2 – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
Skip to main content

Science Archive

Archives for July 2025

Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Google DeepMind’s new AI model helps researchers understand ancient text.

The model, called Aeneas, is designed to contextualize Latin inscriptions by tracking down similarities across thousands of ancient texts. Google DeepMind says researchers can adapt Aeneas to other ancient languages, scripts, and media as well.

Already, Aeneas has explored the dating of the autobiography written by Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, determining the Latin text was most likely etched in stone between 10 and 20 CE.

Marina Galperina
Marina Galperina
FDA’s AI tool “hallucinates confidently.”

U.S. Food and Drug Administration employees told CNN that Elsa — the AI model that’s supposed to help speed up approvals of pharmaceuticals and medical devices — isn’t working great. Instead, it cites nonexistent studies, misrepresents research, fails to access crucial documents, and wastes a bunch of their time. Not quite the “AI revolution” RFK Jr. promised.

Adi Robertson
Adi Robertson
The Trump administration’s war on antidepressants is still brewing.

An FDA panel on antidepressant medications and pregnancy on Monday “largely amounted to misinformation or facts taken out of context,” NBC reports — and comes on the heels of RFK Jr. ordering an investigation into SSRIs earlier this year. OB/GYN Jen Gunter has a slightly more animated blow-by-blow livetweet thread, too.

Justine Calma
Justine Calma
The Citizen app will include weather warnings in NYC.

The announcement over the weekend follows flash floods that inundated subways. The app notifies users of nearby emergencies and crimes. Now, New York City is adding public safety warnings for floods, extreme heat, fires, and more.

An actually good flash flood alert system involves a lot more than sharing weather updates, experts tell The Verge. Officials also have to avoid causing “alert fatigue” if they’re sending out crime and weather alerts through the same platform.

How to design an actually good flash flood alert system

It takes an ‘all of the above’ approach.

Justine Calma
Justine Calma
Justine Calma
Amazon’s greenhouse gas emissions are increasing.

It saw a 6 percent rise in planet-heating pollution last year, according to the company’s latest sustainability report. As it expands data centers for AI, Amazon is moving further away from a goal it set in 2019 to reach net zero carbon emissions.

“One of the biggest challenges with scaling AI is increased energy demands for data centers,” Amazon’s sustainability report says.

Thomas Ricker
Thomas Ricker
SpaceX launches Amazon’s Starlink-rival satellites.

Amazon’s third batch of Project Kuiper satellites has launched into space on Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket. The deployment of 24 Kuiper satellites comes just three hours after 26 Starlink satellites were deployed. Jeff Bezos plans to light up his space Internet service later this year with help from launch partners ULA, Arianespace, and yes, his own Blue Origin. The Kuiper constellation will eventually consist of more than 3,200 satellites, less than half of what Starlink already has operating, with more competitors to come.

An image showing Amazon’s compact Project Kuiper satellite dish on a table
Amazon’s smallest dish teased in 2023.
Image: Amazon
Jay Peters
Jay Peters
Starlink aims to launch its third-generation satellites starting next year.

“Each one of these new satellites is designed to provide over a terabit per second of downlink capacity (> 1,000 Gbps) and over 200 Gbps of uplink capacity to customers on the ground,” Starlink says. “This is more than 10 times the downlink and 24 times the uplink capacity of the second-generation satellites.”

Starlink is also touting how speed and latency have “radically improved.”

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
UnitedHealth is keeping tabs on its critics.

What do a filmmaker in Wisconsin, billionaire investor Bill Ackman, The Guardian, and a doctor who posted on TikTok all have in common? UnitedHealth has targeted them in an effort to clamp down on criticism. The company’s legal tactics have only intensified after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, The New York Times reports.