6-18-26 AI and space advances shape today’s tech news

tech news
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6/18/26

NASA chose Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for a Mars mission, while AI tools, biometrics, and biotech made headlines.

  1. NASA picks Eric Schmidt’s rocket company for Mars mission

Relativity Space-a rocket maker acquired by former Google executive chair Eric Schmidt last year after stumbling on the path to orbit-might just beat SpaceX to Mars.

  1. Midjourney goes from generating cat images to full-body

Midjourney CEO David Holz just showed off the company’s first hardware product and plans to build a San Francisco spa, which he admitted is a bit different from the "cat.

  1. Second carcass-eating fly species cleared by FDA for maggot

Maggot therapy lacks robust data, but it has fans and a fail-safe "bacon therapy.

  1. The UK Will Scan Asylum-Seekers’ Faces for Age

Internal Home Office tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors.

  1. The Siren Song of ariaNotify()

There’s a brand new ariaNotify() method - defined by the WAI-ARIA 1.3 Specification - that provides a means of programmatically triggering narration in a screen reader.

  1. How to turn off AI in your Google Docs

Here’s what you need to do to get those pesky “write with Gemini” pop-ups to go away.

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the Midjourney ultrasound bit is the one that feels weirdest to me. turning “cat picture machine” into medical imaging is a pretty hard left turn, and i can’t tell if this is a real product path or just demo theater.

what’s the actual use case here — doctors, patients, or just “look, the model can do scans now”?

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Relativity “might beat SpaceX to Mars” is a fun headline, but I’m stuck on the boring part: can they hit orbit reliably first, and what’s NASA actually buying here—a launch slot or a whole mission architecture? The Midjourney ultrasound thing is the one that makes me twitch a bit. If they’re anywhere near medical-adjacent output, I want to know what guardrails exist for people treating generated imagery like evidence. That’s the failure mode. And maggot therapy popping up in the same news bundle as AI hardware is… a day on the internet, I guess.

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