KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla.—Three Americans and a Canadian soared into orbit from Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday, riding the most powerful rocket ever crewed, on the opening leg of a nine-day trip around the Moon.

Perched atop the 322-foot-tall (98-meter) Space Launch System rocket, the quartet climbed away from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC).

Four hydrogen-fueled RS-25 engines and a pair of solid rocket boosters ignited to lift the nearly 6 million-pound vehicle off its pad at Launch Complex 39B. Together the engines and boosters produced about 8.8 million pounds of thrust, exceeding the power of NASA’s Saturn V used during the Apollo era.

Moments later, waves of sound rolled toward onlookers several miles away as the rocket roared upward, trailing a brilliant plume of fire and smoke.

Commander Reid Wiseman, a 50-year-old Navy captain and former test pilot, delivered calm radio reports from the Orion spacecraft’s cockpit perched atop the SLS. He was accompanied by pilot Victor Glover (also a Navy captain), mission specialist Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

In the limelight

The launch of Artemis II represents a significant milestone for NASA. The agency has poured nearly $100 billion into components of the Artemis program over the past 20 years and now finds itself racing against China to return people to the lunar surface. The mission is historic: humans last left the Moon in 1972 and have not been back since.

This flight will not touch down on the Moon; a landing is slated for a later mission, currently planned as Artemis IV in 2028. NASA is collaborating with SpaceX and Blue Origin to create crewed landers to transport astronauts between Orion and the lunar surface, while Axiom Space is developing new suits for moonwalks.

Artemis II is validating the transport system NASA intends to use to carry crews to the Moon and back. Wednesday’s successful liftoff was the first major milestone, paving the way for manual piloting demonstrations, trajectory correction burns, life-support system checkouts and, ultimately, a loop that will swing thousands of miles past the Moon’s far side.

If you’re a PC gamer tired of seeing “compile shaders” pop up during load times, you may want to try out Nvidia’s newest beta App. Along with additions to DLSS 4.5 Multi Frame Generation, the beta introduces a feature that can automatically compile new shaders while your PC is idle.

Nvidia’s Auto Shader Compilation feature aims to “reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates” for systems running Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When enabled and the machine is idle, the app will begin rebuilding DirectX shader files for your games so they’re ready the next time you launch them.

The option is off by default when you first install the Nvidia App, but you can enable it via Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. From there you can reserve disk space for precompiled shaders and choose how much system resources the compilation should use. You can also force shader recompilation manually through the app instead of waiting for idle time.

Ollama, a runtime for running large language models on a local machine, has added compatibility with Apple’s open-source MLX machine-learning framework. Ollama also reports better caching performance and now supports Nvidia’s NVFP4 model-compression format, which can considerably reduce memory use for certain models.

Taken together, these changes should deliver noticeably improved performance on Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 or later)—and the timing is apt, since local models are starting to gain momentum beyond the research and hobbyist spheres.

OpenClaw’s recent breakout—which surged past 300,000 stars on GitHub, grabbed attention with experiments like Moltbook, and became a particular phenomenon in China in particular—has pushed many people to try running models locally.

As developers grow frustrated with rate limits and the high prices of premium plans for services such as Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex, experimentation with local coding models has intensified. (Ollama has also recently expanded its Visual Studio Code integration.)

The new capability is available in preview (Ollama 0.19) and currently supports only one model—the 35 billion-parameter variant of Alibaba’s Qwen3.5. The hardware requirements are steep for typical users: besides an Apple Silicon Mac, you need at least 32GB of RAM, according to Ollama’s announcement.

Safety concerns

On March 22, The Wall Street Journal said Kennedy was “poised” to carry out his proposal to remove FDA limits on peptides. Two days later, The Washington Post’s editorial board denounced Kennedy’s proposal as “hypocritical quackery.” Today, The New York Times reported that the FDA is moving toward permitting compounding pharmacies to produce 14 peptides that are now restricted. The Times added that senior FDA officials have “reservations” about the shift and worry the agency could be accused of deciding on political grounds rather than on scientific evidence.

Which 14 peptides might be included hasn’t been made public. Observers expect several well-known compounds to appear on the list, such as BPC-157 (Body Protection Compound-157), originally isolated from gastric secretions and promoted for tissue repair. Growth-hormone–releasing peptides like CJC-1295 and Ipamorelin are also likely candidates.

Specialists point out there are no randomized controlled trials proving the effectiveness of these peptides. Furthermore, experts warn of a range of safety issues, including contaminants from gray- or black-market sources, inconsistent dosing, and mixtures of unproven peptides known as “stacks.” Some peptides that stimulate growth could increase cancer risk, and others may disrupt hormonal balance. Last year, two women fell critically ill after receiving peptide injections at an anti-aging event in Las Vegas.

The evidence for these peptides is “just woefully minuscule,” Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told the Times. “It’s a mess, because we don’t have any data that these work,” he added. “Maybe one of them actually does something good. But right now, we just know that they’re a liability.”