STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind ever built.

Towering 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall, the rocket will lift off during a one-hour launch window beginning at 6:30 pm CDT (7:30 pm EDT; 23:30 UTC) Sunday. The main concern for Sunday's launch attempt will be weather conditions at Starbase, located a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. There's just a 45 percent chance of favorable weather for liftoff Sunday, according to SpaceX.

It will take about 66 minutes for the rocket to travel from the launch pad in Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. You can watch the test flight live on SpaceX's official website. We've also embedded a live stream from Spaceflight Now and LabPadre below.

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When Donald Trump recently claimed, during what was supposed to be a press conference about a European Union trade deal, that wind turbines were a "con job" that drive whales "loco," kill birds and even people, he wasn’t just repeating old myths. He was tapping into a global pattern of conspiracy theories around renewable energy—particularly wind farms. (Trump calls them “windmills”—a climate denier trope.)

Like 19th century fears that telephones would spread diseases, wind farm conspiracy theories reflect deeper anxieties about change. They combine distrust of government, nostalgia for the fossil fuel era, and a resistance to confronting the complexities of the modern world.

And research shows that, once these fears are embedded in someone’s worldview, no amount of fact-checking is likely to shift them.

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Most experimental brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that have been used for synthesizing human speech have been implanted in the areas of the brain that translate the intention to speak into the muscle actions that produce it. A patient has to physically attempt to speak to make these implants work, which is tiresome for severely paralyzed people.

To go around it, researchers at the Stanford University built a BCI that could decode inner speech—the kind we engage in silent reading and use for all our internal monologues. The problem is that those inner monologues often involve stuff we don’t want others to hear. To keep their BCI from spilling the patients’ most private thoughts, the researchers designed a first-of-its-kind “mental privacy” safeguard.

Overlapping signals

The reason nearly all neural prostheses used for speech are designed to decode attempted speech is that our first idea was to try the same thing we did with controlling artificial limbs: record from the area of the brain responsible for controlling muscles. “Attempted movements produced very strong signal, and we thought it could also be used for speech,” says Benyamin Meschede Abramovich Krasa, a neuroscientist at Stanford University who, along with Erin M. Kunz, was a co-lead author of the study.

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Four men in Georgia, all living in the same county, mysteriously became infected with a potentially deadly soil bacterium that's normally found in the tropics and subtropics, particularly Southeast Asia and northern Australia. The four cases were tied together not just by their shared location but also by the bacterial strain; whole genome sequencing showed the bacteria causing all four infections were highly related, suggesting a shared source of their infections.

But this bacterium doesn't tend to jump from person to person. And none of the men had recent travel that explained the infection. In fact, only one of the men had ever been to a place where the bacterium lives, but it was decades before his infection. And there's another twist: The four infections spanned decades. The first occurred in 1983, the second in 1989, and the last two occurred a day apart in September 2024.

In a newly published study in Emerging Infectious Diseases, state and federal health researchers suggest that the four linked cases indicate that the dangerous bacterium—Burkholderia pseudomallei—has been lurking in the Georgia area the entire time. They also think they know what triggered its recent reemergence: Hurricane Helene.

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A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English "just for fun" got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn't know had actually happened until he Googled them.

"I was interested to see if a protest had actually occurred in 1834 London and it really did happen," wrote Reddit user Hayk Grigorian, who is a computer science student at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania.

For the past month, Grigorian has been developing what he calls TimeCapsuleLLM, a small AI language model (like a pint-sized distant cousin to ChatGPT) which has been trained entirely on texts from 1800–1875 London. Grigorian wants to capture an authentic Victorian voice in the AI model's outputs. As a result, the AI model ends up spitting out text that's heavy with biblical references and period-appropriate rhetorical excess.

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Intel has agreed to sell the US a 10 percent stake in the company, Donald Trump announced at a news conference Friday.

The US stake is worth $10 billion, Trump said, confirming that the deal was inked following his talks with Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan.

Trump had previously called for Tan to resign, accusing the CEO of having "concerning" ties to the Chinese Communist Party. During their meeting, the president claimed that Tan "walked in wanting to keep his job and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States."

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A disgruntled developer has been sentenced to four years in prison after building a "kill switch" that locked all users out of a US firm's network the moment that his name was deleted from the company directory following his termination.

Davis Lu, a 55-year-old Chinese national residing in Houston, was convicted of "causing intentional damage to protected computers" in March, the US Department of Justice said in a press release announcing his sentencing Thursday.

Lu had worked at Eaton Corp. for approximately 11 years when suddenly the company reduced his responsibilities during a 2018 "realignment." Anticipating his termination was imminent, Lu began planting different forms of malicious code.

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A lawyer for 4chan said the imageboard website's operators will refuse to pay fines levied under the UK's Online Safety Act.

"Ofcom's notices create no legal obligations in the United States," lawyer Preston Byrne told the BBC, according to an article yesterday. Byrne said the UK regulator's investigation into 4chan is part of an "illegal campaign of harassment" against US tech firms. "4chan has broken no laws in the United States. My client will not pay any penalty," he said.

In June, Ofcom said it opened an investigation into whether 4chan is taking required measures to prevent the site from hosting illegal content and from being used to commit or facilitate crimes. Ofcom announced on August 13 that it "issued 4chan Community Support LLC with a provisional notice of contravention" for failing to comply with two requests for information. Ofcom said it was continuing to investigate whether 4chan "has failed, or is failing, to comply with... duties to protect its users from illegal content."

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So far this year, electricity use in the US is up nearly 4 percent compared to the same period the year prior. That comes after decades of essentially flat use, a change that has been associated with a rapid expansion of data centers. And a lot of those data centers are being built to serve the boom in AI usage. Given that some of this rising demand is being met by increased coal use (as of May, coal's share of generation is up about 20 percent compared to the year prior), the environmental impact of AI is looking pretty bad.

But it's difficult to know for certain without access to the sorts of details that you'd only get by running a data center, such as how often the hardware is in use, and how often it's serving AI queries. So, while academics can test the power needs of individual AI models, it's hard to extrapolate that to real-world use cases.

By contrast, Google has all sorts of data available from real-world use cases. As such, its release of a new analysis of AI's environmental impact is a rare opportunity to peer a tiny bit under the hood. But the new analysis suggests that energy estimates are currently a moving target, as the company says its data shows the energy drain of a search has dropped by a factor of 33 in just the past year.

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The US military's reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS signals.

The core of the navigation experiment is what the Space Force calls the "world's highest performing quantum inertial sensor ever used in space."

This is one of many payloads mounted on the military's X-37B spaceplane when it lifted off aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 11:50 pm EDT Thursday (03:50 UTC Friday).

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“I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he started to question almost immediately, given there were clinical cases in psychiatry where patients reported deriving absolutely no pleasure from listening to any kind of tunes.

So, Pallarés and his team spent the past 10 years researching the neural mechanisms behind a condition they called specific musical anhedonia: the inability to enjoy music.

The wiring behind joy

When we like something, it is usually a joint effect of circuits in our brain responsible for perception—be it perception of taste, touch, or sound—and reward circuits that give us a shot of dopamine in response to nice things we experience. For a long time, scientists attributed a lack of pleasure from things most people find enjoyable to malfunctions in one or more of those circuits.

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Climate change is warming ocean waters, making the environment more acidic thanks to the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This endangers various marine species, and monitoring those changes is vitally important. But it can be challenging to reach the deepest waters without the aid of very expensive equipment. Moon jellyfish can swim to those depths, however, making them a potential ally in the quest to study the deep ocean.

That's why researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) have built "cyborg" jellyfish equipped with tiny microelectronics devices, with the aim of gathering critical data on temperature, acidity, and other relevant properties. To further improve their hybrid creations, the team has been studying the biomechanics of how jellyfish swim. Their research also involves analyzing water flow patterns generated by swimming jellies using suspended starchy biodegradable particles, described in the group's most recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Creating biohybrid creatures is a well-established field. For instance, as we previously reported, scientists have been intrigued by the potential of cyborg insects since the 1990s, when researchers began implanting tiny electrodes into cockroach antennae and shocking them to direct their movements. The idea was to use them as hybrid robots for search-and-rescue applications.

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After a judge warned that the Federal Trade Commission's probe into Media Matters for America (MMFA) should alarm "all Americans"—viewing it as a likely government retaliation intended to silence critical reporting from a political foe—the FTC this week appealed a preliminary injunction blocking the investigation.

The Republican-led FTC's determined to keep pressure on the nonprofit—which is dedicated to monitoring conservative misinformation—ever since Elon Musk villainized MMFA in 2023 for reporting that ads were appearing next to pro-Nazi posts on X. Musk claims that reporting caused so many brands to halt advertising that X's revenue dropped by $1.5 billion, but advertisers have suggested there technically was no boycott. They've said that many factors influenced each of their independent decisions to leave X—including their concerns about Musk's own antisemitic post, which drew rebuke from the White House in 2023.

In the time since, the toxic content has started coming from within X, via backlash-inducing outputs from its chatbot Grok. For MMFA, advertisers, agencies, and critics, a big question remains: Can the FTC actually penalize advertisers for invoking their own rights to free expression and association by refusing to deal with a private company just because they happened to agree on a collective set of brand standards to avoid monetizing hate speech or offensive content online?

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Welcome to Edition 8.07 of the Rocket Report! It's that time again: another test flight of SpaceX's massive Starship vehicle. In this week's report, we have a review of what went wrong on Flight 9 in May and a look at the stakes for the upcoming mission, which are rather high. The flight test is presently scheduled for 6:30 pm local time in Texas (23:30 UTC) on Sunday, and Ars will be on hand to provide in-depth coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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 and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly looks at possibility of Alpha launches in Japan. On Monday, Space Cotan Co., Ltd., operator of the Hokkaido Spaceport, announced it entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Texas-based launch company to conduct a feasibility study examining the practicality of launching Firefly’s Alpha rocket from its launch site, Spaceflight Now reports. Located in Taiki Town on the northern Japanese Island of Hokkaido, the spaceport bills itself as “a commercial spaceport that serves businesses and universities in Japan and abroad, as well as government agencies and other organizations.” It advertises launches from 42 degrees to 98 degrees, including Sun-synchronous orbits.

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ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, New Jersey—Micro LED is still years away, but the next best thing is taking shape right now. A $30,000 price tag and 114.5-inch diagonal size makes the Samsung "Micro RGB" TV  that I demoed this week unattainable for most. But the unique RGB backlight and Micro LED-sized diodes it employs represent a groundbreaking middle ground between high-end Mini LED and true Micro LED, expanding the possibilities for future premium displays beyond the acronyms we know today.

Micro RGB isn’t the same as Micro LED

To be clear, Samsung's Micro RGB TV is not a Micro LED display. During Samsung's presentation, a representative described the TV as sitting "squarely in between" Mini LED and Micro LED.

Unlike true Micro LED TVs, Samsung's Micro RGB TV uses a backlight. The backlight is unique in that it can produce red, green, and/or blue light via tiny RGB LEDs. Most LCD-LED backlights create just blue or white backlighting, which is applied to color filters to create the different hues displayed on the screen.

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Shortly after the Trump administration took office, it started canceling grants for things it had disagreements with: funding for pandemic preparation, efforts to diversify the scientific workforce, efforts that targeted minority health issues, and more. These terminations were challenged in court, and a consolidated case was heard in the District of Massachusetts, pitting the government against individual researchers, organizations that represent them, and states that host research institutions.

The result was a decisive win for the scientists. As the ruling explained, the government's termination efforts violated a statute against "arbitrary and capricious" policies, resulting in a stay that both blocked implementation of the policy and restored the flow of research funding.

That stay remained intact through appeals that brought it to the Supreme Court, which released its ruling on Thursday. As the result is a complicated split among the Justices, the stay against the policy itself remains intact. However, a slim majority decided that government funding issues are required to be heard by a different court and cannot be issued as part of the same ruling. So, researchers who lost their funding due to the now-defunct policy will remain de-funded.

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Last Thursday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner that investors are overexcited about AI models. "Someone" will lose a "phenomenal amount of money," he said, according to The Verge. The statement came as his company negotiates a secondary share sale at a $500 billion valuation—up from $300 billion just months earlier.

"Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes," Altman told the journalists, comparing the current market to the dot-com crash of the 1990s. Wired reported that he also predicted his company will spend "trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future" and that ChatGPT will soon serve "billions of people a day."

For context, Facebook serves about 3 billion monthly active users. Altman's projection would require ChatGPT to reach nearly half the world's population as daily users (not monthly, like Facebook), which is an extraordinarily optimistic outlook.

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There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about electric vehicle adoption here in the US. The current administration has made no secret of its hostility toward EVs and, as promised, has ended as many of the existing EV subsidies and vehicle pollution regulations as it could. After more than a year of month-on-month growth, EV sales started to contract, and brands like Genesis and Volvo have seen their customers reject their electric offerings, forcing portfolio rethinks. But wait, it gets worse.

Time and again, surveys and studies show that fears and concerns about charging are the main barriers standing in the way of someone switching from gas to EV. A new market research study by Telemetry Vice President Sam Abuelsamid confirms this, as it analyzes the charging infrastructure needs over the next decade. And one of the biggest hurdles—one that has gone mostly unmentioned across the decade-plus we've been covering this topic—is all the junk clogging up Americans' garages.

Want an EV? Clean out your garage

That's because, while DC fast-charging garners all the headlines and much of the funding, the overwhelming majority of EV charging is AC charging, usually at home—80 percent of it, in fact. People who own and live in a single family home are overrepresented among EV owners, and data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory from a few years ago found that 42 percent of homeowners park near an electrical outlet capable of level 2 (240 V) AC charging.

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Apple has announced another price increase for its Apple TV+ video-streaming service. Starting today, a new monthly subscription will cost $12.99; it was previously $9.99. Existing subscribers will see the new price take effect during their next billing cycle.

Annual plans and Apple TV+'s inclusion in Apple One at current pricing will remain unchanged.

The price of Apple TV+ has practically doubled since its launch a few years ago. There are many reasons for this.

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A local Neolithic community in northeastern France may have clashed with foreign invaders, cutting off limbs as war trophies and otherwise brutalizing their prisoners of war, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. The findings challenge conventional interpretations of prehistoric violence as bring indiscriminate or committed for pragmatic reasons.

Neolithic Europe was no stranger to collective violence of many forms, such as the odd execution and massacres of small communities, as well as armed conflicts. For instance, we recently reported on an analysis of human remains from 11 individuals recovered from El Mirador Cave in Spain, showing evidence of cannibalism—likely the result of a violent episode between competing Late Neolithic herding communities about 5,700 years ago. Microscopy analysis revealed telltale slice marks, scrape marks, and chop marks, as well as evidence of cremation, peeling, fractures, and human tooth marks.

This indicates the victims were skinned, the flesh removed, the bodies disarticulated, and then cooked and eaten. Isotope analysis indicated the individuals were local and were probably eaten over the course of just a few days. There have been similar Neolithic massacres in Germany and Spain, but the El Mirador remains provide evidence of a rare systematic consumption of victims.

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