r/InterstellarKinetics

Three Sturtevant, Wisconsin residents filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Microsoft on July 1, alleging that its newly operational Fairwater data center in nearby Mount Pleasant emits excessive, constant noise that’s damaging their property and daily lives. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, specifically points to diesel generators and HVAC equipment, including chillers, cooling towers, and condenser fans, arguing the facility fails to use adequate acoustic barriers to stop the noise from spilling onto neighboring properties. Named plaintiff Garrett Ostergaard says the noise forced him to change his work shift entirely, while fellow plaintiffs David and Joy Wade say they can no longer enjoy their backyard deck the way they used to.

Microsoft doesn’t dispute that a noise issue existed. Back in April, the company investigated complaints and traced a disturbing humming sound to the data center’s cooling fans, and in a June 18 blog post, it announced mitigation measures were in place, with plans for additional sound reduction components. Microsoft has since told the Journal Sentinel its fixes “fully resolved the issue,” a company characterization that stands in direct tension with residents choosing to file a federal lawsuit just weeks later describing the same disruption as ongoing.

This case adds to a pattern of friction between Microsoft and Wisconsin communities over its AI infrastructure buildout. A separate 2025 dispute saw Milwaukee Riverkeeper sue the City of Racine after officials withheld public records for over six months on the data center campus’s projected water use, eventually revealed to be roughly 8.4 million gallons annually, while Microsoft also canceled an unrelated nearby data center project near Oak Creek in October 2025 following community pushback.

Johns Hopkins researchers have developed an experimental intranasal DNA vaccine aimed at a persistent problem in tuberculosis treatment: drug-tolerant bacteria known as “persisters” that survive lengthy antibiotic courses and can trigger relapse long after a patient appears cured. TB remains staggeringly deadly on a global scale, with roughly 2 billion people carrying latent infections worldwide and 1.2 million deaths recorded in 2024 alone, making it the leading cause of death from any single infectious pathogen.

The vaccine works by fusing two genes, relMtb and Mip3α, and delivering them through the nose rather than by injection. TB bacteria naturally use the relMtb gene to survive hostile conditions like antibiotic exposure by entering a dormant, drug-tolerant state, so fusing it with Mip3α generates a signal that recruits immune cells capable of identifying and attacking that hidden bacterial reservoir. Because the vaccine is delivered intranasally, it concentrates immune activity directly in the lungs, where TB infections actually take hold, rather than relying purely on a systemic immune response.

In mouse studies, the vaccine accelerated bacterial clearance, reduced lung inflammation, and prevented relapse when paired with standard first-line TB drugs, and it also boosted the effectiveness of a drug combination specifically used against drug-resistant TB. Follow-up testing in rhesus macaques, whose immune systems more closely resemble humans, showed measurable immune responses lasting at least six months, though researchers caution this primate study only measured immune activation, not actual protection against live infection. Lead author Styliani Karanika says more preclinical work is still needed before the vaccine can move into human trials, but called the primate results “an important translational bridge” toward that next step.

STUDY: http://dx.doi.org/10.1172/jci196648

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used a speech commemorating America’s 250th anniversary of independence to take direct aim at Elon Musk, delivering his remarks from behind the very desk George Washington once used, now kept in City Hall. Reflecting on the nation’s founding, Mamdani said, “We see a city of contradictions within a nation of contradictions. We see the wealthiest country in the history of the world, one where children go to sleep hungry, while the world’s first trillionaire hungers for more.”

The comment lands against a striking financial backdrop. Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX went public in June 2026, with shares climbing from an opening price of $135 to roughly $150, propelling his fortune well past his closest rivals, Larry Page at $294.1 billion, Sergey Brin at $271.3 billion, and Jeff Bezos at $248.9 billion. Forbes currently puts his net worth at an estimated $997.1 billion, and Mamdani’s team highlighted a stark comparison: the UN estimates it would cost roughly $93 billion a year to end world hunger globally by 2030, a fraction of what SpaceX’s IPO alone added to Musk’s personal wealth.

This isn’t a new fight between the two. Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist who has said he doesn’t believe billionaires should exist, has repeatedly used Musk’s rising fortune as a talking point for higher taxes on the ultrawealthy, something he’s pushed as a way to help close New York City’s budget deficit. Back in September 2025, he joined Senator Bernie Sanders at a Brooklyn rally vowing to try to stop Musk’s trillionaire status altogether, and more recently in May 2026, he publicly sparred with Jeff Bezos on social media after Bezos argued for zeroing out taxes on lower earners, with Mamdani responding that Queens teachers would likely disagree. Friday’s remarks also carried an implicit reference to the hundreds of millions of dollars Musk spent backing President Trump’s return to the White House, tying economic inequality to political influence in the same breath.

Washington DC’s Fourth of July celebrations faced a second major weather disruption Saturday when severe thunderstorms prompted evacuations on the National Mall, just hours ahead of President Trump’s scheduled Salute to America speech marking the nation’s 250th anniversary. The storms compounded an already chaotic holiday weekend, after organizers canceled the city’s annual Independence Day Parade late Friday night due to an extreme heat warning that pushed forecast heat indices as high as 115°F.

The heat wave’s disruption extended well beyond the parade. The Great American State Fair, a centerpiece of Trump’s 250th anniversary programming, briefly shut down Friday afternoon amid 101°F temperatures before reopening with added cooling tents and misting stations, and organizers pushed Saturday’s opening time back from 10 a.m. to noon. The Washington Monument grounds delayed public access until 5 p.m., and gates for the annual “A Capitol Fourth” concert opened later than scheduled, all aimed at limiting crowd exposure during peak heat hours. Nationally, more than 185 million people were under heat alerts, and DC Fire and EMS confirmed at least 11 people were hospitalized for heat-related illnesses.

Despite the back-to-back weather disruptions, President Trump remained scheduled to deliver his Salute to America speech at 9:45 p.m., which he promised would be lengthy regardless of conditions, followed by a fireworks show organizers billed as record-breaking. The evening fireworks display itself remained on schedule even as storm evacuations unfolded on the Mall, underscoring how organizers tried to balance safety concerns against the symbolic weight of not disrupting the country’s 250th birthday celebration entirely.

Researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have given remote-controlled cyborg cockroaches a striking new ability: walking underwater. The team, led by Hirotaka Sato, designed tiny 3D-printed suits that seal off the spiracles cockroaches use to breathe, connecting them via small hoses so the insects can still move their legs freely, all detailed in a new study published this week in Nature Communications.

Instead of relying on a stored oxygen tank, the suit uses a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide that gradually decomposes to generate breathable oxygen over time. Researchers also moved the control chip and battery inside the roach’s body rather than mounting them externally, after discovering that earlier backpack-style designs limited the insects’ mobility. In testing, the suited-up Madagascar cockroaches, chosen for their five-year lifespan and finger-sized resilience, walked underwater for up to three hours at nearly the same speed they move on land, showing no adverse health effects even days later.

The researchers see this as a meaningful step toward using cyborg insect swarms in disaster response, where flooding often limits what conventional robots can access, and cyborg insects offer a cheaper, more energy-efficient alternative to fully mechanical designs. Sato went even further, telling New Scientist that the underwater suit represents “one big step towards space suits for cyborg insects,” floating the idea of one day using similar technology to explore the surface of Mars.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-74235-1

Long before the Inca Empire became the largest and most elaborate society in pre-Columbian America, a far more mysterious civilization called the Tiwanaku polity ruled the Andes, developing around Bolivia’s Lake Titicaca between roughly 500 and 1100 CE. At its height, the Tiwanaku numbered only 10,000 to 20,000 people, and since they left behind no written records, most of what’s known about them comes entirely from painstaking archaeological detective work.

One of the biggest breakthroughs came from a 2013 underwater excavation at the Khoa Reef near Bolivia’s Island of the Sun, where anthropologist Jose Capriles and his team used sonar and 3D photogrammetry to map submerged ritual offerings dating to the 8th through 10th centuries. Dredging the lakebed revealed puma-shaped incense burners, gold medallions bearing a rayed-face deity motif, and the bones of four young llamas believed to have been ritually sacrificed and deliberately placed in the water as offerings, complete with nearby anchors suggesting the ceremonies were conducted from boats. Capriles noted that while most people associate the Island of the Sun with the Incas, this research proved the Tiwanaku were actually first to treat the area as sacred ground.

Researchers describe these findings as evidence of “a complex interaction” carried out by a small ruling elite, using powerful religious imagery and costly sacrifice to project authority and possibly reach out to neighboring Andean groups. That picture was reinforced further last year, when Capriles’s team uncovered a massive Tiwanaku temple called Palaspata, perched on a Bolivian hilltop roughly 134 miles from the main Tiwanaku site and strategically positioned at the crossing point of three major trade routes, suggesting the civilization was far more organized and far-reaching than its modest population size might suggest.

Microsoft is introducing a new feature called “Meeting AI” that gives Teams organizers and presenters a direct, in-meeting toggle to turn Copilot, Facilitator, and automatic recap on or off in real time, rather than being locked into whatever AI settings were active when the meeting started. Confirming the update to Windows Latest, Microsoft stated the toggle allows granular control, users can disable just Copilot and Recap while keeping Facilitator running, switch everything off entirely, or adjust each AI tool independently depending on what a specific meeting actually needs.

The feature respects existing organizational policy, meaning it will only appear if a company’s IT administrators have already allowed Meeting AI at the tenant level, and won’t show up at all if AI has been disabled by policy. There’s one important technical catch: transcription and Meeting AI are linked together, turning either one on automatically activates the other along with recap generation, so fully avoiding AI in a meeting requires switching off both features together, not just one.

The rollout begins with Targeted Release in early July 2026, reaching General Availability by mid-to-late July, and will be available across Windows, macOS, mobile, and web. Microsoft is also testing a more contentious feature where Facilitator automatically listens for knowledge gaps during a meeting and proactively jumps into the chat with Bing-powered answers, a capability the company says won’t be enabled by default given the privacy concerns it raises, though the new Meeting AI toggle would let users switch it off if an organization does turn it on.

Jeffrey Sovern, a 41-year-old Air Force engineer and mechanic based in Virginia, is facing 13 counts of destruction of property, six counts of petit larceny, and possession of burglary tools after allegedly sawing down more than a dozen Flock Safety automatic license plate reader cameras, and his legal defense fund has become an unexpected rallying point for privacy advocates nationwide. Flock’s AI-powered cameras have spread rapidly across American towns and cities, marketed as crime-fighting infrastructure but increasingly criticized for sweeping up innocent drivers’ data and operating with limited public oversight, making the devices a flashpoint at the local political level.

Sovern launched his GoFundMe campaign in late December 2025 with a modest goal of $8,500, but community support quickly outpaced that target. Writing on the campaign page, he said, “My name is Jeff and I appreciate my privacy. I appreciate everyone’s right to privacy, enshrined in the fourth amendment,” adding that growing local news coverage of his case, and encouraging comments from strangers online, motivated him to start the fund in the first place. He also used the platform to urge supporters to pressure local governments directly, writing that people should “reach out to the local governments and demand that these systems are taken down.”

As of the most recent reporting, his fund has climbed to $15,440 from more than 400 individual donors, nearly double his original goal. Following a preliminary court hearing in late June 2026, Sovern posted a thank-you update noting “a huge uptick in awareness of the system and this case,” and encouraged continued action to “preserve privacy and roll back the pervasive data infrastructure.” His case fits into a wider pattern Futurism describes of privacy-minded direct action against Flock’s camera network, with other citizens across the country reportedly using everything from spray paint to chainsaws to disable similar devices in their own neighborhoods.

A new study published in Science argues that Earth’s earliest crust never had a real chance to survive, not because plate tectonics eventually recycled it away, but because relentless asteroid bombardment kept it too hot and molten to stabilize in the first place. Geologist Tim Johnson of Curtin University and planetary geophysicist Craig O’Neill of Queensland University of Technology reconstructed the Hadean eon’s impact history using evidence preserved on the Moon, Mercury, Mars, and meteorites, since almost no direct terrestrial record survives from Earth’s own first half-billion years.

Rather than simply tallying how many asteroids struck early Earth, as earlier research had done, this team modeled what all that impact energy actually did to the planet. Their findings suggest the heat generated by these collisions, transferred into Earth’s mantle and triggering widespread melting, may have rivaled or even exceeded the planet’s own internal heat output for much of the Hadean period. That constant injection of energy kept rock just a few kilometers below the surface partially molten, making it essentially impossible for the crust to stiffen into stable, long-lived continents or tectonic plates.

The bombardment is estimated to have persisted until roughly 3.9 to 3.5 billion years ago, after which Earth’s internal heat sources finally took over as the dominant force shaping the crust, allowing it to cool, thicken, and eventually stabilize enough for plate tectonics to emerge. Johnson argues the theory neatly explains several longstanding puzzles in early Earth geology, including the unusually round shape of the best-preserved ancient cratons, though he readily acknowledges the idea challenges mainstream models favoring internal, Earth-driven explanations, and expects it to gain traction gradually rather than through a single definitive proof.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeb5402

Google has taken down key infrastructure behind a botnet called Popa that quietly hijacked millions of consumer TV streaming devices and turned them into hidden relay points for cybercriminals and state-linked espionage groups. Working alongside the FBI and Lumen Technologies, Google traced the operation to NetNut, an Israeli company that sells residential proxy services allowing customers to route their internet traffic through IP addresses in different countries, and found that NetNut’s network spanned at least 2 million devices scattered across the globe.

What makes this case especially serious is the scale of who was using it. Google’s investigation identified 316 distinct threat clusters relying on suspected NetNut proxy exit nodes, a group that included both financially motivated cybercriminals and espionage operations, all of whom were reportedly using the service to mask their real IP addresses while breaking into victim networks, accessing their own attack infrastructure, and running password spray attacks designed to guess their way into accounts. According to Google, NetNut built this network by embedding software development kits into devices commonly found in ordinary homes, especially smart TVs and streaming boxes, giving the company a hidden foothold to relay traffic through those devices without the owners ever knowing their hardware was being used this way.

In response, Google shut down the Google accounts and services that NetNut depended on to control the botnet, cutting off a key piece of the infrastructure keeping the operation running. This is not an isolated incident either; Google disrupted a similar residential proxy network called IPIDEA back in January, which it described at the time as the world’s largest, and it has been waging a broader legal and technical campaign against these networks since at least mid-2025, when it filed suit against the operators behind the BadBox 2.0 botnet affecting more than 10 million Android-based devices. Together, these actions point to a growing, largely invisible market where ordinary consumer electronics are quietly repurposed as cover for global hacking and espionage campaigns.

The ACLU has laid out a detailed case that Flock Safety, one of the country’s most widely used automatic license plate reader companies, has a documented pattern of misleading the very governments and communities it sells surveillance technology to. The clearest example happened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in April 2026, when a city council member directly asked Flock’s chief information security officer whether the company’s system could create a heat map tracking where a vehicle had driven over time. Flock’s representative said no, the council approved the contract that same night, and by the next morning the city learned the statement was false, since Flock later admitted its system does generate exactly that kind of tracking heat map for up to a full month of vehicle movement.

The fallout was immediate and unusually swift. Oshkosh’s city council reconvened within 24 hours and unanimously voted to revoke the contract it had just approved, with Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson saying he did not know how the council could govern if Flock told “untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths,” and Mayor Matt Mugerauer bluntly stating he did not want to work with a company that gives bad information. Flock’s response was to call its false statement “one small misconception” and “a minor nuance,” while complaining it had not been given a chance to explain itself, a response the ACLU says reflects a broader corporate habit of treating factual misrepresentations as public relations problems rather than serious credibility failures.

According to the ACLU, Oshkosh was far from an isolated case. In Colorado, Flock’s CEO publicly denied the company had any federal contracts after a police chief raised concerns about federal access to local license data, only for Flock to later admit it did have pilot agreements with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security. The company also published a blog titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No,” despite knowing ICE could access its data indirectly through local police partners, and after reports surfaced that Texas law enforcement used Flock data to track someone who sought an abortion in Illinois, the company rolled out a new oversight tool it claimed would significantly reduce misuse, a claim an ACLU of Massachusetts investigation found could be defeated by officers simply typing vague words like “investigation” or even nonsense like “hehehe” into a required search field. The ACLU says Flock has even falsely claimed to have partnered with the ACLU itself on ALPR legislation in New Mexico and system design in Illinois, claims the organization flatly denies ever happening.

Egyptian authorities unveiled two significant archaeological finds on July 4, led by a remarkably well-preserved Byzantine-era residential city uncovered in the Dakhla Oasis, deep in the country’s western desert. The site reveals an organized fourth-century urban settlement, complete with intersecting north-south and east-west streets forming public squares, a heavily fortified structure with thick defensive walls, and two watchtowers built to safeguard the outskirts, according to officials from Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

At the heart of the settlement stands a mid-fourth-century basilica church overlooking the main streets, alongside the House of Tisous, believed to have belonged to a church deacon and likely used as a house church before the basilica was built. Archaeologists also recovered everyday artifacts including bread ovens, kitchens, and stone grinding tools, alongside bronze coins bearing Byzantine emperor portraits and Christian symbols, plus a notable group of gold coins dating to the reign of Roman Emperor Constantius II, who ruled from 337 to 361 AD.

In a separate announcement, archaeologists also revealed 18 newly discovered tombs at the Marina el-Alamein site near Alexandria, including 11 rock-cut tombs reaching depths of about 8 meters and seven surface limestone-built tombs, bringing the site’s total tomb count to 48. First excavated in 1986, Marina el-Alamein is believed to be the ancient Greco-Roman port city of Leukaspis, which thrived along the Mediterranean coast from the second through fourth centuries. Egypt’s Tourism and Antiquities Ministry says it hopes both discoveries will help draw renewed interest to the country’s vital antiquities-driven tourism sector.

House Democrats released a report on July 2 alleging that donors who intended to support America250, the bipartisan nonprofit congressionally chartered in 2016 to organize the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, were instead secretly redirected to Freedom 250, a separate nonprofit created in December 2025 under the National Park Foundation and closely aligned with the White House. Citing whistleblower interviews and newly obtained documents, the report suggests this was not an accident but a deliberate effort by Trump allies to funnel donor money and attention away from the nonpartisan effort and toward a group under more direct presidential influence, with the Boston Globe noting the alleged conduct could potentially violate several criminal statutes if proven true.

This report builds on months of mounting scrutiny. Since February 2026, Senator Adam Schiff and several Democratic colleagues have investigated Freedom 250 over “pay-to-play” concerns, after reporting revealed donors contributing between one dollar and nearly ten million dollars received perks like private receptions with Trump and speaking roles at official events. Unlike a federal agency, Freedom 250 isn’t bound by strict disclosure rules, and its CEO told Congress the group would let anonymous donors stay hidden until 2027 tax filings, raising alarms among Democrats about undisclosed corporate or foreign influence buying access to the president.

The controversy escalated further in May 2026, when Reps. Gregory Meeks and Jared Huffman accused the State Department of using U.S. embassies in Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore to pressure foreign companies into million-dollar Freedom 250 donations in exchange for presidential access, VIP treatment, and speaking roles, a claim that appears to directly contradict Freedom 250’s earlier assurance that it had not accepted foreign money. Records also show the group spent $10 million retrofitting mobile history exhibits with conservative groups Hillsdale College and PragerU, plus over $270,000 to the firm that organized the January 6 rally, spending choices Democrats say reveal a partisan tilt to what was supposed to be a nonpartisan national celebration.

THE REPORT: https://democrats-naturalresources.house.gov/imo/media/doc/freedom250\_oversight\_report1.pdf

For centuries, science dismissed smell as the least important human sense, with 19th century researcher Paul Broca famously calling it “the bestial sense.” That view stalled research for decades, until Covid-19 caused unprecedented numbers of people to lose their sense of smell almost overnight, with a 2023 study finding 60 percent of Covid patients experienced some smell loss. Unlike vision or hearing, which pass through the thalamus first, smell signals go directly into the amygdala and hippocampus, the brain’s emotion and memory centers, explaining why a single scent can trigger a vivid memory instantly. Chrissi Kelly, who lost her sense of smell 14 years ago, described the experience as “climbing the walls” and no longer feeling like herself.

Unexplained smell loss can also be an early warning sign of serious disease. The article follows “Dave,” a wine enthusiast who hid his smell loss for 20 years before being diagnosed with Parkinson’s after other symptoms emerged. Scientists suspect Parkinson’s-related toxic proteins may first accumulate in the olfactory bulbs, making smell loss one of the earliest detectable signs, sometimes years ahead of other symptoms, a pattern also seen in Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia. Altered smell has even been linked to depression, schizophrenia, and autism, part of a broader list of 139 conditions researchers now associate with smell disorders.

The good news is that smell appears at least partially trainable. Olfactory training, essentially physical therapy for the nose, involves smelling scents like lemon, rose, and clove twice daily to help regenerate receptor cells. Stanford’s Zara Patel found about 30 percent of patients improve after months of training, rising to 50 percent when paired with a steroid sinus rinse. For Kelly, that training paid off: two years into recovery, catching the scent of pine in the Austrian Alps, she felt “this flutter in my stomach, it was like, ‘I’m alive.’”

ORIGINAL ARTICLE: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/health-disease/2026/what-happens-brain-lose-sense-of-smell

If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly not doing it alone. Nearly every adult human face carries a population of Demodex folliculorum, a microscopic mite roughly 0.3 millimeters long that spends its entire three-week lifespan living head-first inside human hair follicles, feeding on sebum and dead skin, and emerging only at night to mate on our faces while we sleep, timing that activity to take advantage of the melatonin our bodies release during rest.

What makes these mites unusual is just how completely they depend on us. Humans are literally the mite’s only habitat in existence: they are born on us, feed on us, mate on us, and die on us, and researchers who sequenced the mite’s genome for the first time found it has lost a significant number of genes typically needed for independent survival, alongside having roughly 500 times fewer cells than a fruit fly. That level of genetic and cellular stripping down suggests the mites are moving away from an independent lifestyle entirely, and scientists say they can no longer survive on any other mammal species, or outside human skin at all.

Researchers led by Dr. Alejandra Perotti at the University of Reading argue this points to an ongoing evolutionary shift from a parasitic relationship to a mutually beneficial, symbiotic one, where the mites may actually help keep human pores clear in exchange for a permanent home. Looking further ahead, the scientists behind the study lay out two speculative long-term outcomes: either the mites eventually become unable to reproduce and die off completely, or, in a more remarkable possibility, they continue this dependency trend so far that they become a permanent, internal part of the human body rather than remaining a separate organism living on its surface.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msac125

A Tesla Semi has been linked to its first known fatal crash after rear-ending two vehicles stopped at a red light in Dayton, Nevada on Sunday morning, killing a married couple and leaving a third person with life-threatening injuries. According to the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office, preliminary statements taken at the scene suggest the truck’s driver may have fallen asleep before slamming into the stopped vehicles at the intersection of U.S. 50 and Traditions Parkway, just east of Carson City. The victims, identified by family as Sergio “Boo” and Jennifer Villanueva, were sitting westbound in a Volkswagen Beetle when they were struck from behind, and both were pronounced dead at the scene.

While Nevada Highway Patrol has not officially confirmed the truck’s make, photos from the crash site clearly show the distinctive center-seat, cab-forward design of a Tesla Semi pulling a white dry-van trailer, first flagged by FreightWaves reporter Timothy Dooner. The location is notable too, sitting about an hour from Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada, where the company both manufactures the Semi and operates its own delivery fleet, making it plausible the truck belonged to Tesla’s own operation. Tesla only began ramping customer deliveries of the Semi this year after years of delays, and with only a few hundred units currently on the road, a fatal crash involving one is a significant first for the young program.

Because the reported cause was driver fatigue rather than any autonomous system, this incident sits apart from Tesla’s ongoing Full Self-Driving controversies, since the Semi does not offer FSD and the driver was in full manual control at the time. That shifts the scrutiny toward the truck’s active safety systems instead, particularly automatic emergency braking, which is designed to stop a vehicle before hitting stationary obstacles even without driver input. Tesla has said the Semi uses the same camera hardware that enables standard AEB on its passenger cars, and the company has also built drowsiness detection into vehicles like the Model 3 and Model Y, but it has never published Semi specific safety specifications, leaving open the question of whether either system was active, or whether it engaged, before the crash.

Homo floresiensis, the tiny extinct human relative nicknamed “hobbits” after they were discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, likely survived by scavenging meat that Komodo dragons left behind rather than hunting large animals themselves, according to a new study that overturns earlier assumptions about their capabilities. Researchers had long debated whether these diminutive hominins, who lived until roughly 50,000 years ago, were sophisticated enough to hunt dwarf elephants called Stegodon and control fire, but new evidence points toward a far more limited skill set.

To figure out who really killed the Stegodon whose bones fill the Liang Bua cave, researchers led by paleoanthropologist Elizabeth Grace Veatch ran an unusual experiment: they fed a dead goat to a Komodo dragon at Zoo Atlanta and studied the exact bite marks it left behind. The dragon, unsurprisingly, went straight for the meatiest parts of the carcass, the hindquarters and forequarters, leaving 192 toothmarks across 26 bones. When researchers compared that pattern to the ancient Stegodon bones bearing Homo floresiensis stone tool marks, they found something telling: the hobbits’ cut marks were concentrated on the least desirable parts, like skull fragments and chest vertebrae, exactly what you’d expect if dragons ate first and hobbits picked over what remained.

The fire evidence was just as decisive. Out of more than 3,000 ancient Stegodon bones tied to Homo floresiensis, only a single one showed any sign of burning, and researchers believe even that came from later disturbance by modern humans rather than the hobbits themselves. That’s a stark contrast to roughly a fifth of rodent bones left by modern humans in the same cave layers, which showed clear cooking marks. As Veatch put it, “the rat bones demonstrate the pattern clearly, zero burned bones in Homo floresiensis layers, hundreds burned in modern human layers,” concluding that earlier claims about advanced hobbit behavior have been “slowly chipped away” by mounting evidence like this. Adam Brumm, an outside researcher at Griffith University, called the study convincing evidence that these small ancient humans scavenged rather than hunted their way through life on Flores.

STUDY: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aeb7219

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 29, 2026 in Trump v. Slaughter that President Trump had the constitutional authority to fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 91-year-old precedent from 1935 that had protected members of independent federal agencies from presidential removal without cause for nearly a century. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion joined by all five conservative justices, stating that limits on the president’s ability to remove those who exercise executive power on his behalf unconstitutionally infringe on his Article II authority, and that the president may remove his subordinates at will. Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the rare and pointed step of reading her dissent aloud from the bench, a move justices reserve for decisions they consider historically significant and profoundly wrong.

The ruling applies to roughly two dozen independent federal agencies whose leaders previously served fixed terms and could only be removed for cause. The FTC, NLRB, SEC, CFPB, and Federal Reserve Board of Governors are all now subject to at-will presidential removal under the ruling, giving President Trump and every future president direct control over agencies that regulate Wall Street, consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, labor relations, and the broader financial system. Legal scholars describe the ruling as the culmination of the unitary executive theory, the legal doctrine holding that a president must have total control over all executive branch functions, and say it represents the most significant expansion of presidential power over the regulatory state in modern American history.

In a separate ruling issued the same day, the Court drew a distinction and held that Trump could not fire Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, though the legal reasoning behind that carve-out is still being analyzed by constitutional scholars and its precise limits remain unclear. Trump celebrated the Slaughter ruling publicly, saying it “greatly increases” his presidential power. The immediate practical effect is that no commissioner, board member, or director of an independent federal agency can now consider themselves protected from removal if they make a decision the White House opposes.

A leaked internal Microsoft video has surfaced showing Project Aion, an experimental operating system concept where Copilot doesn’t just live inside Windows, it effectively becomes Windows, replacing decades of familiar desktop conventions like the Start menu and taskbar. The footage first appeared through BetaWiki’s Discord server, and Windows Central’s Zac Bowden confirmed with sources that the video is genuine, though it reportedly dates back to around 2024, meaning the project as shown is roughly two years old and its current status is unknown.

Aion runs on a codebase Microsoft internally called “Win3,” a lightweight, entirely web-based reimagining of Windows powered by the Edge browser and Chromium’s layout engine. Instead of a traditional Start menu, users interact with a multi-modal input box where Copilot handles finding files, opening apps, and browsing the web, while a new “Spaces” feature lets the AI automatically group related apps and websites together, closing and recalling them on demand. Because the system leans almost entirely on web technologies, it has no native support for classic Win32 desktop programs like Microsoft Word; instead, launching one of those apps hands off to a Windows 365 Cloud PC instance, streaming the program remotely rather than running it on the device itself.

The concept goes further with “rich” plugins that let Copilot take direct action inside a workflow, such as automatically drafting and sending an Outlook email to a coworker using context already gathered within that Space. Despite how fully realized the demo looks, Windows Central notes there’s no confirmation this was ever meant to ship as a real product, and it may simply have been an internal exploration of what a desktop experience could look like if it were rebuilt entirely around agentic AI from the ground up, possibly connected to a separate, similarly web-focused effort known as Project Solara.

Anthony Chavez, a 78-year-old retired HVAC technician who spent his career at Los Alamos National Laboratory before retiring in 2017, vanished from his New Mexico home on May 4, 2025, in circumstances that only got stranger the more investigators dug in. His car remained parked at the house, and he left behind his keys, wallet, and personal documents, details that typically point away from a planned disappearance and toward something investigators couldn’t easily explain.

The strangest twist surfaced in newly obtained police records: a friend told investigators that Chavez had been secretly working alongside an anonymous quantum physicist on a theory aimed at making something exist in two places at the same time. That concept maps onto a real and well-established phenomenon in physics called superposition, where certain particles genuinely can exist in multiple states simultaneously, a principle that underlies how quantum computers work and that researchers believe could eventually inform future teleportation technology. Investigators reportedly noted a specific, non-supernatural link back to Chavez’s own career, since quantum computers require ultra-cold operating environments maintained by specialized cooling systems, exactly the kind of infrastructure an experienced HVAC technician would understand intimately.

Despite the intriguing lead, the physicist Chavez allegedly worked with was never publicly named, and no verified research documentation has surfaced connecting him to any specific quantum computing project, leaving the claim resting entirely on secondhand testimony from a friend. His journal was also left behind at his home, adding another unresolved piece to the case, and police ultimately closed the investigation without a clear resolution. The case has since attracted online speculation linking it to UFO research and secret technology programs, though nothing in the released police records supports those theories directly.