Two NIH employees say the agency has signed an agreement with the Department of Defense to transfer research projects, currently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, from its infectious-diseases institute to military biodefence programs. The NIH is reportedly still selecting which projects to hand over and hopes to finalize the deal before the fiscal year ends in September, when certain funds would otherwise expire. NIH officials describe the move as separating civilian public-health work from defense-related priorities, while a former top HHS lawyer questions whether simply redirecting funds between agencies in this way is legally permissible.
A former controls designer who built a fully automated U.S. nuclear plant system recalls deliberately preserving manual steps so operators wouldn't lose hands-on competence. He now applies that lesson to AI's spread through engineering, citing Harvard and Stanford research showing junior-level employment shrinking in AI-adopting firms while senior roles keep growing.
Market Street, once San Francisco's bustling commercial core, has become a largely deserted stretch lined with boarded-up storefronts and a barren, car-free roadway used mainly by buses. The decline followed the city's 2019 decision to ban private vehicles from the street, compounded by a wave of pandemic-era crime and looting and the mass shift to remote work that emptied downtown offices. Because San Francisco's downtown is zoned mostly for offices rather than housing, the pandemic-driven exodus left the area far emptier than mixed-use downtowns common in Europe and Asia.
A new UN Environment Programme report titled 'Limiting Overshoot' concludes that surpassing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels is now unavoidable. The paper notes current warming is near 1.4 degrees, but even with all existing climate pledges fulfilled, temperatures would still hit at least 1.8 degrees, while current trends point toward 2.6 degrees by 2100.
Jaguar Land Rover has revealed its first fully electric Range Rover, arriving in 2027 with a 118.5-kWh battery, dual 349-horsepower motors producing 542 combined horsepower, and an EPA-estimated range of at least 333 miles. The SUV supports 350 kW charging, adding roughly 125 miles in 10 minutes and going from 10% to 80% in about 22 minutes, and will be built at JLR's Solihull plant in England.
Yum! Brands has finished divesting Pizza Hut, selling its non-China operations to private equity firm LongRange Capital for $1.5 billion after already selling Pizza Hut China to Yum! China Holdings for $1.2 billion. Yum! could earn up to $75 million more by 2030 if Pizza Hut meets performance benchmarks, while CEO Chris Turner said the move frees the company to focus on KFC, Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill.
Sky Map 2000, a browser-based star atlas and planetarium tool, calculates visible celestial objects based on a user's geographic coordinates, using either an integrated city catalogue, manual latitude/longitude entry, or device geolocation. The tool runs location lookups locally in-browser rather than sending queries to an external service, and saves a user's last chosen location only within that browser for future visits.
A group of climbers attempting Mount Shasta in Siskiyou County, California used Google's Gemini chatbot to plan their route, food and water needs, and were told the climb would take eight hours and that they should pack simple carbs instead of fats. The estimate proved drastically wrong: the ascent alone took 16 hours, leaving them descending in darkness, off-route, and with a dead phone after their AllTrails navigation app failed, ultimately requiring a nearly 24-hour rescue operation by search and rescue teams.
Three 16-year-old students from Cork County, Ireland—Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge, and Sophie Healy-Thow—discovered that treating cereal seeds with rhizobia bacteria, normally associated with legumes, sped up germination by 50 percent and increased barley and oat yields by up to 70 percent. Their research, which began as a school geography project on global food shortages, earned them the top prize at the 2014 Google Science Fair.
Three teenage girls from Kinsale, Ireland, followed up an accidental discovery of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in pea plant roots by testing whether the same bacteria could benefit cereal crops, which normally can't host them. Working from a home laboratory over three years, Émer Hickey, Ciara Judge and Sophie Healy-Thow soaked barley, oat and other cereal seeds in rhizobium cultures and tracked germination and growth against controls, despite experts warning the bacteria wouldn't help non-legume plants.
None of the 16 Rassvet satellites Russia launched in June reached their planned 870-km orbit, with several drifting as low as 300-400 km and two already re-entering the atmosphere, according to the Institute for the Study of War citing N2YO tracking data. The March batch of 16 satellites also had issues, with one lost and only 12 reaching proper altitude, undermining Bureau 1440's plan to build a Starlink competitor.
House Democrats are preparing oversight plans for 2026, including using appropriations power to pressure Trump aides and family members to comply with subpoenas if they retake the majority. Targets reportedly include funding for Trump's West Wing renovations and a proposed triumphal arch in Washington. Rep. Jamie Raskin said Congress controls the purse strings for federal buildings and can block further alterations to the White House.
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