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Elon Musk has refuted a WSJ report that claimed SpaceX investors were shown a prototype AI device.

This prototype was reported to feature AI tech from SpaceX subsidiary xAI, while running Qualcomm silicon.

A demo of the prototype was reportedly given to investors ahead of the lucrative SpaceX IPO.

AI is everywhere you see today, with industry giants doing everything in their capacity to get an edge over their competitors. So it didn’t come as a surprise when a new report this week claimed that Elon Musk’s SpaceX had demoed a prototype of an AI device to investors.

According to The Wall Street Journal , this smartphone-like device would run on Qualcomm silicon and incorporate AI tech from SpaceX subsidiary xAI, while featuring a custom operating system. Musk has attempted to pour cold water over that idea by calling it “ utterly false ” in response to a now-deleted tweet.

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With the memory crisis continuing to suck up supplies of memory and push up the cost of computing and gaming devices, a big question mark has lingered over the prices for the next consoles from Microsoft and Sony. And early reports suggest things won't be looking pretty for their launch.

As spotted by TechPowerUp , well-known hardware leaker KeplerL2 recently posted in a NeoGAF thread that the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the PlayStation 6 is currently $200 more than their last report, where they estimated it would cost $760. That means the current expected price of materials alone sits at around $960.

Naturally, this doesn't come from Sony, so a grain of salt is required, but KeplerL2's history as a hardware leaker is solid thus far.

Consoles sit in a unique place in the market. Because you need to use their software, and they get a cut of game sales, consoles have traditionally been sold at a loss or, if companies are lucky, they would barely break even. Where the Steam Machine has to make some sort of profit for Valve (explaining that hefty price tag), Sony and Microsoft care more about securing you as a long-term user.

With this in mind, the BOM estimate suggests the retail price of the PS6 will sit somewhere around the $900-$1000 mark, over double that of the PS5 at launch. The BOM does not factor in the price to build and ship the machine either. Sony could likely afford to take a small loss on these devices, but it seems the price tag isn't going to look pretty either way.

(Image credit: Future) Sony is in a very awkward spot regarding its next console. It seems likely the memory crisis won't end in the next year at least , with it perhaps pushing past 2028 , but pricing likely won't stabilise immediately, even when supply meets demand. This means even if the crisis suddenly ends by the end of 2028, we might not see prices return to normal until 2029 or 2030.

But the PS5 launched in 2020, and Sony has tended to upgrade every five or six years. So it either pushes out the next console with inflated memory prices in 2028, or waits another few years, having to restart research and development around new hardware so its machines don't lag behind the competition.

Even if Sony holds back its next console by a year or two, plenty of work done on designing the PS6 will have to go out the window to catch up with new hardware as it launches. So, like the Steam Machine launching at its astronomical price point, it's likely to just go ahead with it anyway. If you're waiting to get its next console, you'd better start saving soon.

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A mysterious wavelength of light is missing from the dwarf planet Pluto and Saturn's supersized moon Titan, new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) observations show. The surprising discovery hints that these worlds harbor an unknown molecule that has not been seen in any other solar system world or exoplanet so far.

Every element or molecule in the universe absorbs unique wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation . Therefore, one of the main ways astronomers study distant worlds — both inside and outside the solar system — is by closely examining the light that reflects off them and searching for dark "absorption lines" that correspond to the wavelengths of known chemical compounds.

For example, molecular oxygen absorbs light at 230 nanometers, so if the electromagnetic spectrum of a faraway exoplanet has an absorption line at this frequency, researchers can be confident that its atmosphere contains oxygen, according to a 2021 study .

JWST has proved to be exceptionally good at capturing electromagnetic spectra and identifying specific chemicals in exoplanet atmospheres , around distant stars and within primitive galaxies . It has even identified a molecule on one alien world that could point to extraterrestrial life .

In a new study, uploaded June 11 to the preprint server arXiv , researchers analyzed JWST data from Pluto and Titan , focusing on very small wavelengths that have been relatively unexplored until now. This revealed a specific absorption line at around 5.11 micrometers in both worlds' spectra. (These findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.)

The James Webb Space Telescope is specially designed to be able to detect subtle absorption signals from distant worlds. (Image credit: Getty Images) The team pored through similar studies on other planetary spectra but "did not find any band referenced in these publications that corresponds to the location of the observed absorption in Titan and Pluto," the researchers wrote in the paper.

A molecular mystery

The discovery is even stranger because there are very few similarities between Pluto and Titan that could explain why they share a molecule not found anywhere else.

Titan is the largest of Saturn's many moons and is even larger than Mercury . It is also the only solar system world, other than Earth, that is known to have liquid rivers and oceans on its surface. Pluto, on the other hand, is a completely frozen world that's around half the size of Titan and roughly four times farther from the sun than Saturn's satellite is.

Both worlds do have similar atmospheres that are rich in methane and nitrogen. However, the researchers are confident that the molecule responsible for the 5.11-micrometer absorption line is located on both worlds' surfaces, not in their atmospheres.

Titan and Pluto are very different worlds. Saturn's largest moon has liquid on its surface and is around four times closer to the sun than the dwarf planet. (Image credit: Getty Images) Pluto's absorption line is around three times thicker than Titan's, meaning the mystery molecule is likely much more abundant on the dwarf planet. But on Titan, the molecule seems to be unevenly distributed, with a stronger absorption line on its trailing side — the hemisphere opposite to its forward momentum around Saturn — than on its leading side.

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The researchers proposed that it could be benzene — a ring-shaped hydrocarbon — mixed with an unknown molecule, or some form of acetylene or ketene ice. However, much more work is needed to prove that any of these potential candidates are responsible for absorbing this specific wavelength, they wrote.

NASA's Dragonfly spacecraft, which is set to launch no earlier than 2028 and fly through Titan's atmosphere in 2034, could eventually shed more light on the situation. The helicopter-like craft's onboard spectrograph could identify the mystery molecule on Saturn's moon, which would also help reveal if it is viable on Pluto, the researchers suggested. But in the meantime, we'll have to wait to unravel this curious cosmic conundrum.

See how well you know our planetary neighborhood with our solar system quiz!

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A potentially habitable rocky world has been found in the habitable zone around a red dwarf just 25 light-years from us.

However, faced with a hostile wind of radiation from its host star, it remains unclear whether this new exoplanet supports an atmosphere, or the possibility of life. Nevertheless, astronomers are celebrating the discovery.

"This one's exciting," said Paul Robertson of the University of California, Irvine, in a statement . "It's one of our closest cosmic neighbors. Twenty-five light years sounds like a long way, but the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, so in that respect it's our next-door neighbor."

The planet, designated GJ 3378b, orbits the faint red dwarf star in the constellation of Camelopardalis, the Giraffe. It was discovered in 2024 by French astronomers using the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope in Mauna Kea, but American astronomers have revised those initial findings, revealing that the planet is possibly more like Earth than we realized.

All we know for sure is the mass and the orbit of GJ 3378b. We do not yet know whether it is like Earth or not – it could have land and sea and clouds and life, or it could be airless and cratered.

The planet is not seen to transit, or pass in front of its star, blocking its light from our vantage point. Instead, GJ 3378b was detected by the effects of its gravity tugging on its parent star. This causes the star to wobble around the center of mass that it shares with the planet, a wobbling that is betrayed by a Doppler shift in the star's light that can be measured by its spectra, the wavelengths of light that it emits.

When it was discovered in 2024, its mass was measured to be 5.26 times the mass of Earth , putting it in mini- Neptune territory of being a larger, mostly gaseous world. However, by taking a second look at the planet using two different telescopes, Robertson's team was able to show that the planet's true mass is 2.3 times the mass of Earth. This means that it is closer to being a rocky super-Earth instead.

Furthermore, the same observations found that GJ 3378b's orbital period is 21 days, not the 25 days that had originally been measured. This means that the planet is closer to the star than had been thought, sitting comfortably within the habitable zone where temperatures will be suitable for liquid water on the surface of a planet with an atmosphere. So from that point of view, the chance of GJ 3378b being habitable, if not inhabited, seems fair.

"This super-Earth gets about 90% of the radiation from its host star that Earth gets from its sun , so it's right in the sweet spot," said Robertson.

The WIYN 3.5-meter telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona, one of the two telescopes used to discover exoplanet GJ 3378b. (Image credit: NOIRLAB/NSF/AURA) One significant problem, however, is that red dwarfs spit out harmful torrents of radiation in fierce gusts of their stellar winds, which can strip away a planet's atmosphere. This raises the question, does GJ 3378b even have an atmosphere?

Currently there is no way to tell. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been probing for atmospheres around other rocky worlds orbiting red dwarfs, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system. It does so by transit spectroscopy, where an atmosphere wrapped around a planet absorbs some of the star's light filtering through it, leaving dark absorption lines in the star's spectrum.

Unfortunately, GJ 3378b does not transit its star. This means that astronomers will have to wait until the 2040s, when NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory will hopefully launch, to answer the question of whether GJ 3378b really does have an atmosphere or not.

Still, astronomers are hopeful. GJ 3378b is right on the edge of the zone where planets are expected to be seriously battered by radiation, meaning it could have escaped the worst. If so, there might be more than just an atmosphere for the Habitable Worlds Observatory to discover.

"The ultimate goal is biosignatures," said University of Texas at Austin astronomer Michael Endl in a separate statement . "We really want to know, are we alone in the universe? We are still in the reconnaissance phase of our solar neighborhood, trying to find the planets around the nearest stars because those will be the easiest ones to detect a biosignature on."

"This planet brings us one step closer to knowing all of our neighbors and, ultimately, which might be hospitable for life."

The findings were reported on June 30 in The Astrophysical Journal .