"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.

Initial claims that life-associated gases were detected on exoplanet K2-18b are being challenged, with independent reanalysis by Jake Taylor suggesting the data is too noisy to support such conclusions and that stronger, model-independent evidence is needed. NPR reports: Rather than seeing a bump or a wiggle that indicated a signal, "the data is consistent with a flat line," says Taylor, adding that more observations from the telescope are needed to know what can be reliably said about this planet's atmosphere. "If we want to claim biosignatures, we need to be extremely sure."

What this new work shows is that "the strength of the evidence depends on the nitty gritty details of how we interpret the data, and that doesn't pass the bar for me for a convincing detection," says Laura Kreidberg, an expert on the atmospheres of distant planets at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany who didn't work on the original research team or this new analysis.

She explains that astronomers can make a lot of different choices when analyzing data; for example, they can make different assumptions about the physics and chemistry at play. "Ideally, for a robust detection, we want it to be model-independent," she says -- that is, they want the signal to show up even if the underlying assumptions change from one analysis to another. But that wasn't the case here.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: China will let scientists from six countries, including the U.S., examine the rocks it collected from the Moon -- a scientific collaboration that comes as the two countries remain locked in a bitter trade war. Two NASA-funded U.S. institutions have been granted access to the lunar samples collected by the Chang'e-5 mission in 2020, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said on Thursday. CNSA chief Shan Zhongde said that the samples were "a shared treasure for all humanity," local media reported.

Chinese researchers have not been able to access NASA's Moon samples because of restrictions imposed by U.S. lawmakers on the space agency's collaboration with China. Under the 2011 law, Nasa is banned from collaboration with China or any Chinese-owned companies unless it is specifically authorized by Congress. But John Logsdon, the former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told BBC Newshour that the latest exchange of Moon rocks have "very little to do with politics." While there are controls on space technology, the examination of lunar samples had "nothing of military significance," he said. "It's international cooperation in science which is the norm."

The Sydney-based CADA station secretly used an AI-generated host named "Thy" for its weekday shows over six months without disclosure. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: After initial questioning from Stephanie Coombes in The Carpet newsletter, it was revealed that the station used ElevenLabs -- a generative AI audio platform that transforms text into speech -- to create Thy, whose likeness and voice were cloned from a real employee in the ARN finance team. The Australian Communications and Media Authority said there were currently no specific restrictions on the use of AI in broadcast content, and no obligation to disclose its use.

An ARN spokesperson said the company was exploring how new technology could enhance the listener experience. "We've been trialling AI audio tools on CADA, using the voice of Thy, an ARN team member. This is a space being explored by broadcasters globally, and the trial has offered valuable insights." However, it has also "reinforced the power of real personalities in driving compelling content," the spokesperson added.

The Australian Financial Review reported that Workdays with Thy has been broadcast on CADA since November, and was reported to have reached at least 72,000 people in last month's ratings. Vice president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, Teresa Lim, said CADA's failure to disclose its use of AI reinforces how necessary legislation around AI labelling has become. "AI can be such a powerful and positive tool in broadcasting if there are correct safeguards in place," she said. "Authenticity and truth are so important for broadcast media. The public deserves to know what the source is of what's being broadcast ... We need to have these discussions now before AI becomes so advanced that it's too difficult to regulate."

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope's 35th anniversary in orbit, NASA and ESA released a series of new, out-out-of-this-world images spanning planets, nebulae, and galaxies. From a press release: Hubble today is at the peak of its scientific return thanks to the dedication, perseverance and skills of engineers, scientists and mission operators. Astronaut shuttle crews gallantly chased and rendezvoused with Hubble on five servicing missions from 1993 to 2009. The astronauts, including ESA astronauts on two of the servicing missions, upgraded Hubble's cameras, computers and other support systems.

By extending Hubble's operational life the telescope has made nearly 1.7 million observations, looking at approximately 55,000 astronomical targets. Hubble discoveries have resulted in over 22,000 papers and over 1.3 million citations as of February 2025. All the data collected by Hubble is archived and currently adds up to over 400 terabytes. The demand for observing time remains very high with 6:1 oversubscriptions, making it one of the most in-demand observatories today.

Hubble's long operational life has allowed astronomers to see astronomical changes spanning over three decades: seasonal variability on the planets in our solar system, black hole jets traveling at nearly the speed of light, stellar convulsions, asteroid collisions, expanding supernova bubbles, and much more.

Amazon's internet-from-space venture is struggling to ramp up production, jeopardizing its ability to meet a government deadline to have more than 1,600 satellites in orbit by next summer. From a report: Project Kuiper has completed just a few dozen satellites so far, more than a year into its manufacturing program, according to three people familiar with the situation. The slow pace, combined with rocket launch delays, means the company will probably have to seek an extension from the Federal Communications Commission, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

The agency, which has oversight of transmissions from space, expects the company to have half its planned constellation of 3,236 satellites operating by the end of July 2026. To meet that requirement, Amazon would have to at least quadruple the current rate of production, which has yet to consistently reach one satellite a day, two of the people said.

Walmart is taking a lesson from the humble honeybee in its quest to make its deliveries as fast as possible. From a report: The retail giant already boasts a formidable store count of 4,700 locations across the US, which puts it within a short drive of more than 90% of households. But in order to grow its reach without necessarily having to build new supercenters, Walmart says it has been using a relatively new hexagonal map segmentation -- a change from the conventional ZIP code or radius-based strategies that are commonly used in determining delivery areas.

Walmart says the strategy allows it to better understand where customers are and which stores have what they want. As bees have long known, hexagons can be an excellent shape for making the most of a given space, and Walmart says the more precise maps allow it to reach an additional 12 million US households with same-day delivery.

"This is helping us to adapt how we service our customers, by allowing us to go from a fixed-mile radius into a much more dynamic catchment area that caters to the needs of the customers that a particular store will serve," Walmart global tech senior director of engineering Parthibban Raja told Fast Company in December, following a pilot of the concept. Walmart says its platform uses a combination of its own data and open-source software to create new delivery zones.

NASA's oldest active astronaut, Don Pettit, celebrated his 70th birthday by returning to Earth after a seven-month mission aboard the ISS. The Guardian reports: A Soyuz capsule carrying the American and two Russian cosmonauts landed in Kazakhstan on Sunday, Pettit's birthday. "Today at 0420 Moscow time (0120 GMT), the Soyuz MS-26 landing craft with Alexei Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and Donald (Don) Pettit aboard landed near the Kazakh town of Zhezkazgan," Russia's space agency Roscosmos said.

Spending 220 days in space, Pettit, Ovchinin and Vagner orbited the Earth 3,520 times and completed a journey of 93.3m miles over the course of their mission. It was the fourth spaceflight for Pettit, who has logged more than 18 months in orbit during his 29-year career. Nasa said in a statement that Pettit was "doing well and in the range of what is expected for him following return to Earth." A recording of the touchdown can be viewed here.

Earlier this year, Pettit managed to take one of the best photos ever captured from space. "When I first saw it, I was dazzled by its beauty," wrote Ars Technica's Eric Berger. "But when I looked further into the image, there were just so many amazing details to be found."

"In this image, one can see the core of the Milky Way galaxy, zodiacal light (sunlight diffused by interplanetary dust), streaks of SpaceX Starlink satellites, individual stars, an edge-on view of the atmosphere that appears in burnt umber due to hydroxide emissions, a near-sunrise just over the horizon, and nighttime cities appearing as streaks."

Chad Anderson is the founder/managing partner of the early-stage VC Space Capital (and an investor in SpaceX, along with dozens of other space companies). Space Capital produces quarterly reports on the space economy, and he says today, unlike 2021, "the froth is gone. But so is the hype. What's left is a more grounded — and investable — space economy."

On Yahoo Finance he shares several of the report's insights — including the emergence of "investable opportunities across defense-oriented startups in space domain awareness, AI-driven command systems, and hardened infrastructure." The same geopolitical instability that's undermining public markets is driving national urgency around space resilience. China's simulated space "dogfights" prompted the US Department of Defense to double down on orbital supremacy, with the proposed "Golden Dome" missile shield potentially unleashing a new wave of federal spending...

Defense tech is on fire, but commercial location-based services and logistics are freezing over. Companies like Shield AI and Saronic raised monster rounds, while others are relying on bridge financings to stay afloat...

Q1 also saw a breakout quarter for geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI). Software developer Niantic launched a spatial computing platform. SkyWatch partnered with GIS software supplier Esri. Planet Labs collaborated with Anthropic. And Xona Space Systems inked a deal with Trimble to boost precision GPS. This is the next leg of the space economy, where massive volumes of satellite data is finally made useful through machine learning, semantic indexing, and real-time analytics.

Distribution-layer companies are doing more with less. They remain underfunded relative to infrastructure and applications but are quietly powering the most critical systems, such as resilient communications, battlefield networks, and edge-based geospatial analysis. Don't let the low round count fool you; innovation here is quietly outpacing capital.
The article includes several predictions, insights, and possible trends (going beyond the fact that defense spending "will carry the sector...")

• "AI's integration into space (across geospatial intelligence, satellite communications, and sensor fusion) is not a novelty. It's a competitive necessity."

• "Focusing solely on rockets and orbital assets misses where much of the innovation and disruption is occurring: the software-defined layers that sit atop the physical backbone..."

• "For years, SpaceX faced little serious competition, but that's starting to change." [He cites Blue Origin's progress toward approval for launching U.S. military satellites, and how Rocket Lab and Stoke Space "have also joined the competition for lucrative government launch contracts." Even Relativity Space may make a comeback, with former GOogle CEO Eric Schmidt acquiring a controlling stake.]

• "An infrastructure reset is coming. The imminent ramp-up of SpaceX's Starship could collapse the cost structure for the infrastructure layer. When that happens, legacy providers with fixed-cost-heavy business models will be at risk. Conversely, capital-light innovators in station design, logistics, and in-orbit servicing could suddenly be massively undervalued."

For the first time, astronomers have confirmed the existence of a lone black hole," reports Science News — "one with no star orbiting it." It's "the only one so far," says Kailash Sahu, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 2022, Sahu and his colleagues discovered the dark object coursing through the constellation Sagittarius. A second team disputed the claim, saying the body might instead be a neutron star. New observations from the Hubble Space Telescope now confirm that the object's mass is so large that it must be a black hole, Sahu's team reports in the April 20 Astrophysical Journal.... [And that second team has revised its assessment and now agrees: the object is a black hole.]

While solitary black holes should be common, they are hard to find. The one in Sagittarius revealed itself when it passed in front of a dim background star, magnifying the star's light and slowly shifting its position due to the black hole's gravity. This passage occurred in July 2011, but the star's position is still changing. "It takes a long time to do the observations," Sahu says. "Everything is improved if you have a longer baseline and more observations." The original discovery relied on precise Hubble measurements of star positions from 2011 to 2017. The new work incorporates Hubble observations from 2021 and 2022 as well as data from the Gaia spacecraft.

The upshot: The black hole is about seven times as massive as the sun, give or take 0.8 solar masses.... Located 5,000 light-years from Earth, this black hole is much closer than the supermassive one at the Milky Way's center, which also lies in Sagittarius but about 27,000 light-years from us. The star-rich region around the galactic center provides an ideal hunting ground for solitary black holes passing in front of stars. Sahu hopes to find additional lone black holes by using the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in 2027.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company... The company's brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website.

Only part of Precision's system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI, Precision said in a release. Other prominent startups in the space include Elon Musk's Neuralink, and Synchron, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates....

The piece of Precision's system that the FDA approved is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The microelectrode array is thinner than a human hair and resembles a piece of yellow scotch tape. Each array is made up of 1,024 electrodes that can record, monitor and stimulate electrical activity on the brain's surface. When it is placed on the brain, Precision says it can conform to the surface without damaging any tissue. The FDA authorized Layer 7 to be implanted in patients for up to 30 days, and Precision will be able to market the technology for use in clinical settings. This means surgeons will be able to use the array during procedures to map brain signals, for instance. It is not Precision's end goal for the technology, but it will help the company generate revenue in the near term.
Precision's co-founder and chief science officer also helped co-found Musk's Neuralink in 2017 before departing the following year, according to the article. He nows says this regulatory clearance "will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively."

Launched in 1958, the "awkward-looking" Vanguard-1 satellite ("the size of a grapefruit") is the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth.

"A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for closer inspection and are currently working to find a way to bring Vanguard-1 home," writes Gizmodo: Other satellites of its time have reentered through Earth's atmosphere, burning up in a fiery death, but Vanguard-1 is still in orbit, silently zooming through the void of space... A team of researchers and engineers from Virginia-based consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton have put together a proposal on how to retrieve the satellite from space, bringing it back to Earth to study how its equipment has fared over the years, according to a report by Space.com. The team's proposal is detailed in a study published in the Aerospace Research Center earlier this year...

Considering how old Vanguard-1 is, the astronauts would need to handle it with care, according to the team behind the proposal. Before a retrieval attempt, the team suggests that a spacecraft be sent to rendezvous with the satellite to inspect its condition up-close. The engineers suggested partnering with a wealthy space enthusiast willing to fund the outer space venture, or using a SpaceX vehicle to bring the satellite home. Once it's brought back to Earth, experts would examine Vanguard-1 to assess its condition — whether it was struck by space debris, if it's still holding together, and how its time in orbit has affected the satellite. The satellite could then be placed at the Smithsonian for display as a sort of time capsule, a reminder of the history of spaceflight, the team suggests.

"Future missions (space debris removal, materials capture for on-orbit manufacturing, and even deep space exploration) could build on techniques demonstrated in the retrieval of Vanguard 1," the paper read. "Retrieving Vanguard 1 would be a challenge, but an achievable and invaluable step forward for the entire U.S. space community."
"The researchers suggest that the satellite can be placed in a lower orbit and snagged from space, or reeled into the International Space Station," according to the article.

Space.com shares this assessment from Bill Raynor, the associate superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratory's spacecraft engineering division. "For material and radiation effects scientists and engineers, it would be an unprecedented opportunity for investigating the effects of long-term space environmental exposure."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from the Associated Press: Google has been branded an abusive monopolist by a federal judge for the second time in less than a year, this time for illegally exploiting some of its online marketing technology to boost the profits fueling an internet empire currently worth $1.8 trillion. The ruling issued Thursday by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia comes on the heels of a separate decision in August that concluded Google's namesake search engine has been illegally leveraging its dominance to stifle competition and innovation. [...] The next step in the latest case is a penalty phase that will likely begin late this year or early next year. The same so-called remedy hearings in the search monopoly case are scheduled to begin Monday in Washington D.C., where Justice Department lawyers will try to convince U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta to impose a sweeping punishment that includes a proposed requirement for Google to sell its Chrome web browser.

Brinkema's 115-page decision centers on the marketing machine that Google has spent the past 17 years building around its search engine and other widely used products and services, including its Chrome browser, YouTube video site and digital maps. The system was largely built around a series of acquisitions that started with Google's $3.2 billion purchase of online ad specialist DoubleClick in 2008. U.S. regulators approved the deals at the time they were made before realizing that they had given the Mountain View, California, company a platform to manipulate the prices in an ecosystem that a wide range of websites depend on for revenue and provides a vital marketing connection to consumers.

The Justice Department lawyers argued that Google built and maintained dominant market positions in a technology trifecta used by website publishers to sell ad space on their webpages, as well as the technology that advertisers use to get their ads in front of consumers, and the ad exchanges that conduct automated auctions in fractions of a second to match buyer and seller. After evaluating the evidence presented during a lengthy trial that concluded just before Thanksgiving last year, Brinkema reached a decision that rejected the Justice Department's assertions that Google has been mistreating advertisers while concluding the company has been abusing its power to stifle competition to the detriment of online publishers forced to rely on its network for revenue.

"For over a decade, Google has tied its publisher ad server and ad exchange together through contractual policies and technological integration, which enabled the company to establish and protect its monopoly power in these two markets." Brinkema wrote. "Google further entrenched its monopoly power by imposing anticompetitive policies on its customers and eliminating desirable product features." Despite that rebuke, Brinkema also concluded that Google didn't break the law when it snapped Doubleclick nor when it followed up that deal a few years later by buying another service, Admeld. The Justice Department "failed to show that the DoubleClick and Admeld acquisitions were anticompetitive," Brinkema wrote. "Although these acquisitions helped Google gain monopoly power in two adjacent ad tech markets, they are insufficient, when viewed in isolation, to prove that Google acquired or maintained this monopoly power through exclusionary practices." That finding may help Google fight off any attempt to force it to sell its advertising technology to stop its monopolistic behavior.

Astronomers have detected what may be the strongest evidence yet of extraterrestrial life on K2-18b, a massive exoplanet orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. The research team, led by Cambridge astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan, published their findings today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, researchers found significant concentrations of dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide in K2-18b's atmosphere. On Earth, these sulfur compounds are exclusively produced by living organisms, particularly marine algae. "It is in no one's interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life," said Madhusudhan, though he described the findings as "a revolutionary moment" and "the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet."

The team detected the signals during two separate observations, with the second showing an even stronger signature. Their analysis suggests K2-18b may be a "Hycean" planet -- covered with warm oceans and wrapped in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere -- with concentrations of dimethyl sulfide thousands of times higher than Earth levels.

Other scientists remain cautious. Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute suggested K2-18b could instead be "a massive hunk of rock with a magma ocean and a thick, scorching hydrogen atmosphere." Further observations with Webb and future NASA telescopes will be necessary to confirm whether K2-18b is truly habitable or inhabited, though planned budget cuts may impact follow-up research.

Further reading: Water Found On a Potentially Life-Friendly Alien Planet (2019).

Blue Origin's New Shepard completed its 31st mission Monday morning, carrying the first all-female crew to space since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's 1963 solo flight. The NS-31 mission lifted off from West Texas at 9:30 a.m. EDT, with hundreds of thousands watching via livestream as the autonomous vehicle crossed the Karman line 62 miles above Earth.

The 10-minute suborbital journey carried six passengers: journalist and Bezos' fiancee Lauren SÃnchez, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, CBS journalist Gayle King, pop star Katy Perry, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Bowe conducted three research experiments during the flight, while Nguyen became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space. The fully reusable New Shepard system features a pressurized capsule that separates from its booster before returning to Earth with three parachutes.

Nvidia has announced plans to manufacture AI supercomputers entirely within the United States, commissioning over 1 million square feet of manufacturing space across Arizona and Texas. Production of Blackwell chips has begun at TSMC's Phoenix facilities, while supercomputer assembly will occur at new Foxconn and Wistron plants in Houston and Dallas respectively.

"The engines of the world's AI infrastructure are being built in the United States for the first time," said Jensen Huang, Nvidia's founder and CEO. "Adding American manufacturing helps us better meet the incredible and growing demand for AI chips and supercomputers, strengthens our supply chain and boosts our resiliency."

The company will deploy its own AI, robotics, and digital twin technologies in these facilities, using Nvidia Omniverse to create digital twins of factories and Isaac GR00T to build manufacturing automation robots. Nvidia projects an ambitious $500 billion in domestic AI infrastructure production over the next four years, with manufacturing expected to create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Black holes "often exhibit long periods of dormancy," writes Popular Science, adding that astronomers had never witnessed a black hole "wake up" in real time. "Until now..."

In February of 2024 X-ray bursts were spotted coming out of a black hole named Ansky by Lorena Hernández-García at Chile's Valparaiso University, according to the article. And what astronomers have now seen "challenges prevailing theories about black hole lifecycles." Hernández-García and collaborators then determined the black hole was displaying a phenomenon known as a quasiperiodic eruption, or QPE [a short-lived flaring event...] While a black hole inevitably destroys everything it captures, objects behave differently during their impending demise. A star, for example, generally stretches apart into a bright, hot, fast-spinning disc known as an accretion disc. Most astronomers have theorized that black holes generate QPEs when a comparatively small object like a star or even a smaller black hole collides with an accretion disc. In the case of Ansky, however, there isn't any evidence linking it to the death of a star.

"The bursts of X-rays from Ansky are ten times longer and ten times more luminous than what we see from a typical QPE," said MIT PhD student and study co-author Joheen Chakraborty. "Each of these eruptions is releasing a hundred times more energy than we have seen elsewhere. Ansky's eruptions also show the longest cadence ever observed, of about 4.5 days." Astronomers must now consider other explanations for Ansky's remarkable behavior. One theory posits that the accretion disc could come from nearby galactic gas pulled in by the black hole instead of a star. If true, then the X-rays may originate from high energy shocks to the disc caused by a small cosmic object repeatedly passing through and disrupting orbital matter.
It's detailed in a study published on April 11 in Nature Astronomy....

Meanwhile, scientists "have uncovered the strongest evidence yet for the existence of elusive intermediate-mass black holes," reports SciTechDaily.

And there's more black hole news from RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477): Given the recent work on galaxy-centre Super-Massive Black Holes (SMBHs), you may be surprised to learn that the only Stellar-Mass Black Holes (SMBHs ... uh, "BHs") identified to-date have been by their gravitational waves, as they merge with another BH or a neutron star. But the long-running OGLE (Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment) project (1992 — present) has recently confirmed that it has detected an isolated BH not orbiting another bright object, or "swallowing" much of anything...

In this case, 16 other telescopes performed sensitive astrometry (position measurement) over 11 years including the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). These multiple measurements plot an ellipse on the sky, mirroring the movement of the Earth around it's orbit — parallax. Which means this is a relatively close object (1520 parsecs / ~5000 light years).... And there is no sign of a third light emitting body nearby, which means this is an isolated black hole, not orbiting any other body (or, indeed, with any other [small] star orbiting it).

"Gen Z is rediscovering Tumblr — a chaotic, cozy corner of the internet untouched by algorithmic gloss and influencer overload..." writes Fast Company, "embracing the platform as a refuge from an internet saturated with influencers and algorithm fatigue." Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users and accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business Insider's Amanda Hoover, who recently reported on the platform's resurgence. User numbers spiked in January during the near-ban of TikTok and jumped again last year when Brazil temporarily banned X. In response, Tumblr users launched dedicated communities to archive and share their favorite TikToks...

To keep up with the momentum, Tumblr introduced Reddit-style Communities in December, letting users connect over shared interests like photography and video games. In January, it debuted Tumblr TV — a TikTok-like feature that serves as both a GIF search engine and a short-form video platform. But perhaps Tumblr's greatest strength is that it isn't TikTok or Facebook. Currently the 10th most popular social platform in the U.S., according to analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr is dwarfed by giants like Instagram and X. For its users, though, that's part of the appeal.
First launched in 2007, Tumblr peaked at over 100 million users in 2014, according to the article. Trends like Occupy Wall Street had been born on Tumblr, notes Business Insider, calling the blogging platform "Gen Z's safe space... as the rest of the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and dominated by lifestyle influencers." Tumblr was also "one of the most hyped startups in the world before fading into obsolescence — bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion in 2013... then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale.

"That same Tumblr, a relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among Gen Z..." "Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years, leaving her role as head of content in 2021... Part of the reason young people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s, and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic — and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when blurrier.

More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster, surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207 million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past them. The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr...

And Tumblr still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working, you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was 14... Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, [says Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr]. "We've had ups and downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place that we've been in 18 years," he says... And following media companies (including Business Insider) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in 2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to train on Tumblr posts.

"The social internet is fractured," the article argues. ("Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than influence....")

But in a world where megaplatforms "flatten our online experiences and reward content that fits a mold," the article suggests, "smaller communities can enrich them."

Nuclear fusion — which releases four times the energy of fission — could theoretically happen sooner in space than on earth, reports CNN.

"And it could help spacecraft achieve speeds of up to 500,000 miles (805,000 kilometers) per hour — more than the fastest object ever built..." With funding from the UK Space Agency, British startup Pulsar Fusion has unveiled Sunbird, a space rocket concept designed to meet spacecraft in orbit, attach to them, and carry them to their destination at breakneck speed using nuclear fusion... For now, Sunbird is in the very early stages of construction and it has exceptional engineering challenges to overcome, but Pulsar says it hopes to achieve fusion in orbit for the first time in 2027. [Pulsar's founder/CEO says the first functional Sunbird would be ready four to five years later.]

If the rocket ever becomes operational, it could one day cut the journey time of a potential mission to Mars in half.
CNN says the proposed Sunbird process would use helium-3 — which may be abundant on the Moon — to generate protons which "can be used as a 'nuclear exhaust' to provide propulsion". (And without generating any dangerous radioactive material.) "It's very unnatural to do fusion on Earth," says Richard Dinan, founder and CEO of Pulsar. "Fusion doesn't want to work in an atmosphere. Space is a far more logical, sensible place to do fusion, because that's where it wants to happen anyway...."

Sunbirds would operate similarly to city bikes at docking stations, according to Dinan: "We launch them into space, and we would have a charging station where they could sit and then meet your ship," he says. "You turn off your inefficient combustion engines, and use nuclear fusion for the greater part of your journey. Ideally, you'd have a station somewhere near Mars, and you'd have a station on low Earth orbit, and the (Sunbirds) would just go back and forth...." Initially, the Sunbirds will be offered for shuttling satellites in orbit, but their true potential would come into play with interplanetary missions. The company illustrates a few examples of the missions that Sunbird could unlock, such as delivering up to 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of cargo to Mars in under six months, deploying probes to Jupiter or Saturn in two to four years (NASA's Europa Clipper, launched in 2024 towards one of Jupiter's moons, will arrive after 5.5 years), and an asteroid mining mission that would complete a round trip to a near-Earth asteroid in one to two years instead of three.

Other companies are working on nuclear fusion engines for space propulsion, including Pasadena-based Helicity Space, which received investment from aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in 2024. San Diego-based General Atomics and NASA are working on another type of nuclear reactor — based on fission rather than fusion — which they plan to test in space in 2027.

"I started working on Voyager in 1977," the Voyager mission's project scientist told Gizmodo Saturday in a new interview. "It was my first job out of college."

35 years later, a Voyager probe became the first spacecraft to cross into interstellar space in 2012, with Voyager 2 following in 2018. But while each Voyager spacecraft carries 10 scientific instruments, all but three have now been turned off to conserve power, Gizmodo writes. "The two spacecraft now have enough power to operate for another year or so before engineers are forced to turn off two more instruments..." Voyager Mission Project Scientist Linda Spilker: The number of people that are working on and flying Voyager is a whole lot smaller than it was in the planetary days... The challenge was, can we reach the heliopause? We didn't know where it was, we had no idea how far away it was. We got to Neptune, and then we thought, "well, maybe it's just another 10 [astronomical units] or so, a little bit further, a little bit further." And so every time we got a little bit further, the modelers would go back, scratch their heads and say, "ah, it could be a little bit more, a little bit farther away," and so on and on that continued, until finally, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012...

Gizmodo: Is it an emotional decision to turn off Voyager's instruments?

Spilker: I was talking to the cosmic ray instrument lead, and I said, "Wow, this must really be tough for you to see your instrument turned off." He helped build the instrument in the early 1970s. This instrument that's been sending you data, and that's been part of your life for over 50 years now. And he said, it was hard to think about turning it off for the whole team. It's kind of like losing a best friend, or someone that's been a part of your life for so many years, and then suddenly, it's silent. At the same time, there's this pride that you were part of that, and your instrument got so much great data — so it's a mix of emotions...

The spacecraft had a lot of redundancy on it, so that means two of every computer and two of all the key components. We've been able to turn off those backup units, but we're now at the point where, to really get a significant amount of power, all that's left are some of the science instruments to turn off. So, that's where we're at... How cold can the lines get before they freeze? How cold can some of these other components get before they stop working? So that's another challenge. Then there are individual tiny thrusters that align the spacecraft and keep that antenna pointed at the Earth so we can send the data back, and they're very slowly clogging up with little bits of silica, and so their puffs are getting weaker and weaker. That's another challenge that we're going through to balance.

But we're hopeful that we can get one, possibly two, spacecraft to the 50th anniversary in 2027. Voyager's golden anniversary, and perhaps even into the early 2030s with one, maybe two, science instruments.
"We're well past the warranty of four years..." Spilker says at one point. And "We're still working and thinking about an interstellar probe that would go much, much farther than Voyager.

"You're talking about a multi-generation mission."