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On 29 May 2026 a static “hotfire” at Cape Canaveral’s Launch Complex 36 vaporised Blue Origin’s third New Glenn booster and seriously damaged the pad, abruptly halting the rocket’s impending flight schedule.
On 28 May 2026 Meta flipped the switch on global “Plus” paid tiers for its three flagship apps, charging $3.99 for Facebook/Instagram and $2.99 for WhatsApp, marking its first mass consumer paywall beyond verification badges.
On 26-27 May 2026 NASA moved its lunar outpost from powerpoint to production, authorising almost $1 billion in private-sector contracts and fixing a 25-launch, 21-landing schedule for 2026-29 to scout, supply and begin building a South-Pole Moon Base slated for full operation by 2032.
On 27 May 2026 Meta began worldwide rollout of $3–4 monthly “Plus” tiers for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp and announced June trials of $7.99–$19.99 Meta AI plans, the first time it directly charges users for core social and AI features.
Effective May 2026, YouTube will algorithmically flag any video it detects as making “significant” photorealistic use of AI and place an unmistakable “AI” tag directly beneath the player (or overlaid on Shorts), rather than relying solely on creator self-disclosure.
NASA formally green-lit a three-phase, $20 billion program that begins with three uncrewed cargo landings in late 2026 to seed a permanent lunar south-pole outpost before the first Artemis surface crew in 2028.
On 25 May 2026 Pope Leo XIV released his 42,300-word first encyclical, demanding strict global rules to keep AI—especially autonomous weapons—subordinate to people and coupling the call with an unprecedented papal apology for the Church’s historic complicity in slavery.
On 25 May 2026, Huawei publicly committed to achieving 1.4-nm-equivalent chip density by 2031 via a new 3-D “LogicFolding” architecture instead of EUV lithography, formally marking its exit from the conventional Moore’s-Law scaling race constrained by U.S. export bans.
At IEEE-ISCAS Shanghai on 25 May 2026, Huawei introduced a new “Tau Scaling Law” and LogicFolding 3-D architecture, claiming it will deliver Kirin chips this fall and reach 1.4-nanometre-equivalent performance by 2031 without EUV tools.
On 24-25 May 2026 China launched Shenzhou-23, putting three astronauts on Tiangong and beginning the nation’s first experiment in keeping a crew-member aloft for a full year.
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