In 1969, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon's surface ' a momentous engineering and science feat marked by his iconic words: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Now, NASA is making history again. With the successful launch of NASA's Artemis II mission yesterday, four astronauts are set to become the first humans to travel to the moon in more than 50 years. In 2022, the uncrewed Artemis I mission demonstrated that NASA's new Orion spacecraft could travel farther into space than ever before and return safely to Earth. Building on that success, the 10-day Artemis II mission will pave the way for future Artemis missions, which aim to land astronauts on the moon to prepare for a lasting lunar presence, and eventually human missions to Mars. As it orbits the moon, the Orion spacecraft will carry an optical (laser) communications system developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Called the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), the system is capable of higher-bandwidth data transmissions from space compared to traditional radio-frequency (RF) systems. During the Artemis II mission, O2O will use laser beams to send high-resolution video and images of the lunar surface down to Earth....

Good day & happy Thursday! Today, all eyes are on Mastercard, which clearly wants to be the toll road for AI shopping (what their recent partnerships and announcments actually mean & why this could be huge + bonus deep dive into Google's UCP, OpenAI's Super App ambitions, and the analysis of Mastercard's latest financials inside), and Bermuda that's now a laboratory for onchain finance (what Coinbase & Circle are trying to do and why it's one of the most interesting experiments in FinTech + bonus deep dives into Coinbase & Circle inside). So let's jump straight into the interesting stuff '' That's exactly why payments giant Mastercard MA 0.00%' just announced it's joining Google's Universal Commerce Protocol while simultaneously integrating its Agent Pay product into Microsoft's Copilot Checkout and OpenAI's Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. The company is also refocusing Start Path, its decade-old startup accelerator, on AI commerce ventures. On the surface, this looks like a payments giant doing routine partnership deals. Look closer, and you'll see a company making an aggressive bet on who captures value when machines start spending money....

For centuries, humans have sought to study the stars and celestial bodies, whether through observations made by naked eye or by telescopes on the ground and in space that can view the universe across nearly the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Each view unlocks new information about the denizens of space ' X-ray pulsars, gamma-ray bursts ' but one is still missing: the low-frequency radio sky. Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the MIT Haystack Observatory, and Lowell Observatory are working on a NASA-funded concept study called the Great Observatory for Long Wavelengths, or GO-LoW, that outlines a method to view the universe at as-of-yet unseen low frequencies using a constellation of thousands of small satellites. The wavelengths of these frequencies are 15 meters to several kilometers in length, which means they require a very big telescope in order to see clearly. "GO-LoW will be a new kind of telescope, made up of many thousands of spacecraft that work together semi-autonomously, with limited input from Earth," says Mary Knapp, the principal investigator for GO-LoW at the MIT Haystack Observatory. "GO-LoW will allow humans to see the universe in a new light, opening up one of the very last frontiers in the electromagnetic spectrum."...

If you were to revisit photos of Howard Berg's cramped Harvard lab, where the details of bacterial chemotaxis were first worked out, or Sydney Brenner's Cambridge lab, where they cracked the genetic code, you'd recognize almost everything you saw. In both, glass bottles of reagents, racks of disposable plastic tips, and half-empty boxes of parafilm wrap cluttered the benches. pH meters dangled coils of cords next to old Gilson pipettes, resting on their sides. Ice buckets held a jumble of tubes, labels fading into illegibility. A tabletop centrifuge hummed in the corner, its brushed-metal body dented from hard use. Even the smell, if you could step inside the frame, would be familiar ' likely a faint mix of ethanol and agar. People commonly point to this seeming stagnation in laboratory design while opining on how laboratories of the future ought to look. We clearly need to update our equipment, especially as AI and computational tools advance. But in many respects, the fact that our scientific devices haven't changed much in the past 50 years also speaks to their tremendous ingenuity and versatility....