Enlarge / Where are the gentle creatures and native plants you first saw when you landed? More importantly, could this conveyer belt run on a shorter path? (credit: Coffee Stain Studios)

The company that compels you to industrialize an untouched alien planet in Satisfactory, FICSIT, is similar to Portal 's Aperture Science or Fallout 's Vault-Tec. You are a disposable employee, fed misinformation and pushed to ignore awful or incongruous things, all for the greater good of science, profit, or an efficient mixture of the two.

And yet even FICSIT was a bit concerned about how deep into the 1.0 release of Satisfactory I had fallen. I got a warning that I had been playing for two hours straight. While FICSIT approved of hard work, it was important to have some work-life balance, it suggested.

Friends of mine had told me that they had to stop playing Factorio when it began to feel like an unpaid part-time job. Given a chance to check out Satisfactory , I presumed, like I always do, That Could Never Be Me. Folks, it was definitely me. I'm having a hard time writing this post, not because it's hard to describe or recommend Satisfactory. I just stayed up very late "reviewing" it, woke up thinking about it, and am wondering whether enough friends would want to join me that I should set up a private server.

Enlarge / Quantinuum's H2 "racetrack" quantum processor. (credit: Quantinuum)

On Tuesday, Microsoft made a series of announcements related to its Azure Quantum Cloud service. Among them was a demonstration of logical operations using the largest number of error-corrected qubits yet.

" Since April , we've tripled the number of logical qubits here," said Microsoft Technical Fellow Krysta Svore. "So we are accelerating toward that hundred-logical-qubit capability." The company has also lined up a new partner in the form of Atom Computing, which uses neutral atoms to hold qubits and has already demonstrated hardware with over 1,000 hardware qubits.

Collectively, the announcements are the latest sign that quantum computing has emerged from its infancy and is rapidly progressing toward the development of systems that can reliably perform calculations that would be impractical or impossible to run on classical hardware. We talked with people at Microsoft and some of its hardware partners to get a sense of what's coming next to bring us closer to useful quantum computing.

Enlarge (credit: eugenekeebler via Getty Images )

In an age when you can get just about anything online, it's probably no surprise that you can buy a diamond-making machine for $200,000 on Chinese eCommerce site Alibaba. If you, like me, haven't been paying attention to the diamond industry, it turns out that the availability of these machines reflects an ongoing trend toward democratizing diamond production—a process that began decades ago and continues to evolve.

The history of lab-grown diamonds dates back at least half a century. According to Harvard graduate student Javid Lakha, writing in a comprehensive piece on lab-grown diamonds published in Works in Progress last month, the first successful synthesis of diamonds in a laboratory setting occurred in the 1950s. Lakha recounts how Howard Tracy Hall , a chemist at General Electric, created the first lab-grown diamonds using a high-pressure, high-temperature (HPHT) process that mimicked the conditions under which diamonds form in nature.

Since then, diamond-making technology has advanced significantly. Today, there are two primary methods for creating lab-grown diamonds: the HPHT process and chemical vapor deposition (CVD). Both types of machines are now listed on Alibaba , with prices starting at around $200,000 , as pointed out by engineer John Nagle (who goes by " Animats " on Hacker News). A CVD machine we found is more pricey, at around $450,000 .

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

Apple has suffered a significant defeat after the EU’s top court ruled that the iPhone maker must pay €13 billion in back taxes, overturning an earlier decision in the Big Tech group’s favor.

The ruling relates to a 2016 case when the EU’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Ireland had given the company an illegal sweetheart deal, amounting to a tax rate of less than 1 percent.

The European Court of Justice said on Tuesday in its final ruling that it “confirms the European Commission’s 2016 decision: Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid which Ireland is required to recover.”

Enlarge / An Aurora truck departs the company’s depot in Palmer, Texas. (credit: Aurora)

On a sunny morning in December, an 18-wheeler will pull into a truck depot in Palmer, Texas, just south of Dallas. The driver will step out of the cab and help transfer his trailer to a second rig outfitted with powerful sensors.

This second truck will head south on Interstate 45 toward Houston. It will move cautiously, mostly cruising in the right lane at 65 mph despite the 75 mph speed limit.

After three and a half hours, the truck will exit the freeway in Greenpoint, a neighborhood in the north of Houston. It will proceed to a second truck depot, where the trailer will again be transferred to a new rig. A different driver will get in and haul the cargo to its final destination a few miles away.

Enlarge / A Crew Dragon spacecraft separates from the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday morning. (credit: SpaceX)

A Falcon 9 rocket streaked into the blackened the pre-dawn sky above Florida on Tuesday, carrying four people on the most ambitious private human spaceflight to date.

The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, led by a billionaire pilot named Jared Isaacman, were injected into an orbit intended to reach an apogee of 1,200 km and a perigee of 190 km. They plan to raise Crew Dragon's orbit to an apogee of 1,400 km near the end of the first day of flight.

Shortly after the mission's launch, Isaacman thanked the flight controllers, engineers, and technicians at SpaceX that made the privately funded trip possible. "We wouldn't be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX," he said.

Enlarge / The main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is reflected in one of the mission's deployable solar array wings during testing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: NASA/Frank Michaux )

For a while earlier this summer, it looked like NASA's flagship mission to study Jupiter's icy moon Europa might miss its launch window this year.

In May, engineers raised concerns that transistors installed throughout the spacecraft might be susceptible to damage from radiation, an omnipresent threat for any probe whipping its way around Jupiter. The transistors are embedded in the spacecraft's circuitry and are responsible for approximately 200 unique applications, many of which are critical to keeping the mission operating as it orbits Jupiter and repeatedly zooms by Europa, interrogating the frozen moon with nine science instruments.

The transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft are already installed, and removing them for inspections or replacement would delay the mission's launch until late next year. Europa Clipper has a 21-day launch window beginning October 10 to begin its journey into the outer solar system.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images via Getty Images )

On Friday, Roblox announced plans to introduce an open source generative AI tool that will allow game creators to build 3D environments and objects using text prompts, reports MIT Tech Review . The feature, which is still under development, may streamline the process of creating game worlds on the popular online platform, potentially opening up more aspects of game creation to those without extensive 3D design skills.

Roblox has not announced a specific launch date for the new AI tool, which is based on what it calls a "3D foundational model." The company shared a demo video of the tool where a user types, "create a race track," then "make the scenery a desert," and the AI model creates a corresponding model in the proper environment.

The system will also reportedly let users make modifications, such as changing the time of day or swapping out entire landscapes, and Roblox says the multimodal AI model will ultimately accept video and 3D prompts, not just text.

Enlarge / Karen Dunn, one of the lawyers representing Google, outside of the Albert V. Bryan US Courthouse at the start of a Department of Justice antitrust trial against Google over its advertiing business in Alexandria, Virginia, on September 9, 2024. (credit: SAMUEL CORUM / Contributor | AFP )

On Monday, the US Department of Justice's next monopoly trial against Google started in Virginia—this time challenging the tech giant's ad tech dominance .

The trial comes after Google lost two major cases that proved Google had a monopoly in both general search and the Android app store . During her opening statement, DOJ lawyer Julia Tarver Wood told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema—who will be ruling on the case after Google cut a check to avoid a jury trial —that "it’s worth saying the quiet part out loud," AP News reported .

"One monopoly is bad enough," Wood said. "But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here."