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NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to launch an autonomous spacecraft called LINK to dock with the 21-year-old Swift observatory and push it into a stable orbit, mirroring Jared Isaacman's earlier scrapped plan to save the Hubble. The rushed, high-risk mission, assembled in record time after Isaacman became NASA administrator, ultimately fell apart before achieving its goal.
A team from Texas A&M, NASA's Johnson Space Center, and Purdue University developed a system for managing multiple spacecraft around Gateway, the lunar-orbiting station NASA plans to launch no earlier than 2027. Using thousands of simulations, they created a 'string of pearls' approach that spaces waiting vehicles at set intervals ahead of or behind the station along its near-rectilinear halo orbit, accounting for navigation and thruster errors.
A nationwide survey of 1,000 Americans presented at the 2025 Joint Statistical Meetings found that a quarter of respondents reported no understanding of statistics, while 37% said their familiarity was limited. Only about a quarter said they had learned some statistics in school, yet nine in ten said they would rely on statistics more often if they understood the concepts better.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that companies plateau not because of competitors but due to self-imposed limits, chiefly the habit of chasing a comfortable 'fair share' of the market instead of defining themselves by unmet customer needs. The piece, drawn from a keynote at CIBC's Global Corporate and Investment Banking Offsite in Detroit, identifies five internal drag factors—complacency, fear of failure, intimidation by larger rivals, reliance on legacy approaches, and false confidence from busywork—as the real obstacles to becoming a great company.
MIT Lincoln Laboratory, working with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, built the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), which used infrared laser light instead of radio waves to send data from the spacecraft. During the mission the system downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second, delivering sharp footage of the moon's far side, a solar eclipse, and meteoroid impacts.
A team led by associate professor Lahiru Jayakody at Southern Illinois University Carbondale has engineered yeast strains that break down PET plastic bottles combined with agricultural waste like corn stalks into a protein-rich, vanilla-flavored snack called µBites. The project grew out of NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, and though it did not win the competition, NASA encouraged the team to keep refining the concept, leading to improved taste, aroma and color unveiled recently at the American Chemical Society Expo in Chicago.
NASA and Caltech researchers are developing a large, flower-shaped spacecraft called a starshade that would fly in formation with a space telescope to block a star's glare. By blotting out starlight, the device would let astronomers directly observe faint, Earth-sized planets orbiting that star.
Nutex Health, a for-profit hospital operator with 28 facilities across 12 states, told the SEC that an unauthorized third party accessed and stole data from its servers, some of which may be private or confidential. The company has hired forensic investigators, notified law enforcement, and activated its incident response plan, but has not yet determined whose data—patients, employees, or partners—was affected.
NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center no earlier than 7:26AM Eastern on August 30, with live coverage starting at 6:20AM. If weather or technical issues delay the flight, a backup attempt is planned for August 31 at 7:22AM Eastern. NASA will also host a science briefing and prelaunch news conference on August 29.
It has been two decades since the International Astronomical Union voted in August 2006 to strip Pluto of its planetary status, reclassifying it as a dwarf planet after astronomers discovered a similarly sized object, later named Eris, in 2005. The decision remains contentious, with figures like NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and actor William Shatner recently arguing Pluto deserves to be called a planet again.
NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope as early as August 30 from Kennedy Space Center. The observatory matches Hubble's resolution but offers a field of view about 100 times larger, enabling it to map vast regions of sky to study dark matter and dark energy over a five-year primary mission. Scientists also expect it to detect as many as 200,000 new exoplanets, far surpassing the roughly 6,300 confirmed so far.
A longtime Synology NAS owner attempted to transfer files to a new Ubiquiti UniFi UNAS Pro 8 over a 10-gigabit network, expecting the SMB file copy to be routine. Windows Explorer failed partway through with file system limitation errors, prompting a switch to Robocopy, which stalled at 92% with error 665 on certain files, including one called '05 Wires.m4p'. The user traced part of the slowdown to Robocopy's restartable /Z mode, a feature they had relied on since 2007 but which now dramatically hurt transfer speed.