As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year.

The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to “initial operational capability” for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day.

FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million.

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The Space Development Agency was established in 2019 to help speed up the deployment of US military space systems by sidestepping the Pentagon's traditional sluggish bureaucracy.

Seven years later, SDA is finally launching its first batches of operational satellites, just as the Pentagon plans to shutter the semi-autonomous agency and fold it back into the Space Force's procurement pipeline, newly reorganized under several program acquisition executives in a bid to streamline weapons buying.

SDA's fate is not a surprise, and lawmakers in both houses of Congress have backed the agency's closure in drafts of this year's National Defense Authorization Act.

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On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the startling announcement that the US military would begin requiring all active duty and reserve personnel aged 30 and older to undergo mandatory screening for testosterone deficiency. The screenings will take place during yearly health assessments. Those under age 30 can also get screened on request.

In a short video posted on social media, Hegseth explained to the military community that the screenings and possible subsequent treatments are intended to "optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health." While saying that the initiative wasn't about "artificial enhancement" and that members could decline treatment, Hegseth claimed that the testing and potential treatment was for "restoring and optimizing" capabilities, protecting "longevity," and "ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight."

But will testosterone screening and treatment actually "optimize" our "warfighters"? Will it help most of them live longer? Should everyone else get screened and treated, too?

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Federal officials on Friday announced that shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico and served at Taco Bell restaurants in five states is a source of Cyclospora, the foodborne parasite causing the nationwide surge in cases of explosive, watery diarrhea. The five states are Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia.

A traceback investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration identified a single supplier in Mexico as the source of iceberg lettuce for Taco Bell restaurants where sick people reported eating. While federal authorities did not name the supplier, sources told the Washington Post that it is Taylor Farms.

Taylor Farms was also implicated in a 2024 multi-state E. coli outbreak linked to contaminated onions served at McDonald's and other fast-food restaurants. At the time, FDA inspectors found multiple violations at a Taylor Farms facility in Colorado.

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Last month, we reported on a troubling incident at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans. On June 5, five leading scientists were ousted for handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care (an ADA journal) in April, sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on scientific research. There was a public outcry and (eventually) a personal apology from the ADA's CEO for the heavy-handed response, but it seems the organization has not yet learned its lesson.

The deputy editors of Diabetes Care have posted an editorial and seven accompanying opinion articles to a preprint server—handily contained in a single PDF file—that they say the ADA has refused to publish. Several troubling new details are included in the articles, including an accusation that ADA leadership knew in advance that members would be handing out copies of the editorial and deliberately set up an ambush by venue security and local police. That decision, in turn, might be due to simmering tensions connected to a session organized the year before.

ADA leadership was provided with the articles in advance of publication with an invitation to simultaneously publish their response.

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Everyone seems to be launching and landing rockets these days.

Last week, China joined the club of countries that have launched an orbital mission and brought its booster safely back to Earth, which is just the beginning of public and private ventures in that country aggressively pushing into rocket reuse. Also in Asia, Japan's space agency has been conducting hop tests, and Honda recently performed vertical reuse tests.

In the United States, of course, SpaceX launches and lands reusable rockets every few days. Blue Origin, although its New Glenn booster is temporarily grounded, has also demonstrated the ability to both land and re-launch a large orbital booster. Other US companies, including Stoke Space, Rocket Lab, and Relativity Space, are all making credible progress toward partially or fully reusable rockets.

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Fubo prices are going up by $15 per month because it will have some NBCUniversal channels again.

For years, Fubo, a sports-centric vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributor, which lets subscribers watch traditional TV channels live over the Internet), offered NBCUniversal channels. That stopped in November 2025 due to a contract dispute.

With the loss of local NBC affiliates, Telemundo, nine regional sports channels, and 32 national channels, Fubo made the sensible but rare decision to lower subscription prices in December. The Essential plan went from $85 per month to $74 per month. The Pro plan dropped from $85 to $75 per month, and the Elite plan dropped from $95 to $84 per month.

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This week, San Francisco’s attorney general, David Chiu, sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding that Apple and Google remove 13 so-called nudification apps from their app stores, Wired reported.

Nudification apps can make it trivially easy to transform ordinary photos of real people into explicit images. The harmful AI tools allow bad actors to remove clothing, change a person’s features, place them in sexualized positions, and swap victims’ faces onto other people’s naked bodies.

Chiu's letter warned that app stores were violating "California’s laws that prohibit supporting services that create deepfake pornography," Wired reported.

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If you're a skilled writer with outsize technology chops who gets excited by the idea of taking the Ars audience with you as you go hands-on with hardware—all kinds of hardware!—then this position has your name all over it. Plus, you get to have me as your boss, and how could that be anything other than awesome?!

The job

The formal job description and application is right here and has all the specifics and HR stuff, including salary range. The short summary is that we're looking for an experienced writer (where "experience" means "several years of professional work"), who is a technologist first and foremost. We want people who tinker around with tech because they can't not tinker around with tech; that kind of joy tends to leak out into the work, and it's impossible to fake.

Some specifics on the subject matter the job will cover, copied from the job description:

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Climate change is being driven largely by the greenhouse gases we've pumped into the atmosphere, which trap more of the Sun's energy there. That added energy increases the odds of extreme events: longer, more intense heat waves and droughts, interspersed with excessive precipitation. But these sorts of events have happened in the past—how can we tell if any given weather disaster has been made more likely by the climate?

It's a question with implications for everything from building codes to disaster preparedness. And there's some good news: According to a report released by the US National Academies of Science on Thursday, the field of climate attribution is growing increasingly mature and can answer some questions for us with far greater confidence than it could just a decade ago. The report also notes that there are still important limits and suggests steps to address them.

Overall, this makes it clear that climate attribution is normal, mainstream science. And the fossil fuel industry views that as a problem, as it could make it easier to hold companies liable for damages. This has triggered a backlash that has Republicans in Congress and state governments threatening the National Academies' funding.

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The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

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When Lucid introduced the Air electric sedan in late 2021, the first Air Dream Edition I tested packed over 1,100 hp (820 kW) and carried a $180,000-plus window sticker. It's easily the most powerful street car I've tested; the only vehicle I've driven with more power was a purebred race car with a third the mass, and it was on a proper track. Its combustion engine was also about 1,000 times louder than the Air, helping to remind us that "combustion" really does mean explosion after explosion.

For Lucid's second act, the company debuted the Gravity electric SUV last year, and I've just tested the 2026 Gravity Touring, which starts at about $82,000 in the US, including the required destination charge.

My test model carried a bevy of options, including a 22-speaker audio system, the Comfort and Convenience package, third-row seating, a Dynamic Handling package (combining rear-wheel steering and three-chamber air suspension), a luxury seating package (bundling Nappa leather and massaging and ventilated front seats), and special metallic paint.

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Welcome to Edition 9.03 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX counted down all the way to T-0 on Thursday evening in South Texas before a handful of Raptor engines decided not to light at ignition of the rocket. It is not clear whether the vehicle can be worked on at the pad, or whether Starship will need to be de-stacked before this can occur. In any case, a few days delay beats a significant issue in flight.

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.

Vikram-1 rocket gets a launch date. The debut launch attempt by Skyroot Aerospace of its Vikram-1 rocket is now set for July 18, at 11:30 am local time in India. This will be the first time a commercial rocket developed in India attempts to reach orbit. Designed to carry small satellites weighing up to 350 kg to low-Earth orbit, Vikram-1 is targeting a 450 km orbit at a 60-degree inclination.

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SpaceX called off a test flight of its powerful Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster as the countdown clock reached zero Thursday at the company's spaceport in South Texas.

The launch team at Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border, aimed to launch the more than 400-foot-tall rocket at 5:45 pm local time (6:45 pm EDT; 22:45 UTC). The countdown proceeded smoothly throughout the day, culminating in the loading of more than 11.5 million pounds of liquid methane and liquid oxygen into the two-stage rocket.

But the computers controlling the countdown called an abort during the Super Heavy booster's engine startup sequence. SpaceX scrubbed the launch attempt, and engineers began preparations to drain the rocket's propellant tanks. Officials did not immediately announce when they plan to try to launch again.

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Two nominees for high-profile health roles in the Trump administration faced scrutiny from the Senate health committee Wednesday—and both crashed and burned in their own special ways.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) scrutinized Erica Schwartz, the nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Sean Kaufman, up for the role of assistant secretary for preparedness and response.

Schwartz's assignment

Public health experts were "cautiously optimistic" about Schwartz's nomination. She is well-respected and holds views in line with evidence-based medicine, including being supportive of vaccinations—in contrast to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she will serve under. She is also highly qualified for the role, with a medical degree, a master's degree in public health, and a law degree. She's had a long career as a Navy Officer and previously held the roles of chief medical officer for the US Coast Guard and deputy surgeon general in the first Trump administration.

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The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said this week that it found HP India had colluded with some channel partners to drive up the cost of bids for government contracts for computers, as well as for selling ink cartridges, toner, and other printing supplies, including graphic and digital manufacturing supplies.

It said that HP was aiming to outcompete other OEMs and discourage resellers from selling “counterfeit” ink and toner.

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