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The Webb Space Telescope has taken a stunning image of Uranus, with a twist: Here, the seventh planet from the Sun is encircled by prominent concentric rings.

io9 is proud to present fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we feature a story from LIGHTSPEED’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Virtually Cherokee” by Brian K. Hudson. You can read the story below or listen to the podcast on LIGHTSPEED’s website. Enjoy!

This story was originally published by Grist. You can subscribe to its weekly newsletter here.

The ‘90s might be best known for 16-bit gaming, Tamagotchis, and the earliest flip phones, but I remember it as a decade where we got to watch digital cameras go from expensive tools for professional photographers to devices accessible to the average consumer—complete with an awkward teenage phase where companies…Read more...

Elon Musk makes a lot of big promises. Often, these never make it across the expansive gulf that lies between the world’s richest man’s mind and reality. Yet in a rare occurrence, one such pledge appears to have successfully traversed the void.

An Apple developer left one of the strangest Easter eggs hidden in the macOS, offering a surprising and baffling connection between the Cupertino tech company’s mainline operating system to everybody’s (least) favorite cryptographic digital currency.Read more...

Despite the millions of people who read Hugh Howey’s best-selling, dystopian Silo novels, the upcoming Apple TV+ series adaptation feels like it’s flying under the radar—although maybe that’s appropriate for a story about the last vestige of humanity stuck underground so long they can’t remember why. But maybe this…Read more...

Samsung employees are in hot water after they reportedly leaked sensitive confidential company information to OpenAI’s ChatGPT on at least three separate occasions. The leaks highlight both the widespread popularity of the popular new AI chatbot for professionals and the often-overlooked ability of OpenAI to suck up…Read more...

Sean Bothwell can understand why people think desalination is a silver bullet. When he was a kid living in California’s Orange County, the ocean was always close by. It didn’t make sense to him that all the water near him wasn’t usable.Read more...

Scientists in China this week say they’ve accomplished a first in bioengineering: creating embryo-like structures from monkey stem cells. The structures were implanted in surrogate female monkeys and briefly grew but did not become viable fetuses. The research may eventually help us better understand the earliest…Read more...

Following in the footsteps of competitor Microsoft—which added the same tech behind ChatGPT to Bing earlier this year—Google is on its own path to include a chatbot in its own search engine. When? Well, CEO Sundar Pichai was delightfully vague on the timeline.

Get a look at some new posters for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. The Necronomicon is found in a new Evil Dead Rise clip. Plus, new posters for the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. To me, my spoilers!

A soon-to-launch NASA mission is set to offer more data on North America’s air quality than researchers and public health programs have ever had available before. A new monitoring instrument hosted on a commercial satellite will offer continent-wide, hourly updates on air pollution, at about a four square mile…Read more...

There was a time in the evolution of the desktop PC that it didn’t really matter what the insides looked like, because they were always hidden away behind a beige metal box. Now, the insides of many high-performance PCs are flashier than their outsides. Seagate wants to make sure the guts of your gaming rig are as…Read more...

India planted its flag in the sand of the global artificial intelligence race on Tuesday as a major agency said the government has no plans to regulate the technology.Read more...

Nine years is a long time for an actor to play any character, let alone one that is regularly forced to wear an elaborate, skin-hugging superhero costume. So when I heard The Flash star Grant Gustin suggested to the series’ showrunner to kill off Barry Allen in the upcoming series finale, I assumed he just wanted to …Read more...

In a new interview with GQ, Donald Glover has stated that he would “love to return” to the character of Lando Calrissian. Glover took on the mantle of the role in Solo: A Star Wars Story back in 2018, and says now that it was “dope to play [Calrissian]. It was really fun.”

This week, the FBI and a coalition of European police partners took aim at one of the biggest illegal markets on the internet. Genesis, known for selling stolen data to the highest bidder, has officially been dismantled. The crackdown is yet another attempt by the government to disrupt and deter the dark web’s worst…Read more...

A Lannister always pays his debts, but he doesn’t always hang around Westeros when he doesn’t have to. Much like his Game of Thrones co-star Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau has admitted he’s yet to tune into the HBO series’ hit prequel, House of the Dragon. He does plan to... if he can get through the opening…Read more...

Google’s newest developer policy aims to give Android users more control by allowing them to delete their account data on apps that require account creation, even if they don’t currently have the app installed.

Last weekend, Hasbro crowned the winners of the North American School Scrabble Championship, a Scrabble tournament featuring 105 students from across the continent ranging in age groups between 7th grade and 12th grade. 40 championship teams and 25 high school players competed in the tournament with games lasting 55…Read more...

Walt Disney World’s new Tron merchandise capitalizes on Flynn’s arcade and the Grid with futuristic gear, program-inspired toys, and throwback fashion.Read more...

While Nothing has mostly focused its efforts thus far on creating devices that stand out from the competition through distinctive designs, the Ear (2) are proof that the young company is maturing and won’t always be relying on eye candy to sell its hardware. The follow-up to Nothing’s very first product brings some…Read more...

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NASA has released an interactive map of Mars made from over 100,000 images taken by the agency’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; the mosaic is the highest-resolution global portrait of Mars ever made.Read more...

We’ve already mentioned how cool it is that 1) the characters from the classic, goofy 1983 Dungeons & Dragons cartoon make a brief appearance in the new D&D movie Honor Among Thieves, and 2) it’s an Easter egg for fans that doesn’t distract or detract from the film’s storytelling. But now, the movie characters have…Read more...

Meta has some big AI ambitions, even as it seems like it’s long been playing catch up to OpenAI, Microsoft, and even Google. To make a bit of a splash, on Wednesday the company showed off its new AI-based Segment Anything Model that’s surprisingly capable of identifying and separating specific objects in images and…Read more...

Orbit is increasingly becoming a busy highway, with more companies launching hoards of satellites above our skies. With all those spacecraft cruising in Earth orbit, a group of industry representatives is suggesting new guidelines for “road safety” in space.Read more...

A few weeks back, HBO Max shared first-look images at its highly anticipated revival of cult-favorite animated series Clone High. Today we’ve got an actual teaser trailer showing characters like JFK, Cleopatra, Abe Lincoln, and Frida Kahlo in action. Who knew Frida could shred? Check it out!Read more...

A team of researchers designed a two-dimensional photonic time crystal that they say could have applications in technologies like transmitters and lasers.

Music from the ‘90s, dominated by the early years of hip hop and gritty grunge counter-culture might not immediately seem like a groundswell for transformative new gadgets and gizmos. However, despite its seemingly unpolished patina, a handful of crucial innovations spanning the decade have arguably done more to…Read more...

Human memory might be even more unreliable than currently thought. In a new study, scientists found that it’s possible for people to form false memories of an event within seconds of it occurring. This almost-immediate misremembering seems to be shaped by our expectations of what should happen, the team says.Read more...

Gail Simone, the legendary comics author who first began writing for Dynamite Entertainment’s Red Sonja in 2013, is returning again to the character for an all-new novel. While the character remains the same, this is not an adaptation of an older storyline, nor is it a movie tie-in; it’s going to be a totally original…Read more...

New Zealand-based private space company Dawn Aerospace says it has completed three successful tests of its prototype Mk-II Aurora spaceplane using rocket engines. A scaled-up version of the suborbital vehicle could eventually perform multiple flights each day, sending payloads on journeys to low Earth orbit.Read more...

When two very famous celebrities show up on this week’s episode of The Mandalorian, the viewer has a choice to make. Look at the sets, the characters, the costumes, and buy into the absurdity of what’s obviously about to happen, or get angry that clearly, this latest episode is very uninterested in forwarding the…Read more...

The world’s most important climate meeting this year is going to be headed up by one of the world’s most oil-reliant countries. It sounds like the plot of an absurdist play, but it’s reality, and the cracks are already starting to show ahead of an especially crucial year for climate action.Read more...

Westworld is back online, after being cancelled by HBO and subsequently removed from the company’s HBO Max streaming platform at the end of 2022. The popular sci-fi series re-emerged on Roku on Wednesday, as reported by Tech Crunch.

Samsung and Peloton have announced that connectivity is finally available between the former’s smartwatches and the latter’s exercise machines. The Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 5 series can be paired with Peloton’s Bike, Bike+, Tread, Row, and Guide.

NPR’s Twitter account received a state-affiliated media label on Wednesday for reportedly being an entity with editorial independence although the outlet receives some funding from the government. The state-affiliated media label has historically been applied to foreign media outlets providing official government…Read more...

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Severe weather that spawned thunderstorms and tornadoes throughout the U.S. on Tuesday is still threatening states across the South and Midwest today.

Producing airtight, accurate facts isn’t ChatGPT’s strong suit. The OpenAI-created large language model is known to fabricate information for its own ends—outright lying in service of generating fluid text, quickly or completing tasks. But is ChatGPT legally responsible for its falsehoods? Can the inventions of an…Read more...

We all deserve a bit of downtime and relaxation—and for many of us, gaming is a major part of that. No matter whether you’re playing on PC, console, or mobile, you don’t necessarily have to pay very much at all, if anything, to find some top-quality games. From the Epic Games Store to iOS, you can get to free games or…Read more...

On Tuesday, Expedia said it was slapping a beta ChatGPT interface into its app. The interface should let users plan their vacation by offering the chatbot your preferences, time of stay, and budget, and the system should create some natural language responses offering hotel or activity suggestions.Read more...

X and its prequel Pearl were low-budget horror movies, but surprise hits. So it’s arguably no wonder that the newest installment, MaXXXine, has been able to get a higher-profile cast. Kevin Bacon, Bobby Cannavale, and Michelle Monaghan are among the A-list actors who will be joining the movie, where Mia Goth’s Maxine,…Read more...

A pro-Trump YouTube channel was slapped with a seven-day suspension and had several of its videos removed after it spread misinformation about the 2020 presidential election. Right Side Broadcasting Network’s (RSBN) suspension came just days before the former president’s high-profile arrest and could set the stage for…Read more...

Amazon is planning to cut ties with its online book store, Book Depository, which is based in the UK and has been a part of the conglomerate for more than two decades. The announcement comes as Amazon is working to cut costs and has laid off 18,000 employees this year and will reportedly lay off another 9,000 in the…Read more...

While the rest of the world marveled at the arrest of former President Donald Trump on Tuesday afternoon, Twitter’s resident menswear guru Derek Guy focused on something that, for him, was more important: Trump’s courtroom outfit. In his review, Guy discovered evidence not of criminal conduct, but supporting the…Read more...

More than a decade after the mission was announced, JUICE is finally ready for its much-anticipated journey to Jupiter. Packed with 10 instruments, it’s one of the most advanced probes ever sent to the outer solar system. Here’s your guide to the European Space Agency’s historic mission, set to launch on April 13.

The John Wick spinoff Ballerina sets its release date. Former showrunner Bryan Fuller really wants a new season of Hannibal. The Boys teases a bloody (good?) time for Homelander. Plus, a sneak peek at what’s coming in this week’s Star Trek: Picard. Spoilers now!Read more...