Enlarge / A digital advertisement board displaying a Barbie movie poster is seen in New York on July 24, 2023. (credit: Getty | Selcuk Acar )

This post contains spoilers—for the movie and women's healthcare.

There's nothing like stirrups and a speculum to welcome one to womanhood, but for some, the recent Barbie movie apparently offered its own kind of eye-opening introduction.

The smash-hit film ends with the titular character making the brave decision to exit Barbieland and enter the real world as a bona fide woman. The film's final scene follows her as she fully unfurls her new reality, attending her first woman's health appointment. "I’m here to see my gynecologist," she enthusiastically states to a medical receptionist. For many, the line prompted a wry chuckle, given her unsuspecting eagerness and enigmatic anatomy. But for others, it apparently raised some fundamental questions.

Enlarge / Police observe the Eiffel Tower from Trocadero ahead of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games on July 22, 2024. (credit: Hector Vivas/Getty Images )

On the eve of the Olympics opening ceremony , Paris is a city swamped in security. Forty thousand barriers divide the French capital. Packs of police officers wearing stab vests patrol pretty, cobbled streets. The river Seine is out of bounds to anyone who has not already been vetted and issued a personal QR code. Khaki-clad soldiers, present since the 2015 terrorist attacks, linger near a canal-side boulangerie, wearing berets and clutching large guns to their chests.

French interior minister Gérald Darmanin has spent the past week justifying these measures as vigilance—not overkill. France is facing the “biggest security challenge any country has ever had to organize in a time of peace,” he told reporters on Tuesday. In an interview with weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, he explained that “ potentially dangerous individuals ” have been caught applying to work or volunteer at the Olympics, including 257 radical Islamists, 181 members of the far left, and 95 from the far right. Yesterday, he told French news broadcaster BFM that a Russian citizen had been arrested on suspicion of plotting “large scale” acts of “destabilization” during the Games.

Parisians are still grumbling about road closures and bike lanes that abruptly end without warning, while human rights groups are denouncing “unacceptable risks to fundamental rights.” For the Games, this is nothing new. Complaints about dystopian security are almost an Olympics tradition. Previous iterations have been characterized as Lockdown London , Fortress Tokyo , and the “ arms race ” in Rio. This time, it is the least-visible security measures that have emerged as some of the most controversial. Security measures in Paris have been turbocharged by a new type of AI, as the city enables controversial algorithms to crawl CCTV footage of transport stations looking for threats. The system was first tested in Paris back in March at two Depeche Mode concerts.

Enlarge / NASA's SLS rocket core stage for Artemis II is moved to the VAB. (credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky)

Welcome to Edition 7.04 of the Rocket Report! Probably the most striking news this week came from ABL, which said in a terse social media statement that it had lost its second RS1 rocket during pre-flight testing. This is unfortunate, since the company had been so careful and meticulous in working toward this second launch attempt. It's a reminder of how demanding this industry remains.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and 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.

ABL loses rocket after static fire test . ABL Space Systems said Monday that its next rocket had suffered "irrecoverable" damage during preparations for launch. "After a pre-flight static fire test on Friday, a residual pad fire caused irrecoverable damage to RS1," the company said on the social media site X . "The team is investigating root cause and will provide updates as the investigation progresses." As of the writing of this report three days later, the company has not posted any additional information.

Enlarge (credit: NASA/Isaac Watson )

The central piece of NASA's second Space Launch System rocket arrived at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. Agency officials intend to start stacking the towering launcher in the next couple of months for a mission late next year carrying a team of four astronauts around the Moon.

The Artemis II mission, officially scheduled for September 2025, will be the first voyage by humans to the vicinity of the Moon since the last Apollo lunar landing mission in 1972. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian mission specialist Jeremy Hansen will ride the SLS rocket away from Earth, then fly around the far side of the Moon and return home inside NASA's Orion spacecraft.

"The core is the backbone of SLS, and it’s the backbone of the Artemis mission," said Matthew Ramsey, NASA's mission manager for Artemis II. "We’ve been waiting for the core to get here because all the integrated tests and checkouts that we do have to have the core stage. It has the flight avionics that drive the whole system. The boosters are also important, but the core is really the backbone for Artemis. So it’s a big day.”

Enlarge / An illustration provided by Google. (credit: Google )

On Thursday, Google DeepMind announced that AI systems called AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 reportedly solved four out of six problems from this year's International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), achieving a score equivalent to a silver medal. The tech giant claims this marks the first time an AI has reached this level of performance in the prestigious math competition—but as usual in AI, the claims aren't as clear-cut as they seem.

Google says AlphaProof uses reinforcement learning to prove mathematical statements in the formal language called Lean . The system trains itself by generating and verifying millions of proofs, progressively tackling more difficult problems. Meanwhile, AlphaGeometry 2 is described as an upgraded version of Google's previous geometry-solving AI modeI , now powered by a Gemini-based language model trained on significantly more data.

According to Google, prominent mathematicians Sir Timothy Gowers and Dr. Joseph Myers scored the AI model's solutions using official IMO rules. The company reports its combined system earned 28 out of 42 possible points, just shy of the 29-point gold medal threshold. This included a perfect score on the competition's hardest problem, which Google claims only five human contestants solved this year.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards / OpenAI)

Arguably, few companies have unintentionally contributed more to the increase of AI-generated noise online than OpenAI. Despite its best intentions—and against its terms of service —its AI language models are often used to compose spam , and its pioneering research has inspired others to build AI models that can potentially do the same. This influx of AI-generated content has further reduced the effectiveness of SEO-driven search engines like Google. In 2024, web search is in a sorry state indeed .

It's interesting then, that OpenAI is now offering a potential solution to that problem. On Thursday, OpenAI revealed a prototype AI-powered search engine called SearchGPT that aims to provide users with quick, accurate answers sourced from the web. It's also a direct challenge to Google, which also has tried to apply generative AI to web search (but with little success ).

The company says it plans to integrate the most useful aspects of the temporary prototype into ChatGPT in the future. ChatGPT can already perform web searches using Bing, but SearchGPT seems to be a purpose-built interface for AI-assisted web searching.

(credit: Chrome )

Google is redesigning Chrome malware detections to include password-protected executable files that users can upload for deep scanning, a change the browser maker says will allow it to detect more malicious threats.

Google has long allowed users to switch on the Enhanced Mode of its Safe Browsing , a Chrome feature that warns users when they’re downloading a file that’s believed to be unsafe, either because of suspicious characteristics or because it’s in a list of known malware. With Enhanced Mode turned on, Google will prompt users to upload suspicious files that aren’t allowed or blocked by its detection engine. Under the new changes, Google will prompt these users to provide any password needed to open the file.

Beware of password-protected archives

In a post published Wednesday, Jasika Bawa, Lily Chen, and Daniel Rubery of the Chrome Security team wrote:

• 

  The Lego Mario & Yoshi set is an homage to 1990's Super Mario World . [credit: The Lego Group ]

Nintendo and Lego are at it again—they've announced another collaboration today as a follow-up to the interactive Mario sets , the replica Nintendo Entertainment System , the unfolding question mark block with the Mario 64 worlds inside, and other sets besides.

The latest addition is an homage to 1990's Super Mario World , Mario's debut outing on the then-new 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System. At first, the 1,215-piece set just looks like a caped Mario sitting on top of Yoshi. But a look at the back reveals more complex mechanics, including a hand crank that makes Yoshi's feet and arms move and a dial that opens his mouth and extends his tongue.

Most of the Mario sets have included some kind of interactive moving part, even if it's as simple as the movable mouth on the Lego Piranha Plant . Yoshi's mechanical crank most strongly resembles the NES set, though, which included a CRT-style TV set with a crank that made the contents of the screen scroll so that Mario could "walk."

Enlarge / I don't know how Sonos' app might have developed during the groovy era their marketing images aim to summon, but it feels like it might not have wanted to rush head-long into disappointing users quite so quickly. (credit: Sonos)

Sonos issued a redesigned app in May, and what lots of customers noticed about it wasn't the refreshed look, but the things from the previous design entirely missing. Not small things, but things that Sonos enthusiasts would really notice: sleep timers, local music library access and management, playlist and song queue editing, plus accessibility downgrades.

In May, a Sonos executive told The Verge that it "takes courage to rebuild a brand’s core product from the ground up, and to do so knowing it may require taking a few steps back to ultimately leap into the future." You might ask if bravery could have been mustered to not release an app before it was feature-complete.

Now, nearly three months after shipping, Sonos leadership has pivoted from excitement about future innovations to humility, apology, and a detailed roadmap of fixes. CEO Patrick Spence starts his "Update on the Sonos app from Patrick" with a personal apology, a note that "there isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down," and a pledge that fixing the app is the No. 1 priority.