This has been a good week for the US space agency in terms of the federal budget.

On Tuesday, a committee in the US House of Representatives passed a $24.8 billion budget bill for the coming fiscal year. Then, two days later a Senate committee passed a $24.9 billion budget for NASA. Both of these measures would keep funding more or less at the level of the current fiscal year and, for the most part, keep the space agency's programs going on their current trajectories.

These bills are not final. Both must move through the full House and Senate, and then be reconciled before going to President Trump for his signature. And time is running out, with fiscal year 2026 set to begin on October 1, just a little more than ten weeks from now.

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A Polish programmer running on fumes recently accomplished what may soon become impossible: beating an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a head-to-head coding competition. The 10-hour marathon left him "completely exhausted."

On Wednesday, programmer Przemysław Dębiak (known as "Psyho"), a former OpenAI employee, narrowly defeated the custom AI model in the AtCoder World Tour Finals 2025 Heuristic contest in Tokyo. AtCoder, a Japanese platform that hosts competitive programming contests and maintains global rankings, held what may be the first contest where an AI model competed directly against top human programmers in a major onsite world championship. During the event, the maker of ChatGPT participated as a sponsor and entered an AI model in a special exhibition match titled "Humans vs AI." Despite the tireless nature of silicon, the company walked away with second place.

"Humanity has prevailed (for now!)," wrote Dębiak on X, noting he had little sleep while competing in several competitions across three days. "I'm completely exhausted. ... I'm barely alive."

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Researchers recently reported encountering a phishing attack in the wild that bypasses a multifactor authentication scheme based on FIDO (Fast Identity Online), the industry-wide standard being adopted by thousands of sites and enterprises.

If true, the attack, reported in a blog post Thursday by security firm Expel, would be huge news, since FIDO is widely regarded as being immune to credential phishing attacks. After analyzing the Expel write-up, I’m confident that the attack doesn’t bypass FIDO protections, at least not in the sense that the word “bypass” is commonly used in security circles. Rather, the attack downgrades the MFA process to a weaker, non-FIDO-based process. As such, the attack is better described as a FIDO downgrade attack. More about that shortly. For now, let’s describe what Expel researchers reported.

Abusing cross-device sign-ins

Expel said the “novel attack technique” begins with an email that links to a fake login page from Okta, a widely used authentication provider. It prompts visitors to enter their valid user name and password. People who take the bait have now helped the attack group, which Expel said is named PoisonSeed, clear the first big hurdle in gaining unauthorized access to the Okta account.

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The long-running video game series Assassin's Creed will get a live-action TV series adaptation. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter report that Netflix has greenlit the series after years of development hell; the intention to produce the series was announced in 2020.

The series had been through multiple creative teams even before it was greenlit, but Netflix settled on two co-showrunners. Roberto Patino, a writer on FX's Sons of Anarchy and HBO's Westworld, will join David Wiener, who led Paramount+'s Halo TV series as well as Fear the Walking Dead.

The two released a joint statement with the news that the show is moving forward:

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Netflix used generative AI in an original, scripted series that debuted this year, it revealed this week. Producers used the technology to create a scene in which a building collapses, hinting at the growing use of generative AI in entertainment.

During a call with investors yesterday, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos revealed that Netflix's Argentine show The Eternaut, which premiered in April, is "the very first GenAI final footage to appear on screen in a Netflix, Inc. original series or film.” Sarandos further explained, per a transcript of the call, saying:

The creators wanted to show a building collapsing in Buenos Aires. So our iLine team, [which is the production innovation group inside the visual effects house at Netflix effects studio Scanline], partnered with their creative team using AI-powered tools. ... And in fact, that VFX sequence was completed 10 times faster than it could have been completed with visual, traditional VFX tools and workflows. And, also, the cost of it would just not have been feasible for a show in that budget.

Sarandos claimed that viewers have been "thrilled with the results"; although that likely has much to do with how the rest of the series, based on a comic, plays out, not just one, AI-crafted scene.

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This week, a federal court in Miami started hearing a wrongful death case involving Tesla's crash-prone Autopilot driver assistance system. It's not the first time that Tesla Autopilot has been implicated in fatal traffic crashes, but it is the first time that a federal court has heard such a case.

Until now, the most high-profile court case involving Tesla Autopilot was probably the California trial over the death of Walter Huang, who was killed in 2018 when his Tesla Model X steered itself into a concrete highway divider. Huang's family took Tesla to court in April 2024 but quickly settled with the automaker under terms that have been kept secret.

And earlier this week, Tesla settled another Autopilot lawsuit concerning the death of Jeremy Banner in 2019. In that case, the Tesla's sensors failed to recognize a tractor-trailer crossing the highway and collided with it, shearing the top off the car and killing Banner.

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Nearly 800,000 doses of mpox vaccine pledged to African countries working to stamp out devastating outbreaks are headed for the waste bin because they weren't shipped in time, according to reporting by Politico.

The nearly 800,000 doses were part of a donation promised under the Biden administration, which was meant to deliver more than 1 million doses. Overall, the US, the European Union, and Japan pledged to collectively provide 5 million doses to nearly a dozen African countries. The US has only sent 91,000 doses so far, and only 220,000 currently still have enough shelf life to make it. The rest are expiring within six months, making them ineligible for shipping.

"For a vaccine to be shipped to a country, we need a minimum of six months before expiration to ensure that the vaccine can arrive in good condition and also allow the country to implement the vaccination," Yap Boum, an Africa CDC deputy incident manager, told Politico.

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A federal judge ruled yesterday that President Trump violated US law when he fired Democrat Rebecca Kelly Slaughter from her position at the Federal Trade Commission.

"Because the law on the removal of FTC Commissioners is clear, and for the reasons explained below, the court will grant Ms. Slaughter's motion for summary judgment and deny Defendants' cross-motion for summary judgment," said the memorandum opinion from Judge Loren AliKhan in US District Court for the District of Columbia.

Trump is appealing the ruling to the DC Circuit court of appeals and yesterday asked the District Court to stay its order while the appeal is pending. The case could end up at the Supreme Court, with the Trump administration seeking to overturn a 1935 precedent that AliKhan cited while ruling in Slaughter's favor.

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In January, YouTuber Jon Prosser posted a video to his Front Page Tech channel that claimed to be “your very first look at iOS 19,” the operating system that Apple would announce as iOS 26 a few months later.

Though Prosser claimed he “could not show the real video of what I saw” because he wanted to protect his source, the rest of the video showed a mock-up for a redesigned version of the Camera app, which ended up being a preview of the company-wide “Liquid Glass” redesign that Apple would show off at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June (Prosser also posted more extensive iOS 19 previews in April, including one labeled “the biggest iOS leak ever.”)

Months after the fact, Apple confirmed that Prosser got an early look at the new OS and the Liquid Glass design. It did so by suing Prosser and a man named Michael Ramacciotti for leaking Apple’s trade secrets (as reported by MacRumors).

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Last month, the parachutes on Hélène Huby's small spacecraft failed to deploy, and the vehicle and its cargo crashed into the ocean on Earth.

It was both a success and a failure.

The success was that after Huby founded The Exploration Company in Europe, she managed to move nimbly with the "Mission Possible" spacecraft such that it cost less than $25 million to build and reached space in less than three years. The vehicle ticked off a number of successes in spaceflight before making a controlled descent through the atmosphere.

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Sixty thousand years ago, two groups of Neanderthals lived just a stone’s throw apart in what’s now northern Israel. But they had very different cultures when it came to food, according to a recent study. Archaeologist Anaëlle Jallon of Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her colleagues examined dozens of animal bones from both sites, looking for clues about Neanderthal meal prep. It turns out that something as mundane as the cut marks left by butchering an animal can reveal differences in ancient people’s way of life.

These ungulate bones from Amud (left) and Kebara (right) caves show distinctly different patterns of cut marks. Credit: Jallon et al. 2025

What did Neanderthals eat? It depends.

The Neanderthals who lived around the Sea of Galilee between 70,000 and 50,000 years ago had their pick of meat entrees on the hoof. The area was home to several species of deer, from tiny roe deer to larger red deer, along with gazelles, wild goats, boar, and larger game like aurochs and relatives of modern horses. For Neanderthal hunters equipped with wood and stone hunting tools, the place was a veritable buffet. And you might expect that one group of Neanderthals would eat pretty much the same things as any others in the area.

However, what Jallon and her colleagues found in their recent study looks more like the Pleistocene version of New York and Chicago having very different styles of pizza: same ingredients, different ways of using them.

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Donald Trump is expected to sign the GENIUS Act into law Friday, securing his first big win as a self-described "pro-crypto president." The act is the first major piece of cryptocurrency legislation passed in the US.

The House of Representatives voted to pass the GENIUS Act on Thursday, approving the same bill that the Senate passed last month. The law provides a federal framework for stablecoins, a form of cryptocurrency that's considered less volatile than other cryptocurrencies, as each token is backed by the US dollar or other supposedly low-risk assets.

The GENIUS Act is expected to spur more widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies, since stablecoins are often used to move funds between different tokens. It could become a gateway for many Americans who are otherwise shy about investing in cryptocurrencies, which is what the industry wants. Ahead of Thursday's vote, critics had warned that Republicans were rushing the pro-industry bill without ensuring adequate consumer protections, though, seemingly setting Americans up to embrace stablecoins as legitimate so-called "cash of the blockchain" without actually insuring their investments.

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Welcome to Edition 8.03 of the Rocket Report! We are at an interesting stage in Europe, with its efforts to commercialize spaceflight. Finally, it seems the long-slumbering continent is waking up to the need to leverage private capital to drive down the costs of space access, and we are seeing more investment flow into European companies. But it is critical that European policymakers make strategic investments across the industry or companies like PLD Space, which outlined big plans this week, will struggle to get off the launch pad.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Avio celebrates freedom from Arianespace. Representatives from Italy, Germany, and France met at the European Space Agency headquarters last week to sign the Launcher Exploitation Declaration, which officially began the transfer of Vega C launch operation responsibilities from Arianespace to the rocket’s builder, Avio, European Spaceflight reports. "It is a historic step that reinforces our nation's autonomy in access to space and assigns us a strategic responsibility towards Europe," said Avio CEO Giulio Ranzo. "We are ready to meet this challenge with determination, and we are investing in technologies, expertise, and infrastructure to ensure a competitive service."

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The last few years have seen several smartphone makers pull back or totally abandon their mobile efforts. UK-based Nothing Technologies, however, is still trying to carve out a niche in the increasingly competitive smartphone market. Its tools have been quirky designs and glowing lights, along with a focus on markets outside the US. With the Nothing Phone 3, the company has brought its "first flagship" phone stateside.

Nothing didn't swing for the fences with the Phone 3's specs, but this device can hold its own with the likes of OnePlus and Google. Plus, it has that funky Nothing design aesthetic. There's a transparent back, a tiny dot matrix screen, and a comprehensive Android skin. But at the end of the day, the Nothing Phone 3 is not treading new ground.

Designing Nothing

Despite Nothing's talk about unique designs, the Nothing Phone 3 looks unremarkable from the front. The bezels are slim and symmetrical all the way around the screen. Under a sheet of Gorilla Glass 7i, it has a 6.67-inch 120Hz OLED screen with an impressive 1260 x 2800 resolution. It hits 4,500 nits of brightness, which is even higher than Google and Samsung phones (we're not seeing much difference in practice). It's more than bright enough to be readable outdoors, and the touch sensitivity is excellent—sometimes too excellent, as we've noticed a few accidental edge touches.

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San Diego Comic-Con is coming up next week, and Disney is getting ready for its big presentation by releasing a new trailer for TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning.

(Spoilers for TRON: Legacy below.)

As previously reported, TRON: Legacy ended with Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) from the original film, preventing the digital world from bleeding into the real world, as planned by the Grid's malevolent ruling program, Clu. He brought with him Quorra (Olivia Wilde), a naturally occurring isomorphic algorithm targeted for extinction by Clu.

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Late Tuesday, President Trump announced on social media that he had convinced Coca-Cola to agree to use "REAL Cane Sugar" in Coke, in lieu of the current, cheaper sweetener used in the US version of the drink: high-fructose corn syrup.

"I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It's just better!" Trump wrote.

On Wednesday, Coca-Cola failed to confirm that supposed agreement. On its website, the beverage giant posted a brief, vague statement saying "We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand" and that "More details on new innovative offerings" will be announced soon.

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Logophiles are "devastated" after Dictionary.com deleted their logs of favorited words that they carefully crafted for years. The company deleted all accounts, as well as the only ways to use Dictionary.com without seeing ads —even if you previously paid for an ad-free experience.

Dictionary.com offers a free dictionary through its website and free Android and iOS apps. It used to offer paid-for mobile apps, called Dictionary.com Pro, that let users set up accounts, use the app without ads, and enabled other features (like grammar tips and science and rhyming dictionaries) that are gone now. Dictionary.com's premium apps also let people download an offline dictionary (its free apps used to let you buy a downloadable dictionary as a one-time purchase), but offline the dictionaries aren't available anymore.

Accounts axed abruptly

About a year ago, claims of Dictionary.com’s apps being buggy surfaced online. We also found at least one person claiming that they were unable to buy an ad-free upgrade at that time.

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Researchers from Cisco’s Talos security team have uncovered a malware-as-a-service operator that used public GitHub accounts as a channel for distributing an assortment of malicious software to targets.

The use of GitHub gave the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) a reliable and easy-to-use platform that’s greenlit in many enterprise networks that rely on the code repository for the software they develop. GitHub removed the three accounts that hosted the malicious payloads shortly after being notified by Talos.

“In addition to being an easy means of file hosting, downloading files from a GitHub repository may bypass Web filtering that is not configured to block the GitHub domain,” Talos researchers Chris Neal and Craig Jackson wrote Thursday. “While some organizations can block GitHub in their environment to curb the use of open-source offensive tooling and other malware, many organizations with software development teams require GitHub access in some capacity. In these environments, a malicious GitHub download may be difficult to differentiate from regular web traffic.”

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If you're the owner of an Android phone and live in a seismically active region, there's a chance your phone has popped up an unusual warning. Not one that asks for permission to share personal information, or potential malware, but something far more serious: There's an earthquake nearby, and you have up to a minute or two to get to a safer location.

Starting in the US in 2020 and expanding internationally since, the system is called Android Earthquake Alert (AEA), and it's on by default in most Android phones. And today, Google has a paper in Science that describes how the system works, how the company has improved it, and what it has seen during the first few years of operation, including what caused a handful of false alarms.

Shaking things up

Smartphones come with accelerometers, small devices that enable them to sense changes in motion. This is how they manage to do tricks like figuring out how many steps you're walking. If your phone is sitting quietly on a table, however, the accelerometer shouldn't be registering much significant motion. But anything from you walking across the room to a truck going by outside can cause vibrations that your phone's accelerometer can pick up. As can the often less subtle vibrations of earthquakes.

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Last year, Medicare spent over $10 billion on dubious bandages—called skin substitutes—that come with eye-popping prices. Some are made from medical waste, like dried bits of discarded placentas or infant foreskin, and many have not gone through rigorous testing to prove they offer any advantage over standard bandages. Yet, in some cases, Medicare reportedly paid for bandages priced at more than $21,000 per square inch. And individual patients have quickly racked up bills over $1 million just for their bandaging—some who puzzlingly didn't even have a wound.

Private insurance companies largely do not cover these bandages, declaring many of them "unproven and not medically necessary." But Medicare's current coverage seems to tie back to a rule change in 2020 that opened the door to broader use of them—and the market for these dubious skin substitutes, often used for diabetic ulcers, exploded. Since 2023, more than 100 new products have been introduced, according to an investigative report from The New York Times in April.

The Times investigation highlighted two big reasons why they're so pricy: First, due to an oddity in pricing rules, Medicare initially sets the reimbursement rate for the bandages at whatever price the manufacturer chooses—for the first six months at least. The second is that doctors are granted steep discounts, incentivizing them to use the pricy products for bigger reimbursements. After the initial six-month period, Medicare reimburses only what doctors pay after manufacturer discounts. However, some bandage makers get around this by just rolling out new products that are suspiciously similar to the old ones, maintaining the large reimbursement rates.

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