The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Flood Insurance Rate Maps, often referred to simply as flood maps, outline flood risk. The maps are critical to determining the need for flood insurance, construction restrictions, floodplain management, and hazard mitigation. There’s just one problem—75% of FEMA’s maps are out of date.

Writing for The Conversation, Jeremy Porter, a City University of New York researcher who studies flood-risk mapping at the nonprofit organization First Street, argues that the maps’ overreliance on historical data and failure to include climate change impact are partially to blame. After horrific flash floods claimed over 100 lives in Texas’ Kerr County in July, including children at a summer camp, the inaccurate flood maps’ public safety implications are once again in the spotlight.

“While FEMA has improved the accuracy and accessibility of the maps over time with better data, digital tools and community input, the maps still don’t capture everything—including the changing climate,” Porter wrote. “There are areas of the country that flood, some regularly, that don’t show up on the maps as at risk.”

Specifically, a 2023 assessment by First Street, which conducts climate risk financial modeling, revealed that over two times as many properties in the United States were at risk of a 100-year flood (a flood that has a 1% chance of taking place any year) than those outlined in the FEMA maps. In the case of Kerr County, First Street identified over 4,500 homes at risk of flooding near the Guadalupe River. According to FEMA data, however, it was just 2,560.

That means that people in areas not included in the official flood risk zones might not just be uninsured but also tragically unprepared.

According to Porter, one of the problems is that the maps focus on river channels and coastal flooding mostly without taking into account flash flooding, specifically in areas with smaller channels of water. This is particularly notable within the context of climate change and global warming, which sees warmer air holding more moisture, which translates into more extreme rainstorms.

Another issue is conflicts of interest. As NBC News reported, it’s common for property owners to conduct their own flood risk analyses and then petition FEMA to change the flood zone designation accordingly.

“One of the problems with FEMA is it appears to be negotiable as opposed to an empirical or science-based understanding of risk,” Porter told NBC News. “It’s based on the ability to create an engineering study and negotiate with FEMA.”

If you think most people ask the agency to label their area as high flood risk so they can better prepare, you’re probably putting more faith in humanity than we deserve. The truth is that official flood zones can mean expensive flood insurance obligations, lower property values, and stricter construction regulations.

What’s more, “Congress controls FEMA’s mapping budget and sets the legal framework for how maps are created. For years, updating the flood maps has been an unpopular topic among many publicly elected officials, because new flood designations can trigger stricter building codes, higher insurance costs and development restrictions,” Porter explained on The Conversation.

With President Trump threatening to potentially “remake” FEMA, it remains to be seen what’s in store for the agency’s future and what that means for American lives.

OpenAI launched its long-awaited AI update, GPT-5, on August 7. It made lofty promises like “PhD?level intelligence.” But within 24 hours, the tool’s most devoted users were cataloging its many bugs, errors, and shortcomings on Reddit. The ChatGPT fandom started melting down. CEO Sam Altman responded by promising to let customers start using the older GPT models again. By August 11, Altman was in full screencap apology mode trying to cauterize the flow of bad vibes.

“If you have been following the GPT-5 rollout, one thing you might be noticing is how much of an attachment some people have to specific AI models,” he posted on X earlier today. “It feels different and stronger than the kinds of attachment people have had to previous kinds of technology (and so suddenly deprecating old models that users depended on in their workflows was a mistake).”

The tenor of this self-inflicted debacle should be familiar to anyone who’s played Destiny, World of Warcraft, or dozens of other online multiplayer games. It’s the same mix of developer hubris, corporate profit motive, hyper fandom, and “Sorry. Im sorry. Im trying to remove it.” An upcoming expansion is sold with lofty promises. It arrives full of half-baked ideas and stealth nerfs. Players encounter a surprising number of bugs. Meanwhile the prices in the microtransaction shop are going up and the places where you can earn rewards for free are disappearing.

“This guy communicates in a way that is indistinguishable from a community manager of a live service video game having a botched expansion release,” wrote one Bluesky user in response. “Seems kind of humiliating.” Vocal AI critic Ed Zitron, who pegged GPT-5 as generative AI’s enshittification moment, was more direct. “This is the ultimate folly of OpenAI: they engaged gamer-like hype, got gamer-like fandom, and now face the wrath of gamer-like hate,” he wrote today.

The GTP-5 fiasco revolved around a few main issues. While it was promised as another big leap in the model’s capabilities, what really seemed to be going on was that it was just routing queries to lots of different models to save time and money. There was also a very limiting cap on the number of queries users outside of the most expensive plans could make each week. Finally, there was the disappearances of GPT-4o, one of OpenAI’s most popular models which also had a reputation for being “sycophantic.”

“ChatGPT psychosis” is one of the biggest concerns with the billion-dollar cash-burning enterprise right now. Chat bots can suck users into “delusional spirals” with them. People are reportedly being involuntarily committed or jailed after becoming obsessed with their GPT interactions. One guy thought he had trained his AI to become self-aware and that it was talking to God for him.

Altman clearly thinks this aspect of ChatGPT can be harmful in the wrong hands. But many of the people currently paying for ChatGPT also clearly prefer it. And he’s spent so long packaging OpenAI’s platform-shift moonshot as a grand cosmic journey everyone’s on together that dialing down the snake oil is no longer an option. After years of hyping AGI (artificial general intelligence), Altman told Wall Street last week that it’s actually “not a super useful term.”

This is the part in the live-service hype cycle where studios usually go from talking about how their game is completely transformative and unlike anything else you’ve ever played before to offering very in-the-weeds explanations of why patch notes that are impossible for outsiders to parse will overhaul the game into the best version of the thing you already love. The players, who have invested not just their money and free time but also no small chunk of their identity in how your product makes them feel will now become like the dinosaurs at Jurassic Park. They are not trapped in your hyper-complex, infinitely monetizable skinner box. You are trapped in whatever they insist on perverting it into. Even if that’s an expensive rabbit hole full of apocalyptic conspiracies.

Skyrora has become the first British company to secure a license to launch a rocket from the United Kingdom.

The U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted Scotland-based Skyrora a license for up to 16 launches a year from SaxaVord Spaceport, located on the Shetland Islands off the coast of Scotland.

It’s the first time a vertical launch licence has been granted to a U.K.-based company. It allows Skyrora to launch its suborbital Skylark L rocket from SaxaVord, which has already received a safety license from the CAA. The move is also a step toward Skyrora launching its larger orbital rocket, the Skylark XL.

The licensing approval process considered factors such as safety, international obligations and environmental mitigations concerning Skyrora’s planned launches, according to the CAA.

"Becoming the first homegrown company in the U.K. to receive a launch operator license is a testament to the hard work and dedication of everyone at Skyrora," Volodymyr Levykin, CEO of Skyrora, said in a statement.

"It is essential that the U.K. has sovereign launch capabilities — not only to unlock commercial activity for companies that need to access space and to help achieve the government’s objectives for becoming a global player in the space sector, but also from a strategic defence consideration," Levykin continued.

A first launch is not expected before the end of 2025, however. Levykin told Reuters that, despite having acquired a launch license and having a rocket ready, "it is unlikely that Skyrora will be able to complete its launch from the U.K. this year."

He added that the company has options to launch from Australia, Oman and potentially Iceland, with Skyrora having made a failed launch attempt from Iceland with the Skylark L back in 2022.

Skyrora is not the first company of any provenance to receive a vertical launch license from the U.K. CAA. Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) of Germany received an orbital launch license in January, allowing it to launch up to 10 times a year. A year ago, the company’s RFA One rocket exploded during a static-fire test at SaxaVord.

RFA was one of five companies selected for the European Space Agency’s European Launcher Challenge, which aims to foster independent access to space for the continent with small and medium-sized rockets.

Skyrora was not among the selected firms, though its U.K. competitor, Orbex, was chosen. In late March, Germany’s Isar Aerospace made an unsuccessful first orbital launch attempt from the European mainland.

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Nature-Inspired Gel Explains Why This Duck Is Stuck

By Andrea Tamayo edited by Sarah Lewin Frasier

On the shores of a beach in northern Japan, waves pummel a rubber duck stubbornly stuck to a rock. Thanks to a new supersticky hydrogel lining its base, the toy won’t budge.

Hydrogels are soft, jellylike materials used in many fields. In medicine, they can dress wounds and deliver drugs. In agriculture, they can help soil hold more water. But making substances sticky is tough—and underwater, it’s even tougher. The glues typically don’t hold well under a wet and salty surf.

Nature, however, has a solution. Creatures such as barnacles and mussels naturally produce proteins that let them stick to wet surfaces. Inspired by these adhesive abilities, researchers combed through catalogs of these animals’ protein structures to mimic their stickiest features. Then, the scientists incorporated these protein structures into the hydrogels and tested them. After running several experiments, the team fed the results to a machine-learning system so that it could design a hydrogel with even stronger glue. The system came up with three superadhesive designs, composed of different protein structures, which the researchers described this week in Nature.

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Jonathan Barnes, a polymer scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the study, was impressed by the sheer strength of the enhanced hydrogels. In one experiment, the researchers used one of the gels to glue together pairs of plates made of one of three different materials—ceramic, glass and titanium—in a tank of saline. Each glued pair had a kilogram-mass load suspended below it. The gel held on for more than a year. “To last for a year is incredible,” Barnes says.

All three of the artificial-intelligence-designed hydrogels showed similar strength in artificial seawater. But one outperformed the others when tested in deionized water, which is devoid of charge and not found in nature. The differences in strength show that some adhesive materials may be more equipped for specific environments than others. “We are now working to tune this difference and test them in different conditions,” says study co-author Jian Ping Gong, a polymer scientist at Hokkaido University in Japan. “We also want to improve and [find] other formulations that can work on metal, for example.”

After synthesizing the ultrasticky gels, the scientists took two of them into the field to test their real-world capabilities. The researchers used one gel to seal a hole at the base of a three-meter-long pipe that was filled with tap water to simulate a high-pressure water leak. And they used the other to affix a rubber duck onto a rock to see how well the technology fared in seawater. One day these gels could help researchers develop artificial skin or repair underwater and offshore structures.

“[The study] points to tougher, faster and more reliable wet adhesives—for medical sealing, marine infrastructure and emergency repairs,” says Ximin He, a materials scientist who studies biologically inspired materials at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was not involved in the paper. “The data?driven playbook they use could shorten the path from idea to material across many applications that affect daily life.”

Future technology could one day allow a miniature, laser-propelled spacecraft — no heavier than a paperclip — to travel to a nearby black hole, according to a bold new proposal published on Thursday (Aug. 7).

The ambitious mission would aim to test the limits of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in one of the universe’s most extreme environments. It may sound like the plot of a sci-fi novel, but to cosmologist Cosimo Bambi, this idea is rooted in real physics — and could be achievable within our lifetime.

"It may sound really crazy, and in a sense closer to science fiction," Bambi, who is a researcher in the department of physics at Fudan University in China, said in a statement. "But people said we’d never detect gravitational waves because they’re too weak. We did—100 years later. People thought we’d never observe the shadows of black holes," he added. "Now, 50 years later, we have images of two."

"The possibility of an interstellar mission to study a black hole is not completely unrealistic, even if it is certainly very speculative and extremely challenging," he wrote in a paper about the idea.The plan calls for launching one or more tiny spacecraft, called "nanocrafts," to orbit a nearby black hole. Each gram-scale probe would be outfitted with sensors and a light sail, then propelled to nearly a third the speed of light using powerful ground-based lasers.

At that speed, a nanocraft could reach a black hole located 20 to 25 light-years away in about 60 to 75 years, the study estimates. The data it collects would take another 20 to 25 years to reach Earth, putting the total mission duration at nearly a century.

One of the key goals would be to determine whether black holes truly possess event horizons, the invisible boundaries beyond which nothing — not even light — can escape. General relativity predicts the existence of these phenomena, but they’ve never been directly confirmed.

In the proposed mission, one nanocraft would observe another as it plunges toward the black hole. If an event horizon exists, the falling probe’s signal should gradually redshift and fade, consistent with Einstein’s predictions. But if the black hole is instead a "fuzzball" — a theoretical object without an event horizon, proposed by some alternative models — the signal could vanish more abruptly, potentially pointing to new physics.

"We would be able to obtain very valuable information about black holes and general relativity that might be difficult to obtain in other ways," Bambi wrote in the paper.

The mission would require two major advances: the discovery of a sufficiently close black hole, and the development of laser propulsion systems and miniature spacecraft capable of surviving interstellar travel. While the closest known black hole, Gaia BH1, is a little over 1,500 light-years from Earth, stellar evolution models suggest an as-yet-undetected one could lie just 20 to 25 light-years from Earth, the new study notes.

"I think it’s reasonable to expect we could find a nearby one within the next decade," Bambi said in the statement.

Today, building the necessary laser array would cost around $1.1 trillion, far beyond the reach of current science budgets. But if trends in technology continue, Bambi estimates that cost could fall to around one billion euros within 30 years, putting it on par with current flagship space missions.

"We don’t have the technology now," Bambi said in the statement. "But in 20 or 30 years, we might."

"If there exists a black hole within 20–25 light-years of Earth and we find a way to discover it, it is probably only an issue of time to reach the technology necessary to send a probe to the object," he wrote in the paper.

The paper was published on Thursday (Aug. 7) in the journal iScience.

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