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“We were getting basil leaves the size of your palm,” University of Arizona researcher Greg Barron-Gafford said, describing some of the benefits he and his team have seen farming under solar panels in the Tucson desert.

For 12 years, Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI .

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Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What's more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing . Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket , field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX's Starlink are going nowhere fast.

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A political effort to remove space shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian and place it on display in Texas encountered some pushback on Thursday, as a US senator questioned the expense of carrying out what he described as a theft.

"This is not a transfer. It's a heist ," said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) during a budget markup hearing before the Senate Appropriations Committee. "A heist by Texas because they lost a competition 12 years ago."

In April, Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, both representing Texas, introduced the " Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act " that called for Discovery to be relocated from the National Air and Space Museum's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in northern Virginia and displayed at Space Center Houston. They then inserted a provision into the Senate version of the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which, to comply with Senate rules, was more vaguely worded but was meant to achieve the same goal.

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A 57-year-old woman spent six days in the hospital for severe liver damage after taking daily megadoses of the popular herbal supplement, turmeric, which she had seen touted on social media, according to NBC News .

The woman, Katie Mohan, told the outlet that she had seen a doctor on Instagram suggesting it was useful against inflammation and joint pain. So, she began taking turmeric capsules at a dose of 2,250 mg per day. According to the World Health Organization, an acceptable daily dose is up to 3 mg per kilogram of weight per day—for a 150-pound (68 kg) adult, that would be about 204 mg per day. Mohan was taking more than 10 times that amount.

A few weeks later, she developed stomach pain, nausea, fatigue, and dark urine. "I just did not feel well generally," she said.

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The Trump administration's plan to gut the Office of Space Commerce and cancel the government's first civilian-run space traffic control program is gaining plenty of detractors.

Earlier this week, seven space industry trade groups representing more than 450 companies sent letters to House and Senate leaders urging them to counter the White House's proposal. A spokesperson for the military's Space Operations Command, which currently has overall responsibility for space traffic management, said it will "continue to advocate" for a civilian organization to take over the Space Force's role as orbital traffic cop.

Giveth and taketh away

The White House's budget request submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2026 would slash the Office of Space Commerce's budget from $65 million to $10 million and eliminate funding for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). The TraCSS program was established in the Department of Commerce after Trump signed a policy directive in his first term as president to reform how the government supervises the movements of satellites and space debris in orbit.

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Authorities in Europe have detained five people, including a former Russian professional basketball player, in connection with crime syndicates responsible for ransomware attacks.

Until recently, one of the suspects, Daniil Kasatkin , played for MBA Moscow, a basketball team that’s part of the VTB United League, which includes teams from Russia and other Eastern European countries. Kasatkin also briefly played for Penn State University during the 2018–2019 season. He has denied the charges.

Unrelated ransomware attacks

The AFP and Le Monde on Wednesday reported that Kasatkin was arrested and detained on June 21 in France at the request of US authorities. The arrest occurred as the basketball player was at the de Gaulle airport while traveling with his fiancée, whom he had just proposed to. The 26-year-old has been under extradition arrest since June 23, Wednesday's news report said.

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On Thursday, a digital rights group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, published an expansive investigation into AI-generated police reports that the group alleged are, by design, nearly impossible to audit and could make it easier for cops to lie under oath.

Axon's Draft One debuted last summer at a police department in Colorado, instantly raising questions about the feared negative impacts of AI-written police reports on the criminal justice system. The tool relies on a ChatGPT variant to generate police reports based on body camera audio, which cops are then supposed to edit to correct any mistakes, assess the AI outputs for biases, or add key context.

But the EFF found that the tech "seems designed to stymie any attempts at auditing, transparency, and accountability." Cops don't have to disclose when AI is used in every department, and Draft One does not save drafts or retain a record showing which parts of reports are AI-generated. Departments also don't retain different versions of drafts, making it difficult to assess how one version of an AI report might compare to another to help the public determine if the technology is "junk," the EFF said. That raises the question, the EFF suggested, "Why wouldn't an agency want to maintain a record that can establish the technology’s accuracy?"

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T-Mobile is ending DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies in an attempt to obtain the Trump administration's approval for two mergers.

"As T-Mobile indicated earlier this year, we recognize that the legal and policy landscape surrounding DEI under federal law has changed and we remain fully committed to ensuring that T-Mobile does not have any policies or practices that enable invidious discrimination, whether in fulfillment of DEI or any other purpose," T-Mobile General Counsel Mark Nelson wrote in a July 8 letter that was posted to the Federal Communications Commission's filings website yesterday. "We have conducted a comprehensive review of T-Mobile's policies, programs, and activities, and pursuant to this review, T-Mobile is ending its DEI-related policies as described below, not just in name, but in substance."

It's clear that T-Mobile was trying to influence the FCC's review of its pending transactions because the carrier filed the letter in two dockets: one for its pending acquisition of US Cellular's wireless operations and another for a joint venture to acquire fiber provider Metronet . The FCC observes an informal timeline of 180 days to review mergers; the T-Mobile/US Cellular deal is on day 253 .

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Rotax provided flights from San Francisco to Salz, Austria, and accommodation so Ars could visit its factory and ride some of its products. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

"There was always a passion about motorbikes. But it's not only passion, it also needs to be a sustainable business model," Mario Gebetshuber, BRP-Rotax vice president of global sourcing and operations powertrain, told Ars Technica during a tour of the company's museum of motors over the decades.

Gebetshuber says the company wanted to return to the motorcycle market but knew that it was a highly competitive and extremely crowded market. The COVID-related motorcycle sales bump didn't last, and Rotax wasn't interested in what it anticipated would be a 5 percent market share battling against traditional companies like Kawasaki, Honda, Harley, BMW, and others. It's going electric with its bikes and something else—it's not saying what—in August.

"If we want to enter, we want to enter to be a player," Gebetshuber said. Electrification was where the company saw itself as able to move quickly. It could be Rotax's anchor and a way to jump ahead of the competition and grow.

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