Scientists at several federal agencies are losing access to scientific literature published by Springer Nature, which produces the prestigious journal Nature among many other high-profile titles.

That's according to a report Monday by Nature's news team, which is also published by Springer Nature, but is editorially independent.

According to the news outlet, spokespeople for NASA and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) confirmed that agency scientists would no longer have access to Springer Nature journals. A USDA spokesperson said that it "has cancelled all contracts and subscriptions to Springer Nature. The journal [sic] is exorbitantly expensive and is not a good use of taxpayer funds." A government spending database also shows the Department of Energy (DOE) has dropped contracts with the publisher.

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The Trump administration plans to cancel a fleet of orbiting data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency and replace it with a secretive network that, so far, relies primarily on SpaceX's Starlink Internet constellation, according to budget documents.

The move prompted questions from lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the Space Force's budget last week. While details of the Pentagon's plan remain secret, the White House proposal would commit $277 million in funding to kick off a new program called "pLEO SATCOM" or "MILNET."

The funding line for a proliferated low-Earth orbit satellite communications network hasn't appeared in a Pentagon budget before, but plans for MILNET already exist in a different form. Meanwhile, the budget proposal for fiscal year 2026 would eliminate funding for a new tranche of data relay satellites from the Space Development Agency. The pLEO SATCOM or MILNET program would replace them, providing crucial support for the Trump administration's proposed Golden Dome missile defense shield.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has decided to let prisons and jails keep charging high prices for calling services until at least 2027, delaying implementation of rate caps approved last year when the FCC had a Democratic majority.

Carr's office announced the change yesterday, saying it was needed because of "negative, unintended consequences stemming from the Commission's 2024 decision on Incarcerated People's Communications Services (IPCS)... As a result of this waiver decision, the FCC's 2021 Order rate cap, site commission, and per-minute pricing rules will apply until April 1, 2027, unless the Commission sets an alternative date."

Commissioner Anna Gomez, the FCC's only Democrat, criticized the decision and pointed out that Congress mandated lower prices in the Martha Wright-Reed Act, which the FCC was tasked with implementing.

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An mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine from Moderna was 27 percent more effective at preventing influenza infections than a standard flu shot, the company announced this week.

Moderna noted that the new shot, dubbed mRNA-1010, hit the highest efficacy target that it set for the trial, which included nearly 41,000 people aged 50 and above. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either mRNA-1010 or a standard shot and were then followed for about six months during a flu season.

Compared to the standard shot, the mRNA vaccine had an overall vaccine efficacy that was 26.6 percent higher, and 27.4 percent higher in participants who were aged 65 years or older. Previous trial data showed that mRNA-1010 generated higher immune responses in participants than both regular standard flu shots and high-dose flu shots.

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Clothoff—one of the leading apps used to quickly and cheaply make fake nudes from images of real people—reportedly is planning a global expansion to continue dominating deepfake porn online.

Also known as a nudify app, Clothoff has resisted attempts to unmask and confront its operators. Last August, the app was among those that San Francisco's city attorney, David Chiu, sued in hopes of forcing a shutdown. But recently, a whistleblower—who had "access to internal company information" as a former Clothoff employee—told the investigative outlet Der Spiegel that the app's operators "seem unimpressed by the lawsuit" and instead of worrying about shutting down have "bought up an entire network of nudify apps."

Der Spiegel found evidence that Clothoff today owns at least 10 other nudify services, attracting "monthly views ranging between hundreds of thousands to several million." The outlet granted the whistleblower anonymity to discuss the expansion plans, which the whistleblower claimed was motivated by Clothoff employees growing "cynical" and "obsessed with money" over time as the app—which once felt like an "exciting startup"—gained momentum. Because generating convincing fake nudes can cost just a few bucks, chasing profits seemingly relies on attracting as many repeat users to as many destinations as possible.

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Nothing, a startup from OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, has announced its first flagship phone since 2023. The company bills its new Nothing Phone 3 as a "true flagship" device, but it doesn't have the absolute best hardware you can get in a mobile device. Neither does it have the highest price, clocking in at a mere $799. That's shaping up to be a good value, but it's also the highest price yet for a Nothing phone.

A few weeks back, Nothing teased the end of its trademark Glyph interface. Indeed, the Nothing Phone 3 doesn't have the illuminated panels of the company's previous phones. Instead, it has a small dot "Glyph Matrix" LED screen. It's on the back in the upper right corner, opposite the camera modules. Nothing has a few quirky games and notification icons that will flash on the screen, and it can be used as a very low-fi selfie mirror. Nothing is committed to the new Glyph screen, going so far as adding a button on the back to control it.

The rest of the design maintains the Nothing aesthetic, featuring a clear glass panel with a visible mid-frame and screws. The phone will come in either black or white—Nothing isn't really into colors. However, the company does promise the Phone 3 will be a little more compact than the 2023 Phone 2. The new device is 18 percent thinner and has symmetrical 1.87-millimeter bezels around the 6.67-inch OLED screen. That panel supports 120 Hz refresh and has a peak brightness of 4,500 nits, which is competitive with the likes of Samsung and OnePlus.

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Hackers working on behalf of the Iranian government are likely to target industrial control systems used at water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure to retaliate against recent military strikes by Israel and the US, federal government agencies are warning. One cybersecurity company says many US-based targets aren't adequately protected against the threat.

“Based on the current geopolitical environment, Iranian-affiliated cyber actors may target US devices and networks for near-term cyber operations,” an advisory jointly published by the The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, FBI, Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, and the National Security Agency stated. “Defense Industrial Base (DIB) companies, particularly those possessing holdings or relationships with Israeli research and defense firms, are at increased risk.”

Easy targets

Of particular interest to the would-be hackers are control systems that automate industrial processes inside water treatment plants, dams, and other critical infrastructure, particularly when those systems are manufactured by Israel-based companies. Between November 2023 and January 2024, near the onset of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, federal agencies said hackers affiliated with the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps actively targeted and compromised Israeli-made programmable-logic controllers and human-machine interfaces used in multiple sectors, Including US Water and Wastewater Systems Facilities. At least 75 devices, including at least 34 in US-based water facilities, were compromised.

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In another sign that the Trump White House is aggressively moving to slash NASA’s science programs, dozens of mission leaders have been asked to prepare "closeout" plans by the end of next week.

The new directive came from NASA's senior leadership on Monday, which is acting on behalf of the White House Office of Management and Budget. Copies of these memos, which appear to vary a little by department, were reviewed by Ars. The detailed closeout plans called for must be prepared by as soon as July 9 for some missions, which has left principal investigators scrambling due to the tight deadline and the July 4 holiday weekend.

Projects should prepare their plans assuming closeout direction is given on October 1, 2025, one of the NASA memos states. Missions in operations—that is to say, spacecraft whizzing around the Solar System conducting science right now—should "assume closeout is complete within 3 months."

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In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Stephen King published several novels under the pseudonym Richard Bachman before being outed in 1984. One of those was The Running Man, later adapted into a star vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger. There's a new adaptation on the horizon courtesy of director Edgar Wright (Sean of the Dead, Ant-Man, Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho), and Paramount just dropped the trailer for The Running Man (2025).

(Spoilers for the 1982 book and 1987 movie below.)

King wrote the original novel in just one week. It's set in a dystopian 2025 hellscape (making Wright's film particularly timely), with the global economy in a state of collapse and a totalitarian government ruling the US. The protagonist, Ben Richards, lives in "Co-Op City" with his wife and seriously ill daughter, unable to work because he was blacklisted. So he decides to compete on a deadly game show called The Running Man. He is declared an enemy of the state and given a 12-hour head start before an elite team of Hunters (i.e., assassins) chase after him. He's also required to post videotaped messages every day.

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Facing overwhelming opposition from both Democrats and Republicans, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accepted defeat and joined a 99-1 vote against his own plan to punish states that regulate artificial intelligence.

"The Senate came together tonight to say that we can't just run over good state consumer protection laws," Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said. The Cruz plan would have thwarted state laws related to robocalls, deepfakes, and autonomous vehicles, she said.

The House previously approved a budget bill with a provision to ban state AI regulation for 10 years. The Senate has a rule against including "extraneous matter" in budget reconciliation legislation, which Cruz tried to get around by proposing a 10-year moratorium in which states would be shut out of a $42 billion broadband deployment fund if they try to regulate AI.

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The Republican Party's opposition to tax credits for electric vehicles has stepped up a notch. As its members in the US Senate add their input to the budget bill that came from their colleagues in the House of Representatives, among the changes they want to see is a faster eradication of the IRS clean vehicle tax credit. The tax credit provides up to $7,500 off the price of an EV as long as certain conditions are met, and the language from the House would have given it until the end of the year. Now, it might be gone by the end of September.

The looming passage of the bill appears to have reopened the rift between Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the Republican Party, which the billionaire funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in the last election. After a brief war of words earlier this month that was quickly smoothed over when Musk apologized to President Trump, it seems there's the potential for strife again.

Yesterday, Musk once again took to his social media platform to denounce the budget bill, threatening to form a third political party should it pass and reposting content critical of the GOP spending plan.

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Far from the front lines of the climate crisis, 100 men and women in air-conditioned offices, 61 of them millionaires, are making decisions that could increase United States carbon dioxide emissions, and the warming of the climate they are driving, for decades to come.

In the latest political wrangle over energy and climate policy, a group of Republican senators over the weekend added provisions to the US federal budget bill that, as currently written, would end clean energy tax credits at the personal level and at utility scale and increase taxes on foreign-made parts for solar power equipment.

Ending federal subsidies for most renewable energy projects, including residential heat pumps, for example, would affect thousands of projects that are already in planning or development and jeopardize future investments in manufacturing renewable energy equipment.

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In the 1800s, astronomers were mystified by the discovery of stars that displayed highly unusual emission lines. It was only after 1868, when scientists discovered the element helium, that astronomers were able to explain the broad emission bands due to the presence of helium in these stars.

Over time, these stars became known as Wolf-Rayet stars (Charles Wolf was a French astronomer, and helium was first detected by the French scientist Georges Rayet and others), and astronomers came to understand that they were the central stars within planetary nebulae, and continually ejecting gas at high velocity.

This gives Wolf-Rayet stars a distinctive appearance in the night sky. And this week, Chris McGrew has shared a photo of WR 134—a variable Wolf-Rayet star about 6,000 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus—which he captured from a dark sky location in southwestern New Mexico.

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Cloudflare is now experimenting with tools that will allow content creators to charge a fee to AI crawlers to scrape their websites.

In a blog Tuesday, Cloudflare explained that its "pay-per-crawl" feature is currently in a private beta. A small number of publishers and content creators will participate in the experiment. Each publisher will be able to set their own prices that bots must pay before scraping content, Cloudflare said.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said the feature would ensure that the Internet as we know it will survive "the age of AI."

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A boomerang carved from a mammoth tusk is one of the oldest in the world, and it may be even older than archaeologists originally thought, according to a recent round of radiocarbon dating.

Archaeologists unearthed the mammoth-tusk boomerang in Poland’s Oblazowa Cave in the 1990s, and they originally dated it to around 18,000 years old, which made it one of the world’s oldest intact boomerangs. But according to recent analysis by University of Bologna researcher Sahra Talamo and her colleagues, the boomerang may have been made around 40,000 years ago. If they’re right, it offers tantalizing clues about how people lived on the harsh tundra of what’s now Poland during the last Ice Age.

A boomerang carved from mammoth tusk

The mammoth-tusk boomerang is about 72 centimeters long, gently curved, and shaped so that one end is slightly more rounded than the other. It still bears scratches and scuffs from the mammoth’s life, along with fine, parallel grooves that mark where some ancient craftsperson shaped and smoothed the boomerang. On the rounded end, a series of diagonal marks would have made the weapon easier to grip. It’s smoothed and worn from frequent handling: the last traces of the life of some Paleolithic hunter.

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© Talamo et al. 2025

Apple's Vision Pro hasn't made huge waves in the market, partly due to its steep price and "everything including the kitchen sink" feature set. But Apple hasn't given up on the platform yet; a prominent analyst with a strong record of accurate projections for Apple's product lineup, Ming-Chi Kuo, published a roadmap that shows Apple beginning to roll out a new wave of mixed reality devices in 2027.

Kuo says Apple still "views head-mounted devices as the next major trend in consumer electronics." We already knew Apple CEO Tim Cook felt that way before the Vision Pro came out, but continued investment seems to indicate that Apple hasn't been dissuaded by the relatively low sales of the Vision Pro as a niche product. However, Kuo notes that "Apple is not expected to launch any new head-mounted devices in 2026."

Launches are planned for 2027 and 2028, though. You might expect a sort of Vision Pro 2, and Kuo believes that's coming—but not until at least mid-2028. When it arrives, it's expected to jump from Apple's M2 system-on-a-chip to the M5, which should offer a significant performance leap. Based on his supply line sources, Kuo believes the new headset will feature a completely new design that is "significantly" lighter than the first Vision Pro and a lower price point.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. June's list includes the final results from the Muon g-2 experiment, re-creating the recipe for Egyptian blue, embedding coded messages in ice bubbles, and why cats seem to have a marked preference for sleeping on their left sides.

Re-creating Egyptian blues

Close-up image of an ancient wooden Egyptian falcon. Researchers have found a way to reproduce the blue pigment visible on the artifact. Credit: Matt Unger, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Artists in ancient Egypt were particularly fond of the color known as Egyptian blue—deemed the world's oldest synthetic pigment—since it was a cheap substitute for pricier materials like lapis lazuli or turquoise. But archaeologists have puzzled over exactly how it was made, particularly given the wide range of hues, from deep blue to gray or green. That knowledge had long been forgotten. However, scientists at Washington State University have finally succeeded in recreating the recipe, according to a paper published in the journal npj Heritage Science.

The interdisciplinary team came up with 12 different potential recipes using varying percentages of silicon dioxide, copper, calcium, and sodium carbonate. They heated the samples to 1,000° Celsius (about what ancient artists could have achieved), varying the time between one and 11 hours. They also cooled the samples at different rates. Then they analyzed the samples using microscopy and other modern techniques and compared them to the Egyptian blue on actual Egyptian artifacts to find the best match.

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The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico hacked the phone of an FBI official investigating kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán as part of a surveillance campaign “to intimidate and/or kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses,” according to a recently published report by the Justice Department.

The report, which cited an “individual connected to the cartel,” said a hacker hired by its top brass “offered a menu of services related to exploiting mobile phones and other electronic devices.” The hired hacker observed “'people of interest' for the cartel, including the FBI Assistant Legal Attache, and then was able to use the [attache's] mobile phone number to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data, associated with the [attache's] phone."

“According to the FBI, the hacker also used Mexico City's camera system to follow the [attache] through the city and identify people the [attache] met with,” the heavily redacted report stated. “According to the case agent, the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

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Making art used to be a uniquely human endeavor, but machines have learned to distill human creativity with generative AI. Whether that content counts as "art" depends on who you ask, but Spotify doesn't discriminate. A new band called The Velvet Sundown debuted on Spotify this month and has already amassed more than half a million listeners. But by all appearances, The Velvet Sundown is not a real band—it's AI.

While many artists are vehemently opposed to using AI, some have leaned into the trend to assist with music production. However, it doesn't seem like there's an artist behind this group. In less than a month, The Velvet Sundown has released two albums on Spotify, titled "Floating On Echoes" and "Dust and Silence." A third album is releasing in two weeks. The tracks have a classic rock vibe with a cacophony of echoey instruments and a dash of autotune. If one of these songs came up in a mix, you might not notice anything is amiss. Listen to one after another, though, and the bland muddiness exposes them as a machine creation.

Some listeners began to have doubts about The Velvet Sundown's existence over the past week, with multiple Reddit and X threads pointing out the lack of verifiable information on the band. The bio lists four members, none of whom appear to exist outside of The Velvet Sundown's album listings and social media. The group's songs have been mysteriously added to a large number of user-created playlists, which has helped swell its listener base in a few short weeks. When Spotify users began noticing The Velvet Sundown's apparent use of AI, the profile had around 300,000 listeners. It's now over 500,000 in less than a week.

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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz's home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.

Cruz's proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.

When the House of Representatives passed its so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill," it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz's version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band's protection from spectrum auctions. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.

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