Five years later, Windows 11 brings back much-missed taskbar options (and more)

Five years later, Windows 11 brings back much-missed taskbar options (and more)

fivenewscrypto    mai 19, 2026   

When Windows 11 launched in 2021, we mostly liked its refreshed look—the rounded corners and menus with just a hint of translucency were a nice change from the flat colors and hard corners of the Windows 8/10 era. But its reformulated taskbar and Start menu came with a number of functional regressions from the versions in Windows 10. Some of these were addressed quickly; others continue to linger.

A new Windows Insider Preview build released to testers includes a new wave of improvements that fix longstanding regressions while trying out new things.

Most significantly, the Windows 11 taskbar can now be docked to any edge of your screen, including the left and right, something that was possible in Windows 10 (and many older versions of Windows) but has been missing from Windows 11 since launch. Users can configure slightly different taskbar behavior for every taskbar position—if you prefer a different icon alignment or a left/right-mounted taskbar over a top/bottom-mounted taskbar, or if you want different settings for labels and icon groupings, you can choose different options for each position and Windows will remember them.

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BMW sends off the 6th-gen M3 CS with a manual gearbox, rear-wheel drive

BMW sends off the 6th-gen M3 CS with a manual gearbox, rear-wheel drive

fivenewscrypto    mai 19, 2026   

The march of time, and what counts for progress in the automotive industry, has not been particularly kind to the driving enthusiast. Our vehicles have gotten bigger and heavier. Touch-sensitive panels and screens replaced buttons. Steering feel evaporated about a decade ago. And if you're a fan of changing your own gears with a stick shift and three pedals, things have been looking bleak for a while now. Which makes BMW's send-off for its current sixth-generation M3 so notable.

BMW's M division kept the six-speed manual alive for the G80 M3, but only the normal version. If you wanted the more powerful, much torquier M3 Competition or the track-focused M3 CS (Competition Sport), the only transmission choice was an eight-speed automatic. That automatic happens to be the excellent ZF 8HP gearbox, and for being fast on track, I'd still choose it, because that makes left-foot braking easier.

Using paddle shifts might be faster, but I won't pretend it's more engaging than coordinating the movement of a gearstick through its gate, timed properly to the action of the clutch—especially if you're heel-and-toeing, but even if you use the auto-blip feature that revs the engines for you on downshifts now. BMW appears to recognize that too, because it says the 2027 M3 CS Handschalter is designed for maximum driver engagement, and just for North America.

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Did Artemis II break through? Registrations at Space Camp double afterward.

Did Artemis II break through? Registrations at Space Camp double afterward.

fivenewscrypto    mai 19, 2026   

When he was 12 years old, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman attended the weeklong "Aviation Challenge" program at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.

"For the first time, I got behind the controls of an airplane when I attended Aviation Challenge," Isaacman said on Friday evening during an event at the US Space & Rocket Center. "I became a pilot because I thought that was the closest I would ever get to the stars."

Decades later, after founding a successful online payments company and flying to space twice as a private citizen aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon, Isaacman has returned to Space Camp in Alabama on multiple occasions to meet with participants and share a bit of the awe he experienced as a kid. In 2022, a year after the first of these flights, Inspiration4, Isaacman donated $10 million to kick off a Space Camp expansion.

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Bug bounty businesses bombarded with AI slop

Bug bounty businesses bombarded with AI slop

fivenewscrypto    mai 19, 2026   

Companies that pay hackers to find flaws in their software are being inundated with low-quality reports generated by AI, forcing some to suspend the programs altogether.

Businesses that run “bug bounty” schemes have long relied on independent security researchers to spot vulnerabilities. But the rise of AI tools is now overwhelming them with spurious submissions.

Bugcrowd, whose customers include OpenAI, T-Mobile, and Motorola, said the number of reports it received more than quadrupled over a three-week period in March, with most proving to be false.

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The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?

The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?

fivenewscrypto    mai 19, 2026   

These days, one would be forgiven for forgetting that SpaceX is, at its core, a rocket company.

Consider the company's mega deals over the last year. SpaceX paid $17 billion—more than it has spent developing every one of its rockets—to EchoStar for wireless spectrum to boost its Starlink network. It revealed plans to launch 1 million orbital data centers. SpaceX merged with xAI in a deal that valued Elon Musk's artificial intelligence firm at $250 billion, and it announced plans to become a major computer chip manufacturer. And earlier this month, SpaceX sold an enormous amount of ground-based compute to Anthropic.

As a result of all this activity, an impending IPO will value the company at something like $1.5 or $2 trillion. That's trillion, with a t.

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A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease

A revolutionary cancer treatment could transform autoimmune disease

fivenewscrypto    mai 18, 2026   

At age 49, Jan Janisch-Hanzlik’s multiple sclerosis was destroying her freedom to live the life she wanted. She gave up her active nursing job for a desk role. Frequent falls made her afraid to carry her grandchildren. She had to move to a bigger house to make room for the wheelchair she feared she might end up needing full-time.

Even the best available medication wasn’t improving Janisch-Hanzlik’s symptoms, and she worried they’d only get worse. So when she learned about a trial of CAR T cell therapy at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, close to the city of Blair where she lives, she phoned the clinic every other month until they were ready to enroll her as the first patient.

Originally designed to target and wipe out cancer by reprogramming the patient’s immune cells, CAR T is now being offered to patients in hundreds of clinical trials for autoimmune conditions like multiple sclerosis, lupus, Graves’ disease, vasculitis, and many others. The hope is that CAR T can duplicate the success it has demonstrated in a range of blood cancers by hunting down and eliminating cells that target the self in autoimmune diseases. This would essentially reset the body’s defenses to a state like the one that existed before the disease took hold.

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The US is betting on AI to catch insider trading in prediction markets

The US is betting on AI to catch insider trading in prediction markets

fivenewscrypto    mai 18, 2026   

For most of the past year, it looked like prediction markets had kicked off a new golden age of fraud. On Polymarket, traders raked in fortunes from suspiciously timed bets on geopolitical events like the raid on Venezuela and the Iran War. It wasn’t clear whether the US government would bother pursuing some of the most flagrant bad actors, since Polymarket’s crypto-based platform was technically offshore and not regulated or licensed within the country.

Now, however, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction markets, wants you to know that it’s watching very, very closely. The agency is searching for suspicious behavior from traders within the United States who have been sneaking onto offshore markets, including Polymarket’s crypto platform—which is blocked stateside—by using virtual private networks. “We're going to find them, and we're going to bring actions,” agency chairman Michael Selig told WIRED this week, speaking from the CFTC’s headquarters in Washington, DC.

Selig says the agency, which is especially lean right now, is staffing up. Like so many other AI-pilled workplaces, the CFTC is also leaning into automation to handle the growing workload, including tools that analyze trading patterns and flag potential manipulation. “You’ve got so much data,” Selig says. “When we feed it into AI, we get really great information. It can help us understand things, like where we might want to investigate, or when we might need to send a subpoena to a trader.”

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