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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin exploded during a test at the launch pad Thursday night, shaking nearby homes and briefly painting the sky orange. Blue Origin said its New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine-firing test being conducted ahead of a satellite launch planned for next week. No one was hurt, according to officials at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “It’s too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it,” Bezos said via X. “Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to...

Via the Associated Press, a familiar (if dispiriting) incident in space exploration: A rocket belonging to Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin exploded during a test at the launch pad Thursday night, shaking nearby homes and briefly painting the sky orange. Blue Origin said its New Glenn rocket exploded during an engine-firing test being conducted ahead of a satellite launch planned for next week. No one was hurt, according to officials at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Watching this footage, it's kind of incredible that "no one was hurt!" VIDEO AT LINK............. The blowup from other angles is just as unbelievable: VIDEOS...

○ 1 THE VIRUS WAS ENGINEERED IN A LABORATORY IN CHINA. Because the pathogen first emerged in Wuhan, China, President Donald Trump and others have claimed, without evidence, that it started in a lab there, and some conspiracy theorists believe it was engineered as a bioweapon. Why It’s False: U.S. intelligence agencies have categorically denied the possibility that the virus was engineered in a lab, stating that “the Intelligence Community ... concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not man-made or genetically modified.” Chinese virologist Shi Zhengli—who studies bat coronaviruses and whose lab Trump and others...

In A Nutshell A single octopus collected nearly a mile deep near the Galápagos Islands has been identified as a new species, Microeledone galapagensis, overturning a recent definition that placed its entire family exclusively in the cold Southern Ocean. Small enough to fit in the palm of a hand and vivid blue on top with a deep purple-to-maroon underside, the animal displays an unusual reversed color pattern that extends inside its body, a feature researchers think may help hide the glow of bioluminescent prey. Because the DNA samples were lost and no second specimen has been collected, the entire species...

Bruce Springsteen, Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews, Brittany Howard and Joan Baez will headline a star-studded protest festival in Howard County, Maryland, a month before the midterm elections. Springsteen and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello announced the festival Wednesday while performing together at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., as Springsteen winds down his Land of Hope and Dreams American tour. At the concert Wednesday, Springsteen played many of his most political songs, including "American Skin (41 Shots)" about a fatal police shooting and "Streets of Minneapolis," in response to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti during federal...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stole the show at a recent congressional hearing with two jars of brown water. Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) explained that the dirty water had come from Morgan County, Ga., where a Meta data center is allegedly tainting the water of local residents. It was an image perfectly suited to driving the intensifying opposition to data centers in that it was photogenic, easy to understand — and misleading. According to reporting in the New York Times last year, the water problem has affected four homes in the vicinity of the data center, not the entire county, as AOC implied. It...

xplanation: What do you see in this crystal ball? The featured image shows NGC 1514, known as the Crystal Ball Nebula, observed by the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, in Hawai'i. NGC 1514 is 1,500 light-years away and was discovered by William Herschel in 1790. This planetary nebula is formed when a star becomes a red giant and ejects its outer gas layers. The ejected shell of gas is heated up by the core of the star to temperatures hotter than the surface of our Sun: that makes the gas shine, creating beautiful images like this one. The slightly asymmetrical...

La Brújula Verde reports that a German archaeological team under the supervision of the Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe (LWL) recovered an exceptionally well-preserved notebook from a medieval toilet in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The discovery was made during construction of a new administrative headquarters in the city of Paderborn. The four- by three-inch book contains 10 wooden tablet pages coated in wax, onto which the object's owner etched writing using a metal or bone stylus. The volume was also carefully protected by a leather cover that was stamped with motifs of lilies. Although experts have not yet translated any of...

Ocean “acidification” is a somewhat unique branch of the overarching climate scare. It differs from other branches of the big scare in that it does not depend on atmospheric heating as the driver of the supposed scary consequences. Instead, with ocean “acidification,” the idea is that increased CO2 in the atmosphere (from the burning of fossil fuels) leads to increased CO2 dissolved in the oceans, which leads to lower pH of ocean water, which then becomes the driver of the alleged scary consequences. Thus, ocean “acidification” can theoretically work as a scare even if the atmosphere fails to heat with...

Since humans developed the ability to study DNA extracted from fossils, we have uncovered a mystery that until now had no answer. In the DNA of some human species, including our own, Homo sapiens, there were "super-archaic" markers, vestiges of older, unknown species with which we had interbred and produced offspring. Unable to determine who these genomic intruders were, some scientists called them ghost populations...Researchers in China have analysed proteins from the tooth enamel of six fossils dating back around 400,000 years -- five men and one woman -- found at sites across much of the country from north to...

A cheap, vitamin-packed fruit juice could become a surprising new weapon against anemia.Researchers found that drinking guava juice may significantly improve anemia by helping the body absorb iron more efficiently. In a review of 17 studies, women and teenage girls who consumed guava juice — especially with iron supplements — experienced noticeable increases in hemoglobin levels. Since guava contains far more vitamin C than oranges, scientists believe it could become a simple, affordable nutrition tool in regions where anemia is widespread. Guava Juice May Help Fight Anemia Guava juice may do far more than refresh on a hot day —...

The 2026 Tribeca Festival has set the world premiere of “Dreams of Violets,” a fully AI-generated film produced by studio Fountain 0 aimed at showcasing Iranian civilian resistance.The film’s premiere at Tribeca marks the first full-length, live-action film generated by AI to be accepted by a marquee film festival, according to Fountain 0.The project took three months — built entirely using tools such as Kling AI for video generation, Anthropic’s Claude AI for language-related editing, Google’s Gemini and Nanobanana for research and imagery and Fountain 0’s own technology for blocking and frame accuracy, according to the company — all from...

Explanation: What is a pair of headphones doing in the sky? Today’s image features the Headphone Nebula, also known as PK 164 +31.1 or Jones-Emberson 1. This planetary nebula, the remnant of a dying Sun-like star, faintly occupies an angular region of the Lynx constellation about 1/5th the diameter of the full moon. The red and blue-ish green colors trace hydrogen and oxygen atoms, respectively, that have been excited and ionized by the nebula's central white dwarf. The headphone shape, where two lobes of hydrogen puncture the inner region of oxygen, adds this object to a long list of oddly...

Findings by academic researchers suggest that hyperscalers' AI data centers contribute to local warming, but not everyone agrees. Findings of a new study conducted by a group of academics from around the globe have revealed that land surface temperature (LST) increases by 2°C (3.6°F) on average after the start of operations of an AI data center, an effect detectable up to an estimated 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away. The study, The data heat island effect: quantifying the impact of AI data centers in a warming world, was conducted by a dozen experts from leading universities in the UK, Singapore, France,...

Michelangelo left hidden gems across Florence, Rome, and Milan that most tourists never find. This Italy travel guide reveals 10 masterpieces you can still visit today, from a rejected drunk god in the Bargello to the last sculpture his hands ever touched. Most people spend four hours in Florence and see exactly one Michelangelo work. This video finds ten more, scattered across churches with no lines, chapels most visitors walk past, and museums that rarely appear on any itinerary. 10 Michelangelo Hidden Gems in Italy Most Tourists Never Find | 10:17 Roam Roster | 2.06K subscribers | 61,695 views |...

Dr. John Gordon, a reproductive endocrinologist, has been a man of faith for years. When he began to have doubts, they were not about his God, but his life’s work... As co-director of a fertility clinic in suburban Washington, D.C., Gordon grew troubled over helping create surplus embryos, which would often languish in storage or be discarded. With the expansion of genetic testing, couples could choose the sex of their baby. They could screen out painful or fatal diseases, but also milder impairments like hearing loss. “It’s too morally problematic,” Gordon thought. “I don’t know where you draw the line.”...

The city’s s worst “super speeders” will be forced to install speed-limiting devices on their cars, under a new state law passed Tuesday. The measure, approved as part of the state’s budget, will require drivers with 16 or more speed camera violations in a year to install a speed-limiting device that uses GPS technology to keep drivers from going faster than posted speed limits. The new law is set to take effect about one year from the date Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the budget — and will apply only to violations that occur after that. “New York is putting these...

The 'Star Trek' icon also performed a song called "Rage" during the wildly entertaining conversation, held Wednesday at the Saban Theatre in Los Angeles.William Shatner and Neil deGrasse Tyson regaled an enthusiastic crowd with stories of everything from our understanding quantum physics to Shatner‘s space flight to the meaning of the universe on Wednesday night during a conversation dubbed “The Universe Is Absurd!” at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. The event was actually the second of a two-night event wherein the close friends ribbed each other and shared personal anecdotes of their adventures together, including their 2024 trip to...

Driving the highway between Loving and Carlsbad on May 19, Jackie Onsurez noticed something unusual rising above an oilfield site operated by NGL Energy Partners. As he got closer, he realized the 70-foot plume was not smoke but a geyser of toxic oil field wastewater — known as produced water — erupting from a pipe. Onsurez, an engineer and member of New Mexico’s State Emergency Response Commission, immediately began calling NGL, 911, the New Mexico Environment Department and local officials. A roughneck arrived moments later and tried unsuccessfully to stop the spray. “The only people with protective gear were the...

Explanation: The upper galaxy might be more photogenic, but the lower galaxy is more unusual. The galaxy up top is NGC 3660, a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way galaxy in that it has several bright blue spiral arms and a central bar of stars, dust, and gas. Captured by chance in the featured deep and colorful image, surprisingly, is SN 2026cff, a supernova found just to the right of the central bar. Farther in the distance is the bottom galaxy, known informally as Burçin’s galaxy, but formally cataloged as LEDA 1000714. The center of this galaxy appears...