Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said he is investigating Google, claiming that the tech giant censors conservative speech and manipulated search results about Donald Trump.

"BREAKING: I am launching an investigation into Google—the biggest search engine in America—for censoring conservative speech during the most consequential election in our nation's history. Google is waging war on the democratic process. It's time to fight back," Bailey wrote on X , the social network owned by notable Trump supporter Elon Musk.

The New York Post quoted a Bailey spokesperson saying that "evidence has come to light that Google is deemphasizing conservative speech or content—such as putting conservative reporting on Page 11 rather than Page 1—by manipulating search results." The spokesperson said Google "has an obligation to consumers to utilize fair business practice" and that "we will be subpoenaing information on Google's algorithms and other systems to determine whether they are censoring conservative speech."

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On Wednesday morning, a surprising email popped into my inbox with the following subject line: "Astra announces Department of Defense contract valued up to $44 Million."

I had to read it a second time to make sure I got it right. Astra, the launch company? Astra, whose valuation went from $2.6 billion to $25 million after a series of launch failures? Astra, the company that was taken private in July at 50 cents a share?

Yes, it was that Astra.

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A 12th-century Norse saga tells of an invading army from the south razing a castle stronghold and throwing a dead body into the well to render the water undrinkable. Human remains believed to be those of this so-called "Well-man" were discovered in the 1930s, providing valuable potential outside confirmation of the tale. Scientists have now sequenced the DNA of those remains, and while they could not prove once and for all that the remains are those of the Well-man, their findings are consistent with that identification, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience.

Much of what we know about early Norse and Icelandic history comes from the sagas, many of which were written by scholars centuries after the events described—most likely based on oral traditions or earlier now-lost manuscripts. One notable exception is the Sverris Saga , which covers the reign of King Sverre Sigurdsson (1151–1240 CE), a tumultuous period marked by warring factions all vying to claim the throne. Norse scholars think that at least part of this saga was written contemporaneously at the king's request, and it contains detailed descriptions of many battles and speeches and a large cast of characters.

King Sverre's claim to the throne was that he was the son of King Sigurd Munn, killed in 1155 CE by his brother. Sverre's men were known as "Birkenbeiner" because their legwear and shoes were made of birch bark. Among the rival factions were the "Bagleres" from southern Norway. In 1197, King Sverre was spending the winter in Bergen in his stronghold, Sverresborg Castle. Bagler fighters snuck into the castle via a secret door and plundered the place, burning all the homes within the castle walls. That's when they threw a dead man down the local drinking well, subsequently filling the well with boulders.

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AI-infused search engines from Google , Microsoft , and Perplexity have been surfacing deeply racist and widely debunked research promoting race science and the idea that white people are genetically superior to nonwhite people.

Patrik Hermansson, a researcher with UK-based anti-racism group Hope Not Hate, was in the middle of a monthslong investigation into the resurgent race science movement when he needed to find out more information about a debunked dataset that claims IQ scores can be used to prove the superiority of the white race.

He was investigating the Human Diversity Foundation, a race science company funded by Andrew Conru, the US tech billionaire who founded Adult Friend Finder. The group, founded in 2022, was the successor to the Pioneer Fund, a group founded by US Nazi sympathizers in 1937 with the aim of promoting “race betterment” and “race realism.”

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It took a crew of more than 100 talented modders and another hundred voice actors nearly five years to make Fallout: London . Just as they planned to release it, Bethesda came out with a "next-gen upgrade" of the mod's base game , Fallout 4 , forcing the team to scramble and ultimately find a way to downgrade the game. When they finally released London , they then dealt with game-stopping bugs and quality issues that their small QA team could not have caught. It's been a long, maybe even post-apocalyptic road for these modders.

A few updates later, Fallout: London is in much better shape. I've been able to put about 12 hours into it, and that, in itself, is essentially my review: it is worth that kind of time and more. If you can still enjoy Fallout 4 , of course.

Any Fallout fan waits a long time between official releases, so it can be tempting to go easy on any new offering, however spit-and-bailing-wire it may seem. But Fallout: London is a game in its own right, with a distinct look, vision, and stories to tell. You can find evidence of its unofficial mod-ness if you look around, but you're better off doing the Fallout thing: wandering, wondering, fighting, and occasionally talking to some messed-up weirdo.

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Welcome to Edition 7.17 of the Rocket Report! Next week marks 10 years since one of the more spectacular launch failures of this century. On October 28, 2014, an Antares rocket, then operated by Orbital Sciences, suffered an engine failure six seconds after liftoff from Virginia and crashed back onto the pad in a fiery twilight explosion. I was there and won't forget seeing the rocket falter just above the pad, being shaken by the deafening blast, and then running for cover. The Antares rocket is often an afterthought in the space industry, but it has an interesting backstory touching on international geopolitics, space history, and novel engineering. Now, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace are developing a new version of Antares.

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.

Astra gets a lifeline from DOD. Astra, the launch startup that was taken private again earlier this year for a sliver of its former value, has landed a new contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to support the development of a next-gen launch system for time-sensitive space missions, TechCrunch reports . The contract, which the DIU awarded under its Novel Responsive Space Delivery (NRSD) program, has a maximum value of $44 million. The money will go toward the continued development of Astra’s Launch System 2, designed to perform rapid, ultra-low-cost launches.

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The Windows 10 update cliff is coming in October 2025. We've explained why that's a big deal, and we have a comprehensive guide to updating to Windows 11 (recently updated to account for changes in Windows 11 24H2) so you can keep getting security updates, whether you're on an officially supported PC or not.

But this is more than just a theoretical exercise; I've been using Windows 11 on some kind of "unsupported" system practically since it launched to stay abreast of what the experience is actually like and to keep tabs on whether Microsoft would make good on its threats to pull support from these systems at any time.

Now that we're three years in, and since I've been using Windows 11 24H2 on a 2012-era desktop and laptop as my primary work machines on and off for a few months now, I can paint a pretty complete picture of what Windows 11 is like on these PCs. As the Windows 10 update cliff approaches, it's worth asking: Is running "unsupported" Windows 11 a good way to keep an older but still functional machine running, especially for non-technical users?

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An unprecedented 80 percent of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, think the country is deeply divided over its most important values ahead of the November elections. The general public’s polarization now encompasses issues like immigration, health care, identity politics, transgender rights, or whether we should support Ukraine. Fly across the Atlantic and you’ll see the same thing happening in the European Union and the UK.

To try to reverse this trend, Google’s DeepMind built an AI system designed to aid people in resolving conflicts. It’s called the Habermas Machine after Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher who argued that an agreement in a public sphere can always be reached when rational people engage in discussions as equals, with mutual respect and perfect communication.

But is DeepMind’s Nobel Prize-winning ingenuity really enough to solve our political conflicts the same way they solved chess or StarCraft or predicting protein structures ? Is it even the right tool?

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Scout provided flights from Washington to Nashville and accommodation so Ars could attend the reveal. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

NASHVILLE, Tenn.—Today, the reborn Scout Motors showed off a pair of new electric vehicles that revives the long-dormant maker of trucks and SUVs. Originally owned by International Harvester, Scout now belongs to Volkswagen Group, which decided to use it to create a new American-made brand for off-road-capable vehicles.

The first of these will be the Traveler SUV and Terra pickup truck, due to go into production in 2027. Despite VW's recent investment in Rivian, these are all-new, clean-sheet designs with a platform unique to Scout designed in Michigan, a platform that uses a body-on-frame construction with either purely electric or range-extended powertrains.

Scout says that pricing for the Terra and Traveler should start at "under $60,000," or "as low as $50,000 with available incentives" for the entry-level models, which are due to go into production at a new factory north of Columbia, South Carolina, in 2027.

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