Deep Blue took down Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol at Go in 2016, and poker bots have been beating professionals for years. But one classic game called Stratego held out. Even DeepMind, with its exceptional budget, couldn't build a machine that reliably beat the best human players.

Now, a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, New York University, and Stanford University has done it. Their AI, called Ataraxos, beat Pim Niemeijer, arguably the best Stratego player of all time, 15 games to one, with four draws. And it took just 16 GPUs and a few thousand dollars to train it.

Hidden armies

In Stratego, each player gets 40 pieces representing military ranks, from a marshal down to a spy, plus bombs and a flag. You win by capturing the opponent's flag. Your opponent knows where your pieces are, but not what they are. Identities are revealed only when two pieces collide in battle—the weaker one is removed, and the identity of the winner is revealed. That makes Stratego an imperfect-information game, just like poker, which computers cracked years ago. “There's something super distinctive about Stratego, which is that it is a massive amount of hidden information that unfolds over a very long time scale,” said Eugene Vinitsky, a researcher at NYU and co-author of the study.

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A year or two ago, a few Canadian launch companies were trying to develop small rockets, but if we're being frank, the industry was not particularly notable. Sure, something interesting might eventually happen, but no one outside of a few Canadian space geeks was paying much attention.

But then the Trump Administration started threatening and instituting tariffs. There was talk of making Canada the 51st state. And pretty much every Canadian I know began telling me how enraged they were at their neighbors to the south. It's hard to blame them.

This has led the Canadian government to reassess all manner of areas where it had previously been happy to rely largely on the US government and American companies for goods and services. This included sovereign access to space. So this spring, the government announced the first awards to three companies—NordSpace, Reaction Dynamics, and Canada Rocket Company—to support work on rockets with "light lift" capability.

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For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs.

SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality." The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a "playable" state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are "fully playable at 60 fps." That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon's Souls remaster running at playable frame rates.

"SharpEmu has prioritized hardware accuracy from the very beginning, and we’re finally starting to see that investment pay off," CursedIfElse wrote on social media this week. "It was built completely from scratch, and this is how far we’ve come."

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An attempt to save NASA's $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from dropping out of orbit fell short, but the behind-the-scenes machinations required just to make a rescue possible deserve recognition, government and commercial space officials said in a recounting of the mission.

The rescue mission was developed by Katalyst Space Technologies, working under a $30 million contract awarded by NASA last September. NASA gave Katalyst nine months to build and launch a satellite to capture Swift flying some 200 miles above the Earth and boost it into a higher orbit.

Katalyst's rescue spacecraft, known as Link, successfully launched July 3 and completed some of its initial checkouts before a malfunction caused it to spin out of control a few weeks later. NASA announced in August that Link would not be able to reach Swift as intended, and the rescue mission was aborted.

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About 66 million years ago, the Chicxulub asteroid smashed into Earth, kicking up tsunamis and dropping hot debris that annihilated non-avian dinosaurs and many other species. But not everything it left in its wake was destructive. This space rock hit what is now the partially submerged Yucatan Peninsula, and at the bottom of the ocean, the impact generated enough heat to create a hydrothermal system that persisted for 8 million years and may have been a hotbed of life.

When researchers drilled for samples in the impact zone in 2016, they studied the types of rock that had formed as a result of the asteroid strike. This gave more insight into what happened in the immediate and long-term aftermath of this cataclysmic event.

The collision was intense enough to cause deformation far beneath the surface. Subterranean effects reached 35 km (almost 22 miles) down, and included the melting an immense amount of rock. Exposure to seawater made that rock porous. As hot water seeped into the pores, a hydrothermal system formed. The hot water gushing into an isolated region of the freezing depths could have attracted microorganisms and possibly other life forms that were otherwise struggling to survive.

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A fifth, unvaccinated person has died of measles in Pennsylvania, the state's health department announced Wednesday.

The department identified the deceased as a resident of Lancaster County, which is the epicenter of a raging outbreak that began in late April. The updated case count as of Wednesday is 943 across 39 counties, including 119 cases reported in just the last seven days. At least 176 people have been hospitalized.

Lancaster County has reported 381 cases and three of the five deaths in the outbreak. The previous two deaths were both in infants too young to be vaccinated. That includes a newborn boy and a 6-week-old baby girl. So far, no other information has been released about the county's third death announced today.

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An Argentinian-American writer and immigration advocate recently sued the federal government, demanding that it delete data that he believes was copied off of his phone when he re-entered the United States earlier this month.

According to the seven-page complaint, Thomas Kennedy said that a Customs and Border Protection agent at Miami International Airport physically searched his bags, questioned him about his books and magazines, and then demanded that he hand over his phone.

“[The agent] threatened me, saying that if I didn’t give him my phone, my interrogation was going to take much longer and they could retain my phone indefinitely,” Kennedy wrote. “I felt like I had no choice, so I handed my phone to the CBP agent.”

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Most implants like pacemakers and insulin pumps work in isolation. To help them coordinate with each other, a team of Georgia Tech researchers built a networking system that sends signals through body tissue instead of antennas and radio waves.

Radio problems

Implants that communicate today mostly rely on radio protocols like Bluetooth Low Energy or near-field communication (NFC). Both are a poor fit for in-body data transfer, says Alex Abramson, a Georgia Tech engineer and co-author of the new study.

The first problem is power. “If you want an implant to remain in an active state such that it can respond within milliseconds, it's very difficult to do that with the Bluetooth system,” Abramson said. According to the paper, Bluetooth components, when they’re activated, can cut an implant's battery life by up to 90 percent.

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Hackers have been exploiting a critical vulnerability in the Zimbra Collaboration Suite in an attempt to obtain email backups and authentication credentials of vulnerable organzations, Microsoft has warned.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-73570, lets attackers remotely issue operating system commands without authentication. Zimbra maintainer Synacor issued a patch on July 20, but didn’t disclose the vulnerability for more than three weeks after that. The security-focused Shadowserver Foundation said last week that its scans found that 274 separate instances of the Zimbra Collaboration Suite had been compromised. The number of servers running the software has fluctuated from 19,000 in the week following the patch to about 12,000 in the weeks following that. Currently, Shadowserver is tracking about 10,000 instances.

Look, ma, no authorization

From July 28 to August 7, Microsoft said Wednesday, the company detected two distinct scanning tools probing the Internet for vulnerable endpoints. The attackers first validated their exploit worked by sending HTTP, requests and DNS, ICMP, and out-of-band identity checks to domains hosted on public services. The probes allowed the attackers to confirm the exploit successfully executed commands on vulnerable servers without actually compromising them. Eventually, the attackers began using their command injection capability to install malicious payloads. Microsoft wrote:

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