Sgr A* is the name we've given to the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. We've known about its presence since the 1970s but only managed to image it within the past few years. In the intervening time, most of our understanding of the object was obtained by watching a group of stars that orbit the black hole, helping us get a good estimate of its mass and size. In essence, those stars acted as instruments that let us peer into an environment we couldn't study any other way.

In Wednesday's issue of Nature, researchers describe a recently discovered star that is on an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it closer to Sgr A* than anything we've previously identified. It gets so close that it may help us get our first measurements of the spin of the black hole.

Reading the spin

There's an entire population of stars that orbit relatively close to Sgr A*. We can estimate their mass based on their brightness and spectral features. Using their masses and a reconstruction of their orbits using several years of data, we can figure out just how supermassive Sgr A* is (nearly 10 ³⁷ kilograms).

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Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms.

The tool, which is called Kromix, bills itself as an “AI image styler.” A voice-over for one of the video advertisements, viewed by WIRED, promotes the tool as having “no restrictions,” saying “all the characters are real people” and describing it as “the AI that men actually use.” In one ad, a woman closely resembling a prominent female US politician is seen in front of a US flag and the flag of the president of the US above the caption “What if she moved?” She then winks, before the ad cuts to a scene of a woman with the same face performing in a pornographic video.

The Kromix app, which was hosted by Apple’s App Store prior to a request for comment from WIRED, invites paid users to upload photos so that it can use them in scenarios including “bedroom rape” and “Disney love.” Videos on the app also feature AI-generated pornographic videos of women wearing Spider-Man costumes. Requests for comment sent to a contact listed in the app went unanswered.

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President Trump is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports.

Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Trump's second term. At times, she has notably angered members of the Make America Healthy Again movement , which was created by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Overton has a medical degree from the University of New Mexico School of Medicine and earned a doctoral degree in clinical investigation from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. While at Johns Hopkins, she worked with Marty Makary, the previous FDA commissioner who was ousted by Trump amid a cacophony of controversies.

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The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.

Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine .

The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.

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Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers.

The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took place when Russian forces launched a company-size assault with tanks and other armored vehicles in the Donetsk Oblast of eastern Ukraine on July 22. The Ukrainian defenders repelled the attack and posted video footage of their kamikaze drone strikes destroying at least seven T-72B3A tanks, including some that carried the Arena-M system, according to Euromaidan Press .

However, Ukrainian soldiers also described the Russian Arena-M system successfully shooting down some incoming drones, according to the journalists Dmytro Putiata and Rob Lee . The Ukrainians reported requiring between 15 and 20 drones to finish off each tank.

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SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet.

The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown.

Numerous onboard sensors and cameras, along with buoys and drones in position at the splashdown zone, have provided important data for SpaceX to assess the performance of the ship's heat shield after each test flight, so officials accepted the post-flight conflagrations. That day, Starship tipped over and remained intact, surprising just about everyone.

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Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a "campaign of censorship" waged by the Trump administration against ABC.

Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a complaint in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction that would halt the FCC proceeding in which Carr is threatening to deny renewals of broadcast licenses held by ABC stations.

The lawsuit accused the FCC of violating the First Amendment by retaliating against the company's protected expression. "Again and again, the Administration has attacked ABC’s speech—the stories its journalists report and the viewpoints its network programs air," the lawsuit said. "Over time, those attacks have escalated into express demands that ABC be stripped of its broadcast licenses because of its speech ."

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For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices.

The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the price of 10 months.

Peacock’s previous price hike was in July 2025, when the middle tier (with ads) went from $8/month to $11/month, and the ad-free plan increased from $14 to $17. Peacock also raised prices in July 2024 and August 2023. NBCUniversal launched the service in 2020.

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There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there.

Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there. That it took so long for anyone else to follow speaks to the magnitude of the US achievement, they might say.

But others have a starkly different opinion. A dominant storyline of the 21st century has been the economic and geopolitical rise of China, and what was once a unipolar world now has two large nations vying for supremacy across a number of fronts. One is space. If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win. From a propaganda standpoint, it will allow China to declare that it has not just caught up to the United States but surpassed it as this century's superpower.

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