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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).

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Today

Tesla’s Cybercab, a distinctive two-seater without a steering wheel or brake pedals, is set to start picking up members of the public in two states. But the vehicle is already under investigation by the US federal government, which is probing whether it meets federal safety standards. The investigation comes just hours after the electric automaker welcomed hundreds of fans to downtown Austin to r

Yesterday

The BepiColombo mission cleared a major milestone this week in the final stretch of an eight-year interplanetary voyage to Mercury, the hard-to-reach, scorching hot iron world at the Solar System's innermost frontier. The robotic science mission, with a price tag of nearly $2 billion, is led by the European Space Agency with contributions from Japan and the United States. Since its launch in 2018
Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents’ hacking abilities, researchers said Friday . In all, agents with 3,700 distinct self-given names posted the messages to German site DSEwiki over a six-week period. Besides discussin
A six-week-old baby girl in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, died from measles, the county coroner confirmed to local press on Friday. Stephen Diamantoni, a Republican elected coroner in 2007, told Lancaster Online that the baby died at home. "I believe it was the 18th of August," he said. He also noted that the baby had a genetic condition called Amish lethal microcephaly , in which babies are born with
The Federal Communications Commission yesterday urged a court to dismiss a Disney lawsuit and let the FCC continue a proceeding that could end in the nonrenewal of ABC's broadcast licenses. Meanwhile, two watchdog groups and individual viewers of ABC stations are trying to intervene in the lawsuit, saying they are worried Disney will agree to a settlement with the FCC that isn't in the public's i
Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the one that afflicted many flocks of sheep in Greece last year . In order to reconstruct how the virus has evolved over the last 3,500 years, scientists extracted and sequenced sheeppox DNA preserv
For many small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), VMware has become too expensive. Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization firm brought the end of perpetual license sales and the arrival of pricey, stacked, subscription-based bundles that priced out many SMBs. The most obvious is VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), VMware’s flagship private cloud bundle that has been Broadcom’s primary focus sinc
A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns. The technique is broadly known as ASCII smuggling. It gained attention two years ago as a means of making a class of AI attack known as prompt injections more stealthy. Malicious instructions
Following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's startling announcement in July that the US military would begin mandatory testosterone screening for personnel, the Pentagon released a clinical guidance document on September 2 outlining the new medically questionable policy. The next day, though, the clinical guidance document disappeared, as did an accompanying statement by spokesperson Sean Parnell.
Back in 2009, Ars wrote about what was being reported as a leaked trailer for the then-upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 , saying the footage "looks like it’s straight from a high-gloss action movie." Today, we need to offer an important update to this crucial, 17-year-old story: The trailer "leak" was orchestrated by Valve itself. That news comes courtesy of former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, who said in a
On Friday, researchers announced the completion of a map of every neuron in the brain of a male fruit fly. The "connectome" provides a tool that can accelerate neurobiology research. But it also provides an opportunity to do some science on its own, as the connectome of a female Drosophila had been completed earlier this year . The work also provided the team behind it the opportunity to refine t
Anthropic’s prospective public-market investors must reckon with an external group of trustees that control the majority of the AI company’s board, as its planned blockbuster initial public offering forces close scrutiny of its experimental governance structure. The company’s Long-Term Benefit Trust (LTBT) is a small group of advisers created to safeguard the lab’s mission of developing AI for th
On Thursday, Elon Musk’s X won a court order blocking Operation Bluebird from launching a new app taking over the Twitter name . In his opinion , Chief Judge Colm Connolly explained that Operation Bluebird was unlikely to prove that X had entirely abandoned the Twitter name. Therefore, X was likely to succeed on trademark infringement and dilution claims tied to the platform’s former name. Most c
The normally genteel world of international space policy turned ugly this week as several prominent US space companies—including SpaceX, Blue Origin, Stoke Space, K2, and Starcloud—pulled out of a high-profile French space summit organized by the country's president, Emmanuel Macron. Politico first reported the diplomatic turmoil, saying that the White House "pressured" US space companies to skip
Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Or
Smartphone longevity didn't used to matter. In the past, before you could wear out or break a phone, there was always some shiny new thing to buy. Today, we expect our smartphones to go the distance, but they've also become less repairable and, in many cases, more fragile. Fairphone, a Dutch smartphone maker that has just entered the US market, thinks about phones differently. The new $650 Fairph

Sep 3, 2026

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still secretly counting two measles deaths that were deleted from the agency's public measles data—a deletion that occurred at the direct request of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to two reports released today. Early today, Reuters reported that Kennedy instructed new CDC director Erica Schwartz to delete the two de
In 2020, Microsoft announced that Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions would include unlimited access to its new Xbox Cloud Gaming service (then still known as Project xCloud ). Now, that kind of streaming buffet service is coming to an end, as Microsoft announced strict new limits on how much streaming is included in its various Game Pass subscriptions. Starting in November, Game Pass subscriptions
Having more than 150 non-human primates at a research center fall ill with diarrhea in a stomach-churning outbreak that flowed for over two years doesn't sound much like good fortune. But for some scientists, it kind of was, providing a heaping pile of valuable data on how they might finally defeat a foul foe. In a study published in the latest issue of Science Translational Medicine , scientist
A prominent US senator is asking the National Security Agency to provide guidance to the general public on best practices for using virtual private networks to secure their communications from spying by foreign adversaries. VPNs funnel all of a user’s Internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a remote server. The design provides strong assurances that no one between the user and the ser
New Jersey yesterday asked the Supreme Court to rule on whether states can regulate sports betting on prediction markets such as Kalshi. “Companies like Kalshi claim to offer legal sports betting in all 50 states, but they refuse to follow the gambling laws of any state," New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. In April, the US Court of Appea
Tottenham Hotspur, a professional soccer team that’s part of the Premier League, has saved over 85 percent in licensing fees by replacing its stadium's VMware instance with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise’s (HPE’s) Morpheus VM Essentials (VME) virtualization software. Tottenham hasn’t disclosed which VMware products it used or how much it previously paid the Broadcom firm. The soccer organization conf
Fruit flies aren't exactly famous for their brainpower; you've probably drowned more than one in a wine glass left too long on the patio table. And yet, working with roughly 140,000 neurons—a brain smaller than a poppy seed— Drosophila can sort through a huge range of smells in a fraction of a second, and then retain the memory of that scent for a long time. In this, they do much better than curr
Cloud-based AI models operated by OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google suffered a rare and overlapping set of significant service interruptions over a period of hours Thursday morning. Anthropic first reported a "partial outage" related to "elevated errors on requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5" at 9:23 am (all times Eastern). The company reported that it had "identif
On Thursday, the Trump administration imposed a 100 percent tariff on foreign-made drones, alarming critics who warn that high tariffs would harm public safety and devastate thousands of US businesses. Guidance posted by US Customs and Border Protection says that starting Thursday, a 100 percent tariff will apply to imported drones that use thermal imaging or weigh more than 55 pounds. Additional
It's that time of year again, when we learn which lucky scientists are among the winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes. This year, the prizes honor research on designing the perfect splash-free urinal; using mosquito proboscises to "necroprint" tiny nozzles; studying composition rates of buried cotton underwear; and the aerodynamics of a healthy nose-blow, among other highlights. Established in 1991, th

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