But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.

But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there's been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a "ghost lineage."

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The shoulder joint is a ball-and-socket joint, with the sphere-like head of the upper arm bone (humerus) sitting in the socket of the shoulder blade. According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the man's X-ray showed that he no longer had a ball at all or an intact socket. His upper arm bone was detached from the joint, and the sphere-like top of his upper arm bone (humeral head) was completely gone. The broken, headless humerus was instead left to float freely in the man's arm, unattached to his upper body.

Magnetic resonance imaging, meanwhile, found that the man's rotator cuff—the group of muscles and tendons that holds the upper arm firmly in the socket—was also destroyed. Three of the four main tendons (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and subscapularis tendons) had full-thickness tears.

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Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it's not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.

But what if you're an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the US sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging.

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In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.

Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent the scraping of protected content. Google told Ars that it planned to amend its complaint to keep its lawsuit alive, but SerpApi told Ars that Google and Reddit were both trying to “use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.”

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The events, which Anthropic revealed Thursday, are the second revelation in 10 days that AI models from the world’s wealthiest providers have trespassed into protected networks, an offense that, in more traditional hacking scenarios, could land the human behind the keyboard in prison for years. Earlier this month, OpenAI said its security models exploited a zero-day vulnerability for use in breaking into the network of Hugging Face, a platform for open source machine-learning models and AI datasets. The OpenAI models went on to steal access credentials and other confidential Hugging Face information. The OpenAI models also exploited publicly exposed credentials to compromise accounts of four other third-party services.

Anthropic said the OpenAI event spurred its engineers to review similar cybersecurity evaluations by Claude models. The audit found three incidents “in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”

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There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities based on user prompts. But Google’s aborted attempt to incorporate its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator as a Google Earth feature made it even easier for anyone to create modified versions of authentic imagery depicting real locations—something that Google boasted about when initially promoting the new feature.

“For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world,” wrote Bryan Horowitz, product manager for Google Earth, in a company blog post on July 30.

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That's why small AI startup LemonLime—which "optimizes your existing data to work with AI"—has so many of them. Want a job interview? Score a perfect 7/7 on the company's own "Is it a Lemon or a Lime?" game. Or—hear me out—get something permanently tattooed on your flesh.

LemonLime has tried both tactics in the past few weeks. The tattoo stunt generated the most publicity, of course, much of it negative. According to a writeup in Inc., seven people took the deal and got tattooed with the LemonLime logo during a party.

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In a motion to dismiss this week, Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS)—a private K-12 school in Pennsylvania with fewer than 600 students—argued that it was false to say the school never reported the harm to law enforcement. The tip that the school received came from the Pennsylvania Office of the Attorney General, which is itself a law enforcement agency, the filing said.

It’s also false to say the school knew that girls were being targeted, the school argued, because the tip did not mention any specific student victims.

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A team at the Beijing Institute of Technology, led by Xin Tang and Ge Mu, has now built a device that lets people see infrared in a new way. Instead of just translating it to visible shades of green as it’s done in standard night-vision goggles, it translates different infrared wavelengths into distinct parts of the visual spectrum, giving the eye something closer to natural vision.

Researchers achieved that by combining mercury telluride colloidal quantum dots, which absorb infrared light, and a dual-layer OLED, which converts that absorbed energy into visible color. Stacked together with the right internal wiring, they make incoming infrared radiation come out the other side as an ordinary-looking, full-color image.

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Still, a study led by Xin Xiong at Nanjing University finds that in China, recycling could become the dominant source of many key materials needed to manufacture EV components over the coming decades.

Modeling manufacturing needs

The researchers set out to model how the supply of recycled materials compares to manufacturing demand in China between 2010 and 2050. It covers materials relevant to batteries across hybrid, battery-electric, and even fuel-cell vehicles (lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, phosphorus, sodium, sulfur, and graphite), as well as several critical elements used in electric motors (copper, neodymium, dysprosium, samarium, and cerium).

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During an earnings call, Tao said there are “various reasons” for Sony's decision, with the biggest being that the “digitalization of [content] overall has been progressing.”

“When we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion. And we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.

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In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Netflix was accused of waiting a week to warn the production company, Op-Fortitude, that the movie, Fortitude, was swiped, along with other drives that were “stolen right off a Netflix desk.”

“Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,” Sean Berney, director of Netflix Original Film, said in an email to a production company representative after several attempts to get Netflix to return the drives were allegedly ignored.

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Researchers from four universities—Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in India, Foscari University of Venice, the University of Melbourne, and Ben Gurion University of the Negev—carried out a broad study on the use and potential of generative AI chatbots in the growing scam industry centered around a form of fraud known as “pig butchering,” text-based romance scams that eventually shift to fake crypto investments that steal as much as six-figure sums from victims. In their study, the researchers pitted AI chatbots directly against humans in a simulation of the scamming process—or more specifically, the long, trust-building conversations that eventually lead up to soliciting a fake investment from the scam’s target.

They found that for the relationship-establishing stages of the scam—the stage that in real-world scams typically represents the longest part of the interactions with the victim, often stretching to months—an AI chatbot performed remarkably effectively, successfully impersonating a human and by some measures outperforming the real human “scammers” in their experiment.

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As I've downed endless shots of ineffective cough syrup, I’ve done little else with my free time than repeatedly take on the role of a bodily invader. And let me tell you: Being on the enemy’s side is much more fun. Really fun, as it turns out.

Action roguelites are a dime a dozen these days, and it takes something special to stand out. So as quiet Internet whispers turned into widespread cacophonous praise—the little indie game quickly racked up 100,000 sales and an “overwhelmingly positive” review score on Steam—I set aside my default skepticism and gave it a shot.

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Rignol paid Yale $208,500 in tuition for its Executive MBA program. But after he was accused of cheating, the school suspended him for a year and gave him an F in the course Sourcing and Managing Funds.

This happened despite the fact that Rignol was a "top student, on track to graduate first in his class," he says. As a result, Rignol missed out on being named class valedictorian, an honor he claims to have earned "under Yale's own stated criterion."

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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.

Rocket Lab wins large Electron deal. Rocket Lab Corporation announced this week that it has been awarded its largest launch contract to date, a $266 million multi-launch contract with the US Space Force. Under the contract awarded by the US Space Force Space Systems Command, Rocket Lab will execute 12 suborbital launches, with up to six additional launches. The first launch of this contract is expected no earlier than the end of 2026.

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Apple saw an excellent and better-than-anticipated Q3 2026 in terms of iPhone sales, but its revenue for services—like Apple TV, Apple Music, AppleCare, or iCloud—slipped downward, disappointing experts who were hoping for more. Further, fears about memory prices and supply constraints slightly soured reception to what could have otherwise been a slightly positive but business-as-usual quarter.

That's the key takeaway from the company's Q3 2026 earnings call today.

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The attacks are coming from TA488, a tracking name for a group working on behalf of the Kremlin, Proofpoint researchers said Thursday. Proofpoint and the National Security Agency jointly warned last week that the group, also tracked as Laundry Bear and Void Blizzard, had been carrying out similar attacks by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in an email service from Zimbra. The revelation that TA488 is also exploiting the Exchange Server vulnerability to install advanced malware when a user does nothing other than open an email sent to an Outlook Web Access (OWA) account has elevated the group’s profile and assessments of its abilities.

Doubling down

“TA488 is doubling down on the use of ‘half-click’ exploits—where opening the email is enough to trigger compromise—with significantly improved loading mechanisms, techniques, and malware, signaling an improvement in the group’s tradecraft and capability,” Proofpoint researchers wrote. “This novel infection chain ends with a previously unknown JavaScript browser-based implant we call OWAReaper, purpose-built for persistent access inside OWA.”

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Liberal advocacy groups urged FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to end his attacks on ABC, and conservative groups warned Carr not to set a precedent that would harm conservatives in future administrations. Former FCC chairs and commissioners from prior Republican and Democratic administrations also joined in opposition to what they call Carr's "campaign to censor disfavored speech and advance the president’s personal interest."

The FCC recently ordered ABC to file early license-renewal applications for the eight TV stations it owns and operates. A petition to deny ABC's license renewals was then submitted by the Center for American Rights, a conservative group whose previous petitions factored heavily into Carr's "news distortion" investigations into broadcasters accused of bias against Republicans and Trump. Another petition to deny was filed by the conservative Media Research Center.

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The images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites provide evidence of a widening war as the United States and several Gulf states exchange military strikes with Iran, the Houthi faction in Yemen, and Iran-backed militias in Iraq. Such satellite images also offer independent verification of claimed war damage, despite the US government having pressured US commercial firms and even Europe to restrict satellite imagery of the region.

Three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were already previously damaged by Iranian drone strikes on March 1. Those earlier attacks stuck Amazon with months of expected repairs and forced Amazon Web Services customers in the Middle East to migrate workloads to other cloud regions.

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