Over the past few years, LG has set off a strange tech trend that’s been rolling onto devices sold across Amazon and other online electronics retailers.

In 2022, the company launched the StanbyME , which is essentially a $1,000 27-inch tablet running LG's smart TV operating system (OS), webOS, but lacking a tuner. LG's press release announcing the device described it as a “wireless private TV screen with a built-in battery” that is easily portable and ideal for watching shows and movies, in addition to  “video conferencing with family and coworkers and viewing online lectures.”

Today, the StanbyME competes against a slew of similar devices, including some from Samsung , but mostly from smaller brands and running Android.

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Welcome to Edition 8.01 of the Rocket Report! Today's edition will be a little shorter than normal because, for one day only, we celebrate fake rockets—fireworks—rather than the real thing. For our American readers, we hope you have a splendid Fourth of July holiday weekend. For our non-American readers, you may be wondering what the heck is happening in our country right now. Alas, making sense of <waves hands> all this is beyond the scope of this humble little newsletter.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Will Orbex ever launch an orbital rocket ? Orbex, a launch services company based in the United Kingdom, has announced the postponement of its first orbital launch to 2026 due to infrastructure limitations and other issues, Orbital Today reports . At the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, Orbex chief executive Miguel Bello Mora announced that the company is now targeting next year for the liftoff of its Prime rocket from SaxaVord in Scotland. He said the delay is partly due to the limited launch infrastructure at SaxaVord and a "bottleneck" in site operations.

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The maker of a phone app that is advertised as providing a stealthy means for monitoring all activities on an Android device spilled email addresses, plain-text passwords, and other sensitive data belonging to 62,000 users, a researcher discovered recently.

A security flaw in the app, branded Catwatchful, allowed researcher Eric Daigle to download a trove of sensitive data , which belonged to account holders who used the covert app to monitor phones. The leak, made possible by a SQL injection vulnerability, allowed anyone who exploited it to access the accounts and all data stored in them.

Unstoppable

Catwatchful creators emphasize the app's stealth and security. While the promoters claim the app is legal and intended for parents monitoring their children's online activities, the emphasis on stealth has raised concerns that it's being aimed at people with other agendas.

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In mid-June, a federal judge issued a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, declaring that its decision to cancel the funding for many grants issued by the National Institutes of Health was illegal, and suggesting that the policy was likely animated by racism. But the detailed reasoning behind his decision wasn't released at the time. The written portion of the decision was finally issued on Wednesday, and it has a number of notable features.

For starters, it's more limited in scope due to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that were issued in the intervening weeks. As a consequence, far fewer grants will see their funding restored. Regardless, the court continues to find that the government's actions were arbitrary and capricious, in part because the government never bothered to define the problems that would get a grant canceled. As a result, officials within the NIH simply canceled lists of grants they received from DOGE without bothering to examine their scientific merit, and then struggled to retroactively describe a policy that justified the actions afterward—a process that led several of them to resign.

A more limited verdict

The issue before Judge William Young of the District of Massachusetts was whether the government had followed the law in terminating grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. After a short trial, Young issued a verbal ruling that the government hadn't, and that he had concluded that its actions were the product of "racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ. community." But the details of his decisions and the evidence that motivated them had to wait for a written ruling, which is now available.

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In a memo to employees earlier this week , Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a vision for a near-future in which "personal [AI] superintelligence for everyone" forms "the beginning of a new era for humanity." The newly formed Meta Superintelligence Labs—freshly staffed with multiple high-level acquisitions from OpenAI and other AI companies—will spearhead the development of "our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so," Zuckerberg wrote.

Reading that memo, I couldn't help but think of another "vision for the future" Zuckerberg shared not that long ago. At his 2021 Facebook Connect keynote , Zuckerberg laid out his plan for the metaverse , a virtual place where “you're gonna be able to do almost anything you can imagine" and which would form the basis of "the next version of the Internet."

Zuckerberg believed in that vision so much at the time that he abandoned the well-known Facebook corporate brand in favor of the new name "Meta." "I'm going to keep pushing and giving everything I've got to make this happen now," Zuckerberg said at the time. Less than four years later, Zuckerberg seems to now be “giving everything [he's] got" for a vision of AI “superintelligence," reportedly offering pay packages of up to $300 million over four years to attract top talent from other AI companies (Meta has since denied those reports , saying, “The size and structure of these compensation packages have been misrepresented all over the place").

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Two key writers of HBO's series The Last of Us are moving on, according to announcements on Instagram yesterday. Neil Druckmann, co-creator of the franchise, and Halley Gross, co-writer of The Last of Us Part 2 and frequent writer on the show, are both leaving before work begins on season 3.

Both were credited as executive producers on the show; Druckmann frequently contributed writing to episodes, as did Gross, and Druckmann also directed. Druckmann and Gross co-wrote the second game, The Last of Us Part 2 .

Druckmann said in his announcement post :

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If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you that the review you're about to read would be one of the most-read car reviews of the year. For a while—quite a long while, in fact—the Volkswagen ID Buzz was the hottest electric vehicle you couldn't buy. Starting in 2001, VW began teasing concept after concept that called back to its various Transporters and Kombis, classic microbuses reimagined as modern minivans. When the electric Buzz was greenlit for production after wowing crowds in 2017, it caught the attention of the kind of people who don't normally care about such things. Early coverage of the Buzz showed plenty of interest, and it looked like VW might have a real hit on its hands.

At least, that's how things looked for the first couple of years. It actually took seven years for a version of the ID Buzz to go on sale in North America , two years after Europe . Much of the optimism about EV adoption has now gone. Rather than reaching price parity with regular cars as battery prices dropped, everything just got more expensive during the pandemic. Add in recent worries about import tariffs and clean vehicle tax credits (available if you lease), and you start to understand why they remain a rare sight on the roads. Expect stares, glances, and even people taking out their phones as you drive past.

Some of the wait was for VW's more powerful rear drive unit, which provides this 2025 ID Buzz Pro S Plus with 282 hp (210 kW) and 413 lb-ft (560 Nm), paired with a 91 kWh battery pack. The official EPA range is 234 miles, which sounds disappointingly low, but it's correct . It does seem like a very conservative estimate based on a week with the Buzz. 3.1 miles/kWh (20 kWh 100/km) was possible if I drove carefully, with high-twos possible when I didn't, and with 89 percent state of charge in the battery, the Buzz's onboard brain figured we had 255 miles (410 km) of range.

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If you were looking for some motivation to follow your doctor's advice or remember to take your medicine, look no further than this grisly tale.

A 64-year-old man went to the emergency department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston with a painful festering ulcer spreading on his left, very swollen ankle. It was a gruesome sight; the open sore was about 8 by 5 centimeters (about 3 by 2 inches) and was rimmed by black, ashen, and dark purple tissue. Inside, it oozed with streaks and fringes of yellow pus around pink and red inflamed flesh. It was 2 cm deep (nearly an inch). And it smelled.

The man told doctors it had all started two years prior, when dark, itchy lesions appeared in the area on his ankle—the doctors noted that there were multiple patches of these lesions on both his legs. But about five months before his visit to the emergency department, one of the lesions on his left ankle had progressed to an ulcer. It was circular, red, tender, and deep. He sought treatment and was prescribed antibiotics, which he took. But they didn't help.

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After months of backlash over alleged pollution concerns, xAI has finally secured an air permit covering some of the methane gas turbines powering its Colossus supercomputer data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

On Wednesday, the Shelby County Health Department granted xAI an air permit that allows it to power 15 gas turbines while adhering to a range of restrictions designed to minimize emissions. Expiring on January 2, 2027, the permit requires xAI to install and operate the best available control technology (BACT) by September 1 to ensure emissions do not exceed certain limits.

Any failure to comply could trigger enforcement actions by the Environmental Protection Agency or the county health department, the permit notes.

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