"For-profit companies are pushing the narrative that they can do space inexpensively," writes Slashdot reader RUs1729 in response to an opinion piece from SpaceNews. "Their track record reveals otherwise: cutting corners won't do it for the foreseeable future." Here's an excerpt from the article, written by Robert N. Eberhart: The headlines in the space industry over the past month have delivered a sobering reminder: space is not forgiving, and certainly not friendly to overpromising entrepreneurs. From iSpace's second failed lunar landing attempt (making them 0 for 2) to SpaceX's ongoing Starship test flight setbacks -- amid a backdrop of exploding prototypes and shifting goalposts -- the evidence is mounting that the commercialization of space is not progressing in the triumphant arc that press releases might suggest. This isn't just a series of flukes. It points to a structural, strategic and cultural problem in how we talk about innovation, cost and success in space today.

Let's be blunt: 50 years ago, we did this. We sent humans to the moon, not once but repeatedly, and brought them back. With less computational power than your phone, using analog systems and slide rules, we achieved feats of incredible precision, reliability and coordination. Today's failures, even when dressed up as "learning opportunities," raises the obvious question: Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

Until very recently, the failure rate of private lunar exploration efforts underscored this reality. Over the past two decades, not a single private mission had fully succeeded -- until last March when Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the moon. It marked the first fully successful soft landing by a private company. That mission deserves real credit. But that credit comes with important context: It took two decades of false starts, crashes and incomplete landings -- from Space IL's Beresheet to iSpace's Hakuto-R and Astrobotic's Peregrine -- before even one private firm delivered on the promise of lunar access. The prevailing industry answer -- "we need to innovate for lower cost" -- rings hollow. What's happening now isn't innovation; it's aspiration masquerading as disruption... "This is not a call for a retreat to Cold War models or Apollo-era budgets," writes Eberhart, in closing. "It's a call for seriousness. If we're truly entering a new space age, then it needs to be built on sound engineering, transparent economics and meaningful technical leadership -- not PR strategy. Let's stop pretending that burning money in orbit is a business model."

"The dream of a sustainable, entrepreneurial space ecosystem is still alive. But it won't happen unless we stop celebrating hype and start demanding results. Until then, the real innovation we need is not in spacecraft -- it's in accountability."

Robert N. Eberhart, PhD, is an associate professor of management and the faculty director of the Ahlers Center for International Business at the Knauss School of Business of University of San Diego. He is the author of several academic publications and books. He is also part of Oxford University's Smart Space Initiative and contributed to Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory. Before his academic career, Prof. Eberhart founded and ran a successful company in Japan.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NASA is coming to Netflix. No, not a drama or sci-fi reboot. The space agency is actually bringing real rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, and even views of Earth from space directly to your favorite streaming service. Starting this summer, NASA+ will be available on Netflix, giving the space-curious a front-row seat to live mission coverage and other programming.

The space agency is hoping this move helps it connect with a much bigger audience, and considering Netflix reaches over 700 million people, that's not a stretch. This partnership is about accessibility. NASA already offers NASA+ for free, without ads, through its app and website. But now it's going where the eyeballs are. If people won't come to the space agency, the space agency will come to them.

Thousands of Norwegians briefly believed they had won massive Eurojackpot prizes after a manual coding error by Norsk Tipping mistakenly multiplied winnings by 100 instead of dividing. The Register reports: Eurojackpot, a pan-European lottery launched in 2012, holds two draws per week, and its jackpots start at about $12 million with a rollover cap of $141 million. Norsk Tipping, Norway's Eurojackpot administrator, admitted on Friday that a "manual error" it its conversion process from Eurocents to Norwegian kroner multiplied amounts by 100 instead of dividing them. As a result, "thousands" of players were briefly shown jackpots far higher than their actual winnings before the mistake was caught, but no incorrect payouts were made.

Norsk Tipping didn't disclose how large the false jackpots were, but math suggests the improper amounts were 10,000x times higher. Regardless, it seems like a lot of people thought they were big winners, based on what the company's now-former CEO, Tonje Sagstuen, said on Saturday. "I have received many messages from people who had managed to make plans for holidays, buying an apartment or renovating before they realized that the amount was wrong," Sagstuen said in a statement. "To them I can only say: Sorry!" The incorrect prize amounts were visible on the Norsk Tipping website only briefly on Friday, but the CEO still resigned over the weekend following the incident.

While one of the Norsk Tipping press releases regarding the incident described it as "not a technical error," it still appears someone fat-fingered a bit of data entry. The company said it will nonetheless be investigating how such a mistake could have happened "to prevent something similar from happening again."

Microsoft's new AI diagnostic system achieved 80% accuracy in diagnosing patients compared to 20% for human doctors, while reducing costs by 20%, according to company research published Monday. The MAI Diagnostic Orchestrator queries multiple leading AI models including OpenAI's GPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and xAI's Grok in what the company describes as a "chain-of-debate style" approach.

The system was tested against 304 case studies from the New England Journal of Medicine using Microsoft's Sequential Diagnosis Benchmark, which breaks down each case into step-by-step diagnostic processes that mirror how human physicians work. Microsoft CEO of AI Mustafa Suleyman called the development "a genuine step toward medical superintelligence."

"Earth's ozone layer blocks the Sun's shortest wave radiation, called UV-C, which is so damaging to cells in high doses that it's a go-to sterilizer in hospitals," writes Slashdot reader sciencehabit. "UV-C is such a killer, in fact, that scientists have questioned whether life can survive on worlds that lack an ozone layer, such as Mars or distant exoplanets.

"But research published this month in Astrobiology suggests one hardy lichen, a hybrid organism made of algae and fungi, may have cracked the UV-C code with a built-in sunscreen, despite never experiencing these rays in its long evolutionary history."

Science magazine explains: When scientists brought a sample of the species, the common desert dweller Clavascidium lacinulatum, back to the lab, graduate student Tejinder Singh put the lichen through the wringer. First, Singh dehydrated the lichen, to make sure it couldn't grow back in real time and mask any UV damage. Then he placed the lichen a few centimeters under a UV lamp and blasted it with radiation. The lichen seemed just fine.

So Singh purchased the most powerful UV-C lamp he could find online, capable of sending out 20 times more radiation than the amount expected on Mars. When he tested the lamp on the most radiation-resistant life form on Earth, the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, it died in less than a minute. After 3 months—likely the highest amount of UV-C radiation ever tested on an organism—Singh pulled the sample so he could finish his master's thesis in time. About half of the lichen's algal cells had survived. Then, when the team ground up and cultured part of the surviving lichen, about half of its algal cells sprouted new, green colonies after 2 weeks, showing it maintained the ability to reproduce.

The species may provide a blueprint for surviving on Mars or exoplanets, which don't have an ozone layer to protect them.

"Researchers are embarking on an ambitious project to construct human genetic material from scratch," reports the Guardian, "to learn more about how DNA works and pave the way for the next generation of medical therapies." Scientists on the Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project will spend the next five years developing the tools and knowhow to build long sections of human genetic code in the lab. These will be inserted into living cells to understand how the code operates.

Armed with the insights, scientists hope to devise radical new therapies for the treatment of diseases. Among the possibilities are living cells that are resistant to immune attack or particular viruses, which could be transplanted into patients with autoimmune diseases or with liver damage from chronic viral infections. "The information gained from synthesising human genomes may be directly useful in generating treatments for almost any disease," said Prof Jason Chin, who is leading the project at the MRC's Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge...

For the SynHG project, researchers will start by making sections of a human chromosome and testing them in human skin cells. The project involves teams from the universities of Cambridge, Kent, Manchester, Oxford and Imperial College London... Embedded in the project is a parallel research effort into the social and ethical issues that arise from making genomes in the laboratory, led by Prof Joy Zhang at the University of Kent. "We're a little way off having anything tangible that can be used as a therapy, but this is the time to start the discussion on what we want to see and what we don't want to see," said Dr Julian Sale, a group leader at the LMB.

Just four weeks after an early June flight to the edge of space, Blue Origin has again carried six more passengers there and back again, reports CBS News, noting that the 10-minute ride was Blue Origin's 13th flight "out of the discernible atmosphere." The New Shepard capsule's stubby single-stage booster roared to life just after 9:38 a.m. EDT, throttled up to full thrust and smoothly climbed away from Blue Origin's launch site near Van Horn, Texas. The hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine powering the New Shepard fired for about two-and-a-half minutes, accelerating the spacecraft to just under three times the speed of sound.

The capsule then separated from the booster and continued coasting upward along its up-and-down trajectory. At that point, the passengers — Allie and Carl Kuehner, Leland Larson, Freddie Rescigno Jr., Jim Sitkin and Owolabi Salis, the first Nigerian to fly in space — began enjoying about three minutes of weightlessness. Free to unstrap and float about the cabin, the passengers were able to take in the view through the largest windows in any operational spacecraft as the ship climbed to an altitude of just above 65 miles. That's about three miles higher than the internationally recognized boundary between the discernible atmosphere and space.

The capsule then began falling back to Earth and the passengers returned to their seats for the descent to touchdown. The reusable booster, meanwhile, made its own return to the launch site, dropping tail first to a rocket-powered touchdown... The company has now launched 74 passengers, including Bezos' wife Lauren Sánchez, and four who have flown twice.
By April nearly 120 civilians had already travelled to the edge of space, CBS News reported earlier — while Virgin Galactic is expected to resume flights next year.

You can replay the webcast of the mission on Blue Origin's YouTube channel.

In its first 10 hours the Rubin space telescope found 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. And Gizmodo reports the data went directly to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), which "plays an essential role in the early detection and monitoring of asteroids that threaten Earth." The MPC has spent years preparing for the deluge of data from Rubin, ramping up its software to process massive amounts of observations. When the first round officially came flooding in on Monday, it was "nerve-racking and exciting simultaneously," Matthew Payne, MPC director, told Gizmodo.
But Space.com explains how extraordinary that is. "There are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million." "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko IveziÄ, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years...." The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," IveziÄ said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids...."

[I]t's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," IveziÄ said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented."
Space.com notes that the ten million galaxies in its first image are just 0.05% of around 20 billion galaxies that Rubin will have imaged by the end of its 10-year "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" investigating dark energy.

In fact, in its first year of regular operations, the Observation "will collect more data than all previous optical observatories combined," reports Earth.com. That torrent of information — petabytes of images and catalogs — will be processed in near-real time. Alerts will be issued to the worldwide astronomy community within 60 seconds of any detected change in the sky. By democratizing access to its enormous dataset, Rubin Observatory will empower both professionals and citizen scientists. This will foster discoveries that range from mapping the structure of the Milky Way to refining the rate at which the universe is expanding.
Reuters explains just how much data is being generated: The number of alerts the telescope will send every night is equivalent to the inboxes of 83,000 people. It's impossible for someone to look at that one by one," said astrophysicist Francisco Foster. "We're going to have to use artificial intelligence tools."
And New Atlas shares some of the "first look" videos released by the Observatory, including one titled The Cosmic Treasure Chest and another on the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae (which Space.com describe as clouds of gas and dust condensing to birth new stars).

"It has long been unclear when humans started using fire," writes Phys.org... To address this question, researchers from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS), alongside collaborators from China, Germany, and France, analyzed the pyrogenic carbon record in a 300,000-year-old sediment core from the East China Sea. "Our findings challenge the widely held belief that humans only began influencing the environment with fire in the recent past, during the Holocene," said Dr. Zhao Debo, the study's corresponding author.

This study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlights the presence of charred plant remains — known as pyrogenic carbon — formed when vegetation burns but is not completely consumed by fire. The research reveals a notable increase in fire activity across East Asia approximately 50,000 years ago. This finding aligns with earlier reports of heightened fire activities in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Papua New Guinea-Australia region respectively, suggesting a continental-scale intensification of fire use during this period... The study highlights that this global rise in fire use coincides with the rapid spread of Homo sapiens, increasing population densities, and a greater reliance on fire, particularly amid cold, glacial conditions...

These conclusions have significant implications for understanding Earth's sensitivity to human impacts. If human fire management altered atmospheric carbon levels tens of thousands of years ago, current climate models may underestimate the historical baseline of human-environment interactions.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Smithsonian magazine: Last year, Australian scientists picked up a mysterious burst of radio waves that briefly appeared brighter than all other signals in the sky. Now, the researchers have discovered the blast didn't come from a celestial object, but a defunct satellite orbiting Earth... "We got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," says Clancy James, a researcher at Australia's Curtin University who is on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) team, to Alex Wilkins at New Scientist. After taking a closer look, however, the team realized that the only viable source for the burst was NASA's dead Relay 2, a short-lived satellite that hasn't been in operation since 1967....

The researchers also discovered that at the time of the event, the satellite was only around 2,800 miles away from Earth, which explains why the signal appeared so strong. The reason behind Relay 2's sudden burst is not clear, but the team has come up with two potential explanations — and neither involves the satellite coming back to life like a zombie. One relates to electrostatic discharge — a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma, and once enough charge accumulates, it can create a spark. "New spacecraft are built with materials to reduce the build-up of charge, but when Relay 2 was launched, this wasn't well-understood," explains James to Space.com's Robert Lea. The other idea is that a micrometeorite hit the satellite, releasing a small cloud of plasma and radio waves.

Karen Aplin, a space scientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist that it would be tough to differentiate between signals produced by each of those two scenarios, because they would look very similar. The researchers say they favor the first idea, however, because micrometeorites the size of the one that could have caused the signal are uncommon.
"Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."

On the International Space Station, air has been slowly leaking out for years from a Russia-controlled module, reports CNN. But recently "station operators realized the gradual, steady leak had stopped. And that raised an even larger concern." It's possible that efforts to seal cracks in the module's exterior wall have worked, and the patches are finally trapping air as intended. But, according to NASA, engineers are also concerned that the module is actually holding a stable pressure because a new leak may have formed on an interior wall — causing air from the rest of the orbiting laboratory to begin rushing into the damaged area. Essentially, space station operators are worried that the entire station is beginning to lose air.

Much about this issue is unknown. NASA revealed the concerns in a June 14 statement. The agency said it would delay the launch of the private Ax-4 mission, carried out by SpaceX and Houston-based company Axiom Space, as station operators worked to pinpoint the problem. "By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal," the statement read.

More than a week later, the results of that research are not totally clear. After revealing the new Wednesday launch target Monday night, NASA said in a Tuesday statement that it worked with Roscosmos officials to investigate the issue. The space agencies agreed to lower the pressure in the transfer tunnel, and "teams will continue to evaluate going forward," according to the statement... The cracks are minuscule and mostly invisible to the naked eye, hence the difficulty attempting to patch problem areas.
Axiom Space launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Wednesday.

But its four-person crew had previously "remained locked in quarantine in Florida for about a month, waiting for their chance to launch," notes CNN, as NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos "attempted to sort through" the leak issue.

Seven people have now received Neuralink's N1 brain implant, which enables individuals with ALS or spinal cord injuries to control a computer with their thoughts. PCMag reports: In a February 2025 update, Neuralink confirmed that three people had received its brain-computer interface (BCI). That increased to five by June, when it also reported a $650 million funding round. We're now at seven, Barrow tweeted today; Neuralink retweeted that message.

Six of the seven are participating in the PRIME study, conducted by Barrow, which handles the implantations from its Phoenix, Arizona, office. It aims to prove that the N1 implant, the R1 surgical robot, and the N1 User App on the computer are safe and effective, according to the program brochure. (No BCIs have been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.)

Participants in the study get the implant through a surgery in which a custom-built robotic arm drills a hole in their skull and implants the device. The implant connects to a computer via Bluetooth, allowing patients to move the cursor, select words to type, browse the web, and even play video games -- a favorite activity of Neuralink's first human patient, Noland Arbaugh, who can do this all without moving any limbs or fingers. [...] Arbaugh, now 31, became paralyzed during a diving accident. Other Neuralink patients include Alex, a former machine parts builder who lost function of his arms and uses his N1 Implant to design 3D machine parts with computer-aided design (CAD). The third patient is Brad, the first person with ALS to receive the N1 implant, according to Barrow.

Mike is the fourth patient, and "the first person with a full-time job to use the N1 Implant," Barrow says. "He worked as a survey technician for city government and spent the majority of his time in the field until his ALS made the work too difficult. Like Alex, Mike has used CAD software with his Neuralink device to continue doing survey work from home and provide for his family." The fifth publicly named patient is RJ, a veteran who became paralyzed after a motorcycle accident, according to the University of Miami. The other two patients remain anonymous, but we can expect Neuralink to continue recruiting more people (here's how to apply).

A new study challenges previous research about which sleep stages help people achieve breakthrough moments in problem-solving. Researchers found that N2 sleep, a deeper stage of non-REM sleep, significantly increased participants' likelihood of experiencing sudden insights during a perceptual task. The preregistered study involved 90 participants who performed a visual pattern recognition task before and after a 20-minute daytime nap while researchers monitored their brain activity with EEG.

Participants who reached N2 sleep showed an 85.7% rate of achieving insights about a hidden strategy in the task, compared to 63.6% for those who only reached N1 sleep (the first stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep) and 55.5% for participants who remained awake. The findings contradict earlier work by Lacaux and colleagues, which suggested that lighter N1 sleep promoted insight while deeper sleep hindered it.

News coverage: Stuck on a problem? Take a nap!

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study from the University of Bath's School of Management has found that individuals with a higher IQ make more realistic predictions, which supports better decision-making and can lead to improved life outcomes. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that people with a low IQ (the lowest 2.5% of the population) make forecasting errors that are more than twice as inaccurate as those made by people with a high IQ (the top 2.5% of the population).

The research used data from a nationally representative sample of people over 50 in England (English Longitudinal Study of Aging ELSA), assessing their ability to predict their own life expectancy. Individuals were asked to predict their probability of living to certain ages, and these estimates were compared with the probabilities taken from Office for National Statistics life tables (a demographic tool used to analyze death rates and calculate life expectancies at various ages). The study controlled for differences in lifestyle, health, and genetic longevity.

By analyzing participants' scores on a variety of cognitive tests, as well as genetic markers linked to intelligence and educational success, Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events - they are more skilled at assessing probability. Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News Science Magazine: Surgeons have performed the first fully robotic heart transplant in the U.S., using advanced robotic tools to avoid opening the chest. [...] Using a surgical robot, lead surgeon Dr. Kenneth Liao and his team made small, precise incisions, eliminating the need to open the chest and break the breast bone. Liao removed the diseased heart, and the new heart was implanted through preperitoneal space, avoiding chest incision.

"Opening the chest and spreading the breastbone can affect wound healing and delay rehabilitation and prolong the patient's recovery, especially in heart transplant patients who take immunosuppressants," said Liao, professor and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and circulatory support at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center. "With the robotic approach, we preserve the integrity of the chest wall, which reduces the risk of infection and helps with early mobility, respiratory function and overall recovery."

In addition to less surgical trauma, the clinical benefits of robotic heart transplant surgery include avoiding excessive bleeding from cutting the bone and reducing the need for blood transfusions, which minimizes the risk of developing antibodies against the transplanted heart. Before the transplant surgery, the 45-year-old patient had been hospitalized with advanced heart failure since November 2024 and required multiple mechanical devices to support his heart function. He received a heart transplant in early March 2025 and after heart transplant surgery, he spent a month in the hospital before being discharged home, without complications.