First ‘Star Trek: Lower Decks’ season three trailer teases a starship hijacking

Amid the deluge of all the Star Trek shows CBS has produced since bringing the franchise back to TV in 2017, Lower Decks has stood out for its fun and smart take on Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi universe. Last October, season two ended on a cliffhanger with the Federation arresting Captain Freeman for allegedly destroying the Pakled planet. An ominous “To be continued…” left the fate of the loveable crew of the USS Cerritos unclear.

On Saturday, we got a clue as to what happens next on the show, with CBS sharing the first trailer for season three of Lower Decks. And wouldn’t you know it, after stepping up to the occasion, it looks like Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Tendi and Rutherford are back to their usual hijinks with an ill-advised plan to hijack the Cerritos from drydock. “This is for the captain,” one of them declares as the camera pans to a shot of the starship without its hull plating and another voice questions the sanity of the entire plan. “Are you stealing the Cerritos!?” they yell. We can’t wait to see how things pan out.

In the US, you can watch the first two seasons of Lower Decks on Paramount+. Alongside the premiere of Strange New Worlds on May 5th, season three is one of a handful of Star Trek properties that will hit the streaming service before the end of the year.

NASA delays Artemis 1 Moon rocket test to April 12th

NASA has once again delayed the final test of its next-generation Space Launch System. The agency spent much of last weekend conducting a “wet dress rehearsal” of its upcoming Artemis 1 Moon mission. The test was designed to replicate the mission’s countdown procedure and was mostly moving along according to plan until NASA encountered a problem with the SLS’s mobile launcher platform.

The issue prevented the agency from safely loading the rocket with liquid propellant, and NASA delayed the critical test to troubleshoot the problem. It had initially planned to resume the test on April 9th to accommodate Axiom’s Space historic Ax-1 flight but announced today it was further delaying the trial to the start of next week. It also announced it would modify the test after engineers noticed a problem with a helium check valve designed to prevent the gas from escaping the SLS. The modified test will see NASA primarily focus on fueling the rocket’s core stage, with “minimal propellant operations” of its upper stage.

“Due to the changes in loading procedures required for the modified test, wet dress rehearsal testing is slated to resume with call to stations on Tuesday, April 12th and tanking on Thursday, April 14th,” NASA said.

Once the test is complete, NASA can finally move forward with Artemis 1. The mission will send an unmanned Orion capsule on a flight around the Moon designed to study how the trip will affect human astronauts. The agency won’t set a date for the mission until it completes the wet dress rehearsal. If it doesn’t encounter any further setbacks this week, Artemis 1 could lift off as early as this June.

Google blocks Russian parliament YouTube channel

Google has blocked Russia’s Duma TV YouTube channel, according to Reuters. On Saturday, the company said it had “terminated” the channel, which airs meetings of Russia’s lower house of parliament, for a violation of the platform’s terms of service.

“If we find that an account violates our Terms of Service, we take appropriate action,” a Google spokesperson told the outlet. “Our teams are closely monitoring the situation for any updates and changes.” The company added it was committed to complying with sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in late February.

The suspension quickly drew the ire of Russian officials, with a spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry warning YouTube had “signed its own warrant.” Russia’s Roskomnadzor telecom regulator condemned the move and ordered Google to restore Duma TV’s YouTube access immediately. “The American IT company adheres to a pronounced anti-Russian position in the information war unleashed by the West against our country,” the agency said.

The response from Russian authorities suggests YouTube could become the latest Western internet service to face restrictions within the country. Shortly after the war in Ukraine began on February 24th, Russia moved to block access to Twitter. In March, it then cut off Facebook and Instagram – but not WhatsApp due to the chat app’s popularity among Russian citizens. It subsequently found the Meta-owned services guilty of “extremist” activity after the company said it would temporarily allow calls of violence in Ukraine and a handful of other countries.

3D CT scans make even ketchup caps look cool

See that picture up there? It may look like something out of Tron or Blade Runner, but it’s actually a CT scan — of a Heinz ketchup cap. A group of “deeply curious engineers” is scanning different types of items every month to give us a deeper appreciation of various engineering marvels surrounding us in every day life. The latest batch of scans includes a Heinz squeeze-bottle cap that took its inventor 185,000 hours and 45 prototypes to finalize. It’s quite a complex assembly, which allows for the ketchup to be stored upside-down without leaking — the design was even licensed to NASA to create leak-proof containers for its astronauts.

In addition to the Heinz bottle cap, the team also scanned a Sriracha nozzle that had such a distinctive design, the family behind the hot sauce chose to trademark it. The engineers scanned a Vita Coco bottle cap, as well, confirming that the foil inside does indeed remain intact until the cap’s miniature saw does its job when you open it for the first time. Who knew food packaging could be this fascinating?

Back in December, the team scanned three different AirPods to show how Apple’s wireless earbuds have evolved. You’ll see how the tech giant kept rearranging the earbuds’ internal components over the years, giving each generation a complete redesign. A month later, the team uploaded scans of Nintendo’s handheld consoles from the Game Boy to the Switch. Seeing the original Game Boy’s processor, which was apparently slower than a TI-83 calculator’s, will give you a new appreciation of how far handheld gaming has come. Finally, in February, the team scanned a handful of Polaroid and Fujifilm instant cameras, showcasing their complex internal components and how the small devices can print on pretty large films.

 You can see all all team’s 3D scans on their website, where all future projects will most likely be uploaded. 

The first all-civilian space crew has docked with the ISS

A SpaceX Dragon capsule carrying the first fully private space crew has docked with the International Space Station. The quartet launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday morning without any major hiccups. Their journey to the ISS took around 20 hours. The Dragon ran into a video routing problem before the docking sequence could start, causing a 45 minute-delay as it stayed roughly 20 meters away from the ISS while SpaceX was troubleshooting the issue. 

The crew members — commander and former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría and businessmen Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy — are expected to spend eight days on the space station. They’ll conduct science experiments, along with outreach and commercial activities. They’ll also bring some scientific samples back to Earth for NASA as well.

Axiom Space’s first all-civilian mission, AX-1, is the first of several private ISS missions the company plans to launch in the coming years. It will build the first commercial module on the space station as well as a module that houses a sports arena and film studio. The Axiom Station and attached film studio module are expected to separate from the ISS in 2028.

Mariella Moon contributed to this report.