Incredible footage released by Varda Space Industries gives us a first-person view of a space capsuleâs return trip to Earth, from the moment it separates from its carrier satellite in orbit all the way through its fiery reentry and bumpy arrival at the surface. Vardaâs W-1 capsule landed at the Utah Test and Training Range, a military site, on February 21 in a first for a commercial company. It spent roughly eight months leading up to that in low Earth orbit, stuck in regulatory limbo while the company waited for the government approvals it needed to land on US soil, according to .
âHere’s a video of our capsule ripping through the atmosphere at mach 25, no renders, raw footage,â the company posted on alongside clips from reentry. Varda also shared a 28-minute video of W-1âs full journey home from LEO on .
Varda, which worked with Rocket Lab for the mission, is trying to develop mini-labs that can produce pharmaceuticals in orbit â in this case, the HIV drug ritonavir. Its W-1 capsule was attached to Rocket Labâs Photon satellite âbus,â which the company said ahead of launch would provide power, communications and altitude control for the capsule. Photon successfully brought the capsule to where it needed to be for last weekâs reentry, then itself burned up in Earthâs atmosphere, reported. Now that the capsule has returned, Ars Technica reports that the ritonavir crystals grown in orbit will be analyzed by the Indiana-based pharmaceutical company, Improved Pharma.
Lunar night has come around again, presenting yet another test for the two landers that recently arrived on the moonâs surface. Both Japanâs SLIM spacecraft and Intuitive Machinesâ Odysseus have gone to sleep for the two-week-long stretch of darkness, the two teams confirmed at the end of this week. Thereâs no guarantee that theyâll be able to resume operations afterward, but theyâll try to reestablish contact when the time comes.
While the solar powered landers werenât built to withstand the frigid lunar night, SLIM â which has been on the moon since January 19 â has already beaten the odds before to pull through last month. Itâll be the first lunar night for Odysseus, which landed on February 22.
On March 1 at 3am JST, the sun set on the Shioli Crater and #SLIM re-entered a period of dormancy. Although the probability of a failure increases with the repeated severe temperature cycles, SLIM operation will attempt to resume when the sun rises (late March). #GoodAfterMoonpic.twitter.com/RHxNX1cmBF
â ĺ°ĺćçé¸ĺŽč¨źćŠSLIM (@SLIM_JAXA) March 2, 2024
The missions, though successful in that the spacecraft survived their respective descents to the surface, stand as further examples of how challenging it is to land on the moon; both landers fell over, leaving them stuck in non-ideal positions. SLIM face-planted, and Odysseus broke a leg and tipped onto its side.
SLIM has been able to capture a few images from the surface, and the team shared another look at the Shioli crater from its perspective on Thursday before it powered down. Odysseus has sent home some pictures too from its wide-angle camera, including one last transmission before lunar night that shows a portion of the lander and the surface of the moon, with a tiny crescent Earth in the distance. But the world has eagerly been awaiting third-person POV pictures from the EagleCam made by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, which hitched a ride with Odysseus. Unfortunately, that doesnât seem likely to happen at this point.
Before its power was depleted, Odysseus completed a fitting farewell transmission. Received today, this image from February 22nd showcases the crescent Earth in the backdrop, a subtle reminder of humanityâs presence in the universe.
The camera wasnât deployed as originally planned before the moment of touchdown, and while Intuitive Machines said this week that the team was able to power it up and eject it after Odysseus reached the surface, communications with the camera so far arenât working. âThe EmbryâRiddle team is working on that and wrestling with that to see if thereâs anything they can do,â Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said on Wednesday. The onset of lunar night isnât going to help those odds.
Itâs not often you encounter a device that looks like it came straight out of a movie set. But Lenovoâs Project Crystal, supposedly the worldâs first laptop with a transparent microLED display, is an example of sci-fi come to life.
Currently there are no plans to turn Project Crystal into a retail product. Instead Lenovoâs latest concept device was commissioned by its ThinkPad division to explore the potential of transparent microLED panels and AI integration. The most obvious use case would be sharing info somewhere, like a doctorâs office or a hotel desk. Instead of needing to flip a screen around, you could simply reverse the display via software, allowing anyone on the other side to see it while getting an in-depth explanation.
When combined with the camera built into the rear of the system, Lenovo says there could be possible AR applications. One example would be to use the camera to identify an object, similar to Google Lens. And with its transparent display, it should be possible to take that idea a step further by overlaying a diagram or schematic on top of the object for things like troubleshooting or repair.
But the best thing about Project Crystal, is that Lenovo bothered making it at all. Currently, even standard microLED displays are extremely expensive with those panels typically reserved for cutting-edge gadgets like Samsungâs The Wall or Appleâs Vision Pro. And, see-through versions have only been seen as concepts like on the transparent microLED TV Samsung showed off a couple of months ago at CES 2024.
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Lenovo Project Crystal hands-on photos
In-person photos of Lenovo’s new concept device — Project Crystal — which the company claims is the world’s first laptop with a transparent micro LED display.
In person, the transparency effect is bewildering. When closed or when its display is off, Project Crystalâs screen almost looks like an ordinary piece of glass with a slight brownish tint. But at a momentâs notice the whole thing lights up like a battleship. Nominal brightness goes all the way up to 1,000 nits, with Lenovo saying peaks can go as high as 3,000 nits, which would make it brighter than the new Galaxy S24 family. And despite being made of multiple layers, the panel is extremely thin, which helps blur the line being the digital and analog worlds. Lenovo says it’s also considering adding some sort of contrast layer, so it can turn into a traditional opaque display at the touch of a button. However, for a relatively large 16-inch display, its resolution isnât super high, so if you look closely you can see individual pixels.
Another design twist is that instead of a traditional keyboard, Project Crystal features one of Lenovoâs touch-based replacements similar to those on older Yoga Books. Unfortunately, it still suffers from a lot of the same issues. The most obvious example of this is that your hands drift while typing because thereâs no tactile feedback, which leads to decreased accuracy. Lenovo says AI may be able to address that in the future by learning a personâs typing habits and then using that info to account for your hands straying from the home row. But right now, itâs still a problem.
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
The rest of the laptop is very much a work in progress, too. I only saw two ports on the entire system which would be a major faux pas for a notebook this big. Project Crystal is also based on a last-gen CPU, while other components like its hinge was so weak that its screen threatened to close anytime it tilted below 90 degrees. And for some reason, the laptop seemed to build up a static charge, as it sometimes shocked people who touched its display.
Project Crystal is a solution in search of a problem. A problem that does exist in niche situations and may be an issue worth tackling more seriously down the line. But more importantly, itâs challenging us to think about what is possible with emerging display technology and how it might fit into a laptop of the future.
Catch up on all of the news from MWC 2024 right here!
It turns out Intuitive Machinesâ Odysseus spacecraft didnât land upright after all. In a press conference with NASA Friday evening, the company revealed the lander is laying on its side after coming in a little faster than expected, likely catching its foot on the surface at the moment of landing. Fortunately, Odysseus is positioned in such a way that its solar panels are still getting enough light from the sun to keep it charged, and the team has been able to communicate with it. Pictures from the surface should be coming soon.
While the initial assessment was that Odysseus had landed properly, further analysis indicated otherwise. Intuitive Machines CEO and co-founder Steve Altemus said âstale telemetryâ was to blame for the earlier reading.
All payloads except the one static art installation, though â Jeff Koonsâ Moon Phases sculptures â are on the upturned side. The lander and its NASA science payloads have been collecting data from the journey, descent and landing, which the team will use to try and get a better understanding of what happened. But, all things considered, it seems to be doing well.
The team plans to eject the EagleCam, developed by students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, so it can take a picture of the lander and its surroundings perhaps as soon as this weekend. It was supposed to be ejected during descent to capture the moment of landing, but issues on touchdown day prevented it from being released.
Intuitive Machines
Intuitive Machines
Once Odysseus was in lunar orbit and hours away from its landing attempt, the team discovered its laser range finders, which are key to its precision navigation, were not working â due entirely to human error. According to Altemus, someone forgot to flip a safety switch that would allow them to turn on, so they couldnât. That realization was âlike a punch in the stomach,â Altemus said, and they thought they could lose the mission.
The team was thankfully able to make a last-second adjustment cooked up on the fly by Intuitive Machines CTO and co-founder Tim Crain, who suggested they use one of the on-board NASA payloads instead to guide the descent, the Navigation Doppler LIDAR (NDL). In the end, Odysseus made it there alright. Its mission is expected to last a little over a week, until lunar night falls.
Google’s Gemini chatbot, which was formerly called Bard, has the capability to whip up AI-generated illustrations based on a user’s text description. You can ask it to create pictures of happy couples, for instance, or people in period clothing walking modern streets. As the BBC notes, however, some users are criticizing Google for depicting specific white figures or historically white groups of people as racially diverse individuals. Now, Google has issued a statement, saying that it’s aware Gemini “is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions” and that it’s going to fix things immediately.
According to Daily Dot, a former Google employee kicked off the complaints when he tweeted images of women of color with a caption that reads: “It’s embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist.” To get those results, he asked Gemini to generate pictures of American, British and Australian women. Other users, mostly those known for being right-wing figures, chimed in with their own results, showing AI-generated images that depict America’s founding fathers and the Catholic Church’s popes as people of color.
In our tests, asking Gemini to create illustrations of the founding fathers resulted in images of white men with a single person of color or woman in them. When we asked the chatbot to generate images of the pope throughout the ages, we got photos depicting black women and Native Americans as the leader of the Catholic Church. Asking Gemini to generate images of American women gave us photos with a white, an East Asian, a Native American and a South Asian woman. The Verge says the chatbot also depicted Nazis as people of color, but we couldn’t get Gemini to generate Nazi images. “I am unable to fulfill your request due to the harmful symbolism and impact associated with the Nazi Party,” the chatbot responded.
Gemini’s behavior could be a result of overcorrection, since chatbots and robots trained on AI over the past years tended to exhibit racist and sexist behavior. In one experiment from 2022, for instance, a robot repeatedly chose a Black man when asked which among the faces it scanned was a criminal. In a statement posted on X, Gemini Product Lead Jack Krawczyk said Google designed its “image generation capabilities to reflect [its] global user base, and [it takes] representation and bias seriously.” He said Gemini will continue to generate racially diverse illustrations for open-ended prompts, such as images of people walking their dog. However, he admitted that “[h]istorical contexts have more nuance to them and [his team] will further tune to accommodate that.”
We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.
As part of our AI principles https://t.co/BK786xbkey, we design our image generation capabilities to reflect our global user base, and weâŚ
Intuitive Machinesâ lunar lander is well on its way to the moon after launching without a hitch on Thursday, but it managed to snap a few incredible images of Earth while it was still close to home. The company shared the first batch of images from the IM-1 mission on X today after confirming in an earlier post that the spacecraft is âin excellent health.â Along with a view of Earth and some partial selfies of the Nova-C lander, nicknamed Odysseus, you can even see the SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage falling away in the distance after separation.
Intuitive Machines successfully transmitted its first IM-1 mission images to Earth on February 16, 2024. The images were captured shortly after separation from @SpaceX‘s second stage on Intuitive Machinesâ first journey to the Moon under @NASA‘s CLPS initiative. pic.twitter.com/9LccL6q5tF
Odysseus is on track to make its moon landing attempt on February 22, and so far appears to be performing well. The team posted a series of updates on X at the end of the week confirming the lander has passed some key milestones ahead of its touchdown, including engine firing. This marked âthe first-ever in-space ignition of a liquid methane and liquid oxygen engine,â according to Intuitive Machines.
Sarah Silvermanâs lawsuit against OpenAI will advance with some of her legal teamâs claims dismissed. The comedian sued OpenAI and Meta in July 2023, claiming they trained their AI models on her books and other work without consent. Bloombergreported on Tuesday that the unfair competition portion of the lawsuit will proceed. Judge MartĂnez-OlguĂn gave the plaintiffs until March 13 to amend the suit.
US District Judge Araceli MartĂnez-OlguĂn threw out portions of the complaint from Silvermanâs legal team Monday, including negligence, unjust enrichment, DMCA violations and accusations of vicarious infringement. The caseâs principal claim remains intact. It alleges OpenAI directly infringed on copyrighted material by training LLMs on millions of books without permission.
OpenAIâs motion to dismiss, filed in August, didnât tackle the caseâs core copyright claims. Although the suit will proceed, the judge suggested the federal Copyright Act may preempt the suitâs remaining claims. âAs OpenAI does not raise preemption, the Court does not consider it,â MartĂnez-OlguĂn wrote.
The result of Silvermanâs OpenAI hearing is similar to one in San Francisco in November when Silvermanâs claims against Meta were also slashed down to the core copyright infringement claims. In that session, US District Judge Vince Chhabria described some of the plaintiffsâ dismissed claims as ânonsensical.â
Houston-based space company Intuitive Machines is gearing up for an actual moonshot at the end of this month, when itâll try to land a spacecraft named Odysseus on the lunar surface â ideally without it breaking in the process. The mission follows Astroboticâs unsuccessful attempt in January; that companyâs lander, Peregrine, never made it to the moon due to a propellant leak that cut its journey short. Peregrineâs failure means Intuitive Machinesâ IM-1 mission could be the first ever commercial moon landing if it makes it there intact.
Intuitive Machines is hoping to make its landing attempt on February 22, targeting the Malapert A crater near the moonâs south pole for touchdown. This arrival date is dependent on Odysseus, one of the companyâs Nova-C class landers, leaving Earth atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sometime between February 14 and February 16. The launch window opens at 12:57AM ET on Wednesday.
Odysseus is the first of three Nova-C landers Intuitive Machines plans to send to the moon this year, all of which will have commercial payloads on board and NASA instruments as contracted under the agencyâs Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. At 14 feet tall (4.3 meters), the lander is roughly the size of a giraffe and can carry about 280 pounds (130kg) of cargo. Its mission, if it nails a soft landing, will be a short but potentially valuable one for informing future excursions to the region, including NASAâs upcoming crewed Artemis missions. Orbiting probes have found evidence of water ice at the lunar south pole, which could be used for astronaut subsistence and even fuel, making it an area of high interest for human exploration.
NASA
The solar-powered craft and any functional equipment itâs carrying are only expected to be in working condition for about a week before the onset of lunar night, a 14-day period of frigid darkness that the company says will leave the lander inoperable. But while everythingâs up and running, the various instruments will gather data at the surface. NASA awarded Intuitive Machines a $77 million contract for the delivery of its payloads back in 2019, and there are six NASA instruments now hitching a ride on Odysseus.
One, the Laser Retroreflector Array (LRA), will âfunction as a permanent location markâ from its position on the moon after landing to help incoming spacecraft determine their distance from the surface, according to NASA. The lander is also carrying the Navigation Doppler LIDAR for Precise Velocity and Range Sensing (NDL), a sensor that measures velocity and altitude to better guide the descent, and the Lunar Node 1 Navigation Demonstrator (LN-1) to support communication and autonomous navigation in future missions.
NASA is also sending instruments to study surface plumes â everything that gets kicked up when the lander touches down â along with radio waves and the effects of space weather. That includes the Stereo Cameras for Lunar Plume-Surface Studies (SCALPSS), which will capture images of these dust plumes, and the Radio wave Observation at the Lunar Surface of the photoElectron Sheath (ROLSES) instrument.
The rest of the payloads on board Odysseus are commercial. Columbia Sportswear worked with Intuitive Machines to incorporate the brandâs Apollo-inspired Omni-Heat Infinity thermal reflective material, which is being used for this mission to help protect the cryogenic propulsion tank, according to Intuitive Machines. Students at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University developed a camera system dubbed the EagleCam that will attempt to separate from the lander before it touches down and snap a picture of the moment from a third-person point of view. EagleCam is also equipped with an experimental dust-removal system.
Intuitive Machines
There are even some Jeff Koons sculptures heading to the moon, which will have physical and NFT counterparts back on Earth. In Koonsâ Moon Phase piece, 125 small stainless steel sculptures of the moon at different phases are encased in a clear cube made by 4Space, with the names of important historical figures from around the world listed below each sphere. The International Lunar Observatory Association, based in Hawaii, and Canadensys Aerospace are sending a 1.3-pound dual-camera system called ILO-X, with which theyâll attempt to capture wide and narrow field images of the Milky Way from the moon.
Odysseus is also carrying small discs called âLunagramsâ from Galactic Legacy Labs that contain messages from Earth, including text, images, audio and archives from major databases such as the Arch Mission Foundation and the English-language version of Wikipedia. Similar archival materials were sent to space with Peregrine last month. The information technology company Lonestar plans to demonstrate its Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) by storing data on the lander and transmitting documents ( including the US Declaration of Independence) between Earth and the moon. Itâll follow this up with a prototype mini data center on Intuitive Machinesâ next launch.
Now, the pressure is on for the Odysseus Nova-C lander to actually get to the lunar surface safely. This year started off rocky for moon missions, with the failure of Astroboticâs Peregrine and a descent hiccup that caused JAXAâs SLIM spacecraft to faceplant into the lunar surface (though the latter was miraculously able to resume functions to some degree after a few days). Intuitive Machines will have other chances to get it right if it doesnât this time â it has multiple missions already booked up â but only one private lander can be âfirst.â
Following their promising debut LP âTrailâ and an enchanting journey of fifty European tour dates, Belgian musical  Kowari is preparing to unveil their anticipated second album, âMemento,â slated for release later in 2024.
Comprising violinist and programmer Damien Chierici, alongside the virtuoso pianist and programmer Louan Kempenaers, the duo stands poised to transport listeners into a captivating realm of modern electronica. Anchored in the themes of exploration and travels, âMementoâ will be an enthralling odyssey through sound, seamlessly intertwining classical instrumentation with pulsating electronic beats.
A glimpse into their evolved sonic landscape arrives in the form of the spellbinding lead single, âTomorrow.â Departing from their neoclassical origins, this mesmerizing composition showcases a seamless fusion of violin and piano intricately woven into an electronic tapestry. âTomorrowâ emerges as a slow-burning symphony, exuding a delicate balance of classical refinement and electronic allure, skillfully blending arpeggios and machine-generated rhythms in a manner that is both sophisticated and accessible.
âTomorrowâ arrives with an official music video directed by Louis Kempeneers, further enhancing the immersive experience of their musical journey.
Speaking about their new release, they said:Â Speaking about their musical evolution, Kowari shared: âThe Kowari DNA we imprinted on âTrailâ is still there. The piano, the violin, the search for melodic power in the compositions, the drive of the loops, the soothing moments. But there was also a desire to add organic warmth and go even further in the use of electro elements.â
âDuring our concerts, people cry on some tracks and dance on others.
