America is set to return to the moon on Thursday, marking the first time a US-made craft touched down on the lunar surface since the last Apollo mission in 1972. Odysseus, or Odie, is soaring through space, but unlike previous trips, this one is owned by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. The six-legged robot lander is scheduled to touch down at 6:24pm ET at a crater called Malapert A near the moon's south pole. The landing attempt will be livestreamed on NASA TV beginning at 5pm ET. While the mission is operated by a private company, NASA has sponsored the journey to take its scientific instruments and technology to the moon.

While the hope of the US returning to the moon has been temporarily dashed, Astrobotic CEO John Thornton expressed high hopes for its future Griffin lunar lander missions. 'What a wild adventure we were just on,' Thornton said. 'Certainly not the outcome we were hoping for and certainly challenging right up front.' Like the Peregrine, these robotic lunar landers are expected to serve as a scout for the NASA's Artemis astronauts before they make their own moon landing in 2026. The CEO and trained mechanical engineer described'victory' after'victory' as his team scrambled to make the most of the scrapped Peregrine mission.

Fake accounts on Twitter posing as late celebrities is nothing new, but what about artificial intelligence technology that can accurately resemble the dead? This is what happened when a new podcast from Play.ht used such a software to generate a construct of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs who was played to be interacting on a Joe Rogan podcast. The developer (Podcast.AI) says that the podcast is "an example of how artificial intelligence can learn about people", according to a report by AppleInsider. The company's official site reads: "The Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him we could find online so the AI could accurately bring him back to life. "At Play.ht, we believe in a future where all content creation will be generated by AI but guided by humans, and the most creative work will depend on the human's ability to articulate their desired creation to the machine."

Oak Ridge National Laboratory is behind the development of a new type of artificial intelligence (AI) software called Peregrine, meant to improve the quality of functional parts being produced via powder bed 3D printers. Peregrine requires no "expensive characterization equipment," yet possesses the ability to evaluate parts during manufacturing. "Capturing that information creates a digital'clone' for each part, providing a trove of data from the raw material to the operational component," said Vincent Paquit, leader of advanced manufacturing data analytics research as part of ORNL's Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning group. "We then use that data to qualify the part and to inform future builds across multiple part geometries and with multiple materials, achieving new levels of automation and manufacturing quality assurance." Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Chase Joslin uses Peregrine software to monitor and analyze a component being 3D printed at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL (Image: Luke Scime, ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy) The software is based on a convolutional neural network that imitates the human brain, rapidly evaluating images from cameras during printing.

Eugene Schieffelin was the eccentric ornithologist who in 1890 shipped 60 starlings from London to New York City and set them free in Central Park. The next year he released 40 more, and today there are maybe 200 million starlings in the United States and Southern Canada. As immigrants go, starlings are shrewd flyers, clever mimics, and often unwelcome. The truth is they're no more than uptown blackbirds, stocky, three-ounce grifters with iridescent blue and green plumage, along with yellow beaks and a long history of displacing woodpeckers and flycatchers, and destroying entire crops of berries and cherries. Not to mention the havoc they cause at many airports.