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We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribution to solving this mystery,” says Richard Zare, a Stanford University chemistry professor. Zare is the senior author of the recent study into a previously unknown electrochemical process that might have helped supply the raw materials needed for life.

Zare’s team demonstrated the existence of micro-lightning, very small electricity discharges that occur between tiny droplets of water spray. When triggered in a mixture of gases made to replicate the atmosphere on early Earth, these micro-lightnings produced chemical compounds used by present-day life, like glycine, uracil, and urea, along with chemical precursors like cyanoacetylene, and hydrogen cyanide. “I’m not saying it’s the only way this could happen—I wasn’t there,” Zare acknowledged. “But it’s a new plausible mechanism that gives us building blocks of life.”

Lightning in the bulb

Scientific research into the beginnings of life on Earth started in the 1920s with Aleksander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, scientists who independently proposed that life on Earth could have arisen through a process of gradual chemical evolution. In their view, inorganic molecules might have reacted due to energy from the Sun or lightning strikes to form life’s building blocks, like amino acids. Those building blocks, Oparin and Haldane argued, could have accumulated in the oceans, making a “primordial soup.”

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Elon Musk's Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump's trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses and hurting the economy.

In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump's tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports.

"Tesla supports a robust and thorough process" to "address unfair trade practices," but only those "which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies," the letter said.

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As he consolidates control over Relativity Space, new owner and chief executive Eric Schmidt is planning significant changes at the launch company, including a likely move to the Lone Star State.

Schmidt's recent acquisition of the California-based company, which has largely evolved away from its 3D-printing origins to becoming a more conventional rocket developer, has solved Relativity's primary need. The company has been in a cash crunch for months, and being acquired by one of the 50 wealthiest people on the planet provides financial stability.

One source said Schmidt has made a "mega" investment in Relativity, but the company has not publicly stated the size. It is likely to be at least $1 billion, if not more. Schmidt is also taking an active hand in operations.

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Tesla has a real image problem. Once, it was the beloved brand for the environmentally aware car buyer; more than that, it was the hottest thing in town. Hundreds of thousands of fans paid thousand-dollar deposits and then waited for up to two years for a chance to buy a Model 3, with others paying hefty markups to people at the front of the queue. Back then, of course, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed to care about climate change—now he seems more likely to be found helping to undo work on climate change.

That has hurt Tesla's new car sales, which have cratered in Europe and declined to a lesser degree in China (where Musk's political activities have less bearing, and decline is more stiff competition from local brands and the lack of a real model range). It has dented the reality-distortion field that surrounds the company's share price, if perhaps only to where it was six months ago. And it has also affected the prices of used Teslas here in the US.

Being a Tesla driver is starting to carry some stigma, and owners are unused to the opprobrium they are now facing for their choice of electric vehicle. "Two weeks ago, I was called a Nazi in the parking lot at Kroger," one owner told The New York Times.  And more than one Ars commenter has sold their Tesla in recent weeks as a direct result of Musk.

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With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.

Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.

The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.

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Over the coming months, we’ll be upgrading users on mobile devices from Google Assistant to Gemini.Over the coming months, we’ll be upgrading users on mobile devices from Google Assistant to Gemini.

In spite of sky-high costs and little in the way of profits, generative AI systems continue to proliferate. The Trump administration has called for a national AI Action Plan to guide America's burgeoning AI industry, and OpenAI was happy to use that as an opportunity to decry the negative effect of copyright enforcement on AI development. Google has also released its policy proposal, which agrees with OpenAI on copyright while also prompting the government to back the AI industry with funding and policy changes.

Like OpenAI, Google has been accused of piping copyrighted data into its models, but content owners are wising up. Google is fighting several lawsuits, and the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI could set the precedent that AI developers are liable for using that training data without permission. Google wants to avoid that. It calls for "balanced copyright rules," but its preference doesn't seem all that balanced.

The dearth of available training data is a well-known problem in AI development. Google claims that access to public, often copyrighted, data is critical to improving generative AI systems. Google wants to be able to use publicly available data (free or copyrighted) for AI development without going through "unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations." The document claims any use of copyrighted material in AI will not significantly impact rightsholders.

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An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons.

The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design.

Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. "Regular spoons are so 3000 BC," a tagline on the project's website joked.

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Reddit has shown a growing commitment to promoting ads on its platform, especially since going public a year ago. But in the interest of not completely alienating customers with incessant, irrelevant, or personally offensive ads, the social media company is giving users the ability to block advertisers for a year.

In a Reddit post last night, a Reddit employee known as cozy_sheets said that clicking “Hide” on an unwanted ad on Reddit will soon result in Reddit automatically hiding “future ads from that advertiser account for at least a year (you can re-hide the ad after that period of time).” The change will debut on the Reddit website and Reddit’s iOS and Android app throughout “the next several weeks,” according to the announcement.

Reddit didn't detail what limits it will use to ensure that users don't block every single advertiser for an ad-free Reddit. Some users have already reported seeing a daily limit for hiding ads, though.

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Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX's steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn't seem like it's rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX's next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year's pace.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It's the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with 1 ton-class satellites.

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Every March 14 (or 3/14), we pay tribute to the infinite, non-repeating Pi (π) on Pi Day. And what better way to celebrate than digging into 3.14159 (or more) slices of …

Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still new, everyone was "sheltering in place" and bingeing films and television. Pandemic-related fare proved especially popular, including the 1995 medical disaster-thriller Outbreak, starring Dustin Hoffman. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity, which some researchers have suggested is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from imagined experiences. Outbreak turned 30 this week, making this the perfect time to revisit the film.

(Spoilers for Outbreak abound below.) 

Outbreak deals with the re-emergence of a deadly virus called Motaba, 28 years after it first appeared in an African jungle, infecting US soldiers and many others. The US military secretly destroyed the camp to conceal evidence of the virus, a project overseen by Major General Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) and Brigadier General William Ford (Morgan Freeman). When it re-emerges in Zaire decades later, a military doctor, Colonel Sam Daniels (Hoffman), takes a team to the afflicted village to investigate, only to find the entire town has died.

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Apple released a new version of the basic $349 iPad this week, though you could be forgiven for not noticing. The new 11th-generation iPad (also known as the "iPad (A16)" or just plain-old "iPad") looks identical to the previous version, it was introduced in a single paragraph buried in the middle of an iPad Air announcement, and the company didn't offer to send any to reviewers. The one I have I bought myself for our 5-year-old, whose hand-me-down 2019 iPad Air 3 is slightly older than he is and a little worse for wear.

There's nothing exciting or even particularly interesting about this tablet. The design is recycled from 2022's 10th-generation iPad, which was itself a lower-rent version of the 2020 iPad Air design. It's powered by a variant of the Apple A16, originally an iPhone chip from 2022. It still doesn't support the regular Apple Pencil or Pencil Pro or the same keyboard accessories as other iPads. It still doesn't have an anti-reflective screen coating, and the screen doesn't feel as nice to use as an iPad Air's or Pro's.

But for all that, this is still probably the purest expression of what the iPad is: a cheap Internet-connected screen for reading and watching things. I say this as someone who has tried every new piece of hardware and software that Apple has introduced to try and make the iPad a powerful and versatile laptop replacement—it still feels like trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. The more expensive iPads are nice, but I don't end up using them much differently from how I use this bare-bones tablet.

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