From Playstation to Parenthood: Meet the Sperm-Injecting Robot

There’s a new baby-making machine in town! A team of engineers, with no experience in fertility medicine, has successfully designed a sperm-injecting robot that has produced the first-ever “robot babies”.

Using a Sony PlayStation 5 controller, one member of the team remotely positioned a robotic needle, which then did its thing by penetrating human eggs and depositing sperm cells with a level of precision that would make a brain surgeon envious. The robot successfully fertilized over a dozen eggs, resulting in the birth of two healthy baby girls.

Overture Life, the startup behind the machine, believes this is the first step in automating the costly and often stressful IVF process. Currently, IVF labs require multimillion-dollar investments and trained embryologists who delicately handle sperm and eggs using ultra-thin hollow needles under a microscope. The main goal of automating IVF is to make fertility medicine more accessible to a wider audience.

Rapid Rundown

• 💉 Sperm-injecting robot fertilized over a dozen eggs, resulting in two healthy baby girls.

• 🚀 Overture Life's robot is automating IVF to potentially make the procedure less expensive and more common.

Court Rules: Apple’s App Store Stays Closed, but Developers Can Link to Outside Payments

In a recent turn of events, the court has decided to maintain the status quo in Epic’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In other words, it’s business as usual for Apple. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Apple’s closed App Store and security restrictions were all good in the hood and didn’t violate antitrust law. However, they did put their foot down on Apple’s anti-steering rules that prevent users from learning about alternate payment options.

Apple spokesperson Marni Goldberg provided The Verge with the following statement: “Today’s decision reaffirms Apple’s resounding victory in this case.” In other words, Apple is feeling pretty good about itself right now.

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney shared a response to the ruling on Twitter, noting that while “Apple prevailed at the 9th Circuit Court,” the court’s decision to reject Apple’s anti-steering policies “frees iOS developers to send consumers to the web to do business with them directly there.” Sweeney adds, “We’re working on the next steps.” Translation: Epic Games isn’t giving up just yet.

Rapid Rundown

• 📰 Epic Games loses antitrust claim against Apple in App Store lawsuit.

• 💻 But Apple cannot maintain anti-steering policies that prevent users from learning about alternate payment options.

Japanese lunar lander to pave the way for high-frequency, low-cost transportation to the moon

The Hakuto-R mission is about to make history by becoming the first privately developed lunar lander to make a soft touchdown on the moon. If everything goes according to plan, the lunar lander will begin its descent from an altitude of about 100 km above the lunar surface, with a pre-programmed set of commands guiding it to a gentle landing.

The company behind this historic mission, ispace, is one of many new companies focused on commercial lunar services. They're aiming to provide high-frequency, low-cost transportation services to the moon, as well as developing lunar resources to sell to others.

They're not alone in their mission, though. NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program is also sponsoring private landing attempts, with two US-based companies, Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, launching their lunar landers this summer.

Rapid Rundown

• 🚀 Japanese company to attempt a soft touchdown on the moon.

• 🌕 The landing will pave the way for a new lunar aerospace industry, with US companies planning their own missions.

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