When The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, no one could have dreamed that it would become the longest-running theatrical release film in history. But that's what happened. Thanks to a killer soundtrack, campy humor, and a devoted cult following, Rocky Horror is still a mainstay of midnight movie culture. In honor of its 50th anniversary, Disney/20th Century Studios is releasing a newly restored 4K HDR version in October, along with deluxe special editions on DVD and Blu-ray. And the film has inspired not one, but two documentaries marking its five decades of existence: Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror and Sane Inside Insanity: The Phenomenon of Rocky Horror .

(Spoilers below, because it's been 50 years.)

The film is an adaption of Richard O'Brien 's 1973 musical for the stage, The Rocky Horror Show . At the time, he was a struggling actor and wrote the musical as an homage to the science fiction and B horror movies he'd loved since a child. In fact, the opening song (" Science Fiction/Double Feature ") makes explicit reference to many of those, including 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flash Gordon (1936), King Kong (1933), The Invisible Man (1933), Forbidden Planet (1956), and The Day of the Triffids (1962), among others.

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After several days of working its way across the open and at times hostile Atlantic Ocean this week, Hurricane Erin found more favorable conditions and exploded in intensity on Friday night. Shortly before noon on Saturday, the National Hurricane Center declared that Erin had reached Category 5 status, the most powerful kind of hurricane.

This determination is based on sustained winds, which were measured by a US Air Force Hurricane Hunter aircraft on Saturday at 160 mph.

There is some good news: Erin is threading a needle with its projected track. Although it should pass close to several landmasses between now and next Thursday, Erin should remain far enough away to avoid catastrophic damage. Erin is presently passing to the north of the Caribbean islands, and will turn northward before reaching the Bahamas and the Eastern United States. Later next week it should follow a path that takes it between Atlantic Canada and Bermuda.

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Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?

Physicists don’t know the answer to that question yet, but many think the solution must involve some subtle difference in the way that matter and antimatter behave. And right now, the most promising path into that unexplored territory centers on new experiments involving the mysterious subatomic particle known as the neutrino.

“It’s not to say that neutrinos are definitely the explanation of the matter-antimatter asymmetry, but a very large class of models that can explain this asymmetry are connected to neutrinos,” says Jessica Turner , a theoretical physicist at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

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SpaceX is continuing with final preparations for the 10th full-scale test flight of the company's enormous Starship rocket after receiving launch approval Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Engineers completed a final test of Starship's propulsion system with a so-called "spin prime" test Wednesday at the launch site in South Texas. Ground crews then rolled the ship back to a nearby hangar for engine inspections, touchups to its heat shield, and a handful of other chores to ready it for liftoff.

SpaceX has announced the launch is scheduled for no earlier than next Sunday, August 24, at 6:30 pm local time in Texas (23:30 UTC).

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Earlier this year, Nintendo helped popularize the microSD Express standard by requiring it for the new Switch 2 console. Created in 2019, the specification had languished in relative obscurity for years because the cheap, plentiful non-Express microSD cards were generally fast enough for the things that people were using them for, and because most hardware didn't support microSD Express cards in the first place.

However, Nintendo's console needed performance closer to that of an internal SSD to run games, given that the more powerful Switch 2 can run more of the titles being developed for SSD-equipped systems such as the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series S and X, and the PC. And now other companies are trying to push the "fast, removable storage" envelope even further.

The Verge reports that a Chinese company called Biwin has developed the "Mini SSD," a 15 by 17 mm-thick card that supports read speeds of up to 3,700MB per second due to a two-lane PCI Express 4.0 interface. The current microSD Express standard can support roughly the same peak speeds when connected to two PCIe 4.0 lanes. But in reality, most of today's cards top out around 900MB per second, roughly the amount of bandwidth available from a single PCI Express 3.0 lane.

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The recent rollout of OpenAI's GPT-5 model has not been going well , to say the least. Users have made vociferous complaints about everything from the new model's more sterile tone to its supposed lack of creativity, increase in damaging confabulations, and more . The user revolt got so bad that OpenAI brought back the previous GPT-4o model as an option in an attempt to calm things down.

To see just how much the new model changed things, we decided to put both GPT-5 and GPT-4o through our own gauntlet of test prompts. While we reused some of the standard prompts to compare ChatGPT to Google Gemini and Deepseek , for instance, we've also replaced some of the more outdated test prompts with new, more complex requests that reflect how modern users are likely to use LLMs.

These eight prompts are obviously far from a rigorous evaluation of everything LLMs can do, and judging the responses obviously involves some level of subjectivity. Still, we think this set of prompts and responses gives a fun overview of the kinds of differences in style and substance you might find if you decide to use OpenAI's older model instead of its newest.

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The Trump administration has ended potential enforcement actions against dozens of tech firms and 165 corporations overall, delivering on promises to end the alleged "weaponization" of the federal government, a report by nonprofit consumer advocacy group Public Citizen said.

"In six months, the Trump administration has already withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 corporations of all types—and one in four of the corporations benefiting from halted or dropped enforcement is from the technology sector, which has spent $1.2 billion on political influence during and since the 2024 elections," the report published on Wednesday said. The political spending includes $352 million that "is attributable to Elon Musk."

At the beginning of Trump's second term, there were at least 104 tech companies facing at least 142 federal investigations and enforcement actions, Public Citizen reported. The Trump administration has halted or withdrawn about one-third of the "targeted investigations into suspected misconduct and enforcement actions against technology corporations... So far, 47 enforcement actions (against 45 tech corporations) have been withdrawn or halted (38 withdrawn, nine halted)," the report said.

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Zealous anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reviving a long-defunct federal vaccine panel that anti-vaccine advocates, including Kennedy, have long sought and health experts fear will be used to dismantle evidence-based recommendations for life-saving childhood shots.

The panel is a task force outlined in the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 , which is best known for setting up the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The law states that the task force's goal is to "promote the development of childhood vaccines that result in fewer and less serious adverse reactions than those vaccines on the market on the effective date of this part and promote the refinement of such vaccines."

The federal government has multiple overlapping procedures and systems that evaluate, review, and continuously monitor the safety of childhood vaccines, which have gone through rigorous testing and are well-established to be safe. Further, the government does, in effect, promote improved vaccines by providing grants to academic and industry researchers to develop advanced shots. It also conducts its own vaccine research toward that goal. For instance, researchers at the National Institutes of Health were critical in developing the mRNA vaccine technology that enabled the swift creation of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines that saved millions of lives at the height of the pandemic.

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Donald Trump has been meddling with Intel , which now apparently includes mulling "the possibility of the US government taking a financial stake in the troubled chip maker," The Wall Street Journal reported .

Trump and Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan weighed the option during a meeting on Monday at the White House, people familiar with the matter told WSJ. These talks have only just begun—with Intel branding them a rumor—and sources told the WSJ that Trump has yet to iron out how the potential arrangement might work.

The WSJ's report comes after Trump called for Tan to "resign immediately" last week. Trump's demand was seemingly spurred by a letter that Republican senator Tom Cotton sent to Intel, accusing Tan of having "concerning" ties to the Chinese Communist Party.

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