Month: March 2024

Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Waze, the navigation app owned by Google, is adding some new features. Some of these are safety-oriented, like alerts about first responders or speed limit changes. Others are convenience-minded, like help navigating roundabouts or parking information. It's also expanding its use of crowdsourcing to determine road conditions.

When Google bought Waze back in 2013, the navigation app was already well-liked for adding a slightly social aspect to in-car navigation—something that seems adorably quaint and perhaps unthinkable these 11 years later.

Over the years, Google has slowly incorporated more of Waze's features into its own Google Maps platform and taken away Waze's autonomy, too. In 2022 it was formally merged into the same division at Google that runs Maps, and last year Google laid off some workers and ditched Waze's own ad platform for Google ads.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship rocket completes a fueling test on Sunday night. (credit: SpaceX)

After SpaceX completed a fueling test of its third full Starship stack on Sunday night, successfully loading more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellant onto the rocket, it was only a matter of time before the world's largest rocket took flight.

Now, we have a tentative date. In a post on the social media site X, the company posted a link to watch "Starship's third flight test" at 7:30 am ET (11:30 UTC) on March 14. Published on Tuesday morning, the social media post was 'hidden,' but somehow discovered late Tuesday night.

Nevertheless, this is a credible date that the company is working toward. The hardware, following the fueling test on Sunday night at the company's Starbase site in South Texas, appears to be in good shape. And although SpaceX has yet to receive its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency recently announced that it has closed its investigation into the second Starship test flight in November. So a mid-March launch date is plausible from a regulatory standpoint.