Shannon Garcia

RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine changes to CDC vaccine guidance blocked by judge

ACIP, american academy of pediatrics, CDC, health, HHS, kennedy, robert f kennedy jr, vaccine / Shannon Garcia / March 17, 2026

“This is all to say that there is a method to how these decisions historically have been made—a method scientific in nature and codified into law through procedural requirements,” Judge Murphy wrote.

“Unfortunately, the Government has disregarded those methods and thereby undermined the integrity of its actions,” he wrote. “First, the Government bypassed ACIP to change the immunization schedules, which is both a technical, procedural failure itself and a strong indication of something more fundamentally problematic: an abandonment of the technical knowledge and expertise embodied by that committee. Second, the Government removed all duly appointed members of ACIP and summarily replaced them without undertaking any of the rigorous screening that had been the hallmark of ACIP member selection for decades. Again, this procedural failure highlights the very reasons why procedures exist and raises a substantial likelihood that the newly appointed ACIP fails to comport with governing law.”

Rebuke of ACIP members

The judge also blasted the firing of past ACIP members, the apparent lack of vetting for new members, and the lack of qualifications of the members, naming names.

“First, of the fifteen members currently on ACIP, even under the most generous reading, only six appear to have any meaningful experience in vaccines—the very focus of ACIP,” he wrote (emphasis his).

“At least six ACIP members—Dr. Hillary Blackburn, Dr. Evelyn Griffin, Dr. Joseph Hibbeln, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, Dr. James Pagano, Dr. Raymond Pollak—appear to lack any expertise or professional qualifications related to vaccines or immunization as required by ACIP’s Charter,” he wrote. “An additional three of the current ACIP members—Dr. Retsef Levi, Dr. Robert Malone, and Dr. Catherine Stein—though they have some experience arguably relevant to ACIP’s function, appear to lack the qualifications and experience to constitute expertise in vaccines and immunization.”

In all, Judge Murphy argued that Kennedy’s hand-selected advisors fail to meet the requirements of ACIP’s charter, which states members must be knowledgeable in relevant fields. They also fail to meet federal regulations requiring advisory boards to be “fairly balanced” in representing the views within those relevant fields.

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Trump and his FCC chair demand more positive news coverage of Iran war

brendan carr, donald trump iran war, FCC, fcc chair, Policy / Shannon Garcia / March 17, 2026

Carr makes evidence-free claim of “hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump is thrilled.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr arrives for an FCC meeting on February 18, 2026 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch

President Trump and the Federal Communications Commission chairman are demanding more positive media coverage of the Iran war. On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr issued yet another threat to revoke licenses from news broadcasters, claiming without evidence that they are running “hoaxes and news distortions” related to the war in Iran.

In an X post, Carr shared a complaint about an Iran war headline that Trump had made on Truth Social and added his own commentary. “Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions—also known as the fake news—have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not.”

Carr making vague threats about enforcing rules against hoaxes and news distortion is nothing new. Given how difficult it is to actually revoke a broadcast license, and the fact that no TV station licenses are up for renewal until 2028, the threats so far have been attempts to intimidate news organizations without any concrete punishment.

What’s slightly odd about Carr’s latest threat is that it’s based on a Trump complaint about a newspaper headline, not broadcast news coverage. The Trump post that spurred Carr’s latest threat was about a Wall Street Journal article.

Carr has repeatedly claimed he’s only targeting licensed broadcasters because they have an obligation to operate in the public interest as users of the public airwaves. Carr said in his Saturday message, “The American people have subsidized broadcasters to the tune of billions of dollars by providing free access to the nation’s airwaves.” But the only example Carr provided was Trump’s Truth Social post that didn’t mention any broadcast reports.

Trump’s quibble

Trump’s complaint said, “Yet again, an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media about the five tanker planes that were supposedly struck down at an Airport in Saudi Arabia, and of no further use. In actuality, the Base was hit a few days ago, but the planes were not ‘struck’ or ‘destroyed.’ Four of the five had virtually no damage, and are already back in service. One had slightly more damage, but will be in the air shortly. None were destroyed, or close to that, as the Fake News said in headlines.”

The only specific news outlets Trump’s post mentioned were The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but he was referring to a Wall Street Journal article. Even if Trump’s version of events is true, his complaint wouldn’t meet the legal standard for proving a hoax or news distortion, or even prove that the Journal got anything wrong. Trump claims the planes were not “struck” but said four out of five “had virtually no damage,” which seemingly indicates that all five were struck and suffered some damage.

Trump’s post seems to accuse the Journal of falsely reporting that the planes were destroyed and would not be used again. But the Journal article makes it clear the planes were merely damaged, not destroyed, and would be repaired. It said:

Five US Air Force refueling planes were struck and damaged on the ground at Prince Sultan air base in Saudi Arabia, according to two US officials.

The tankers were hit during an Iranian missile strike on the Saudi base in recent days, the officials said. US Central Command declined to comment. The tankers were damaged but not fully destroyed and are being repaired, one of the officials said. No one was killed in the strikes.

The Journal article was published on Friday, and Trump issued his complaint on Truth Social on Saturday morning. The Journal article was updated on Saturday afternoon to include a quote from Trump’s Truth Social post. As far as we can tell, the article never claimed that any of the five tanker planes were destroyed. A Reuters article on Friday that quotes the WSJ report also uses the phrases “struck and damaged,” and “not fully destroyed,” undercutting Trump’s claim of false reporting.

The Journal article’s only reference to destroyed planes is related to a previous crash that killed six US military members. It said:

The news brings the total number of Air Force refueling planes damaged or destroyed to at least seven. It comes after two Air Force KC-135 refueling planes collided on Thursday, leading one of the aircraft to crash into the ground. All six crew members were killed, the Pentagon announced on Friday.

Trump “thrilled” by Carr’s latest threat

While it doesn’t appear that the Journal got anything wrong, it was the only example Carr provided in his complaint about fake news, hoaxes, and news distortions.

“It is very important to bring trust back into media, which has earned itself the label of fake news,” Carr wrote. “When a political candidate is able to win a landslide election victory after in [sic] the face of hoaxes and distortions, there is something very wrong. It means the public has lost faith and confidence in the media. And we can’t allow that to happen. Time for change!”

Carr has repeatedly made statements of this sort during Trump’s second term despite writing himself in 2019 that the government should not “censor speech it doesn’t like” and that the “FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest.’”

Trump wrote last night that he is “thrilled to see Brendan Carr… looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations. They get Billions of Dollars of FREE American Airwaves, and use it to perpetuate LIES, both in News and almost all of their Shows, including the Late Night Morons, who get gigantic Salaries for horrible Ratings, and never get, as I used to say in The Apprentice, ‘FIRED.’”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is also demanding more positive media coverage of the Iran war. Criticizing CNN reporting at a press conference on Friday, Hegseth said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Hegseth was referring to Paramount Skydance’s planned purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that was helped along by the Trump administration.

Carr’s threat to broadcast licenses was roundly criticized by Democrats. “If Trump doesn’t like your coverage of the war, his FCC will pull your broadcast license. That is flagrantly unconstitutional,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom wrote.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) wrote, “Constitutional law 101: it’s illegal for the government to censor free speech it just doesn’t like about Trump’s Iran war. This threat is straight out of the authoritarian playbook.” Carr replied by quoting the Supreme Court’s Red Lion Broadcasting decision in 1969, which said, “No one has a First Amendment right to a license or to monopolize a radio frequency; to deny a station license because ‘the public interest’ requires it ‘is not a denial of free speech.’”

“This is worse than the comedian stuff”

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote, “This is a clear directive to provide positive war coverage or else licenses may not be renewed. This is worse than the comedian stuff, and by a lot. The stakes here are much higher. He’s not talking about late night shows, he’s talking about how a war is covered.”

Schatz was referring to Carr’s previous threats to stations regarding late-night talk show hosts such as ABC host Jimmy Kimmel. Even some Republicans criticized Carr’s Kimmel threats last year.

FCC Democrat Anna Gomez said the agency’s threats are dangerous because they have a chilling effect on media coverage. But the threats themselves have no legal backing, she said.

“Once again, this FCC pretends it has the power to control news coverage,” Gomez said in a statement today. “In reality, the FCC has vanishingly little power over national news networks. It licenses local broadcast stations, not networks, and no licenses are up for renewal until 2028. Early renewal attempts are exceedingly rare, and the process is so demanding that any effort would almost certainly fail, especially given the well-documented First Amendment violations underlying these moves. These threats are grounded in neither reality nor law and would not survive judicial scrutiny, just as other recent attempts by this administration to push beyond constitutional limits have repeatedly failed in court.”

At least one Republican seems concerned about Carr’s latest threat. On Fox News yesterday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) was asked about Carr threatening broadcast licenses over Iran war coverage, and whether he thinks it is the role of government to police that kind of coverage.

“I’m a big supporter of the First Amendment,” Johnson responded. “I do not like the heavy hand of government no matter who’s wielding it. I’d rather the federal government stay out of the private sector as much as possible. And really, the federal government’s role is to protect our freedoms, to protect our constitutional rights.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

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Apple’s AirPods Max 2 bring H2 chip, boosted ANC in April for $549

airpods, AirPods Max, Apple, audio, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 17, 2026

Apple announced the AirPods Max 2 today, following up the original AirPods Max, which were announced in December 2020. The new model brings improved active noise cancellation (ANC) and other new features via an updated H2 chip.

The five AirPods Max 2 colorways. — The AirPods Max 2 are available in the same five colorways as their predecessor. Credit: Apple

Apple introduced the H2 with the AirPods Pro (2nd Generation), which came out in September 2022. The original AirPods Max released in 2021 with an H1, meaning the new over-ear headphones should be more in line with Apple’s AirPods series in terms of features.

Apple claims that the new chip, combined with new computational audio algorithms, makes ANC up to 1.5 times “more effective” on the AirPods Max 2 compared to the original AirPods Max.

Transparency mode, meanwhile, should sound “more natural” due to a new “digital signal processing algorithm optimized for H2,” Apple’s announcement said.

The H2 adds support for a slew of additional AirPods Max 2 features, including adaptive audio (which automatically adjusts levels in Transparency and ANC modes based on ambient noise) and Conversation Awareness (where the device automatically lowers the volume when someone starts talking to you).

A close up of an AirPods Max 2 can in the starlight (purple) colorway. — The AirPods Max 2 also feature a small spec bump from Bluetooth 5.0 to Bluetooth 5.3. Credit: Apple

The H2 also enables the AirPods Max 2 to support live translation (which uses Apple Intelligence for real-time language translation) and voice isolation (which taps “advanced computational audio powered by H2 to prioritize the voice during calls, while blocking out ambient noise,” according to Apple’s announcement today).

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100 years later, where is Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket?

100 years, 100th, 1926, Anniversary, artifacts, Auburn, centennial, Clark University, fragments, liquid fuel rocket, March 16, massachusetts, National Air and Space Museum, Nell, remains, robert goddard, rocket, Roswell Museum and Arts Center, Smithsonian, Space, space artifacts, Space exploration, space history / Shannon Garcia / March 17, 2026

“He didn’t preserve it as a sacred object… “

Robert Goddard (at left) and Henry Sachs, Percy Roope, and Esther Goddard with parts from the first liquid-fueled rocket after its history-making flight in Auburn, Massachusetts, March 16, 1926. Credit: Robert Goddard/Clark University/collectSPACE.com

It flew for only two seconds, but its impact is still felt a century later.

Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket, which lifted off from a snowy field on March 16, 1926, has been written about extensively. Earlier solid-fueled rockets existed, but liquid-fueled rockets promised the sustainability and control needed to send spacecraft and humans into Earth orbit and beyond.

“The rocket’s reach was short, but it marked the moment that humanity entered a new era,” said Kevin Schindler, author of “Robert Goddard’s Massachusetts,” speaking at the site of that first launch as part of a centennial commemoration held Saturday in Auburn (March 14). “It proved that liquid fuel could lift a craft skyward—the essential breakthrough that would one day carry humans to the moon.”

Photos from that day exist through the efforts of Goddard’s wife, as does a monument stand from where the rocket, nicknamed “Nell,” left the ground (today, located on a golf course). Over the decades, replicas of Nell have been built, even ones capable of flight. But a century later, a question about the rocket remains.

Where is it now?

First (and last?) to see

“Goddard didn’t seek the spotlight. He sought the truth. He was a scientist. Apart from his small team, very few people could say that they were truly there who felt the steady roar and saw the flash of fire against the New England snow. One of those people was my father,” said Thomas Hastings, addressing a small crowd who gathered in Auburn.

Hasting’s father, Gerald, who was 10 years old on that day in 1926, was sledding with some friends when he saw “four people in heavy coats got out of [their] vehicle and remove some rather large objects.” As he later learned, those four were Goddard, Goddard’s wife Esther, Goddard’s crew chief Henry Sachs, and Clark University assistant physics professor Percy Roope.

A black and white photo of a man holding a pole next to a early rocket on a snowy field. — Henry Sachs, Robert Goddard’s assistant, ignites the first liquid fueled rocket on March 16, 1926. Credit: Esther Goddard/Clark University

“Dad [later] commented that the scene felt very strange,” said Hastings. “He and his friends continued looking on with great interest as the nameless visitors took whatever it was they had removed from the vehicle and assembled the pieces.”

“You can imagine how his imagination soared suddenly. They saw fire and smoke and heard loud noise as some object shot up into the air,” Hastings said, recounting what his father told him. “Dad and his friends shook their heads at each other, completely baffled by what they had just witnessed, and they continued sledding like you would expect them to.”

Goddard wrote in his notebook that the rocket “rose 41 feet & went 184 feet, in 2.5 secs.” The next day, he added, “Even though the release was pulled, the rocket did not rise at first, but the flame came out, and there was a steady roar. After a number of seconds it rose, slowly until it cleared the frame, and then at express train speed, curving over to the left, and striking the ice and snow, still going at a rapid rate.”

“It looked almost magical as it rose, without any appreciably greater noise or flame, as if it said, ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind,’” he wrote.

Nell’s “salvation”

Nell, which gained its name from the title character of the then-contemporary play “Salvation Nell,” found its salvation in pieces.

Hastings, as recounted by his son, recalled watching as the “strangers in dark coats ran through the snow, gathered up what it was they had brought and set on fire, and they put the pieces back into their vehicle.”

Esther took a photograph of her husband standing with the recovered parts. She also posed for a similar photo, together with Sachs and Roope. In his notebook, Goddard wrote that they brought the rocket’s remains back to his laboratory.

By all accounts, Goddard did not try to reassemble Nell, nor did he treat the pieces as historic artifacts.

“He didn’t preserve it as a sacred object,” wrote Michael Neufeld, who retired as a senior curator for the space history division of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, in an email. “He didn’t have a lot of money at that point and reused everything.”

A nozzle and a flood

In 1950, five years after Goddard’s death, the Guggenheim Foundation for the Promotion of Aeronautics donated to the Smithsonian the scientist’s immediate successor to Nell. Goddard attempted to launch that rocket on May 4 and 5, 1926.

“It survives because its thrust was too weak to launch itself,” wrote Neufeld. “For some reason he preserved it.”

The National Air and Space Museum’s collection catalog describes the Goddard May 1926 rocket as “likely includ[ing] the nozzle” recovered from Nell.

a close-up photo of a small metal rocket nozzle — The nozzle on Robert Goddard’s May 1926 rocket, which did not fly and was donated to the National Air and Space Museum, “likely” was at least part of the first liquid fueled rocket launch on March 16 of that same year. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

“I gather the nozzle assertion is based on his notes. I haven’t seen them myself,” said Neufeld. “More may be on the May 1926 rocket, which we can’t prove.”

Goddard’s notebook is held at the Robert H. Goddard Library at Clark University today. In his March 16, 1926, entry, Goddard recorded that “the lower half of the nozzle burned off.” Photos taken prior to Nell’s launch show a longer nozzle than what is installed on the May rocket, perhaps supporting its suggested reuse.

Frank Winter, a retired curator of rocketry at the National Air and Space Museum, recently wrote an article for “Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly,” in which he cited an inventory of the Robert H. Goddard Collection at the Roswell Museum and Arts Center in New Mexico, including “the protective conical cap that was mounted on top of the propellant tanks, nozzle fragments and the combustion chamber” from Nell.

Unfortunately, the Roswell Museum has been closed since October 2024, ever since it was devastated by a flood. Reached for this article, Caroline Brooks, the Roswell Museum’s executive director, confirmed they have four pieces claimed to be part of the March 1926 flight.

As referenced by both Winter and Brooks, W.S. Crane researched and published a catalog for the museum’s Goddard holdings in 1994. The chamber is attributed to coming from Clark University and the nozzle fragments are described as a gift from Esther Goddard. The source of the nose cone is unknown.

a black and white photo of damaged rocket parts, including a nose cone and nozzle pieces — Fragments attributed to flying as part of the world’s first liquid fuel rocket in the Robert Goddard collection at the Roswell Museum and Arts Center in New Mexico. Credit: W.S. Crane/Roswell Museum

The museum also has the rod, rollers, and wire that were used to ignite Nell. “Pulling the wire opened a hole in the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank, where the oxygen dripped onto a heated surface,” Crane wrote, adding that the assembly was also a gift from Mrs. Goddard.

“We are a few years out from a full recovery,” wrote Brooks in an email. “The Goddard collection will return in a contemporary and updated presentation (compared to the original exhibit, which dated back to 1959) when the museum reopens.”

Cente-Nell-ial

Today, the remains from the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket to fly might be less consequential than the legacy they helped create. Goddard’s design for Nell—especially mounting the exhaust nozzle above its propellant tank—was less a model for the engines that followed than a symbol of what is possible.

“Apart from its historic significance, this rocket became a minor source of embarrassment for Dr. Goddard, since the illogical position of the combustion chamber at the top is evidence that he had failed to consider some very basic physics in his design,” wrote Crane. “This is a great example of the role of common sense and intuition in pioneering engineering, and one of the very few times that Dr. Goddard’s failed him.”

Today, replicas, more than the remains, help the public understand Nell’s role in history. Since its opening in 1976, the National Air and Space Museum has displayed a full-scale, NASA-donated recreation of Goddard’s first rocket (which is now at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia).

In December 2003, for the national celebration of the centennial of flight, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center worked with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) to reconstruct “historically accurate, functional replicas” of Nell. The project was carried out to “clearly understand, recreate, and document the mechanisms and workings of the 1926 rocket” and created a “resource for researchers studying the evolution of liquid rocketry.”

a photo of a replica of an early rocket on display on a golf course — A full-scale replica of Robert Goddard’s first liquid fueled rocket on display at the site where the original launched on March 16, 1926. The static model was on exhibit as part of the centennial celebration in Auburn, Massachusetts, on Saturday, March 14, 2026. Credit: Auburn Fire Rescue Department

On Monday, a different full-size replica premieres on display at The Museum of Worcester, just 10 minutes from where the real Nell launched. On exhibit through August, the rocket is a model, but its support frame was used in a 1929 launch test, on loan from Clark University.

“Goddard’s legacy is not just technological. It’s aspirational,” said Schindler. “It tells us that greatness can emerge from quiet places, that bold ideas can take root in small towns, and that the next breakthrough may come from someone standing right here looking up at the sky with wonder.”

“As we honor the centennial, we’re invited to step into the story ourselves. The next century of exploration will be shaped by those who choose to dream boldly, learn deeply, and support the next generation of explorers,” he said.

Listing image: Auburn Fire Rescue Department

Robert Pearlman is a space historian, journalist and the founder and editor of collectSPACE, a daily news publication and online community focused on where space exploration intersects with pop culture. He is also a contributing writer for Space.com and co-author of “Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space” published by Smithsonian Books in 2018. He is on the leadership board for For All Moonkind and is a member of the American Astronautical Society’s history committee.

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Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae

astrophysics, general relativity, magnetar, Physics, Science, supernova / Shannon Garcia / March 15, 2026

Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae.

Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years, astrophysicists tried to understand what exactly makes superluminous supernovae so absurdly powerful. Now it seems like we may finally have some answers.

Farah and his colleagues have found that these events are most likely powered by magnetars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that warp the very space and time around them.

The power within

Magnetars have been a leading candidate for the engine behind superluminous supernovae. The theory says these insanely magnetized stars are born from the collapsing core of the original progenitor star and emit energy via magnetic dipole radiation. “This core is roughly a one solar mass object that gets crushed down to the size of a city,” Farah explains. As its spin slows down, a magnetar bleeds its rotational energy into the expanding material of the dead star, lighting it up.

The problem was that this theory did not quite explain observations. In a standard magnetar model, the light curve of the supernova should rise rapidly and then fade away evenly as the neutron star loses its rotational energy. “This way the light curve, in the prediction of this model, just goes up and then down quite smoothly,” Farah says. But when astronomers observe superluminous supernovae, they almost never see this smooth fade. Instead, they see bumps, wiggles, and strange modulations. The light curve flickers over months.

For a while, scientists tried to patch the magnetar engine theory to fit observations. Maybe the expanding debris was slamming into irregular shells of material shed by the star before it died. Or perhaps the magnetar engine was spitting out random, violent flares. But these explanations required highly specific, fine-tuned parameters to match what we were seeing through our telescopes.

The solution to the strange flickering problem came when the Liverpool Gravitational Wave Optical Transient Observer collaboration detected an object designated SN 2024afav on December 12, 2024. Initially, the object looked like a standard superluminous supernova. “It was as bright and it had bumps in the light curve like many other objects of this kind,” Farah says. But as the telescopes kept watching, it started doing something unprecedented: It started to chirp.

The chirping star

In physics, a chirp refers to a signal with a frequency that steadily increases over time. In the case of SN 2024afav, its emissions were bumping up and down, but the gap between these bumps was shrinking. After a second and third bump both appeared with the gaps between them reduced by roughly 35 percent, Farah and his team realized they could calculate how much the gap between the bumps would decrease next.

The team adjusted their observation schedule, pointed their instruments at SN 2024afav, and discovered the fourth bump appeared exactly when they expected it would. The fifth bump enabled the scientists to narrow down the period reduction to about 29 percent.

The fact that Farah and his colleagues could accurately predict the bumps delivered a massive blow to our existing magnetar models. While a few irregular bumps could be explained away by the supernova ejecta crashing into clouds of gas, it doesn’t explain perfectly timed, cleanly sinusoidal modulations with a steadily decaying period. Random space rubble just doesn’t work that way.

“So, we came up with the new model to describe this behavior,” Farah explains. They proposed a new physical mechanism that relied on the Lense-Thirring effect, otherwise known as frame-dragging. Frame-dragging is a prediction of General Relativity, where a massive spinning object slightly drags the spacetime around with it as it rotates. “We didn’t try this mechanism before because it had never been seen around a magnetar before,” Farah says. But when his team did try it, it turned out to perfectly match what was going on.

The flickering in the superluminous supernovae, Farah hypothesized, was caused by the extreme gravity of a newborn magnetar dragging the very spacetime around it along as it was spinning.

Twisted space

To understand Farah’s Lense-Thirring solution, imagine a bowling ball spinning in a vat of molasses. As the ball rotates, friction drags the sticky fluid along, creating a swirling vortex. According to Einstein’s General Relativity, mass and energy can warp the fabric of spacetime, so if a sufficiently large mass is spinning rapidly, it drags the space-time along in a manner similar to the molasses. Around Earth, this effect is minuscule. But around a newborn magnetar, which is far more massive and spinning hundreds of times a second, spacetime is whipped into a violent, twisting frenzy.

When the progenitor star exploded to create SN 2024afav, it didn’t eject all of its material perfectly. Some of the stellar guts failed to escape and fell back toward the newborn magnetar, forming a small accretion disk around it. Crucially, this disk was misaligned, tilted relative to the rotational axis of the magnetar. Because the disk was tilted in this aggressively twisted spacetime, the Lense-Thirring effect forced the entire disk to wobble, or precess, around the magnetar’s spin axis like a top that was spinning ever more slowly.

As this misaligned disk wobbled, it acted like a giant cosmic lampshade: it periodically blocked, reflected, or redirected the intense radiation and jets spewing from the central magnetar. The high-energy photons emitted by the magnetar had to fight their way through the expanding supernova ejecta, getting reprocessed into optical light and diffusing outward over a span of about 15 days. Observed through our telescopes on Earth, this wobbling disk created a rhythmic fluctuation in the superluminous supernova’s brightness.

After Farah and his colleagues explained the bumps in the signal with the wobbling disk around the magnetar, they moved to explaining why the signal chirped.

The shrinking disk

The answer the team proposes lies in the environment of the disk itself. The size of this accretion disk isn’t static. It’s determined by an inward ram pressure from the infalling matter and the outward radiation pressure coming from the magnetar. Over time, as the exploding star runs out of fallback material, the accretion rate of the disk drops. With less matter pushing in, the disk loses equilibrium and begins to shrink, falling inward toward the magnetar. And the closer it gets to the spinning magnetar, the stronger the Lense-Thirring effect becomes.

As the accretion disk shrinks and falls deeper into the gravity well, the twisted spacetime whips it around faster and faster. “Imagine a pirouetting figure skater pulling her arms in to accelerate the spinning movement,” Farah suggests. In consequence, the precession speeds up, the wobbles get tighter, and the light curve chirps.

Finally, by measuring the chirps, Farah and his colleagues were able to work backward to measure the properties of the magnetar powering the SN 2024afav. They constrained its spin period to 4.2 milliseconds and precisely calculated its staggeringly powerful magnetic field. The team found that the magnetar’s properties that derived solely from the chirping matched the properties required to power the overall baseline brightness of the superluminous supernova. The engine that powered the main explosion was exactly the right size and speed to cause the wobbling we observed.

But the work on the revised “magnetar+LT” model is just beginning. “This object is so rare and so new,” Farah admits. “We were scraping the bottom of the barrel for references that were even remotely related to the idea we were pitching here.”

Superluminous siblings

Farah’s team went back and looked at archival data from other bumpy superluminous supernovae such as SN 2018kyt, SN 2019unb, and SN 2021mkr. They found that their “magnetar+LT” model explains the modulations in those events as well. A whole class of exploding stars that previously required multiple mutually exclusive physical explanations could be unified by a single, elegant model.

This model, though, still has many unanswered questions. “How the accretion disk forms, how it blocks or modulates the light from the magnetar, how that light then gets to the ejecta, and finally how it gets to the observer,” Farah listed. “Basically every step along the way we made the best assumptions we could.” For each of these steps, he admits, there were at least five different ways it could happen, and the team just went with their best guess of what was going on.

To really figure it all out, Farah says, we need to wait till more objects like SN 2024afav are discovered. And this, he hopes, should become possible with new observatories like the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile coming online. “The Rubin Observatory is expected to discover dozens of these chirped supernovae,” Farah says. “We will be able to test our models against many different objects. There’s definitely room for development and growth. This is just the very beginning.”

Nature, 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10151-0

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Measles vaccinations rose 291% among New Mexico adults during outbreak

anti-vaccine, health, measles, MMR, New Mexico, outbreak, texas, vaccination / Shannon Garcia / March 15, 2026

In January 2025, a measles outbreak erupted on the western edge of Texas and soon spilled over to New Mexico and other states. The overall outbreak would become the largest the country has seen since 2000, when measles was declared eliminated from the US. In Texas, it was the largest outbreak recorded since 1992. And in New Mexico, it was the first measles outbreak the state had even seen since 1996.

But the trajectory of the two states’ measles cases diverged. Texas declared the outbreak within its borders over on August 18, with an end tally of 762 cases. In New Mexico, officials declared its outbreak, which began in February, over on September 26, with a total of just 99 cases.

One of the key differences, according to a new study, was that in New Mexico, the rapid spread of the highly infectious virus spurred a massive surge in measles vaccinations among children and adults. Overall, shots of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine increased 55 percent statewide from January to September compared to the same period in 2024.

The study, appearing in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, further broke down the increase in shots. Over the whole year, the number of MMR doses given to children (defined as less than age 18) increased 18 percent compared to 2024—from 27,988 in 2024 to 32,890 in 2025. Doses in adults (aged 18 and up) skyrocketed by a whopping 291 percent— from 5,748 in 2024 to 22,500 in 2025.

The increase in vaccination didn’t appear to be an unrelated fluke. Health officials noted that within two weeks of the outbreak being declared, the number of vaccine doses given in all regions of the state began to exceed the number given during the previous year. And in some regions, when a first measles case was identified, officials saw week-over-week increases in vaccinations as high as 78 and 83 percent.

Measles vaccinations rose 291% among New Mexico adults during outbreak Read More »

Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review

artemis II, falcon 9, Firefly Aerospace, launch, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Space, space launch system, spacex, starship / Shannon Garcia / March 15, 2026

SpaceX has started commissioning a second launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in Texas.

Firefly Aerospace’s seventh Alpha rocket rises above its launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: Sean Parker/Firefly Aerospace

Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch System rocket to check the integrity of fickle seals in a liquid hydrogen loading line. The rocket will return to the launch pad next week, with liftoff targeted for April 1 at 6: 24 pm EDT (22: 24 UTC). NASA has six launch dates available in early April after the agency added April 2 to the launch period. April 1 and 2 each have launch windows that open before sunset, an added bonus for those of us who prefer a day launch, for purely aesthetic reasons.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly’s Alpha rocket flies again. Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight Wednesday, March 11, launching a technology demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket’s previous launch failed, Space News reports. The launch followed several delays and scrubbed launch attempts. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and headed southwest over the Pacific Ocean, reaching orbit about eight minutes later. Firefly said the rocket’s upper stage later reignited its engine, demonstrating the restart capability required for some orbit insertion missions. This was the seventh flight of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, capable of hauling more than a ton of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Block II preview... The recent setbacks for Firefly’s Alpha program included a launch failure last April and a fire that destroyed a booster stage on the test stand. The Texas-based company billed this week’s flight as a purely demonstration mission to validate several upgrades for the Alpha Block II rocket configuration, which will debut on the next launch. The Block II will include a 7-foot (2-meter) increase to Alpha’s length, consolidated batteries and avionics built in-house, improved thermal protection systems, and stronger carbon-composite structures built with automated machinery. This week’s flight carried the rocket’s new in-house avionics suite and enhanced thermal protection system, Firefly said. “Flight 7 served as a critical opportunity to validate Alpha’s performance ahead of our Block II upgrade, and this team knocked it out of the park,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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Rocket Lab launches undisclosed satellite. Rocket Lab launched a spacecraft March 5 for a confidential customer, most likely Earth observation company BlackSky, Space News reports. The mission began with the liftoff of an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab’s private spaceport in New Zealand. The rocket delivered a “single commercial satellite” to a roughly 292-mile-high (470-kilometer) orbit for a “confidential customer,” Rocket Lab said in a press release. This was the 83rd flight of an Electron rocket, including suborbital flights for the US military’s Defense Innovation Unit testing hypersonic missile tech. Electron is a workhorse in the dedicated small launch sector, with capacity for up to 710 pounds (320 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Solving the puzzle... This was the second time in less than four months that Rocket Lab has launched a satellite mission for an undisclosed customer. BlackSky, a US-based remote sensing company, confirmed it was the customer for a November Rocket Lab launch under similar circumstances. BlackSky announced this week that it activated its newest “Gen-3” optical Earth-imaging satellite “in less than one week following launch.” While the company did not confirm its launch with Rocket Lab, this statement suggests BlackSky was, indeed, the customer on the March 5 mission. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Pentagon orders more SM-3s. In early February, the Pentagon and RTX, formerly Raytheon, reached an agreement to ramp up missile production, with a framework to dramatically increase manufacturing of Tomahawk cruise missiles, air-to-air missiles, and SM-3 and SM-6 missile interceptors. The announcement did not include a dollar value. The Defense Department put some numbers on the deal in the military’s daily dump of contract announcements Thursday. The Missile Defense Agency is ordering dozens of new SM-3 Block IB missiles, which are used to intercept enemy ballistic missiles in space. Thursday’s announcement added 23 SM-3 missiles to the order, bringing the total number to 78, for a total cost of more than $1.36 billion.

Before the Iran war... The Pentagon is making deals with several defense contractors to deliver more weapons systems. Lockheed Martin plans to quadruple THAAD interceptor production to 400 units annually and boost Patriot PAC-3 output to 2,000 per year, Reuters reported. These agreements were in place before the US began striking Iran. The conflict has increased the military’s urgency to replenish weapons inventories, particularly interceptor stocks being used to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones attacking US and allied bases in the Middle East.

SpaceX delivers for EchoStar. A direct television satellite for Dish Network, a subsidiary of EchoStar, headed into geosynchronous Earth orbit on Monday night aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Spaceflight Now reports. The satellite, EchoStar XXV, flew to a geosynchronous transfer orbit before maneuvering to its operational position at 110 degrees west longitude above the equator. This was the 30th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket so far in 2026, putting SpaceX on a similar pace to last year.

A rarity these days... This was the first launch of a large commercial geosynchronous communications satellite in nearly six months. These types of satellites operate more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator, where their orbits match the rate of Earth’s rotation. They were once the favored solution for commercial broadcasting and data relay. Today, the strong trend is toward large mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit, with networks like SpaceX’s Starlink beaming broadband Internet to global customers. Commercial geosynchronous satellites are now a niche, primarily for markets like direct-to-home TV and satellite radio. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China resumes space launches. Two Chinese rockets launched Thursday, March 12, from spaceports in the northwest and south of the country. These were the first Chinese orbital launches in more than a month, a break that coincided with the Chinese New Year holiday. It is unclear whether the holiday was the reason for the interruption of satellite launches. China did not have such a long lull in launch activity over the last couple of years. Two Chinese rockets failed during launches in January, but China’s rocket industry has a deep bench, so there’s no obvious link between those failures and the recent letup in launches.

Assembling a network… The first of Thursday’s launches from China involved a Long March 8A rocket carrying a batch of Internet satellites, followed by the launch of a Long March 2D rocket with a pair of classified military satellites. These missions continued China’s rapid build-up of satellite networks for data relay and imaging surveillance.

Artemis II clears critical review. NASA plans to haul its Artemis II Moon rocket back out to its seaside launch pad next week to ready the huge booster for blastoff as early as April 1 on a delayed-but-historic flight to send four astronauts on a nine-day trip around the moon, CBS News reports. At the conclusion of a two-day flight readiness review, “all the teams polled ‘go’ to launch and fly Artemis II around the Moon, pending completion of some of the work before we roll out to the launch pad,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator of Exploration Systems Development at NASA Headquarters, in a press conference Thursday. “Just a reminder to everybody, we talk about it every time we talk about this flight, it’s a test flight, and it is not without risk. But our team and our hardware are ready,” Glaze said.

Behind schedule… Based on the ever-changing positions of the Moon and Earth, along with a complex mix of mission objectives, NASA must launch Artemis II by April 6, or the flight will slip another month or so. For an April 1 launch, liftoff is expected at 6: 24 pm EDT, followed by splashdown in the Pacific Ocean nine days later. NASA workers had hoped to launch the Space Launch System rocket, the Orion crew capsule, and its four passengers—Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—in early February. But the long-awaited flight was delayed by hydrogen fuel leaks and, more recently, by problems with the rocket’s upper-stage propellant pressurization system. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Goodbye to NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage. The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage was confirmed last Friday, March 6, in a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).” The announcement spells the end of the Exploration Upper Stage, a multibillion-dollar, Boeing-led development 10 years in the making that was still years away from being ready to fly, Ars reports.

We hardly knew ya… Contracted to Boeing more than a decade ago, the Exploration Upper Stage upgrade was intended to allow the SLS rocket to launch not just the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, but large payloads alongside it. That the development of capable rockets by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance to deliver large cargo to the Moon rendered it obsolete mattered, for a long time, not at all. If the Exploration Upper Stage was anything, it was a survivor—a testament to the power of pork and the value of political support from key Southern senators in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida. Now, NASA is going with a more affordable commercial option to upgrade the SLS rocket.

SpaceX activates second Starbase launch pad. For the first time since October, SpaceX has a rocket on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, NASASpaceflight reports. This time, it is the first of SpaceX’s new Block 3 Super Heavy boosters mounted on SpaceX’s newest launch pad, Pad 2. The launch pad has been under construction for the past 22 months and will help usher in the next chapter for the Starship program. This is the start of pad commissioning, a process that will culminate with the first launch of the upgraded third-generation Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket. SpaceX previously put the new booster and ship through a series of checkouts at a separate test stand at Starbase.

Slipping until April… At some point, SpaceX is expected to test-fire the new Super Heavy booster on Pad 2. But the booster only has a subset of its 33 Raptor engines, so a static fire test does not appear to be in the plan for the booster’s current stay at the launch pad. Meanwhile, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X on March 7 that the first Block 3 launch is about four weeks away, suggesting a launch sometime in early April. SpaceX had been targeting March for the test flight. This time one year ago, Musk wrote that SpaceX was “tracking to a Starship launch rate of once a week” within 12 months. That launch cadence has not been achieved.

Next three launches

March 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-31 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14: 33 UTC

March 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-48 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10: 00 UTC

March 15: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 13: 20 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review Read More »

Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games

AI, chess, Computer science, Games, math, NIM, Science, training / Shannon Garcia / March 14, 2026

When winning depends on intuiting a mathematical function, AIs come up short.

Oddly, the training methods that work great for chess fail on far simpler games. Credit: SimpleImages

With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google’s DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and Go by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then some odd things happened as people started identifying Go positions that would lose against relative newcomers to the game but easily defeat a similar Go-playing AI.

While beating an AI at a board game may seem relatively trivial, it can help us identify failure modes of the AI, or ways in which we can improve their training to avoid having them develop these blind spots in the first place—things that may become critical as people rely on AI input for a growing range of problems.

A recent paper published in Machine Learning describes an entire category of games where the method used to train AlphaGo and AlphaChess fails. The games in question can be remarkably simple, as exemplified by the one the researchers worked with: Nim, which involves two players taking turns removing matchsticks from a pyramid-shaped board until one is left without a legal move.

Impartiality

Nim involves setting up a set of rows of matchsticks, with the top row having a single match, and every row below it having two more than the one above. This creates a pyramid-shaped board. Two players then take turns removing matchsticks from the board, choosing a row and then removing anywhere from one item to the entire contents of the row. The game goes until there are no legal moves left. It’s a simple game that can easily be taught to children.

It also turns out to be a critical example of an entire category of rule sets that define “impartial games.” These differ from something like chess, where each player has their own set of pieces; in impartial games, the two players share the same pieces and are bound by the same set of rules. Nim’s importance stems from a theorem showing that any position in an impartial game can be represented by a configuration of a Nim pyramid. Meaning that if something applies to Nim, it applies to all impartial games.

One of the distinctive features of Nim and other impartial games is that, at any point in the game, it’s easy to evaluate the board and determine which player has the potential to win. Put another way, you can size up the board and know that, if you play the optimal moves from then on, you will likely win. Doing so just requires feeding the board’s configuration into a parity function, which does the math to tell you whether you’re winning.

(Obviously, the person who is currently winning could play a suboptimal move and end up losing. And the exact series of optimal moves is not determined until the end, since they will depend on exactly what your opponent does.)

The new work, done by Bei Zhou and Soren Riis, asks a simple question: What happens if you take the AlphaGo approach to training an AI to play games, and try to develop a Nim-playing AI? Put differently: They asked whether an AI could develop a representation of a parity function purely by playing itself in Nim.

When self-teaching fails

AlphaZero, the chess-playing version, was trained from only the rules of chess. By playing itself, it can associate different board configurations with a probability of winning. To keep it from getting stuck in ruts, there’s also a random sampling element that allows it to continue exploring new territory. And, once it can identify a limited number of high-value moves, it’s able to explore deeper into future possibilities that arise from those moves. The more games it plays, the higher the probability that it will be able to assign values to potential board configurations that could arise from a given position (although the benefits of more games tend to tail off after a sufficient number are played).

In Nim, there is a limited number of optimal moves for a given board configuration. If you don’t play one of them, then you essentially cede control to your opponent, who can go on to win if they play nothing but optimal moves. And again, the optimal moves can be identified by evaluating a mathematical parity function.

So, there are reasons to think that the training process that worked for chess might not be effective for Nim. The surprise is just how bad it actually was. Zhou and Riis found that for a Nim board with five rows, the AI got good fairly quickly and was still improving after 500 training iterations. Adding just one more row, however, caused the rate of improvement to slow dramatically. And, for a seven-row board, gains in performance had essentially stopped by the time the AI had played itself 500 times.

To better illustrate the problem, the researchers swapped out the subsystem that suggested potential moves with one that operated randomly. On a seven-row Nim board, the performance of the trained and randomized versions was indistinguishable over 500 training gains. Essentially, once the board got large enough, the system was incapable of learning from observing game outcomes. The initial state of the seven-row configuration has three potential moves that are all consistent with an ultimate win. Yet when the trained move evaluator of their system was asked to check all potential moves, it evaluated every single one as roughly equivalent.

The researchers conclude that Nim requires players to learn the parity function to play effectively. And the training procedure that works so well for chess and Go is incapable of doing so.

Not just Nim

One way to view the conclusion is that Nim (and by extension, all impartial games) is just weird. But Zhou and Riis also found some signs that similar problems could also crop up in chess-playing AIs that were trained in this manner. They identified several “wrong” chess moves—ones that missed a mating attack or threw an end-game—that were initially rated highly by the AI’s board evaluator. It was only because the software took a number of additional branches out several moves into the future that it was able to avoid these gaffes.

For many Nim board configurations, the optimal branches that lead to a win have to be played out to the end of the game to demonstrate their value, so this sort of avoidance of a potential gaffe is much harder to manage. And they noted that chess players have found mating combinations that require long chains of moves that chess-playing software often misses entirely. They suggest that the issue isn’t that chess doesn’t have the same issues, but rather that Nim-like board configurations are generally rare in chess. Presumably, similar things apply to Go, as illustrated by the odd weaknesses of AIs in that game.

“AlphaZero excels at learning through association,” Zhou and Riis argue, “but fails when a problem requires a form of symbolic reasoning that cannot be implicitly learned from the correlation between game states and outcomes.” In other words, even if the rules governing a game enable simple rules for deciding what to do, we can’t expect Alpha-style training to enable an AI to identify them. The result is what they call a “tangible, catastrophic failure mode.”

Why does this matter? Lots of people are exploring the utility of AIs for math problems, which often require the sort of symbolic reasoning involved in extrapolating from a board configuration to general rules such as the parity function. While it may not be obvious how to train an AI to do that, it can be useful to know which approaches will clearly not work.

Machine Learning, 2026. DOI: 10.1007/s10994-026-06996-1 (About DOIs).

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games Read More »

Subscribers to Amazon Prime Video with ads lose 4K support on April 10

ads, Amazon, amazon prime video, streaming, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 14, 2026

Starting on April 10, Amazon Prime subscribers will pay $5 per month for ad-free Prime Video without ads, up from the current $3 per month on top of their Prime subscription, Amazon announced today.

On that date, Amazon will introduce a new ad-free Prime Video subscription tier called “Prime Video Ultra.” Amazon will also increase the number of simultaneous streams supported by the tier from three to five and the number of downloads permitted from 25 to 100.

Currently, Prime Video with ads is part of Amazon’s Prime membership, which starts at $15 a month. Today, ad-free Prime Video users can watch supported titles in 4K, but starting on April 10, a new Prime Video Ultra subscription will be required for 4K viewing.

You’ll also need Prime Video Ultra to use Dolby Atmos, though Prime Video’s cheaper subscription tier will include Dolby Vision, up to four simultaneous streams (up from three), and 50 downloads (up from 25).

For comparison, ad-free Netflix with 4K support is $25/month, and ad-free Disney+ with 4K is $19/month.

“Delivering ad-free streaming with premium features requires significant investment, and this structure aligns with other major streaming services while ensuring customers have the flexibility to choose how they want to watch,” Amazon’s announcement said.

Amazon first forced ads onto Prime Video for all Prime subscribers in January 2024 unless subscribers paid the extra $3 monthly fee. Since then, Amazon has been increasing the number of ads subscribers see. In June 2025, AdWeek reported that Prime Video’s ad load was six minutes per hour, compared to an industry average ad load of two to three-and-a-half minutes, per a January 2024 report from The Wall Street Journal, when the ad tier launched.

Subscribers to Amazon Prime Video with ads lose 4K support on April 10 Read More »

HP has new incentive to stop blocking third-party ink in its printers

HP, printers, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 12, 2026

The third option is for manufacturers to make available, such as via the manufacturer’s website, “to purchasers remanufactured cartridges, either manufacturer or nonmanufacturer branded, for, at minimum, registered products.”

As of this writing, 38,291 devices are under the EPEAT 1.0 registry. There are 163 products registered under EPEAT 2.0, but none are printers. This all underscores how new the EPEAT 2.0 registry is and the likelihood that the GEC is still working to register more devices, like printers.

Still, the Int’l ITC is skeptical about HP ever following EPEAT 2.0’s criteria, especially considering that “HP released firmware 2602A/B on January 29, 2026 across eleven printer models,” the trade group said in a press release last week. (At least some of the firmware updates, including for the nearly 9-year-old OfficeJet Pro 7720, appear to have come out in February.)

“HP’s recent behavior is emblematic of a larger pattern,” the Int’l ITC’s release said. “HP positions itself as a leader in sustainability, circular business models, and responsible product design, but instead of proactively aligning its products and practices with the highest environmental standards, such as EPEAT 2.0, HP puts profits first and waits until external scrutiny or the threat of non-compliance forces change.”

In an email discussion with Ars Technica, Tricia Judge, the Int’l ITC’s executive director and general counsel, pointed out that HP’s firmware update succeeded the launch of the EPEAT 2.0 registry. She explained why the Int’l ITC’s press release called out HP but no other printer manufacturers:

HP is the only one with lockout chips that are triggered using firmware “upgrades” that claim “security” as a justification for their existence. HP is the only one that misleads and frustrates its own customers when locking out the environmentally superior competition. The others have made some interesting attempts in the past to create a competitive advantage.

In 2023, the Int’l ITC wrote a letter to the GEC requesting that the GEC revoke at least 101 of HP’s printers from the (original) EPEAT registry, largely due to Dynamic Security. GEC denied the Int’l ITC’s request.

“EPEAT 1.0 was very basic (no interference with the use of remanufactured cartridges), and HP claimed that its statements (buried in its marketing materials and/or on its website) that it didn’t interfere with the use of remanufactured cartridges was a loophole that the GEC decided was acceptable,” Judge said. “We were trying to close that loophole with EPEAT 2.0. We didn’t get it as airtight as we hoped, but it is better.

HP didn’t respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment for this story.

HP has new incentive to stop blocking third-party ink in its printers Read More »

Report: RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda curbed as GOP realizes it’s unpopular

anti-vaccine, COVID-19, health, MAHA, mRNA, robert f kennedy jr / Shannon Garcia / March 11, 2026

Kennedy’s plans were only getting started. The staunch anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist made his most brazen attack on vaccines in January, slashing the CDC’s childhood vaccine schedule from 17 immunizations down to 11 to be in line with recommendations of Denmark, a much smaller country with a relatively homogenous population and universal health care. The US is now an outlier among peer nations for recommending so few childhood vaccines.

Conspiracy theories and political risks

While these and other changes to vaccine recommendations by Kennedy and his underlings have been widely decried by medical and public health experts, they are still not enough for his rabid anti-vaccine followers, who, in no uncertain terms, want all vaccines abolished.

On Monday, the MAHA Institute, a think tank stemming from Kennedy’s Make America Health Again movement, held an event brimming with prominent anti-vaccine activists. Those include Del Bigtree, a prominent conspiracy theorist who leads the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, and Mary Holland, who is CEO of the anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense, which Kennedy founded.

The event was focused on an alleged “Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury,” a nonexistent health crisis the MAHA institute wants to sell to the American public, branded as the catchy term “Mevi.” The six-hour event was essentially an extravaganza of anti-vaccine talking points, with false claims, misinformation, and disinformation about immunizations, including that vaccines cause autism and autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 vaccines are deadly.

At the start of the event, MAHA Institute President Mark Gordon laid out his grand belief that the medical community has orchestrated an elaborate, global, decades-long conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines, which he called poisons, and falsify data showing their benefits. “Vaccines are the greatest scam in medical history,” one of his slides proclaimed.

He concluded that “the childhood vaccination schedule needs to be eliminated and all vaccines need to be removed from the market.”

While Gordon and the other speakers were not concerned about the popularity or political ramifications of their beliefs, the Trump administration appears to be. The Post noted that Trump’s top pollster, Tony Fabrizio, has concluded that vaccine skepticism is “rejected by most voters,” and skepticism of vaccine requirements is “politically risky.” His polling data, like many others, have found broad support for vaccines and vaccine requirements. Fabrizio warned in a December memo that politicians supporting eliminating vaccine recommendations “will pay a price in the election.”

Report: RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda curbed as GOP realizes it’s unpopular Read More »

FCC chair blasts Amazon after it criticizes SpaceX megaconstellation

Amazon, FCC, megaconstellation, Policy, Space, spacex / Shannon Garcia / March 11, 2026

In addition to parrying with SpaceX over its proposed, vastly larger orbital data center constellation, Amazon is seeking some regulatory relief of its own. Most pressing for Amazon is a deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation, intended to ultimately comprise 3,236 satellites, by July 30. The company will not meet this deadline, with only a little more than three months to go, and Amazon has requested an extension, asking for it to be moved to July 30, 2028.

Carr pulls up

On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr injected himself into the SpaceX-Amazon fracas over megaconstellations.

“Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of meeting its upcoming deployment milestone, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit,” Carr said on X, the social media network owned by Musk.

There are arguments to be made in favor of both SpaceX and Amazon regarding their competing concerns. For example, SpaceX is likely to be able to greatly accelerate the rate at which it launches satellites with the forthcoming Starship rocket. So saying it will take centuries to put its data centers into space is not likely true.

However, it is valid to criticize SpaceX’s application for 1 million satellites, which is an extraordinary number of spacecraft that would completely change many things about low-Earth orbit. The SpaceX application did not contain critical information about the size, mass, and other details needed to evaluate the constellation for safety and other concerns.

It cannot be comfortable for Amazon and Bezos to see Carr weighing in so publicly and favorably on Musk’s side. Legally, Carr is allowed to have strongly held policy views. But he is not supposed to single out companies for preferential treatment.

FCC chair blasts Amazon after it criticizes SpaceX megaconstellation Read More »

Author name: Shannon Garcia