Houston-based startup Venus Aerospace has completed the first-ever test flight of a rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) in the United States.
The launch took place on Wednesday (May 14) from Spaceport America in New Mexico. A small rocket equipped with Venus’ RDRE lifted off at 9:37 a.m. EDT (1337 GMT; 7:37 a.m. local time in New Mexico).
The milestone marked the first successful test of such an engine from U.S. soil and took Venus a "step closer to making high-speed flight accessible, affordable and sustainable," the company said in a statement.
Venus Aerospace conducted the first-ever test flight with its rotating detonation rocket engine on May 14, 2025. (Image credit: Venus Aerospace)
"This is the moment we’ve been working toward for five years," Venus CEO Sassie Duggleby said in the statement.
The test serves as a proof of design for Venus’s RDRE and keeps the company on track for runway-based high-speed flight, she added: "We’ve proven that this technology works — not just in simulations or the lab, but in the air."
The Venus RDRE uses a compact, high-efficiency design the company hopes can eventually power aircraft up to Mach 6 — six times the speed of sound — starting from conventional runways. Compared to traditional rocket engines, RDREs offer greater thrust in smaller packages, but up until now the technology has been mostly theoretical.
Normally, rocket engines burn fuel in a combustion chamber in a steady, controlled process. RDREs use a continuous detonation wave that travels in a circle within a ring-shaped chamber, which produces higher pressure and efficiency and results in increased thrust with less fuel.
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"This milestone proves our engine works outside the lab, under real flight conditions," Venus CTO Andrew Duggleby said in the same statement. "We’ve built an engine that not only runs, but runs reliably and efficiently — and that’s what makes it scalable."
The RDRE is designed to work in tandem with Venus’s VDR2 air-breathing detonation ramjet — a combination the company says will enable sustained hypersonic flight without the need for a booster. (Hypersonic flight is generally defined as Mach 5 and above.)
"This is the foundation we need that, combined with a ramjet, completes the system from takeoff to sustained hypersonic flight," Andrew Duggleby said.
With the successful test in the books, Venus is planning full-scale propulsion test of their integrated system as it moves to qualify the design of its future Stargazer M4, a reusable passenger aircraft capable of reaching Mach 4.
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When arsenic is mentioned, many people associate it with a bygone poison. The type of quiet killer used in a murder mystery set on a train somewhere in Victorian England. It seems like a problem of the past.
However, arsenic is a naturally occurring substance that can contaminate groundwater and food irrigated with tainted water. And in an alarming new study, researchers have found that climate change is impacting the level of arsenic that people are ingesting.
Given that arsenic is a carcinogen, it’s primed to become a lethal killer. Billions of people are at risk of developing arsenic-induced diseases.
Why Arsenic Levels are Rising in Rice
In a 2025 study in The Lancet, an international team of researchers revealed the results of a study that measured two components associated with climate change — increased carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and surface temperatures — in rice paddies in China.
“One important chemical aspect that has been known about rice is its ability to accumulate arsenic, leading to an important and crucial question: Can CO2 and temperature affect arsenic concentration, and if so, what are the health consequences?” says Lewis H. Ziska, an associate professor in environmental health sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.
The study was the first of its kind. Although scientists have long understood how both inorganic and organic arsenic can make their way into food or water, they weren’t sure how climate change might influence arsenic levels.
To find out, the researchers grew rice in controlled paddies in China from 2014 to 2023. To a certain extent, the research team expected to find some arsenic in the rice because it grows in flooded paddies and absorbs arsenic from the water.
The research team also expected the CO2 levels and surface temperatures would increase because climate change scientists have charted a projection of the likely increase. But would increased CO2 levels and temperatures lead to higher arsenic levels? And what might that mean if people eat the tainted crop?
The study found that the increased CO2 levels and temperatures indeed lead to higher concentrations of arsenic. The researchers’ rice paddies were representative of rice paddies in Asia, which means that what happened in their paddies is likely happening in others around the region.
Higher arsenic rates in rice are a major health concern. Arsenic is a known carcinogen. When found in drinking water, there is an increased risk of bladder and skin cancer. Other studies have found that ingesting arsenic can lead to cancer in the digestive tract, hematopoietic system, kidneys, liver, or lymphatic system.
Problematically, billions of people can now be considered at risk for arsenic-related cancers. More than half of the world’s population depends on rice as a staple food. Scientists are concerned that the increased arsenic in a staple food like rice could lead to a spike in future cancer cases throughout Asia.
Rice Consumption in the U.S.
But what does this mean for the U.S. food supply? Rice consumed in the U.S. comes from the Arkansas Grand Prairie, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Delta, or Sacramento Valley. These crops have not been tested by scientists to determine how CO2 levels and surface temperatures are impacting the arsenic concentrations. But if climate change can raise arsenic levels in Asia, Ziska says it can happen in the U.S. as well.
“It seems likely given the biogeochemistry of how rice can accumulate arsenic when grown under flooded (paddy) conditions,” Ziska says.
It’s a research area that Ziska says needs more attention, both in terms of long-term study support and public awareness. Many people don’t realize that climate change has the ability to alter the food supply by creating conditions that are ripe for toxins.
“Climate change isn’t just about wildfires and sea-level rise and storms of the century. It’s also affecting a food staple — rice — that is consumed by half the world’s population every day. Maybe we should pay attention,” he says.
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
Nintendo’s latest legal move to combat piracy may be super effective. According to a new change in the Nintendo User Agreement, the console maker can brick your Switch, or render it useless, if it’s found with pirated games or mods. While some people may have glazed over the changes since Nintendo didn’t make this a major announcement, Game File’s Stephen Totilo dug through the changes and spotted the major updates.
In Nintendo’s own words, you shouldn’t "bypass, modify, decrypt, defeat, tamper with, or otherwise circumvent any of the functions or protections of the Nintendo Account Services." The company’s previous agreement only prohibited if you "adapt, reverse-engineer, or modify a Nintendo user account," but this updated language gives exact definitions of what you can’t do with your Switch. If you do break these rules, Nintendo could make your "applicable Nintendo device permanently unusable in whole or in part." In plain English, that means if you’re found with an emulator or pirated copies of games, your Switch might just end up being a very expensive paperweight.
This latest legal leap isn’t surprising considering Nintendo’s strict stance on emulation. In March 2024, the company filed a lawsuit against the popular Switch emulator called Yuzu claiming that the developers were facilitating piracy. Later that year, another emulator called Ryujinx shut down after Nintendo offered an agreement to the development team to discontinue the project in October. This latest user agreement update comes on the heels of the upcoming release of the Switch 2 that’s planned for June 5.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/PSnczoF
A Slovakian startup working to make the age-old dream of flying cars a reality says it has a new prototype that could ship as early as 2026. Klein Vision, which has spent the past three decades developing its “AirCar,” has already completed over 170 flight hours and more than 500 takeoffs and landings. It also became one of the first vehicles of its kind to receive a certificate of airworthiness back in 2022.
Now, the company says it’s ready to shift out of the testing phase and into production. Whether it can actually get there, however, remains far from certain. Many companies have tried—and failed—to bring flying cars to life.
AirCar prototype. Image: Klein Vision Hand-out
How the AirCar works
Klein Vision claims its Jetsons-like vehicle can transform from a four-wheel car into a fixed-wing aircraft in under two minutes. Video demonstrations of its transition from flight mode to driving show the two wings retracting and folding in on themselves, somewhat resembling a hardtop convertible. Once in car mode, the company says it generates downforce using a spoiler and elevator pitch. The newest iteration of the vehicle can reportedly reach top speeds of 124 mph on the road and 155 mph in the air, with a maximum flight range of around 1,000 kilometers. (620 miles).
“The AirCar is a fusion of certified aviation engineering and advanced automotive design—a true dual-mode vehicle that meets rigorous standards in both air and ground performance,” AirCar co-founder Anton Zajac said in a statement.
The company did not immediately respond to Popular Science‘s request for comment, but told The Next Web that it hopes to start shipping to customers as early as 2026, with an estimated price between $800,000 and $1 million. According to The Next Web, the newly announced model includes several noteworthy improvements. It features a 280-horsepower motor—double the power of the previous version. It can also fly longer, drive farther, and switch between modes slightly faster. The first iteration of the AirCar received a Certificate of Airworthiness from the Slovak Transport Authority after completing 70 hours of “rigorous flight testing,” according to the company. This newest version will also need to receive certification before it can legally take to the skies.
But even if the new and improved AirCar finds buyers, potential owners shouldn’t expect their expensive new toy to soar over rush hour traffic. In car mode, the AirCar can, in theory, operate much like any other road vehicle. Those looking to fly it, however, will first need to drive to an airport and take off from a runway. For now, the AirCar’s flight path is limited to travel between airports. The video below shows the original AirCar making its maiden flight back in 2021.
Where there’s significantly more commercial activity currently ongoing is in the closely related area of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) vehicles. These vehicles have wheels but are intended to be able to lift off into the air without the need for a runway. In practical terms, they are somewhere in between a flying car and a helicopter. The two leading companies in that space, Joby Aviation and Archer Aviation, have already struck deals with airlines in the US and the U.K to transport passengers between airports and helicopter pads. In theory, that would allow time-crunched travellers to bypass traffic on busy streets.
But those use cases are still a far cry from the vision many futurists have of personal flying cars swarming city skies. Many of the obstacles keeping that vision grounded go beyond the technology itself. Current certification processes mean owners of these vehicles would need to acquire a pilot’s license to operate them. Federal and local regulators would also need to radically reimagine traffic logistics and safety rules to accommodate what would essentially be a new dimension of navigation. There’s also the very real concern about what happens if one of these flying cars falls out of the sky. The far more likely scenario is that a handful of airworthy car-plane hybrids may reach the market—but remain confined to use as expensive toys for wealthy enthusiasts.
Since AI has diffused into every aspect of the technology sector, I’ve been more than a little tempted to try my hand at some of AI’s cooler applications. That growing temptation finally culminated in me building a desktop PC just for AI — to try my hand at vibe coding apps just for fun.
My budget wasn’t that high, so for the build I landed on an AMD Ryzen 5 2400G CPU with a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, and an Nvidia RTX 3090 video card. That combination was validated by my fellow PC builders online as entirely suitable for AI, so I felt confident I was onto a good thing.
And they weren’t wrong! My new PC worked well for my newest hobby, allowing me to dabble in making simple apps in DeepAgent. But with the gift of hindsight, I now realize that I made a big mistake with my build, and I deeply regret it.
The issue was and still is that I had built a PC suitable for one use case only, and in doing so it has since become obsolete to my life. I arrived at my rig’s configuration by unknowingly breaking one of life’s less spoken-about rules: “Know thyself.”
By that I mean two things: The first is that in my life I have Buckley’s chance of compartmentalizing my devices for just one use — I’m just too busy and inevitably end up using them for everything. My phone is the classic example of that –- it’s my mobile notetaker, my repository for holiday snaps, and my communication’s hub, all in one.
Secondly, I had overlooked a personality trait that I sometimes exhibit, one that I share with the character Toad from the classic children’s story The Wind in the Willows, and that is the tendency to get all worked up over a new hobby that can last for several months but then I lose interest quickly and stop it abruptly.
Of course, I should have known that AI was the most recent of these temporary hobbies, soon to be replaced by something else.
These two oversights would have been no problem at all had I selected more versatile hardware for my AI PC. But I had chosen potato-like components, suitable for running LLMs but not much more. That aha! moment came after a lengthy coding session when I decided to give the neurons a rest and loaded up a game of CounterStrike: Go.
My spiffy AI PC, which until then I had otherwise been chuffed about, at that very moment became an insubordinate nuisance.
Yes, I had a decent graphics card, but my PC was severely bottlenecked at the CPU and no number of settings changes were going to improve that. Like most gamers, I have a minimum frame rate that I simply can’t bear to play beneath — that’s 60FPS.
The best I could achieve on my AI PC, even in games with cartoony graphics, was a measly 40FPS — so it was of little use to me for any kind of serious gaming.
Building a PC with limited capability was not a great idea.
Pixabay: Andreas160578
Sure, I could have just changed out the CPU for a more powerful one, but I had other bottlenecks too; Like the slow 8GB RAM onboard, and a PSU so underpowered it was only really suitable for running the lights in a chicken coop.
If I had to find a moral in all of this, like in a family talk session at the end of a cheesy 1990s sitcom, it would be this: Don’t build a PC for just one application; reach higher with your hardware specs right from the get-go and build a more powerful and versatile rig capable of a whole bunch of stuff. If you do, you will save yourself a ton of hassle and possibly a ton of money too.
And, no matter what your next hobby is (composing music? VR gaming? Heck, even snapping time lapse videos of your cat!) you will have a powerful enough rig to cover your needs!
So a professional dominatrixspecializing in foot worship signs into her YouTube account for the first time in seventeen years and compiles over 900 playlists, including the debut LP of progressive math-rock band 90 Day Men, an album from hyperpop/chiptune darling Saoirse Dream and portions of the original soundtrack from early 2000s anime Chobits. There’s no punchline to that one. Let me explain.
Despite an entirely separate paid product — YouTube Music — vanilla YouTube’s sometimes spotty enforcement of copyright has made it a goldmine for music, especially the kind that’s niche, and possibly unavailable on legal streamers. Dedicated channels for screamo, doom metal or acid jazz, for instance, are regularly uploading rare releases, and searching for nearly any artist and "full album" will typically return the desired result no matter how obscure. In some cases, albums are uploaded as a single, lengthy video with timestamps indicating where one track ends and the next begins; in others, individual tracks are uploaded and compiled as playlists.
In recent months, however, countless tainted playlists have cropped up in YouTube search results. Engadget compiled a sample of 100 channels (there are undoubtedly many, many more) engaged in what we’ll refer to as playlist stuffing. These had between 30 and 1,987 playlists each — 58,191 in total. The overwhelming majority of these stuffed playlists contain an irrelevant, nearly hour-long video simply titled "More."
Engadget
The robotic narration of "More" begins: "Cryptocurrency investing, when approached with a long-term perspective, can be a powerful way to build wealth." You’d be forgiven for assuming its aim is to direct unwitting listeners to a shitcoin pump-and-dump. But over the next 57 minutes and 55 seconds, it meanders incoherently between a variety of topics like affiliate marketing, making a website and search engine optimization. (Here’s the entire transcript if you find yourself pathologically curious.) What’s odd is there’s no link to any scam page, no specific business the video directs a listener to patronize. Its description simply reads "Other stuff I’ve recorded and edited that I hadn’t released until now, a special for my biggest fans with footage never seen before!"
For all its supposed advice on making easy money online, its best example isn’t anything said in the video, it’s that "More" has amassed nearly 7.5 million views at the time of this writing — and it’s monetized.
Unscrupulous artists also seem to engage, on a smaller scale, in a less obtuse sort of playlist stuffing. The channel Ultra Sounds has garnered 4.1 million views on its song "The Pause," after inserting it into — among other places — the Nine Inch Nails album Add Violence. Anastasia Coope’s Darning Woman and 1991, an album by shoegaze pioneers Drop Nineteens, are not made better for the inclusion of Murat Ba?kaya, an apparent Turkish rapper. Electronic dance group The Daring Ones have added a few hundred thousand views to several of their tracks by stuffing them into a variety of playlists, including one of last month’s new Viagra Boys record. Engadget attempted to contact these musicians on their content strategy but has not heard back.
"More" takes advantage of a very simple UI quirk. Besides there being no easy way to tell how many playlists a YouTube account has made (it loads them 30 at a time on scroll), search results show only the first two tracks of a given playlist. "More" is almost invariably inserted as track three. Unwitting listeners who click and tab away are greeted with irrelevant marketing jargon around seven minutes later — a scenario reflected in the often bewildered comments beneath the video.
Playlist stuffing would seem to contravene YouTube’s policies on playlists and deceptive practices, which proscribe "playlists with titles or descriptions that mislead viewers into thinking they’re about to view videos different than what the playlist contains." A glance at the channel to which "More" was uploaded provides a hint that something more insidious is at play than just playlist stuffing for ad revenue.
"More" is not the only video on the channel Hangmeas. The channel description states "I produce my own custom music videos with footage I record around East Asia where me and the locals sing and dance to traditional music from their cultures," and sure enough its other two uploads are songs from Cambodian musicians — uploaded 18 years ago. The army of channels posting stuffed playlists containing "More" are all similarly ancient. One, kcnmttcnn, was created on December 26, 2005, only a few months after YouTube itself first launched. It now hosts over 900 playlists. The vast majority of channels engaged in this activity were created in 2006, and the youngest was claimed in February of 2009. In all likelihood, these accounts were abandoned long ago and have since been compromised, either by whoever is behind "More" or by a third party which sold access to these accounts to them.
Just like Hangmeas, several of these possibly compromised accounts have their channel descriptions, links — like the Myspace account for the aforementioned dominatrix — and old uploads intact. Viewing them in aggregate triggers a strange kind of melancholy, like finding the photo album of someone else’s family in a thrift store. Here’s two friends go-karting down a stretch of farmland; here’s a girl sledding down a very short hill; here’s 11 minutes off an online game of Uno; here’s two girls trying on hats in a department store; here’s Muse playing "Time Is Running Out" in Paris, 2006, rendered in such poor quality it could be literally any show at all. This one’s just called "David." Its description reads "I’m cool."
Unfortunately none of these channels had extant contact information. It’s impossible to know how the subjects of these videos feel about their old digital selves being leveraged for playlist stuffing. We can’t even know how many of these people are still alive.
Somehow, a raft of accounts old enough to vote logged back in, probably from very different parts of the world than where they originated, and churned out playlists at a rate no human being could possibly hope to achieve. YouTube, it seems, did not find this suspicious. We reached out to YouTube for comment and did not receive comment by time of publication.
Yes, amateurish, nearly two decade-old footage harkens to a simpler time, when being able to upload a video that the whole world could see — though much more likely it would be viewed by a couple of your friends, and then one reporter 18 years later — was still exciting. But the history of the internet seems to be contained here: The simple joy of connection, neglected on a megacorp’s servers, slowly co-opted by anyone trying to make a quick and dishonest buck.
Author’s note: I’ve included a list of the potentially compromised accounts here; if you happen to be the owner of one of them, I’d love to hear from you.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://ift.tt/vZj8OgX
The need for Alzheimer’s prevention is growing. About 7 million people in the U.S. now live with the disease, with estimates climbing to 13 million by 2050. The estimated annual cost of care for Alzheimer’s and other dementias could rise from $360 billion to almost $1 trillion over that time period, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.
One class of HIV drug shows promise in preventing Alzheimer’s disease, according to an article in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
Scientists arrived at the finding serendipitously. While studying how a class of drugs used to treat HIV works, researchers noticed that they also impacted mechanisms involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.
Analyzing HIV Treatment
Once the researchers made that connection, they turned to two databases. They scoured them for patients being treated with a class of HIV drugs called nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs), which prevent the HIV virus from replicating in the body. They searched decades of data for people who were both being treated with various HIV medications and were 50 years or older. They excluded people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
They found more than 270,000 subjects who met those criteria from two sources: 24 years of patient data within the U.S. Veterans Health Administration Database and 14 years of data for commercially insured patients. Then they compared how many people developed Alzheimer’s between those taking NRTIs and people who were prescribed other HIV medication.
Even after screening out factors like potential pre-existing conditions, they found the difference “significant and substantial,” according to the paper. In one set of patients, risk of developing Alzheimer’s decreased 6 percent every year the patients took NRTIs. In the other, the annual decrease was 13 percent.
“Our results suggest that taking these drugs could prevent approximately 1 million new cases of Alzheimer’s disease every year,” Jayakrishna Ambati, a researcher with University of Virginia School of Medicine and an author of the study, said in a press release.
The researchers note that patients taking other types of HIV medications did not show the same reduction in Alzheimer’s risk as those on NRTIs. Based on that, they say that NRTIs warrant clinical testing to determine their ability to ward off Alzheimer’s.
This article is not offering medical advice and should be used for informational purposes only.
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.
