After more than a decade of development and testing, US military officials are finally ready to entrust United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to haul a batch of national security satellites into space.
An experimental military navigation satellite, also more than 10 years in the making, will ride ULA's Vulcan rocket into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. There are additional payloads buttoned up inside the Vulcan rocket's nose cone, but officials from the US Space Force are mum on the details.
The Vulcan rocket is set for liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 7:59 pm EDT (23:59 UTC) Tuesday. There's an 80 percent chance of favorable weather during the one-hour launch window. It will take several hours for the Vulcan rocket's Centaur upper stage to reach its destination in geosynchronous orbit. You can watch ULA's live launch webcast below.
© United Launch Alliance
Staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta are reeling from a deadly shooting that unfolded Friday evening.
The shooting left one local police officer dead, at least four agency buildings riddled with bullet holes, and terrified staffers feeling like "sitting ducks." Fortunately, no CDC staff or civilians were injured. But, it quickly drew a spotlight to US health secretary and zealous anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who critics accused of fueling the violence with his menacing and reckless anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Kennedy publicly responded to the shooting on social media at about 11 am Eastern Time on Saturday, roughly 18 hours after the event. Former US Surgeon General Jerome Adams subsequently slammed Kennedy's delayed response as "tepid" in a critical essay published in Stat. The news outlet separately pointed out that Kennedy had posted on his personal social media account about 30 minutes prior to his response to the shooting, in which he shared pictures of a fishing trip.
© Getty | Elijah Nouvelage
It's easier than ever to manipulate video footage to deceive the viewer and increasingly difficult for fact checkers to detect such manipulations. Cornell University scientists developed a new weapon in this ongoing arms race: software that codes a "watermark" into light fluctuations, which in turn can reveal when the footage has been tampered with. The researchers presented the breakthrough over the weekend at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and published a scientific paper in June in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics.
“Video used to be treated as a source of truth, but that’s no longer an assumption we can make,” said co-author Abe Davis, of Cornell University, who first conceived of the idea. “Now you can pretty much create video of whatever you want. That can be fun, but also problematic, because it’s only getting harder to tell what’s real.”
Per the authors, those seeking to deceive with video fakes have a fundamental advantage: equal access to authentic video footage, as well as the ready availability of advanced low-cost editing tools that can learn quickly from massive amounts of data, rendering the fakes nearly indistinguishable from authentic video. Thus far, progress on that front has outpaced the development of new forensic techniques designed to combat the problem. One key feature is information asymmetry: An effective forensic technique must have information not available to the fakers that cannot be learned from publicly available training data.
© Sreang Hok/Cornell University
Courtesy University of Alabama Museums, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Ann Hodges never intended to be famous, but in 1954 she found herself thrust into the national spotlight when her afternoon nap was interrupted by a falling meteorite.
The Alabama woman has the distinction of being the first documented case of a person being struck by a meteorite. She survived with a bruised hip.
In June, a man nearly joined her exclusive club when small space rocks pierced his roof in McDonough, Georgia, missing him by 14 feet, The New York Times reported. The fragments — from a meteorite that researchers say likely formed 4.56 billion years ago — dented his floor instead.
In the more than 70 years since Hodges was struck, her strange tale remains a source of fascination. Mary Beth Prondzinski with the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where the meteorite is on exhibit, told Business Insider, "It's one of those local legends that not too many people know about."
Here's what happened to Hodges and the meteorite.
Courtesy of NASA/Newsmakers/Getty Images
1685 Toro, a mid-sized asteroid, has been classified by NASA JPL as a "Near Earth Asteroid" because of its orbit's proximity to Earth. Its size is similar to the island of Manhattan.
An asteroid is a rocky object in space that orbits the sun. When an asteroid or a piece of one enters the Earth's atmosphere, it becomes a meteor. What remains after impact is a meteorite.
Jay Leviton/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
At a time when both the threat of an atomic bomb and little green men in flying saucers invaded public fear, it was perhaps unsurprising that residents in the small Alabama town started calling 911. The Decatur Daily reported that many people thought they were witnessing a plane crash.
Ann Hodges, with her husband, rented a house in the Oak Grove community. Incredibly, across the street was the Comet Drive-In Theater, which had a neon sign depicting a comet falling through the sky, the Decatur Daily reported.
Jay Leviton/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
Hodges, who was 34 at the time, had been home with her mother on the afternoon of November 30. The meteorite crashed through the roof of Hodges' home at 2:46 p.m., Slate Magazine reported.
"Ann Hodges was taking a nap on her living room couch and she was under a blanket, which probably saved her life somewhat," Prondzinski said. "The meteorite came down through the roof in the living room and it ricocheted off a stand-up console radio that was in the room and landed on her hip."
Her mother, who was in another room, ran to her daughter's assistance when she heard her scream. In the aftermath, neither Hodges nor her mother knew what had happened.
"All she knew is that something had hit her," Prondzinski said. "They found the meteorite, this big rock, and they couldn't figure out how it had got there."
University of Alabama Museums, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Prondzinski said the meteorite is a chondrite or stony meteorite and composed of iron and nickel. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the meteorite is an estimated 4.5 billion years old.
When the meteor entered the Earth's atmosphere, it broke apart. One fragment hit Hodges while another was located a few miles away. A farmer, Julius Kempis McKinney, discovered the second fragment while driving a mule-drawn wagon and later sold it for enough money to buy both a house and car, the Decatur Daily reported.
Courtesy University of Alabama Museums, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
"Before you knew it, everyone in town was surrounding the house wanting to see what had happened," Prondzinski said.
"In those days they didn't have Facebook, but word still traveled quickly," she added.
A doctor and the police were called to the home. Prondzinski said it was Mayor Ed Howard and the police chief who discovered the hole in the ceiling where the meteorite had crashed through.
Jay Leviton/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
"She had this incredible bruise on her hip," Prondzinski told Business Insider. "She was taken to the hospital, not because she was so severely injured that she needed to be hospitalized, but because she was very distraught by the whole incident. She was a very nervous person, and she didn't like all the notoriety or all the people around."
Hodges' husband, Eugene, arrived home from work to find his house surrounded by a crowd of people.
Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
"The fact that it came through the roof, that slowed its trajectory, and the fact that it did bounce off the radio — if she had been lying under the radio, it would have broken her leg or her back. It probably wouldn't have killed her, but it would have done a lot more damage to her," Prondzinski said.
Bettmann/Getty Images
"The Air Force looked at it because they thought it was a flying saucer and all this other wild and crazy stuff," Prondzinski said.
After it was confirmed a meteorite, the Hodgeses faced a lengthy litigation process to acquire ownership of it. Their landlord, Birdie Guy, believe the meteorite belonged to her because she owned the house.
"Suing is the only way she'll ever get it," Hodges told reporters at the time. "I think God intended it for me. After all, it hit me!"
The Decatur Daily News reported Guy wanted money to fix the house's roof. Litigation went on for a year, and Prondzinski said Guy settled the case for $500. The house eventually caught fire and was demolished to make way for a mobile home park.
CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
"She became famous for 15 minutes. She had all these photo shoots. She was invited to go to New York City to be on Garry Moore's show '["I've Got a Secret"] where the panel had to guess what's her profession or what happened to her, why she is a notable figure," Prondzinski said.
Hodges would receive fan mail from churches, children, and educators asking about the meteorite, but she never answered any of them, leaving it to her lawyer.
"She was a very quiet person. She was a very private person," Prondzinski said. "She did not like having all the notoriety."
Courtesy University of Alabama Museums, Tuscaloosa, Alabama
"By the time she had got the meteorite in her possession, she was so sick of the whole thing. She said, 'You can have it,'" Prondzinski said.
All Hodges asked in return was for the museum to reimburse her for her attorney fees.
Prondzinski said the meteorite created problems between Hodges and her husband, Eugene. Her husband wanted to make money off the meteorite but failed to secure a buyer. The two eventually divorced in 1964.
In 1972, aged 52, Hodges died of kidney failure in a nursing home.
New York Daily News Archive/NY Daily News via Getty Images
"She's the only one who's ever been hit by a meteorite and lived to tell about it. Because of that, the meteorite has been appraised at over a million dollars," Prondzinski said.
In an interview with National Geographic, Florida State College astronomer Michael Reynolds said, "You have a better chance of getting hit by a tornado and a bolt of lightning and a hurricane all at the same time."
There have been some near misses in the years since Hodges was hit.
Most recently, on June 26, people in Southern states reported seeing a fireball fly across the sky, and pieces of a meteorite hit a house in McDonough, Georgia, with some piercing its roof, denting its flooring, and missing a resident inside. He likely heard what sounded like a gunshot.
"I suspect that he heard three simultaneous things," said Scott Harris, a researcher at the University of Georgia's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences' department of geology, the university reported. "One was the collision with his roof, one was a tiny cone of a sonic boom and a third was it impacting the floor all in the same moment.
"There was enough energy when it hit the floor that it pulverized part of the material down to literal dust fragments."
Harris studied the rocks and concluded the meteorite could have formed 4.56 billion years ago, making it older than the Earth. It is still being studied at the university.
: Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
According to NASA, about once a year a car-sized asteroid enters Earth's atmosphere but burns up before it can touch down.
One expert told Live Science that while it's impossible to know for sure how many asteroids hit Earth each year, he estimated "about 6,100 meteorite falls per year over the entire Earth, and about 1,800 over the land."
Most of these go undetected, but occasionally they'll capture the public's attention, like Hodges' meteorite.
For instance, in 1992 a 26-pound meteorite landed on a red Chevy Malibu in New York, and in 2013, one exploded over Russia. There has also been evidence of a meteorite killing a man and injuring another in 1888. Meteor Crater, which is almost a mile wide, in Arizona shows the impact a large meteorite can have.
Prondzinski told Business Insider that in the years since Hodges was struck, her story remains popular, and people have contacted the museum about using the story in movies, plays, and even a graphic novel.
Can deleting old emails and photos help the UK tackle ongoing drought this year? That’s the hope, according to recommendations for the public included in a press release today from the National Drought Group.
There are far bigger steps companies and policymakers can take to conserve water of course, but drought has gotten bad enough for officials to urge the average person to consider how their habits might help or hurt the situation. And the proliferation of data centers is raising concerns about how much water it takes to power servers and keep them cool.
“Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort to reduce demand and help preserve the health of our rivers and wildlife,” Helen Wakeham, Environment Agency Director of Water, said in the press release.
“Simple, everyday choices – such as turning off a tap or deleting old emails – also really helps the collective effort”
The Environment Agency didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry from The Verge about how much water it thought deleting files might save, nor how much water data centers that store files or train AI use in the UK’s drought-affected areas.
A small data center has been estimated to use upwards of 25 million liters of water per year if it relies on old-school cooling methods that allow water to evaporate. To be sure, tech companies have worked for years to find ways to minimize their water use by developing new cooling methods. Microsoft, for example, has tried placing a data center at the bottom of the sea and submerging servers in fluorocarbon-based liquid baths.
Generating electricity for energy-hungry data centers also uses up more water since fossil fuel power plants and nuclear reactors also need water for cooling and to turn turbines using steam, an issue that transitioning to more renewable energy can help to address.
August ushered in the UK’s fourth heatwave of the summer, exacerbating what was already the driest six months leading to July since 1976. Five regions of the UK have officially declared drought, according to the release, while another six areas are in the midst of “prolonged dry weather.”
The National Drought Group says pleas to residents to save water have made a difference. Water demand dropped by 20 percent from a July 11th peak in the Severn Trent area after “water-saving messaging,” according to the release. Plugging leaks is another major concern. Fixing a leaking toilet can prevent 200 to 400 liters of water from being wasted each day, it says.
Most adhesives can’t stick to wet surfaces because water and other fluids disrupt the adhesive’s bonding mechanisms. This problem, though, has been beautifully solved by evolution in remora suckerfish, which use an adhesive disk on top of their heads to attach to animals like dolphins, sharks, and even manta rays.
A team of MIT scientists has now taken a close look at these remora disks and reverse-engineered them. “Basically, we looked at nature for inspiration,” says Giovanni Traverso, a professor at MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and senior author of the study.
Remora adhesive disks are an evolutionary adaptation of the fish’s first dorsal fin, the one that in other species sits on top of the body, just behind the head and gill covers. The disk rests on an intercalary backbone—a bone structure that most likely evolved from parts of the spine. This bony structure supports lamellae, specialized bony plates with tiny backward-facing spikes called spinules. The entire disk is covered with soft tissue compartments that are open at the top. “This makes the remora fish adhere very securely to soft-bodied, fast-moving marine hosts,” Traverso says.
© Brent Durand
When a Spinosaurus attacked a T. rex in Jurassic Park III, both giant carnivores tried to finish the fight with one powerful bite of their bone-crushing jaws. The Spinosaurus won, because when the movie was being made back in the early 2000s, fossil discoveries suggested it was the largest carnivorous dinosaur that ever lived. But new research provides evidence that size and weight didn’t always create a powerful bite.
“The Spinosaurus and the T. rex didn’t live at the same time at the same continent, but if they did, I don’t really see the Spinosaurus winning,” says Andre Rowe, a paleobiologist at the University of Bristol. He led a study analyzing the biomechanics of skulls belonging to the largest carnivorous dinosaurs. Based on his findings, T. rex was most likely was the apex predator we’ve always believed it to be. The story of other giant carnivorous dinosaurs, though, was a bit more complicated.
“Of the giant carnivore dinosaurs, T. rex is the one we know the most about because it has a pretty good fossil record,” Rowe says. There are many complete skulls which have already been scanned and analyzed, and this is how we know the T. rex had an extremely high bite force—one of the highest known in the animal kingdom. We have far fewer fossil records of other giant carnivores like Spinosaurus or Allosaurus, so we assumed they were similar to T. rex.
© ROGER HARRIS/SPL
Texas is gearing up for war as a savage, flesh-eating fly appears poised for a US invasion and is expanding its range of victims.
On Friday, the Texas Department of Agriculture announced the debut of TDA Swormlure, a synthetic bait designed to attract the flies with a scent that mimics open flesh wounds, which are critical to the lifecycle of the fly, called the New World Screwworm. The parasite exploits any open wound or orifice on a wide range of warm-blooded animals to feed its ravenous spawn. Female flies lay hundreds of eggs in even the tiniest abrasion. From there, screw-shaped larvae—which give the flies their name—emerge to literally twist and bore into their victim, eating them alive and causing a putrid, life-threatening lesion. (You can see a graphic example here on a deer.)
The new lure for the flies is just one of several defense efforts in Texas, which stands to suffer heavy livestock losses from an invasion. Screwworms are a ferocious foe to many animals, but are particularly devastating to farm animals.
© CSIRO
The nation’s premier group of scientific advisers announced Thursday that it will conduct an independent, fast-track review of the latest climate science. It will do so with an eye to weighing in on the Trump administration’s planned repeal of the government’s 2009 determination that greenhouse gas emissions harm human health and the environment.
The move by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to self-fund the study is a departure from their typical practice of responding to requests by government agencies or Congress for advice. The Academies intend to publicly release it in September, in time to inform the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision on the so-called “endangerment finding,” they said in a prepared statement.
“It is critical that federal policymaking is informed by the best available scientific evidence,” said Marcia McNutt, president of the National Academy of Sciences. “Decades of climate research and data have yielded expanded understanding of how greenhouse gases affect the climate. We are undertaking this fresh examination of the latest climate science in order to provide the most up-to-date assessment to policymakers and the public.”
© Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued an executive order asserting political control over grant funding, including all federally supported research. The order requires that any announcement of funding opportunities be reviewed by the head of the agency or someone they designate, which means a political appointee will have the ultimate say over what areas of science the US funds. Individual grants will also require clearance from a political appointee and "must, where applicable, demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities."
The order also instructs agencies to formalize the ability to cancel previously awarded grants at any time if they're considered to "no longer advance agency priorities." Until a system is in place to enforce the new rules, agencies are forbidden from starting new funding programs.
In short, the new rules would mean that all federal science research would need to be approved by a political appointee who may have no expertise in the relevant areas, and the research can be canceled at any time if the political winds change. It would mark the end of a system that has enabled US scientific leadership for roughly 70 years.
© Nicolas Tucat
Some stone tools found near a river on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi suggest that the first hominins had reached the islands by at least 1.04 million years ago. That's around the same time that the ancestors of the infamously diminutive “Hobbits” may have reached the island of Flores.
Archaeologist Budianto Hakim of Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency and his colleagues were the ones who recently unearthed the tools from a site on Sulawesi. Although a handful of stone flakes from that island don't tell us who the ancestors of the small species were or how they reached remote islands like Flores and Luzon, the tools are one more piece in the puzzle. And this handful of stone flakes may eventually play a role in helping us understand how other hominin species conquered most of the world long before we came along.
Sometimes the deep past leaves the smallest traces. At the Calio site, a sandstone outcrop in what's now a cornfield outside the village of Ujung in southern Sulawesi, people left behind just a handful of sharp stone flakes roughly a million years ago. There are seven of them, ranging from 22 to 60 millimeters long, and they're scratched, worn, and chipped from tumbling around at the bottom of a river. But it's still clear that they were once shaped by skilled human—or at least human-like—hands that used hard stones as hammers to make sharp-edged chert flakes for cutting and scraping.
© Hakim at al. 2025
Human remains from 11 individuals recovered from El Mirador Cave in Spain showed evidence of cannibalism, archaeologists have concluded. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, the cannibalism was likely the result of a violent episode between competing Late Neolithic herding communities about 5,700 years ago.
“Cannibalism is one of the most complex behaviors to interpret, due to the inherent difficulty of understanding the act of humans consuming other humans," said co-author Palmira Saladié, a researcher at IPHES-CERCA and the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV). "Moreover, in many cases we lack all the necessary evidence to associate it with a specific behavioral context. Finally, societal biases tend to interpret it invariably as an act of barbarism.”
The El Mirador Cave is located at Sierra de Atapuerca, an archaeological site in the Burgos province of northern Spain. There is prior evidence of cannibalism at the Atapuerca site, including the remains of six Early Bronze Age humans, which included skull caps possibly used as containers during ceremonial consumption. In addition, since 1994, more than 160 bone fragments have been recovered from the Aurora Stratum (TD-6) in the Gran Dolina cavern at Sierra de Atapuerca. Over 30 percent of those fragments showed signs of butchering and consumption, such as slice marks, scrape marks, and chop marks.
© Maria D. Guillen/IPHES-CERCA
Login