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Category: futurism

Artemis II live updates: Crew enters high Earth orbit, NASA says they are in ‘great spirits’

Artemis II will make history, taking astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. The four-person crew will launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, for a 10-day journey.

The trip will pave the way for future Artemis missions intended to eventually see astronauts set foot on the moon, and the building of a permanent lunar base.

Read more here about what you need to know regarding the Artemis II mission, including how long it will take, who the astronauts are and how to watch.

Deus Ex: Invisible War’s audio director says ‘there was room for improvement,’ but remains proud of the team’s work

After serving as a composer on the original Deus Ex, and contributing some voices, Alexander Brandon was made audio director on its sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War. The second game in the series has long been divisive, and was Brandon’s first time as an audio director. As he told PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon in a recent interview, “There was room for improvement, I will just put it that way.”

Brandon remains pleased with a lot of the team’s work, however. “As far as the content goes, I think we did really, really well,” he said. “I’m proud of the main theme. My now ex-wife did the vocals on it, and did an amazing job on that. And I was given a little more freedom to express thematic, melodic stuff, even though it was muted in comparison to the original main theme. It wasn’t this ’90s cyberpunk Johnny Mnemonic cheese fest that everybody reveled in at that time.”

Targeting the tiniest divide: Research reveals potential vulnerability in bacterial reproduction

A Université de Montréal study has found a previously unknown mechanism in bacterial reproduction that could be attacked by future antibiotics. Bacteria reproduce by dividing into two: they form a wall, or septum, between the two future cells while remodeling the old cell walls so the so-called “daughter” cells can separate without bursting. Until now, scientists had believed that once the dividing wall was built, bacteria gradually break down the links between its two sides to allow the cells to separate in a process called cleavage.

However, the new study published in Nature Communications shows that bacteria actually strengthen the septum during the final moments of cleavage by a previously undetected mechanism. The research was led by Yves Brun, a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Infectiology and Immunology at Université de Montréal and holder of the Canada 150 Research Chair in Bacterial Cell Biology.

Engineers introduce first synthetic charged domain wall in 2D material

In a first for the field, materials scientists from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have interfaced two materials to artificially generate a highly conductive ferroelectric charged domain wall. Led by associate professor of materials science and engineering Arend van der Zande and graduate student Shahriar Muhammad Nahid (now a postdoc at Stanford) and published in Advanced Materials, their approach highlights the versatility of charged domain walls in 2D materials and may be used in the future development of neuromorphic devices and reconfigurable electronics.

2D materials are valued for their utility in molecular-scale systems, which are used to create new kinds of memory and molecular electronic architectures. While most materials must be grown naturally layer by layer, 2D materials can be stacked like building blocks to create arbitrary structures.

One emerging 2D material of interest is indium selenide (α-In2Se3), a layered semiconductor that is also ferroelectric. Ferroelectric materials exhibit spontaneous and mutable electric polarization—something that piqued the interest of van der Zande and Pinshane Huang, professor of materials science and engineering.

Google now allows you to change your @gmail.com address

Google is rolling out a new feature that allows users in the U.S. to change their @gmail address or create a new alias.

This feature was first spotted in October 2025 and showed up on some Google accounts by the end of the year, but it was not available in the United States.

Starting today, Google says you can customize your @gmail address in the United States.

The Mediterranean Isn’t Safe: Scientists Warn of Inevitable Tsunami

Contrary to common belief, the Mediterranean holds a significant and underrecognized tsunami risk, with waves capable of striking coastlines in minutes. The Mediterranean Sea is often dismissed as a low-risk zone for tsunamis, but that assumption is increasingly being challenged. Historical recor

Psychopathic traits are linked to a lack of physical and emotional connection during face-to-face interactions

A new study reveals that people with psychopathic traits can accurately judge another person’s emotions. However, they show a distinct inability to physically and emotionally resonate with those feelings.

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