The Tennessee Vols are reportedly 'trending' for a coveted transfer guard who is visiting Knoxville  A to Z Sports

Rangers prospects stock report: Who’s trending up, down, including Malcolm Spence  Forever Blueshirts

Prediction: Vanderbilt trending for offensive target  On3

Trending this week: NRN’s 2026 Power List  Nation’s Restaurant News

5 Trending Spring Pedicure Colors to Try, From Milky Pink to Vanilla Chrome  instyle.com

1. Two-year-old Surface PCs get $300 price hikes as sub-$1,000 models go away  Ars Technica
2. Memory wars: Microsoft announces big price increases for Surface laptops  Mashable
3. RAMageddon has come for Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Surface Laptop  The Verge
4. Microsoft raises prices on Surface PCs due to skyrocketing RAM costs  Engadget
5. The RAM Crisis Just Royally Screwed Microsoft Surface PCs  Gizmodo

1. Google brings its Gemini Personal Intelligence feature to India  TechCrunch
2. Gemini app starts rolling out Personal Intelligence globally  9to5Google
3. Google gives Gemini access to your Gmail and photos. Here's what this means in practice — and what remains beyond your control  razomua.media
4. Google expands Personal Intelligence to India (GOOG:NASDAQ)  Seeking Alpha
5. Google launches Personal Intelligence in Arab world  The National

How the rewards app Freecash scammed its way to the top of the app stores  TechCrunchView Full Coverage on Google News

1. How to Use Google Chrome’s New AI-Powered ‘Skills’  WIRED
2. Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome  blog.google
3. Google adds AI Skills to Chrome to help you save favorite workflows  TechCrunch
4. Google introduces "Skills" in Chrome to make Gemini prompts instantly reusable  Ars Technica
5. Chrome Skills let you save your favorite Gemini prompts for easy access  Engadget

1. GoPro goes bigger and pro-er with support for Micro Four Thirds lenses  The Verge
2. GoPro Launches MISSION 1 Action Cinema Cameras With 8K and 50MP 1″ Sensor  Y.M.Cinema Magazine
3. GoPro unveils cinematic 8K camera series Mission 1  Mashable
4. GoPro's Mission 1 offers 8K 60p video and interchangeable lenses  Engadget
5. GoPro Mission 1 Pro: 8Kp60 Video, 50MP Photos, 10-Bit Log, 5+ Hour Battery  PetaPixel

Written by Abigail Fraeman, Deputy Project Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Earth planning date: Friday, April 10, 2026

Curiosity spent the past week driving towards a small crater, about 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. Today the team informally named this crater “Antofagasta,” after a region and major city in Chile next to the Atacama. Craters are very cool for many reasons, one of which is that they act as “nature’s drill,” exposing material to the surface through their walls and ejecta that would have otherwise been buried. From orbit, Antofagasta looks like it might be a relatively young crater (less than 50 million years old, which is young on a Martian geologic scale!), so there may be material in and around the crater that was only exposed to the harsh, organic-molecule destroying radiation environment on Mars’ surface in the very recent past. Curiosity has already found many hardy organic molecules that survived billions of years, but could there be an even bigger treasure trove of complex chemistry deep below the surface? Antofagasta could help us answer this question… but only if the crater is big enough to have excavated deep rocks, if it really is relatively young, and if we are able to find a rock we are confident was excavated from depth that also meets the physical requirements for Curiosity’s drill. That’s a lot of “ifs,” but also too exciting of an opportunity to drive by! We’ll be able to answer all these “ifs” and decide what to do once we get a much closer look at the crater from the ground next week.

In the meantime, the journey to Antofagasta has been extremely interesting. Many of the rocks we’ve driven over have these incredible textures — thousands of honeycomb-shaped polygons crisscross their surface. Here’s one example, and here’s another example, both from Sol 4859. We’ve seen polygon-patterned rocks like these before, but they didn’t seem quite this dramatically abundant, stretching across the ground for meters and meters in our Mastcam mosaics. This week we continued to collect lots of images and chemical data that will help us distinguish between different hypotheses for how the honeycomb textures formed. We also continued to monitor Mars’ environment, with lots of dust-devil searches and images toward the horizon to characterize the Martian atmosphere as it grows predictably dustier approaching the warm summer months.

I’m looking forward to seeing the data that should arrive on Earth by Tuesday morning. If all goes well, Curiosity will be perched on the edge of Antofagasta, sending images that will allow us humans to see the crater rim and into the interior for the first time from the ground.

Scientists have found that young stellar cousins of our Sun are calming down and dimming more quickly in their X-ray output than previously thought, according to a new study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. A paper describing the results published Monday in The Astrophysical Journal.

Unlike in the new movie “Project Hail Mary,” this quieting of young stars is a benefit for the prospects for life on orbiting planets around these stars — not a threat.

Astronomers used Chandra and other telescopes to monitor how powerful radiation from young stars — often in the form of dangerous X-rays — can pummel planets surrounding them. They did not know, however, how long this high-energy barrage continued.

This latest study looked at eight clusters of stars between the ages of 45 million and 750 million years old. The researchers found that Sun-like stars in these clusters unleashed only about a quarter to a third of the X-rays they expected.

“While science fiction – like the microbes in Project Hail Mary – imagines alien life that dims stellar output by consuming its energy, our real observations reveal a natural ‘quieting’ of young Sun-like stars in X-rays,” said Konstantin Getman, the lead author of the new study from Penn State University. “This is not because an outside force is consuming their light, but because their internal generation of magnetic fields becomes less efficient.”

In fact, this calming could be a boon to the formation of life on planets around stars that are younger versions of our own Sun. (Our Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, so significantly older than the stellar cousins in this study.) This is because large amounts of X-rays can erode a planet’s atmosphere and prevent formation of molecules necessary for organic life as we know it. On average, three-million-year-old stars with a mass equal to the Sun produce about a thousand times more X-rays than today’s Sun. Meanwhile, 100-million-year-old solar-mass stars are about 40 times brighter in X-rays than the present Sun.

“It’s possible that we owe our existence to our Sun doing the same thing, several billion years ago, that we see these young stars doing now,” said co-author Vladimir Airapetian of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “This real-world dimming echoes the dramatic stellar change in fiction, but it may be even more fascinating because it highlights our own Sun’s actual history.”

The researchers found that stars with about the same mass as the Sun quieted down relatively rapidly — after a few hundred million years — while ones with less mass kept up their high levels of X-ray emission for longer. Combined with a decrease in the energy of the X-rays and the disappearance of energetic particles, the Sun-sized stars are apparently better suited to host planets with robust atmospheres and possibly blossoming life than previously thought.

The research team also used data from ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Gaia satellite and X-ray data from the ROSAT (ROentgen SATellite) mission. This data allowed them to identify the stars that were members of the clusters (not foreground or background stars). To measure the X-ray output from the stars, they made new Chandra observations of five clusters with ages between 45 million and 100 million years, in addition to using Chandra and ROSAT data from archives to study three older clusters with ages between 220 and 750 million years.

Astronomers have not been able to study the X-ray output of stars in this age range well before. Most astronomers have relied on sparse data and a derived relation that predicts the X-ray emission young stars should produce based on their ages and rates of spin. Older and more slowly rotating stars are usually fainter in X-rays, but the team found that X-ray output drops off about 15 times more rapidly than the derived relation predicts during this specific adolescent phase.

“We can only see our Sun at this current snapshot in time, so to really understand its past we must look to other stars with about the same mass,” said co-author Eric Feigelson, also of Penn State University. “By studying X-rays from stars that are hundreds of millions of years old, we have filled in a large gap in our understanding of their evolution.”

While they are still investigating the cause of this slower-than-expected activity, scientists think the process that generates magnetic fields in these stars may become less efficient. This would lead to the stars becoming quieter in X-rays more quickly, as they age. The researchers will continue to look at this and other potential causes for the rapid dimming of young Sun-like stars.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Chandra program. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s Chandra X-ray Center controls science operations from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flight operations from Burlington, Massachusetts.

Read more from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory

Learn more about the Chandra X-ray Observatory and its mission here:

https://science.nasa.gov/chandra

https://chandra.si.edu

News Media Contact

Megan Watzke
Chandra X-ray Center
Cambridge, Mass.
617-496-7998
mwatzke@cfa.harvard.edu

Joel Wallace
Marshall Space Flight Center, Huntsville, Alabama
256-544-0034
joel.w.wallace@nasa.gov

Since it began in 1958, NASA has been charged by law with spreading the word about its work to the widest extent practicable. From typewritten press releases to analog photos and film, the agency has effectively moved into social media and other online communications. NASA’s broad reach across digital platforms has been recognized by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), with 7 nominations across multiple categories for the academy’s 30th annual Webby Awards.

Public Voting Opportunities

Voting for the Webby People’s Voice Awards—chosen by the public—is open now through Thursday, April 16. Voting links for each category are listed below.

30th Annual Webby Award Nominees

AI, Immersive & Games

Hearing Hubble
NASA Goddard
Immersive Content: Science & Education

Social

NASA’s Webb Telescope and the Universe: Using social media to connect us all 
NASA Goddard
Social Campaigns: Education & Science

Nerdy Words 
NASA Marshall
Social Video Short Form: Education & Science

NASA Astronauts Posts from Space 
NASA 
General Social: Education & Science 

Video & Film

Cosmic Dawn (NASA+ Original Documentary)
NASA
General Video and Film: Documentary: Longform

Podcasts 

Houston We Have a Podcast: Artemis II: The Mission
NASA Johnson
Individual Episodes: Science & Education

NASA’s Curious Universe: The Earth Series 
NASA
Limited-Series & Specials: Health, Science, & Education

About the Webby Awards

Established in 1996 during the web’s infancy, The Webbys is presented by the IADAS—a 3000+ member judging body. The Academy is comprised of Executive Members—leading Internet experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries, and creative celebrities—and associate members who are former Webby winners, nominees and other internet professionals.

The Webby Awards presents two honors in every category—the Webby Award and the Webby People’s Voice Award. Members of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) select the nominees for both awards in each category, as well as the winners of the Webby Awards. In the spirit of the open web, the Webby People’s Voice is chosen by the voting public, and garners millions of votes from all over the world.

2025-2026 Dream with Us Winners

Congratulation to our 2025-2026 Dream with Us Design Challenge Winners! We are pleased to share this year’s winning projects: 

Middle School

1st Place: Scout Farm

(Varenya D., Aashritha P., and Alvitha P., NJ)

2nd Place: AgriTech

(Charlotte W. and Richard F., CA)

3rd Place: AgriDrone

(Hasini B. and Kanishka A, TX and CA)

High School

1st Place: SkySeekers

(Monta Vista High School and Foothill High School, CA)

Team SkySeekers Engineering Notebook

2nd Place: AeroForge

(Adrian Wilcox High School, CA)

Team AeroForge Engineering Notebook

3rd Place: Flight Fusion Team

(Eastern Technical High School, Damascus High School, Dulaney High School, and Thomas Wooten High School, MD)

Team Flight Fusion Engineering Notebook

Dream with Us

NASA astronaut Christina Koch, Artemis II mission specialist, hugs the Orion spacecraft in the well deck of USS John P. Murtha, Saturday, April 11, 2026. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, on Friday, April 10.

After splashdown, the astronauts were met by a combined NASA and U.S. military team that assisted them out of the spacecraft in open water and transported them via helicopter to the USS John P. Murtha for initial medical checkouts. On April 11, the astronauts returned to the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for a news conference.

Artemis II is the first crewed mission in the program. Lessons learned from this test flight will inform our return to the lunar surface and future missions to Mars. Learn more about the cadence for upcoming Artemis missions.

Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

One investor who has backed both companies told the FT that justifying OpenAI's recent round required assuming an IPO valuation of $1.2 trillion or more — making Anthropic's current $380 billion valuation look like the relative bargain.

Fundraising is reportedly flowing for Fluidstack after it secured a $50 billion deal to build data centers for Anthropic.

Dozens of WordPress plug-ins were allegedly hijacked to push malware after they were sold to a new corporate owner.

In an interview at the Semafor World Economy summit this week, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark explained why the company was still engaged with the U.S. government while simultaneously suing them.

Waymo's commercial service will eventually follow testing if the U.K. government approves.