A budding startup called Interlune is trying to become the first private company to mine the moon’s natural resources and sell them back on Earth. Interlune will initially focus on helium-3 — a helium isotope created by the sun through the process of fusion — which is abundant on the moon. In an interview with Ars Technica, Rob Meyerson, one of Interlune’s founders and former Blue Origin president, said the company hopes to fly its harvester with one of the upcoming commercial moon missions backed by NASA. The plan is to have a pilot plant on the moon by 2028 and begin operations by 2030, Meyerson said.

Interlune announced this week that it’s raised $18 million in funding, including $15 million in its most recent round led by Seven Seven Six, the venture firm started by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. The resource it’s targeting, helium-3, could be used on Earth for applications like quantum computing, medical imaging and, perhaps some day down the line, as fuel for fusion reactors. ​​Helium-3 is carried to the moon by solar winds and is thought to remain on the surface trapped in the soil, whereas when it reaches Earth, it’s blocked by the magnetosphere.

Interlune aims to excavate huge amounts of the lunar soil (or regolith), process it and extract the helium-3 gas, which it would then ship back to Earth. Alongside its proprietary lunar harvester, Interlune is planning a robotic lander mission to assess the concentration of helium-3 at the selected location on the surface. 

Interlune

“For the first time in history,” Meyerson said in a statement, “harvesting natural resources from the Moon is technologically and economically feasible.” The founding team includes Meyerson and former Blue Origin Chief Architect Gary Lai, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison H. Schmitt, former Rocket Lab exec Indra Hornsby and James Antifaev, who worked for Alphabet’s high-altitude balloon project, Loon. 

Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard who stepped down at the end of last year, is apparently interested in buying TikTok as a new bill in the US threatens to ban the app or force its sale. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Kotick mentioned the idea of partnering on such a purchase to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others seated with him at a conference dinner last week, and brought it up with ByteDance Executive Chair Zhang Yiming. If TikTok is sold, the WSJ notes, it would likely go for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Kotick led Activision for over 30 years but didn’t exactly leave on a good note. In a 2021 lawsuit that was settled last year, the company was accused of fostering sexual harassment and gender discrimination under his leadership, in what was described as a “pervasive frat boy workplace culture.” The Wall Street Journal soon after reported that Kotick was aware of misconduct and assault allegations over the years and did not properly disclose some of these instances to the board. He was also accused of harassment himself, The Verge noted at the time. Activision Blizzard called the report “misleading.”

After the information came to light, Activision Blizzard employees walked out and demanded Kotick resign, but that did not happen. Kotick ultimately stayed on as head of Activision Blizzard until the completion of Microsoft’s acquisition in 2023.

Kotick’s alleged interest in TikTok comes at a tumultuous moment for the immensely popular platform after lawmakers introduced the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” last week, which President Biden said he would sign, if it passes. Under the bill, which goes to the House floor on Wednesday for a vote, TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, would have to sell the app within six months. Otherwise, it’ll be banned from US app stores.

TikTok has been trying to get its millions of US users to rally behind it in wake of the bill’s sudden momentum, and sent out push notifications last week asking users to call their representatives. After the House vote, where it’s expected to be approved after clearing the Energy and Commerce Committee in a unanimous vote last week, the bill would move on to the Senate. While lawmakers’ concerns about TikTok center on fears of data privacy and its connection to China, WSJ notes that involving Altman in its purchase could open the app up to the possibility of being used by OpenAI to train its AI models, which doesn't exactly sound ideal for users, either.

Nintendo packed a whole bunch of news into Mario Day this year, including the announcement of release dates for two classics that have been modernized for the Switch: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD. Both titles were announced last fall during Nintendo Direct. Paper Mario will drop first, on May 23, followed by Luigi’s Mansion on June 27, but both are available for pre-order now on the Nintendo Switch store for $60.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door was first released for the GameCube (deep breath) 20 years ago, and Nintendo says the new Switch version will have “revamped graphics, and a suite of additional changes that make the game easier than ever to enjoy.” Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD, which you may remember as Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, originally came out for the 3DS in 2013. Now that just leaves the first Luigi’s Mansion that we’re still waiting on for Switch...

Alongside the games’ release dates, Nintendo also announced that it’s working on a followup to last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie. That’s set to come out in 2026. Lego and Nintendo also announced three new Mario-themed Lego sets that will be released this year — the Bowser Express Train, King Boo’s Haunted Mansion and Battle with Roy at Peach’s Castle — and a Mario Kart set that will drop in 2025.

Riding the success of 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Nintendo and Illumination are releasing a second animated film in the franchise that’s expected to come out April 3, 2026. The news comes from series creator Shigeru Miyamoto himself, who tweeted it from the Nintendo of America X account on Sunday as part of the ongoing Mario Day celebrations. Details are so far scant, but Miyamoto says the team is “thinking about broadening Mario's world further, and it'll have a bright and fun story.”

Based on his description, it doesn’t seem like it will be a direct sequel to the first, though that remains to be seen. In an announcement video also featuring Miyamoto, Chris Meledandri from Illumination said the team is already “storyboarding scenes and developing set designs for new environments.” Animations are due to begin soon. The next movie set in the Super Mario Bros. world will be released in the US and other areas on April 3, 2026 before coming to other regions later that month.

The Super Mario Bros. Movie absolutely crushed at the box office when it was released last April, becoming the highest-grossing video game movie at opening. It hit $1.3 billion worldwide by the beginning of June, Variety reported. If you didn’t get a chance to catch it in theaters then — or you’re just dying to see it on the big screen again — AMC Theaters is bringing The Super Mario Bros. Movie back to theaters this year on June 28, as spotted by GoNintendo.

Dyson’s higher-end vacuums might normally feel like a bit too much of a splurge, but a deal for today only brings the V15 Detect down to a more manageable price. The Dyson V15 Detect is $180 off in a deal from QVC. Normally $750, the V15 Detect is going for just $570 right now — almost as low as we saw it go during Black Friday, when it dropped to $550. But the deal will only last until the end of the day, so don’t take too long mulling it over. Dyson’s V15 Detect is a cordless, stick vacuum with an LED light on its head to expose all the unseen dirt hanging around your floors.

The Dyson V15 Detect doesn’t just suck up the dirt in your home, but it analyzes it to give you a report on what it cleaned, too. It has a LCD display on the back end that will show you a particle count and a breakdown of the different particle size groupings. The display will also let you know how much run time it has left before it needs to be recharged. Dyson says it runs on average for up to 60 minutes, and optimizes the suction and run time based on the level of mess it’s tasked with cleaning.

Fancy extra features aside, it’s a real powerhouse when it comes down to the cleaning. Engadget’s Mat Smith reviewed the Dyson V15 Detect and said it was the most powerful vacuum he’d ever used, even rivaling heavier plug-in vacuums. It has three cleaning modes to choose from: Eco, Auto and Boost. The vacuum’s brush bar has an anti-tangling design to better cope with things like hair that tend to get caught up. There’s also a separate hair screw tool that’s included with the V15’s accessories for those households that need to tackle the problem with more muscle.

The Dyson V15 Detect comes with a crevice tool to help you get into hard-to-reach areas, and it can be converted to a handheld vacuum for smaller jobs. In the box, it also comes with a wall dock, combination tool and charging adapter.

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An update to Google Wallet has further simplified the process of getting all your passes in one place. Per this week’s release notes for Wallet, spotted by Android reporter ​​Mishaal Rahman, Google says movie tickets and boarding passes will now be surfaced automatically after purchase, as long as the confirmation email has made it to the user’s Gmail inbox. It might not work for every theater chain or airline just yet, but Google says the feature is live for “some” and more should be added in time.

Google little by little has been tweaking Wallet to make it more useful. The company last month expanded Wallet passes to WearOS so Android smartwatch users could have easy access to their tickets from their wrist. That includes boarding passes, event tickets, gym memberships, loyalty cards and more. Per the latest release notes, Google has also added a way for users to manually archive most of their passes from either their smartphone or smartwatch. These will be moved to a section called Archived Passes, where users will be able to undo the action if they’ve made a mistake or need to refer to an old pass.

Lego and Nintendo are releasing a Mario Kart-themed set, but you’ll have to wait quite a while until you can actually get it. The companies announced the upcoming addition to their collaborative line in a brief teaser today ahead of Mario Day (March 10), which said only “Mario Kart — Ready, set, build! Racing in 2025.” That’s a long way off for anyone whose immediate reaction was, “I need this now.” In the meantime, though, Lego has three other sets coming to its Super Mario collection before that: the Bowser Express Train, King Boo’s Haunted Mansion and Battle with Roy at Peach’s Castle.

Those three sets will be available starting August 1 of this year from $64-$120, with the Bowser Express Train being the most expensive of the batch. If you want a better look at what they’ll include, check out the announcement video from Lego, which goes in-depth on each build.

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent years about the practice of capitalizing on celebrities’ digital likenesses without their consent, whether after they die or while they’re still alive. Zelda Williams, for one — the Lisa Frankenstein director and daughter of Robin Williams — slammed the “disturbing” trend of people trying to recreate the voices and faces of the deceased last year, as striking actors fought for, among other things, better protections around studios’ potential use of AI clones. Yet despite the obvious ethical issues, companies keep doing it. The latest? Soul Machines just unveiled “Digital Marilyn,” an AI chatbot designed to look and talk just like Marilyn Monroe.

The company, which specializes in what it refers to as Biological AI-powered Digital People, debuted the Marilyn bot at SXSW on Friday in a partnership with Authentic Brands Group. ABG owns the rights to Monroe’s likeness and those of numerous other celebrities both dead and living, including Elvis Presley and Shaq. Digital Marilyn, powered by GPT 3.5, is “hyper-real” and capable of responding with “emotions and nuanced expressions,” Soul Machines says in a press release. She can hold a roughly 20-minute conversation.

“More than just an impressive impersonation, Digital Marilyn is an autonomous Digital Person capable of engaging in natural, dynamic conversations that feel authentic and responsive,” Soul Machines wrote in a blog post. “It’s as if the spark of Marilyn herself has been translated into the AI age, offering a unique and deeply personal connection for both devoted fans and curious newcomers.” Anyone else’s skin crawling?

Soul Machines touts its digital celebrities (there are others, including an upcoming Carmelo Anthony bot) as a way for famous people to “engage 1-on-1 with their fans, without limits” and “deliver 24/7 connection.” Notably, all of the other AI celebrities the company currently offers chats with — Mark Tuan, Francis Ngannou and Jack Nicklaus — are men who are alive and thus able to weigh-in on their inclusion. Soul Machines introduced its Marilyn Monroe AI to the public with an Instagram post for International Women’s Day, because nothing says “celebrate women” like exploiting the likeness of a female celebrity who is no longer around to give permission.

Apple is expected to have some big releases coming up soon — including new iPad Pro and iPad Air models, and the M3 MacBook Air — but it’s reportedly not going to host a big spring launch event for the announcements. In the Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman reports that Apple is “planning to announce the new products on its website with a series of online videos and marketing campaigns.” If so, that’d be two years in a row that Apple has passed on a spring event, with this year being particularly stacked with new products.

Whatever format the announcements come in, rumors suggest they’ll be happening imminently. Gurman, however, predicts more conservatively that the hardware drop will come either this month or next. Along with the iPad Pro refresh and a new 12.9-inch iPad Air, Gurman reports that Apple is planning to announce new Apple Pencils and Magic Keyboards. It’s also expected to release the M3 MacBook Air in 13-inch and 15-inch models.

A class action complaint filed against Apple on Friday in the northern California court has accused the company of creating unfair conditions to ensure iCloud remains the dominant cloud storage choice for its devices, according to Bloomberg Law. By placing “surgical technological restraints” on the types of files other cloud providers can host, Apple has made it so only iCloud can offer Apple device users full-service storage, the complaint argues. According to the complaint, this has also allowed Apple to charge higher fees in the absence of “any real threat to iCloud’s dominance.”

The proposed class, represented by Hagens Berman, would cover tens of millions of customers in the US, Bloomberg Law notes. While iPhone and iPad users do have the option to store certain types of files with non-Apple cloud storage providers, there are some things — including app data and device settings — that only iCloud has permission to host. This leaves users to choose either the “unattractive” option of juggling multiple cloud storage accounts to fully cover their backup needs, or iCloud’s full-service convenience. The complaint argues that Apple’s restrictions are arbitrary and work to stifle competition.

Apple “does not dominate because it built a superior cloud-storage product,” the complaint states. “From a security and functionality standpoint, iCloud is no better (and often inferior) to other cloud storage platforms. Instead, Apple has achieved market dominance by rigging the competitive playing field so that only iCloud can win.” The case was only just filed and hasn’t yet been granted class action status, but anyone who thinks they may be eligible to get in on it can fill out a form on the Hagens Berman website to find out more information.