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Steelers’ ‘Tackling Machine’ Trending Toward Draft Regret  heavy.com

Why the jet set are obsessed with this trending racquet sport  AFR

1. Waze is getting a bunch of new AI-powered features  The Verge
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This free Mac app reveals the truth about your mystery USB-C cables  The Verge

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From declines in annual sea ice extent to the greening of the tundra, environmental change has been unfolding incrementally in the Arctic over decades. Some shifts, however, have come on more abruptly.

Satellite, aerial, and ground-based surveys spanning more than 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) across Alaska’s Brooks Range have observed stream water changing from clear to orange in more than 200 watersheds. What’s more, scientists are finding that the switch has largely taken place within the past 10 to 12 years, coinciding with a pronounced increase in air and ground temperatures.

Thawing permafrost soils, accelerated by warming air and ground temperatures, are the most likely cause of the “rusty” rivers, scientists say. They surmise that water is now encountering thawed ground and bedrock where it previously had not. Chemical weathering of minerals leaches iron, sulfuric acid, and trace metals into streams, akin to the process behind acid mine drainage, which similarly pollutes and discolors water near abandoned mines. Microbes may also contribute to the color change by producing a soluble form of iron as they digest plant and animal matter in thawing soils, which then becomes oxygenated, or “rusts,” in flowing streams.

Researchers have only recently begun to comprehend the prevalence of rusting rivers in Arctic regions. In 2024, a team of National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, and university scientists documented 75 northern Alaskan streams that recently changed from clear to orange. With subsequent exploration, mostly using high-resolution satellite imagery, they added 200 more observations. The locations of these discolored streams, published in NOAA’s 2025 Arctic Report Card, are shown in the map above.

“I’m still surprised by the broad spatial scope of our observations,” said Brett Poulin, environmental toxicologist at the University of California, Davis. He and his collaborators have been monitoring the region’s streams since 2013—when many were still clear. “Now we’re seeing hundreds of streams that have changed color seemingly overnight, including in designated National Wild & Scenic River corridors,” he said.

Observations from NASA/USGS Landsat satellites allowed the team to determine the timing of several of these changes. For the 2024 study led by ecologist Jon O’Donnell of the National Park Service, the team calculated a redness index based on red and blue spectral information sensitive to the color of iron hydroxides (i.e., rust) in water. After analyzing a subset of streams, they found that some turned rusty around 2018 and stayed that way, while others had periods of rusting and then returned to being clear.

One stream that underwent a sudden change is the Agashashok River in Noatak National Preserve (above). In 2019, a jump in redness values appeared in Landsat data along this waterway. Ground and aerial surveys the same year found an orange section of the river several kilometers long, and vegetation around nearby groundwater seeps and springs appeared blackened. “The Landsat archive has proved uniquely useful for investigating the historical onset of rusting rivers where creeks and rivers are sufficiently large,” Poulin said.

Having gained a better picture of the extent and timing of the phenomenon, the researchers want to focus on the conditions driving the orange color’s onset and the yearly and seasonal changes. A deep snowpack may play a role some years, for example, by insulating the soil from cold winter temperatures and enabling permafrost thaw earlier in the summer. In addition, periods of higher streamflow throughout the year can dilute the discoloration. The team is planning a geophysical survey along a hillslope where acidic groundwater is discharging to the surface to investigate the subsurface geology, hydrology, and permafrost.

Further, they seek to quantify the effects on water quality and aquatic ecosystems. Communities rely on these river systems for drinking water and subsistence fisheries, and a decrease in stream biodiversity has already been documented in some locations coincident with water turning orange. The researchers now are looking deeper into the patterns of toxicity over time and space, such as where rusting rivers overlap with known spawning areas for migratory fish.

“The rusting river phenomenon is a good example of an unforeseen consequence of permafrost thaw in the Arctic,” Poulin said. “Further, it’s consistent with the emergence of acid rock drainage following cryosphere loss across Earth.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using stream location data from O’Donnell, J.A., et al., and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Lindsey Doermann.

References & Resources

• NASA Earth Observatory (2024, January 16) Rusting Rivers. Accessed July 9, 2026.
• O’Donnell, J. A., et al. (2025) Rusting Rivers: Assessing the Causes and Consequences in Alaska and Across the Arctic. Arctic Report Card 2025.
• O’Donnell, J. A., et al. (2024) Metal mobilization from thawing permafrost to aquatic ecosystems is driving rusting of Arctic streams. Communications Earth & Environment, 5, 268.
• U.S. Geological Survey (2026, February 27) The Rusting of Arctic Rivers: Freshwater Ecosystems Respond to Rapidly Uptaking Metals. Accessed July 9, 2026.

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Advanced Diagnostics for High-Enthalpy Test Facilities Simulating Spacecraft Atmospheric Entry

• Damiano Baccarella
  University of Tennessee, Knoxville
  Application of Resonance Enhanced Multi-Photon Ionization Diagnostics to the Characterization of Arcjet Flows​
• Ciprian Dumitrache
  Colorado State University
  Ultrafast Laser Diagnostics for Nonequilibrium Flowfields Characterization in Atmospheric Entry Studies​
• Dan Fries
  University of Kentucky, Lexington
  Multiplexed Polarization Spectroscopy for Single-Shot Multi-Species Diagnostics in High-Enthalpy Flows​
• Yi Mazumdar
  Georgia Institute of Technology
  Simultaneous Temperature, Species, and Velocity Measurements using Ultrafast Laser Diagnostics for Ground Testing of Spacecraft Atmospheric Entry Systems​

Planning for Autonomous Spacecraft Using Machine Learning Methods to Enable Onboard Guidance, Navigation, and Control

• Glen Chou
  Georgia Institute of Technology
  Robust Real-Time Hierarchical Neural Planning and Control with System-Level Guarantees
• Roshan Eapen
  Pennsylvania State University
  Hamilton-Jacobi aided Planning and Reasoning for Intelligent Spacecraft Maneuvers (HJ-PRISM)
• Bin Hu
  University of Houston
  Safety-Enabled and Efficient Onboard Planning for Autonomous Spacecraft via Physics-Informed Reinforcement Learning

The Zooniverse, a NASA grantee that runs the world’s largest platform for online people-powered research, has reached an extraordinary milestone: 1 billion classifications contributed by volunteers around the world. This milestone is a celebration of everyone who has marked a dip in a light curve, confirmed the presence of a moving object in a short video, or identified species in a camera trap image. Each of these small contributions collectively advances our understanding of the universe.

A total of 31 NASA-sponsored citizen science projects have been hosted on Zooniverse, accounting for 120 million classifications by 324 thousand volunteers since 2020. Through projects like Planet Hunters TESS, Daily Minor Planet, Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, Space Umbrella, and Snapshot Wisconsin, volunteers help discover exoplanets, identify near-Earth objects and asteroids, search for brown dwarfs and planetary systems, analyze effects of the solar wind, and inform wildlife management decisions. These projects have led to 96 scientific publications, and 56 of these articles feature NASA citizen scientists as co-authors to recognize the significance of their research contributions. These efforts demonstrate how public participation can accelerate discovery by combining human curiosity and pattern recognition with data from NASA missions and observatories. Collaboration between volunteers, scientists, and computing technology will be even more important in the future as we tackle enormous and complex datasets, like those from NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. 

“One billion classifications represent far more than a number; it’s one billion moments of curiosity transformed into meaningful contributions to research,” said Laura Trouille, principal investigator of Zooniverse and vice president of Science Engagement at the Adler Planetarium. “Every classification on Zooniverse brings us one step closer to new discoveries and a deeper understanding of our universe, our world, and ourselves.” 

Zooniverse is the world’s largest platform for people-powered research. Co-founded by the Adler Planetarium and the University of Oxford, with the University of Minnesota serving as a key institutional partner, Zooniverse enables anyone, anywhere to contribute directly to real scientific research. Through its six-year collaboration with NASA, Zooniverse provides science-enabling infrastructure to NASA researchers through tools and a community of more than 3 million registered volunteers.

NASA flight photographers capture history from a perspective few ever experience, getting a rare bird’s-eye view of the agency’s missions in action. Their photos document key NASA research and give the public a front-row seat to the work happening behind the scenes.

Jim Ross, a photographer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, flew over Washington during the Fourth of July celebration to document a NASA flyover commemorating America’s 250th birthday. He’s captured some of the agency’s most exhilarating milestones, like early SR-71 flights, the delivery flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour to Los Angeles, and first flights of NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft.

“I grew up in Bozeman, Montana, when it was still considered a small town, so if someone told that little kid that he would be flying in a F-18 over the National Mall, he would have never believed it,” Ross said. “I love documenting history, and having the opportunity to capture flights and launches has kept me doing it for almost 37 years.”

Ross began his aviation photography career in 1989 when he joined the staff at NASA Armstrong (then Dryden). He became the photo lead in 1997, a title he retains.

Check out his images from the flyover here: https://www.nasa.gov/gallery/freedom-250/

The waxing gibbous moon is nestled in the darkness of space in this June 26, 2026, image from the International Space Station. The space station was 264 miles above the Indian Ocean southeast of Madagascar at the time.

The waxing gibbous phase comes before the full moon phase. During this time, the Moon appears brighter in the night sky to viewers on Earth.

Image credit: NASA

Washington D.C. has become a battleground for Uber and Waymo's competing views.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility, your hub for the future of transportation and now, more than ever, how AI is playing a part.

When we last sat down with Jobs at TechCrunch Disrupt nearly three years ago, his firm Yosemite was brand new and biotech was still reeling from its post-pandemic crash. Now, the venture outfit has a team of 17; a cluster of blockbuster drugs are all losing patent protection in roughly the same window, creating all kinds of new opportunities; and AI has gone from a curiosity to, in Jobs's words, a huge part of what Yosemite does. "I didn't expect Yosemite to be moving this fast," he said.

Ninja's latest slushie machine builds on the popularity of the original Slushi, but with a big upgrade.

The glasses are targeted at people who might be constantly in meetings, giving presentations, and traveling to countries where different languages are spoken.