Apple has lost multiple top managers of its self-driving car team in recent months, a sign of attrition at the division involved in what could become an important future product. From a report: The iPhone maker has hundreds of engineers working on underlying self-driving car technology as well as groups of employees working on an actual vehicle, Bloomberg News has reported. Running the division is Doug Field, a former top vehicle engineer for Tesla, along with a management team of fewer than a dozen executives. At least three members of that Apple car management team have departed this year.
In recent days, Dave Scott, who led teams working on robotics related to the car, left to become the chief executive officer at Hyperfine, a health care company developing next-generation MRI systems. Before Scott's departure, Jaime Waydo, who led autonomous car safety and regulation teams, departed to become the chief technology officer at Cavnue, a startup focused on the safety of autonomous cars on public roads. In February, Benjamin Lyon, who helped create Apple's original car team several years ago and was key in the future project's development, left to become the chief engineer at Astra, a company developing technology for sending satellites to space.

The James Webb Space Telescope, the largest science observatory to ever be placed into space, won't launch as scheduled on Halloween this year due to a "combination of different factors." The new launch date is expected to be pushed into November or possibly early December. Ars Technica reports: During a press briefing with reporters on Tuesday, the telescope's director for launch services, Beatriz Romero, said that there are a "combination of different factors" to consider when setting a new launch date. These factors include shipment of the telescope, the readiness of the Ariane 5 rocket, and the readiness of the spaceport in South America as well. Romero said she did not expect to identify a new launch date until later this summer or early fall.

NASA plans to ship the telescope to the launch site by boat late this summer. (NASA is keeping precise plans vague due to concerns about piracy at sea. Seriously.) The space agency's chief of science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said Tuesday that "we don't have a lot of reserve" left in the schedule to prepare for shipment. However, he added that NASA and Webb's primary contractor, Northrop Grumman, are close to folding up the telescope and putting it into a shipping container. He said that this should happen toward the "end of August." The launch campaign, which begins when the telescope arrives in French Guiana, requires 55 days. Asked whether this means that Webb will not launch until mid-November at the earliest, Zurbuchen said this assessment was correct.

The rocket is also not ready. The Ariane 5 booster, a venerable rocket in service for more than 25 years, has been grounded since August 2020 due to a payload fairing issue. However, officials with Arianespace, which manages launch for the Ariane 5, said the fairing issue's cause has been diagnosed and addressed with a redesign. Two Ariane 5 launches are scheduled before Webb's launch to ensure that the fairing issue has been fixed. (Those launches are scheduled for July and August, but delays are possible.) Finally, there are concerns about the spaceport itself, where operations have been limited by COVID-19. Vaccines are not yet widely available in French Guiana, and officials have said that if virus activity worsens, it could further slow operations.

Obipale shares a report from ScienceAlert: The inevitable has occurred. A piece of space debris too small to be tracked has hit and damaged part of the International Space Station -- namely, the Canadarm2 robotic arm. The instrument is still operational, but the object punctured the thermal blanket and damaged the boom beneath. It's a sobering reminder that the low-Earth orbit's space junk problem is a ticking time bomb. Canadarm2 -- formally known as the Space Station Remote Manipulator System (SSRMS), designed by the Canadian Space Agency -- has been a fixture on the space station for 20 years. It's a multi-jointed titanium robotic arm that can assist with maneuvering objects outside the ISS, including cargo shuttles, and performing station maintenance.

It's unclear exactly when the impact occurred. The damage was first noticed on 12 May, during a routine inspection. NASA and the CSA worked together to take detailed images of and assess the damage. "Despite the impact, results of the ongoing analysis indicate that the arm's performance remains unaffected," the CSA wrote in a blog post. "The damage is limited to a small section of the arm boom and thermal blanket. Canadarm2 is continuing to conduct its planned operations." Robotics operations on the ISS using the Canadarm2 will continue as planned for the near future, the CSA said. But both space agencies will continue to gather data in order to perform an analysis of the event, both to understand how it occurred, and to assess future risk.

In a Q&A with TechRadar, storage hardware giant Seagate revealed it is keeping a close eye on the crypto space, with a view to potentially launching a new line of purpose-built drives. From the report: Asked whether companies might develop storage products specifically for cryptocurrency use cases, Jason M. Feist, who heads up Seagate's emerging products arm, said it was a "possibility." Feist said he could offer no concrete information at this stage, but did suggest the company is "exploring this opportunity and imagines others may be as well."

Slashdot reader 4wdloop shared this report from NVIDIA's blog, joking that maybe this is where all NVIDIA's chips are going: It will help piece together a 3D map of the universe, probe subatomic interactions for green energy sources and much more. Perlmutter, officially dedicated Thursday at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), is a supercomputer that will deliver nearly four exaflops of AI performance for more than 7,000 researchers. That makes Perlmutter the fastest system on the planet on the 16- and 32-bit mixed-precision math AI uses. And that performance doesn't even include a second phase coming later this year to the system based at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

More than two dozen applications are getting ready to be among the first to ride the 6,159 NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs in Perlmutter, the largest A100-powered system in the world. They aim to advance science in astrophysics, climate science and more. In one project, the supercomputer will help assemble the largest 3D map of the visible universe to date. It will process data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a kind of cosmic camera that can capture as many as 5,000 galaxies in a single exposure. Researchers need the speed of Perlmutter's GPUs to capture dozens of exposures from one night to know where to point DESI the next night. Preparing a year's worth of the data for publication would take weeks or months on prior systems, but Perlmutter should help them accomplish the task in as little as a few days.

"I'm really happy with the 20x speedups we've gotten on GPUs in our preparatory work," said Rollin Thomas, a data architect at NERSC who's helping researchers get their code ready for Perlmutter. DESI's map aims to shed light on dark energy, the mysterious physics behind the accelerating expansion of the universe.

A similar spirit fuels many projects that will run on NERSC's new supercomputer. For example, work in materials science aims to discover atomic interactions that could point the way to better batteries and biofuels. Traditional supercomputers can barely handle the math required to generate simulations of a few atoms over a few nanoseconds with programs such as Quantum Espresso. But by combining their highly accurate simulations with machine learning, scientists can study more atoms over longer stretches of time. "In the past it was impossible to do fully atomistic simulations of big systems like battery interfaces, but now scientists plan to use Perlmutter to do just that," said Brandon Cook, an applications performance specialist at NERSC who's helping researchers launch such projects. That's where Tensor Cores in the A100 play a unique role. They accelerate both the double-precision floating point math for simulations and the mixed-precision calculations required for deep learning.

"Traveling in a space plane is a lot like traveling in a regular plane, except for the middle part," quips Bloomberg Business Week: After reaching cruising altitude, the pilot hits the rocket boosters and blasts the aircraft to the edge of space at more than 9,000 mph, or about 12 times the speed of sound. The plane travels at that speed for about 15 minutes, then glides against the atmosphere to slow itself down, cruising back to Earth to land at a conventional airport.

Venus Aerospace Corp., a startup pursuing a hypersonic space plane, is aiming to use this technique to ferry people from Los Angeles to Tokyo in about an hour.

The company was started by two former Virgin Orbit LLC employees: Sarah "Sassie" Duggleby, a code-writing launch engineer, and her husband, Andrew, who managed launch, payload, and propulsion operations... Venus now has 15 employees, most veterans of the space industry, and has received investment from venture capital firms including Prime Movers and Draper Associates. "Every few decades humans attempt this," says Andrew Duggleby, in a tacit acknowledgment of the idea's repeated failure. "This time it will work...."

Still, flights aren't imminent. The shape of the aircraft is a work in progress, and the company will begin testing three scale models this summer. The Dugglebys, who've secured a small research grant from the U.S. Air Force and are pursuing additional funding from the Department of Defense, expect the project to take a decade or more.

"To help realize the possibility of carbon-free applications, Microsoft, the consultancies Accenture and ThoughtWorks, the Linux Foundation, and Microsoft-owned code-sharing site, GitHub, have launched The Green Software Foundation," reports ZDNet: Announced at Microsoft's Build 2021 developer conference, the foundation is trying to promote the idea of green software engineering - a new field that looks to make code more efficient and reduce carbon emitted from the hardware it's running on... The foundation wants to set standards, best practices and patterns for building green software; nurture the creation of trusted open-source and open-data projects and support academic research; and grow an international community of green software ambassadors. The goal is to help the Information and Communication Technology sector to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 45% before 2030.

That includes mobile network operators, ISPs, data centers, and all the laptops being snapped up during the pandemic. "We envision a future where carbon-free software is standard - where software development, deployment, and use contribute to the global climate solution without every developer having to be an expert," Erica Brescia, COO of GitHub said in a statement. Microsoft president Brad Smith said "the world confronts an urgent carbon problem."

"It will take all of us working together to create innovative solutions to drastically reduce emissions. Microsoft is joining with organizations who are serious about an environmentally sustainable future to drive adoption of green software development to help our customers and partners around the world reduce their carbon footprint."
VentureBeat also points out that Microsoft "recently launched a $1 billion Climate Innovation Fund to accelerate the global development of carbon reduction, capture, and removal technologies."

But Bloomberg explores the rationale behind the new foundation: Data centers now account for about 1% of global electricity demand, and that's forecast to rise to 3% to 8% in the next decade, the companies said in a statement Tuesday, timed to Microsoft's Build developers conference... While it's tough to determine exactly how much carbon is emitted by individual software programs, groups like the Green Software Foundation examine metrics such as how much electricity is needed, whether microprocessors are being used efficiently, and the carbon emitted in networking. The foundation plans to look at curricula and developing certifications that would give engineers expertise in this space. As with areas like data science and cybersecurity, there will be an opportunity for engineers to specialize in green software development, but everyone who builds software will need at least some background in it, said Jeff Sandquist, a Microsoft vice president for developer relations.

"This will be the responsibility of everybody on the development team, much like when we look at security, or performance or reliability," he said. "Building the application in a sustainable way is going to matter."

The senior technology editor at Ars Technica checked the plausibility of Andy Weir's new science fiction novel Project Hail Mary with an actual professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Northern Illinois University. It's another tale of solving problems with science, as a lone human named Ryland Grace and a lone alien named Rocky must save our stellar neighborhood from a star-eating parasite called "Astrophage." PHM is a buddy movie in space in a way that The Martian didn't get to be, and the interaction between Grace and Rocky is the biggest reason to read the book. The pair makes a hell of a problem-solving team, jazz hands and fist bumps and all. But the relative ease with which Grace and Rocky understand each other got me thinking about the real-world issues that might arise when two beings from vastly different evolutionary backgrounds try to communicate...

The question I put to her was this: going by our current understanding of how and why human languages operate, do we think it would be practical—or even possible — for two divergently evolved sentient beings from different worlds to learn each other's languages well enough in a short amount of time (perhaps as little as a week) to usefully converse about abstract concepts and to be reasonably assured that both beings actually understand those abstracts...?
And the professor's response? We ended up blowing an entire hour on linguistics, and it was easily the coolest and nerdiest conversation I've had in a long time. Nearing the end, though, I asked Dr. Birner for her final take on whether or not the language acquisition exercise portrayed in Project Hail Mary would work.

Her consensus was "probably," but only given a number of extremely lucky — and extremely unlikely — coincidences in psychology and evolution (there's that anthropic principle of science fiction rearing its head!). If we can take it as a given that the alien is "friendly," and if we can also take it as a given that "friendship" in the alien's society carries along with it the same or a similar set of relationship expectations as it does for humans, and if we can take it as a given that the alien has similar emotional drivers, and if the alien values (or can at least intellectually conceive of) concepts like altruism and cooperation, and if the alien has a compatible sense of morality that places value on the lives of individuals and prioritizes the avoidance of death—if we can take all those things and more as givens, then things might work out.

"I think that given a theoretically infinite amount of time, probably yes," communication would be possible, she said. "As long as there's enough goodwill that you are going to be there together working together."
But in a long comment, long-time Slashdot reader shanen argues all sentient beings are basically Universal Turing Machines running mental programs in our heads, but still warns of "hardware-level incompatibilities not just at the level of sound systems, but in the kinds of programs that 'run sufficiently easily' in the more dissimilar Universal Turing Machines."

The Canadian astronaut, who commanded the International Space Station and recorded the famous microgravity rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity, on Sunday spit some fire at true believers who see a link between UFOs or UAPs (for "unidentified aerial phenomena" in the newish military parlance) and some sort of alien intelligence. From a report: "Obviously, I've seen countless things in the sky that I don't understand," Chris Hadfield, a former pilot for the Royal Canadian Air Force, said during a CBC Radio call-in show.

"But to see something in the sky that you don't understand and then to immediately conclude that it's intelligent life from another solar system is the height of foolishness and lack of logic." [...] Hadfield added that he does think it's likely there's life somewhere else in the universe. "But definitively up to this point, we have found no evidence of life anywhere except Earth," he said, "and we're looking."

Alphabet's Google is nearing a settlement of an antitrust case in France alleging the company has abused its power in online advertising, and is likely to pay a fine and make operational changes, WSJ reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter said. From the report: The French case is one of the most advanced in the world looking at Google's dominance as a provider of tools for buying and selling ads across the web. As part of the case, France's Competition Authority alleged that the company's advertising server -- historically known as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) and used by most large online publishers to sell ad space -- gave Google's online ad auction house, AdX, an advantage against other auction operators, the people said.

The authority also alleged other forms of self-preferencing between Google's advertising technology tools, they added. To settle the French charges, Google has offered to improve the interoperability of AdX with advertising servers run by other companies, as well as to remove some other obstacles faced by competitors, some of the people said. The settlement still must be approved by the authority's board, which could reject the deal, the people said. If approved, the settlement could be announced in coming weeks, they said.

New submitter rundgong shares a report from the BBC: An international team of researchers has created the largest and most detailed map of the distribution of so-called dark matter in the Universe. The results are a surprise because they show that it is slightly smoother and more spread out than the current best theories predict. The observation appears to stray from Einstein's theory of general relativity -- posing a conundrum for researchers. The results have been published by the Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.

Using the Victor M Blanco telescope in Chile, the team behind the new work analyzed 100 million galaxies. The map shows how dark matter sprawls across the Universe. The black areas are vast areas of nothingness, called voids, where the laws of physics might be different. The bright areas are where dark matter is concentrated. They are called "halos" because right in the centre is where our reality exists. In their midst are galaxies like our own Milky Way, shining brightly like tiny gems on a vast cosmic web.

According to Dr Jeffrey, who is also part of a department at University College London, the map, clearly shows that galaxies are part of a larger invisible structure. "No one in the history of humanity has been able to look out into space and see where dark matter is to such an extent. Astronomers have been able to build pictures of small patches, but we have unveiled vast new swathes which show much more of its structure. For the first time we can see the Universe in a different way."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: After more than three years of negotiations, San Jose officials voted late Tuesday to approve Google's plan for a sprawling downtown campus with thousands of new homes, millions of square feet of office space and a first-of-its kind $200 million community benefit agreement. It's a deal that business, labor and community groups say could signal a shift in Bay Area development politics -- particularly as San Jose, long overshadowed by neighboring San Francisco, looks to rebound from the pandemic with more active public spaces near transit. But in a region long accustomed to isolated suburban tech campuses and big-dollar affordable housing commitments, some still questioned how exactly a $155 million community fund will be spent, and whether it will be enough to offset familiar concerns about gentrification, homelessness and daily issues like parking.

With the vote on Tuesday, Google can move forward with an80-acre development plan near San Jose's central rail hub at Diridon Station, including 4,000 new homes, more than 7 million square feet of office space, 15 acres of parks and 500,000 square feet of retail and other space. Under a community benefit deal approved earlier this year, the company also agreed to create a $155 million community stabilization fund for job training, homelessness and affordable housing. It's unprecedented for a Bay Area tech campus -- and a stark contrast to tech peers like Amazon and Tesla, which have at times asked governments to compete for business by cutting costs -- as well as developers from other industries where community concessions are not the norm. Before the coronavirus upended daily commutes, Google planned for up to 25,000 workers to occupy the new San Jose office. The company has since announced that some of its global workforce will shift to remote roles, but the city hopes that the proposed "Downtown West" neighborhood around the new offices will help buoy lively public spaces. "A Google spokesman said the company will soon transfer land to the city for planned affordable housing development," the report says. "It aims to start construction work in 2022 and plans to transfer an initial $3 million to the city within 30 days of approval of the project, the spokesman said. In the meantime, the San Jose City Council will be tasked with appointing a new committee to oversee the $155 million community fund."

Who wants to be an astronaut? If the answer is you, there's a reality TV show, appropriately titled "Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?", that you ought to apply for. From a report: The Discovery Channel is seeking to cast about 10 would-be astronauts to compete during the series' eight-episode run next year for a seat on a real-life trip to the International Space Station, followed by live coverage of the launch of the winner on a SpaceX rocket. "We'd like a diverse group of people that each have their own story, why they want to go to space, why they're worthy of going to space, what their back story is," said Jay Peterson, president of Boat Rocker Studios, Unscripted, one of the companies producing the show for Discovery. That person will not be the only amateur astronaut destined for the space station next year. So many tourism and entertainment efforts are preparing trips there that it could begin to look more like a soundstage for television shows and a hotel for the wealthy than an orbiting research laboratory.

Many who work in the business of space believe that is a good thing, even if trips to orbit will remain out of reach of all but the wealthiest passengers in the near term. "This is a real inflection point, I think, with human spaceflight," Phil McAlister, NASA's director of commercial spaceflight development, said during a news conference this month announcing that the agency had signed an agreement with Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, to fly the first mission of private astronauts to the space station. "I'm very bullish on the tourism market and the tourism activity," Mr. McAlister said. "I think more people that are going to fly, they're going to want to do more things in space." Although the International Space Station may stay up in orbit at least until 2028, in the future it will not be only space station. Russian space authorities last month declared their intention to leave the I.S.S. in the coming years and build a station of their own. A Chinese orbital outpost is expected to come online in the next year or two.

So, what would it feel like to fall into a black hole? From a report: "Well, at the moment you crossed the horizon, you wouldn't feel anything -- there would be nothing dramatic," Peter Galison, co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, says over the phone. Huh. Doesn't sound too bad. "But inevitably, you would be pulled towards the centre," he continues. "There's no going back; everything that falls into a black hole just keeps falling; there's no resisting that pull and things don't end well."

Ah. Go on. "Physicists have an expression called 'spaghettification' because if you were falling in feet first, your feet would be more attracted towards the centre than your head, and your sides would be pushed towards your middle and this process would extend and compress you." Right. So, terrifying, then. Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: "In the long term that's not a good survival event." We are talking about his documentary film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, four years in the making and available on Netflix from 1 June, which follows two scientific collaborations to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. Among the highlights is being a fly on the wall as the late Stephen Hawking tries to figure them out.

It is Hawking's voice, that instantly recognisable computer speech synthesiser, that opens the film: "A black hole is stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. It's a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Once you are over the edge, there's no way back." City-sized black holes form when certain stars run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity. Supermassive black holes -- millions or billions of times bigger than our sun -- are found at the centre of almost every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way.

Researchers from University of Copenhagen have investigated what happened to a specific kind of plasma -- the first matter ever to be present -- during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today. Phys.org reports: "We have studied a substance called quark-gluon plasma that was the only matter, which existed during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Our results tell us a unique story of how the plasma evolved in the early stage of the universe," explains You Zhou, associate professor at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. "First, the plasma that consisted of quarks and gluons was separated by the hot expansion of the universe. Then the pieces of quark reformed into so-called hadrons. A hadron with three quarks makes a proton, which is part of atomic cores. These cores are the building blocks that constitutes Earth, ourselves and the universe that surrounds us," he adds.

The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) was present in the first 0.000001 second of Big Bang, and thereafter, it disappeared due to the expansion. But by using the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, researchers were able to recreate this, the first matter in history, and trace back what happened to it. "In addition to using the Large Hadron Collider, the researchers also developed an algorithm that is able to analyze the collective expansion of more produced particles at once than ever possible before. Their results show that the QGP used to be a fluent liquid form and that it distinguishes itself from other matter by constantly changing its shape over time.

"For a long time, researchers thought that the plasma was a form of gas, but our analysis confirm the latest milestone measurement, where the Hadron Collider showed that QGP was fluent and had a smooth soft texture like water. The new details we provide show that the plasma has changed its shape over time, which is quite surprising and different from any other matter we know and what we would have expected," says You Zhou. Even though this might seem like a small detail, it brings physicists one step closer to solving the puzzle of the Big Bang and how the universe developed in the first microsecond, he elaborates. The study has been published in the journal Physics Letters B.

The major growth in Amazon's advertising unit means its revenue contribution is now 2.4 times larger than Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest combined, and it's growing 1.7 times as quickly, according to Loop Capital. CNBC reports: Amazon's "Other" unit, which is primarily made up of advertising but also includes sales related to other service offerings, grew revenue a whopping 77% year-over-year to more than $6.9 billion in the first quarter, the company reported last month. "Performance ads on the ecommerce sites fueled by Amazon's high-intent traffic and unparalleled user insights are providing significant value for sellers and brands," Loop Capital analysts wrote in the Monday note.

They also cited the company's presentation at the recent IAB NewFronts that discussed the company's efforts in the streaming space. Amazon said early this month its ad-supported streaming video content now reaches more than 120 monthly users every month, driven by platforms like Twitch. Amazon generated $22.4 billion in ad revenue in the past 12 months, up 65% year-over-year, according to Loop. That was 2.4 times the $9.3 combined revenue total of middle-cap ad platforms Snap, Twitter, Roku and Pinterest, which grew by 38% over that same timeframe.

A group of Redditors came together in a bid to archive over 85 million scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down. Interesting Engineering reports: Over the last decade or so, Sci-Hub, often referred to as "The Pirate Bay of Science," has been giving free access to a huge database of scientific papers that would otherwise be locked behind a paywall. Unsurprisingly, the website has been the target of multiple lawsuits, as well as an investigation from the United States Department of Justice. The site's Twitter account was also recently suspended under Twitter's counterfeit policy, and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, reported that the FBI gained access to her Apple accounts.

Now, Redditors from a subreddit called DataHoarder, which is aimed at archiving knowledge in the digital space, have come together to try to save the numerous papers available on the website. In a post on May 13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, stated that "it's time we sent Elsevier and the USDOJ a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many." This will be no easy task. Sci-Hub is home to over 85 million papers, totaling a staggering 77TB of data. The group of Redditors is currently recruiting for its archiving efforts and its stated goal is to have approximately 8,500 individuals torrenting the papers in order to download the entire library. Once that task is complete, the Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new "uncensorable" open-source website.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Intercept: Now that Jeff Bezos's space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that's being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA -- money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that's headquartered in Cantwell's home state.

Cantwell's amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. "It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America," Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell's measure wouldn't rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos's company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it's likely to benefit. The measure has been attached to the Endless Frontier Act as part of a manager's amendment and authorizes $10.032 billion through the year 2026 for the moon program. Authorization alone does not fund the program, and Congress would still need to appropriate the money, or the executive would need to find other appropriated funds.

Big under-the-hood changes are coming to Google's original Nest Hub, even if most users won't ever be aware of what's happening. From a report: Starting today, the open-source Fuchsia OS will start rolling out to first-gen Nest Hub displays, according to 9to5Google. In the works since 2016, Fuchsia will land first on Nest Hub devices enrolled in Google's Preview Program, before arriving more widely on non-Preview Program displays. Don't expect the user experience to change much, though. 9to5Google notes that the look and feel of Fuchsia OS-powered Nest Hubs will be "essentially identical" to what it was before.

OK, so what's the big deal about Fuchsia, then? It's a new, open-source OS that's decidedly not based on the Linux kernel, as Android and Chrome OS are. Instead, Fuchsia is based on Magneta, which (as we described it back in 2016) is "combination microkernel and set of user-space services and hardware drivers" with a "physics based renderer" that can power graphical user interfaces. Because it's an open-source project, Fuchsia's existence has been well publicized over the years, although its purpose has been harder to fathom; "out in the open" yet "shrouded in mystery" is how we aptly put it. With its arrival on the original Nest Hub, Fuchsia is taking its first tentative steps out of the lab and into the hands of actual users, even if those users aren't aware of the new OS.

Peloton said Monday it will invest $400 million to build its first factory in the United States to speed up production and delivery of its popular cycles and high-end treadmill machines. CNBC reports: After vetting a number of locations, it selected a 200-acre site in Troy Township in Wood County, Ohio, to construct more than 1 million square feet of manufacturing, office and amenities space, the company said. Peloton expects to break ground later this summer on the project, which should bring more than 2,000 jobs to the area. The facility should be up and running by 2023.

Potential customers will be able to visit the Ohio facility to view its products or schedule tours to see the cycles and treadmills being made, the company said. The site will also have a fitness center for its workers. According to Foley, the extra space also means Peloton will have room to manufacture additional products in the years ahead.