Earth is about 71 percent water. An overwhelming 97 percent of that water is found in the oceans, leaving us with only 3 percent in the form of freshwater—and much of that is frozen in the form of glaciers. That leaves just 0.3 percent of that freshwater on the surface in lakes, swamps, springs, and our main sources of drinking water, rivers and streams.
Despite our planet’s famously blue appearance from space, thirsty aliens would be disappointed. Drinkable water is actually pretty scarce.
As if that doesn’t already sound unsettling, what little water we have is also threatened by climate change, urbanization, pollution, and a global population that continues to expand. Over 2 billion people live in regions where their only source of drinking water is contaminated. Pathogenic microbes in the water can cause cholera, diarrhea, dysentery, polio, and typhoid, which could be fatal in areas without access to vaccines or medical treatment.
In December 2010, a study led by a NASA astrobiology fellow claimed to have found an alien-like microbe in a salty, alkaline lake in California. This extraordinary bacterium could reportedly thrive using the toxic element arsenic in place of phosphorus—otherwise thought essential for life on Earth. It even incorporated arsenic, instead of phosphorus, into the backbone of its DNA, according to the study, which was published online by the prestigious journal Science.
If true, the claims were groundbreaking. And NASA's press team only hyped the potential significance. In press materials, the agency claimed the finding "begs a rewrite of biology textbooks" and "will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." In a subsequent press conference, the lead author, Felisa Wolfe-Simon, didn't hold back, either, saying, "We've cracked open the door to what's possible for life elsewhere in the universe and that's profound."
Backlash
But upon that very splashy debut, outside scientists quickly identified flaws and problems in the study. When the study finally appeared in the June 3, 2011, print issue of Science, it was accompanied by eight "technical comments" blasting the study claims.
Welcome to Edition 8.04 of the Rocket Report! The Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield will be a lot of things. Along with new sensors, command and control systems, and satellites, Golden Dome will require a lot of rockets. The pieces of the Golden Dome architecture operating in orbit will ride to space on commercial launch vehicles. And Golden Dome's space-based interceptors will essentially be designed as flying fuel tanks with rocket engines. This shouldn't be overlooked, and that's why we include a couple of entries discussing Golden Dome in this week's Rocket Report.
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.
Space-based interceptors are a real challenge. The newly installed head of the Pentagon's Golden Dome missile defense shield knows the clock is ticking to show President Donald Trump some results before the end of his term in the White House, Ars reports. Gen. Michael Guetlein identified command-and-control and the development of space-based interceptors as two of the most pressing technical challenges for Golden Dome. He believes the command-and-control problem can be "overcome in pretty short order." The space-based interceptor piece of the architecture is a different story.
Not surprisingly, Congress is pushing back against the Trump administration's proposal to cancel the Space Launch System, the behemoth rocket NASA has developed to propel astronauts back to the Moon.
Spending bills making their way through both houses of Congress reject the White House's plan to wind down the SLS rocket after two more launches, but the text of a draft budget recently released by the House Appropriations Committee suggests an openness to making some major changes to the program.
The next SLS flight, called Artemis II, is scheduled to lift off early next year to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon. Artemis III will follow a few years later on a mission to attempt a crew lunar landing at the Moon's south pole. These missions follow Artemis I, a successful unpiloted test flight in 2022.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence have developed a groundbreaking tool that allows open-source AI systems to match or surpass the visual understanding capabilities of proprietary models like GPT-4V and Gemini 1.5 Flash, potentially reshaping the competitive landscape between open and c…Read More
The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels, so a plan is being implemented to relocate its population to Australia.
In a landmark ruling, the International Court of Justice declared that failure to act on climate change can be an “internationally wrongful act”—meaning countries could face legal consequences for harming the planet.
A Chinese man with no medical training is injecting cancer patients with a toxic bleach solution; a full course of treatment runs $20,000. He’s now working to bring the unproven treatment to the US.
Activists around the world are calling attention to harassment they’ve faced on Meta’s platforms. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected to their work. Facebook was the most-cited platform, followed by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.
Global Witness and many of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its peers to do more to address harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks to activists. Around 75 percent of people surveyed said they believed that online abuse they experienced corresponded to offline harm.
“Those stats really stayed with me. They were so much higher than we expected them to be,” Ava Lee, campaign strategy lead on digital threats at Global Witness, tells The Verge. That’s despite expecting a gloomy outcome based on prior anecdotal accounts. “It has kind of long been known that the experience of climate activists and environmental defenders online is pretty awful,” Lee says.
Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks
Global Witness surveyed more than 200 people between November 2024 and March of this year that it was able to reach through the same networks it taps when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found Meta-owned platforms to be “the most toxic.” Around 62 percent of participants said they encountered abuse on Facebook, 36 percent on WhatsApp, and 26 percent on Instagram.
That probably reflects how popular Meta’s platforms are around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users, more than a third of the global population. But Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned could lead to more hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X, where 37 percent of survey participants reported experiencing abuse.
In May, Meta reported a “small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content” on Facebook as well as “a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content” during the first quarter of 2025.
“That’s sort of the irony as well, of them moving towards this kind of free speech model, which actually we’re seeing that it’s silencing certain voices,” says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.
Fatrisia Ain leads a local collective of women in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmers’ lands and contaminated a river local villagers used to be able to rely on for drinking water. Posts on Facebook have accused her of being a communist, a dangerous allegation in her country, she tells The Verge.
Ain says she’s asked Facebook to take down several posts attacking her, without success. “They said it’s not dangerous, so they can’t take it down. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta would understand, in Indonesia, it’s dangerous,” Ain says.
Other posts have accused Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her that could wind up exposing her to more threats in the real world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Women who are being the defenders for my own community are more vulnerable than men … more people harass you with so many things,” she says.
Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to the Global Witness survey said that they have feared for their safety, including Ain. She’s been physically targeted at protests against palm oil companies accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. During a protest outside of a government office, men grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older women activists surround her to protect her as a security measure.
In the Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they’d been attacked on the basis of their sex. “There’s evidence of the way that women and women of color in particular in politics experience just vast amounts more hate than any other group,” Lee says. “Again, we’re seeing that play out when it comes to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impact that that is having on the mental health of lots of these defenders and their ability to feel safe.”
“We encourage people to use tools available on our platforms to help protect against bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its “HiddenWords” feature that allows you to filter offensive direct messages and comments on your posts and its “Limits” feature that hides comments on your posts from users that don’t follow you.
Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been operating on local farmers’ land without paying them, as they’re supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme.
Global Witness says there are concrete steps social media companies can take to address harassment on their platforms. That includes dedicating more resources to their content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and inviting public input on the process. Activists surveyed also reported that they think algorithms that boost polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the problem worse.
“There are a number of choices that platforms could make,” Lee says. “Resourcing is a choice, and they could be putting more money into really good content moderation and really good trust and safety [initiatives] to improve things.”
Global Witness plans to put out its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its last such report found that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.
New types of AI coding assistants promise to let anyone build software by typing commands in plain English. But when these tools generate incorrect internal representations of what's happening on your computer, the results can be catastrophic.
Two recent incidents involving AI coding assistants put a spotlight on risks in the emerging field of "vibe coding"—using natural language to generate and execute code through AI models without paying close attention to how the code works under the hood. In one case, Google's Gemini CLI destroyed user files while attempting to reorganize them. In another, Replit's AI coding service deleted a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code.
The Gemini CLI incident unfolded when a product manager experimenting with Google's command-line tool watched the AI model execute file operations that destroyed data while attempting to reorganize folders. The destruction occurred through a series of move commands targeting a directory that never existed.
Most people, after suffering consequences for a bad decision, will alter their future behavior to avoid a similar negative outcome. That's just common sense. But many social circles have that one friend who never seems to learn from those consequences, repeatedly self-sabotaging themselves with the same bad decisions. When it comes to especially destructive behaviors, like addictions, the consequences can be severe or downright tragic.
Why do they do this? Researchers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia, suggest that the core issue is that such people don't seem able to make a causal connection between their choices/behavior and the bad outcome, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Communications Psychology. Nor are they able to integrate new knowledge into their decision-making process effectively to get better results. The results could lead to the development of new intervention strategies for gambling, drug, and alcohol addictions.
In 2023, UNSW neuroscientist Philip Jean-Richard Dit Bressel and colleagues designed an experimental video game to explore the issue of why certain people keep making the same bad choices despite suffering some form of punishment as a result. Participants played the interactive online game by clicking on one of two planets to "trade" with them; choosing the correct planet resulted in earning points.
Two NASA satellites rocketed into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of space physics that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age.
The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth's magnetic field known as polar cusps. As the name suggests, these regions are located over the poles. They play an important but poorly understood role in creating colorful auroras as plasma streaming out from the Sun interacts with the magnetic field surrounding Earth.
The same process drives geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting GPS navigation, radio communications, electrical grids, and satellite operations. These outbursts are usually triggered by solar flares or coronal mass ejections that send blobs of plasma out into the Solar System. If one of these flows happens to be aimed at Earth, we are treated with auroras but vulnerable to the storm's harmful effects.
Anthropic research reveals AI models perform worse with extended reasoning time, challenging industry assumptions about test-time compute scaling in enterprise deployments.Read More
Google DeepMind's Gemini AI won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad by solving complex math problems using natural language, marking a breakthrough in AI reasoning and human-level performance.Read More
Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) and President Donald Trump during the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images
At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump - flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil - said that "the most important man of the day" was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. "He's gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?" Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era a …
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