Technologies

Amazon Scrubs Wednesday Rocket Launch for Its Starlink Satellite Service Rival

The weather hampers Project Kuiper’s launch, and no new date has been scheduled for its first full-scale satellite launch.

Amazon will soon launch 27 low-Earth orbit satellites as part of its Project Kuiper. The original launch window was set for Wednesday between 7 and 9 p.m. ET (4 to 6 p.m. PT), but poor weather forced the rocket launch to be scrubbed for the day.

«Weather is observed and forecast NO GO for liftoff within the remaining launch window at Cape Canaveral this evening, according to Launch Weather Officer Brian Belson,» United Launch Alliance said in its live updates Wednesday night. «The stubborn cumulus clouds and persistent winds make liftoff not possible within the available window.»

There’s no word yet on when it’ll be rescheduled, but there’s a mission page for updates on the launch and plans to livestream the takeoff. You can watch the rocket launch live on that page or YouTube.

The launch mission, KA-01 or Kuiper Atlas 1, will be on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and will take place at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

It’ll be a big step forward for the project, which Amazon announced in 2019 with promises of a $10 billion investment. Now the company is poised to enter the race to provide satellite internet service, a space currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink, which has about 7,000 satellites. Amazon’s plans call for 3,200 satellites to be deployed over 80 launches. The company intends to provide internet service with this technology later this year.

More competition will improve internet services

The literal space race, which includes Starlink, Amazon and other companies such as Viasat, Hughesnet, Eutelsat and China’s SpaceSail, could mean more internet service availability in far-flung and rural areas with limited broadband options. Though Starlink is the leader in space, some of these other companies are continuing to launch satellites and working to deploy high-speed internet in more markets, such as Brazil. With more players in the market, that could mean faster and cheaper internet in more areas, although whether that actually bears out for consumers remains to be seen.

Mahdi Eslamimehr, executive vice president at Quandary Peak Research and adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at USC, said Amazon is well poised to compete with Starlink. «Amazon has made extensive launch agreements with major providers such as ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and even SpaceX itself, positioning Kuiper as a major challenger due to its expansive infrastructure and significant resources.»

He said, «While Starlink currently enjoys clear market leadership, it faces increasing competition from well-capitalized and strategically agile competitors, specifically from China, suggesting the market will become considerably more competitive in the near future.»

So far, Eslamimehr said, Amazon’s satellite efforts have been promising and successful, at least in the prototype stages. The company has also been testing Amazon Web Services in space. «These developments collectively underscore Amazon’s robust entry into the satellite internet market and reflect positive early momentum in its overall space strategy.»

Beyond how it fares against Starlink and other companies, the Amazon satellite launches are significant in other ways. Eslamimehr said, «Project Kuiper isn’t just about competition; it’s positioned as a critical step toward closing the global digital divide, promising to deliver high-speed internet to underserved communities worldwide.»

Correction, April 4: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the USC professor and Quandary Peak Research executive vice president. His name is Mahdi Eslamimehr.

Technologies

Nike Workout Shoes With Compression and Heating Will Cost $900

The Nike Hyperboot shoes will be available next month and are intended to help you warm up before and recover after workouts.

Those warmup compression shoes Nike and Hyperice showed off at CES 2025 finally have a launch date and price. The Hyperboot will be available to buy online in North America starting May 17, for a cost of $899.

The high-tops, which Nike and Hyperice say are a wearable much like your smartwatch, help your feet warm up before and recover after a workout. The footwear does this with heating and air-compression massage technology right there in your shoes, taking the idea of heating pads and compression socks and making them mobile.

CNET former mobile senior writer Lisa Eadicicco got the chance to try these shoes on in January.

«You can definitely feel the heat in here,» Eadicicco said at the time, as she walked across a demo room in Las Vegas wearing the fancy footwear. The boots massage and compress your ankles and feet, and in CNET’s test, we could especially feel the heat around the ankles.

Buttons on the shoes let you adjust compression and the amount of heat, with multiple settings for each.

«The Hyperboot contains a system of dual-air bladders that deliver sequential compression patterns and are bonded to thermally efficient heating elements that evenly distribute heat throughout the shoe’s entire upper,» Nike explains.

The battery lasts for 1 to 1.5 hours on max heat and compression settings, or 8 hours if you’re only using the massage setting. It takes 5 to 6 hours to charge via USB-C cable. The boots come in five sizes: S, M, L, XL and XXL.

Technologies

Marvel Rivals’ New Costume Customization Is Fairly Priced, but There’s a Problem

A couple dollars isn’t much to pay for in-depth skin customization, but you can’t spend your existing Units on the new feature.

Marvel Rivals’ latest Season 2 feature is targeted at all the fashionistas out there. Costume customization lets players change the color palette of their skin, creating a new in-game look that suits them best.

The new palette swap customization isn’t free and isn’t available on every skin, though more skins will be available to customize as time goes on. Four reskins shipped with the feature’s introduction.

Unlocking costume customization will cost you the in-game currency equivalent of $6 per skin, but you can freely change the color to any variation released for a skin you bought customization on as they are released.

The pricing of these reskins is actually generous compared with Rivals’ largest competitor: Overwatch 2. Palette-swapped legendary reskins in Blizzard’s first-person hero shooter have typically cost just as much as the original skin, and unlocking the black-and-gold customization for special Mythic skins costs the equivalent of $20.

The $6 price tag for Marvel Rivals costume customization is a tame monetization practice in comparison. But the biggest problem with the new feature isn’t the price tag — it’s the introduction of Unstable Molecules, which feels like an unnecessary additional currency introduced to lure players into spending more money.

Marvel Rivals is developing a currency bloat problem

There were already three separate currencies to manage in the game, alongside the occasional addition of special tokens that let players interact with limited-time events like Galacta’s Cosmic Adventure.

Of the three existing currencies, most players will interact with Chrono Tokens, the purple currency, as it’s available to free-to-play Marvel Rivals players. These tokens unlock rewards on the battle pass. Whereas most games have experience points that unlock battle pass tiers, Chrono Tokens are a currency that disappears at the end of a season.

Units and Lattice are the current premium currencies in Marvel Rivals. Lattice is the gold coin that you directly pay — most microtransactions convert your money into this currency to spend in-game, at a rate of $1 to 100 Lattice.

Units, the blue currency, are what you need to buy most of the premium costume bundles in the game — so you need to convert your Lattice to Units at a one-to-one exchange rate when you’re buying costumes.

That brings us to the new cosmetics system. As if that wasn’t overly complicated enough, costume customization now requires a new currency: Unstable Molecules. Unstable Molecules aren’t Units, but they might as well be. You exchange Lattice to Unstable Molecules at the same one-to-one rate.

The only difference between these currencies is that you use Units to purchase costumes, emotes, sprays and account name changes, and you use Unstable Molecules to purchase the costume customization feature for skins you already own.

The decision to add another currency for no reason needlessly complicates Marvel Rivals’ microtransactions — and the system was already pretty opaque as it stands. Maybe that’s by design, as trading in multiple fictional currencies helps obscure the real dollar cost that players are sinking into their in-game cosmetics.

The addition of Unstable Molecules feels like an anti-consumer move. The costume customization prices are fair when you compare them with the competition’s asking prices for similar cosmetic tweaks, but the new feature should be bought and paid for with Units. There’s no need to add another currency to Marvel Rivals, unless the entire point is to create another way to obfuscate and inflate player spending.

How to unlock costume customization in Marvel Rivals

You can rock palette-swapped versions of some of your favorite Marvel Rivals costumes right now. Costume customization is live in Marvel Rivals — for a handful of skins. Here are the skins the new feature is compatible with right now:

Magik Punkchild: Rosy Resilience skin variant
Psylocke Vengeance: Phantom Purple skin variant
Luna Snow Mirae 2099: Plasma Pulse skin variant
Winter Soldier Blood Soldier: Winter’s Wrath skin variant

Each costume customization is available for purchase for 600 Unstable Molecules. The customizations are purchasable as part of the costume’s listing under the store tab in the main menu. You need to own the base skin before you can purchase the costume customization color variants.

Unstable Molecules are currently only available in a one-to-one exchange with the Lattice premium currency, but the costume customization announcement in the official Marvel Rivals Discord server mentioned that there will be new ways to earn Unstable Molecules in Season 3.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for April 18, #207

Hints and answers for the NYT Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, No. 207, for April 18.

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles.

Connections: Sports Edition might be tough today. If you’ve never heard of a particular method for healing an injury, the green group could stump you. And there’s one of those last-name groups that the New York Times loves to throw at players. Read on for hints and the answers.

Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That’s a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports journalism site owned by the Times, will continue to publish it. It doesn’t show up in the NYT Games app but now appears in The Athletic’s own app. Or you can continue to play it for free online.

Read more: NYT Connections: Sports Edition Puzzle Comes Out of Beta

Hints for today’s Connections: Sports Edition groups

Here are four hints for the groupings in today’s Connections: Sports Edition puzzle, ranked from the easiest yellow group to the tough (and sometimes bizarre) purple group.

Yellow group hint: Collectibles.

Green group hint: For an injury.

Blue group hint: Not olds.

Purple group hint: Rock and ____.