Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron.

“That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. “What we didn’t know was whether scorpions evolved to be like that or if it was accidental and they were just picking the metals up from the environment.”

To answer this question, Campbell and his colleagues examined how metals are distributed across the stingers and pincers of different scorpion species. Based on their data, detailed in a recent study published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, there was nothing accidental about it.

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Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to “critical industry partners.” But new research from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week , reached "a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations" as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month .

Since 2023, the AISI has run a variety of frontier AI models through 95 different Capture the Flag challenges designed to test capabilities on cybersecurity tasks, such as reverse engineering, web exploitation, and cryptography. On the highest-level "Expert" tasks, GPT-5.5 passed an average of 71.4 percent, slightly higher than the 68.6 percent achieved by Mythos Preview (though within the margin of error). In one particularly difficult task that involved building a disassembler to decode a Rust binary, AISI notes that "GPT-5.5 solved the challenge in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with no human assistance at a cost of $1.73" in API calls.

GPT-5.5 also matched Mythos Preview in its progress on "The Last Ones" (TLO), an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. GPT-5.5 succeeded in 3 of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to 2 of 10 for Mythos Preview—no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. But GPT-5.5 still fails at AISI's more difficult "Cooling Tower" simulation of an attempted disruption of the control software for a power plant, as every previously tested AI model also has.

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Did you know that SUVs now account for 6 in 10 new vehicles sold in Europe? That's even higher than in the US or China, where market share for lifted hatchbacks currently runs at about 40 percent. So the fact that Ferrari decided to enter the segment with the Purosangue in 2023 should be seen clearly in that context. Anyway, Four-seat Ferraris aren't entirely unheard of: I remain a big fan of the looks of the shooting brake FF and GTC4Lusso—if not the reliability of the latter .

But the test drivers in Maranello (where Ferrari's factory is) must have found something a little lacking with the way the Purosangue drove because they got to work on an upgrade for the SUV, which debuted this week. It's a new Handling Speciale option, featuring new active suspension calibration that better resists the body's roll, pitch, and yaw, something Ferrari says makes the Purosangue feel more compact than its 16.3 feet (4.9 m) might suggest. Expect Ferrari's always-quick steering to feel even sharper, then.

The control strategies for the double-clutch paddle-shift gearbox have also been improved, cutting shift times at the expense of a bit of refinement. But then that's the point: If you want a soothing luxury SUV, many other companies will sell you one. Ferrari buyers want the feeling of the next gear engaging to be a little more brutal, particularly if they're in one of the more permissive traction and stability control settings (or if those are disengaged entirely). In manual mode, that happens when you shift above 5,500 rpm, Ferrari tells us.

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On Thursday, the publicly traded spaceflight company Virgin Galactic shared on social media a new photo of its next-generation spaceship being towed outside of its factory in Mesa, Arizona.

You remember Virgin Galactic, right? The space tourism company was founded 22 years ago by Sir Richard Branson to bring spaceflight to the masses. Hundreds of people began buying tickets to space nearly two decades ago. And after a long, and at times deadly, development campaign, the company reached outer space (defined, somewhat controversially , as an altitude of 80 km and above) in December 2018.

The company began flying passengers in May 2021 with its VSS Unity spacecraft, and impressively completed six spaceflights in 2023. But a few months later, in June 2024 , Virgin Galactic stopped flying VSS Unity to focus on the development of its next-generation vehicle capable of more frequent, lower-cost spaceflights.

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Apple's Mac mini and Mac Studio desktops have been increasingly difficult to buy over the course of the year—multiple configurations are listed on Apple's site as "currently unavailable," which almost never happens, and others will take weeks or months to ship if you order them today. A top-end version of the Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM was delisted from Apple's store entirely .

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook addressed the situation on Apple's Q2 earnings call yesterday as part of a larger conversation about how Apple is navigating component shortages, and he partly blamed the shortage on the popularity of those desktops among users looking to run AI agents and other tools locally.

"Both [the Mac mini and the Mac Studio] are amazing platforms for AI and agentic tools, and the customer recognition of that is happening faster than what we had predicted, and so we saw higher-than-expected demand," said Cook. "We think looking forward that the Mac mini and the Mac Studio may take several months to reach supply-demand balance."

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In a series of social media posts Thursday, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Make America Health Again influencer Casey Means to be surgeon general, lashed out at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for Means' stalled nomination in the Senate, then announced a new nominee: Nicole B. Saphier, a breast radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a Fox News contributor, and founder of an herbal supplement company who has questioned vaccines.

Trump's abandonment of Means comes as no surprise. The nomination of the Stanford University-trained doctor has been stalled in the Senate since her February confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which Cassidy chairs. Afterward, it became clear that several Republican lawmakers, including Cassidy, had reservations about her nomination .

Doubts about Means

Specifically, concerns centered around her vaccine views and qualifications. Although she has a medical degree, she dropped out of her medical residency and does not hold an active license, which means, if confirmed, she would serve as the country's top doctor without being able to practice medicine. During her hearing, she largely tried to skirt questions about vaccines, avoiding explicitly recommending lifesaving shots or contradicting the views of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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From watching too much Nordic noir , I have learned the key lessons to Scandinavian safety: Stay out of the deep woods, avoid all "rustic villagers," flee every solstice or equinox ritual, and run screaming from any creature (human or otherwise) wearing antlers in the wrong anatomical location.

But assuming you can avoid pagan magic and the "old gods," Nordic countries do well on many other measures of human development. In the most recent World Happiness Report , for example, Finland tops the list while Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are all in the top six. (Costa Rica is the non-Nordic exception here, taking the fourth spot.)

These countries are also near the top in global average life expectancy .

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If you believe official Russian reports, the country's northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months.

The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX's Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine's military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia's Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow.

The Russian space agency's first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.

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Elon Musk seems tired and cranky. On Thursday, he took the stand for the third day in a four-week trial stemming from his lawsuit alleging that OpenAI abandoned its mission and should be blocked from taking the company public later this year. If Musk plays his cards right, Sam Altman could be ousted and OpenAI would remain a nonprofit forever.

But Musk stumbled at least seven times in ways that possibly put his chances at winning in jeopardy. Most notable, 1) OpenAI's lawyer managed to get him to make several concessions over his own lawyer's objections. 2) He also lost a fight to keep xAI's safety record off the table, calling his reputation as a supposed AI savior defending OpenAI's mission into question. 3) He repeatedly appeared dishonest, as OpenAI's lawyer showed documents contradicting his testimony. And he twice appeared disingenuous, 4) first when confronted with calling OpenAI's safety team "jackasses," 5) and then again when admitting that he didn't know what "safety cards" are, even though his own AI firm issues them. Perhaps most embarrassing, 6) he testified that he never loses his temper before raising his voice at OpenAI's lawyer. And finally, 7) his lawyers failed to keep his ties to Donald Trump off the record, with the judge agreeing to hear discussions that might further discredit Musk's testimony.

Musk faced Altman while testifying

Since he was called as the trial's first witness, Musk has spent more than seven hours over the past two days testifying that OpenAI made a "fool" out of him. He repeatedly claimed that OpenAI executives "stole a charity" after accepting $38 million in donations. Musk insists he was conned into giving "free funding" to start a nonprofit that Altman supposedly always intended to turn into an $800 billion company—not for the benefit of humanity, but to enrich Altman and his co-conspirators.

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