The War Zone.

One of Russia’s commercially flagged vessels in the Baltic has appeared armed with heavy machine guns, and it isn’t just any cargo hauler. The weapons fit is likely intended to provide close-in protection against naval drone attacks but is also evidence of increasingly bold measures taken by Moscow to ensure that military bases in its strategically important Kaliningrad exclave continue to be supported. After all, the ship in question, the Marshal Vasilevskiy, is a highly strategic one — Russia’s only floating storage and regasification vessel — that plays a key role in supporting Kaliningrad.

This comes at the same time that Russia ramps up efforts to protect its notorious ‘shadow fleet,’ used to circumvent Western sanctions on oil exports, despite efforts to interdict it.

Evidence of the armed tanker development was brought to light in an exclusive report from Holger Roonemaa, an investigative journalist working for Delfi Estonia, an Estonia-based news website.

Roonemaa secured the release of imagery from the Estonian Border Guard showing the Marshal Vasilevskiy operating in the Baltic Sea last month, with machine gun positions on either side of the deck above the bridge.

The War Zone.

U.S. Central Command said it struck Iranian targets today in response to an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) attack on a cargo vessel exiting the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday. This marks the first U.S. kinetic response against Iran since Washington and Tehran signed a Memorandum of Understanding about a peace deal last Friday.

CENTCOM said the strikes were “a powerful response to yesterday’s attack on a commercial ship that was transiting the Strait of Hormuz.” The command added that “U.S. aircraft struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites after Iran hit M/V Ever Lovely on June 25 with a one-way attack drone. The Singapore-flagged cargo ship was exiting the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast at the time of Iran’s attack.”

That incident “clearly violated the ceasefire,” the command proclaimed. “Furthermore, Iran’s dangerous behavior undermined freedom of navigation as commerce increasingly flows through the vital international trade corridor.”

You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

ATQUE: Trump Starting To Think Iran Might Not Be Trustworthy (Babylon Bee)

ATQUE: US strikes Iranian drone, missile sites after cargo ship attack (Task & Purpose)

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Scientists found that some inherited traits can bypass the traditional rules of genetics, revealing a surprising new layer of inheritance beyond DNA.

For more than a century, Gregor Mendel’s laws of inheritance have served as the foundation of genetics. But new research suggests that inheritance can be more complicated than the DNA sequences passed from parents to their children.

In a federally funded study involving mice, scientists found that certain inherited epigenetic marks, which are chemical modifications that influence gene activity without altering the underlying DNA code, can be transmitted across generations in ways that do not follow Mendel’s classic rules. The researchers estimate that about 7% of the epigenetic inheritance patterns they examined fell outside traditional Mendelian expectations.

Federally funded! That guarantees it!

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An experimental satellite has mapped the scale of GPS jamming across Europe and the Middle East from space for the first time.

The data surprised the team behind the project and indicated that satellites orbiting far from Earth aren’t the only ones that experience degradation of their positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) signals, which could affect their performance and the safety of their operations.

The new measurements were made by Pulsar-0, the first satellite of the novel Pulsar navigation constellation developed by California-based Xona Space Systems. The experimental satellite orbits 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth, testing Xona’s technology before the company begins deploying its navigation constellation of 300 spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) later this year.

The Register.

A sealed scroll from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which was destroyed by Mount Vesuvius’ eruption nearly 2,000 years ago, has finally given up its secrets, thanks to a combination of machine learning and high-resolution CT scans.

In 2023, researchers managed to decipher a few words from among the char and ash that make up the bulk of the scrolls. Some of those same prize-winning researchers recovered more passages from one of the scrolls, PHerc.Paris.4, netting them the $700,000 grand prize from the Vesuvius Challenge contest in early 2024.

Fast forward two more years, and those grand prize winners are now part of the Vesuvius Challenge team that managed to read the surviving portion of a rolled scroll end-to-end, as the VC team shared in a Thursday announcement and detailed in an accompanying paper.

According to the research paper, the ability to make out the entirety of the scroll was thanks to high-resolution phase-contrast X-ray microtomography performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France – an improved imaging technique over prior methods used to capture prior images that were analyzed in the prize competition.

Naval News. By all means watch the video.

Known previously for their aerial drones and powerful electronic warfare (EW) systems, Global Mark is taking things below the surface. This steel-hulled, oval-shaped underwater beast is built for heavy-duty strikes, logistics, and neutralizing enemy underwater threats—and it’s small enough to fit inside a standard ISO shipping container for rapid road transport.

According to Global Mark, Sea Trident is an autonomous underwater vehicle designed for long range missions in maritime environments capable or delivering payloads of up to 1,000 kg to strategic targets. The system is tailored for modern asymmetric maritime operations requiring low observability and full autonomy. Low detectability and subsurface movement capability at depths up to 5 meters support covert ingress to contested maritime areas. The UUV is designed as a multi-role platform capable of performing three primary mission profiles.

They actually list four profiles, but hey, sometimes that happens.

For some reason, the mock-up in the booth next to the hot chick in the tank top has its nomenclature in English—I guess nobody there speaks Ukranian.

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As the Army retools many of its top-tier infantry units around the buggy-like Infantry Squad Vehicle, or ISV, it’s already looking for a new, beefier version of the truck, dubbed the ISV-Heavy.

Despite the “Heavy” name, that variant won’t be inherently more rugged or armored than its open-sided predecessor. Instead, the trucks will carry a suite of batteries and generators to produce power for electricity-hungry drones, communications equipment, and even a “Directed Energy Weapon Systems,” according to Army contracting requirements released in late March.

An Army official said last week that the ISV-Heavy is designed to fit a “niche requirement” to act as a roving power station for modern, electricity-hungry infantry units. Jesse D. Tolleson Jr., the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said during a Senate subcommittee budget hearing last week that the ISV-Heavy is “really going to be focused on the power generation part. One of the things that we do have a critical capability gap on right now is power generation at that mobile brigade combat team level,”

The Other McCain.

The 1979 psychological thriller When a Stranger Calls is a cult classic, famous for one line: “The call is coming from inside the house.”

That line came to mind Tuesday night after I learned about an interesting controversy on BlueSky, the left-wing echo chamber where many Trump-haters fled after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022. A Canadian feminist, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, recently published a book The Last Straight Woman: On Desiring Men. A website published a 23-paragraph excerpt of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s book and, when this excerpt was promoted on BlueSky, the book’s theme and its author were angrily denounced.

Of course, I immediately ordered the book from Amazon. Anything that sends the BlueSky crowd into paroxysms of apoplectic rage must be good. After skimming through the excerpt of The Last Straight Woman, however, I quickly located the nexus of Ms. Maltz Bovy’s problem, specifically in the sentence when she declares “we need to be looking for feminist approaches to female heterosexuality.”

Feminism has spent almost 200 years trying to turn women into defective men, men into defective women, and our culture into shit.

The War Zone.

Researchers conclude the nuclear-powered cruise missile almost certainly uses a direct-cycle engine that spews radioactive material throughout its flight.

Read it.

Alogic is bringing more touch and stylus input options to Mac with a new desktop monitor and portable displays, expanding a lineup that adds a feature Apple doesn’t offer on its own hardware yet.

The company unveiled the Aspekt Touch 27 and Folio portable displays at InfoComm 2026, expanding its lineup of touch-enabled hardware for Mac users. Both products let users interact directly with apps, documents, presentations, and creative projects through touch and stylus input.

Alogic is one of the few monitor makers offering touchscreen hardware for Macs. The company uses its own software to enable touch gestures, navigation, annotation, and drawing on macOS.

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Microwaving food does not uniquely destroy nutrients. All cooking can reduce some nutrients, especially heat-sensitive vitamins, but microwaving is often one of the gentler methods because it is fast and uses little or no water. Long cooking times and discarded cooking water cause much of the loss in vegetables.

That is why microwaving often preserves vitamin C and other water-soluble nutrients as well as, or better than, boiling.

The myth mixes two ideas: fear of the word “radiation” and confusion about how cooking losses happen. Microwave energy does not erase nutrients in a special way. Nutrients are reduced mainly by heat, time, oxygen exposure, and leaching into water. Boiling can be hard on water-soluble vitamins because those vitamins move into the water and often go down the drain with it.

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A new treatment that blocks an aging-related protein restored lost cartilage in old mice and helped prevent arthritis after knee injuries. Human cartilage samples showed similar signs of regeneration, raising hopes for a future drug that could repair joints instead of replacing them.

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Inside every living cell, tens of thousands of different types of proteins are at work: ferrying molecular cargo, relaying signals, repairing DNA, deciding whether a cell should divide or die. Most of these proteins are too small to image with existing microscopes. Those that can be imaged must be pulled out of the cell and studied in isolation — not in the crowded, dynamic environments that drive the processes of life.

That is about to change. In three papers, researchers at Biohub and UC Berkeley report successful results from a technology called a laser phase plate, which uses a laser 100 million times brighter than the Sun to significantly improve the contrast of images produced by cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). The laser phase plate could make otherwise faint, blurry proteins inside intact cells visible, including many proteins most relevant to human disease.

“Rough estimates suggest that scientists can image 10% of the human proteome in purified form using existing cryo-EM — and fewer than 1% of proteins in their native cellular environment,” says Scott Fraser, president of dynamic imaging at Biohub. Scientists believe the laser phase plate could make more than 50% of the proteins that carry out cellular functions visible.

“This is just the first step,” says Bridget Carragher, founding technical director of imaging at Biohub. “It’s like seeing first light through a telescope. The science it enables — that comes next.”

CNN, a Voice of the Crust.

Bear in mind that this is CNN, so you’ll want to read the agreement and skip the tendentious commentary.

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The job of a tumor suppressor protein is right in the name: stopping us from getting cancer at the cellular level. But when they’re not working properly, the cell is left with limited defenses.

In a new paper published today in the journal Nature titled “Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding,“ researchers at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and Gladstone Institutes, along with collaborators at University of Utah and Utah State University, report that a creative new CRISPR-based approach can selectively destroy cells carrying a mutation in a tumor suppressor found in nearly half of all cancers and up to 70–90% of cases of some of the most difficult-to-treat cancers, including ovarian, pancreatic, and non-small cell lung cancer.

“Not only can this approach target the ‘undruggable’ cancers that we know, we can also easily and quickly adapt this to new mutations,” says IGI Founder Jennifer Doudna, a co-author on the paper. “This is an exciting development for cancer therapies, and potentially for other applications as well.”

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If you’ve ever wondered why some people can wake up before sunrise without an alarm while others struggle to get out of bed on time each morning, the answer lies in biology. Our circadian rhythm, also known as our internal body clock, largely influences our natural sleep-wake preferences, known as chronotypes.

That doesn’t mean your daily habits don’t matter. Light exposure, regular exercise, and consistent sleep schedules can also influence when you feel tired and when you wake up, our experts reveal. But for some people, rising early comes more naturally than it does for others. To better understand why some people are early risers—and whether night owls can shift their schedules—we asked sleep experts to explain the science behind it.

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Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s State Department has dismantled organized “birth tourism” networks across West Africa, North Africa and Europe, revoking hundreds of visitor visas tied to schemes that helped pregnant foreign nationals enter the United States to give birth and secure automatic citizenship for their children.

The department detailed more than 600 cases in a June 10 series of posts on X, framing the enforcement push as a defense of the “integrity of U.S. citizenship” against foreigners obtaining visitor visas for the primary purpose of childbirth.

A U.S. Embassy in West Africa uncovered a network of more than 100 foreign nationals using fraudulent documents and visa “fixers”; a U.S. Embassy in North Africa revoked more than 100 additional visas issued to parents who traveled chiefly to deliver in the U.S.

The European caseload runs deeper.

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Pick & Place is a core building block of how C12 envisions the scalable manufacturing of carbon nanotube quantum processors. A carbon nanotube is 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. Placing one on a chip is like placing a hair on a surface the size of Paris, accurate to within a few streets. By introducing an intermediate assembly step that decouples nanotube growth from chip fabrication, the process brings significantly more flexibility and modularity to C12’s fabrication flow, while addressing one of the hardest challenges in quantum hardware manufacturing: qubit variability.

The Telegraph (UK).

In a six-hour operation in the early hours of Sunday morning, Royal Marine Commandos and law enforcement officers from the National Crime Agency (NCA) boarded the Smyrtos, a Russian tanker operating off the south coast of England.

The vessel, which was sailing under the flag of Cameroon, will now be moved to an anchorage off the south coast of England and will be monitored for any environmental or safety concerns, officials said.

The operation, ordered by Sir Keir Starmer, comes after months of warnings that Russian shadow tankers, which are used by Vladimir Putin to trade sanctioned oil across the world, were sailing with impunity through the Channel.

The Telegraph previously revealed that tankers had been escorted through the Channel by Russian warships in open defiance of UK sanctions.

Ars Technica.

Antares is one of a number of companies that is basing its design on a new fuel system called TRISO that takes some of the complexity and safety out of the reactor design and places them in the fuel design. The fuel design is based on tiny pellets with a uranium oxide core. The pellets are surrounded by several layers of carbon that can moderate the energy of both the neutrons and lighter nuclei that are released by fission reactions. All of that is encased in a hard ceramic shell that’s designed to withstand the highest temperatures that can be produced by the encased uranium.

As long as your reactor can keep the TRISO pellets contained, then there should be no risk of meltdown or even the release of the most dangerous isotopes produced from the reactions. There are still some safety concerns, as neutrons will still escape and can potentially convert some of the surrounding material into unstable isotopes. But the Antares design surrounds the TRISO with a graphite sheath, which should slow most of these neutrons down.

To mitigate non-radioactive risks, the Antares design uses sodium to take heat from the reactor to a heat exchanger. The heat is transferred to pressurized nitrogen, which then drives a turbine in a closed Brayton cycle setup.

This appears to be a form of the pebble-bed reactor, although it’s difficult to tell from the bare-bones description in the article.

Pebble-bed reactors strike me as the best and safest form of small reactor we can build.

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Title Head of Stonehenge

Location Stonehenge, Amesbury, Wiltshire, SP4 7DE

Salary From £64,189 p.a. depending on skills and experience

36 hours per week

Permanent Job type Permanent Ref 16449

I’m curious as to what type of ‘skills and experience’ they’re looking for.

I suppose showing up for the interview painted with woad would be a plus….

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Chemists have observed a boron buckminsterfullerene for the first time, providing experimental evidence for an 80-atom cage whose existence has been debated since 2007 (Chem. Sci. 2026, DOI: 10.1039/d6sc02674e).

Buckminsterfullerenes, or buckyballs, are hollow, soccer ball–shaped molecular cages first discovered in carbon. Their discovery launched a new branch of nanoscience. Boron, carbon’s electron-deficient neighbor in the periodic table, has long been considered a candidate for its own fullerene.

“Boron is known as the rule breaker in chemistry,” says Lai-Sheng Wang of Brown University, who led the experimental work. “For 80 atoms to exhibit this structure—I still find it incredible.”

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Can your brain attune itself to a foreign language before you’re born? A UdeM-led team of neuropsychology researchers has found that it can. A few weeks of prenatal exposure to a new language is enough to rewire the language networks in a newborn’s brain. From the very first hours of life, the foreign language heard in the womb is processed along the same neural pathways as the mother tongue, while a completely new foreign language is processed differently.

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On May 28, Lockheed Martin announced the delivery of the first Integrated Combat System (ICS) baseline to the U.S. Navy. This milestone starts a planned six-month update and certification cycle for all surface ships and advances the Navy’s goal of a single, common combat system architecture. The ICS merges the legacy Aegis combat system with modern, networked infrastructure, making it easier to field new capabilities fleetwide.

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The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. That number appears in almost every popular account of memory and intelligence, and it tends to carry an implicit argument: that the scale of human cognition follows from the scale of this cell count. What is less often mentioned is that the brain contains a roughly comparable number of a different cell type entirely, one that researchers have treated, for most of the history of neuroscience, as little more than biological scaffolding.

A paper published on 23 May in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesputs forward a new hypothesis about what those cells, called astrocytes, might actually be doing. The work comes from a team at MIT: lead author Leo Kozachkov, Jean-Jacques Slotine, a professor of mechanical engineering and brain and cognitive sciences, and Dmitry Krotov of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, who is the paper’s senior author. Their claim is not that astrocytes have been misunderstood in any dramatic sense; it is the more careful suggestion that they may be doing computational work that neurons, on their own, cannot account for.

This is a hypothesis supported by a mathematical model. The experimental work needed to test it has not yet been done.

The War Zone.

A new type of submarine that appears to lack a traditional sail has emerged in China. The same shipyard launched a smaller ‘sailless’ submarine — a technology demonstrator — eight years ago. More recently, a top Chinese shipbuilding conglomerate put forward a concept for an uncrewed underwater vehicle (UUV) with a broadly comparable hullform. Designs of this kind can offer benefits in terms of speed, maneuverability, and reduced acoustic signature, but also have major drawbacks.

TWZ has obtained imagery of the submarine in question at JN (Jiangnan) Shipyard in Shanghai on June 1, as seen at the top of this story and below, from Vantor (previously Maxar Technologies). The boat, the name and/or designation of which are currently unknown, first appeared there sometime at the end of May, according to Naval News. That outlet was first to report on this development.

From the imagery, the submarine does not have a traditional sail. However, the exact shaping of what is present is also not entirely clear from the view that is currently available. As noted, JN Shipyard is known to have built at least one other ‘sailless’ submarine in the past, which we will come back to later on.

ScienceDaily.

Scientists have developed a solar desalination system that turns seawater into drinking water without creating environmentally damaging brine. Special laser-textured metal panels use sunlight to evaporate water while automatically moving salt deposits away from the working surface, preventing clogging. The process was successfully tested with water from three oceans and can recover nearly all salts as solids. Those leftover materials could even become a source of valuable lithium for batteries.

Sounds pretty good. Let’s see whether it makes it into an actual product.

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Researchers in the US have recently demonstrated a new way to detect hidden underground tunnels by transmitting acoustic signals from beneath the target instead of above it.

Led by Mike Kass, PhD, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, the team tested the new technique during a field experiment at the facility’s campus. They were able to identify concealed underground structures that threaten roads, railways, and other critical infrastructure.

Tunnel detection usually relies on signals sent downwards from the surface. Still, for the project, the team flipped the process and transmitted sound upward from below a tunnel to generate a distinctive subharmonic signal.

Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.

US tech billionaire Peter Thiel has temporarily moved his family to Buenos Aires, drawn by the libertarian ideology and regulation-busting agenda of Argentina’s President Javier Milei.
Thiel, the founder of data intelligence group Palantir, plans to spend roughly three months in Argentina initially and has enrolled his children in a local private school, said two people familiar with his plans.

Since arriving in Buenos Aires in April, Thiel has attended a Superclásico football match between the city’s two biggest teams and spent a Saturday at a local chess club, placing third in a tournament. Thiel told the club’s surprised young players he hoped to return, according to one member.

Go Where You’re Treated Best.

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An American aircraft fired a Hellfire missile into a cargo ship’s engine room on Friday, disabling the vessel after it tried to break the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. Central Command said on Saturday that the military took action against the Gambia-flagged M/V Lian Star after it tried sailing through the Gulf of Oman towards an Iranian port on May 29.

It’s the fifth time since early April that U.S. forces have directly fired on a ship to disable it as part of enforcing the blockade. The U.S. and Iran have maintained dual and competing blockades on the Strait of Hormuz, a major route for oil, gas and other important chemicals, for several weeks, and the status of transit through the strait has been a point of contention between the two countries.

American forces issued more than 20 warnings to the merchant ship, saying it was violating the blockade.

“A U.S. aircraft disabled the vessel by firing a Hellfire missile into the ship’s engine room after Lian Star’s crew failed to comply,” CENTCOM said in its statement. “The ship is no longer transiting to Iran.”

You don’t tug on Superman’s cape,
You walk onto the lawn,
You don’t pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger
And you don’t mess around with Don….

Read it.

While wave upon wave of smartglasses and face-based wearables crash on the shores of CES, traditional glasses really haven’t changed much over the hundreds of years we’ve been using them. The last innovation, arguably, was progressive multifocals that blended near and farsighted lenses — and that was back in the 1950s. It makes sense that autofocusing glasses maker IXI thinks it’s time to modernize glasses.

After recently announcing a 22-gram (0.7-ounce) prototype frame, the startup is here in Las Vegas to show off working prototypes of its lenses, a key component of its autofocus glasses, which could be a game-changer.

IXI’s glasses are designed for age-related farsightedness, a condition that affects many, if not most people over 45. They combine cameraless eye tracking with liquid crystal lenses that automatically activate when the glasses detect the user’s focus shifting. This means that, instead of having two separate prescriptions, as in multifocal or bifocal lenses, IXI’s lenses automatically switch between each prescription. Crucially — like most modern smartglasses — the frames themselves are lightweight and look like just another pair of normal glasses.

CNBC, a Voice of the Crust.

A federal judge on Friday barred President Donald Trump from adding his name to that of the Kennedy Center, as he did in late December, ruling that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that Trump’s name be removed from the facade of the center and other sinage within two weeks.

Cooper also temporarily blocked the Washington, D.C., performing arts landmark, which in December had been renamed the “Trump Kennedy Center,” from being closed for two years for renovations at the behest of the president, who is chair of its Board of Trustees.

Cooper’s order came in response to a lawsuit by Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and ex officio Kennedy Center trustee, whose civil complaint challenged the renaming, the closure of the center for renovations, and being stripped of her voting rights by board in May 2025.

Watch it.

The YouTube channel MAXIMONICS has the data.

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Australian company Hyperion Systems has revealed a compact uncrewed surface drone dubbed the Astra 460, featuring a 3D-printed hull at this week’s Indian Ocean Defence and Security Conference (IODS) 2026 in Perth, Western Australia. Hyperion specialises in additive manufacturing, also called 3D printing, in conjunction with portable robotics for civilian and military applications.

In this context the WA-based company also displayed its “Titan Cell” containerised 3D printing solution which Hyperion dubs “factory-in-a-box” due to its small infrastructure footprint and transportability.

For those worried about AI taking their jobs, the improvements in additive manufacturing will, I think, rapidly bring the capital requirements needed to set up one’s own shop to blue-collar-affordable levels. We may be on the verge of an explosion in custom-job entrepreneurship.

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Corporations, partnerships, trusts, limited liability companies, and other “artificial entities” have the right to vote in Delaware elections under some circumstances, a judge said in a novel ruling Tuesday.

Judge Craig A. Karsnitz rejected an ACLU challenge to a charter permitting voting in local elections by the entities that own most of the property in the Town of Fenwick Island, one of several municipalities in the state with similar provisions. Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit from Delaware’s Superior Court, citing “the principle of one person/entity/one vote.”

“Visions of faceless large corporations or even HAL controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction,” but “trusts, partnerships, limited liability companies, and corporations are expressly recognized as ‘persons’ in the Delaware Code,” the judge said.

The dispute over municipal voting in a tiny coastal community represents an unusual flashpoint in the decades-long fight over the free speech rights of corporations and the dark money flooding the American electoral system. The US Supreme Court held in 2010’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that political spending counts as constitutionally protected speech.

Ever since that ruling effectively ended corporate campaign finance regulation, the prospect of outright voting by business entities has served as fodder for both critics and comedians.

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There’s being rejected by voters, then there’s being absolutely embarrassed.

That’s what we saw in Texas last night. John Cornyn, who outspent his opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton 10-1, was absolutely wrecked at the polls.

Science Daily.

Researchers at Texas A&M have developed a nasal spray that appears to reverse brain aging by calming inflammation and restoring the brain’s energy systems. After just two doses, memory and cognitive function improved for months, raising hopes for future treatments targeting dementia and brain fog.

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A new self-driving bus service in the Swedish city of Gothenburg got off to a rough start this week when one of its vehicles was hit by a tram on its second passenger-carrying trip. The autonomous bus, running on route 169 between Gothenburg Central Station and Liseberg, opened to passengers on May 25. It was struck from behind shortly after setting off on its second run, resulting in damage to both vehicles and the bus enduring the ignominy of being towed away. According to reports, the bus braked and was rear-ended by the tram. A spokesperson for Västtrafik, the bus operator, told The Register: “A small number of passengers were on board. No one was seriously injured, and that is the most important outcome. Both the bus and the tram sustained minor damage.” The autonomous bus project began in 2024, and trials were scheduled to conclude by 2027 [PDF]. At present, a driver is still required, although the controls are not touched during normal operation. However, someone else driving into it is a whole different challenge. On the rear of the Karsan bus was the warning “Keep your distance! The bus can brake sharply!” but that did not appear to deter the tram. As a rule of thumb, trams tend to have the right of way since they cannot swerve around a suddenly slowing vehicle.

Naval News.

The “Basic Plan for the Development of the Republic of Korea Nuclear-Powered Submarine” is the first document to present, both domestically and internationally, the direction for the Republic of Korea to systematically develop a nuclear-powered submarine. Its main contents are as follows.

Nuclear-powered submarines possess dramatically enhanced operational capabilities compared to existing diesel-powered submarines, including long-duration submerged endurance and high mobility. They will therefore play a key role in responding to North Korea’s submarine-based nuclear and missile threats.

The development of nuclear-powered submarines is not merely a warship construction project, but a national strategic project that requires the concentration of national capabilities based on the Republic of Korea’s technologies in the nuclear and shipbuilding sectors.

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Millions of Americans have altered vision, ranging from blurriness to blindness. But not everyone wants to wear prescription glasses or contact lenses. Accordingly, hundreds of thousands of people undergo corrective eye surgery each year, including LASIK—a laser-assisted surgery that reshapes the cornea and corrects vision.

The procedure can result in negative side effects, prompting researchers to take the laser out of LASIK by remodeling the cornea, rather than cutting it, in initial animal tissue tests.

Michael Hill, a professor of chemistry at Occidental College, presented his team’s results at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS Fall 2025) held Aug. 17–21.

Human corneas are dome-shaped, clear structures that sit at the front of the eye, bending light from surroundings and focusing it onto the retina, where it’s sent to the brain and interpreted as an image. But if the cornea is misshapen, it doesn’t focus light properly, resulting in a blurry image. With LASIK, specialized lasers reshape the cornea by removing precise sections of the tissue.

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It’s no secret that some humanoid robotics companies are training their machines for work on factory floors, while others are positioning their bots to enter homes in the coming years.

One of the first real signs of humanoids entering homes today is a new cleaning service in San Francisco that uses what appear to be Unitree humanoid robots trained to clean everything from floors and countertops to stovetops, mirrors, and nearly any surface in the house.

Called “Gatsby,” the new service deploys humanoid robots to homes for a flat service charge of $150.

The Times (UK).

The Cabinet Office and the role of cabinet secretary would be abolished by a Reform UK government, according to an 11-page blueprint that reveals plans for an overhaul of Whitehall.

The document, devised by Danny Kruger, the Reform MP who is leading the party’s preparations for government, outlines changes to the civil service, predicting cuts of about 50 per cent to communications, human resources and policy roles.

There were 520,000 full-time civil servants last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics, the highest headcount in two decades. One in five are based in London.

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In a new study published today, scientists discovered that keratin, a protein found in hair, skin and wool, can repair tooth enamel and stop early stages of decay.

The King’s College London team of scientists discovered that keratin produces a protective coating that mimics the structure and function of natural enamel when it comes into contact with minerals in saliva.

…

While fluoride toothpastes are currently used to slow this process, keratin-based treatments were found to stop it completely. Keratin forms a dense mineral layer that protects the tooth and seals off exposed nerve channels that cause sensitivity, offering both structural and symptomatic relief.

The treatment could be delivered through a toothpaste for daily use or as a professionally applied gel, similar to nail varnish, for more targeted repair. The team is already exploring pathways for clinical application and believes that keratin-based enamel regeneration could be made available to the public within the next two to three years.

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Aircraft manufacturing is on the cusp of its most profound transformation since the dawn of powered flight. The assembly line, a staple of industrial production for over a century, is about to be replaced by a far more efficient and cost-effective alternative — swarm robotics.

Swarm robotics is a manufacturing system in which autonomous robots work with a common “consciousness” guided by generative artificial intelligence, or “genAI,” to self-program a large-scale manufacturing process.

The assembly-line system, invented by Ransom Olds in 1901 and refined by Henry Ford in 1913 to make his cars, has dominated manufacturing. However, swarm robotics could transform the way large, complex structures such as airplanes and aerospace assets are built. The use of AI-driven, self-coordinating robots could enable faster, lower-cost production while delivering higher precision and enhanced safety.

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The Supreme Court determined that a U.S.-based company—Havana Docks—can recover damages from four major cruise lines that used its docks previously confiscated by the Cuban government.

Havana Docks, a U.S. company, built docks in Havana’s port before the Cuban Revolution. The Castro regime revoked the company’s legal right to the docks, and the company later sued cruise lines that used the docks, claiming they were liable for trafficking in confiscated property. The cruise lines argued that the company’s legal right to the docks would have expired by then, regardless of confiscation.

In an 8-1 ruling issued on Thursday, Justice Clarence Thomas found that Havana Docks “did not have to prove that the cruise lines interfered with a property interest that would have existed in the counterfactual scenario in which the Cuban government did not confiscate it.”

“The cruise lines’ use of the docks is sufficient to establish that they used ‘property which was confiscated by the Cuban Government,’” Thomas wrote.

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For decades, scientists believed ancient humans avoided dense rainforests, treating them as nearly impossible environments for early survival. But a groundbreaking discovery in West Africa is rewriting that story. Researchers uncovered evidence that humans were living deep within rainforest environments in present-day Côte d’Ivoire around 150,000 years ago — far earlier than anyone thought possible.

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Scientists have discovered that the human body undergoes a dramatic internal transformation during extended fasting, with major changes appearing only after about three days without food. In a seven-day water-only fasting study, researchers tracked thousands of proteins in the blood and found widespread shifts affecting organs throughout the body — including the brain. While the body quickly switches from burning glucose to fat, the most intriguing biological changes linked to potential health benefits didn’t emerge until later in the fast.

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A new study suggests humans became overwhelmingly right-handed because of two major evolutionary shifts: walking on two legs and developing much larger brains. Researchers found that as human ancestors evolved, their right-hand preference steadily intensified — transforming a mild tendency into one of humanity’s most distinctive traits.

When you’re right, you’re right.

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Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have created a remarkable new material that works like a “rechargeable solar battery,” storing sunlight inside tiny molecules and releasing it later as heat — even long after the sun goes down. Inspired by reversible changes found in DNA and photochromic sunglasses, the system captures solar energy without relying on bulky batteries or the electrical grid. The molecule can hold energy for years and packs more energy per kilogram than lithium-ion batteries.