YouTuber and Elon Musk stan Ellie Sheriff had a bizarre experience during her first Tesla robotaxi ride in Austin, Texas.
As seen in a <a href="https://youtu.be/edEpCjk6Skw">video</a> she shared on her channel, "Ellie in Space," over the weekend, Sheriff got a strange call from the EV maker mid-ride, asking her and her fellow passenger to literally leave the vehicle due to incoming weather.
"So we had to get out of the robotaxi, because weather is coming in," Sheriff said in the video while standing in the middle of a windy field.
Their ride had to be fully canceled, leaving them stranded. Worse yet, the app claimed there was "high service demand." However, moments later, they were able to hail another robotaxi to get them back to the place where they started.
"I don't want to just be a Tesla rah-rah cheerleader," Sheriff said. "It is very cool. However, this is a limitation currently, how it is. You shouldn't have to terminate the service cuz it's about to rain."
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The head-scratching incident highlights some glaring shortcomings of Tesla's long-awaited autonomous ride-hailing service. The company's launch of an extremely scaled-down service that features human safety drivers in the passenger's seat has already led to plenty of chaos, including <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-jerks-wheel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">violently jerking steering wheels</a>, unexpected <a href="https://gizmodo.com/videos-show-tesla-robotaxis-swerving-hard-braking-for-cops-in-first-day-of-austin-launch-2000619035" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">braking around cop cars</a>, and a <a href="https://youtu.be/C_pSZv6THfA?si=13hvrVR1JsM90h5J&amp;t=2276" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dangerous drop-off</a> in the middle of a four-way intersection.
It's unclear why exactly Sheriff's ride was cut short beyond some wind and rain. However, considering Musk's carmaker has <a href="https://futurism.com/robotaxi-fails-elon-musk-decision">long ditched light detection and ranging sensors</a> known as lidar in favor of relying exclusively on cameras for its driver assistance features, it seems probable that Tesla is nervous about having the robotaxi drive in bad conditions.
Case in point, earlier this year, YouTuber and former NASA engineer Mark Rober <a href="https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ">published a damning video</a>, demonstrating that Tesla's erroneously-named "Full Self-Driving" software can be <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot">easily fooled by rain</a>, bright lights, and even a fake, Wile E. Coyote-style wall painted to look like the road behind it.
The stakes are extremely high for the EV maker as Musk has bet the company's fate on the tech. In light of <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-crumbles-sales">cratering car sales</a>, the CEO has gone all in on automation. Earlier this week, the company <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-dismal-sales-news-robotaxi-launch">revealed</a> it had delivered just 384,000 vehicles between April and June, compared to 444,000 over the same period last year, the <a href="https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-stock-price-deliveries-sales-musk-99a554a7">biggest drop</a> in the company's history.
More on Tesla robotaxis: <a href="https://futurism.com/tesla-robotaxi-jerks-wheel">Tesla Robotaxi Terrifyingly Jerks Wheel Back and Forth While Carrying Passenger</a>

Rain Check

What the...

Tesla Robotaxi Rider Gets Bizarre Call Saying She Has to Exit Vehicle Immediately

Billionaire tech moguls aren't the only ones doomsaying about artificial intelligence layoffs. CEOs across a range of industries are now jumping on the bandwagon, saying it's no longer a matter of "if," but "how many" jobs AI will take.
A recent <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259">survey by the </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-white-collar-job-loss-b9856259">Wall Street Journal</a> explored just how pervasive the automation idea is throughout a number of industries, and execs aren't pulling any punches.
For example, CEO of Ford Motor Company Jim Farley recently predicted that AI "is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US." He added that "AI will leave a lot of white-collar people behind."
In June, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spooked his employees with a memo saying to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/amazon-ceo-says-ai-will-lead-to-job-cuts-5401ab17?mod=article_inline">expect layoffs</a> in the next few years because of the "once-in-a-lifetime" revolution of AI.
And at JPMorgan Chase, CEO Marianne Lake recently told investors to expect the company's overall head count — and therefore its payroll expenses — to fall by as much as 10 percent over the next few years, thanks to the magic of AI.
If the AI automation dystopia really is upon us, it evidently slipped under the radar of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which recently released its <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm">latest jobs report</a>. Among other things, it found that the US added 147,000 jobs in June, slightly dropping the unemployment rate from 4.2 percent to 4.1 — and seemingly refuting the claim of an impending AI takeover, at least for now.
Over half of these jobs, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/june-2025-jobs-report-what-to-know-unemployment-rate-economy-right-now-rcna216599">NBC notes</a>, were in state and local government roles, while healthcare, social, service, and construction work made up the bulk of other gains.
Still, there are some major issues buried in the data, like the fact that <a href="https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#longterm">long-term unemployment</a> — people unemployed for six months or more — has skyrocketed from 190,000 to a whopping 1.6 million. Meanwhile, the number of people unemployed at the median length of unemployment, 15 weeks or more, jumped from 34.9 percent to 38.3 percent. That level hasn't been seen since the throes of the pandemic, NBC notes.
While those numbers are bad news — like, <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/capitalism-and-unemployment/">really bad</a> — the crisis they point to is a little more complicated than an AI-powered dystopia. At their core, these numbers are arguably the result of our economy's <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269599332_The_Reserve_Army_of_Labor_in_the_Postwar_U_S_Economy">dependence on unemployment</a> laundered through AI hype.
As economic researchers Jeffrey Funk and Gary Smith observed in a <a href="https://mindmatters.ai/2025/07/the-job-market-is-telling-us-something-about-ai-and-jobs/">recent column</a>, revenue from large language model (LLM) adoption is falling <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-looking-worse-than-the-dot-com-bubble-heres-why-f688e11d">far short</a> of the tech industry's promises. What gets presented as proof of AI's automation potential is instead a mash of <a href="https://futurism.com/ceo-ai-scare-labor">penny-pinching layoffs</a>, <a href="https://futurism.com/startup-investors-gig-jobs-ai">outsourcing</a>, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/computer-science-majors-job-market-7ad443bf?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAjg57MU31YENkPdNGxweKu8yYToE5EURA5LdC6eeYycvY7aW5eEeOJw&amp;gaa_ts=686444d1&amp;gaa_sig=MpyA3u2QrzSLJ6Og2t5w9nR1UtrnEfjUshBU77WHdU33J2XD7WlnyR6Nj0pvxWA9tSpLBIBCtt71qj0dsJg_Gw%3D%3D">labor market saturation</a>, and in some cases, <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/companies-avoid-hiring-gen-z-workplace-1884613#:~:text=While%2041%20percent%20of%20hiring,be%20successful%20in%20the%20workplace.">employer bias</a> against recent college grads.
With that view in mind, all the CEO bluster looks less like an imminent crisis brought on by AI, and more like business as usual in a <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/capitalism-and-unemployment/">market economy</a>. What workers do about that whole situation is another story altogether.
More on Automation: <a href="https://futurism.com/professors-company-ai-agents">Professors Staffed a Fake Company Entirely With AI Agents, and You'll Never Guess What Happened</a>

Serf Plus

You gotta believe them.

CEOs Say AI Is Poised to Wipe Out an Astonishing Number of Jobs

In the city that built the blues, Elon Musk's xAI data center has been given permission to keep polluting the air with fumes from burning methane gas — which it had already been doing so <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/elon-musk-xai-memphis">without authorization</a> for a year.
As <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/xai-data-center-air-pollution-permit/">Wired reports</a>, Memphis' local health department has granted an air permit for the xAI data center, allowing it to keep operating the methane gas turbines that power Musk's Grok chatbot and Colossus, the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-most-powerful-ai-supercomputer">gigantic supercomputer</a> at its heart.
In Boxtown, the historically Black neighborhood in South Memphis where xAI's data center is situated, Musk's unfettered pollution has ripped the band-aid off a wound that had barely begun to heal. As <a href="https://capitalbnews.org/we-deserve-to-breathe-clean-air-memphis-residents-take-on-elon-musks-xai/">Capital B News reported</a> earlier this year, the neighborhood was once home to the Allen Fossil Plant, an electrical facility that left pits of noxious coal ash and a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/19/tennessee-valley-authority-memphis-coal/">lengthy legacy of environmental racism</a> behind when it was forced to close in 2018.
In the year since the data center opened and Colossus went online, the smog from Musk's gas turbines has been veritably choking out local residents in a district already struggling with heightened asthma rates due to its proximity to industrial pollution.
"I can't breathe at home," Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memphis-gas-turbines-air-pollution-permits-00317582">told Politico</a> earlier this year. "It smells like gas outside."
Given that context, local activists are furious that xAI was granted a permit at all — especially because it appears to violate the <a href="https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-air-act">Clean Air Act</a>, a landmark  federal law that regulates the kind of emissions that the xAI plant has been leaching out for a year now.
"I am horrified but not surprised," conceded KeShaun Pearson, the head of the Memphis Community Against Pollution, in an interview with Wired after the permit decision came down. "The flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act and the disregard for our human right to clean air, by xAI's burning of illegal methane turbines, has been stamped as permissible."
"Over 1,000 people submitted public comments demanding protection," he continued, "and got passed over for a billionaire’s ambitious experiment."
The new permit, as Wired notes, grants xAI the right to operate 15 turbines. According to <a href="https://www.selc.org/press-release/new-images-reveal-elon-musks-xai-datacenter-has-nearly-doubled-its-number-of-polluting-unpermitted-gas-turbines/">aerial footage</a> from the Southern Environmental Law Center, which is <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/17/naacp-launches-lawsuit-pollution-musks-xai-00410597">planning to sue</a> the Musk-owned AI company for violating the Clean Air Act, there are <a href="https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators">as many as 35</a> on the site of the xAI data center — and with its track record of flagrant law-breaking, there's a good chance all will be turned on.
Between the SELC's suit and the permit's year-long expiration date, there is time for Musk's massively-polluting data center to be reined in — but until that happens, Memphians will keep being choked out in their own homes thanks to their government's decision to put one billionaire's profit margins over its own people.
More on xAI: <a href="https://futurism.com/grok-ai-white-genocide-tampered">Grok AI Went Off the Rails After Someone Tampered With Its Code, xAI Says</a>

Permission Granted

"I am horrified but not surprised."

Elon Musk Obtains Permit to Spew Pollution

Folks, it's official: the object that astronomers <a href="https://futurism.com/interstellar-object-detected-center-solar-system">recently spotted</a> blowing through the outer solar system came from interstellar space.
Yesterday, the intriguing stranger was named A11pl3Z. Now, it's earned the esteemed designation 3I/ATLAS — that "I" standing for "interstellar." 
3I/ATLAS is currently located between the orbits of the asteroid belt and Jupiter, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/science/interstellar-object-a11pi3z.html">New York Times reports</a>, where it's about 416 million miles away from the Sun, NASA <a href="https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/planetary-defense/2025/07/02/nasa-discovers-interstellar-comet-moving-through-solar-system/">said</a>. That's equal to four and a half times the distance between the Earth and our star.
But it's approaching fast. As we speak, 3I/ATLAS is hurtling toward the inner solar system at a speed of about 130,000 miles per hour — a "thousand times over the speed limit on a highway," Harvard's Avi Loeb <a href="https://avi-loeb.medium.com/welcoming-a-new-interstellar-object-a11pi3z-0b01f1cb4fbc">quipped</a>.
"This thing is traveling pretty fast," Paul Chodas, director of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, told the NYT.
"If you trace its orbit backward, it seems to be coming from the center of the galaxy, more or less," Chodas added. "It definitely came from another solar system. We don't know which one."
3I/ATLAS is only the third confirmed interstellar object to reach our Sun's domain — hence the "3." The first was '<a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/oumuamua-not-alien-gas">Oumuamua</a>, spotted in 2017, which became famed for its unusually elongated shape. The second, dubbed Borisov, was a comet that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/science/comet-borisov-break-up.html">spectacularly began to break apart</a>.
Provisionally, this latest visitor also appears to be a comet, making it the second known "rogue" comet in history. 
Its discovery and confirmation as an extrasolar visitor were a collaborative effort. What initially appeared to be an asteroid was first flagged Tuesday by a telescope in Chile that's part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). The International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center quickly added the intriguing object to its list of confirmed near-Earth objects. So did NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Soon, more than 100 observations from telescopes across the globe poured in, including "tentative reports of cometary activity," the Minor Planet Center said Wednesday, providing enough data to designate it 3I/ATLAS.
"There's no uncertainty" about its interstellar origins, Chodas told the NYT, because it's moving too fast to come from our own solar system.
We can only speculate how it got here. Per the NYT, it probably formed as a comet around another star, before a gravitational interaction, perhaps a <a href="https://futurism.com/passing-star-fling-earth">passing star</a>, booted it out of its home system.
How large 3I/ATLAS is is also a matter of some debate. If it were a rocky asteroid, the interstellar interloper would have to be about 12 miles wide to reflect the levels of light we're seeing, according to the NYT, which is what astronomers initially estimated.
But since it's a comet, it's much harder to say. Comets owe their luminous appearance to a halo of gas and dust known as a coma, which is released when the object is heated up by sunlight. These comas appear much larger than the solid object at their center, and their tails even more so; Borisov's was nearly 100,000 miles long, astronomers <a href="https://news.yale.edu/2019/11/26/new-image-offers-close-view-interstellar-comet">estimated</a>, or about 14 times the size of the Earth.
"You can't infer the size of the solid object from the brightness of the coma," Chodas told the NYT. "So it's too early to say how big this object is."
The good news is that there will be plenty of time to study 3I/ATLAS, which hasn't always been the case in our limited encounters with interstellar visitors; 'Oumuaua, for instance, vanished after just a few weeks. 
"It'll be easily observable for astronomers around the world," Chodas told the NYT. "It should be visible well into next year to large telescopes."
3I/ATLAS is expected to reach its closest approach to the Sun around October 30, NASA said, at a distance of about 130 million miles, putting it inside the orbit of Mars.
More on: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-moon-dust-lungs">Scientists Investigate What Happens If You Snort Moon Dust</a>

Galaxy Quest

"It definitely came from another solar system."

Mysterious Object Headed Into Our Solar System Is Coming From the Center of the Galaxy

As millions of Americans stock up on hot dogs ahead of Independence Day, researchers have some bad news: those franks are deadly — no tails, snouts, or butts about it.
The tragic news comes from a <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-025-03775-8">survey published in Nature Medicine</a>, an esteemed biomedical research journal. Combing over 60 previous nutrition studies on processed foods — specifically cured meat, sugary drinks, and trans fatty acids, all staples of the <a href="https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/ultraprocessed-foods-account-for-more-than-half-of-calories-consumed-at-home">North American diet</a> — researchers determined there's "no safe amount" of processed food humans can eat.
The survey established an iron-clad link between the consumption of those three foodstuffs and chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease, and colon cancer.
For example, the data showed that even eating one hot dog a day leads to an 11 percent greater risk of type 2 diabetes, and a seven percent increased risk of colon cancer, compared to non-glizzy guzzlers.
"This current research has shown, yet again and consistent with prior research… that to achieve health gains it is best to avoid or minimize the habitual consumption of each of processed meat, sugar-sweetened beverages, and industrially produced trans fatty acids," Dr. Nita Forouhi, head of nutritional epidemiology at the University of Cambridge, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/02/health/processed-meats-sweet-drinks-disease-wellness">told CNN</a>.
While the science seems sound, decoupling America from the humble frankfurter may be easier said than done.
According to the <a href="https://www.hot-dog.org/culture/hot-dog-fast-facts">National Hot Dog and Sausage Council</a> (NHDSC) — arguably a biased source — the US collectively consumes anywhere between 9 and 20 billion hot dogs per year. It's estimated that some <a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/06/29/1185197828/the-savory-story-of-hot-dogs-and-america">150 million</a> of those are eaten on the 4th of July alone.
Meanwhile, a 2021 survey <a href="https://www.beefmagazine.com/market-news/survey-shows-hot-dogs-are-essential">reported by BEEF Magazine</a> — seriously, who else has this kind of data? — found that 73 percent of Americans believe hot dogs are "essential to a cookout."
Of course, hot dogs are just one of many things consumed around the world that aren't necessarily "good" for you. But for Jamie Loftus, the author of "Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs," the glizzy is the perfect avatar to represent everything wrong with the industrial meat industry.
In her book, Loftus follows the frank along its entire lifecycle, detailing the <a href="https://www.bonappetit.com/story/book-review-raw-dog-hot-dog-jamie-loftus?srsltid=AfmBOooH--8wnUe0Zbclu6eeI4NnUjhx2mCyxDCIbpzTJWzjynnTZuKp">depression-era roots</a> of the hot dog, the role of <a href="https://www.bonappetit.com/story/nathans-hot-dog-eating-contest?srsltid=AfmBOoqbPy_6jyG5qhv6aT2edMx_3ASaaa0-3dKc02EpRRRSe__CNIi3">hot dog eating competitions</a>, the <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-15/pork-prices-are-a-key-issue-in-debate-over-gestation-crates">horrors of factory farming</a>, and the <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/461774-risking-food-safety-usda-plans-to-let-slaughterhouses-self-police/">lack of federal oversight</a> over meat industry labor conditions.
It's not a pretty story, to put it mildly, but it is an important reflection on the state of food in the United States — especially in light of the fact that glizzies are literally killing us.
Joey Chestnut did not respond to a request for comment.
More on Food: <a href="https://futurism.com/achatz-ai-recipes">Famous Chef Boasts That He's Using AI to Invent New Recipes</a>

Franko Un-American

Happy July 4.

Scientists Find that Hosing Glizzies Is Basically a Death Sentence

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman got a taste of his own medicine when he went on the New York Times' turf and tried to twist the newspaper's copyright lawsuit against it.
As <a href="https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/openai-execs-whine-about-the-new-york-times-lawsuit-during-live-nyt-event-get-served-by-nyt-journalist-it-must-be-really-hard-when-someone-does-something-with-your-data-you-dont-want-them-to/">flagged by PG Gamer</a>, the live recording of the NYT's "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdNwzYMtPN8">Hard Fork</a>" podcast — hosted by journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, and featuring as guests Altman and OpenAI's chief operating officer Brad Lightcap — was testy from its start.
Almost immediately upon sitting down on the "Hard Fork" stage, the CEO came out punching.
"Are you going to talk about where you sue us because you don't like user privacy?" Altman quipped. The audience loved it, but unless they were up-to-date with the minutiae of the <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-whistleblower-witness">legal battle between OpenAI and the NYT</a>, they might not understand what he meant.
That jabs seems to be a reference to OpenAI's latest forte in the copyright lawsuit, arguing that a <a href="https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/nyt-to-start-searching-deleted-chatgpt-logs-after-beating-openai-in-court/">judge's twice-affirmed order</a>, which compels the AI company to allow the NYT to access all of its chat logs as it searches for evidence of infringement,  is evidence of some secret quest to violate user privacy.
Though Roose emphasized that neither he nor Newton are involved in the lawsuit at all — and in fact have been increasingly prominent boosters of AI tech over the past few years — Altman refused to let it go.
"The New York Times, one of the great institutions for a long time, is taking a position that we should have to preserve our users' logs even if they're chatting in private mode, even if they’ve asked us to delete them," the CEO explained. "And the lawsuit we're having to fight out, but... we think privacy and AI is an extremely important concept to get right for the future"
Rather than backing down, Roose went all in on Altman.
"Well thank you for your views," the journalist and podcaster said, "and I'll just say it must be really hard when someone does something with your data you don't want them to."
Though Altman's opening bid garnered its share of giggles from the audience, Roose's drive-by clapback elicited shrieks of mirth: it's true, after all, that a wave of enormously valuable tech companies led by OpenAI ingested everybody's data to train their AI, without asking permission from anyone — so the hypocrisy of Altman suddenly caring about privacy is pretty striking.
"I don't know what that's like personally," Roose continued, "but maybe someone else does."
The subtext was loud and clear. Altman chose to do the interview in the middle of the testy lawsuit to set the record straight as it exists in his mind, only to be met with a hearty rejoinder from someone whose job involves being clever and making a succinct point.
Regardless of which side wins in this <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-content-new-york-times-lawsuit">long-running battle of wills</a>, that roast was absolutely a point in the NYT's corner.
More on OpenAI hypocrisy: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-mockery-stole-work-deepseek">OpenAI Hit With Wave of Mockery for Crying That Someone Stole Its Work Without Permission to Build a Competing Product</a>

Epic Burn

Y'all be easy!

Journalists Just Roasted Sam Altman To His Face

<h2>Red Sprite</h2>
NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, currently stationed on board the International Space Station, <a href="https://x.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563">shared an incredible image</a> of a sprite — a rare weather phenomenon that's triggered high above the clouds by "intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below."
The image shows the rare electrical discharge in the shape of a starkly red, upended umbrella, hovering high over a brewing storm, like some sort of occult tower from "Lord of the Rings."
"Just. Wow," Ayers tweeted. "As we went over Mexico and the US this morning, I caught this sprite."
Being hundreds of miles above the surface of the Earth gave Ayers the perfect vantage point to watch the stunning event unfold.
"We have a great view above the clouds, so scientists can use these types of pictures to better understand the formation, characteristics, and relationship of [Transient Luminous Events] to thunderstorms."
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Just. Wow. As we went over Mexico and the U.S. this morning, I caught this sprite.
Sprites are TLEs or Transient Luminous Events, that happen above the clouds and are triggered by intense electrical activity in the thunderstorms below. We have a great view above the clouds, so… <a href="https://t.co/dCqIrn3vrA">pic.twitter.com/dCqIrn3vrA</a>
&mdash; Nichole “Vapor” Ayers (@Astro_Ayers) <a href="https://twitter.com/Astro_Ayers/status/1940810789830451563?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">July 3, 2025</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<h2>Seven Up</h2>
According to NASA, sprites can appear at altitudes of <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/general/spritacular-nasas-new-citizen-science-project-to-capture-elusive-upper-atmospheric-electrical-phenomena-on-camera/">around 50 miles</a>, which is far higher than where thunderstorms form. They often appear mere moments after lightning strikes, forming spiny tendrils of red plumes.
The otherworldly phenomenon, which was first officially observed in 1989 photographs, is still poorly understood. Scientists have yet to uncover how and why they form.
In 2022, NASA launched a "citizen science project," dubbed "Spritacular," to crowdsource images of the TLEs. According to the project's official website, over 800 volunteers have joined the effort, and 360 observations have been collected across 21 countries.
Other TLEs include <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/astronaut-glowing-orbs-space-station-red-sprites">elves</a>, an acronym for "emission of light and very low frequency perturbations due to electromagnetic pulse sources," and jets, a type of cloud-to-air discharge that can <a href="https://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147900/bolts-of-blue">appear as blue tendrils</a>.
"While sprites [and other TLEs] may appear delicate and silent in the upper atmosphere, they are often linked to powerful, sometimes devastating weather systems," University of Science and Technology of China PhD student and TLE expert Hailiang Huang <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/lightning-sprites-transient-luminous-events-thunderstorms">told National Geographic last week</a>.
"Understanding them not only satisfies our curiosity about the upper atmosphere, but also helps us learn more about the storms we face here on Earth," he added.
Best of all, studying TLEs could even help us learn about distant planets: NASA's Juno mission found <a href="https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/juno-data-indicates-sprites-or-elves-frolic-in-jupiters-atmosphere/">evidence of sprites and elves</a> in the atmosphere of Jupiter as well.
More on sprites: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/nasa-crowdsourcing-sprite-research">NASA Crowdsourcing Investigation of Otherworldly "Sprites" in Sky</a>

In Full Plume

"Just. Wow."

Wildly Beautiful and Rare "Red Sprite" Flare Seen on Earth From Orbit

A satellite designed to monitor human-made methane emissions has gone missing in space.
Dubbed MethaneSAT, the $88 million spacecraft was launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket in March 2024 and was expected to collect data on the potent greenhouse gas for at least five years.
But for the past two weeks, the satellite's operators, the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, have been unable to establish contact.
Now, in a final blow, mission control says that MethaneSAT has lost power, crushing almost all hope of bringing it back online.
"It is likely not recoverable," the EDF said in a <a href="https://www.methanesat.org/project-updates/methanesat-loses-contact-satellite">statement</a> Tuesday. 
The cause, at this time, isn't known, and an investigation into why communications were lost is ongoing.
It's an agonizing loss, especially as the mission — which was backed by Google and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — had proven that its advanced spectrometer instruments could pick out emissions from space and trace them back to their source with remarkable precision.
The just under a year's worth of data it managed to collect was "magnificent," Steven Hamburg, chief scientist at the EDF, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/climate/methane-sat-lost.html">told the </a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/climate/methane-sat-lost.html">New York Times</a>.
"We set out in this first year to demonstrate what was possible, that we could think about direct measurement of greenhouse gases in a way that we had never been able to do before," Hamburg added. "And I think we demonstrated that."
Methane traps 28 times more heat than carbon dioxide and is considered to be the second biggest contributor to global warming.
Many scientists fear, however, that we're actually underestimating its impact. That's because methane is a very leaky greenhouse gas, meaning that a lot of it escapes as it's stored, transported, and drilled without being accounted for. Research suggests that gas companies are <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/28/1048425/permian-basin-methane-emissions/">drastically underreporting</a> their real methane emissions as a result, with it being in their best interests to turn a blind eye.
To hold polluters accountable, numerous organizations including NASA have been monitoring methane from space. But MethaneSAT purported to do it with enough accuracy to single out the specific facilities responsible, as the NYT explained. 
Data gathered by the satellite — which is publicly available — implicated oil and gas sites in North America and Central Asia as emitting far higher amounts of methane than predicted, per the NYT.
It's not how it would've wanted things to end, but with its satellite making a convincing case for itself before going out, the EDF is choosing to look on the bright side.
"The mission has been a remarkable success in terms of scientific and technological accomplishment, and for its lasting influence on both industry and regulators worldwide," the EDF said in the statement. "We will continue to process data that we have retrieved from the satellite and will be releasing additional scenes of global oil and gas production region-scale emissions over the coming months."
More on spacecraft: <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/lost-spaceship-ocean">Alert: There's a Lost Spaceship in the Ocean</a>

Sad-ellite

"It is likely not recoverable."

Major Satellite Suddenly Disappears

SpaceX is facing yet another sexual harassment lawsuit.
TechCrunch <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/02/former-spacex-manager-alleges-harassment-retaliation-and-security-violations-in-lawsuit/">reports</a> that Jenna Shumway, a former security manager at the company, is suing SpaceX and a senior employee for sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful termination.
According to a <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25988273-shumway-vs-spacex/?q=interview&amp;mode=document#document/p8">complaint</a> filed in late May, the senior employee, Daniel Collins, began a "campaign of harassment and retaliation" against Shumway after he was hired in the spring of 2024, preventing her from carrying out her duties while doing everything he could to get her fired.
"These efforts ultimately succeeded," the complaint said.
Shumway further alleges that she was passed over for a promotion to a director role in favor of Collins, even though she was recommended for the position and was told she would have an opportunity to interview. That opportunity never came, and Shumway claims that when she raised the issue with HR and management, they stonewalled her.
After Collins was hired, Shumway was given a promotion to senior manager "seemingly as consolation in an effort to appease" her, per the complaint. She allegedly received lower pay compared to her male counterparts, in effect leaving her stuck with all the extra duties that the director position entails, but without the title or salary.
Collins turned out to be a lousy pick. As TechCrunch notes, the former Department of Defense official was implicated in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/technology/elon-musk-spacex-national-security-reporting.html">reporting by the </a><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/17/technology/elon-musk-spacex-national-security-reporting.html">New York Times</a> in December last year, which detailed how SpaceX was facing three separate federal reviews by US defense and intelligence agencies for mishandling security protocols. According to the story, Collins repeatedly allowed executives without proper clearance into classified meetings, and discouraged employees from reporting these violations, including those by CEO Elon Musk.
This latest lawsuit alleges that Collins vigorously harassed other female employees, too, aggressively berating and yelling at them — behavior he never exhibited towards the men in the office. In at least one incident, he stared at an employee's breasts so blatantly that she  "sought to cover up."
The women repeatedly reported Collins to HR — and its response was insulting tone deaf.
"Again, as before, HR did nothing except make a useless suggestion that he female employees use a 'buddy system' so as to avoid being alone with Collins," the complaint said.
This isn't the first lawsuit that alleges alarming treatment of women at the space company — and especially by its CEO, who has a long history of <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/elon-musk-sexual-harassment-techno-feudalism/">creepy behavior</a>. In 2024, SpaceX was <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/musk-spacex-lawsuit-former-employees-sexual-harassment-fired-rcna156854">sued</a> by eight former employees who alleged that Musk sexually harassed female employees and treated them as "sexual objects," emboldening their male coworkers to emulate his gross behavior. The plaintiffs were abruptly fired, the lawsuit alleges, after circulating a petition calling out his behavior.
In 2022, it came to light that a woman who worked as a flight attendant on the company's corporate fleet had accused Musk of exposing his genitals to her, before groping her legs and offering to buy her a horse. To buy her silence, SpaceX <a href="https://futurism.com/spacex-allegations-elon-musk">reportedly</a> paid her $250,000. In 2024, the billionaire was also <a href="https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-sex-spacex-intern">accused</a> of having sex with a SpaceX intern. Musk has fathered at least 14 children with four different mothers, and has a track record of approaching women, <a href="https://www.wsj.com/business/elon-musk-spacex-employee-relationships-8bca2806?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=ASWzDAiV4ywGUXpAZRK4Xc5W5bENRN0qsbJcfSJndRlZjdXvQfmDROXhRrbyLkMxGFo%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6866f94e&amp;gaa_sig=EBfdJ17lCfZmJuRfNY0fB-ORfw3yZSx8vnbBZ3H5cO2Q20Mh3LiXtCXYWOgo2ykjkdBvDYO-F6QGa1dK-FuaYw%3D%3D">some of them his employees</a>, and <a href="https://futurism.com/leaked-text-elon-musk-woman-many-babies">asking them to have his babies</a>.
Per TechCrunch, the latest suit was first filed in a Los Angeles County Superior Court, but was moved to a federal court on June 30 at SpaceX's request.
More on SpaceX: <a href="https://futurism.com/crane-collapse-spacex-starbase">Video Shows Large Crane Collapsing at Safety-Plagued SpaceX Rocket Facility</a>

Space Disgrace

Gross.

SpaceX Sued Yet Again for Sexual Harassment

Like any crappy human writer, AI chatbots have a tendency to overuse specific words — and now, scientists are using that propensity to catch their colleagues when they secretly use it in their work.
As the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/health/ai-chatgpt-research-papers.html">New York Times reports,</a> scientists estimate, based on an analysis of those overused terms, that there could already be hundreds of thousands of academic papers written with the assistance of AI.
In a new study published in the <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813">journal Science Advances</a>, researchers from Germany's University of Tübingen identified some 454 words that large language models (LLMs) use frequently — terms like "garnered," "encompassing," and "burgeoning" — and found that anywhere from 13.5 to 40 percent of biomedical article abstracts were written entirely or with assistance from AI.
With roughly 1.5 million papers indexed each year on the academic journal database PubMed, that means that at least 200,000 of those papers could have been written with the help of LLMs. That whopping figure may, as the NYT notes, be conservative when accounting for any intentional editing of AI-generated text.
While some deceptive journal writers take pains to conceal their AI use, others didn't seem to care who knew. In an <a href="https://x.com/rao2z/status/1769429746717515853">example posted on X</a> by Arizona State University computer scientist Subbarao Kambhampati, for instance, the "writers" of a low-quality radiology journal left in an acknowledgement that it had been penned by a chatbot.
"I'm very sorry," the paper quote reads, "but I don't have access to real time-information or patient-specific data as I am an AI language model."
Not all mistakes are going to be that obvious. Unless you're familiar with the term "regenerate response" — an option on ChatGPT that forces the chatbot to rework a shoddy answer — you could easily miss it being sprinkled throughout respected journals, the blog <a href="https://retractionwatch.com/2023/10/06/signs-of-undeclared-chatgpt-use-in-papers-mounting/">Retraction Watch found</a> back in 2023.
That same blog also flagged a frustrating debacle involving a paper about millipedes with completely made-up references, which was <a href="https://futurism.com/professor-chatgpt-scientific-paper-errors">initially withdrawn</a> from a pre-print server, only to reappear online on a different academic database with those same hallucinated sources.
And let's not forget the journal that was <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/scientific-journal-frontiers-publishes-ai-generated-rat-with-gigantic-penis-in-worrying-incident/">forced to retract a paper</a> after observers noticed it was filled with nonsense, including an AI-generated image of a rat with comically gigantic genitals.
Complicating matters, academics are taking pains to hide their AI use. As Kambhampati told the NYT, academics have even started changing the way they write so their work won't be mistaken for AI, removing terms like "delve" that are overused by LLMs.
In the Science Advances paper, the Tübingen researchers proffer that all this AI use in academic journals, if corroborated, could be an "unprecedented impact on scientific writing in biomedical research, surpassing the effect of major world events such as the COVID pandemic."
To the mind of coauthor Dmitry Kobak, however, the whole thing seems counterintuitive.
"I would think for something as important as writing an abstract of your paper," he told the NYT, "you would not do that."
More on AI: <a href="https://futurism.com/openai-forensic-psychiatrist">OpenAI Says It's Hired a Forensic Psychiatrist as Its Users Keep Sliding Into Mental Health Crises</a>