In recent years, Michigan has typically reported around 50 cases of cyclosporiasis, which causes urgent bouts of watery diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and nausea. But, this year, as of July 14, the state has reported 3,309 cases of the food-borne pathogen. Of those 44 have been hospitalized.

Based on interviews with more than 1,000 people sickened in Michigan, the latest data is pointing to leafy greens as the source, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).

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The US military shared a video showing three “one-way attack surface drones” exploding after approaching an Iranian midget submarine and ship maintenance facility at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Naval Base on the night of July 12. US Central Command, the US military combat command responsible for Middle East operations, described the strikes in a social media post as the “first time American forces have employed sea drones in combat operations.”

The US drone boats were able to “make a low-speed, uncontested approach” to their targets before exploding, according to USNI News, a news service from the nonprofit US Naval Institute. USNI News also identified one of the targets as an Iranian Ghadir-class midget submarine that was out of the water while being suspended from a gantry.

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Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a novel conductive ink that can be painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, turning into a functional electrode for biomonitoring after drying. They described their work in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

As previously reported, epidermal electronics attached to the skin via temporary tattoos (e-tattoos) have been around for more than a decade. So-called e-tattoos connect to skin without adhesives, are practically unnoticeable, and are typically attached via temporary tattoo, allowing electrical measurements (and other measurements, such as temperature and strain) using ultra-thin polymers with embedded circuit elements.

However, these e-tattoos have their limitations, most notably that they don’t function well on curved and/or hairy surfaces, as well as requiring personalized electrode placement design to cover larger areas, since biosignals are spatially distributed. So scientists have been getting creative. For instance, in 2024, researchers developed special polymer-based conductive inks that can be printed onto a person’s scalp to measure brain waves, even if they have hair. This could one day enable mobile EEG monitoring outside a clinical setting, among other potential applications.

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Google claims the impetus for image search a quarter-century ago was the green Versace dress Jennifer Lopez wore to the 2000 Grammy Awards. If you were alive at the time, you probably remember the one. Google engineers understood that people searching for the dress didn't want to read about it—they just wanted to see it. The company got to work building image search, launching the first version in July 2001. Twenty-five years later, it's easy to take for granted that you can search for Lopez's green dress or whatever else strikes your fancy.

Currently, going to the Google image search site shows a plain search bar for finding images. It's a refreshingly minimalist interface for the modern web. Even Google's search homepage has a smattering of AI buttons and drop-down menus. That will change when the new Google Images rolls out.

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The state-wide ban applies to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, officials told Reuters, and it won’t be lifted until the state figures out what "consistent standards" for responsible data center development in New York should look like.

Across the US, calls to halt data center construction have multiplied, as Americans grow increasingly concerned about risks of pollution, rising energy costs, and diminishing water supplies. At the federal level, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) have introduced legislation seeking a possible nationwide construction ban. But Republicans are seemingly unlikely to embrace that legislation, given Donald Trump's claim that such moratoriums would threaten America's lead in the AI race.

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Seventy-one percent of boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, consumed alcohol in the past six months—the lowest drinking rate of any generation and down 2 percentage points from three years ago, according to IWSR, a market researcher for the global beverage industry.

By contrast, 74 percent of Gen Z who are at the legal drinking age reported drinking in the past six months, up from 66 percent three years ago, as young people in their late teens and 20s catch up with the total adult population drinking rate of 76 percent.

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But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

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The Ebola outbreak, which was first declared on May 15, is already the third largest on record and still growing. As of July 12, the DRC has reported 1,926 cases and 702 deaths in the outbreak, which is caused by the lesser-known Bundibugyo strain of Ebolavirus.

Under the Trump administration, the US has adopted a seemingly isolationist approach, implementing stringent and controversial travel restrictions and blocking the repatriation of citizens exposed to or infected with the virus. That's despite the US having multiple facilities around the country designed to safely monitor and provide high-quality care for Ebola patients in these types of situations.

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Both the Russian and Chinese governments have been compromising routers for years, sometimes in prolonged tugs-of-war to wrest control of devices the other has already commandeered. The US government has occasionally issued covert commands and taken other steps to disinfect routers. Google and other companies have also worked to disrupt the massive botnets that control compromised routers in lockstep. The actions to date are little more than whack-a-mole exercises as the operators simply replace their botnets with new ones.

Proxy networks: The go-to tool

“Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Center 16 cyber actors continue to exploit poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices worldwide, opportunistically compromising multiple critical infrastructure sector networks,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday. The hacking groups are tracked under various names, including Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Static Tundra. The advisory was co-issued by governments from around the world, including Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the UK.

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Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have flown one-way attack drones to target and strike more than 100 Russian tankers and other ships in total, along with posting video evidence showing such drone strikes occurring every night between July 6 and July 14. The campaign has forced Russia to completely shut down the shipping route that flows from Russia’s Don River into the Sea of Azov, and to halt all Kerch Strait shipping transits from the Sea of Azov into the Black Sea, according to Reuters reporting.

The shutdown of such maritime lanes has further isolated the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula by cutting off seaborne delivery of fuel in particular. Crimea had already been experiencing severe fuel rationing and power outages as Ukraine stepped up its mid- and long-range drone strike campaign on Russian energy infrastructure and supply lines, leaving behind damaged oil refineries with billowing black smoke and burned-out trucks littering highways.

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But EV buyers in California aren't quite as unlucky as their peers in the other 49 states and the District of Columbia. Yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a new EV rebate into law for residents of the Golden State.

As Newsom said in a statement:

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In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple sought several injunctions blocking OpenAI from using confidential information allegedly stolen by former employees. According to Apple’s complaint, OpenAI conspired with former Apple employees as part of a grand scheme to “take an unlawful shortcut” and launch a line of AI-powered devices as marketable as Apple’s iPhone.

Apple explained that it found a bug while investigating internal messages between a then-current employee, Yu-Ting “Alyssa” Peng, and an engineer who spent eight years “working on some of Apple’s most sensitive product development programs,” Chang Liu.

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As previously reported, the reverse sprinkler problem is associated with physicist Richard Feynman because he popularized the concept, but it actually dates back to a chapter in Ernst Mach’s 1883 textbook The Science of Mechanics (Die Mechanik in Ihrer Entwicklung Historisch-Kritisch Dargerstellt). Mach’s thought experiment languished in relative obscurity until a group of Princeton University physicists began debating the issue in the 1940s.

Feynman was a graduate student there at the time and threw himself into the debate with gusto, even devising an experiment in the cyclotron laboratory to test his hypothesis. One might intuit that a reverse sprinkler would work just like a regular sprinkler, merely played backward, so to speak. But the physics turns out to be more complicated. “The answer is perfectly clear at first sight,” Feynman wrote in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1985). “The trouble was, some guy would think it was perfectly clear [that the rotation would be] one way, and another guy would think it was perfectly clear the other way.”

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"The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ultimately, audiences on every sofa and movie theater seat in the US," California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

The merger would combine two of the largest movie studios and merge streaming service Paramount+ with HBO Max. Netflix previously had a deal to buy WBD's streaming and movie studios businesses, but Paramount succeeded in a hostile takeover bid helped along by support from the Trump administration.

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When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn't seen anything other than a title announcement and a teaser in May that largely provided a retrospective of star Tom Cruise's career, with just 30 seconds of footage from Digger tacked on at the end. But now we have the official trailer, and it certainly lives up to that earlier enthusiastic word of mouth. We're getting powerful Dr. Strangelove vibes, updated for our 21st-century times.

Digger is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015's The Revenant. The official logline is short and sweet: "The most powerful man in the world races to prove he's humanity's savior before the disaster he unleashed destroys everything." That disaster appears to be ecological in nature and involves a rapidly melting iceberg, as well as some nuclear waste.

Cruise is often at his best when he takes big creative swings and plays against type—the rage-fueled motivational speaker in Magnolia, for instance, or the over-the-top movie mogul in Tropic Thunder. He's almost unrecognizable in this new trailer as eccentric billionaire oil baron Digger Rockwell—wispy hair, potbelly, and all.

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According to Counterpoint, this substantial drop brings smartphone shipments to their lowest second-quarter level since 2013. Analysts place the blame for this drop squarely on the increasing price of DRAM and NAND chips. Manufacturers have largely shifted to supporting the AI computing boom, which leaves fewer components for consumer devices like smartphones and PCs. As prices climb higher, fewer people are interested in buying new phones.

This problem has been particularly vexing for people who are happy to purchase budget devices. A recent report from market research firm Omdia noted that higher memory costs are particularly bad for phones priced at $500 or less. In these segments, memory can now easily account for half of the total manufacturing cost. These devices have seen quicker and larger price increases compared to flagship devices, for which memory is now more than a quarter of the cost. That's a significant increase in the past year, but there's still more profit to be had at the high end.

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Advance Colorado, which wrote the measure and led the effort to gather enough signatures to add the measure to the ballot, submitted its petition on June 25 to put Initiative 177, the “Right to Natural Gas,” to voters in November’s state election.

The broad language of the measure—only 60 words in total—makes it difficult to predict how state agencies would implement it if it passes, and many people worry the amendment would endanger Colorado’s ability to reach its climate goals.

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Both of these projects have significant graphical compromises that limit how viable they would have been for a marketable, '90s-era console port, as MVG lays out in a new video. Still, they stand as a testament to the surprising results that clever, determined coders can coax out of legacy hardware.

It looks like Doom if you squint

To create the Doom64KB project for the Neo Geo, coder FrenkelS adapted an earlier Doom port they designed to run on 16-bit PC processors like the 8088 and 286. Using that engine, the Neo Geo code then makes a kind of proto frame buffer out of the console's fix layer, an area of display memory that's usually used to display menus and HUD information on top of gameplay.

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Through its Commercial Crew program and multibillion-dollar contracts awarded in 2014, NASA had hoped to foster two providers of low-Earth orbit transportation, SpaceX and Boeing. However Boeing has yet to complete a successful crewed test flight—a perilous 2024 test flight by Boeing's Starliner was later declared a Type A mishap—and probably won't fly another crewed mission before 2028.

With the International Space Station slated for retirement in the early 2030s, NASA is partnering with several US companies to develop private space stations. As part of that effort, the private companies will have to work with NASA to determine how they will transport astronauts to and from their space stations, some of which could launch as soon as 2030.

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Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too.

A strong, sharp effect

Researchers from Tracebit on Monday said they found that placing prompt injections alongside passwords, cryptographic keys, and other secrets stored on Amazon Web Services was often all that was needed to shut down attacks from AI hacking agents. The prompts direct the attacking LLM to perform an action forbidden by its guardrails, the safety barriers AI developers erect to prevent it from taking harmful actions. The LLM responds by shutting down.

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