“Starbase is a newly incorporated Texas city that doubles as the headquarters for SpaceX, an aerospace company founded by Elon Musk. The 1.5-square-mile municipality includes a rocket launch site, manufacturing facilities, and fewer than 300 SpaceX employees living in modest houses and Airstream trailers. Following a near-unanimous vote — largely by SpaceX workers — Starbase officially became a city in May 2025. Now, plans are underway to expand it into a full-fledged company town, with additional housing, stores and restaurants to accommodate more workers, who currently commute 40 minutes from Brownsville. But SpaceX’s growth has upset other local residents who worry about the adverse effects that Starbase is having on the environment, wildlife and public beach access…”

AI is getting good… almost too good. Like, write-its-own-songs-that-don’t-suck kinda good. Who knows? The next “Don’t Stop Believing” could very well be devised by the likes of bots with great programming and exquisite taste. Bots like Supermusic AI, we mean. This impressive AI takes your lyrics and adds instrumentals and vocals, creating a complete song that could hold its own on the Billboard Hot 100. Don’t believe it? Just click below and scroll to listen to some soundbites — and let us know whether you can tell if it’s AI… or not. [Ad]

“A baby boy with a devastating genetic disease is thriving after becoming the first known person to receive a bespoke, CRISPR therapy-for-one, designed to correct his specific disease-causing mutation. Little KJ Muldoon, now nearly ten months old, is doing well after receiving three doses of a gene-editing treatment to mend a mutation that had impaired his body’s ability to process protein, his parents told reporters this week. But it is too soon to use the word ‘cure’, says Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and one of Muldoon’s physicians. ‘This is still really early days,’ she says. ‘We know we have more to learn from him.’”

“A charred scroll recovered from a Roman villa that was buried under ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago has been identified as the influential work of an ancient Greek philosopher. Researchers discovered the title and author on the Herculaneum scroll after X-raying the carbonised papyrus and virtually unwrapping it on a computer, the first time such crucial details have been gleaned from the approach.”

First the goal was to make phones portable and smaller. Then, we started making them bigger again. In a world of plus-sized and foldable smartphones, NanoPhone brings cellphones back to exactly what they were designed for: simplicity and portability. It has 4G connectivity, video chats, and even social media apps — all in a credit-card-sized device. For less than $100, it’s making us think that bigger doesn’t always mean better. [Ad]

“Males of the species Anolis proboscis — called the Pinocchio lizard, among other common names — sport long, nose-like proboscises off the tips of their snouts. … After the species re-emerged from the ranks of the possibly extinct, scientists got busy trying to learn more about it. One of the most compelling questions was, ‘What the heck is that proboscis for?’ In 2014, researchers captured eight males and five females near Mindo and released pairs of them in a tree to observe their behavior. They learned that the lizard’s horn (which is not a nose — the lizard’s nostrils are on the top of its snout near the base of the proboscis) is primarily a tool de amor.”