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Blue Origin explosion is a major setback for NASA’s Moon plans and Amazon’s Starlink competitor

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Blue Origin explosion is a major setback for NASA’s Moon plans and Amazon’s Starlink competitor

While Blue Origin investigates the root cause behind last night’s spectacular explosion of its New Glenn rocket, it’s already clear that this will be a major setback for NASA’s Moon base plans and Amazon’s fledgling Leo space internet constellation.

The incident occurred at about 9pm at Blue Origin’s Florida launch site during a hot-fire test, where seven engines in the booster stage are lit while keeping the 322-foot-tall rocket fixed to the launchpad. The explosion and ensuing fireball severely damaged the only launchpad Blue Origin has for its New Glenn rocket.

“It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” wrote Blue Origin boss Jeff Bezos on X. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

According to sources speaking to Ars Technica, the transporter-erector and one of the lightning towers at LC-36A may not be salvageable. “New Glenn almost certainly will not launch again in 2026, and frankly a launch during the first half of 2027 would be heroic given the launch site concerns,” writes Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica.

Such a delay would affect NASA’s Moon base plans. NASA announced on Tuesday that New Glenn would deliver a robotic lunar lander as soon as fall 2026. In 2027, Blue Origin is also scheduled to participate in the upcoming Artemis III mission, which will see astronauts docking their Orion capsule with lunar landers developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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“Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman on X. “We will work with our partners to support a thorough investigation of this anomaly, assess near-term mission impacts, and get back to launching rockets.”

The New Glenn rocket that exploded Thursday night was being prepped to carry 48 Amazon Leo satellites — the largest batch ever slated for a single launch — into low-Earth orbit on an upcoming mission. The satellites were not onboard.

To date Amazon has launched just over 300 of the 1,618 Leo satellites the FCC requires by July 30, 2026. Amazon has applied for an extension to keep its license.

Amazon had been counting on New Glenn’s massive payload capacity and reusable boosters to accelerate a launch schedule that is already behind. Without its primary workhorse, Amazon will be forced to rely more heavily on secondary providers like United Launch Alliance (ULA) and Arianespace — and its chief rival, SpaceX.

“Sorry to see this,” wrote fellow billionaire spaceman Elon Musk on X. “I hope you recover quickly.”

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Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans

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Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body ultrasound scans

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the “cat pictures” produced by its AI image generator. Dubbed The Midjourney Scanner, it’s an ultrasound-based full-body scanner that uses a ring of sensors to capture vertical slices of the inside of your body, looking at the composition of your muscle, fat, bone, and organs to start. Holz said ideally, you could do this once a year or every single day, as it “aims for image quality comparable to MRI in many ways.”

He mentioned that one way he’d like to use it would be to see how his body changes in response to diet and workout changes, saying, “I’m not the most measured man on Earth yet, you know, but maybe I want to have that daily [measurable information].” A set of job listings advertises the company’s goal as trying to “build and launch the world’s first full-body ultrasound CT scanner, ultimately bringing safe, fast, and high fidelity preventative scanning to billions via a magical spa experience.”

The Midjourney Scanner was developed in a partnership with ultrasound tech company Butterfly Network, which said it uses “40 Butterfly Ultrasound-on-Chip imaging modules per system.”

The scanning process starts with stepping onto a platform that drops down into the water on rails through a ring of thousands of transducers that create ultrasonic waves. It then records the ripples passing through your body to analyze them and create detailed 3D images. The scan takes about 60 seconds. Holz said about a dozen people have been scanned so far.

It starts by stepping into a shallow pool of golden light. You then begin to descend into the water. Your body passes through a ring of underwater sensors, each acting like a dolphin, using its echolocation. The sensors send ultrasonic sound waves through your body from every angle. With enough waves, and enough angles, we form an image of what’s happening inside your body.

It combines those sensors with two petaflops of processing power. But after watching the livestreamed reveal, I’m still unclear on what Midjourney’s AI image generation tech exactly has to do with the Midjourney Medical effort, beyond an alternative business for otherwise-unused AI compute.

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Holz hopes to put 10 of the scanners into a Midjourney Spa location in San Francisco’s Union Square that will open before the end of 2027 and offered to scan the hands of attendees at its launch event. The Midjourney Spa will have a gym, saunas, and cold plunges to go along with the hot tub–equipped scanning rooms where visitors will get into the water to be scanned.

He did mention that various medical applications would require FDA clearances, but for now, Midjourney Medical says it’s working on “body composition maps” that don’t require the same level of clearance as diagnostic imaging. It also says the “library of scans” users create can be shared with doctors, AI health tools, or others, and that, “We take data privacy seriously — more details on our data policies will come as we get closer to launch.”

Holz suggested that eventually these scans could become better than an MRI, without radiation, powerful magnets, or other complicating factors, to get a look at what’s going on inside people’s bodies “real fast.” In response to a question, he imagined a future where the FDA had a class of devices to look at “weird” things and allowed people to “just try to get as much data as we can.”

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UK to ban TikTok, YouTube, other social media apps for children under 16, Starmer says

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UK to ban TikTok, YouTube, other social media apps for children under 16, Starmer says

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U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is taking on some of the world’s largest technology companies, announcing Monday that Britain will ban children under 16 from using major social media platforms — including TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube — and impose hefty penalties on companies that fail to keep minors off their services.

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The restrictions, expected to take effect early next year, would also apply to Instagram, Facebook and X. Messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal, as well as YouTube Kids, would be exempt.

Starmer said he is prepared to confront resistance from technology companies and acknowledged some teenagers will try to circumvent the rules, but argued the government has a responsibility to act.

“Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy,” Starmer, who has two teenage children, told reporters. “I’ve heard first hand from families crying out for change and we will do right by them.”

AFTER AUSTRALIA PASSES SOCIAL MEDIA BAN LAWMAKERS PROBED ON WHY CONGRESS HASN’T DONE MORE TO PROTECT KIDS

A 14-year-old boy looks at a iPhone screen on November 30, 2024 in Bath, England. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)

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The move places Britain at the forefront of a growing international push to limit children’s access to social media. Australia last year became the first country to prohibit children under 16 from holding social media accounts, while Canada, Brazil and Indonesia have introduced or proposed similar age-based restrictions. France, Spain, Denmark, Thailand and South Korea are among others studying or developing similar approaches.

Under the British plan, platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to prevent kids under-16 from accessing their services could face multimillion-dollar fines. Starmer said enforcement efforts would be directed at technology companies rather than the children themselves.

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer attends a press conference at Downing Street in London to announce government action to protect children online on June 15, 2026. (Carlos Jasso/Pool Photo via AP)

The decision follows a public consultation that drew 116,000 responses from parents, children and the tech industry — the second-highest response total for a government consultation since one on same-sex marriage in 2012.

DAN GAINOR: ENGLAND DOESN’T HAVE FREE SPEECH AND WANTS TO TAKE OURS AWAY, TOO

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More than 90% of respondents supported an under-16 ban, according to the government.

A YouTube spokesperson warned Monday that a blanket social media restriction could “push kids out of such curated, supervised, beneficial experiences and towards anonymous, less-safe services.”

A teen holds a phone displaying nine social media app icons, illustrating common platforms that collect user data. (Anna Barclay/Getty Images)

The U.S. Embassy in London warned that any regulations should be narrowly tailored and not infringe on free speech protections, while also expressing concern about additional burdens on American technology companies.

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Starmer said he expected to discuss the issue with President Donald Trump and other world leaders at the G7 summit in France that starts Monday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices

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Tim Cook says RAM expenses are ‘unsustainable’ and Apple is going to raise prices

We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.

Cook doesn’t say when Apple plans on raising prices or which products will be affected. The company has already stopped selling the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM in March and later raised the starting price of the Mac Mini to $799 after dropping the cheaper $599 option from its lineup. Analyst Tim Culpan also suggested that Apple could discontinue the base configuration of the MacBook Neo, while keeping the $699 model with 512GB of storage.

As AI companies continue to demand more memory in their sprawling data centers, suppliers are struggling to keep up. The shortage has led to surging RAM and storage costs, as well as price increases across game consoles, laptops, and other devices.

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” Cook tells the WSJ. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products.”

Apple is getting ready to take the wraps off its latest lineup of iPhones later this year, though it’s unclear how big an impact the memory shortage will have on pricing. The WSJ estimates that the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro could cost $1,299, a jump from the $1,099 iPhone 17 Pro.

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