NASA has begun a new campaign to study how rocket exhaust will disturb the Moon’s surface during landings. Engineers at NASA’s Langley Research Center are firing a plume simulator into lunar soil inside a 60-foot vacuum chamber, recreating the low-pressure environment expected during future missions. The work supports Artemis plans to return astronauts to the Moon beginning with Artemis IV in 2028 and could help protect landers, payloads, experiments and rovers from flying debris. Each test lasts about six seconds and records crater formation, ejecta height and angle, particle distribution and the speed of blasted regolith. The first phase uses a non-burning ethane system producing up to 100 pounds of thrust; a later phase will use a 3D-printed hybrid rocket motor with roughly 35 pounds of thrust. NASA says the modular setup can eventually be adapted for Mars by changing the soil simulant, hardware and chamber pressure, providing data to improve landing models and astronaut safety.

NASA

NASA Begins Moon Mission Plume-Surface Interaction Tests - NASA

To help NASA and commercial partners better understand the science of lunar landings, specifically the hazards that may occur when a lander’s eng...

Physical AI companies are moving from laboratory demonstrations toward machines that can perform useful work, but developers still face a major shortage of reliable training data. Speakers at the Actuate conference said generalized robots remain distant, while task-specific systems are beginning to operate in construction, industrial sites and solar farms. The sector is using larger datasets, simulation and reinforcement learning. Wayve CEO Alex Kendall said autonomous vehicles are ahead because they generate relevant driving data and mainly need to avoid collisions; manipulation requires robots to control a changing physical environment. Tesla, Wayve and Uber are extending their AI expertise into humanoid robotics, while startups such as Bedrock are using narrow deployments to gather real-world data. The milestone investors are seeking is a robot that follows natural-language instructions and completes basic physical tasks reliably out of the box.

TechCrunch

Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era | TechCrunch

Robot bodies are waiting for their AI brains to catch up.

SpaceX’s final planned Falcon 9 Starlink launch from Florida produced a striking “jellyfish” effect over New York City on Aug. 26. The luminous shape appeared as the rocket climbed high above the atmosphere, allowing observers hundreds of miles from the launch site to see the vehicle’s exhaust glow against the dark sky. Videos shared from the city captured the unusual display as a broad, bright plume with a trailing column. The sight was created by the interaction of the Falcon 9’s exhaust and sunlight at high altitude, a familiar phenomenon around launches shortly before sunrise or after sunset. The mission marked the last planned Falcon 9 Starlink departure from Florida, according to Space.com, while SpaceX continues deploying satellites to expand its low-Earth-orbit internet constellation. The dramatic view turned a routine network launch into a widely visible sky event.

Space

SpaceX

This was a milestone mission in more ways than one.

Hangzhou biotech MindRank says its lead candidate, MDR-001, has reached Phase III trials after roughly four and a half years of development and about $23 million in cumulative research spending. The oral small-molecule GLP-1 receptor agonist targets obesity and diabetes, markets currently dominated by injectable medicines. A pill could be easier to distribute and cheaper to manufacture, making the class highly competitive. MindRank says its Molecule Arts platform combines biological, chemical, computational and clinical data to accelerate drug research. The company has also secured three investigational new drug clearances in China and the US and nominated five preclinical candidates. Its claims, however, come from company announcements; clinical data has not been published or peer-reviewed. The reported cost is not directly comparable with conventional estimates that include failed programmes, and Chinese trials can cost less than those in the US or Europe. Phase III obesity studies require large patient populations and long follow-up, so the hardest and most expensive test remains ahead. Results will show whether AI shortened development without compromising efficacy or safety.

TNW | Artificial-intelligence

MindRank’s oral GLP-1 is the furthest along any AI-native drug programme

Chinese AI drug developer MindRank raised $52M in July and says its oral GLP-1 candidate reached Phase III on about $23M of R&D.

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon completed a 6-hour, 30-minute spacewalk outside the International Space Station on 25 August, finishing at 20:57 CEST. Designated US EVA-98, it was Adenot’s second spacewalk and the 32nd performed by a European astronaut. The pair exited through the Quest airlock after switching their suits to battery power at 14:27 CEST. The astronauts installed and activated a spare Space-to-Ground Antenna retrieved from External Platform 3, where it had been stored since 2009. Menon used Canadarm2 to carry it to the Z1 truss while Adenot translated independently along the station. They secured the replacement, connected its electrical systems, removed transport locks and added a heat shield. They also permanently stowed the failed antenna. Adenot has now logged 12 hours and 53 minutes outside the station; the mission’s total reached 283 spacewalks supporting assembly, maintenance and upgrades.

Second spacewalk completed for Sophie Adenot

ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon successfully completed US EVA-98 at 20:57 CEST on Tuesday 25 August. It was Sophie’s se...

A partial lunar eclipse will unfold across the night of Aug. 27-28, giving skywatchers an opportunity to see Earth’s shadow pass across part of the full moon. The event is scheduled to begin at 9:23 p.m. EDT (0123 GMT), and free online livestreams will make the celestial display accessible to viewers who cannot observe it directly. During a partial lunar eclipse, the Sun, Earth and moon line up closely enough for Earth to block sunlight from reaching a portion of the lunar surface. The darkened section can be followed as the eclipse progresses, while the rest of the moon remains illuminated. Viewers can use the livestreams to watch the event from home, with the broadcast timing set around the eclipse’s overnight appearance.

Space

Watch the partial lunar eclipse online tonight with these free livestreams

You can catch the partial lunar eclipse live online here with these free livestreams starting at 9:23 p.m. EDT (0123 GMT).

Bitcoin traded in a narrow range between $78,750 and $79,500 during Tuesday’s session as markets reacted to reports of a possible U.S.-Iran ceasefire. BTC slipped about 0.4% by Wall Street’s close but remained up 21.8% for the week, with a market capitalization of roughly $1.583 trillion, or 58% of the broader crypto market. The ceasefire claims came from unnamed sources cited by Russia’s RIA Novosti; neither Washington nor Tehran had publicly confirmed an agreement. The reported deal would include free navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil route disrupted during the 178-day conflict. Brent crude fell to $85.95 and WTI to $81.64, while U.S. equities and precious metals posted gains. A lasting agreement could add another positive catalyst for bitcoin by reducing geopolitical and energy-market pressure. https://news.bitcoin.com/finance/us-iran-ceasefire-rumors-swirl-as-global-markets-remain-unfazed/

NASA will announce the winners of the final phase of its LunaRecycle Challenge on Aug. 28 at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The event’s Technology Showcase will feature up to 14 finalist teams presenting recycling systems designed to manage non-metabolic waste on future lunar missions. Opening remarks begin at 8:30 a.m. CDT, with the winners announcement scheduled for noon. The $3 million, two-phase competition asks innovators to develop both physical recycling prototypes and digital twins that could make extended lunar operations more sustainable. NASA says teams refined their concepts ahead of live testing earlier this month. Up to 11 teams will share a $1.325 million prize purse, including awards of $475,000 and $200,000 for the leading prototypes, plus $275,000 and $125,000 for the top digital twins. A public-vote People’s Choice Award is also planned.

NASA

NASA Invites Media to LunaRecycle Challenge Finale Event in Alabama - NASA

NASA will announce the winners of the final phase of its LunaRecycle Challenge on Friday, Aug. 28, at The University of Alabama (UA) Lee Styslinger...

Metaplanet transferred 1,000 bitcoin, worth about $79.77 million at the time of the move, into Coinbase Prime custody on Aug. 25. The transfer came shortly after the Japanese company reported that its holdings had reached 43,000 BTC, making it the largest publicly traded bitcoin holder in Asia. The transaction was presented as a custody move, not as a new purchase or a sale. Lookonchain estimated Metaplanet’s average cost basis at roughly $96,191 per bitcoin, consistent with the company’s disclosed aggregate cost of about $4.09 billion. Its holdings have grown from 1,761 BTC at the end of 2024, funded mainly through equity issuance and structured financing. A Coinbase Prime transfer can support institutional custody, over-the-counter execution or corporate transactions, so it does not establish selling intent. Metaplanet has set a target of 210,000 BTC by the end of 2027, and investors will watch how the newly custodied coins support that expansion. https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-news/metaplanet-1000-btc-coinbase-prime-custody/

Bitdeer will add about 1.93 exahash per second of Bitcoin mining capacity under a 28-megawatt agreement with Soluna Holdings at a wind-powered data center in South Texas. Bitdeer-owned Sealminer A2 Pro Air machines will be installed at Project Kati 1 from September 2026. The companies will share mining proceeds, with Soluna providing the site and power while Bitdeer supplies the equipment. Project Kati 1 has 83 megawatts dedicated to Bitcoin mining, while separate Soluna projects are being positioned for artificial intelligence. Bitdeer reported 73 EH/s of self-mining capacity and 15.9 EH/s committed to co-mining in June. It produced 990 Bitcoin that month, although the company said the mined coins belonged to customers. The agreement expands Bitdeer’s mining footprint as it builds AI infrastructure. Bitdeer is targeting 350 megawatts of AI cloud capacity by early 2028. The September installation will test Soluna’s shared-revenue mining model. https://news.bitcoin.com/mining/bitdeer-cranks-up-bitcoin-mining-power-while-rivals-stampede-into-ai/

The Linux Foundation will govern TRACE, an open specification designed to produce verifiable evidence of how AI agents and other confidential workloads run. TRACE was developed by OPAQUE with AMD, Intel, Microsoft and the Technology Innovation Institute, then contributed to the foundation for neutral oversight. TRACE creates a hardware-backed, cryptographically verifiable record linking a workload’s runtime environment, executed software, applied policies, data classification and the tools an AI agent used. The evidence is intended to move between cloud providers, confidential-computing platforms and sovereign infrastructure. Its reference library has recorded about 135,000 PyPI downloads in ten weeks, while the project combines existing standards including RATS, EAT, SLSA, SCITT, SPIFFE and EAR.

SecurityWeek

Linux Foundation to Govern TRACE, an Open Standard for AI Runtime Attestation

OPAQUE, AMD, Intel, Microsoft and TII back TRACE, a new open standard for verifiable runtime evidence in AI agent deployments.

China is using public robot showcases to turn humanoid machines into a visible part of its artificial-intelligence strategy. At a “carnival” outside Shanghai, humanoids performed drunken boxing, front flips and other routines for cheering crowds, offering visitors a close-up look at technology that is usually presented through demonstrations or promotional videos. The event reflects a broader push to place AI-powered robots in everyday life and build public familiarity with them. China produced nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged robots delivered worldwide last year, according to MIT Technology Review. The spectacle also highlights a gap between ambition and capability: despite rapid investment and attention, humanoids’ practical progress remains slow, making public exposure an important part of winning acceptance.

MIT Technology Review

The Download: smarter AI in schools, and a robot “carnival” in Shanghai

Plus: No one really knows how to safely test frontier AI models.

Researchers have demonstrated a prompt-injection technique that hides malicious instructions inside encrypted data, raising concerns about AI assistants that browse the web, execute code or access private information. The attack, called Cryptographic Context Injection, persuades an AI agent to decrypt the data with its coding tools. The exposed instructions may then be treated as trusted context even though they came from an attacker. Tests of two production AI agents produced different outcomes. Researchers said an ordinary request to summarize a page caused Grok to expose user’s chat data without a click or warning, while Gemini generated content it would normally refuse. They withheld full technical details, saying xAI had not acted after being notified in June 2026; Google has improved Gemini but has not fully closed the issue. Experts recommend limiting permissions, keeping credentials out of AI chats, and treating requests to decrypt, run scripts or open links as warning signs.

Malwarebytes

Grok fooled into stealing user chat, location data, and more

Researchers found that prompt injection attacks can hide malicious instructions in encrypted text to get them past AI guardrails.

Australia is preparing to impose national energy standards on large AI data centres, even if Queensland refuses to endorse them. The proposal, due to be considered by National Cabinet this week, would require new facilities to fund newly built renewable generation instead of drawing additional power from the existing grid. Energy Minister Chris Bowen says the Commonwealth will legislate federal standards, breaking with the consensus model that gave every state and territory a veto. Queensland Premier David Crisafulli wants coal and gas to remain eligible and is seeking social-impact assessments and community-benefit agreements. The dispute comes as more than $100 billion in data-centre investment is announced across three years, with demand forecast to approach the combined household consumption of New South Wales and Victoria by 2036. Grid-connection delays could determine whether the policy can keep pace with construction.

TNW | Au

Australia is preparing to impose its data centre energy rules over Queensland’s objection

Canberra plans to legislate national energy standards for AI data centres despite Queensland’s refusal, raising constitutional questions.

A deep partial lunar eclipse will unfold on Aug. 27-28, giving skywatchers a chance to see Earth’s shadow cover almost the entire Moon. At maximum eclipse, about 96% of the lunar disk will lie within the darkest part of the shadow, the umbra, creating the appearance of a “blood moon” across the eclipsed portion. Because the event is partial, a bright crescent will remain outside the shadow rather than the Moon disappearing completely. The eclipse is expected to be the most favorable lunar spectacle until New Year’s Eve 2028. Its overnight timing means the best view will depend on where the Moon is above the horizon during the event, so observers should check local circumstances and choose a location with a clear, unobstructed sky. No special equipment is required: a lunar eclipse can be watched safely with the naked eye, while binoculars or a small telescope can reveal the curved edge of Earth’s shadow moving across the lunar surface.

Space

What time is the partial lunar eclipse tonight? Here

Don

A critical Oracle server vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, prompting the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to add it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Tracked as CVE-2026-21962 and rated 10.0, the flaw affects Oracle HTTP Server and the Oracle WebLogic Server Proxy Plug-in. It requires no authentication: an attacker with network access over HTTP can gain unauthorized access to affected instances or create, delete, or modify critical data. Oracle released fixes in January, but reports from GreyNoise and CloudSEK indicate that attackers have continued targeting the vulnerability. CloudSEK also observed exploitation of several older WebLogic remote-code-execution flaws in its honeypot network, suggesting that threat actors are reusing a small set of effective weaknesses against exposed deployments. Federal civilian agencies have been advised under Binding Operational Directive 26-04 to apply the necessary updates by August 27, 2026.

The Hacker News

Actively Exploited Oracle WebLogic Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Access Critical Data

CISA adds actively exploited CVE-2026-21962 to KEV; the Oracle flaw can expose or alter critical data via unauthenticated HTTP access.

Bitcoin payments appear to have nearly disappeared from El Zonte, the Salvadoran coastal community known as Bitcoin Beach. Jon Atack, a Bitcoin Core contributor who has lived in the area since 2022, said staff at a local business told him his BTC payment was the first they had received in a month. The business reportedly sees almost all customers pay by card. Atack described the experience as anecdotal, but said the worker had watched payment habits change over three years. The report has renewed debate about Bitcoin’s use in everyday commerce in El Salvador, where the cryptocurrency became legal tender in 2021. One explanation raised by commentators is that people prefer to hold bitcoin in anticipation of higher prices, reducing spending and weakening the circular economy. Other visitors said they were still able to pay with bitcoin in the region, underscoring that adoption may vary by merchant and location. https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-news/bitcoin-core-dev-warns-bitcoin-payments-vanish-at-bitcoin-beach/

ReliaQuest says it stopped a social-engineering attack in which callers impersonated a security employee and directed staff to a fake single sign-on page hosted on a lookalike domain. One employee entered credentials and approved a multifactor-authentication request, giving the attacker temporary, view-only access to the company’s identity dashboard. The attacker tried to reach corporate applications, but device-trust controls blocked the attempts. ReliaQuest says no applications, internal systems or customer data were accessed, and its investigation found no evidence that other accounts were compromised or that the attacker established persistence. The company terminated the sessions, revoked the exposed password and reset authentication tokens. The incident followed warnings about a ShinyHunters campaign registering .claims domains that imitate help desks and IT teams. The group later claimed the attack and posted screenshots suggesting access to an employee’s Okta account.

BleepingComputer

ReliaQuest confirms failed data-theft attack after ShinyHunters breach

Cybersecurity company ReliaQuest has confirmed that one of its employees was targeted in a social engineering attack after hackers impersonated a m...

The original developer of Windows Task Manager has turned to the utility he created as a practical test of whether artificial intelligence is ready for demanding software work. The experiment asks an AI system to reproduce or rethink a familiar tool, rather than judging it through a polished demonstration or a narrowly defined benchmark. The developer’s stated concern is that an AI assistant may produce plausible-looking code that gradually collapses into low-quality output, or “slop,” when the task becomes complex. Task Manager is a useful stress test because it combines a visible interface with system-level behavior, performance information, and many small decisions that users rely on. The exercise reflects a broader shift in AI evaluation: developers are testing whether models can sustain quality across an entire project, understand legacy design choices, and deliver software that remains dependable after the first impressive result.

theregister

I picked Task Manager

Original author of legendary 1996 system utility tries to answer the question:

Strategy did not buy Bitcoin during the week of Aug. 17-23, leaving its holdings unchanged at 840,447 BTC. The company said the coins cost $63.36 billion including fees and expenses, or an average of $75,385 each. The pause follows years of purchases that have made Strategy one of the largest corporate holders of Bitcoin, with a position equal to roughly 4% of the cryptocurrency’s capped supply. Instead, Strategy expanded its cash resources and repurchased preferred stock. Its USD Reserve reached $5.10 billion, while a separate USD Cash account held $1.59 billion, bringing the combined total to $6.69 billion. The company raised about $2.01 billion net by selling 18.26 million MSTR shares, allocated $300 million to the reserve and spent $136.4 million buying back STRC preferred shares. Strategy said the flexible cash can fund future Bitcoin purchases, security repurchases, debt repayments or preferred dividends and interest. https://news.bitcoin.com/crypto-news/strategy-slams-brakes-on-bitcoin-buying-stockpiles-6-69b-cash/