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We got to share in a rare moment of collective awe this week as four astronauts blasted off toward the moon, beginning a 10-day journey that will take them farther from Earth than any humans have traveled in the last 50 years. It'll still be a little while before they reach their destination — the Orion spacecraft is expected to loop around the moon on Monday — but they've already seen some pretty incredible stuff on the way there. Here's the latest on the Artemis II mission, and other interesting science stories from this week.
Artemis II crosses the halfway pointAfter years of planning, NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, are finally on their way to the moon for the Artemis II mission. This test flight is a crucial step in NASA's plans to send humans to the surface of the moon again for the first time since Apollo 17, and the high-stakes launch went off without a hitch on Wednesday.
The Artemis II crew is now more than halfway to the moon, according to NASA. When Orion reaches the moon on April 6, the astronauts will have a six-hour window of opportunity to observe the partially lit lunar far side, which can't be seen from Earth. If you're curious about where exactly the astronauts are at any given moment, you can track the mission by visiting NASA's Artemis Real-Time Orbit website. And, if you just want to see what space looks like from Orion, here's a
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 Apple today shared a trailer for Widow's Bay, a mysterious new "genre-bending" horror-comedy series set to premiere on Apple TV on Wednesday, April 29.
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Sony just revealed a trio of PlayStation Plus Monthly Games for April and it's a pretty stacked lineup. These will all be playable on April 7 for subscribers on any tier. After downloading, the games will stay in a player's library as long as the subscription remains active.
First up, there's Lords of the Fallen for PS5. This is a sequel to 2014's Lords of the Fallen, despite having the same exact name. The 2023 release boasts a much larger world than the original, but similar fast-paced gameplay. It's an action RPG with nine character classes and hundreds of weapons to choose from. There's also a dual-world mechanic that's (sort of) like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It was generally well-reviewed and a success with players. There's another sequel scheduled for release later this year.
Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is a collection of ports first released back in 2024. These updated versions of old-school PlayStation classics boast updated graphics, with the ability to instantly switch back to the retro polygonal look. There's a new challenge mode that offers pl
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 Apple's first-generation AirTag 4-Pack has dropped to $59.99 this week on Amazon, down from the original price of $99.00.
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NEW RESOURCES Cayman Compass: The Compass Archives: More than just a novelty. "Now, for the first time, members of the public can visit - free of charge - the newly launched Archive […]
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‘A faster, more efficient, and more capable chip'
The M5, as you would expect, is a higher-performance chip than its M4 predecessor. Although it's still built using 3-nanometer technology (albeit 3rd-gen, compared to 2nd-gen on the M4), Apple claims substantial improvements in graphical speed in particular.
According to the announcement, the M5's 10-core GPU architecture, with a Neural Accelerator in each core, delivers "over 4x the peak GPU compute performance compared to M4" as well as "enhanced graphics capabilities and third-generation ray tracing." Overall, Apple claims, the new chip is capable of up to 45 percent higher graphics performance than the M4.
On the CPU side, what Apple describes as "the world's fastest performance core" promises a 15 percent bump in multithreaded performance compared to the M4. And unified memory bandwidth has been improved by almost 30 percent to 153GB/s.
All of which sounds good on paper, but what's all this theoretical power for? Apple makes this very clear: AI. Unlike the M4 announcement in May 2024, which referenced AI only twice in the first seven paragraphs, the M5's press release mentions the current tech obsession in the headline, the standfirst, the first subhead, the captions of the first two pictures, twice in the first paragraph, twice in the second paragraph, three times in the third paragraph…
So we can expect lots more discussion of Apple Intellige
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