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The Lunar Trailblazer mission to the moon officially ended on July 31, but it wasn’t a complete journey. NASA said today that its teams lost contact with the satellite shortly after its launch several months prior.

The NASA satellite was part of the IM-2 mission by Intuitive Machines, which took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center on February 26 at 7:16PM ET. The Lunar Trailblazer successfully separated from the rocket as planned about 48 minutes after launch. Operators in Pasadena, CA established communication with the satellite at 8:13PM ET, but two-way communication was lost the next day and the team was unable to recover the connection. From the limited data ground teams received before the satellite went dark, the craft’s solar arrays were not correctly positioned toward the sun, which caused its batteries to drain.

“While it was not the outcome we had hoped for, mission experiences like Lunar Trailblazer help us to learn and reduce the risk for future, low-cost small satellites to do innovative science as we prepare for a sustained human presence on the Moon,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator at NASA Headquarters’ Science Mission Directorate. “Thank you to the Lunar Trailblazer team for their dedication in working on and learning from this mission through to the end.”

The Lunar Trailblazer mission was one of several commercial spaceflights planned for travel to the moon during 2025. Its goal was to create high-resolution maps of any water on the moon’s surface, as well as assessing how much water was present, in what forms and how it may have changed over time. Fingers crossed the remaining missions have better success.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-lunar-trailblazer-mission-ends-in-disappointment-201318932.html?src=rss 

Four years after Amazon’s acquisition of podcast network Wondery, the tech giant is dismantling its $300 million purchase and reorganizing various audio properties into separate teams at the company. As first reported by Bloomberg, this reorg will see the studio lose about 110 employees, and CEO Jen Sargent is departing the company.

Amazon told Bloomberg it will continue to produce podcasts, though their place within the company will be restructured. The more narrative-focused podcasts under the Wondery brand, such as American Scandal and Business Wars, will merge with Amazon’s Audible team. Some of these podcasts will retain Wondery branding, and the Wondery Plus app will remain active. Subscribers to Wondery Plus get early access to some podcast episodes through the app, though it’s unclear at this point what functionalities will remain in the app, and which will be absorbed by Audible.

Meanwhile, the celebrity-hosted shows such as New Heights with Jason and Travis Kelce and Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard will be rolled into a new team that Amazon is calling Creator Services. According to Bloomberg, a main focus of this new team will be selling large sponsorships. These titles are part of a growing trend toward video podcasts that have helped make YouTube the go-to platform for podcast consumption.

Steve Boom, VP for Audio, Twitch and Games at Amazon, addressed the changes in a memo (published by Deadline) sent to Amazon employees. “The podcast landscape has evolved significantly over the past few years. As video podcasting has grown in popularity, we have learned that creator-led, video-integrated shows have different audience needs and require distinct discovery, growth and monetization strategies compared with audio-first, narrative series,” he wrote.

Employees who were let go as part of these changes were notified Monday, though Amazon spokesperson Alice Zhou told The Verge that “many of the impacted employees” would be moved to “other parts of Amazon.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/amazon-splits-up-the-wondery-podcast-network-and-lays-off-about-110-employees-185358357.html?src=rss 

Rivian has filed a lawsuit against Ohio’s Department of Motor Vehicles because of the state’s partial ban on direct car sales, The Verge reports. The company says that the ban “reduces competition, decreases consumer choice and drives up consumer costs and inconvenience.” Rivian believes Ohio’s law is particularly unfair because it contains a carveout for the company’s competitor Tesla.

Ohio currently requires the state DMV to not provide a dealership license to “a manufacturer, or a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliated entity of a manufacturer, applying for a license to sell or lease new or used motor vehicles at retail.” The law keeps car sales in the hands of independently owned car dealerships — except for Tesla. An exception was created for Tesla in 2014, The Columbus Dispatch writes, after the EV maker reached an agreement with the Ohio Dealership Association. Now cars in the state are sold through traditional car dealerships, and three dealerships owned and operated by Tesla.

“Rivian believes that consumers should be able to choose the vehicles they purchase,” Rivian’s Chief Administrative Officer Mike Callahan shared in a statement. “Consumer choice is a bedrock principle of America’s economy. Ohio’s archaic prohibition against the direct-sales of vehicles is unconstitutional, irrational and harms Ohioans by reducing competition and choice and driving up costs and inconvenience.”

The company’s lawsuit does a good job of laying out the illogical situation Ohio has created with its ban. Rivian is allowed to perform repairs on cars in the state and deliver cars purchased out-of-state to Ohioans. “Nonsensically, the thing that Rivian cannot do is actually complete the sale of Rivian vehicles in Ohio,” the company writes. “This imposes an extraordinary burden on Ohio consumers and Rivian for no legitimate reason.”

As The Verge notes, bans on direct car sales have historically exist to prevent large, established car companies from having a monopoly on the sale of their own cars. Going direct to consumer is one of the ways EV makers have differentiated themselves from older brands, something companies like Tesla and Rivian can’t do in states with bans. Rivian could try and strike a deal like Tesla, but filing a federal lawsuit suggests the company could be aiming to win a bigger, more lasting change. Rivian has achieved similar wins in the past. The state of Illinois sued to stop Rivian and Lucid Motors from selling directly to consumers in 2022, but ultimately lost.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rivian-sues-ohio-dmv-over-partial-ban-on-direct-car-sales-191259497.html?src=rss 

OpenAI has announced that ChatGPT will now remind users to take breaks if they’re in a particularly long chat with AI. The new feature is part of OpenAI’s ongoing attempts to get users to cultivate a healthier relationship with the frequently compliant and overly-encouraging AI assistant.

The company’s announcement suggests the “gentle reminders” will appear as pop-ups in chats that users will have to click or tap through to continue using ChatGPT. “Just Checking In,” OpenAI’s sample pop-up reads. “You’ve been chatting for a while — is this a good time for a break?” The system is reminiscent of the reminders some Nintendo Wii and Switch games will show you if you play for an extended period of time, though there’s an unfortunately dark context to the ChatGPT feature.

The “yes, and” quality of OpenAI’s AI and it’s ability to hallucinate factually incorrect or dangerous responses has led users down dark paths, The New York Times reported in June — including suicidal ideation. Some of the users whose delusions ChatGPT indulged already had a history of mental illness, but the chatbot still did a bad job of consistently shutting down unhealthy conversations. OpenAI acknowledges some of those shortcomings in its blog post, and says that ChatGPT will be updated in the future to respond more carefully to “high-stakes personal decisions.” Rather than provide a direct answer, the company says the chatbot will help users think through problems, offer up questions and list pros and cons.

OpenAI obviously wants ChatGPT to feel helpful, encouraging and enjoyable to use, but it’s not hard to package those qualities into an AI that’s sycophantic. The company was forced to rollback an update to ChatGPT in April that lead the chatbot to respond in ways that were annoying and overly-agreeable. Taking breaks from ChatGPT — and having the AI do things without your active participation — will make issues like that less visible. Or, at the very least, it’ll give users time to check whether the answers ChatGPT is providing are even correct.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpt-will-now-remind-you-to-take-breaks-following-mental-health-concerns-180221008.html?src=rss 

Elon Musk recently announced that he’s bringing back the Vine archives, after teasing the return of the social platform over the last week or so. The X owner says that the company recently discovered the entire video archive of the once-popular short-form video app and is working to restore user access. Twitter bought Vine all the way back in 2012.

Musk says that X users will be able to post these Vines, but it’s just an archive. In other words, this doesn’t sound like a renaissance for the actual platform.

It remains unclear as to what Musk’s intentions are for the brand, but the announcement about the returning archive was accompanied by an ad for the Grok Imagine video-creation platform. He called the service the “AI Vine.” Why expand energy to make short-form content when you can type some words into a prompting field?

There’s also the Musk of it all. He doesn’t have the best track record when it comes to delivering on promises. We’ll just have to wait and see if the Vine video archive actually returns and what happens after that.

For the uninitiated, Vine was sort of like TikTok before TikTok. It was a platform for 6-second looping videos. The app was extremely popular for a while, but Twitter never really capitalized on that after its $30 million purchase. It was shut down in 2016, which ended uploads, and was completely discontinued in 2017.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/elon-musk-says-the-vine-archive-is-coming-back-180935178.html?src=rss