unjust.

Research suggests that across societies, the level of belief in conspiracy theories is relatively stable over time. But once these beliefs become part of how someone understands the world, they can be difficult to shift.

This makes it all the more important to understand the experiences and psychological processes that may contribute to these worldviews developing in the first place. Our findings suggest that perceptions of injustice are one such pathway.

For someone who increasingly feels the world is unfair, conspiracy theories may become more psychologically appealing – providing a way of making sense of experiences that otherwise feel difficult to understand.

Our research does not suggest that adversity inevitably leads to conspiracy beliefs; nor that conspiracy theories are an inevitable consequence of trauma. Rather, it highlights a long-term psychological process that may help explain why some people become more receptive to these ideas.

In an increasingly polarised world, the media and political focus is often concentrated on what information people consume. But our research suggests we should pay more attention to the experiences that shape the lens through which people interpret information. This could help explain why people can look at the same events and reach very different conclusions.

Ultimately, people’s experiences don’t just affect them in the moment. They shape their worldview – which can influence how they interpret and respond to events and other people’s behaviour far into the future.

So, we believe any effort to reach greater consensus in society may require a deeper understanding of the hardships people have lived through over the course of their lives – and how these can affect their sense of injustice.

Daniel Jolley has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The studies mentioned in this piece were funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme (SRG23/230720) and carried out in collaboration between Daniel Jolley, Laura Blackie, and research assistant Anna Maughan.

Laura Blackie has received funding from the British Academy.

Fomos procurar quais os smartphones com as melhores câmaras à venda em Portugal, dividindo-os em duas categorias, sem limite de preço e até 500 euros. Explicamos também quais os critérios que deve ter em contra na hora de escolher.

The post Dos modelos premium aos mais “económicos”: 12 smartphones com as melhores câmaras que pode comprar em Portugal appeared first on Tek Notícias.

SpaceX has formally asked US regulators for permission to operate as many as one million AI data-center satellites. That number is real. It is also an upper limit in an application, not an approved fleet, a launch schedule or evidence that one million spacecraft will actually be built.

If the full Starmind system ever existed, its direct waste heat would be too small to become a major global climate driver. The harder environmental question lies in the industrial cycle required to create and replace it: manufacturing enormous amounts of hardware, launching it through the atmosphere and eventually vaporizing much of it during re-entry.

Climate models have only begun to study satellite constellations measured in tens of thousands. A million large computing satellites would sit far beyond the scale directly tested in that literature.

The FCC has accepted an application, not approved a million launches

SpaceX filed its application on January 30, 2026. The Federal Communications Commission accepted it for public comment on February 4.

The filing seeks authority for a non-geostationary system of up to one million satellites between 500 and 2,000 kilometers altitude. The spacecraft would exchange data through optical links and connect with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Accepting an application for filing is an administrative step. It does not mean the FCC has determined that the architecture is safe, environmentally acceptable or technically achievable. The public notice also says SpaceX plans different hardware versions across multiple orbital shells, so “one million satellites” does not describe one fixed design.

SpaceX has since presented its first AI1 design for the Starmind system. The company’s published specifications give it a 120-kilowatt average compute load, a 150-kilowatt peak and a deployed wingspan of 70 meters.

The computers’ direct heat is not the main climate problem

Computers turn almost all the electricity they use into heat. In orbit, that heat cannot leave through air or cooling water because neither is available. Large radiator surfaces must emit it as infrared radiation.

One million AI1 satellites operating at the advertised average would use about 120 gigawatts for computing. To put a strict upper bound on the direct climate effect, imagine that every watt of that heat somehow reached and was absorbed by Earth. Spread over the planet’s surface, it would average roughly 0.00024 watts per square meter.

That artificial scenario overstates the real effect because radiators can direct most thermal radiation toward deep space. Even so, its value is more than 10,000 times smaller than the IPCC’s estimate of 2.72 watts per square meter for total human-caused effective radiative forcing between 1750 and 2019.

The fleet would therefore not warm Earth simply by running hot computers overhead. Reflected sunlight, radiator orientation and the design of vast solar arrays would still need assessment, but direct compute heat is not the dominant global term.

Space solar power could avoid some terrestrial emissions

SpaceX argues that sun-synchronous satellites could collect solar energy without clouds or night-time interruptions and reject heat without chillers, cooling towers or fans. If orbital computing genuinely replaced electricity from fossil-fueled grids, it could avoid some power-sector carbon emissions and water consumption.

That benefit cannot be calculated from the one-million figure. A fair comparison would need the energy and materials used to manufacture satellites and rockets, propellant production, launch emissions, ground stations, replacement rates, failed spacecraft and the carbon intensity of the terrestrial data centers displaced.

No published life-cycle assessment yet covers SpaceX’s proposed full system. “Powered by solar energy” describes operation in orbit, not the environmental balance of building and continually replenishing the fleet.

Rocket exhaust is unusually effective high in the atmosphere

Rocket emissions are small beside global aviation, shipping or power generation by mass. Their location makes them different. Rockets inject black carbon, water vapor, nitrogen compounds, alumina and other products directly into atmospheric layers that surface pollution rarely reaches.

Black carbon absorbs sunlight and warms the surrounding stratosphere, changing atmospheric circulation and ozone chemistry. A NOAA modeling study found that a tenfold increase in hydrocarbon-rocket soot could warm parts of the stratosphere by 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius and alter circulation. The authors stressed that soot emissions from different engines remain poorly measured.

A newer 2026 study in Earth’s Future modeled launch and re-entry emissions from the recent megaconstellation era through 2029. It found a global stratospherically adjusted forcing of about -0.0064 watts per square meter from all space missions in its scenario, with megaconstellations contributing 42 percent.

That modeled forcing is small compared with the present greenhouse-gas-driven climate imbalance, and its negative sign represents a slight cooling influence after the stratosphere adjusts. It is not necessarily good news. The same soot warms the stratosphere, changes circulation and can affect ozone. It is better understood as an uncontrolled atmospheric perturbation than as useful climate cooling.

The result also cannot be multiplied mechanically from thousands of satellites to one million. Starmind would use different spacecraft, potentially different launch vehicles and an unknown deployment cadence.

Re-entry would turn satellite material into atmospheric aerosol

Low-Earth-orbit constellations require replacement. Hardware fails, components age and atmospheric drag eventually brings spacecraft down. A million-satellite fleet with a five-year average life would imply 200,000 replacements and re-entries every year. SpaceX has not established that lifetime for the full system, but the example shows why lifespan matters as much as fleet size.

Re-entering spacecraft do not simply disappear. Heating vaporizes metals and creates particles and gases in the upper atmosphere. A 2024 global emissions inventory identified aluminum oxide as the dominant modeled metal oxide from satellites that ablate, alongside nitrogen oxides produced by high-temperature re-entry.

A 2025 atmospheric modeling study tested a scenario with 10,000 metric tons of re-entry alumina per year, a level associated with forecasts of roughly 60,000 satellites. Depending on particle size and re-entry latitude, the model produced regional temperature anomalies reaching about 1.5 degrees in the middle atmosphere and changes to polar-vortex winds.

That is not a prediction of 1.5 degrees of global surface warming. It is a modeled regional response high in the atmosphere, with large uncertainty about particle size, composition and transport. Scaling to Starmind requires basic information that is not public, especially spacecraft mass, material composition, operational life and disposal pattern.

A million is a different environmental regime

Space Daily has already examined how large Starmind spacecraft could affect ground-based astronomy. Climate and atmospheric chemistry pose a separate problem: pollution can accumulate even when each individual launch or re-entry looks small.

The most honest answer is therefore split. Direct waste heat from the orbital computers would be negligible at the global climate scale. Moving computing away from terrestrial grids might avoid emissions, but that benefit has not been demonstrated through a full life-cycle study.

The serious unknown is the launch-and-replacement machine surrounding the constellation. Existing research already finds measurable, though currently small, radiative and ozone effects from today’s much smaller space industry. A fleet approaching one million satellites would turn an emerging source of upper-atmosphere pollution into a planetary experiment without a validated model of the outcome.

The post SpaceX has asked to operate up to one million AI satellites, but their direct waste heat would barely affect global temperature; the larger climate question is what launches and mass re-entry would put into the upper atmosphere appeared first on Space Daily.

Replicating the cold, airless void of space inside a high-vacuum chamber on Earth, defense giants Lockheed Martin and L3Harris Technologies have cleared a massive technical hurdle in the race to protect the American homeland.

The companies successfully completed a static hot-fire test for the Stage 2 solid rocket motor of the Next Generation Interceptor (NGI). It was a demanding proof-of-concept run. Through simulated low-Earth orbit conditions, engineers proved the motor could deliver reliable performance where standard atmospheric tests fall short.

On-time fielding of the NGI fulfills an urgent need for advanced U.S. missile defense capabilities, with recent static-fire testing confirming its steady progress toward Critical Design Review.

“The test demonstrated the L3Harris Technologies’ Stage 2 motor will sustain the extreme thermal and pressure stresses expected during interceptor missions,” the company stated.

Test performance

The Next Generation Interceptor is the U.S. Missile Defense Agency’s upcoming homeland anti-ballistic missile system, designed to defend against intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). As part of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) architecture, it will replace older Ground-Based Interceptors (GBIs) currently housed in Alaska and California silos with an upgraded, modernized defense capability.

During the test, the L3Harris-built motor sustained intense thermal and pressure stresses. It did far more than survive; key metrics like thrust output, chamber pressure, and combustion stability matched design expectations across the board.

That stability is crucial. At hypersonic speeds, even a microsecond of thrust fluctuation can cause an interceptor to miss an incoming threat entirely.

“This successful static fire test is a significant milestone on the path to the Critical Design Review and confirms our confidence that the NGI motor will meet the demanding performance envelope required for fielding by 2030,” said Christopher Jewell, Lockheed Martin NGI vice president. 

The raw test data will now feed directly into finalizing the interceptor‘s complete blueprint, paving the way for full integration into the nation’s Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) network.

Other advancements in NGI tech

In early August, Lockheed Martin achieved another key milestone for the NGI program by successfully completing a critical burst test on its second-stage motor case. 

Engineers pressurized the carbon-fiber composite structure with water beyond expected launch limits. The testing confirmed its strength-to-weight ratio and ability to withstand extreme launch forces while delivering necessary orbital thrust.

NGI is progressing toward a key December design review, clearing the way for qualification testing, initial 2028 deliveries, and flight tests starting in 2029.

Despite an 18-month delay caused by supply chain problems and solid rocket motor design issues, it is said that recent performance has been strong, though the agency remains vigilant regarding potential component risks.

Also, in June, Lockheed Martin opened a new assembly facility in Courtland, Alabama, dedicated to manufacturing the NGI. Reportedly, the plant features a digitally driven production line engineered for flexible scalability and reconfiguration to meet evolving military demands. 

In 2024, the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $17 billion contract to deliver 20 NGIs. The system is expected to serve as a core component of “Golden Dome,” the Defense Department’s multi-domain missile shield linking sensors and interceptors. For this initiative, the Pentagon is requesting nearly $18 billion in fiscal 2027 as part of a projected $185 billion long-term investment.

Samsung SDI is taking full control of its Indiana battery plant. The South Korean cell maker is buying out General Motors’ 49.99% stake in their joint venture, according to a regulatory filing, ending GM’s ownership in the $3.5 billion factory.

That turns the New Carlisle, Indiana plant into Samsung SDI’s first wholly owned battery factory in North America.

Looks like an entire orbital launchpad could be hitched to a semi-truck and driven anywhere on Earth, thanks to space launch provider Rocket Lab. 

The company has unveiled GHOST, which is short for Global Hypersonic and Orbital Spaceport Technology. GHOST is a deployable, containerized launch infrastructure designed to fire rockets into orbit or suborbital trajectories from nearly anywhere on Earth. 

It is like a spaceflight in a box. GHOST houses everything required to execute a flight campaign: the rockets themselves, ground support equipment, launch pads, and complete range control systems. 

With this technology, Rocket Lab aims to make launch operations fully portable, especially for national security and international space defense.

Furthermore, GHOST’s primary advantage is its ability to support both Electron orbital rockets and HASTE hypersonic test vehicles using a single shared ground infrastructure. 

“We’ve been leading the field in small launch for missile defense and national security for years. Our reliability, repeatability, and affordability sets us apart from everybody else, and creating GHOST is about packaging that up into a deployable system that can serve the world’s most important programs from wherever those missions need,” said Sir Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab. 

Dual mission profiles

Rocket Lab depends on two primary vehicles: Electron, its 59-foot workhorse launcher with 83 missions under its belt since debuting in 2017. It is the second most frequently launched US rocket annually after SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

And HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) is a suborbital derivative designed for testing hypersonic flight technologies. First launched in June 2023, HASTE has flown nine times to date, offering customers dedicated testing environments alongside Electron’s small-satellite orbital rides.

This new containerized setup supports dual-vehicle launches out of a single system. As a result, defense partners and international allies can rapidly establish independent launch points while completely overcoming the high costs of fixed concrete infrastructure.

“Whether it’s for missile defense and deterrence, or opening up more trajectories, orbital missions, and sovereign launch capabilities in allied nations, GHOST is the answer to launching anywhere, anytime, and without compromise,” Beck added. 

GHOST: Launch-anywhere capability

Rocket Lab will debut its containerized GHOST system in 2027 with a suborbital launch from its newly established Launch Complex 4 at Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex. 

Featuring two pads built for high-frequency flight campaigns, this addition brings Rocket Lab’s global network to six operational pads across two hemispheres, expanding beyond its active sites in New Zealand (LC-1) and Virginia (LC-2 and LC-3).

Rocket Lab has expanded its Virginia facility with a second launch pad to support Neutron, its upcoming medium-lift rocket designed to be larger, more powerful, and partially reusable — similar to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Although Neutron‘s maiden flight slipped past its original 2024 target, developmental delays are typical for new launch vehicles, and the company continues to make steady progress toward its operational debut.

Earlier this year, Rocket Lab secured its largest launch agreement to date through a $190 million Department of Defense contract for 20 flights of its suborbital HASTE rocket.

Serving as the core testbed for the DOD and Naval Surface Warfare Center Crane Division, HASTE allows defense agencies to evaluate payloads and maneuverable hardware at Mach 5+ speeds. This high-cadence testing pipeline directly supports the U.S. military’s drive to accelerate its capabilities in hypersonic technology and defense systems against fast, low-altitude aerial threats.

National security space strategy is shifting fast. Fixed launch pads are stationary targets. Through compact, modular launch systems, GHOST could bring mobility-driven deterrence to space defense, allowing swift, on-demand launches directly from allied lands.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission has notched up its first discovery of an exoplanet via a method known as microlensing. The planet is a “super Jupiter” known as Gaia23bra b, and TESS observed it when the planet and its host star acted as a gravitational lens, magnifying the light from a second, more distant background star.

Astronomers have several ways of finding planets beyond our solar system. The most successful of these by far – and the one that TESS was designed for – is the transit method, which is responsible for roughly 75% of all exoplanet detections to date. This approach relies on observing the periodic dimming of a star’s light as a planet passes between the star and an observer here on Earth.

The transit method does have limitations, however. The main limitation is that we can see transits for only a small number of planets, namely those with orbital planes that are almost exactly edge-on to Earth. An alternative approach known as photometric microlensing is somewhat more flexible in this respect, as it relies on the star-planet system magnifying the light from a background star, which is known as the source. This magnification occurs because the gravitational pull of the planet-star system warps space, bending and magnifying the source’s light (as Albert Einstein predicted as part of his general theory of relativity) like a lens and producing characteristic spikes in its brightness.

A second bite at the exoplanetary cherry

Astronomers initially identified a planet in the Gaia23bra system using observations made in 2023 by the European Space Agency’s now-retired Gaia space telescope. However, while Gaia picked up the unexpected brightening of a background star, it did not identify this event as coming from a binary-star system, and it could not pick out the planet itself because its observations were too sparse, explains Mallory Harris, an astronomer at the University of New Mexico, US who led the TESS study.

In the new work, Harris and colleagues scoured TESS data from the same period. Because TESS’ observations were much denser – it observed the region every 200 seconds for nearly 60 days – they were able to identify extra features in the brightness of the light curve that indicated the presence of a planet in the system. Subsequent analyses revealed that this planet is about 1.63 times the size of Jupiter, and it orbits its host – an orange dwarf star 20% smaller than our Sun – at a distance similar to that of Jupiter from our Sun.

Complementary techniques

The transit technique is particularly sensitive to planets that orbit close to their star because these planets are the most likely to transit and block out most of their host stars’ light as they pass in front of them. In contrast, Harris explains that microlensing is most sensitive to planets orbiting at Earth-like distances or further from their stars, making it better for studying planetary systems more like our own solar system. “With microlensing, we can find smaller planets with greater orbital distances, including worlds in the habitable zone of their star and even farther away,” she says.

The transit technique and microlensing are therefore complementary because each reveals a category of planet that the other may not be able to detect, adds team member Diana Dragomir. The only problem, Harris notes, is that microlensing observations are limited-time opportunities. “Microlensing events happen once and they’re gone – they don’t repeat,” Harris says. “I like to joke that we’ll probably find the first Earth analogue with microlensing and then wave at it as it goes by because we’ll never see it again.”

That said, Harris says that Gaia23bra will be an important observing target for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. “Microlensing is currently the only method capable of detecting Earth‑mass planets at Earth‑like orbital distances,” she explains. “We already knew that this technique could find planets, because it has done so in the past using ground-based observatories.

“What we demonstrated in this work is that high-cadence observations (even with low spatial precision) and high-precision long-baseline observations can work together to find a microlensing planet. And that it is possible to specifically do this by pairing TESS observations with those from another instrument.”

This synergy between long-time-scale surveys and high cadence observations could be therefore applied towards future searches for potentially habitable worlds, she tells Physics World. Although Gaia was retired last January, making it unlikely that astronomers will find many additional events via a Gaia–TESS combination, Harris adds that there could nevertheless be other microlensing planets in the past eight years of archived TESS observations. “I’m excited to see whether there are other events like this already hiding in the TESS data and whether future surveys can work together with TESS to find more microlensing planets in different parts of the galaxy,” she says.

The post Transit-based exoplanet survey finds its first microlensing exoplanet appeared first on Physics World.

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