Upgraded

• SpaceX scrubbed the launch of its upgraded Starship rocket from Texas on Thursday after multiple countdown pauses caused by fuel temperature and pressure issues. • The company plans to retry the launch this coming Friday following the technical delays that occurred seconds before the planned liftoff. • Separately, Secretary of State Marco Rubio warned Cuba that the U.S. remains focused on changing the island's communist system.

• Google announced a new family of AI advances led by Gemini 3.5, which it said is rolling out first through Gemini 3.5 Flash to billions of users. • The company said Flash is its strongest agentic and coding model yet and that it is now the default model in the Gemini app and Google Search AI mode. • Google also introduced Gemini Omni for video generation from text, images, video, and audio, plus Gemini Spark, a cloud-based agent that can organize notes, emails, and chats.

• CERN scientists announced the discovery of the Ξcc⁺ particle, a long-predicted heavy cousin of the proton, resolving a 20-year mystery in particle physics. • The breakthrough marks the first particle discovery with the upgraded LHCb detector, involving over 1,000 researchers from 20 countries, with the UK contributing the most led by University of Manchester's Professor Chris Parkes. • Professor Parkes stated, 'Rutherford's gold-foil experiment in a Manchester basement transformed our understanding of matter, and today's discovery builds on that legacy.'

Snappily named Xi-cc-plus, Cern physicists spotted the particle in shower of debris that lit up Large Hadron ColliderScientists at the Cern nuclear physics laboratory near Geneva have discovered a heavier version of the proton, the subatomic particle that sits at the heart of every known atom in the universe.They spotted the particle in a shower of debris that lit up a detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), located deep beneath the ground at Cern, which smashes protons together at close to the speed of light. The collisions recreate in microcosm conditions that prevailed just after the big bang, with the energy converting to particles that spray in all directions. The newfound particle, which is four times heavier than the regular proton, should help physicists refine their understanding of the strong nuclear force that glues together the innards of all atomic nuclei. The force is unusual because it behaves like a rubber band, getting stronger as the distance between subatomic particles increases. Continue reading...