German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.

The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.

Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.

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Elon Musk's X is trying to revive a lawsuit against advertisers it's accusing of illegally boycotting the social media platform, despite previously reaching a settlement to end litigation against an ad-industry trade group.

"This case involves an unusually brazen group boycott," X said in a filing yesterday. "That misconduct has drawn the attention of regulators and Congress. There is no valid reason that this effort by the direct victim to recover its massive economic losses from that boycott should not move forward."

X's lawsuit was thrown out in March when US District Judge Jane Boyle in the Northern District of Texas ruled that advertisers did not commit any antitrust violation. Last week, Musk reached a settlement with the World Federation of Advertisers, the first defendant named in the lawsuit.

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The Internet is awash in AI content, and it's not always easy to tell it apart from genuine human creations. While images and videos are perhaps the most obvious type of AI slop, streaming music services like Spotify are also being inundated with AI-generated tunes. Suno is one of the most prolific sources of this AI music, but the company now says it's looking to clean up its act with watermarks and policy changes.

In a blog post announcing the plans, Suno CEO and co-founder Mikey Shulman says this is a necessary change to meet "emerging industry standards" for the labeling of AI content. Soon, the company will add watermarks to all audio outputs from its models, giving platforms the option to mark content as AI or block it entirely. Shulman doesn't say if Suno will rely on an in-house solution or a ready-made solution like Google's SynthID.

Google recently began licensing SynthID to other companies. Google says the tech has been used to label 60,000 years' worth of audio generated by its Gemini models, plus more than 100 billion images and videos.

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Anthropic is hiring a "custom silicon team" to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed.

Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. (You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager, silicon on Anthropic's job board right now.) A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirmed the plans to both Business Insider and TechCrunch.

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A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins. That's partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and structuring cells. So, figuring out how to make a new protein can mean directly tinkering with biochemistry, providing new and potentially useful functions.

Since the genetic code provides a layer of abstraction between DNA and proteins, it wasn't obvious what a model trained on DNA could do. Yet people went ahead and made a large genome model, and it turned out to be able to output DNA sequences that could encode functional proteins in bacteria and mimic the gene structures found in complex cells. Now, those same models have been used to output the genomes of viruses that infect bacteria.

This isn't science fiction—all the viruses the models created are closely related to an existing virus. But they do have some distinct features that would be challenging to evolve. And the researchers who did the work, based at Stanford University, suggest we may want to start thinking now about preparing for the potential that someone could develop a related AI that can design a virus that targets vertebrates.

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Blue Origin provided its first substantive update this week on the cause of the catastrophic loss of the New Glenn rocket and most of its launch pad infrastructure at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in May.

The space company's chief executive, Dave Limp, said investigative work is continuing into the anomaly that happened during a hot-fire test of the rocket during the evening of May 28, 2026. He confirmed, for the first time, widespread speculation that the problem started in one of the rocket's seven BE-4 engines that power the vehicle's first stage.

"The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," he said. "Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations."

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The parasitic fungi in the Cordyceps genus are a favorite subject of nature documentaries. They've also infiltrated popular culture via the zombie-apocalypse video game The Last of Us (2013) and its TV adaptation, in which a parasitic fungus mutates to infect humans. Scientists are keen to study Cordyceps to learn more about the origins and intricate mechanisms underlying these pathogen-based diseases.

The latest finding: DNA analysis revealed the same fungus in both parasitized insects and surrounding mosses, according to a paper published in the journal IMA Fungus. (Yes, really.) This suggests a second life stage during which the fungus lives inside the moss, possibly an evolutionary adaptation to survive when insect hosts may be scarce. It could also explain why the host species seems to prefer biting into mosses during their final death throes.

As we've previously reported, there are more than 400 different species of Cordyceps fungi, each targeting a particular insect species, like ants, dragonflies, cockroaches, aphids, or beetles. The spores attach to the target insect, such as a carpenter ant, and germinate, spreading through the host’s body via long tendrils called mycelia. Cordyceps essentially turns its host into a zombie slave, compelling the ant to climb to the top of the nearest plant and clamp its tiny jaws in a death grip around a leaf or twig.

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The Federal Communications Commission voted 2–1 today to eliminate the National Television Ownership Rule, claiming authority to repeal a limit that was set by Congress over 20 years ago.

The rule prohibits any single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. Under Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC is replacing the rule with a “case-by-case review” of each proposed merger.

"This will empower the FCC to approve deals that promote the public interest while allowing the agency to reject any deals that do not meet that standard," Carr's office said in a press release today. Without the 39 percent rule, broadcasters will be better able to compete against streaming companies that don't face similar limits, Carr's office said.

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Despite significant drama from Trump officials this year, the Food and Drug Administration has for the first time approved a flu vaccine that uses mRNA technology.

On Thursday, vaccine maker Moderna announced that its flu shot, mRNA-1010, aka mFLUSIVA, had earned approval for use in all adults ages 50 and up. The approval announcement follows a unanimous vote by FDA advisors in June to approve the vaccine. That vote was based on its superior efficacy to existing seasonal flu shots and a good safety record demonstrated in trials that included nearly 44,000 people. After that vote, the FDA set a goal of August 5 for a decision on the vaccine's fate.

While the unanimous support from FDA advisors boded well for Moderna's shot, the overall path to approval was treacherous and uncertain, even until the end. For one thing, current Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a well-established anti-vaccine advocate who has worked diligently in his time in office to thwart vaccinations. One of his first acts as health secretary was canceling a federal campaign to encourage people to get flu shots in the midst of a bad flu season—despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already paid for the campaign and the flu season was killing relatively high numbers of children.

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Cloudflare has open-sourced its Cloudflare OS platform, which it first developed as an internal workspace for employees to build apps using AI agents—including people who are not software developers or engineers. The company also touts a security framework designed to reduce the risk of employee vibe-coding sessions creating serious security flaws or leading to data breaches.

The tech company spent several months building and internally testing Cloudflare OS, which allows employees to describe workflows in natural language so that an AI agent can code them into applications. In an August 5 blog post announcing the open source version’s availability on GitHub, the company claims thousands of Cloudflare employees use the platform on a daily basis to “create documents and slides, automate repeatable tasks, and build small apps to visualize data and help them do their work.”

“This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild—the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug,” said Kenton Varda, principal engineer at Cloudflare, in a post on the social media platform X. “We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night.”

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Ford's second attempt at an electric vehicle strategy is getting closer to primetime. After its initial approach of electrifying its best-selling F-150 fell a little flat, it decided to try something a little radical. An internal skunkworks was set up in California with a brief to rethink the idea of a universal EV platform from the ground up, taking into account the advances made by EV startups and clean-sheet designs both in the US but especially China.

And today, we found out what that first new EV—an affordable four-door pickup truck—will be called: the Ford Fathom.

We've known for some time that the first EV built on Ford's new UEV platform was going to be a pickup truck. And that it would use a new zonal architecture for its electronics, which massively reduces the amount of wiring needed by swapping the hundred or more discrete electronic control units you find in most new cars with a handful of powerful computers each controlling multiple domains.

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Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. But when it comes to AI slop and hateful content threatening the safety and value of social media platforms, adding more fire—in this case, more AI—can make the problem worse.

At its best, social media can be a haven for people who want to share their experiences and knowledge. It gets closest to this ideal when users contribute authentic, valuable content, whether that’s a uniquely thoughtful blog post or a helpful video on how to build a PC. Relying primarily on AI tools to preserve that authenticity misses what makes social media worthwhile in the first place: the people behind it.

Erroneous erasures

In April, a Slack channel for moderators of the r/AskHistorians Reddit community was usually busy. The channel, which automatically receives links to modmail messages, was flooded with alerts after dozens of comments and posts dating back 10 years were automatically removed from the subreddit.

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Thousands of Internet-connected servers sold by the world’s biggest manufacturers can be remotely backdoored by exploiting critical vulnerabilities—some more than a decade old—that lurk deep inside system motherboards, according to research presented Wednesday.

Baseboard management controllers are miniature computers that are embedded into the motherboards of virtually every enterprise server. The microcontrollers, typically abbreviated as BMCs, run with their own operating system firmware, network stack, and IP address. Administrators rely on them to monitor the physical status of large fleets of servers and to perform a variety of tasks, including rebooting machines, installing updates, and even reinstalling operating systems. BMCs provide what’s known as “lights out” and “out-of-band” management because they work even when servers they’re attached to are turned off or are unresponsive.

A “pervasive, under-monitored, under-patched parallel attack surface”

Researchers have warned since at least 2013 that BMCs present a golden opportunity for hackers looking for ways to gain deep and persistent access to datacenters. The chief culprit was IPMI, the protocol that allows BMCs to operate independently of servers and to perform administrative tasks. Vulnerabilities in this firmware made it possible for attackers to remotely execute malicious code on the controllers and, from there, infect the servers they manage.

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