Astrobotic engineers went all out on their Chakram prototypes, doing a series of hot-fire tests that dwarfed anything previously done with this type of hardware. Two rotating detonation engines together clocked over 470 seconds of operation throughout eight runs at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, one of which lasted a whole 300 seconds without any hitches, and the entire time each engine delivered a solid 4,000 pounds of thrust as steady as can be.

These tests were conducted a few weeks ago and completed on a shoestring budget of just $1.5 million dollars. Every significant firing met the mark for a steady working temperature exactly, and when the crew disassembled the hardware for a thorough inspection later on, they couldn’t locate a single inch of obvious damage. This lot was put together by a small group of designers and builders with the help of two NASA contracts and a direct arrangement with the Marshall Center, and if you ask me, they’ve done far more than expected.

LEGO Technic NASA Artemis Space Launch System Rocket Building Toy for Boys & Girls – STEM Learning…

• BUILD AN OFFICIAL NASA ROCKET – Kids prepare to explore outer space with the LEGO Technic NASA Artemis Space Launch System Rocket (42221) building…
• 3-STAGE ROCKET SEPARATION – Young builders can turn the hand crank to watch the rocket separate in 3 distinct stages: solid rocket boosters, core…
• STEM BUILDING TOY FOR KIDS – This educational rocket kit was created in collaboration with NASA and ESA to showcase the authentic system that will…

Rotating detonation engines operate on a simple but powerful concept: mix your fuel and oxidizer in a ring-shaped chamber, fire it up, and then send a shockwave around in circles at supersonic speed, squeezing as much energy out of the propellant as possible. As a result, you get improved efficiency, lighter hardware, and the ability to carry a lot more payload or drive a long distance on one tank.

Astrobotic believes this technology will be very useful on its upcoming lunar landers, as the business has already contracted with NASA to send cargo to the Moon, and its next lander, Griffin, is scheduled to launch this year. Adding a Chakram engine to future landers could allow them to carry greater mass to the lunar surface or remain in orbit for longer periods of time. It also appears that the concept would fit in well with the company’s work on reusable rockets and orbital cargo ships that would transport stuff between Earth and Moon.

Next, the team plans to install regenerative cooling channels to allow the engine to run for longer periods of time without overheating. They’ll also work on a mechanism to adjust the thrust during flight, and as the design progresses, they’ll seek to trim it down and make it lighter. Each tiny adjustment brings them closer to using this technology in real-world space missions.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The Hypergear 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Dock is meticulously engineered to reduce the cable clutter and streamline your daily routine. Featuring 2 dedicated wireless charging surfaces, you can power up your phone and AirPods easily. In addition, you can charge your Apple Watch with the built-in charger mount. Stylish and compact, the dock is perfect for your tabletop, desk, or nightstand and will effortlessly charge your everyday essentials in one convenient place. It’s on sale for $33.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

Silicon Valley tends to tolerate a certain amount of founder exaggeration when pitching investors, often dismissing it as part of selling a vision. But some choices cross the line and can lead to jail time for founders and scandal for their investors.

A case in point is Joseph Sanberg, whose once high-flying fintech startup Aspiration Partners was backed by a roster of tech celebrities, including former Microsoft CEO and current Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. In August 2025, Sanberg pleaded guilty to two counts of wire fraud and defrauding multiple investors and lenders, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a press release. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

Ahead of sentencing, which is scheduled for Monday, victims were invited to describe their experience with Sanberg to the judge. Ballmer did so, and publicly. Ballmer’s lawyers said in the letter that he has lost money, been vilified, and that the NBA is investigating allegations stemming from the association.

Sanberg co-founded green fintech startup Aspiration Partners, which offered what it called sustainable banking services like credit cards and investment products that avoided fossil fuels. The startup promised to “automatically plant trees with every card purchase.” In 2021, it announced plans to go public via a SPAC merger at a value of $2.3 billion, though that transaction never took place.

The DOJ alleged that Aspiration booked and recognized revenue from entities held by Sanberg, who made the company appear as if it had a steady stream of customers and revenue that it didn’t actually have. The agency further alleged he defrauded investors by showing them a fabricated letter from Aspiration’s audit committee that said the company had $250 million in available cash and equivalents when it had less than $1 million. The DOJ alleged that Sanberg, along with a board member who also pleaded guilty, falsified financial records to obtain $145 million in loans.

When Ballmer shared his letter on X, asking the judge to consider the harm done to him in sentencing, he wrote, “I was duped and feel silly about that. Everyone who believed in Aspiration, including employees, customers and investors, was also duped. Everyone is still tallying the losses.”

The letter says that Ballmer invested a total of $60 million in the company, and lost all of it. Ballmer was not only an investor, but had contracted with Aspiration to provide carbon-offsetting programs for the Clippers and its stadium. Aspiration also became a major Clippers sponsor.

The billionaire said in the letter that not only did he lose that money, his reputation was negatively affected. He used the letter to deny the reporting of a multi-part series from famed sports podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out that delved into the relationship between the Clippers and Aspiration. The podcast made allegations that Aspiration helped sidestep the salary cap for a star Clippers player. Ballmer’s lawyers called those allegations “misapprehension or intentional disregard of the facts,” in the letter.

Ballmer’s letter also said that as a result of the association with this company, the podcast and other public attention of it, he’s been named in lawsuits. Meanwhile, the NBA said in its own letter regarding Sanberg’s sentencing that it’s investigating the salary cap allegations and Sanberg has been providing evidence, ESPN reported.

While the basketball world is embroiled in all of these downstream developments, the message founders can take from it is clear: If one fabricates financial documents to raise capital, the outcome will very likely be prison.

The Ballmer Group did not respond to our request for comment.

Three very different worlds are waiting for you on Netflix this weekend. A 19th-century murder mystery that questions everything you think you know about guilt, a Danish Nordic noir serial killer thriller that you genuinely cannot stop watching, and a Japanese sumo drama that has absolutely no business being as gripping as it is.

One is based on a Margaret Atwood novel, the second has a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the third one will make you care deeply about a sport you have never thought about once in your life. All three are criminally underrated and worthy of your weekend binge.

We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.

Alias Grace (2017)

Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, this six-part miniseries follows Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant in 19th-century Canada, convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. A decade into her sentence, psychiatrist Dr. Simon Jordan begins interviewing her to determine whether she should be pardoned on grounds of insanity. The whole show rests on one central question: is Grace telling the truth?

Sarah Gadon plays Grace with such quiet, calculated control that you never quite know where you stand with her. She is fragile yet magnetic and possibly dangerous all at once. The show is also a sharp study of how women were perceived, judged, and silenced in that era. It holds a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and deserves every bit of it.

You can watch Alias Grace on Netflix.

The Chestnut Man (2021)

This is your perfect weekend watch because season 2 of The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek drops on Netflix on May 7. So you have just enough time to binge the first season before it arrives. This Danish crime thriller follows detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess as they hunt a serial killer in Copenhagen who leaves tiny chestnut figurines at each crime scene.

What makes the series so gripping is how the mystery keeps expanding in directions you do not see coming. The pacing is relentless, the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling, and the finale lands hard. With six episodes, a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, it is one of the best Nordic noir series Netflix has ever put out.

You can watch The Chestnut Man on Netflix.

Sanctuary (2023)

It’s baffling how little people talk about this hidden gem on Netflix. This Japanese drama follows Kiyoshi, a broke and reckless young man who stumbles into the world of professional sumo wrestling, chasing money, only to find himself swallowed whole by its traditions, politics, and brutal hierarchy. Think Rocky, but set in one of Japan’s most sacred sporting institutions, with a dark comedy streak running through it.

The actual sumo matches are equal parts brutal and stunning. But what keeps you hooked on this underrated show is how it captures the culture around the sport, the rivalries between stables, the iron grip of tradition, and the political games played behind the scenes. It holds an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8/10 on IMDB. I recommend giving it two episodes before you judge the show.

You can watch Sanctuary on Netflix.

It’s about that time of year. National Pool Opening Day is tomorrow, April 25, and summer is almost here, which means pool owners everywhere are getting ready to unveil the horrors of whatever happened during the off-season. Most of the Beatbot lineup is on sale at Amazon and Beatbot’s own storefront, with prices starting at $499. Beatbot makes many of the best pool-cleaning robots we’ve tested, and we’ve highlighted our top picks below. Note that the discounts are scheduled to end on April 26, though items may sell out sooner. Happy pool party season! (Drop me an invite!)

Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra for $2,649 ($500 Off)

Our favorite robotic pool cleaner overall, the AquaSense 2 Ultra has what WIRED contributor Chris Null called “near-perfect cleaning capabilities.” It has six hours of battery life and AI-powered debris detection, and it can handle cleaning the floors, walls, and waterline. You’ll get a charging stand as well. Be aware that this cleaner weighs nearly 30 pounds, so be sure to eat your protein so you can lug it out of the water when the job is done. Even though it floats, it can still feel pretty hefty. The AI debris detection sets this model apart, as do the five cleaning brushes and frankly oversized battery capacity. If you want the fanciest pool cleaner we’ve tested, and you don’t want to pay full price, this deal is up your alley.

Beatbot Sora 30 for $749 ($200 off)

The Beatbot Sora 30 offers great value for the price. It tends to fluctuate between this discounted price and its full thousand-dollar MSRP, and we have yet to see it sell for less than it is right now. It has excellent battery life and more than enough power and features for daily pool cleaning needs for most users. It doesn’t have a surface skimmer—you might want the pricier Sora 70 (on sale for $1,200; $300 off) for that—but otherwise it’s capable of cleaning your pool floor, walls, and waterline. It’s easy to use with the companion app, and it floats when it’s done cleaning for easy retrieval. If you don’t need a surface skimmer or you don’t want to drop a ton of cash, this middle-of-the-road robot is worth considering.

Beatbot iSkim Ultra Robotic Pool Skimmer for $649 ($350 off)—Clip the Coupon

The best surface skimmer has sensors that prevent it from slamming into your pool walls while it cleans. Unlike many other robots in this category, it actually slows down and turns while it’s skimming. It does have a basket-eject button on the front that sometimes gets depressed by accident, though this might not be an issue depending on your pool shape, and it’s not so much a deal-breaker as it is a thing to be aware of. Snag this model if you want to keep the surface of your pool clean automatically, but you don’t mind manually cleaning the walls and floor.

More Beatbot Deals

Here are some more pool cleaner discounts for your perusal, on models with slight variations from those we recommend above.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

from the playing-favorites-with-religions dept

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Constitution to mandate the posting of a religious text in every classroom in Louisiana. This wasn’t about displaying an assortment of “foundational texts” as its defenders (disingenuously) claimed: It was about pushing their preferred religion on students by any means possible.

Last June, the Fifth Circuit exposed the hypocrisy of the mandate while upholding the lower court’s injunction blocking its enactment:

It is also unclear how H.B. 71 ensures that students in Louisiana public schools “understand and appreciate the foundational documents of [its] state and national government” when it makes displaying those “foundational” documents optional, and does not require that they also be printed in a large, easily readable font. La. R.S. § 17:2124(A)(9). When the Ten Commandments must be posted prominently and legibly, while the other “contextual” materials need not be visible at all, the disparity lays bare the pretext.

If only that had been the end of the story. Presumably, enough Fifth Circuit judges preferred to reach a different conclusion that the appellate court decided to take another look at it using its full slate of judges. Since this is the Fifth Circuit we’re talking about, you already know how that turned out.

This time, the majority pretended it was simply impossible to tell if this Louisiana law actually violated the Constitution. The only way to be sure was to let the state enact it first and allow the courts to deal with any rights violations after they’ve occurred. The injunction was lifted, with the majority claiming Supreme Court precedent (that hasn’t actually been overturned by the Supreme Court) is no longer valid when it comes to discussing possible Establishment Clause violations.

That same argument — that the three-prong test created by the Supreme Court in 1971’s Lemon v. Kurtzman, which dealt with another set of church/state separation issues. This is the test:

• The “Purpose Prong”: The statute must have a secular legislative purpose.
• The “Effect Prong”: The principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion.
• The “Entanglement Prong”: The statute must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.

While a handful of judges (you can guess which ones) have opined that the “Lemon test” is dead, having been “abrogated” by more recent decisions, the Supreme Court has never issued a ruling overturning it. In fact, elements of the test were still being applied more than 30 years later.

Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit — as it did earlier this year during its en banc review of the Louisiana law — says Lemon is dead [PDF] and, therefore, pretty much any law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms doesn’t violate the Constitution.

We conclude the Texas law does not violate either the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause. Here is a summary of our reasons.

First, the Establishment Clause. Plaintiffs primarily claim we are bound by Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) (per curiam), which invalidated a similar Kentucky law decades ago. We disagree. Stone applied an analysis—the “Lemon test”—which confounded courts for decades. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Mercifully, the Supreme Court jettisoned Lemon and its offspring some years ago. See Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist., 597 U.S. 507, 534 (2022) (recognizing the Court has “abandoned Lemon”). With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone.

After deciding Lemon (and Stone) no longer applies, the majority moves on to say even if it did, there would be no constitutional violation because:

No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin…

While it is true that the law makes no demands of teachers or students to do anything more than be in the same room as a Ten Commandments poster that “must be visible” to all students from up to 16 feet away, it’s quite obvious that this law is crafted to sneak a bit of the state’s preferred religion (at least in terms of those writing, supporting, and defending this law) past the protections of the Constitution.

It’s obvious from the statements they made while pushing this bill through the legislature. And it’s just as obvious now that the law has been given a free pass by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.”

“The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day,” he said.

Pretty bold to use the royal “our” to mandate a specific set of moral values be posted prominently in taxpayer-funded public schools. It’s even bolder when it directly contradicts the desires of prominent members of this particular religious community — something that was pointed out by the dissenting judges in Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the Louisiana Ten Commandments law:

Indeed, every faith-based organization before us—on behalf of thousands of members—and every clergy and devout plaintiff agree that Louisiana must not pick and post specific scripture that the state commands will confront children in state classrooms. All religious voices submitted to us, barring one individual, oppose Louisiana’s attempt to select, inculcate, and enforce this version of gospel text in compulsory public education.

The people with power are pushing religion on kids against the wishes of the clergy and “devout plaintiffs.”

There’s a dissent attached to this ruling as well. This one tackles the Fifth Circuit majority’s decision to rely twice on its presumption that Lemon is dead law to hand Bible-thumping legislators wins in two states:

In Van Orden, despite applying a historical approach instead of Lemon, the plurality cited Stone as a “limit[] to the display of religious messages or symbols” and “an example” of the Court’s “vigilan[ce] in monitoring compliance with the Establishment Clause in . . . schools.” “The placement of the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,” Van Orden explained, is “a far more passive use of those texts than was the case in Stone.” […] This is because “[t]he display [was] not on the grounds of a public school, where, given the impressionability of the young, government must exercise particular care in separating church and state.” Id. at 703 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (citing Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 592 (1992); Stone, 449 U.S. 39). And, unlike in Van Orden, “the text” of the Ten Commandments in Stone “confronted elementary school students every day.”

Van Orden recognized Stone’s viability, notwithstanding Lemon, given the special “concerns that arise in the context of public elementary and secondary schools.”

The Fifth Circuit majority — like the defendants whose unconstitutional law it has allowed to be enacted — cherry picks from post-Lemon Supreme Court jurisprudence to arrive at the conclusion it wants, rather than one the Constitution (and actual Supreme Court precedent) dictates. With two of the three states in the circuit already have been given a green light to mix church and state, it’s up to Mississippi to get this bill signed by the governor so the Fifth can complete its three-state sweep of the Establishment Clause.

Filed Under: 10 commandments, 1st amendment, 5th circuit, establishment clause

At its highest capacity, DeepSeek’s V4 ‘redefines the state-of-the-art for open models’, according to the company.

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek has launched its long-awaited V4 large language model (LLM) in preview, as speculation around a possible first funding round swirls.

The latest open-source launch comes more than a year after the start-up released R1, whose cost effectiveness and performance sent Silicon Valley leaders in a flurry, igniting accusations of theft. R1 was trained using lower-capacity Nvidia chips.

The V4 series comes in two versions, a ‘Pro’ version with 49bn activated parameters and a ‘Flash’ version with 13bn activated parameters, both supporting a context length of 1m tokens.

At its maximum capacity, the V4-Pro-Max mode “redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks”, DeepSeek said.

This mode has “significantly closed the gap” with Google’s Gemini 3.1-Pro, the leading model in knowledge-based evaluations, according to the company, while outpacing OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.0-Pro on “standard reasoning benchmarks”.

In agentic tasks, DeepSeek’s V4-Pro-Max is on par with leading open-source models, such as Kimi-K2.6 and GLM-5.1, but slightly worse than frontier closed models, it noted.

Its internal evaluations revealed that the Pro-Max version outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the level of Opus 4.5. Huawei has said that its Ascend supernode ​based on Ascend ⁠950 ​AI chips would be supporting V4’s versions.

OpenAI made fresh allegations against DeepSeek as recent as February, calling the company’s distillation techniques a part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”.

Meanwhile, the US administration yesterday (23 April) said it will work closely with AI companies to fight “industrial-scale campaigns” by foreign actors attempting to steal its technology.

Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba are reportedly in talks to join the DeepSeek’s first funding round. A source told Bloomberg that the benchmark for a valuation would be around $40bn. The publication further reported that Tencent has proposed a 20pc stake in the company.

DeepSeek’s Chinese contemporaries have made their own AI model launches in the months past, wishing to get ahead of V4, which was hyped to be the company’s most important launch since R1, and V3 in late 2024.

Latest launches include Alibaba’s Qwen3.5; ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0; Zhipu’s GLM-5, trained entirely using Chinese chips; MiniMax, which released M2.5; and the Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI, which came out with Kimi K2.5.

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.