They might be better than gas-powered cars in most conceivable ways, but electric vehicle sales are having an undeniably hard time right now. The cause is no mystery: since January 2025 the US government has been actively hostile to the idea of energy efficiency and in the intervening months has taken an axe to fuel efficiency regulations, prosecuting polluters, and the consumer-facing tax credit.

That last one had the effect of bringing forward sales from people who needed an EV and knew the credit was expiring at the end of last September, leading to a rosy-looking Q3 2025 followed by a rather bad Q4. Things got even worse this year—in January just 5.1 percent of all new vehicles sold were EVs , compared to 8.3 percent in January 2025. But the government's antipathy toward EVs isn't done yet. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) wants to include an annual $250 tax on EV drivers—hybrids would also pay $100 a year—in an upcoming bill.

This is the second time Graves has tried to tax drivers of more efficient vehicles; last year the committee under Graves wanted to include an escalating EV tax , starting at $200 annually, into the budget but was unsuccessful.

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Two teens behind one of the earliest US high school deepfake scandals will be sentenced this week, but the case is unlikely to resolve families' concerns about the school's significantly delayed response.

Earlier this month, the 16-year-old boys admitted to using AI tools to "nudify" images of 48 female classmates at Lancaster Country Day School in Pennsylvania, along with 12 other young female acquaintances.

The incident could have been caught early, after the school learned of the images following an anonymous report to a state-run tipline. But officials—who at the time weren't legally required to act—failed to notify parents or police for six months, as the number of victims continued to grow. In total, the boys created at least 347 AI-generated sexualized images and videos before they were stopped.

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Generally, when you hear “water use” and “sustainability,” you expect those words to be followed by some bad news. Humanity’s enduring ability to ignore the math of declining water supplies is almost impressive. But there are cases where actions have successfully reversed our loss of water resources. A new paper in Science by Scott Jasechko of the University of California, Santa Barbara, examines documented cases of groundwater recovery around the world to identify which strategies have worked.

Groundwater is invaluable for many reasons. For one, it’s (usually) cleaner than surface water. It’s also right under your feet and often close enough to the surface that it doesn’t take much energy to pump it up. And there’s loads of it down there, no matter the season. Because of this, humans use a lot of it for drinking water, agriculture, and every other use you can think of.

Unfortunately, in many places, the rate of groundwater use has grown to exceed the rate at which precipitation soaks into the ground to replenish it.

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In spring 2024, two days after undergoing complex cardiac surgery in the Midlands, a man in his mid-70s unexpectedly deteriorated and died.

The hospital referred the death to the coroner’s service, as is protocol when a cause is unknown, and clinical negligence barrister Anthony Searle was instructed by the man’s devastated family to represent them.

To try to get to the bottom of what had happened, Searle knew he would need to ask the surgeons some probing questions. So when the coroner declined his request for an independent expert report, Searle was frustrated.

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BROOMFIELD, Colorado—One of NASA's oldest astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as scientists await the arrival of a pioneering robotic rescue mission.

The 21-year-old spacecraft is falling out of orbit, and NASA officials believe it's worth saving—for the right price. Swift is not a flagship astronomy mission like Hubble or Webb, so there's no talk of sending astronauts or spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a rescue expedition. Hubble was upgraded by five space shuttle missions, and billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman—now NASA's administrator— proposed a privately funded mission to service Hubble in 2022, but the agency rejected the idea.

Swift may be a more suitable target for a first-of-a-kind commercial rescue mission. It has cost roughly $500 million (adjusted for inflation) to build, launch, and operate, but it is significantly less expensive than Hubble, so the consequences of a botched rescue would be far less severe. Last September, NASA awarded a company named Katalyst Space Technologies a $30 million contract to rapidly build and launch a commercial satellite to stabilize Swift's orbit and extend its mission.

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The 1980s brought us so many terrific films, including director Russell Mulcahy's sword-and-sorcery fantasy action film Highlander , starring Christopher Lambert as an immortal Scotsman who must battle others like him to the death until just one remains. The film spawned two direct sequels and two TV series (one live action, one animated), and a planned reboot has been kicking around Hollywood since 2008. But the original still stands tall as the best of the bunch, 40 years later.

(Spoilers below because it's been 40 years.)

Screenwriter Gregory Widen was a college student at UCLA when he wrote the first draft of what would become Highlander for a screenwriting class. It was originally entitled Shadow Clan and partially inspired by Ridley Scott's 1977 film about two swordsmen engaged in a longstanding feud ( The Duelists ). Combine that with Widen's visits to Scotland and the Tower of London, with its impressive display of historical armor, and Widen had all he needed for his tale of dueling Immortals secretly living among us. He sold that first draft for $200,000—a princely sum for a college student—and a few revisions later, Highlander was ready for filming.

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More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70-ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile—sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt, and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by a Canadian business, The Metals Company, was pronounced a success.

The company is working to get a green light to deploy similar machines for commercial harvesting over an area of 65,000 square kilometers, to extract over 600 million metric tons of nodules.

There are riches on the ocean floor—round deposits made up of tightly packed layers of critical minerals that have long been out of reach. But not anymore. The pursuits of The Metals Company are among 31 initiatives by companies, governments and state-owned enterprises—including China, India, and the Republic of Nauru, a tiny island nation in the southwestern Pacific Ocean—to collect nodules for analysis and to test mining equipment.

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On Monday, a paper announcing that all four DNA bases had been found on an asteroid sparked a lot of headlines. But many of the headlines omitted a key word needed to put the discovery in context: "again." The paper itself cited similar results dating back to 2011, and the ensuing years have seen various confirmations and more rigorous studies. The new work was less notable for showing that we had found these bases in Ryugu than for solving a previous mystery: earlier studies had failed to detect them there, despite their presence in many other asteroid samples.

Outside the headlines, though, the new work provides some interesting details, as it may answer an important question: how these bases got there in the first place. Understanding that better may be critical for getting a better picture of how the raw materials for life ended up on Earth in the first place.

Searching for bases

Let's start with a description of what the researchers found. Both DNA and RNA, the two nucleic acids used by life, share a similar structure. That includes the backbone, a chain that alternates between sugars and phosphates that are all chemically linked together. While the specific sugar differs between DNA and RNA, the chain itself varies only in length; otherwise, the backbone of every DNA or RNA molecule is identical.

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Last summer, a group of officials from the Department of Energy gathered at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling 890-square-mile complex in the eastern desert of Idaho where the US government built its first rudimentary nuclear power plant in 1951 and continues to test cutting-edge technology.

On the agenda that day: the future of nuclear energy in the Trump era. The meeting was convened by 31-year-old lawyer Seth Cohen. Just five years out of law school, Cohen brought no significant experience in nuclear law or policy; he had just entered government through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team.

As Cohen led the group through a technical conversation about licensing nuclear reactor designs, he repeatedly downplayed health and safety concerns. When staff brought up the topic of radiation exposure from nuclear test sites, Cohen broke in.

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