NASA has announced a date for the second wet dress rehearsal for the SLS rocket that will send a crew of astronauts on a voyage around the moon in the highly anticipated Artemis II mission.

The space agency also confirmed that the earliest the rocket could launch is Friday, March 6.

NASA is now targeting Thursday, February 19, for the fueling part of the wet dress rehearsal at the Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida.

The rehearsal is a key part of flight preparation and involves engineers fueling the rocket and going through the entire launch procedure short of actually igniting the engines.

During the first Artemis II rehearsal at the start of this month, engineers spotted a hydrogen leak at the base of the SLS rocket, prompting the team to ditch the target launch date of February 8 while it addressed the issue.

NASA said that it will only announce a new target launch date once the results of the second wet dress rehearsal have been fully assessed, but said the rocket would not lift off before March 6.

“The wet dress rehearsal will run the launch team as well as supporting teams through a full range of operations, including loading cryogenic liquid propellant into the SLS rocket’s tanks, conducting a launch countdown, demonstrating the ability to recycle the countdown clock, and draining the tanks to practice scrub procedures,” NASA said in a post on its website on Monday.

It added that the launch controllers will arrive at their consoles in the Launch Control Center at Kennedy at 6:40 p.m. ET on Tuesday to start the nearly 50-hour countdown. The simulated launch time is 8:30 p.m. on Thursday.

The Artemis II mission will send NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, and Christina Koch, together with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen, on a 10-day flight around the moon aboard the Orion spacecraft. It’ll be the first crewed lunar-bound flight since the final Apollo mission in 1972.

The mission will test the spacecraft’s systems and deep-space operations to validate them for future crewed moon missions and lunar landings.

As TechRadar’s resident 4K Blu-ray tester, I’ve seen a ton of excellent 4K discs and reviewed them as part of my Blu-ray Bounty feature.

I recently wrote about my favorite six 4K ‘classic movies’. These are the movies from the Golden Age of Hollywood that benefitted hugely from the picture and audio restoration that 4K Blu-ray can provide.

• First PCIe 6.0 SSD reaches market availability for hyperscale AI environments
• Micron 9650 targets AI inference with up to 28GBps sequential reads
• Storage performance shifts toward accelerator-fed data pipelines in hyperscale data centers

Micron has declared its 9650 NVMe SSD has entered mass production, making it the first PCIe 6.0 SSD on the market, although the customer list is likely to be limited to hyperscalers and giant AI data center operators rather than everyday enterprise buyers.

The drive arrives as storage architecture adapts to support AI inference workloads that need faster and more predictable data access.

One night not long ago, Jaxon Roman sat naked in front of his laptop wearing only a pup hood as he masturbated with single-minded zeal to the attention of eight other men watching onscreen.

It was a typical weekday for the 33-year-old Arlington, Virginia, program analyst. “When bros praise me and say they’re enjoying [me], I get to that edge point so fast,” Roman says. His favorite instances are “when they all come to what I’m doing.” Sometimes, when he’s feeling especially kinky, Roman, who is bisexual, likes to ask for permission before climaxing. When granted, he releases and his body, he says, shakes for 10 seconds. “Pure bliss,” he calls it.

At least a few times a month on Batemates, a social app for men who like to masturbate with other men, Roman will spend an hour online with his bros. Masturbating—or “bating” as it’s known online—has always helped him relieve stress and find his center.

He’s not the only one. Pitched as an “all-in-one platform designed to embrace bating as a lifestyle, together,” Batemates is the newest haven of queer pleasure. “It’s a community of like-minded people who are just trying to be porn for others, virtually, while watching others pleasure themselves,” Roman says. “Group play with hotties around the world. What’s not to like?”

Though Batemates technically launched in October 2024, it wasn’t until last year that it really started to catch on as a viable—and safe—alternative to other online bator platforms.

Nearly all of the bators WIRED spoke to said they were introduced to the lifestyle in 2020, during Covid, because, as one of them put it, “there was nothing else to do.” Gone were the days of the discreet sauna circle jerk. Instead, men flocked to private video channels on Skype and Zoom for digital jam sessions where they communally bated with other men from around the world via the portal of their laptop screens. During this period, virtual sessions got so popular that they would occasionally max out with more than 100 people in a single room.

Everything changed last year. Skype was shut down in May. Zoom sessions started getting reported more often. (“Sensitive content,” including porn, nudity, and “other content intended to cause sexual arousal” is prohibited according to the company’s acceptable use guidelines; Zoom did not respond to a request for comment.) Some queer bators have since decamped to Teams, Microsoft’s chat and video-conferencing app; others rely on chat forums like BateWorld—a Reddit-style platform for all things male masturbation that is arguably the most popular destination for bators—as well as Discord, Telegram, and Reddit to find bros to bond with.

Batemates emerged as an exciting replacement. “All the corporate tools were just banning us,” says Batemates founder Johan Guams. “As members of the LGBTQ+ community, we had no space. I was really upset about the hypocrisy of the situation, especially when this is something everybody does.”

Batemates wants to put an end to the corporate sanctimony around adult content. It’s an ethos the company has even woven into its branding. A recent ad posted on X makes clear: “Your friends. Your boss. Your coach. Your colleague. Everyone bates.”

Microsoft declined to comment, but according to both its digital safety policy and its terms of use, “any images, videos, audio, text, or links that depict or imply nudity, sexual acts, sexual arousal, or sexual violence” are prohibited on Teams.

Though Guams, who is 31 and from Paris, was also a regular in various Zoom bating sessions during the pandemic, he often left them wanting more. “I was like, OK, I masturbate on Zoom, but I don’t know who these people are. There’s no control. I can’t keep in touch with them. Sometimes you find crazy people. The experience just felt complicated.”

Dr Vivek Soundararajan of the University of Bath discusses how learning and training is changing for future employees in the wake of AI advancement.

For a long time, the deal for a wide range of careers has been simple enough. Entry-level workers carried out routine tasks in return for mentorship, skill development and a clear path towards expertise.

The arrangement meant that employers had affordable labour, while employees received training and a clear career path. Both sides benefitted.

But now that bargain is breaking down. AI is automating the grunt work – the repetitive, boring but essential tasks that juniors used to do and learn from.

And the consequences are hitting both ends of the workforce. Young workers cannot get a foothold. Older workers are watching the talent pipeline run dry.

For example, one study suggests that between late 2022 and July 2025, entry-level employment in the US in AI-exposed fields like software development and customer service declined by roughly 20pc. Employment for older workers in the same sectors grew.

And that pattern makes sense. AI currently excels at administrative tasks – things like data entry or filing. But it struggles with nuance, judgement and plenty of other skills which are hard to codify.

So experience and the accumulation of those skills become a buffer against AI displacement. Yet if entry-level workers never get the chance to build that experience, the buffer never forms.

This matters for organisations too. Researchers using a huge amount of data about work in the US described the way that professional skills develop over time, by likening career paths to the structure of a tree.

General skills (communication, critical thinking, problem-solving) form the trunk, and then specialised skills branch out from there.

Their key finding was that wage premiums for specialised skills depend almost entirely on having those strong general foundational skills underneath. Communication and critical thinking capabilities are not optional extras – they are what make advanced skills valuable.

The researchers also found that workers who lack access to foundational skills can become trapped in career paths with limited upward mobility: what they call “skill entrapment”. This structure has become more pronounced over the past two decades, creating what the researchers described as “barriers to upward job mobility”.

But if AI is eliminating the entry-level positions where those foundations were built, who develops the next generation of experts? If AI can do the junior work better than the actual juniors, senior workers may stop delegating altogether.

Researchers call this a “training deficit“. The junior never learns, and the pipeline breaks down.

Uneven disruption

But the disruption will not hit everyone equally. It has been claimed, for example, that women face nearly three times the risk of their jobs being replaced with AI compared to men.

This is because women are generally more likely to be in clerical and administrative roles, which are among the most exposed to AI-driven transformation. And if AI closes off traditional routes into skilled work, the effects are unlikely to be evenly distributed.

So what can be done? Well, just because the old pathway deal between junior and senior human workers is broken, does not mean that a new one cannot be built.

Young workers now need to learn what AI cannot replace in terms of knowledge, judgement and relationships. They need to seek (and be provided with) roles which involve human interaction, rather than just screen-based tasks. And if traditional entry-level jobs are disappearing, they need to look for structured programmes that still offer genuine skill development.

Older workers meanwhile, can learn a lot from younger workers about AI and technology. The idea of mentorship can be flipped, with juniors teaching about new tools, while seniors provide guidance and teaching on nuance and judgement.

And employers need to resist the urge to cut out junior staff. They should keep delegating to those staff – even when AI can do the job more quickly. Entry level roles can be redesigned rather than eliminated. For ultimately, if juniors are not getting trained, there will be no one to hand over to.

Protecting the pipeline of skilled and valuable employees is in everyone’s interest. Yes, some forms of expertise will matter less in the age of AI, which is disorienting for people who may have invested years in developing them.

But expertise is not necessarily about storing information. It is also about refined judgement being applied to complex situations. And that remains valuable.

By Dr Vivek Soundararajan

Dr Vivek Soundararajan is a professor of work and equality at the University of Bath. He conducts research on the governance of labour rights in supply chains, inequalities in and around organisations and the future of work. He leads a research initiative called Embed-Dignity and acts as a deputy director of the Centre for Business, Organisations and Society (CBOS) at the University of Bath.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.