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Personalized mRNA vaccines against melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer—reduced the risk of death or recurrence by 42 percent compared to standard treatment in a late-stage trial, pharmaceutical partners Merck and Moderna announced Thursday.
The results are a significant advance in melanoma treatment; Merck and Moderna are already engaging with regulatory authorities to get the vaccine approved. More broadly, the vaccine's success bolsters hope that mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines offer a new paradigm for cancer therapies.
"From the beginning, we believed mRNA technology could make it possible to develop cancer treatments uniquely matched to each patient’s tumor," Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said in a statement. The trial results "mark a defining moment for that vision and show what’s possible when we rethink how medicines are made." They also "reinforce our conviction that mRNA has the potential to fundamentally change how we treat cancer," he said.
Meta must pay $25 billion to New Mexico after a jury found the tech giant guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws.
The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.
In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta's repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."
Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.
One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States.
By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and nuclear technologies. According to Trump, that plan works best with self-sustaining supply chains. Not even neighboring countries or longtime allies should be relied upon to manufacture a single component of any US product in his ideal world.
The Consumer Technology Association (CTA) has long warned that Trump’s reshoring goals are not grounded in reality, but only recently has America’s largest technology trade association attempted to estimate what it would cost businesses and consumers to follow through on Trump’s plan.
After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services.
Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of the company created from the $111 billion merger.
In an announcement today, Skydance said that all of the direct-to-consumer streaming services it owns, including the Discovery+ service that Discovery Inc. (which merged with WarnerMedia in 2022 to create WBD) launched in 2021, “will unify into a single service over time.”
A four-person crew rocketed into orbit Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, heading for a six-month expedition on the International Space Station.
Riding a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, the four crew members departed from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral at 11:10 am EDT (15:10 UTC) Thursday. Nine minutes later, they were in orbit to begin closing in on the space station for docking Thursday evening.
The launch was delayed from mid-September to replace a balky valve in the Dragon spacecraft's propulsion system, a task that involved cutting into a propellant line inside the ship to swap out a faulty component.
An attempt to save NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from dropping out of orbit fell short, but the behind-the-scenes machinations required just to make a rescue possible deserve recognition, government and commercial space officials said in a recounting of the mission.
The rescue mission was developed by Katalyst Space Technologies, working under a $30 million contract awarded by NASA last September. NASA gave Katalyst nine months to build and launch a satellite to capture Swift flying some 200 miles above the Earth and boost it into a higher orbit.
Katalyst's rescue spacecraft, known as Link, successfully launched July 3 and completed some of its initial checkouts before a malfunction caused it to spin out of control a few weeks later. NASA announced in August that Link would not be able to reach Swift as intended, and the rescue mission was aborted.
There was a call to boycott Disney last fall. The owner of the ABC network had taken Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air over comments Kimmel made about responses to Charlie Kirk's murder, sending free speech proponents into a frenzy.
Those free speech proponents include me, who, as a reporter, has clear stakes in protecting that right. Although I was on board with halting support for a company I felt had acted wrongfully, truly boycotting Disney proved harder than I expected.
Canceling Disney+ was simple but threw a hefty wrench into my evening routine. I tend to end many weekdays laughing at comforting sitcom reruns and adult animation. I usually associate Disney with princesses, kids' movies, and, more recently, comic heroes. But Disney also owns Hulu, which exclusively streamed many of my favorite shows for unwinding at the time, like American Dad, Futurama, Living Single, Fresh Off the Boat, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
SpaceX's Starship rocket thundered into the sky over South Texas early Monday. It was the 14th test flight of the world's most powerful launch vehicle. This time, however, the rocket's massive upper stage squeezed out some extra oomph from its Raptor engines and accelerated to orbital velocity.
On all of Starship's previous flights, SpaceX intentionally dialed back the full capability of the rocket to fly a suborbital trajectory, slow enough for Earth's gravity to pull the vehicle back into the atmosphere before it could complete a full lap around the planet. After several successful suborbital flights in a row, SpaceX officials decided this launch should go all the way to low-Earth orbit. And it did.
What's more, SpaceX packed 26 of the company's newest generation of Starlink broadband satellites into the rocket's cargo bay. One by one, the flat-packed satellites—too large to fit inside SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket—were released from Starship's payload deployer using a system of pulleys and cables to eject the satellites overboard like a Pez dispenser spits out candy.
Pretty much every rocket company in the United States, save one, has embraced two fundamental tenets: reusability and diversification.
Most famously, SpaceX branched out from reusable rockets to pursue and dominate a growing spectrum of space services: cargo delivery, human spaceflight, satellite production, broadband, and, perhaps soon, orbital data centers and in-space manufacturing. Blue Origin is evolving from a pure rocket company into a satellite manufacturer, robotics developer, and, most recently, a potential competitor for SpaceX's Starlink network.
Rocket Lab used a different approach to diversify after achieving success with its small Electron launch vehicle. The company relocated its headquarters from New Zealand to Southern California, started building spacecraft and payloads, and then went on a spree of corporate acquisitions to expand into satellite communications and take on a new role as a merchant supplier of satellite components and sensors. It's now in a stage of advanced development of its partially reusable next-generation Neutron launch vehicle.
The commander and pilot of NASA's Artemis II mission have gained a new distinction five months after splashing down from the Moon: They're not fully retiring from the space agency.
Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover are the first astronauts to join NASA's emeritus program, enabling them to continue to support the work being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They will remain available to train and mentor the current workforce while still being able to pursue employment and opportunities outside of NASA.
"I have asked NASA ... to not use the term 'retire' as much, but technically emeritus is a retirement program," Glover told collectSPACE.com on Wednesday. "It's something we have typically done for scientists when they have groundbreaking research, and they want to go back to academia to teach or to research and publish."
Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately developed rocket into low-Earth orbit Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle.
The two-stage rocket, named Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit. With Saturday's success, Isar is the clear leader among a pack of several European launch startups vying to inject some competition into Europe's stagnant launch market.
Isar's 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket lifted off at 4:12 pm EST (20:12 UTC) Saturday from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, where it was 10:12 pm local time and the final bluish hues of daylight faded from the late summer sky. Seven minutes later, the rocket was in orbit.
The BepiColombo mission cleared a major milestone this week in the final stretch of an eight-year interplanetary voyage to Mercury, the hard-to-reach, scorching hot iron world at the Solar System's innermost frontier.
The robotic science mission, with a price tag of nearly $2 billion, is led by the European Space Agency with contributions from Japan and the United States. Since its launch in 2018, BepiColombo has spiraled closer to the Sun using a combination of plasma propulsion and a series of flybys of Earth, Venus, and Mercury. The maneuvers changed the spacecraft's velocity and steered it toward a final encounter with Mercury later this year.
Next time it reaches Mercury, BepiColombo will be traveling at just the right speed for the planet's gravity to capture the spacecraft into orbit. Scientists working on interplanetary missions are accustomed to long waits for scientific payoffs. It took nearly 10 years for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to travel from Earth to Pluto. It turns out traveling to fleet-footed Mercury and then entering orbit requires more energy, or delta-v, than sending a probe to fly by Pluto.
The first Japanese citizen to launch into space, Toyohiro Akiyama was also the first commercially sponsored cosmonaut and the world's first journalist to file reports while on a spaceflight.
Akiyama, 84, died last Wednesday, August 26, of lower gastrointestinal bleeding, news agencies in Japan reported. A funeral was held with his close relatives in attendance.
As a correspondent for the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), Akiyama was chosen out of his 162 fellow employees who applied to fly to space in celebration of the network's 40th anniversary. He trained at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, located outside of Moscow, and was assigned to the Soyuz TM-11 crew.
I filed a request with McDonald’s earlier this month to access all of the personal data the fast food company collected about me, and I received a stunning 515-page report a few days later that detailed my app interactions in granular detail and predicted I would never stop eating there.
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, I have the legal right to request access to information from large companies that collect personal data. So I was curious what others might have on me, and I spent the next week filing more than 100 requests.
The CCPA went into effect in 2020, and three of its key provisions are the right to opt out of the selling of personal information, the right to delete that info, and the right to request a copy for yourself.
New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate.
Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and reports of police abusing the tool.
Secure Justice, an Oakland-based advocacy group, has recorded 214 cities and counties that have dropped Flock since 2021. Of those, 90 ended their relationship with Flock in August 2026 alone, a fourfold increase compared to the previous month.
I'm on record declaring James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to be The Best Damn Sequel of All Time, and I stand by that assessment. August 29, the fictional date (in 1997) of the franchise's original nuclear holocaust, is fast approaching, and Judgment Day is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. So StudioCanal has decided to mark both occasions with a special theatrical rerelease of the film this weekend. What better time to revisit some of our favorite scenes from this seminal sci-fi action blockbuster?
(Many, many spoilers below.)
Nobody really expected 1984's The Terminator to be a hit, but it racked up an impressive $78 million at the box office against its modest $6.4 million budget. Star Arnold Schwarzenegger was keen to do a sequel, but Cameron was busy with other projects, including Aliens in 1986 (another killer sequel). There were also legal complications over the film rights until Schwarzenegger convinced Carolco Pictures, the studio behind Total Recall (1990), to buy everyone out and hire Cameron to make Judgment Day.
A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America.
Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste, they also had trade connections that reached at least 3,000 kilometers to Central America. And in a sense, chocolate may have helped build the Mississippian mounds.
University of South Carolina archaeologist Adam King and his colleagues found fragments of ancient DNA from Theobroma cacao in the inner surfaces of potsherds from long-ago feasts at Etowah. Fruit from the cacao tree contains beans that, when dried and roasted, produce chocolate in all its glorious forms. Cacao only grows in the tropics, which means the nearest actual cacao trees would have been at least a 3,000-kilometer trek away from the woodlands of the eastern US. And that means the Mississippian people who lived in Etowah must have had continent-spanning trade connections.
“Protect our water,” “Water for people not AI,” “Don’t mess with our water,” declare protest signs from Texas to New Mexico to Arizona. Angered by water use, energy consumption, and pollution, locals are increasingly protesting the rapid expansion of data centers in the United States as tech companies work to rapidly expand capacity for AI.
Many data centers rely at least partly on water to absorb heat from air or surfaces, and then cause cooling as it evaporates, just like sweating keeps our bodies cool. The processors inside data centers can reach internal temperatures of up to 176° Fahrenheit, for the same reasons that an overtaxed laptop heats up.
But while there’s little doubt that data centers are consuming significant amounts of energy, water consumption is more complicated. Claims circulating online bring scant clarity, ranging from articles claiming that chatbots can consume 500 ml of water per query to some online commentators declaring AI's water issue to be nonexistent. And the consumption data from large tech companies themselves are often incomplete and inconsistent.
Fashionistas of a certain age no doubt remember the late designer Stephen Sprouse, who gave Blondie's Debbie Harry her distinctive Bowery punk style. Sprouse's first collections in the mid-1980s made a major splash, melding graffiti prints, a playful '60s aesthetic, and bright Day-Glo colors that won admirers such as Andy Warhol.
Several examples of Sprouse's work are preserved in the textiles collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, where conservationists are trying to learn more about the phosphorescent and fluorescent pigments the designer used in his creations in order to keep the colors from dulling over time. They described recent advances in that research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS) held this week in Chicago.
Scientists began describing minerals that glowed in the dark as phosphors in the Middle Ages. Typically, such materials take on a charge when exposed to light, storing the absorbed energy and releasing it gradually as re-emitted light. Henri Becquerel discovered radioactive decay in 1896 because of his work with phosphorescent uranium salts: He left the salts in a closed drawer with photographic plates, which fogged up even without a light source. DayGlo paints and similar materials exploit the related phenomenon of fluorescence. DayGlo pigments fluoresce in daylight by essentially converting UV light into visible light to produce brighter, more vibrant colors.
Data centers have become the largest driver of a surging electricity demand that is straining US power grids. But the AI data center boom has also accelerated investment in a technology that could provide a silver lining for everyone—solid-state power transformers that replace industrial-age technology with modern power electronics.
Power grids currently rely on conventional transformer technology that is painstakingly assembled by hand and has a fundamental design dating back to the 1880s. Two copper wire coils manually wound around a steel core create electromagnetic fields that help step up voltage levels of alternating current electricity for long-distance transmission or step down voltage levels for the electricity use of homes and businesses. The largest power transformers cannot be mass-manufactured but are instead custom-built for each utility company’s electrical substations.
Manufacturing constraints, coupled with the scramble to upgrade US power infrastructure, have meant utility companies and other customers must wait up to several years for delivery of new power transformers. That not only hinders power grid infrastructure expansion needed to support growing electricity demand, but also delays the process of replacing aging power transformers.
A new national space transportation policy signed by President Donald Trump on Thursday calls for the development of more spaceports to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries per year by 2030.
The presidential memorandum replaces a 2013 policy signed by former President Barack Obama. Both policies share an emphasis on supporting the commercial space industry and underscore the importance of assured access to space. But the launch sector has changed immensely since then. There were 176 orbital launch attempts from US soil last year, nearly 10 times the number in 2013. SpaceX led the pack last year with 165 orbital launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, plus five suborbital test flights of the much larger Starship.
"By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year," the policy says. "The policies set forth in this memorandum will secure America's continued superiority in space."
Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report! China's workhorse Long March rocket family appears to be rebounding quickly from a rare launch failure August 10. Chinese officials have not publicly released any information on what may have caused the Long March 7A rocket to break apart less than 90 seconds after liftoff, but the rocket's use of YF-100 engines initially raised questions about the failure's impact on other Chinese rockets that use the same type of engines. But no biggie. YF-100 engines returned to flight six days later with the successful flight of a Long March 12 rocket, and the heavy-lift Long March 5—also with YF-100 engines—is set to launch in a few days with one of China's most important space missions of the decade: the Chang'e 7 lunar lander en route to the Moon's south pole.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's Central News Agency reports. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from the rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.
NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.
The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.
Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that "ongoing attitude control issues" will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link's remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite's close-in navigation system.
Pharmaceutical partners Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine—individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations—was effective in a late-stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer.
The announcement was scant on details, but if the success holds, it stands to realize the high aspirations for both mRNA vaccines and individualized cancer-targeting medicines in cancer therapy, providing a first success for both treatment types.
The Phase 3 trial included 1,137 patients who had stage IIB–IV melanoma that had been surgically removed prior to their treatment in the trial. Patients were randomized 2-1 to receive either a combination treatment of the tailored mRNA vaccine (intismeran or mRNA-4157) with Merck's established monoclonal antibody cancer treatment Keytruda, or they received treatment with Keytruda alone. Both patient groups were treated for about a year. The trial was placebo-controlled and double-blind, meaning neither the doctors nor the patients knew which treatment patients were randomly assigned to receive.
Perhaps it's the local summer diet of deep-fried cheese curds, corn on the cob, and Spotted Cow, but Wisconsin residents have been feeling pretty dyspeptic about Flock's automated license plate cameras.
Over the past few months, a spate of Wisconsin towns and cities have withdrawn from Flock deals over privacy and trust concerns. As they did so, another issue revealed itself: With each city that leaves, the Flock network becomes less useful to the cities that remain. And cities are starting to notice.
Consider Dane County, which includes the city of Madison. It's one of the most populous counties in Wisconsin. It was also a significant Flock user, with a contract for 24 license plate cameras. But after complaints from citizens and privacy experts, the Dane County Board of Supervisors on April 16 voted to cut the $80,000 in county funding for Flock cameras and banned "further expenditures on the system."
This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."
This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.
The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.
One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA's $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control.
It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft's cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.
The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up in the atmosphere.
A new Airbus passenger jet completed an ultra-long test flight between Australia and France lasting more than 24 hours—paving the way for the world’s longest nonstop commercial flights starting up next year.
The Airbus A350-1000ULR was developed specifically for Qantas Airways’ planned nonstop flights between Sydney and either New York or London. The Australian airline has ordered a dozen of the new airliners for its Project Sunrise routes that aim to start offering tickets for sale in 2027.
The aircraft had been doing initial test flights near the Airbus facilities in Toulouse, France, with a small team of test pilots and test engineers before conducting its first ultra long-haul test flight last week. After taking off from Toulouse on July 23, it flew for 19 hours and 13 minutes before landing in Melbourne, Australia, on July 24.
SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean.
Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended with conflagrations, an outcome SpaceX officials have come to expect with each water landing of Starship.
The buoyant Starship looked to be in fine shape after reaching the Indian Ocean. SpaceX engineers flew drones over the vehicle to inspect its heat shield, getting their best look yet at how more than 18,000 ceramic tiles insulating the ship's stainless steel airframe weathered the trip to space and back. The tiles withstood temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as Starship streaked back into the atmosphere at the end of its hourlong flight from Starbase, Texas.
On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled "Science: A New Golden Age," in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It's a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.
The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of "Science, the Endless Frontier," a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.
The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it's a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley's perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it's unlikely to have anything like the impact of "Science, the Endless Frontier."
Indian space officials celebrated the debut flight of Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 rocket, India's first fully commercial satellite launcher, as a "grand success" Saturday after an on-target climb into a 280-mile-high orbit following liftoff from an island spaceport in the Bay of Bengal.
The Vikram-1 lifted off from India's primary spaceport on Sriharikota Island at 1:35 am EDT (06:35 UTC) Saturday, around midday at the launch base along India's southeast coast. The launch was delayed more than a half-hour to resolve a last-minute technical problem. The countdown resumed, culminating in the command to ignite Vikram-1's solid-fueled first stage booster to propel the rocket off the launch pad.
Vikram-1 is modest in size compared to India's larger workhorse rockets. Skyroot's rocket stands about 72 feet (22 meters) tall, with the capability to place payloads of up to 770 pounds (350 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. This makes Vikram-1 somewhat larger than the Electron launch vehicle developed by Rocket Lab, the world's most successful dedicated small satellite launcher.
Last month, we reported on a troubling incident at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans. On June 5, five leading scientists were ousted for handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care (an ADA journal) in April, sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on scientific research. There was a public outcry and (eventually) a personal apology from the ADA's CEO for the heavy-handed response, but it seems the organization has not yet learned its lesson.
The deputy editors of Diabetes Care have posted an editorial and seven accompanying opinion articles to a preprint server—handily contained in a single PDF file—that they say the ADA has refused to publish. Several troubling new details are included in the articles, including an accusation that ADA leadership knew in advance that members would be handing out copies of the editorial and deliberately set up an ambush by venue security and local police. That decision, in turn, might be due to simmering tensions connected to a session organized the year before.
ADA leadership was provided with the articles in advance of publication with an invitation to simultaneously publish their response.
The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.
The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.
Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.
Baby boomers are the generation cutting back most on alcohol consumption, outstripping Gen Z’s abstinence, as moderation takes hold at every level of society.
Seventy-one percent of boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, consumed alcohol in the past six months—the lowest drinking rate of any generation and down 2 percentage points from three years ago, according to IWSR, a market researcher for the global beverage industry.
By contrast, 74 percent of Gen Z who are at the legal drinking age reported drinking in the past six months, up from 66 percent three years ago, as young people in their late teens and 20s catch up with the total adult population drinking rate of 76 percent.
Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space—60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts—died on Wednesday at 87 years old.
Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the Mercury 13), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same physical and psychological tests as the United States' first spacemen.
Despite performing as well or better than their male counterparts, though, the Lovelace Woman in Space Program was conducted separately from NASA, and the space agency required that its astronauts be test pilots with jet time. The US military, however, did not accept women into its flight programs.
The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.
It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.
The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.
In announcing plans for 3,200 layoffs across the Xbox division yesterday, CEO Asha Sharma focused on discussing cuts to the Xbox platform team and redundant layers of middle management. Now, though, word is filtering out about significant staffing cuts at remaining Microsoft-owned game developers including id Software and Bethesda.
Apogee and 3D Realms founder Scott Miller—who helped publish some of id's earliest games—wrote on social media yesterday of "insider reports" that a majority of id had been laid off, "including most (if not all) coders." And last night, veteran programmer Michael Maynard—whose credits at id Software date back to 2011's Rage—wrote on LinkedIn that he was among the "roughly 50%" of the id team that was let go Monday.
Game Developer cites "multiple anonymous sources" in confirming those reports, saying the redundancies amount to about 90 employees at the Doom studio. The first DLC pack for last year's Doom: The Dark Ages launched earlier today.
Did you know that the space shuttle once launched the Statue of Liberty into space?
In fact, there were two "Lady Liberties" on board Discovery when it lifted off on its fourth flight in April 1985. To be fair, each statue was only 15 inches tall (38.1 centimeters), but they were also each made of copper that was removed from the full-size statue during its then-still-ongoing restoration.
After the weeklong STS-51D mission was over, one of the space-flown statues was placed on display, and the other was melted down to create copper seals, which were then sold to the public by the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Centennial Commission.
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.
The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.
Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.
The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.
Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.
The last time America celebrated a big anniversary, I was all of three years old. Even so, I retain a few fuzzy memories from a sunny summer afternoon in small-town Michigan: climbing on a cannon in front of the courthouse, watching a parade, and seeing my dad, a veteran and Centreville city councilman, giving a short talk about democracy.
Only later would I realize the significance of the date: July 4th, 1976, America’s bicentennial.
America was imperfect and inconsistent in its approaches to "freedom," but the country had done some big, difficult things in recent decades. We had led the charge to roll back the tide of fascism and Holocaust during World War II. We had begun to confront internal demons through the nonviolent activism of the civil rights movement. And, critically for my own life trajectory, we had landed on the Moon.
NASA's inspector general released an audit Tuesday of the agency's Commercial Crew Program, and it looks increasingly likely that Boeing's Starliner crew capsule won't be certified for operational flights to the International Space Station until next year.
That's just three years before NASA's official retirement date for the ISS in 2030, though lawmakers in Congress are seeking an extension until 2032. What's more, declaring Starliner ready for regular crew rotation flights next year would put the Boeing crew capsule a decade behind its original target of 2017.
The inspector general issued six recommendations. NASA officials agreed to all of them. The recommendations include developing a schedule for the next Starliner flight and future crew missions and making sure the schedule is updated to include sufficient time to ensure all of the problems from Starliner's first test flight with astronauts in 2024 are "resolved and documented."
The British government could intervene in the $111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery by Paramount Skydance, citing concerns around the need for a plurality of views in news as well as media ownership in the UK.
UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy said on Tuesday that she was “minded to intervene” in the deal, which would create one of the world’s largest media and entertainment groups.
The takeover would lead to WBD media franchises such as CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros. movies being added to Paramount’s stable of assets, which include CBS in the US and Channel 5 in the UK.
In a supposed “nationwide first” use of drones to disarm a person, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in California promoted a video showing how a small quadcopter drone used a dangling magnet to remove a knife from the hand of a motionless suspect.
The promotional video shared to Facebook and Instagram on June 22, 2026, uses the Mission: Impossible film franchise theme to dramatize video footage of the incident that took place earlier in the month, which involved what the video describes as a “felony suspect armed with a knife and a firearm” who “was not responding to negotiators.” The sheriff’s office is just one among hundreds of US police departments and sheriff’s offices that have deployed camera-equipped drones to assist first responders.
In a Facebook post, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office described having surrounded the suspect’s residence with a SWAT team after the “known felon and parolee-at-large was seen earlier with a firearm.” A first drone deployed to the scene located the suspect hiding in a corner of the garage, but also spotted the motionless suspect holding a knife in one outstretched arm.
Taiwan’s existence as a self-governing democracy may depend heavily on having enough military drones to discourage any attempted invasion by China’s military. As the Taiwanese government aims to boost domestic production of military drones and Taiwanese citizens sign up for drone flight training, Taiwanese companies are forming international partnerships to sell more drones to the US military and other overseas buyers.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense proposed a special budget that would spend $6.6 billion over six years on buying drones made in Taiwan, according to the Central News Agency that represents the national news service of Taiwan. Presented on June 18, the budget proposal would allow the government to buy more than 208,000 coastal attack drones, along with more than 1,400 coastal reconnaissance drones and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels, between 2026 and 2031.
That would be a significant boost to the Taiwanese military arsenal that currently includes just 5,000 US-made attack drones and domestically produced drones, according to Resilience Media. During military exercises in early June, Taiwanese soldiers fired Altius-600 loitering munition drones—made by a subsidiary of the US military technology company Anduril Industries—from towed flatbed launchers to strike offshore targets, according to USNI News. In another exercise earlier this year, Taiwanese Marines used Taiwan-made drones to similarly strike targets at sea.
Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company's efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks.
The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause."
The two-stage, 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket was awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. It was the fourth time in five months that Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, Germany, had reached a target launch date for the second test flight of the Spectrum launch vehicle.
Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. for $160 per share, an approximate enterprise value of $22 billion, the firms announced today.
The acquisition would unite Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its streaming businesses, including Tubi, a free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) platform that Fox bought in 2020, with Roku’s own FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming hardware business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.
The most valuable part of Roku’s business isn't its hardware, which lost $19.1 million in the quarter ending March 31, 2026, but its the operating system (Roku OS) and advertising business. In that same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscriptions business posted a gross profit of $584.1 million, with the advertising business pulling in $371 million in revenue. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company didn’t see annual profitability again until 2025.
Early in the 11th century, a young Benedictine monk named Eilmer jumped from the 150-foot tower of his abbey in the small English town of Malmesbury, wearing a pair of crude wings he’d fashioned from willow wood and cloth. Eilmer managed to glide a good 600 feet, passing over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the river Avon. The fall broke both his legs, crippling him. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained-glass window in honor of Brother Eilmer.
This legendary experiment in medieval aviation comes to us via 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury in an account written circa 1125, although William neglected to provide future historians with an exact date for the feat. But William does mention another key episode in Eilmer's life when the monk was "advanced in years": Eilmer witnessed Halley's comet in 1066, commenting, "It is long since I saw you." Some historians have interpreted this to mean that Eilmer saw Halley's comet on an earlier fly-by in 989, when he would have been a young boy.
Assuming Eilmer was at least five years would in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would make Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempt at flight—which occurred when he was "in his first youth"—likely falling between 1000 and 1010. However, it's an estimate that is based on a lot of assumption, according to James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argues in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries that Eilmer may have seen a different comet altogether in his youth—the comet of 1018. If so, he would have been born much later and the date of his flight would have occurred between the 1020s and 1040s.
Paramount Skydance is accusing Netflix of maintaining a campaign against its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD).
In a June 5 letter (PDF) addressed to Jared A. Hughes, acting section chief of the Media, Entertainment, and Communications Section of the US Department of Justice's (DOJ's) Antitrust Division, and A. Maya Kahn, a trial attorney for the Antitrust Division, and first reported on by Politico today, Paramount chief legal officer Makan Delrahim accused Netflix of trying to influence stakeholders about the merger. The letter reads:
Indeed, Netflix’s panic-level response and scorched-earth campaign to try and poison regulators and other stakeholders against the Transaction shows just how seriously Netflix takes Paramount as a scaled competitor.
The letter from Delrahim, a former assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division, is a response to a letter that The International Brotherhood of Teamsters sent to the DOJ in March. The teamsters' letter argued that Paramount and WBD's merger would threaten film and TV workers. The union, which has 1.3 million members, asked the DOJ to block the merger "unless substantial and enforceable safeguards are put in place to increase domestic production and protect jobs," per an announcement from the group.
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