It’s not easy to extract iron from its ore. But the peoples of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—the capital of a thriving kingdom in southern Africa between 1000 to 1700 AD—were masters.

At sites near the city’s stone ruins, clusters of iron-smelting furnaces survive today as mounds of rubble. At Mashava, a village 25 miles northwest, fragments bear fingermarks of those who long ago smoothed the structures’ clay interiors.

Some of the furnaces were nearly an adult’s arm span in width, with walls thick and strong to contain the heat of more than 2,100° Fahrenheit needed to smelt iron. Unlike other furnaces that required workers to force air into them with bellows, these were designed to suck air in, then out through a chimney, no human labor required. This would have made it significantly easier to produce the iron, which was fashioned into hoes, axes, and arrowheads.

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An Estonian newspaper recently revealed that a British soldier disobeyed a direct order to remove the SIM card from his cellphone before being deployed to a part of Estonia, approximately 90 miles west of the Russian border.

As a result of his refusal to engage in this element of operational security (opsec), the soldier, Daniel Barton-Kennedy, had his phone hacked, and nude photos of himself were stolen and used as blackmail against him.

Eventually, Barton-Kennedy was court-martialed for disobeying a lawful command, pled guilty, was reduced in rank, and ordered to serve 10 months in detention.

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A man in his 20s showed up to a UK hospital with the hilt of a knife sticking out of his face. The 15 mm-wide blade hidden within went completely through his right eye and through his brain, with the tip of the blade hitting the top of his skull.

Despite the ghastly injury, the man was alive and conscious when he arrived. He could still talk and move all four limbs. His doctors described him as being in a state of agitation. On the Glasgow Coma Scale, he scored a 12 (E3 V4 M5), indicating a "moderate" brain injury, just one point above "mild." He could open his left eye when told, but otherwise kept it closed (E3 score); he could talk and answer questions, but was confused (V4); and he intentionally moved away when pressure was applied to his body (M5).

In a report published Friday in BMJ Case Report, his doctors said they were concerned that in his confused, agitated state he may try to pull the knife out on his own. So, they swiftly sedated and intubated him. They put him on prophylactic treatments for bacterial infections, including tetanus. Then they used images to see what was going on in his head.

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Several tanker ships linked to Iran have been loitering over subsea Internet cables in the Gulf of Oman near the Strait of Hormuz—a possible indication that the Iranian government is preparing to attack such undersea infrastructure in response to any renewed US and Israeli strikes.

The movements of three sanctioned tankers and an Iranian fishing boat have been tracked near major undersea cables by the maritime intelligence firm Windward in October, according to the Financial Times. Six active cables currently cross through the contested Strait of Hormuz, linking the Middle East to Europe, Africa and Asia, with two more cables having segments under construction in the region.

Four countries, including Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar, depend entirely upon such subsea telecommunications connections running through the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint to link with the outside world. But other countries also depend heavily on the region's undersea cable network—one third of India’s westbound Internet traffic goes through the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.

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Many people are not big fans of game publisher EA right now for good reason, but for those who remember a better time in the 1990s, there's a little good news. Twenty-five classic games from that EA era have been lightly remastered and updated, then placed for sale on Steam and GOG, including several Wing Commander games and nearly the entire Ultima series.

Below is the full list of remastered or re-released games:

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Blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said that hackers have obtained sensitive personal information—including names, usernames, password hashes, and live tokens—for all of its users following a breach of its network security.

The accomplishment could be a major coup for the attackers. Both Chainalysis and public sources have revealed a long list of high-profile customers, including government agencies such as the FBI, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and the US Air Force, as well as private companies such as Microsoft, Coinbase, and Barclays. It's unclear if the data theft exposed customers to additional threats.

We regret to inform you...

Last Friday, Chainalysis said it had been the target of a cybersecurity incident in October that was similar to the hacks of other platforms during the same month. The external actor used AI agent-assisted offensive techniques to gain unauthorized access to Chainalysis systems and internal tools. An email the company sent to affected customers said some “non-sensitive customer data, such as user IDs, full names, email addresses, and organization role labels for users provisioned on our platform were accessed.” It's not clear why the company considered such information "non-sensitive."

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In the Grand Canyon, there is a line in the rock where time seems to have gone missing. Ancient crystalline rocks mark its bottom, while sandstones laid down as life started to diversify during the Cambrian explosion mark the top. “It’s called the Great Unconformity, and it’s a gap in the geologic record,” says Nicolas Flament, a geoscientist at the University of Wollongong, Australia. "This gap can be anywhere between 200 million years, which is not that impressive, to more than a billion years.”

In a recent Nature study, Flament and his colleague Santosh Dhungana argue that this gap was carved with help from deep within the planet. According to their models, slow currents of hot rock in Earth's mantle pushed entire continents up for hundreds of millions of years, letting glaciers grind them down and then let them sink, allowing fresh sediments to bury the scar. The largest hole in the rock record might be a fingerprint of processes happening deep in the planet's interior.

Ice and sea

The oldest sediments resting on the Great Unconformity in North America are between 635 and 482 million years old. Geologists have traced it across most of North America and parts of northern Europe and northern China. “Something seems to have happened, in particular in North America,” Flament says.

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A shipment of Nvidia hardware valued at $11.4 million vanished in transport between Oakland and Texas over the summer, and more than two months later, police have announced no arrests or recovery of the cargo.

As reported by The Mercury News, six pallets of unknown Nvidia equipment left Oakland on August 29 on a truck bound for Fort Worth, Texas. The hardware was reportedly picked up as scheduled by a truck bearing the logo of a food transportation company before vanishing off the grid. The theft wasn't noticed until early September, when the buyers realized that the shipment had never been received. Police attempting to trace the truck's route found it had made several multi-hour stops after picking up the hardware before losing the truck somewhere in San Bernardino County, California.

Oakland police confirmed that there was a grand theft report filed on September 13 and that the investigation remains ongoing. Authorities have not said what Nvidia hardware was stolen or exactly how the theft was carried out.

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Some Roku OS users have been sad to learn that their favorite screensaver will no longer be available as of December 1.

This week, affected users reported receiving an alert on their device that they will not be able to use the “Aquatic Life” screensaver after this month, as first reported by Cord Cutters News.

The screensaver has been an option for Roku OS users for 10 years. Roku has been licensing the animation, which is called the Marine Aquarium, from artist Jim Sachs through Prolific Publishing.

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While you might be pondering whether to replace a smartphone with one that has a slightly better camera or a second screen, the Federal Aviation Administration is planning a much bigger leap in technology for the country's air traffic control system.

The FAA said yesterday that it will stop using floppy disks as part of a long-awaited upgrade that will give air traffic controllers faster access to data needed for crucial safety alerts. The new Enterprise Information Display System (E-IDS) will be installed in 435 facilities, replacing several information display systems dating to the 1980s.

The FAA "is continuing its historic modernization of America’s air traffic control system by replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system," the agency said. E-IDS will be "deployed to operational control positions at more than 400 facilities across all air traffic control domains," and "provide operationally essential information for controlling aircraft," the FAA said.

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Those of us missing the John Wick universe can take heart, because Chad Stahelski—who created that franchise—is coming back early next year with a new dystopian action film. It's called Karōshi (a Japanese term that means "death overwork"), and Lionsgate released a killer trailer that puts this film at the top of my list of "must see" movies of 2027.

Dying from working too hard is a very real phenomenon, not just in Japan and much of Asia, but also in Sweden. The physical cause is usually stress-related heart attacks or strokes, as well as suicide (karōjisatsu in Japan). Writer/director Takashi Doscher has transported that concept to a grim, futuristic corporate Manhattan, specifically a company called Ikigai Technologies. Per the official premise:

Karōshi is an action-thriller set in a near-future Manhattan, where corporate loyalty and cultural tradition have reshaped everyday life. When a mysterious outsider infiltrates a powerful company after a worker’s death, he exposes the violent system hidden beneath its polished surface.

Teo Yoo (Past Lives) stars as the aptly named Hiro, who is clearly out for vengeance against the offending corporation. The cast also includes Takehiro Hira, so memorable in the 2024 miniseries Shōgun, as well as Giancarlo Esposito, Cynthia Erivo, Bill Camp, Richard Harmon, Isabel May, and Show Kasamatsu.

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There are optimistic plans for spaceflight, and then there are optimistic plans.

AST SpaceMobile is a Texas-based, publicly traded company building very large satellites to provide direct-to-cell communications on Earth. But it has been having trouble finding rides to space. So on Friday, AST announced that it is developing a medium-lift rocket, named Blacklift, which will have the capacity to lift 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. Oh, and the company said it would start launching commercially in late 2028.

"The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owner's economics in the industry," said Abel Avellan, founder, chairman, and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a news release.

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After weeks of backlash—and a failed attempt to quell it—Meta has indefinitely delayed plans to update its commercial terms and require Meta Business account users to allow extensive AI training on external websites linked on Facebook.

"We're pausing the ‌changes ⁠as we continue to engage with stakeholders and ​take ​our ⁠time to get this right. ​In the ​meantime, ⁠our existing terms remain in ⁠effect," a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.

Soon after Meta notified business account holders of the upcoming changes, legal experts warned Nieman Lab that the vague language could allow the company to ignore scraping preferences specified in robots.txt files and exhaustively crawl vast amounts of off-Facebook content for AI training. Since virtually every news publisher has a Facebook page, Nieman Lab sounded the alarm that Meta could potentially avoid millions in licensing fees if the TOS update happened as planned.

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An infant in Wisconsin has died of measles, the first measles death in the state since 1990, officials reported Thursday. The death comes amid an outbreak in the Badger State that has stricken over 430 people across 13 counties this year.

"Any death of a child is a tragedy, and even more so when it is related to a vaccine-preventable disease," Wisconsin Health Secretary Kirsten Johnson said in a statement. "Measles can cause serious illness and death, and it is important for all Wisconsinites to evaluate their risk and take steps to protect themselves and their family."

The baby's death is the third measles fatality nationally just this week, following the death of a New York child reported on Monday and another death in Pennsylvania reported on Wednesday. The Pennsylvania death was of an unvaccinated person in Jefferson County; the state health department did not provide additional details, such as the age of the person. The state's explosive, ongoing measles outbreak has led to 1,467 cases so far this year.

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Yesterday, when reporting on emerging efforts to pipe the console version of GTA VI through a PC's DLSS-powered Nvidia GPU, we mentioned in passing that PC players could instead just wait for the AI-assisted decompilation port that will no doubt be coming in short order. Now, a former Rockstar tech director says he thinks that exact threat could cause the developer to work faster on the official PC version of its soon-to-release crime/lifestyle simulator.

Obbe Vermeij hasn't worked at Rockstar since 2009, but in a new interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, he recalled how artists for the PC version of the original top-down Grand Theft Auto were incensed when the console version squashed the game's 256-color textures down to 16 colors for the PS1 release.

"So it always has been that sort of awkward relationship between PC and the console," Vermeij said. "So in those days, it was like PC first and then console second, even though that didn't really make much sense for the sales, because the PlayStation versions sold way better."

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Apple's new MacBook Pro is expensive as hell.

Let's get that out there right away, because for a lot of people, it will be the only thing that matters. As with so many things in life, though, you get what you pay for. There's no questioning the quality of the laptop's display or most of its other hardware components.

But should you buy it? Well, that's a complicated question in 2026.

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Top Republican lawmakers have asked Jensen Huang to appear before Congress to answer questions after it was reported that US intelligence officials believe Nvidia’s chief executive has been targeted by a Chinese spying operation.

The chairs of the House committees on China, foreign affairs, and intelligence wrote to Huang this week asking him to appear before a joint closed-door briefing for their committees on November 18.

“Recent reports raise significant national security concerns regarding the People’s Republic of China’s access to sensitive US technology and information,” representatives John Moolenaar, Brian Mast, and Rick Crawford wrote.

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Elon’s Edsel is no more. Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed on social media that his car company is ending its failed attempt to wrest control of the American pickup truck market. The Cybertruck will cease production in the middle of 2027, liberating that space in Tesla’s cavernous factory for other uses—more Cybercabs, most likely.

Musk first revealed the Cybertruck in late 2019, back when Tesla was still trading at a theoretically understandable price-to-earning ratio. The pickup's unusual angular shape owed more to low-res video game models than any concessions to practicality. At the time, Musk made fanciful claims that the truck would use a stainless steel monocoque construction, telling his audience that “the body and bed don’t do anything useful” on a normal truck. While some race cars use carbon-fiber monocoques for strength and lightness, making a pickup truck with a stainless steel monocoque chassis would only make sense if someone had an awful lot of stainless steel lying around and needed something to do with it all.

The truck was supposed to go on sale for less than $40,000, and Tesla made its usual stratospheric sales predictions that (had they been accurate) the bare metal EVs would be as ubiquitous as the Model 3 and Y.

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Welcome to Edition 9.18 of the Rocket Report! Blue Origin packed a lot of news into one afternoon Thursday with the reveal of a new kick stage for the New Glenn rocket, a new rocket engine design, and the minor and widely expected delay for New Glenn's return-to-flight mission from December until January. The reconstruction of Blue Origin's wrecked launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, continues apace after a catastrophic explosion nearly six months ago. There's a lot of pent-up demand from NASA, Amazon, and the Space Force for Blue Origin to get New Glenn back in action.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

SpaceX vets work on water-fed propulsion. Three brothers who worked at SpaceX in the Falcon 9 era are now building satellites that run on water, a potentially harvestable resource on the Moon and found all over the Solar System, Ars reports. In late 2022, the three Carlisle brothers founded Argo Space to build infrastructure in space. Their vision was not just in-space transportation but also removing the need to use propellants from Earth to move around the heavens. Argo Space's satellites will use water not only as a propellant, but also as a coolant and radiation shield.

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket on Thursday, reducing the cost of manufacturing the vehicle and expanding its capacity for payload delivery to geostationary orbit and the Moon.

With these upgrades, the company aims to eventually position New Glenn to launch more than 1,000 times a year.

"There has never been higher demand for launch, ever," Dave Limp, chief executive officer of Blue Origin, said during the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.

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