This notion isn’t new. Following this week’s successful Artemis II launch, NASA plans to operate the SLS rocket a few more times—possibly through Artemis V—as required by Congress. Friday’s budget proposal backs that approach. Isaacman has said he wants NASA to move away from the expendable SLS in favor of a commercial option, like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn, for crewed flights once those systems are available—but that transition is still several years away.

“To execute missions beyond Artemis V, NASA will initiate a new procurement to obtain commercial transportation services to launch astronauts to rendezvous with the lunar landers,” the agency said in a budget summary published on Friday. NASA said this procurement is expected to begin in fiscal year 2027.

Portions of the vision Isaacman and other NASA officials outlined last week—such as deep-space nuclear propulsion, lunar nuclear reactors, and prospecting for resources on the Moon—will demand substantial investment in new space technologies. Under this budget, one new initiative would fund a commercial effort to produce, store, transfer, and test rocket propellant made from materials on the lunar surface.

But the overall outlook for NASA’s space-technology portfolio is bleak. The White House proposes cutting $297 million from NASA’s space technology directorate compared with this year—and $476 million less than 2025—targeting what the Trump administration describes as “frivolous technology projects with no applications.”

The White House budget office also seeks to cut $1.1 billion from International Space Station funding, keeping the retirement and de-orbit of the ISS scheduled for 2030. That stance conflicts with a congressional bill backed by key lawmakers, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), that would extend the ISS to 2032.

Last week NASA announced a new strategy to help commercial companies build crewed outposts to replace the ISS in low Earth orbit. Despite delays and concerns about whether a commercial station will be ready when NASA retires the ISS, the White House requested only a modest funding increase for that program in 2027.

The administration’s spending plan would continue the Trump-era effort to eliminate funding for NASA’s education programs.

Madden definitively identified 565 Native American dice from 45 sites and classified another 94 artifacts as “probable” dice. Items with a drilled or pierced hole were left out of his survey because they could just as well be beads or other ornaments rather than dice. He also excluded pieces whose two faces could only be told apart by shape, without distinct markings, for the same reasons. The oldest examples, from Folsom deposits in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, date to the end of the last Ice Age, about 12,000 years ago.

According to Madden, dice and gaming in these cultures were not like modern gambling, where the house has an advantage; instead, they likely played a social role.

“These games are one-on-one; there’s no house,” said Madden. “They were fair contests, with everyone having equal opportunity and equal conditions, and they functioned as a means of exchange, particularly between groups that did not interact frequently and thus didn’t really know one another. It’s essentially a form of gifting over time that builds lasting reciprocal relationships. It’s not a commercial transaction where you and I swap something and then go our separate ways.”

The results also illuminate early Native American notions of probability. “When we see the origins of dice, we’re literally seeing the origins of probabilistic thinking,” said Madden. “That origin has typically been placed in the Old World during the Bronze Age, about 6,000 years ago. This study indicates that Native Americans were making dice, producing random outcomes and applying those streams of chance in games of luck 6,000 years earlier. So, to understand the history of probabilistic thought, we now need to investigate the Old World at the end of the last Ice Age.”

That said, “These findings don’t claim that Ice Age hunter-gatherers were doing formal probability theory,” Madden added. “But they were deliberately creating, observing, and relying on random outcomes in repeatable, rule-based ways that exploited probabilistic regularities, such as the law of large numbers. That matters for how we interpret the global history of probabilistic thinking.”

American Antiquity, 2026. DOI: 10.1017/aaq.2025.10158 (About DOIs).

For Doe, he was “dismayed” to discover that full and partial transcripts of chats about his family’s financial information appeared to have been shared with Google and Meta, reportedly along with PII. His complaint says he relies on Perplexity to help manage taxes, obtain legal advice, and make investment choices. He argued that, without an injunction stopping Perplexity’s alleged ongoing privacy harms, he would be prevented from using his preferred search engine.

The lawsuit asserts other members of the proposed class likely turned to Perplexity when researching various sensitive topics. It alleges the companies built ad trackers to operate “surreptitiously” so they could purportedly “exploit this sensitive data for their own benefit, including targeting individuals with advertising and reselling their sensitive data to additional third parties.”

Most worryingly, people often use these AI systems to look up health and medical information, particularly when talking to another person might feel embarrassing or upsetting.

The complaint claims Perplexity appears to take advantage of users’ tendency to overshare with AI by prompting them to upload sensitive records during chats. That includes data that, if transmitted to Google and Meta, could cause users to be suddenly targeted with ads they “may find overwhelming, disturbing, or, in many instances, physically deleterious,” the filing said.

For example, the complaint notes Perplexity answers a simple prompt like “What is the best treatment for liver cancer?” by offering that “I can help you interpret a specific scan report, biopsy result, or proposed treatment plan if you share more details.”

The suit says invasive trackers embedded in Perplexity’s AI search engine include the Facebook Meta Pixel, Google Ads, and Google DoubleClick, and possibly a Meta tool called “Conversions API.” The complaint alleges Meta recommends partners use that technology alongside the Meta Pixel because it supposedly provides a “workaround” that stops “savvy users” from blocking Pixel tracking. It also points out Meta has faced several privacy lawsuits over that tech, with some settlements, while Congress has criticized some former partners who used trackers from Google and Meta.