STARBASE, Texas —I first visited SpaceX's launch site in South Texas a decade ago. Driving down the pocked and barren two-lane road to its sandy terminus, I found only rolling dunes, a large mound of dirt, and a few satellite dishes that talked to Dragon spacecraft as they flew overhead.

A few years later, in mid-2019, the company had moved some of that dirt and built a small launch pad. A handful of SpaceX engineers working there at the time shared some office space nearby in a tech hub building, "Stargate." The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley proudly opened this state-of-the-art technology center just weeks earlier. That summer, from Stargate's second floor, engineers looked on as the Starhopper prototype made its first two flights a couple of miles away.

Over the ensuing years, as the company began assembling its Starship rockets on site, SpaceX first erected small tents, then much larger tents, and then towering high bays in which the vehicles were stacked. Starbase grew and evolved to meet the company's needs.

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

Hayden, a small town in the mountains of northwest Colorado, is searching for ways to diversify its economy, much like other energy communities across the Mountain West.

For decades, a coal-fired power plant, now scheduled to shut down in the coming years , served as a reliable source of tax revenue, jobs, and electricity.

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Advanced driver assistance systems—also known as ADAS—come in a few variations. Blind spot monitoring, collision warnings, and emergency braking act like a second pair of eyes and ears, monitoring the car's environment to warn the driver, or possibly intervene, if a crash looks imminent. Other systems are better thought of as convenience features—things like adaptive cruise control and lane keeping , which relieve some of the burden of driving.

Among the newer of these is the traffic jam assist. It's a variant of adaptive cruise plus lane keeping designed for low-speed stop-start driving on limited-access highways, usually cutting out around 40 mph. But we're still talking about a so-called "level 2" system, where the human driver is responsible for maintaining situational awareness; even more advanced "level 3" assists exist— these allow the driver to completely disengage from the task —but are not the topic for today.

AAA recently put five (unnamed) ADAS systems to the test in the Los Angeles area, blessed as it is with dependable heavy freeway traffic. The testers went out together in morning and afternoon weekday traffic, covering the same routes simultaneously. The vehicles were driven an average of 342 miles (550 km) over 16.2 hours, with the ADAS operated according to each vehicle's user manual. And the cars were instrumented with cameras and GPS to record traffic conditions, behavior, and so on.

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When Hurricane Helene ravaged western North Carolina in September 2024, one of its many victims was a manufacturing plant that made intravenous fluids. The sterile IV solutions produced in the plant are essential supplies for hospitals and other medical facilities, which use them in various treatments, from rehydration to drug delivery and kidney dialysis. And the plant damaged by Helene—Baxter International's North Cove manufacturing facility in Marion—didn't just make some of the US supply; it made 60 percent .

With the Baxter plant down, hospitals around the country began rationing supplies . They changed treatment strategies and, in some cases, canceled or delayed surgeries. In one poll, over 86 percent of health care providers said they were affected by the nationwide shortage. The federal government, for its part, loosened importation rules and granted extensions to expiration dates to offer some relief from the dire shortage.

This secondary emergency was yet another reminder of just how fragile the US drug supply chain has become. Just months before the catastrophic hurricane in North Carolina, drug shortages in the US reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages . Although they've fallen since then, they remain high, with shortages in the first quarter of this year at 253 , according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

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At first glance, Nam-Joon Cho’s lab at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University looks like your typical research facility—scientists toiling away, crowded workbenches, a hum of machinery in the background. But the orange-yellow stains on the lab coats slung on hooks hint at a less-usual subject matter under study.

The powdery stain is pollen: microscopic grains containing male reproductive cells that trees, weeds, and grasses release seasonally. But Cho isn’t studying irksome effects like hay fever, or what pollen means for the plants that make it. Instead, the material scientist has spent a decade pioneering and refining techniques to remodel pollen’s rigid outer shell—made of a polymer so tough it’s sometimes called “the diamond of the plant world” —transforming the grains to a jam-like consistency.

This microgel, Cho believes, could be a versatile building block for many eco-friendly materials, including paper, film, and sponges.

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After the Trump administration confirmed a rumor that the US is planning to buy a 10 percent stake in Intel , US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) came forward Wednesday to voice support for the highly unusual plan, finding rare common ground with Donald Trump.

According to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, the plan would see the US disbursing approved CHIPS Act grants only after acquiring non-voting shares of Intel and likely other chipmakers. That would allow the US to profit off its investment in chipmakers, Lutnick suggested, and Sanders told Reuters that he agreed American taxpayers could benefit from the potential deals.

"If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment," Sanders said.

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When updating a piece of software as large and complex and old as Windows, you're inevitably going to break something every once in a while. Microsoft tracks known issues here —generally they affect lesser-used features or obscure edge cases, but every once in a while you run into something bigger and more disruptive.

August's updates have introduced a couple of more noticeable problems. The first was caused by update KB5063875 , a relatively minor security update for older versions of Windows 10 and 11. This update broke Windows' built-in reset and recovery features, used to restore a Windows installation to its factory defaults if you're experiencing a problem or are planning on handing down or otherwise getting rid of your PC. After installing the update, users of Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2 and Windows 10 22H2 who tried to reset their PCs would see the process silently fail with no explanation.

Microsoft quickly resolved this one with update KB5066189—the issue was opened on August 18 and marked as resolved on August 19—so if you're still having issues, check for the update that will fix your update.

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If you were to design the strangest diet possible, eating nothing but ants and termites would probably make the shortlist. Yet over the past 66 million years, mammals across the globe have repeatedly gone down this path—not once or twice, but at least a dozen times. From anteaters and aardvarks to pangolins and aardwolves, the so-called myrmecophages (animals that feed on ants and termites) have evolved similar traits: they’ve lost most or all of their teeth, grown long sticky tongues, and learned to consume insects by the tens to hundreds of thousands each day.

A new study reveals that this extreme dietary specialization, once thought rare and mysterious, has emerged independently in mammals at least 12 times in the last 66 million years (i.e., since the Cenozoic era began). This is a striking example of convergent evolution and shows just how powerful ants and termites have been in shaping mammalian history.

“The number of distinct origins for myrmecophagy was certainly surprising, as was the discovery that their origins seem to quite neatly follow the trend of growth across ant and termite colony sizes throughout the Cenozoic,” Thomas Vida, first author of the study and a researcher at the University of Bonn, told Ars Technica.

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US defense officials have long worried that China's Guowang satellite network might give the Chinese military access to the kind of ubiquitous connectivity US forces now enjoy with SpaceX's Starlink network.

It turns out the Guowang constellation could offer a lot more than a homemade Chinese alternative to Starlink's high-speed consumer-grade broadband service. China has disclosed little information about the Guowang network, but there's mounting evidence that the satellites may provide Chinese military forces a tactical edge in any future armed conflict in the Western Pacific.

The megaconstellation is managed by a secretive company called China SatNet, which was established by the Chinese government in 2021. SatNet has released little information since its formation, and the group doesn't have a website. Chinese officials have not detailed any of the satellites' capabilities or signaled any intention to market the services to consumers.

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