RFK may replace entire panel of CDC vaccine advisors again, ally lets slip

RFK may replace entire panel of CDC vaccine advisors again, ally lets slip

fivenewscrypto    mars 22, 2026   

A member of an influential federal vaccine advisory panel made a dramatic claim Thursday afternoon that the panel had been disbanded following a temporary block by a federal judge and would be entirely reconstituted—again. But, just hours later, he retracted the claim, saying that it was merely a possibility.

The claim immediately caused a stir online. Public health experts began to cheer the news, given that most of the current members hold anti-vaccine views and have little to no qualifications for being on the panel—which is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Current members were hand-selected by anti-vaccine health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had summarily fired all 17 experts previously on ACIP. Kennedy's new ACIP members have since held several chaotic meetings in which they voted to roll-back CDC's evidence-based vaccine guidance.

On Monday, Federal Judge Brian Murphy issued a temporary injunction blocking Kennedy's ACIP members and their votes after finding that they were improperly appointed and vaccine recommendations were changed without procedural requirements. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and other medical groups, who challenged Kennedy's anti-vaccine efforts.

Read full article

Comments

Perseverance’s radar revealed ancient subsurface river delta on Mars

Perseverance’s radar revealed ancient subsurface river delta on Mars

fivenewscrypto    mars 22, 2026   

When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater in 2021, its primary mission was to scour the remnants of a dried-up Martian lakebed for signs of ancient life. Scientists have been focused on the crater's spectacular Western Delta, a fan-shaped geologic feature deposited by a river flowing into the basin billions of years ago. But now Perseverance’s ground-penetrating radar (called RIMFAX) detected what is likely another, even older river delta buried tens of meters beneath it.

“I think it’s a promising place to look for signs of biosignatures at depth,” says Emily L. Cardarelli. “Microbial life could have potentially developed in those types of environments.” Cardarelli, an astrobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, led the team interpreting RIMFAX imagery.

Peeking underground

Perseverance’s RIMFAX, the Radar Imager for Mars Subsurface Experiment, continuously fires radar waves into the ground, acquiring soundings each time the rover traveled 10 centimeters. When these radio waves hit boundaries between different types of rock, ice, or sediment layers, some of the signal bounces back. The timing and intensity of these reflections allow scientists to construct a two-dimensional, vertical slice of the subsurface, much like a sonogram of the Martian crust.

Read full article

Comments

NASA wants to know how the launch industry's chic new rocket fuel explodes

NASA wants to know how the launch industry's chic new rocket fuel explodes

fivenewscrypto    mars 22, 2026   

For more than 60 years, nearly every large rocket used some combination of the same liquid and solid propellants. Refined kerosene was favored for its easy handling and non-toxicity, hydrazine for its storability and simplicity, hydrogen for its efficiency, and solid fuels for their long shelf life and rapid launch capability.

About 15 years ago, rocket companies started serious development of large methane-fueled engines. SpaceX and Blue Origin now build the most powerful of these new engines—the Raptor and BE-4—each capable of generating more than half a million pounds of thrust. SpaceX's Starship rocket and its enormous booster are powered by 39 Raptors, while Blue Origin's New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rockets use a smaller number of BE-4s on their booster stages.

Burning methane in combination with liquid oxygen, these "methalox" engines have several advantages. Methane is better suited for reusable engines because they leave less behind sooty residue than kerosene, which SpaceX uses on the Falcon 9 rocket. Methane is easier to handle than liquid hydrogen, which is prone to leaks and must be stored at staggeringly cold temperatures of around minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celsius). Methane is also a cryogenic liquid, but it has a warmer temperature closer to that of liquid oxygen, between minus 260 and minus 297 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 162 to minus 183 degrees Celsius).

Read full article

Comments

Amazon is reportedly developing an AI-centric smartphone

Amazon is reportedly developing an AI-centric smartphone

fivenewscrypto    mars 22, 2026   

Amazon is developing a new smartphone over a decade after discontinuing the Fire Phone, Reuters reported today, citing four anonymous “people familiar with the matter.”

Reuters said the phone is codenamed Transformer but couldn’t confirm what it might cost, how much Amazon has invested into development thus far, or how much Amazon expects to make off the device. Like any product reportedly under development, it’s possible that Amazon will never release the phone. Reuters’ sources noted that Transformer could be cancelled over finances or a change in strategy.

When reached for comment by Ars Technica, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on Reuters’ report.

Read full article

Comments

Major SteamOS update adds support for Steam Machine, even more third-party hardware

Major SteamOS update adds support for Steam Machine, even more third-party hardware

fivenewscrypto    mars 21, 2026   

Valve's Steam Machine desktop is currently in a state of involuntary limbo, driven by historically awful pricing and availability for memory and storage chips. AI data centers are absorbing much of what memory manufacturers can produce, leaving much less for enthusiast and hobbyist hardware like the Steam Machine and the Steam Frame VR headset. Even the years-old Steam Deck is currently out of stock thanks to component shortages.

But that hardware uncertainty hasn't stopped Valve from working on the software, and the company released a major update this week. The SteamOS 3.8.0 preview release comes with a long list of changes for the Steam Deck as well as third-party gaming handhelds and other PC hardware, and it also adds "initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware."

Many of the update's improvements come from various upstream Linux components. Valve says the update includes a new Arch Linux base, an updated graphics driver, version 6.16 of the Linux kernel, and a new version of the KDE Plasma desktop environment for Desktop Mode (which now uses Wayland rather than X11).

Read full article

Comments

Monte Verde site gets a new date, but the big picture doesn't change

Monte Verde site gets a new date, but the big picture doesn't change

fivenewscrypto    mars 21, 2026   

A landmark site in the peopling of the Americas is several thousand years younger than we thought. While that means very different things about the site itself, it doesn’t change the big picture as much as the researchers who generated the new date are claiming.

University of Wyoming archaeologist Todd Surovell and his colleagues recently took a second look at the age of a site called Monte Verde in southern Chile, and it turns out that people lived there 8,000 years ago—not 14,500, as the archaeologists who first described it claimed.

Monte Verde is about as far from the Bering Land Bridge as you can get without leaving the continents, so its age was the first piece of evidence that people were well-established in the Americas before the end of the last Ice Age. But it hasn't been the last, so Surovell and his colleagues’ findings don’t actually change what we now know about the peopling of the Americas—and they definitely don’t put the “Clovis First” hypothesis back on the table.

Read full article

Comments

Jeff Bezos just announced plans for a third megaconstellation—this one for data centers

Jeff Bezos just announced plans for a third megaconstellation—this one for data centers

fivenewscrypto    mars 21, 2026   

A little more than a month ago, SpaceX founder Elon Musk put down a marker of his intent to saturate low-Earth orbit with up to 1 million satellites. Its purpose? Provide always-on data center services around the planet.

Now, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has done something similar with a filing to the Federal Communications Commission of his own, proposing a constellation of up to 51,600 satellites operating in Sun-synchronous orbits at altitudes ranging from 500 to 1,800 km. Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, sought the authority to do this and is calling the constellation "Project Sunrise."

In its filing, Blue Origin argues that terrestrial AI-based data centers will face difficulties scaling up to meet computing demand.

Read full article

Comments