New details of the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House’s desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have shown a new way of exploring the Solar System.

Trump’s NASA budget request is rife with spending cuts. Overall, the White House proposes reducing NASA’s budget by about 24 percent, from $24.8 billion this year to $18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026. In previous stories, Ars has covered many of the programs impacted by the proposed cuts, which would cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft and terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars Sample Return, probes to Venus, and future space telescopes.

Instead, the leftover funding for NASA’s human exploration program would go toward supporting commercial projects to land on the Moon and Mars.

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More office space in the U.S. is being removed than added for the first time in at least 25 years. New data from CBRE Group shows that across the 58 largest US markets, 23.3 million square feet of office space is slated for demolition or conversion by year-end, while developers will complete just 12.7 million square feet of new construction.

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If you use Google Chrome, you need to update your browser right now. Google just released an emergency patch for a three security vulnerabilities, one of which is a zero-day that has been actively exploited.

Zero-days are high-severity flaws that are either actively exploited in the wild or publicly disclosed before the developer pushes an update to fix the vulnerability.

What the Google Chrome patch fixes

The latest Chrome zero-day—labeled CVE-2025-5419—is an out-of-bounds read-and-write vulnerability that affects the V8 JavaScript engine, which would allow a remote attacker to “exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page.”

The flaw was discovered and reported on May 27 by Clement Lecigne and Benoît Sevens from the Google Threat Analysis Group. While Google has acknowledged that the zero-day has been actively exploited, it hasn’t disclosed any additional details as to how or by whom to prevent other bad actors from leveraging the bug until more Chrome users have applied the patch.

This isn’t the first zero-day vulnerability affecting Chrome this year. Google released additional emergency patches in March and May: The first flaw allowed the deployment of malware in espionage attacks, while the second permitted account takeover.

What Chrome users need to do

Google has confirmed that it pushed a configuration change to the Stable version of Chrome to address the vulnerability the day after it was discovered. On Monday, the company released a Stable channel update with patches for the zero-day and two additional security issues.

Users should ensure they are on Chrome version 137.0.7151.68/.69 for Windows and macOS, and version 137.0.7151.68 for Linux. Check your version by opening the Chrome menu and selecting About Google Chrome. If an update is available, allow it to complete and relaunch your browser to install it.

After years of holding out, I recently upgraded my Apple Watch, and quickly learned that jumping from the Apple Watch Series 6 to the Series 10 is a journey of both big and small changes. It’s still the same Apple Watch, but bigger and lighter. It’s also finally light enough that I can wear it to bed, and get a sleep analysis report each night. Honestly, I just upgraded my Apple Watch because the battery was dying on my old one, but now I’m glad I did.

While it’s easy to talk about the updated form factor, I’ve also noticed that my upgrade to the Series 10 has brought with it a few smaller perks that I feel aren’t talked about enough. Some of these aren’t exclusive to the Series 10, but they are front and center on it: These are the little conveniences that I’ve come to appreciate since upgrading to the new Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch speaker, unchained

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Before the Series 10, the Apple Watch’s built-in speaker was limited to taking calls, and for sounding out notification alarms. And I quite liked that I could take calls without while away from my phone.

But if you’re using the Series 10 or the Ultra 2, you can now play a wide variety of sounds from the speakers. It works on Apple’s own apps, of course, like Podcasts and Music. But also for third-party apps, if they support it. YouTube Music works, and so does Spotify, though only if you’re paying for Premium. If you use a media app often, check to see if the speaker output works.

A sleeper hit for me has been Audible and Zenitizer, my meditation app of choice. I now don’t touch my iPhone at all when starting my meditation routine. Zenitizer is a guidance-free meditation app, but I do use it to play background nature sounds as something to focus on, which is simple enough to do it on the Apple Watch speakers.

Photos, the superior watch face

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

I’ve been trying for the past 10 years now, but I can never really nail a watch face config that I like. It’s hard to set up a watch face that you like looking at and that’s still useful, loaded with all the complications that you like.

So, I’ve given up, and embraced the newly updated Photos watch face. If you haven’t tried the new version in watchOS 11 yet, you should. It does all the heavy lifting for you. First, find it on your iPhone, from the Watch app. Here, you can tell it to circle between photos of Nature, Cities, or a person. It will automatically suggest the name of your partner or your family members. Then, I suggest leaving the clock font on Dynamic, after which you can complication or two if you want.

Every day, your watch face will now cycle through a different set of photos, cropped in a way that looks beautiful on the Apple Watch. The font will be interspersed dynamically with the photo background, too. So you’ll see it peeking out of the horizon on a sunset photo, or out of your wife’s curly hair (my personal favorite). Quite nice to look at throughout the day.

Widgets for the win

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

If watch face complications aren’t working out for you, you can turn to widgets. Introduced in watchOS 10, they bring a small version of iPhone widgets to the Apple Watch. You can access them by swiping up on the watch face, or by turning the Digital Crown.

The first widget lets you add app shortcuts, and then it’s your playground. Your Apple Watch will automatically show you widgets based on the time of the day, or context. But you’re free to add and pin widgets as you want.

For me, widgets have become my command center. Almost every interaction starts with my watch starts with widgets. I use them to open the Workouts app, to check the weather, to start my meditation timer, to control my podcasts and timers, and to see my fitness activity.

My only issue here is that the widget space is quite limited. You can only add up to eight widgets (plus the complications shortcut widget at the top). I use seven widgets right now, so I’m quite close to the limit. I hope Apple extends this limit in the next watchOS update.

Offline playback and the ability to leave your iPhone behind

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

I don’t have the cellular Apple Watch, but I still enjoy leaving my iPhone behind and relying solely on my watch. Plus, the Apple Watch’s connection with the iPhone is quite limited, anyway. Sometimes the Apple Watch fails to connect even when I’m in an adjacent room (concrete walls might be the reason there). It’s good to get used to using it on its own.

My favorite thing about using an Apple Watch on its own? You can load it up with media and podcasts. It’s not a single button press, or even necessarily an easy process. But if you open a compatible media app on your Apple Watch, and also on your iPhone, there’s a good chance the app will give you instructions on how to sync audio files and podcasts. Overcast, my podcast client of choice, does this quite well. It takes a long time to sync up between my devices, but after that, you can go to the Settings section to enable the feature that automatically downloads the 20 latest episodes from any playlist onto your Watch (when it’s connected to wifi, and charging).

In the Music app, open any playlist, tap the three-dotted Menu icon and tap Download. Apple’s Podcasts app will automatically download episodes in your Up Next queue, but you can also select shows to always download to your Watch. From the Watch app on iPhone, go to My Watch > Podcasts > Add Shows.

Double-tap grows on you

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Lastly, I want to talk about the humble little double-tap feature that has come in handy for me in a couple of crucial situations. This feature is available on Apple Watch Series 9 and higher, and lets you tap your index finger and your thumb twice, in the air, to do a major action on your screen. You can use it to pick up a call, end a call, to wake up the Apple Watch, and even to scroll lists. For example, you can double-tap once to wake up the screen, do it again to open the widgets screen, and keep scrolling through. Not exactly revolutionary, but quite useful when you have your hands full.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Open source software used by hobbyist drones powered an attack that wiped out a third of Russia’s strategic long range bombers on Sunday afternoon, in one of the most daring and technically coordinated attacks in the war. In broad daylight on Sunday, explosions rocked air bases in Belaya, Olenya, and Ivanovo in Russia, which are hundreds of miles from Ukraine. The Security Services of Ukraine’s (SBU) Operation Spider Web was a coordinated assault on Russian targets it claimed was more than a year in the making, which was carried out using a nearly 20-year-old piece of open source drone autopilot software called ArduPilot.

ArduPilot’s original creators were in awe of the attack. “That’s ArduPilot, launched from my basement 18 years ago. Crazy,” Chris Anderson said in a comment on LinkedIn below footage of the attack. On X, he tagged his the co-creators Jordi Munoz and Jason Short in a post about the attack. “Not in a million years would I have predicted this outcome. I just wanted to make flying robots,” Short said in a reply to Anderson. “Ardupilot powered drones just took out half the Russian strategic bomber fleet.”

ArduPilot is an open source software system that takes its name from the Arduino hardware systems it was originally designed to work with. It began in 2007 when Anderson launched the website DIYdrones.com and cobbled together a UAV autopilot system out of a Lego Mindstorms set.

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There aren’t that many pizza ovens made for indoor use. That’s why the Ooni Volt 12 is special. This indoor oven is now on sale for 30 percent off via Amazon, bringing the price down to $629. This deal is also available directly from the manufacturer.

The Volt 12 made our list of the best pizza ovens, and for good reason. It’s simply the best indoor pizza oven on the market, not that there’s all that much competition. It can reach temperatures of up to 850 degrees Fahrenheit, which cooks up a Neapolitan style pie in around 90 seconds.

This is approaching the ultra-high temperatures that outdoor ovens achieve. To that end, this unit can be used outside when necessary. We actually said it “works just as well” as the outdoor models in our official review.

Front-facing controls offer the ability to adjust both heating elements, with cooking presets and a boost function to quickly get the oven back to temp between pies. It comes with a square-shaped pizza stone, which is handy because it allows folks to slide in pans for Detroit style pizza or traditional baked goods.

As a downside, this thing is huge. It’ll most likely have to be stored away between use sessions. The exterior gets pretty hot, so keep the kiddos away until it’s time to nosh.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on X for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/the-ooni-volt-12-pizza-oven-is-30-percent-off-right-now-151453097.html?src=rss

President Trump’s 2026 budget proposes over $1 billion for Mars exploration through a new Commercial Mars Payload Services Program, while simultaneously slashing NASA’s overall budget by 25%. Phys.Org reports: Under the proposal, NASA would award contracts to companies developing spacesuits, communications systems and a human-rated landing vehicle to foster exploration of the Red Planet. Trump’s proposed $18.8 billion NASA budget would cut the agency’s funding by about 25% from the year before, with big hits to its science portfolio. The fleshed-out request on Friday builds upon a condensed budget proposal released earlier this month.

“We must continue to be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars,” NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro wrote in a letter included in the request. “That means making strategic decisions — including scaling back or discontinuing ineffective efforts.” The new Mars scheme is modeled after NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program that has benefited Intuitive Machines LLC, Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Astrobotic Technology Inc., though it has achieved mixed results. According to the budget, the contract to land on Mars would build upon existing lander contracts. America’s Next NASA Administrator Will Not Be Former SpaceX Astronaut Jared Isaacman

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New simulations suggest that the long-assumed collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies is not guaranteed, with the odds now estimated at just over 50% within the next 10 billion years. Factoring in other massive galaxies like M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud revealed that their gravitational influence significantly alters the likelihood of a merger. ScienceAlert reports: The Milky Way and Andromeda are not, however, alone in this little corner of the cosmos. They belong to a small group of galaxies within a radius of about 5 million light-years from the Milky Way known as the Local Group. The Milky Way and Andromeda are the largest members, but there are quite a few other objects hanging out that need to be taken into consideration when modeling the future. [Astrophysicist Till Sawala of the University of Helsinki] and his colleagues took the latest data from the Hubble and Gaia space telescopes, and the most recent mass estimates for the four most massive objects in the Local Group — the Milky Way, Andromeda, the Triangulum galaxy (M33), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Then, they set about running simulations of the next 10 billion years, adding and removing galaxies to see how that changed the results.

Their results showed that the presence of M33 and LMC dramatically altered the probability of a collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda. When it is just the two large spiral galaxies, the merger occurred in slightly less than half the simulation runs. The addition of M33 increased the merger probability to two in three. Taking M33 back out and adding LMC had the opposite effect, decreasing the probability to one in three. When all four galaxies were present, the probability of a merger between the Milky Way and Andromeda within 10 billion years is slightly more than 50 percent. “We find that there are basically two types of outcomes,” Sawala said. “The Milky Way and Andromeda will either come close enough on their first encounter (first ‘pericenter’) that dynamical friction between the two dark matter haloes will drag the orbit to an eventual merger, which very likely happens before 10 billion years, or they do not come close enough, in which case dynamical friction is not effective, and they can still orbit for a very long time thereafter.”

“The main result of our work is that there is still significant uncertainty about the future evolution — and eventual fate — of our galaxy,” Sawala added. “Of course, as a working astrophysicist, the best results are those that motivate future studies, and I think our paper provides motivation both for more comprehensive models and for more precise observations.”

The research has been published in Nature Astronomy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People born more recently are less likely to have dementia at any given age than earlier generations, research suggests, with the trend more pronounced in women. According to the World Health Organization, in 2021 there were 57 million people worldwide living with dementia, with women disproportionately affected. However, while the risk of dementia increases with age, experts have long stressed it is not not an inevitability of getting older. “Younger generations are less likely to develop dementia at the same age as their parents or grandparents, and that’s a hopeful sign,” said Dr Sabrina Lenzen, a co-author of the study from the University of Queensland’s Centre for the Business and Economics of Health. But she added: “The overall burden of dementia will still grow as populations age, and significant inequalities remain — especially by gender, education and geography.”

Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers in Australia report how they analyzed data from 62,437 people aged 70 and over, collected from three long-running surveys covering the US, England and parts of Europe. The team used an algorithm that took into account participants’ responses to a host of different metrics, from the difficulties they had with everyday activities to their scores on cognitive tests, to determine whether they were likely to have dementia. They then split the participants into eight different cohorts, representing different generations. Participants were also split into six age groups. As expected, the researchers found the prevalence of dementia increased by age among all birth cohorts, and in each of the three regions: UK, US and Europe. However, at a given age, people in more recent generations were less likely to have dementia compared with those in earlier generations.

“For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890-1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939-1943,” said Lenzen, adding similar trends were seen in Europe and England, although less pronounced in the latter. The team said the trend was more pronounced in women, especially in Europe and England, noting that one reason may be increased access to education for women in the mid-20th century. However, taking into account changes in GDP, a metric that reflects broader economic shifts, did not substantially alter the findings. A number of factors could be contributing to the decline. “This is likely due to interventions such as compulsory education, smoking bans, and improvements in medical treatments for conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, and hearing loss, which are associated with dementia risk,” said Prof Tara Spires-Jones, the director of the Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

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Coinbase reportedly knew as early as January about a customer data breach linked to its outsourcing partner TaskUs, where an employee in India was caught leaking customer information in exchange for bribes. “At least one part of the breach […] occurred when an India-based employee of the U.S. outsourcing firm TaskUs was caught taking photographs of her work computer with her personal phone,” reports Reuters, citing five former TaskUs employees. Though Coinbase disclosed the incident in May after receiving an extortion demand, the newly revealed timeline raises questions about how long the company was aware of the breach, which could cost up to $400 million. Reuters reports: Coinbase said in the May SEC filing that it knew contractors accessed employee data “without business need” in “previous months.” Only when it received an extortion demand on May 11 did it realize that the access was part of a wider campaign, the company said. In a statement to Reuters on Wednesday, Coinbase said the incident was recently discovered and that it had “cut ties with the TaskUs personnel involved and other overseas agents, and tightened controls.” Coinbase did not disclose who the other foreign agents were.

TaskUs said in a statement that two employees had been fired early this year after they illegally accessed information from a client, which it did not identify. “We immediately reported this activity to the client,” the statement said. “We believe these two individuals were recruited by a much broader, coordinated criminal campaign against this client that also impacted a number of other providers servicing this client.” The person familiar with the matter confirmed that Coinbase was the client and that the incident took place in January.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s changes in response to the Digital Markets Act already included allowing Windows machines in the regions it covers to uninstall Edge and remove Bing results from Windows search, but now the list is growing in some meaningful ways. New features announced Monday for Microsoft Windows users in the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway) include the option to uninstall the Microsoft Store and avoid extra nags or prompts asking them to set Microsoft Edge as the default browser unless they choose to open it.

Additionally, setting a different browser, like Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or something else, will pin it to the taskbar unless the user chooses not to. While setting a different browser default already attaches it to a few link and file types like https and .html, now users in the EEA will see it apply to more types like “read,” ftp, and .svg. The default browser changes are live for some users in the beta channel and are set to roll out widely on Windows 10 and Windows 11 in July.

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