Rocket Lab announced on Monday that it is acquiring the satellite communications company Iridium. The deal, made for cash and shares of Rocket Lab stock, values Iridium at about $8 billion.

The deal pairs the launch company, founded and led by Peter Beck, with a decades-old profitable satellite company whose network of 80 satellites in low-Earth orbit provides telecommunications services.

"We believe this will be one of the most transformative deals in the space industry," Beck said in a short promotional video announcing the deal. "It's the ultimate combination for growth."

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Imagine this: The US military begins tracking a mysterious spacecraft maneuvering near one of the Space Force's missile-warning satellites more than 22,000 miles over the equator.

This US satellite cost several billion dollars to build and launch. It's one of a handful of sentinels keeping constant watch for ballistic missile launches that might threaten the US homeland or US military bases overseas. Suddenly, this missile warning satellite goes dark. Ground controllers at a military base just outside of Denver scramble to figure out what went wrong.

There are two possibilities. Perhaps the mystery spacecraft lurking nearby somehow disabled or destroyed it, or as sometimes happens in the unforgiving environment of space, something important broke on the satellite, rendering it unresponsive. If the former, was it an intentional attack or an accident? Who carried it out and why? If the latter, how might controllers reactivate the satellite?

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Comcast said it plans to separate its media businesses from its mobile and broadband networks in the latest reshaping of the US industry, sending shares in the group up more than 20 percent on Monday.

The US media group said it expected to complete the break-up within a year through a tax-free spin-off of NBCUniversal and Sky —handing existing shareholders stock in both Comcast and the new standalone media company.

The move comes as the traditional American media industry races to keep pace as audiences shift their attention to social media and streaming platforms.

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More than two decades since the Concorde supersonic airliner last took to the skies, NASA has been flying an experimental aircraft designed to replace loud sonic booms with a quieter thump equivalent to a car door slamming shut 20 feet away. A successful NASA flight test program could influence the design of future supersonic airliners capable of flying overland routes without rattling buildings—and people’s nerves.

The Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst—an acronym for Quiet SuperSonic Technology—first took flight late last year and recently began supersonic test flights. But unlike with many experimental “X-plane” aircraft that may never leave restricted airspace near Edwards Air Force Base in California, NASA plans to eventually take the X-59 on a tour around the United States so residents of various cities and towns can provide feedback on the quieter sonic “thumps” it produces.

“Usually an X plane is kind of bare-bones—‘cobble it together from a bunch of parts from other airplanes and just demonstrate one thing,’” said Jim “Clue” Less , a NASA test pilot and aerospace engineer, in an interview with Ars. “We need to demonstrate that one thing, but then we need a plane that's robust enough that we can fly it all over the place and gather that data.”

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German physicist Max Planck was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics in the early 20th century, earning the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of quanta .  There has never been a whisper of scandal about the man's integrity or his scientific work. So a pair of science historians were puzzled when they discovered that a scientific journal had inexplicably retracted two of Planck's papers from the 1940s.

The journal in question is Naturwissenschaften, now known as The Science of Nature.  The journal typically adds a large RETRACTED notice across digital papers that have been retracted, leaving them available for download. But it has removed the two Planck papers entirely, leaving just a blank page (and empty PDFs) with a brief note saying the articles had been "withdrawn due to article violation.”

Physics historian Yves Gingras of the University of Quebec in Montreal was browsing the blog Retraction Watch's list of Nobel Prize winners who have had scientific papers retracted, just out of curiosity. Gingras was shocked to see Planck's name on the list, and enlisted fellow historian Mahdi Khelfaoui, of the University of Quebec at Trois-Rivieres, to investigate why the two papers had been retracted. They outlined their findings in a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

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It seems to be the week for cheap EVs. Right after the production model of the Slate electric truck was revealed, complete with a bump in range, a new European entrant in electric mobility is launching out of stealth mode today and plans to bring its own affordable yet stylish rides to market.

Amble's founders worked at Audi and Ford , started Cowboy ebikes, and cofounded Forpeople, the creative agency that works for, among others, Nio EVs , Arc’teryx , and Herman Miller . Indeed, Amble's design lead, Julian Hoenig, worked on the infamously canceled Apple car , which goes some way to explaining how this, the $25,000 Amble One, looks like it could have driven straight out of Cupertino, despite hailing from Lisbon, Portugal.

The Amble One is a street-legal, stripped-down electric buggy designed for the kind of places where a normal car feels out of place. Coastal paths, private estates, and those dusty tracks between luxury hotel villas and the sea. Think of it as if Apple decided it was going to design a golf cart, then took the project even further.

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South Korea plans to train every single member of its nearly half-million-strong military to operate drones as easily as they handle personal firearms. That ambitious goal was announced as the South Korean military seeks to maintain a technological edge in its 70-year border standoff with the larger military of a hostile North Korea.

The goal is to make drones a “universal combat tool” for all troops by training them to use drones like a “second personal weapon,” said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea’s Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times . The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies.

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A  60-year-old man in Spain went to the doctor complaining of a headache that he couldn't shake. It had started two weeks prior and was only getting worse. He also said he had noticed subtle changes in his behavior.

In a neurological exam, doctors found he had a mild delay in his movements, but no other deficits. His blood work was generally normal except for elevated IgE, a signal of immune responses linked to allergies, autoimmune disease, and parasitic infections. The doctors did a computed tomography (CT) scan of his head and saw much more obvious evidence of a problem: There were multiple lesions distributed throughout his brain accompanied by swelling.

In a case report in Emerging Infectious Diseases , the doctors reported working through the possible conditions that could explain all the findings. They noted that the man was not immunocompromised and had never traveled internationally. Their top suspicion was metastatic cancer.

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On July 1, it will be illegal for streaming platforms to play ads louder than the content being watched in California.

As The Hollywood Reporter highlighted this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill ( SB 576 ) in October 2025 that prohibits any video streaming service from transmitting the “audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany” in the state.

The law brings some parity between streaming services and broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers, which, under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, can only play commercials at “the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” the FCC says .

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