There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I’ve got to fix it.

I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on the grass nearby. A bright red notification sits on the screen, telling me something is wrong. I type in a question and the software pulls up instructions and a few images from the user manual that matches the serial number of the machine.

Credit: Boone Ashworth

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On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. I’ve never gotten more attention from strangers.

A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.)

Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it.

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If you ask most satellite companies aside from SpaceX, they will tell you the world doesn't have enough capacity for launching payloads into orbit. This is despite the blistering launch cadence we've seen around the world in recent years, led by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. Theoretically, competition will lead to lower prices and allow the best to rise to the top. It seems like the customers buying launch services were right. SpaceX is dialing back its Falcon 9 launch program, and there is no certainty about when SpaceX's reusable next-generation super-heavy-lift rocket, Starship, will carry anything to orbit besides the company's own Starlink satellites.

So it's no surprise satellite operators are cheering the success of a new launch provider. This was especially the case a few days ago, when Germany's Isar Aerospace reached orbit for the first time with its Spectrum rocket. The launcher delivered a batch of CubeSats to low-Earth orbit from a spaceport in northern Norway, and Isar tasted success after its first test flight ended in failure last year.

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Games may be life with all the hard bits removed, but they provide a way to study why people make the choices they make. Traditional games are usually played against a static background: the rewards per outcome are constant. That limits their relevance to behavior because, in real life, the rewards and consequences of strategic choices are ever changing. Now, researchers have used a mathematical model to study a series of games that include evolving strategies and randomly varying returns.

A bit of history

Perhaps the most famous game-theory contest is the prisoner’s dilemma. In the prisoner’s dilemma, a pair of thieves have been captured and are being separately interrogated by the police. If both clam up, they will be punished for a lesser crime. If one prisoner makes a deal (defects) then that prisoner gets to go free and the other gets a heavier sentence. If both make a deal, they both get an in-between punishment.

The person running the game can start it with different rewards for cooperating and defecting to explore how the optimum strategy varies with reward and risk, which the players can figure out by varying the strategies across multiple rounds. Depending on the balance between the reward for staying silent (cooperating) and betrayal, the game stabilizes with everyone betraying everyone. In this simple situation, everyone loses.

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For a child bursting with energy, few things are more fun than hurtling through a bouncy castle, launching into the air, and ping-ponging between every surface. But that childhood buoyancy will quickly deflate when it turns out those surfaces are smeared with a hypervirulent, multidrug-resistant pathogen.

That was the horrifying reality for a community in Ireland in fall 2025. Neighbors had gathered for an afternoon of merriment, complete with a barbecue, a sweets station, and three bouncy castles. Officials estimate that about 120 people joined the festivities, and around half of them were children and teens. Within a day, some children began developing signs of an infection. In all, 48 children in the community developed aggressive skin and soft-tissue infections.

Of the 48 cases, 33 were treated by their regular doctor, and 15 sought emergency care. Four children ended up being hospitalized. Luckily, all of the children recovered. The results of the outbreak investigation were reported this week in the journal Eurosurveillance.

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The use of coal to generate electricity on the US grid has been plunging for nearly two decades, and the first Trump administration was unable to affect the trend. So his second administration has attempted more aggressive interventions to prop up coal use. One of its most direct means of doing so is to order coal plants that were scheduled to close to remain open, even if there is no need for them.

The administration's justification for these orders is a statute that allows the Department of Energy (DOE) to declare an emergency in the case of wartime or a sudden shortfall in generation. A number of parties, including states where coal plants have been slated to close, have challenged this declaration. And on Friday, in the first of these cases to make its way through the courts, the declaration was judged to be contrary to the statute. While this only affects a single coal plant in Michigan, the reasoning of the decision will apply to every coal plant closure that has been blocked by the DOE.

No emergency

The decision was issued by a unanimous three-judge panel from the DC Circuit's Court of Appeals. It focuses on the J.H. Campbell Generating Plant, which was scheduled to close last year but has been kept open by a total of five emergency declarations by the DOE, each limited to 90 days by the Federal Power Act. At issue was section 202(c) of that Act, which allows the DOE to declare emergencies when the US is at war or when “an emergency exists by reason of a sudden increase in the demand for electric energy, or a shortage of electric energy.”

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The New Mexico Supreme Court held a ChatGPT-using lawyer in direct contempt of court for submitting a brief with "false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," including fake police testimony and other mistakes. The state's top court referred the lawyer to a disciplinary board for further proceedings and concluded that he "demonstrated a lack of remorse and a lack of concern for his client."

Attorney Stephen Aarons "admitted to the Court that he did not verify the factual claims and legal authority in his AI-generated brief before signing it and filing it with the Court, and that he did not inform his client of this failure or that the brief in chief contained multiple factual and legal misrepresentations," the state Supreme Court said in an order on Wednesday.

Aarons has been a criminal defense lawyer in New Mexico for over 40 years and was hired by a defendant's family members to appeal a murder conviction. Aaron's now-former client, Oscar Renee Sandoval, was sentenced to life in prison in February 2025 after being convicted of killing Shiereen Al-Jibury, who was his partner and the mother of his children.

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The precise composition of ancient Egyptian paints, binders, adhesives, and similar materials used to make artifacts is largely unknown, in part because a full analysis would require taking samples that would damage those valuable artifacts. The development of cutting-edge, non-destructive techniques has been helping to unlock those secrets, aiding conservation efforts.

Most recently, researchers have used mass spectrometry-based proteomics to analyze the glues and adhesives in a broad set of Egyptian artifacts, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. They found plenty of expected sources, such as animal collagens and egg proteins, but also plant proteins, specifically from sesame and drumstick tree (moringa) cereals.

As previously reported, the ancient Egyptians had a highly formalized (and easily recognizable) painting style, and there has been considerable interest in gaining insights into the specific pigments and painting techniques employed. Common pigments included hematite and realgar for red; goethite and orpiment for yellow; Egyptian blue; Egyptian green; carbon-based black; and calcite, gypsum, anhydrite, and huntite for white. (Just last year, Washington State University researchers were able to re-create Egyptian blue by mixing together silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate in varying proportions and heating them at very high temperatures akin to those of ancient kilns.)

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Oracle’s proposed investment in 2 gigawatts of renewable energy projects for New Mexico comes as local opposition could delay development of the Project Jupiter data center that Oracle is building for OpenAI.

The two tech companies are developing the $165 billion Project Jupiter data center in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, as part of the broader Stargate AI infrastructure project announced by President Donald Trump in 2025. But Project Jupiter faces local protests and court battles over concerns about its environmental impacts—and the latest Oracle announcement on September 8 seeking proposals for renewable energy projects does not change the fact that the data center will be powered by fuel cells that consume natural gas.

“Like all matching programs, this would be synthetic in the sense that 2 GW of renewables wouldn't directly power the data center,” wrote Michael Thomas, CEO of the Cleanview data platform that tracks renewable energy and data center projects, in a LinkedIn post.

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NASA has released a document that provides some initial details about the proposed United States Space Academy, and it's clear that the space agency wants to move quickly in establishing the institution.

According to the document's timeline, NASA seeks a groundbreaking for a permanent campus no later than next year, the first class to be enrolled and begin studies in temporary facilities in 2028, and a transition to a permanent campus in 2031.

What will that campus look like?

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Anthropic said it stopped multiple attempts by scientists this year to use its technology for research that could help develop biological weapons, as experts increasingly fear the threat that AI poses to public safety.

The startup gave five examples of times actors “circumvented controls” and made other efforts to “obfuscate” the purpose of their research to dodge safeguards. The cases involved some users in nations that it prohibits from accessing its models, which include Russia, China, and Iran.

“We hope that by sharing these examples, we spark a conversation within the AI industry and with governments about emerging biological risks and how best to counter them,” Anthropic said in a report about efforts to use its models for malicious activity.

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It wasn’t that long ago that ClickFix attacks were exotic. Now the technique has become mainstream as attackers reap its simplicity and effectiveness in infecting users of PCs and Macs alike. All that’s required is a compromised website—a painless enough task—a fake CAPTCHA overlay, and the inclusion of a single terminal command. So many visitors get suckered into pasting and running the command that just about every malware pusher has adopted the technique. Even Kremlin-backed hacking groups are joining in.

“Reddit is becoming post after post after post of people getting their computer infected via ClickFix,” independent researcher Kevin Beaumont observed Thursday. “Legit websites everywhere [are] getting hacked to serve the fake captcha prompts.”

How many of us make things worse

More seasoned Internet users—a fair number who read this site—are quick to dismiss the attack. They typically blame the people who fall for the scams and marvel at their gullibility and lack of attention. The reality is that for more casual users, using computers and the Internet has become so difficult—think impossible-to-close interstitials, CAPTCHAs with an endless series of pictures to analyze, and constantly changing interfaces that bury the features they’re looking for—that they have grown desensitized to instructions that seem ridiculous and burdensome.

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Almost a hundred years ago, physicists theorized out what free fall should do to a quantum wave. If the solution they came up with is wrong, quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of gravity flatly contradict each other. But testing it has been impossible because nobody has managed to build an interferometer that could perform the necessary measurement.

Now, a team led by Ron Folman, a physicist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, with collaborators in Germany, the UK, and the US, including Nobel laureate Roger Penrose, has done it. They built a new interferometer that gives a single atom two possible paths at once: one that involves a free fall, and another where it is held perfectly still. Both paths end at the same place at the same moment, allowing the team to measure what the fall does to a wave-like property of the atom.

Long time coming

Ever since Galileo, physicists have known how to describe a falling object—where it is, how fast it goes, or how quickly it accelerates. Quantum mechanics, though, insists that every object is also a wave. “Every particle, doesn't matter if it's a car or a spaceship or an atom, is a wave,” Folman says. “Everything that is a wave, like sea waves or sound waves, goes up and down. And if you're up or down, this is measured by something called a phase. A phase just tells you if you are at the top of the wave or at the bottom.”

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Pretty much every rocket company in the United States, save one, has embraced two fundamental tenets: reusability and diversification.

Most famously, SpaceX branched out from reusable rockets to pursue and dominate a growing spectrum of space services: cargo delivery, human spaceflight, satellite production, broadband, and, perhaps soon, orbital data centers and in-space manufacturing. Blue Origin is evolving from a pure rocket company into a satellite manufacturer, robotics developer, and, most recently, a potential competitor for SpaceX's Starlink network.

Rocket Lab used a different approach to diversify after achieving success with its small Electron launch vehicle. The company relocated its headquarters from New Zealand to Southern California, started building spacecraft and payloads, and then went on a spree of corporate acquisitions to expand into satellite communications and take on a new role as a merchant supplier of satellite components and sensors. It's now in a stage of advanced development of its partially reusable next-generation Neutron launch vehicle.

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Welcome to Edition 9.10 of the Rocket Report! This week we're celebrating a historic moment in Europe when a German rocket company successfully put its launch vehicle into orbit. Isar Aerospace became the first purely commercial European company to reach orbit, and impressively it did so on just its second launch attempt. How quickly can they scale up operations? How quickly will the second European launch firm reach this goal? Big questions, which for now we don't have answers to.

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 as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Isar Aerospace takes a huge step forward. Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately developed rocket into low-Earth orbit on Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle. The two-stage rocket, Spectrum, became the first fully commercial launch vehicle in Europe to reach orbit, Ars reports. With Saturday’s success, Isar becomes the clear leader among a pack of several European launch startups vying to inject some competition into Europe’s stagnant launch market.

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Fears that modern electronic devices may harm children are nothing new. Gadgets with screens of any size have long been allegedly melting, rotting, and/or corrupting the brains of youths for decades. However, a medical case report published this week offers a new and alarming way our digital doodads may cause physical harm.

In BMJ Case Reports, two UK doctors, Mara Znagoveanu and Edward Artley, report the case of a boy who came to an emergency department with alarming marks on his abdomen. The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (6 inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown "interlacing lines forming irregular circles and a lace-like morphology." A picture of the marks is here.

Mysterious marks

The boy, whom they described only as being in "mid-childhood," was not in any pain, and the rash was not warm to the touch or tender. He and his parents said they couldn't think of any recent injuries or trauma that might explain the marks. He was otherwise healthy, hadn't recently been ill, and had no systemic symptoms, such as fever or fatigue. Everything about the boy's health, growth, and medical history looked normal.

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LinkedIn beat two lawsuits over its practice of scanning users’ browser extensions, with a judge granting the Microsoft subsidiary's motion to dismiss the cases. The users who sued LinkedIn failed to adequately allege that they have standing to sue because neither asserted that they "had browser extensions installed that conveyed private information to LinkedIn," ruled Judge Vince Chhabria in US District Court for the Northern District of California.

In his ruling on Tuesday, Chhabria gave the plaintiffs leave to amend their complaints but said he doubts they can make a plausible case. "Given LinkedIn’s further arguments that users voluntarily download browser extensions, which by their nature intentionally expose data to websites, it seems unlikely that the plaintiffs will ever be able to allege a privacy violation, much less prevail at the end of the day," Chhabria wrote.

California residents Nicholas Farrell and Jeff Ganan separately filed class actions against LinkedIn in April, seeking to represent themselves and other LinkedIn users. Ganan's attorney, J.R. Howell, said he is evaluating whether to bring the claims in a California state court, which has different requirements on standing, or to appeal the US district court ruling in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

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The European Space Agency is moving "full steam ahead" with development of a robotic mission to Venus after NASA officials determined they were unlikely to fulfill a commitment to provide a US-built radar instrument for the spacecraft, the mission's project scientist said.

The European orbiter, named Envision, will map the Venusian surface at 10 times higher resolution than the last radar mission sent to Venus by NASA in the 1990s. The planet is enshrouded in a blanket of thick clouds of sulfuric acid, rendering its mysterious surface unseen by optical cameras in orbit. Radar is the most effective way to penetrate the clouds of Venus to reveal the terrain below, and scientists will use Envision to look for signs of active volcanism.

NASA and ESA signed a memorandum of understanding in 2024 outlining their partnership on Envision. NASA agreed to supply a US-made synthetic aperture radar instrument, Envision's primary means of mapping the surface of Venus, along with providing tracking and communications support through NASA's Deep Space Network. In exchange, ESA would include US researchers on Envision's science team. Europe would build the Envision spacecraft and the rest of its science instruments and provide the launch on an Ariane 6 rocket.

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As longer, more complex passwords have become a necessity, remembering all those strings of numbers, letters, and special characters has become nearly impossible. Password managers can solve that problem, but what happens when you want to move to a different login organizer? Sure, you could manually type all your logins into a new app, but now Android can do that for you without the tedium.

Google designed the new login transfer process to happen entirely on your phone, so you need the corresponding apps installed with your credentials synced. To start the move, you'll have to find the import option in the app you want to use. The location of that feature will vary, but in Google Password Manager (built into Android), it's near the top under the settings tab.

The import option in Google Password Manager will plug in to the new migration system, while export still just creates an unencrypted CSV with your passwords that can be dumped into any app. It will be similar in other apps, so make sure to start the process in the app you want to use. Currently, this works in Google's app, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane.

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Doug Kreuzkamp was shocked when news outlets reported that Google won an auction to buy a huge amount of operational data as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings.

Kreuzkamp founded a startup called Springshot in 2011, which created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on time and airlines can operate as smoothly as possible. Hundreds of airports use it globally.

Springshot powered Spirit’s technology stack for the last three years, right up to the “very last flight,” Kreuzkamp told Ars. Yet his company got no notice when Spirit prepared to auction off a massive dataset that he thinks likely improperly includes a substantial amount of data and intellectual property (IP) that Springshot owns—not Spirit.

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