Month: August 2025

The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months.

Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, that lifted off from Florida's Space Coast at 11:43 am EDT (15:43 UTC) on Friday. Sitting to her right inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule was veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, serving as the vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Cardman and her crewmates rode a Falcon 9 rocket off the launch pad and headed northeast over the Atlantic Ocean, lining up with the space station's orbit to set the stage for an automated docking at the complex early Saturday.

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Silicon Valley's AI talent war just reached a compensation milestone that makes even the most legendary scientific achievements of the past look financially modest. When Meta recently offered AI researcher Matt Deitke $250 million over four years (an average of $62.5 million per year)—with potentially $100 million in the first year alone—it shattered every historical precedent for scientific and technical compensation we can find on record. That includes salaries during the development of major scientific milestones of the 20th century.

The New York Times reported that Deitke had cofounded a startup called Vercept and previously led the development of Molmo, a multimodal AI system, at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. His expertise in systems that juggle images, sounds, and text—exactly the kind of technology Meta wants to build—made him a prime target for recruitment. But he's not alone: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly also offered an unnamed AI engineer $1 billion in compensation to be paid out over several years. What's going on?

These astronomical sums reflect what tech companies believe is at stake: a race to create artificial general intelligence (AGI) or superintelligence—machines capable of performing intellectual tasks at or beyond the human level. Meta, Google, OpenAI, and others are betting that whoever achieves this breakthrough first could dominate markets worth trillions. Whether this vision is realistic or merely Silicon Valley hype, it's driving compensation to unprecedented levels.

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Despite the protests of millions of Americans, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced it will be winding down its operations after the White House deemed NPR and PBS a "grift" and pushed for a Senate vote that eliminated its entire budget.

The vote rescinded $1.1 billion that Congress had allocated to CPB to fund public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. In a press release, CPB explained that the cuts "excluded funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades." CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said the corporation had no choice but to prepare to shut down.

"Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations," Harrison said.

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Vaccination rates among the country's kindergartners have fallen once again, with coverage of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination dropping from 92.7 percent in the 2023–2024 school year to 92.5 percent in 2024–2025. The percentage changes are small across the board, but they represent thousands of children and an ongoing downward trend that makes the country more vulnerable to outbreaks.

In the latest school year, an estimated 286,000 young children were not fully protected against measles. At the same time, the country has seen numerous explosive measles outbreaks, with case counts in 2025 already higher than any other year since the highly infectious disease was declared eliminated in 2000. In fact, the case count is at a 33-year high.

The latest small decline is one in a series that is eroding the nation's ability to keep bygone infectious diseases at bay. In the 2019–2020 school year, 95 percent of kindergartners were protected against measles and other serious childhood diseases, such as polio. That 95 percent coverage is the target that health experts say prevents an infectious disease from spreading in a community. But amid the pandemic, vaccination rates fell, dropping to 93.9 percent MMR coverage in the 2020–2021 year, and have kept creeping downward.

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The Nintendo Switch sold for $300 when the game console first launched in 2017. Since then Nintendo has added a lower-cost Switch Lite as well as a premium Switch OLED. And this year the company launched the follow-up Switch 2. There continues to be demand for original even 8 years after launch, but while most […]

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Tesla was found partially liable in a wrongful death lawsuit in a federal court in Miami today. It's the first time that a jury has found against the car company in a wrongful death case involving its Autopilot driver assistance system—previous cases have been dismissed or settled.

In 2019, George McGee was operating his Tesla Model S using Autopilot when he ran past a stop sign and through an intersection at 62 mph then struck a pair of people stargazing by the side of the road. Naibel Benavides was killed and her partner Dillon Angulo was left with a severe head injury.

While Tesla said that McGee was solely responsible, as the driver of the car, McGee told the court that he thought Autopilot "would assist me should I have a failure or should I miss something, should I make a mistake," a perception that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk has done much to foster with highly misleading statistics that paint an impression of a brand that is much safer than in reality.

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has placed unbelievable pressure on drone developers on both sides of the war, who have responded with astounding innovations that include:

• fiber-optic drones (to prevent radio jamming)
• kamikaze sea drones, eventually equipped with anti-air missiles
• drones that fire shotguns
• bomber drones that drop mines and grenades
• drones that release flaming thermite into trenches
• long-range, aircraft-style drones that can substitute for small cruise missiles
• interceptor drones that hunt down other drones
• first-person view (FPV) drones so maneuverable they can be piloted right through a broken window pane to hit indoor targets
• ground drones for both combat and transport

Many drone developers are now chasing the next big thing—AI built right into the drone, allowing it to make autonomous targeting decisions if its communication links are cut.

But sometimes you don't need high-tech software, agility, or stealth. Sometimes, you just need a really, really big drone that can carry an entire e-bike and deliver it to a soldier stranded several kilometers away.

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Although NASA and its counterpart in Russia, Roscosmos, continue to work together on a daily basis, the leaders of the two organizations have not held face-to-face meetings since the middle of the first Trump administration, back in October 2018.

A lot has changed in the nearly eight years since then, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the rocky departure of Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin in 2022 who was subsequently dispatched to the front lines of the war, several changes in NASA leadership, and more.

This drought in high-level meetings was finally broken this week when the relatively new leader of Roscosmos, Roscosmos Director General Dmitry Bakanov, visited the United States to view the launch of the Crew-11 mission from Florida, which included cosmonaut Oleg Platonov. Bakanov has also met with some of NASA's human spaceflight leaders at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

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Delta spent July dealing with backlash over what the airline company claims is widespread public confusion over its AI pricing system.

Now, Delta has finally come forward to break down precisely how the AI pricing works to dispute what it claims are "incorrect" characterizations by consumer watchdogs, lawmakers, and media outlets.

In a letter to lawmakers who accused Delta of using AI to spy on customers' personal data in order to "jack up" prices, Delta insisted that "there is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing, or plans to use that targets customers with individualized prices based on personal data."

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The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 “Strix Halo” processor is a ridiculously powerful mobile chip that combines a 16-core, 32-thread CPU with a Radeon 8060S 40-core integrated GPU that offers the kind of performance you’d expect from discrete graphics. There’s also an NPU that supports up to 50 TOPS of AI performance. But these chips ain’t […]

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