Author: Olivia Hartman

Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced a bill on Monday that could prevent prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket from allowing users to wager money on sports events or play casino-style games. This bipartisan bill would not apply to FanDuel and DraftKings, which are subject to state-by-state gambling laws, rather than federal ones. “Sports prediction contracts are sports bets — just with a different name. And yet, these contracts are currently offered in all fifty states in clear violation of state and federal law,” Schiff said in a statement. Gambling has become more prominent in American culture…

If you’ll recall, during the extreme heat tests, the pouch surrounding Donut’s battery lost its vacuum seal. This led to researchers at Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre, which conducted all of the lab’s previous tests, to explore whether the cell could still function under these high-stress, high-temperature conditions. As Donut notes, damage such as the one sustained by its pack during the heat test has been known to cause fire or thermal runaway in conventional lithium-ion batteries. The startup wanted to see whether its solid-state battery could avoid a similar calamity.Researchers conducted three tests: a baseline test of 5…

A Russian cargo spacecraft carrying supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) failed to deploy two of its antennas, jeopardizing its ability to dock with the space station. The Roscosmos Progress 94 spacecraft launched on Monday at 7:59 a.m. ET on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. After liftoff, two of the spacecraft’s automated rendezvous antennas did not deploy as planned, NASA revealed in an update. The spacecraft is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Tuesday at 9:45 a.m. ET. The Russian space agency is attempting to troubleshoot the issue ahead of the planned docking. If…

Photograph: Christopher NullAsusZenbook S 16 (UM5606)Lastly, I’ll point you in the direction of the Asus Zenbook S 16. I’ve always appreciated this laptop for its stunning design. That all-white aesthetic, oversized trackpad, and those thin bezels make it stand out. There’s also the fact that it’s only 0.48 inches thick, which is very close to as thin as the MacBook Air. My only problem with this laptop has been that the pricing refused to drop throughout much of last year. It was hard to justify at over $1,500, regardless of how polished it felt. These days, the price is hovering…

But the Swift spacecraft will surely crash back to Earth, likely before the end of this year, without a reboost. That’s where Katalyst comes in. The company’s robotic servicing spacecraft, named Link, will attempt to rendezvous and dock with the Swift satellite, then raise its altitude to give the observatory a new lease on life. That is, if everything goes according to plan. Artist’s illustration of Katalyst’s Link spacecraft (top) approaching NASA’s Swift observatory (bottom). Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies Artist’s illustration of Katalyst’s Link spacecraft (top) approaching NASA’s Swift observatory (bottom). Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies Deadline looming There are a…

AI coding company Cursor launched a new model this week called Composer 2, which it promoted as offering “frontier-level coding intelligence.”  However, an X user posting under the name Fynn soon claimed that Composer 2 was “just Kimi 2.5” with additional reinforcement learning — Kimi 2.5 being an open source model recently released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese company backed by Alibaba and HongShan (formerly Sequoia China).  As evidence, Fynn pointed to code that seemed to identify Kimi as the model. “[A]t least rename the model ID,” they scoffed. It was a surprising revelation, since Cursor is a well-funded U.S.…

Elon Musk stated that every chip he can buy today only covers about 2% of what his companies actually need. Rather than wait for the rest of the world to catch up, he announced TeraFab on Saturday night, a chip factory in Austin and a joint venture between Tesla and SpaceX. The announcement came via a livestream broadcast from the old Seaholm Power Plant in downtown Austin. “We either build the TeraFab, or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we’re going to build the TeraFab,” Musk said. The facility will be built on the Tesla…

Elon Musk announced plans to build a giant chip factory in Austin, Texas. Speaking at an event in Austin on Saturday, Musk announced that the project, Terafab, would start off as an “advanced technology fab” meant to produce two kinds of chips to be used by Tesla and the newly merged SpaceX and xAI. One of those chips, Musk said, will be optimized for “edge and inference,” primarily to be used in Tesla’s autonomous driving ventures and Optimus humanoid robots. The second will be a high-powered chip to be used in space, on the road to Musk’s long-preached goals of…

Adam Doud/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysMy 5G road trip tests included rigorous testing on three Google Pixel phones.Signal reliability generally proved good to decent across three major interstate carriers.Network architecture, including non-standalone 5G, emerged as a factor in deployment.5G made a number of promises when it debuted. The first was the ability to handle excessive capacity. I tested that promise outside a baseball playoff game this past October, and I found it to be partially true. The other promise was better coverage coast to coast. Now, it was time to head out and give that…