Enlarge / Astrobotic's Peregrine lander, with some of its propellants visible, before shipment from the company's headquarters in Pittsburgh to the launch site in Florida. (credit: Astrobotic )

Seven months after its first lunar lander fell short of reaching the Moon, Astrobotic announced Tuesday that the spacecraft was stricken by a valve failure that caused a propellant tank to burst in orbit. The company's next landing attempt, using a much larger spacecraft, will include fixes to prevent a similar failure.

Astrobotic's first Peregrine lander, which the company called Peregrine Mission One, launched January 8 aboard United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket . But soon after separating from the rocket in space, the lander ran into trouble as it stepped through an activation sequence to begin priming its propulsion system.

A review board determined "the most likely cause of the malfunction was a failure of a single helium Pressure Control Calve called a PCV—Pressure Control Valve 2, within the propulsion system," said John Horack, a space industry veteran and professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at Ohio State University.

Enlarge / A screen capture of landing video of a Falcon 9 rocket just before it tips over on Wednesday morning. (credit: SpaceX)

Early on Wednesday morning, at 3:48 am ET local time, a Falcon 9 rocket booster making its 23rd launch took off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The mission successfully delivered 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 of the larger vehicles with direct-to-cell capabilities, before attempting a landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas . However, the experienced booster had a shortfall of stability and tipped over shortly following touchdown.

Prior to Wednesday's landing failure, SpaceX had landed 267 boosters in a row. The company's last failure occurred in February 2021. The cause of the failure was not immediately clear, and SpaceX said "teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status." Based on video of the landing , it is possible there was an engine burn timing issue.

Enlarge / AMD's Ryzen 7 7700X. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Among AMD’s explanations for the somewhat underwhelming Ryzen 9000 performance reports from reviewers earlier this month: that the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update would bring some improvements to the CPU scheduler that would boost the performance of the new CPUs and their Zen 5-based architecture.

But rather than make Ryzen owners wait for the 24H2 update to come out later this fall (or make them install a beta version of a major OS update), AMD and Microsoft have backported the scheduler improvements to Windows 11 23H2. Users of Ryzen 5000, 7000, and 9000 CPUs can install the KB5041587 update by going to Windows Update in Settings, selecting Advanced Options, and then Optional Updates.

"We expect the performance uplift to be very similar between 24H2 and 23H2 with KB5041587 installed," an AMD representative told Ars.

Enlarge (credit: Getty )

Indian IT firm Infosys has been accused of being “exploitative” after allegedly sending job offers to thousands of engineering graduates but still not onboarding any of them after as long as two years. The recent graduates have reportedly been told they must do repeated, unpaid training in order to remain eligible to work at Infosys.

Last week, the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate ( NITES ), an Indian advocacy group for IT workers, sent a letter [ PDF ], shared by The Register , to Mansukh Mandaviya, India’s Minster of Labor and Employment. It requested that the Indian government intervene “to prevent exploitation of young IT graduates by Infosys." The letter signed by NITES president Harpreet Singh Saluja claimed that NITES received “multiple” complaints from recent engineering graduates “who have been subjected to unprofessional and exploitative practices” from Infosys after being hired for system engineer and digital specialist engineer roles.

According to NITES, Infosys sent these people offer letters as early as April 22, 2022, after engaging in a college recruitment effort from 2022–2023 but never onboarded the graduates. NITES has previously said that “over 2,000 recruits” are affected.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Elon Musk's X platform made a change to its AI assistant, Grok, that may prevent it from giving users false information on election ballot deadlines and other election-related matters. From now on, X says that Grok will direct users to Vote.gov when asked election-related questions.

X, formerly Twitter, made the change about two weeks after five secretaries of state complained to the company. "On August 21, 2024, X's Head of US and Canada Global Government Affairs informed the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State [Steve Simon] that the platform has made changes to its AI search assistant, Grok, after a request from several Secretaries of State," Simon's office said in a press release yesterday.

Grok is developed by xAI, one of Musk's other companies, and is available on X to paying subscribers.

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli—he's back, and he's still got copies of that Wu-Tang Clan album. (credit: Getty | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez )

The members of PleasrDAO are, well, pretty dis pleased with Martin Shkreli.

The "digital autonomous organization" spent $4.75 million to buy the fabled Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin , which had only been produced as a single copy. The album had once belonged to Shkreli, who purchased it directly from Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million in 2015. But after Shkreli became the "pharma bro" poster boy for price gouging in the drug sector , he ended up in severe legal trouble and served a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud.

He also had to pay a $7.4 million penalty in that case, and the government seized and then sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to help pay the bill.

Enlarge / Teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program and primary contractor Bechtel National, Inc. continue construction on the base of the platform for the new mobile launcher at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, April 24, 2024. (credit: NASA/Isaac Watson)

NASA's problems with the mobile launch tower that will support a larger version of its Space Launch System rocket are getting worse rather than better.

According to a new report from NASA's inspector general, the estimated cost of the tower, which is a little bit taller than the length of a US football field with its end zones, is now $2.7 billion. Such a cost is nearly twice the funding it took to build the largest structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa, which is seven times taller.

This is a remarkable explosion in costs as, only five years ago, NASA awarded a contract to the Bechtel engineering firm to build and deliver a second mobile launcher (ML-2) for $383 million, with a due date of March 2023. That deadline came and went with Bechtel barely beginning to cut metal.

Enlarge / A man peers over a glass partition, seeking transparency. (credit: Image Source via Getty Images )

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) recently unveiled its latest draft definition for "open source AI," aiming to clarify the ambiguous use of the term in the fast-moving field. The move comes as some companies like Meta release trained AI language model weights and code with usage restrictions while using the "open source" label. This has sparked intense debates among free-software advocates about what truly constitutes "open source" in the context of AI.

For instance, Meta's Llama 3 model, while freely available, doesn't meet the traditional open source criteria as defined by the OSI for software because it imposes license restrictions on usage due to company size or what type of content is produced with the model. The AI image generator Flux is another "open" model that is not truly open source. Because of this type of ambiguity, we've typically described AI models that include code or weights with restrictions or lack accompanying training data with alternative terms like "open-weights" or "source-available."

To address the issue formally, the OSI—which is well-known for its advocacy for open software standards—has assembled a group of about 70 participants, including researchers, lawyers, policymakers, and activists. Representatives from major tech companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon also joined the effort. The group's current draft (version 0.0.9) definition of open source AI emphasizes "four fundamental freedoms" reminiscent of those defining free software : giving users of the AI system permission to use it for any purpose without permission, study how it works, modify it for any purpose, and share with or without modifications.

Enlarge / BARCELONA, SPAIN - 2021/10/02: Spanish tattoo artist Oscar Garcia works on a man, during the Expo. Fira de Barcelona hosts the XXIV edition of the Barcelona Tattoo Expo where tattoo artists from Spain and other countries exhibit tattoos and tattoo material such as ink, needles and special machinery for tattoo work. (Photo by Ramon Costa/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

The Food and Drug Administration has been warning for years that some tattoo inks are brimming with bacteria —a large assortment that, when injected into your skin, can cause inflammatory reactions, allergic hypersensitivity, toxic responses, and, of course, straight-up infections. And, worse yet, the labels that say the inks are sterile are not reliable.

But, a recent recall of three tattoo pigments from the same manufacturer does a good job of illustrating the FDA's concerns. The water-based inks, all from Sierra Stain, had a bizarre array of bacteria, which were found at high levels, according to FDA testing.

One ink product—described as "Carolina Blue"—offered a microbial menagerie, with six odd species identified. They included a bacterium that often dwells in the gastrointestinal system and can inflame the mucosal lining of the intestines ( Citrobacter braakii ), a water-borne bacterium ( Cupriavidus pauculus ), and several that cause opportunistic infections ( Citrobacter farmer , Achromobacter xylosoxidans , Ochrobactrum anthropi , and Pseudomonas fluorescens ). These are bacteria that don't typically go about attacking humans but will if the conditions are right, including when they find themselves inside a human with a compromised immune system.