The parent company of X, formerly known as Twitter, argued in a federal suit that the law referred to as AB 587 violates its free speech rights.

“The true intent of AB 587 is to pressure social media platforms to eliminate certain constitutionally-protected content viewed by the State as problematic,” the suit contended.

“The state is compelling social media companies to take public positions on controversial and politically charged issues.”

The suit railed against the law, which requires social media companies to publicly post policies regarding hate speech, disinformation, harassment and extremism on their platforms, and report data on their enforcement of the policies.

“California will not stand by as social media is weaponized to spread hate and disinformation that threaten our communities and foundational values as a country,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said when he signed the bill into law a year ago.

“Californians deserve to know how these platforms are impacting our public discourse, and this action brings much-needed transparency and accountability to the policies that shape the social media content we consume every day.” Musk early this week said he is considering suing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a leading anti-hate group, arguing that its accusations of anti-Semitism have led X to lose revenue.

Musk accused the US-based Jewish organization of making unfounded complaints against him and X that have scared away advertisers.

“Advertisers avoid controversy, so all that is needed for ADL to crush our US & European ad revenue is to make unfounded accusations,” Musk wrote in a long X thread that started with a clarification that he favors free speech but is “against anti-Semitism of any kind.” In a 2016 report, the ADL said anti-Semitic attacks against journalists had exploded on Twitter, “thanks to the rhetoric in the 2016 presidential campaign.” It accused the social network of failing to control its “trolling problem.” Billionaire Musk has been accused of fueling anti-Semitic tropes, including attacks against Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

According to the ADL and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), problematic and racist speech has sharply risen on X since Musk completed his $44 billion takeover in October.

Since then, the Tesla boss has fired thousands of the platform’s employees, cut content moderation and reinstated former president Donald Trump’s account.

This colossal bubble spans a billion light-years, dwarfing our galaxy 10,000 times in size.

Named "Ho'oleilana" (meaning "sent murmurs of awakening" in Hawaiian), this bubble is like a spherical shell with a heart, containing the Bootes super cluster of galaxies surrounded by a vast void known as "the Great Nothing." It also encompasses other known galaxy super clusters, including the Sloan Great Wall.

The discovery, described in The Astrophysical Journal, confirms a phenomenon first proposed by cosmologist Jim Peebles in 1970. Peebles theorized that in the early universe, sound waves created bubbles in a hot plasma soup shortly after the Big Bang. These bubbles froze in shape about 380,000 years after the Big Bang as the universe cooled down and then expanded as the universe grew.

This bubble, although the first of its kind to be identified, may not be the last. The Euclid space telescope, launched by Europe in July, and massive radio telescopes like the Square kilometre Array, being built in South Africa and Australia, could potentially reveal more such cosmic bubbles in the universe.

The significance of this discovery lies in the window it provides into the early universe and the formation of cosmic structures. Understanding these ancient remnants helps astronomers piece together the puzzle of how our universe evolved over billions of years, ultimately leading to the galaxy-rich cosmos we observe today.

Ho'oleilana stands as a testament to the endless wonders of the universe, waiting to be uncovered by the curious minds of scientists exploring the cosmos.

The launch of the HII-A rocket from Tanegashima Space Center in southwestern Japan was shown on live video by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, known as JAXA.“We have a liftoff,” the narrator at JAXA said as the rocket flew up in a burst of smoke then flew over the Pacific.

Thirteen minutes after the launch, the rocket put into orbit around Earth a satellite called the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, which will measure the speed and makeup of what lies between galaxies.

That information helps in studying how celestial objects were formed, and hopefully can lead to solving the mystery of how the universe was created, JAXA says.

In cooperation with NASA, JAXA will look at the strength of light at different wavelengths, the temperature of things in space and their shapes and brightness.

David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute at Rice University, believes the mission is significant for delivering insight into the properties of hot plasma, or the superheated matter that makes up much of the universe.

Plasmas have the potential to be used in various ways, including healing wounds, making computer chips and cleaning the environment.

“Understanding the distribution of this hot plasma in space and time, as well as its dynamical motion, will shed light on diverse phenomena such as black holes, the evolution of chemical elements in the universe and the formation of galactic clusters,” Alexander said.

Also aboard the latest Japanese rocket is the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, a lightweight lunar lander. The Smart Lander won’t make lunar orbit for three or four months after the launch and would likely attempt a landing early next year, according to the space agency.

JAXA is developing “pinpoint landing technology” to prepare for future lunar probes and landing on other planets. While landings now tend to be off by about 10 kilometers (6 miles) or more, the Smart Lander is designed to be more precise, within about 100 meters (330 feet) of the intended target, JAXA official Shinichiro Sakai told reporters ahead of the launch.That allows the box-shaped gadgetry to find a safer place to land.

The move comes at a time when the world is again turning to the challenge of going to the moon. Only four nations have successfully landed on the moon, the US, Russia, China and India.

Last month, India landed a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole. That came just days after Russia failed in its attempt to return to the moon for the first time in nearly a half century. A Japanese private company, called ispace, crashed a lander in trying to land on the moon in April.

Japan’s space program has been marred by recent failures. In February, the H3 rocket launch was aborted for a glitch. Liftoff a month later succeeded, but the rocket had to be destroyed after its second stage failed to ignite properly.
Japan has started recruiting astronaut candidates for the first time in 13 years, making clear its ambitions to send a Japanese to the moon.

Going to the moon has fascinated humankind for decades. Under the US Apollo program, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969.

The last NASA human mission to the moon was in 1972, and the focus on sending humans to the moon appeared to wane, with missions being relegated to robots.

Microsoft plans to no longer update Wordpad but instead to remove feature from future Windows updates. Users will be recommended Microsoft Word in the future for a better experience.

“WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows,” reads a support note published by Microsoft. “We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt.”

The announcement of the removal came just after Microsoft updated Microsoft Notepad with autosave and automatic restoral of tabs.

WordPad was introduced in Windows 95 and was last updated with Windows 7’s Ribbon UI, but didn't receive any changes besides a slight design change in Windows 8.

The astronauts, members of the Crew-6 mission run jointly by NASA and SpaceX, departed the space station on Sunday at 7:05 am ET. The crew spent the day aboard the 13-foot-wide Crew Dragon vehicle as it maneuvered through Earth’s orbit and toward its target landing site off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, where they landed after midnight ET.

The Crew Dragon capsule was traveling at more than 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour), and as it began the final leg of its descent, the spacecraft’s exterior heated up to about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius) while it sliced back into the thickest part of Earth’s atmosphere. Inside the spacecraft cabin, the passengers were protected by a heat shield and the temperature should’ve stayed at comfortable temperatures well below 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees Celsius).

The capsule then deployed sets of parachutes to further slow its descent. Rescue crews waiting near the splash down site are prepared to haul the spacecraft out of the ocean and onto a special boat, called the “Dragon’s nest,” where final safety checks will take place before the crew can disembark.

Before the astronauts left the space station, NASA said that it had been monitoring the impact of Hurricane Idalia, which made landfall Wednesday morning on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The storm pummeled northern Florida before tearing through southern Georgia and into the Carolinas.

The four astronauts that make up the Crew-6 team include NASA astronauts Stephen Bowen and Warren “Woody” Hoburg, as well as Sultan Alneyadi, the second astronaut from the United Arab Emirates to travel to space, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.

The group spent six months on board the orbiting laboratory after launching to the station in March. Over the past week, the Crew-6 astronauts worked to welcome and hand over operations to Crew-7 team members, who arrived at the space station on August 27.

During their stint in space, the Crew-6 astronauts were slated to oversee more than 200 science and tech projects.

“We got a lot done during our mission,” Hoburg said during a remote news conference with the astronauts on August 23. “We had two visiting SpaceX cargo vehicles — the CRS-27 and 28 missions with lots of science on board. And we, as a crew, conducted a total of three spacewalks.”

During their stay, the Crew-6 astronauts also hosted the Axiom Mission 2 crew, a group of one former NASA astronaut and three paying customers that included an American businessman and two astronauts from Saudi Arabia. That flight was part of a plan to fly tourists and other paying customers regularly to the International Space Station, as NASA has sought to increase the amount of commercial activity in low-Earth orbit.

“It’s been a big adventure and a lot of fun,” Hoburg added.