The new Denza Z9 GT can drive over 1,000 km (621 miles) without stopping, fully recharge in under 10 minutes, and starts at about $40,000 in China. Now, BYD is unleashing it in Europe, the UK, and several other markets.
Tesla has pushed the planned public demo of its next-generation Roadster to August or later, according to a report from The Information citing four people with knowledge of the program. It marks yet another delay for the vehicle first unveiled as a prototype nearly nine years ago.
The demo, expected to take place in Texas, is meant to showcase the SpaceX cold gas thruster system that Tesla claims will allow the Roadster to achieve extreme acceleration and even lift off the ground.
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Tesla Semi nailing a big test, BMW iX3’s range impressing in a new test, Xpeng catching up to Tesla, and more.
Understanding the nature of our cosmos requires an accurate map of how galaxies are spread throughout it. For decades, astronomers suspected that something vast lurked behind the Milky Way’s dense, dusty disk in our sky. There were indirect, subtle distortions present in galaxy motions that we could see, showing unexplained gravitational pulls. But the structureContinue reading "Giant supercluster discovered hiding behind the Milky Way"
The post Giant supercluster discovered hiding behind the Milky Way appeared first on Astronomy Magazine.
A dark void once dismissed as cosmic dust may be a far more fascinating dance of black holes.
MILAN – Italian ground segment operator Leaf Space unveiled a new space connectivity service May 27. The technology, named TreeNet, aims to make space communications more seamless by treating individual […]
The post Leaf Space partners with D-Orbit and EnduroSat to test connectivity service appeared first on SpaceNews.
We’ve got some notable headliners closing out this week’s Green Deals, starting with Yozma’s Anniversary Sale that is offering up to $1,043+ in savings when using our exclusive code, giving you $500 price cuts and $448 FREE bundles on the IN 10 Electric Mini Dirt Bike and IN 10 Pro Electric Dirt Bike starting from $1,044, not to mention further savings playing its prize wheel game. We also have Lectric’s newly launched Father’s Day Sale that is offering up to $893 bundle savings on e-bikes starting from $799. From there, you can find the new Segway Navimow i215 LiDAR Robot Lawn Mower with second-ever savings to its $1,399 low, among other models – plus, EGO’s 10-inch and 18-inch misting fans, Greenworks’ 60V 20-inch pole hedge trimmer, and GOOLOO’s 12-in-1 A7 jump starter + air compressor. And don’t forget about the hangover deals collected down at the bottom of the page, like yesterday’s exclusive 3,584Wh Jackery HomePower 3600 Plus power station + bundle deals, the new low on EGO’s Select Cut Touch Drive mower bundle, and more.
Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.
Range Rover has confirmed the electric SUV is still set to go on sale in the next few months, after it was delayed last year.
It's just crazy enough to work.
The search for a ninth planet in our solar system could reach a turning point as soon as this year, according to a planetary scientist involved in the hunt for a mysterious object believed to be lurking in the outer reaches of the Solar System.
For the past decade, astronomers around the world have been searching for evidence of another resident in our planetary neighborhood. As far back as 2016, there were already hints that something might be out there, given the odd orbits of distant objects like Sedna, discovered in 2003.
Now, two astronomers—California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers Konstantin Batygin, a professor of planetary science, and his colleague, Dr. Michael E. Brown—believe there is a high probability that the confirmation of a ninth planet in our solar system could be on the horizon.
Batygin and Brown’s findings suggest Planet Nine may have a mass roughly 5 to 10 times that of Earth and orbit, on average, about 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune, which circles the Sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles. If it exists, the distant world would take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to complete a single orbit around the Sun.
“This would be a real ninth planet,” says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy, in a 2016 statement. “There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It’s a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that’s still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting.”
Evidence for Planet Nine comes from a small group of distant Kuiper Belt objects whose highly elongated orbits appear clustered in the same direction and share similar orbital tilts relative to the plane of the known planets.
Researchers argue that this type of alignment is unlikely to occur by chance. Alternative explanations involving the Kuiper Belt itself have also been explored, but models suggest the belt would require far more mass than has been observed to produce the effect.
Brown’s excitement shines through: “It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” he says, adding that the odds of having that happen are something close to one in 100.
Computer simulations suggest that a large, unseen planet in the outer Solar System could maintain these orbital alignments through its gravitational influence. The models also demonstrate how mean-motion resonances could keep the distant objects in stable orbits while preventing collisions with the proposed planet.
The hypothesis may also explain the unusual trajectories of objects such as Sedna and 2012 VP113, whose highly elongated orbits do not bring them close to Neptune.
In July, additional data relevant to the Planet Nine debate emerged with the discovery of a newly identified object nicknamed “Ammonite,” found by Japanese astronomers using the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii. The object is only the fourth known sednoid, joining a rare class of distant celestial bodies with unusual orbits beyond Pluto.
“The fact that Ammonite’s current orbit does not align with those of the other three sednoids lowers the likelihood of the Planet Nine hypothesis,” said Dr. Yukun Huang of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, who conducted simulations of Ammonite’s orbit in a July interview with The Debrief.
“It is possible that a planet once existed in the Solar System but was later ejected, causing the unusual orbits we see today,” says Huang.
Astronomy is often a science of probabilities and competing hypotheses, but Planet Nine presents a relatively rare case where new observations may soon provide a clear answer. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile recently began scientific operations and could provide the data needed to confirm—or rule out—the existence of Planet Nine.
Perched atop a mountain in Chile, the NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory observes the night sky in extraordinary detail. Equipped with the largest digital camera ever built for astronomy, it will repeatedly survey the sky over ten years, producing an unprecedented time-lapse record of the Universe.
In a recent podcast interview, Batygin told The Debrief how his and Brown’s theory could soon be tested.
“The Planet Nine hypothesis is kind of readily refutable, right? I find that to be quite important,” says Batygin. “There’s a new telescope that came online called the Vera Rubin Observatory, and as it collects data this year, we will, I think, know one way or another whether Planet Nine is really out there or not.”
Batygin says Rubin’s greatest strengths are its survey efficiency and extensive sky coverage. By repeatedly imaging vast portions of the sky, Rubin is uniquely suited to detecting a faint, distant, and slowly moving object like Planet Nine.
“If Rubin detects an object at hundreds of astronomical units from the Sun, and its orbit is consistent with the predicted Planet Nine parameter space, that would essentially be it,” Batygin explained, in terms of what kind of observation would provide a definitive answer regarding Planet Nine’s existence.
“At that distance, anything visible to Rubin would have to be very large, so a direct detection would be the decisive confirmation,” he added, although suggesting that “whenever you find some interesting pattern in the data, the first thing you have to ask is, ‘will it hold up to additional scrutiny from [some] fresh kind of unbiased data?”
He points to this summer being a turning point in his research: “We will get that new batch of discoveries basically starting this summer, starting summer twenty twenty-six. It will be a direct test of all lines of evidence that we have for the existence of Planet Nine.”
“ You can imagine Vera Rubin comes online, looks at the sky for a few months, finds an object that it can see that is far away, that is hundreds of astronomical units away, meaning hundreds of times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, as far away from the Sun as the Earth,” adds Batygin. “That’s Planet Nine. Like, that’s direct confirmation, right? Then you close the book and move on to the more interesting question of like characterization.”
Batygin suggests it would solidify many of the lines of evidence for Planet Nine, even if his team does not discover the object itself. “Nevertheless, that would lend support to its existence because, if the solar system is structured in this way, then something must be sculpting that structure.”
Although he has devoted years to the Planet Nine hypothesis, Batygin says he remains open to the possibility that the planet does not exist and believes the data must ultimately determine the outcome.
“It would definitely suck,” Batygin told The Debrief of this possibility, though noting that scientists have to “go where the data takes you, right?”
Over the decades, the Planet Nine hypothesis has inevitably drawn comparisons to “Nibiru,” a supposed hidden world popularized in modern pseudoscientific interpretations of ancient Mesopotamian texts.
The idea gained widespread attention through the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, who argued that ancient Sumerian records described a rogue planet that periodically enters the inner Solar System and causes catastrophic events on Earth. However, mainstream historians and archaeologists reject these interpretations, noting that ancient Mesopotamian flood traditions, including the story of Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, do not identify Nibiru as the cause of a global catastrophe.
When asked on the podcast whether Planet Nine could pose any threat to Earth, Batygin dismissed the idea.
“The important thing to understand about Planet Nine is that if you’re worried about Planet Nine’s gravity destroying things, I would encourage you to revisit the inverse square law of gravity, right?
He explains that gravity increases with mass and falls off as the distance between objects squared, and that Planet Nine is estimated to be five Earth masses, and at a distance of 500-600 astronomical units away. By comparison, Jupiter is 300 Earth masses and only around four astronomical units away.
“So if you’re worried about Planet Nine, you should really, really worry about Jupiter,” Batygin says. “I mean, this is one of the intriguing, frankly humbling things about learning celestial mechanics and understanding how the solar system works at a large scale,” Batygin added.
The confirmation of Planet Nine would be one of the most significant astronomical discoveries of the century, reshaping our understanding of the Solar System and its formation. Textbooks, educational materials, and scientific models would need updating to account for a previously unknown major planet residing far beyond Pluto. More importantly, its discovery could reveal new insights into how planetary systems form and evolve.
Batygin also thinks the influence of such a discovery also might impact science in ways we haven’t yet considered.
“Until we really take a look, we don’t know what kind of awesome and exciting information we’ll discover. This has been true along the way in all planetary exploration. We have been surprised time and time again,” says Batygin.
Batygin also surmises that astronomers “will discover interesting constraints about the birth environment of the Sun itself by studying Planet Nine.”
An exciting future may indeed lie ahead if Planet Nine is soon discovered. Astronomers could eventually determine whether it is a gas giant, an icy world, or something entirely unexpected. Future observations may even reveal details about its atmosphere and composition.
When Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 returned the first close-up images of the outer planets, it marked one of humanity’s greatest scientific achievements. For the first time, people saw distant worlds in remarkable detail rather than as tiny points of light in the night sky.
Now, in 2026, humanity may once again stand on the brink of a major planetary discovery, thanks to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
Fundamentally, confirmation of a ninth planet would not only be a cosmic discovery: it would also offer a reflection of humanity, and a reminder of how much remains unknown, even within our own cosmic backyard.
Chrissy Newton is a PR professional and the founder of VOCAB Communications. She currently appears on The Discovery Channel and Max and hosts the Rebelliously Curious podcast, which can be found on YouTube and on all audio podcast streaming platforms. Follow her on X: @ChrissyNewton, Instagram: @BeingChrissyNewton, and chrissynewton.com. To contact Chrissy with a story, please email chrissy @ thedebrief.org.
NASA instructed astronauts on the International Space Station to briefly shelter in a Dragon spacecraft June 5 as cosmonauts attempted to repair an air leak in a Russian module.
The post Astronauts briefly shelter in Dragon during ISS leak repair appeared first on SpaceNews.
Toyota’s new electric SUVs are selling surprisingly well, becoming top-sellers in several markets. So, why is it pulling back now?
Days after successfully flying its Quarterhorse unmanned aircraft at supersonic speeds, an industry-first defense aviation company, Hermeus, has received the largest-ever contract awarded by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to demonstrate high-Mach flight combined with high-Mach payload release.
The new $ 159 million award, which increases the original contract to a total of $219 million, will allow Hermeus’ engineers to expand on previous high-Mach test flight milestones in direct partnership with the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy, with the goal of providing the American warfighter with the most advanced arsenal capable of delivering munitions and payloads around the world at record-setting speeds.
“By delivering flight-ready aircraft and demonstrating payload release at speed, we will prove this technology can create a decisive military advantage on a timeline that matters,” explained Hermeus CEO and co-founder, AJ Piplica. “Our focus is on providing the Air Force and Navy with the validated data they need to transition these platforms into the future force.”
When announcing the new DIU award, Hermeus executives noted that the program will include a series of “intensive flight tests.” The first is expected later this year, while the final flights are expected sometime in 2027.
Although few specifics were provided, the company said the flights will “prove the aircraft can maintain high speeds and expand its performance limits” while also demonstrating the successful carry and release of payloads at high velocity. The company also noted that all flight data gathered during the development and testing phases “will directly inform service experimentation and future acquisition decisions.”
Although the U.S. Military has several aircraft capable of exceeding the speed of sound, and several more hypersonic (exceeding five times the speed of sound) aircraft and missile prototypes, delivering payloads from high-Mach aircraft has remained a challenge. However, some military experts argue that the U.S. would benefit greatly from the capability.
When discussing the need for high-speed payload release, DIU Military Deputy Major General Joe “Solo” Kunkel said that the largest problems the military is facing in the future are “generally around time and distance,” and the associated challenges with getting to distant locations “in a timeframe that matters.”
“I care about the warfighting capability, providing advantage to our partners and us in the fight, and making sure that we can walk into every fight with swagger,” General Kunkel said, adding that mass producing the technology developed by Hermeus could move it from a test platform to a “game-changing warfighting capability.”
“I think we found a significant number of use cases where it can be used as a weapon,” the General added.
When discussing the company’s approach that convinced the DIU to offer its largest award in the organization’s history, including what they describe as “reclaiming the lost art of rapid iterative prototyping to build the fastest aircraft in the world today,” Hermeus noted that directly partnering with the USAF and USN allows their engineers to align tests with future mission needs and shorten the path from testing to deployment.
“By prioritizing relentless hardware iteration, we deliver high-speed systems at the pace of the modern battlefield,” the company’s statement explained. “We work with the Department of War to provide the high-speed capabilities our nation and its allies need to maintain a durable, asymmetric advantage.”
When discussing the significance of the upcoming tests and the overall need for high-Mach flight payload deployment, including the benefit of the performance data, the company CEO heralded the DIU’s award, noting that the financing will help them move their successful demonstrations into real-world high-Mach platforms.
“This program is about moving high-Mach capability out of the lab and into an operationally relevant environment,” Piplica said.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
A novel phase of matter has been achieved by a team of American researchers, finally realizing a theoretical quantum prediction using nanoscale building blocks, a breakthrough that could pave the way for room-temperature quantum computing.
Researchers at Brown University and the University of Michigan College of Engineering revealed how they briefly stabilized the novel state of matter in a nanoparticle superlattice in a recent paper published in the journal Science. They say their work provides a new method for engineering classes of materials with custom-shaped nanoparticles, which could be applied to quantum computers and other quantum applications.
“Our work is a little bit like kids playing with LEGO blocks,” said co-author Ou Chen, an associate professor of chemistry at Brown. “We synthesize unique nanoscale building blocks and stack them into interesting structures. In this case, we were able to stabilize these theorized transitional structures and demonstrate important quantum optical properties.”
Most metals form in one of two primary groups of crystal structures. The first is face-centered cubic (FCC), the tightest packing arrangement for spherical particles, typically forming a cube with a single particle at each corner and at the center of each face. The other type is body-centered cubic (BCC), a more loosely packed structure in which single particles are still present at the corners, but instead of each face being centered on a particle, one sits at the center of the entire arrangement.
For the most part, atoms form one of these structures as they arrange into a metal, yet at high temperatures, some metals can switch from one structure to another. When it reaches 912° Celsius, Iron will transition from BCC to FCC. One explanation proposed for the transition is the Nishiyama-Wassermann pathway, which suggests that, due to the lower symmetry of the transition phases between FCC and BCC, these phases are fleeting.
The American team behind the recent research decided to test this idea, fabricating one of those low symmetries in between phases with silver nanoparticles
“Materials scientists have cared about how to control the amount of FCC and BCC in their metals for a long time, but the transitions between these phases have been hard to study because they are so unstable,” said co-author Tim Moore, an assistant research scientist at the University of Michigan. “Being able to observe these structures is a fundamental breakthrough in materials science, and it gives us greater control over nanomaterial engineering.”
At the heart of the team’s work was the truncated octahedron, or “mecon,” a 14-sided polyhedron formed by cutting off the vertices of a diamond, producing an intermediate shape between a cube and sphere.
As the team synthesized silver nanoparticles, they varied the heat level during production, resulting in a spectrum of shapes ranging from cubic to spherical, which were coated with long, sticky molecules that bound the particles. They found that the sticky molecules were required for the particles to assemble themselves into the intermediate shapes predicted by the Nishiyama-Wassermann pathway.
Once the particles self-assembled into variously shaped nanoparticle superlattices, the team tested their behavior with computer simulations and physical observations.
The superlattices show evidence of a process known as deep-strong light-matter coupling, in which silver electrons vibrate in unison with light waves, becoming so hybridized they could no longer be treated independently. The similarity of this state to quantum entanglement leaves the team hopeful that their superlattice can be applied to quantum work in the future.
Crucially, this action occurs at room temperature, whereas in previous instances it occurred only at very cold temperatures. This means the work could be useful for developing quantum technologies, which have been limited by the extreme cold required.
“One of the major challenges in quantum computing is maintaining coherent quantum states without requiring extremely low temperatures,” Chen told The Debrief in an email. “Our work suggests that carefully engineered nanoparticle superlattices may provide a scalable materials platform where strong and coherent light–matter interactions can persist at room temperature.”
“In the long term, such systems could potentially be used to create or manipulate quantum states for applications in quantum information science, including quantum communication, sensing, or photonic quantum technologies,” Chen said. “However, it is important to emphasize that this research is still at the fundamental physics and materials discovery stage. We are not yet building a room-temperature quantum computer, but rather exploring new material platforms that may help enable future quantum technologies.”
As research continues, the team is focused on more precisely controlling the superlattices’ quantum optical properties.
“Specifically, we are interested in: Engineering nanoparticle architectures that produce even stronger and more controllable light–matter coupling; Exploring how structural order, particle shape, and lattice symmetry influence quantum optical behavior,” Chen explained, “and Integrating these materials with photonic and optoelectronic platforms for potential quantum-device applications.
“More broadly,” Chen concluded, “we see this work as opening a new direction where nanoscale self-assembly can be used to engineer emergent quantum optical properties that do not exist in the individual nanoparticles alone.”
The paper, “Stabilizing In-Transition Phases of Superlattices Through Shape Control of Silver Nanocrystals,” appeared in Science on May 28, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
A thermal imaging still has been circulating rapidly online, allegedly capturing an unidentified aerial vehicle flying at night near the Groom Lake military base in Nevada, commonly known as Area 51. The image has prompted active discussion and comparisons with publicly available information about the development of a next-generation low-observable fighter aircraft for the United […]
The post Tracking “Ghosts”: Night-time thermal imaging still of a next-generation fighter jet leaked online appeared first on AERONAUT.media.
On the night of June 5, personnel of the Unmanned Systems Forces carried out a successful strike against five civilian cargo vessels operating in the Sea of Azov. These vessels were reportedly used for the illegal transportation of Ukrainian goods from temporarily occupied territories. Details of the operation were provided by the head of the Unmanned […]
The post Night raid in the Sea of Azov: Unmanned Systems Forces drones turn five “ghost” vessels of the occupying forces into targets appeared first on AERONAUT.media.
Amazon will fly its largest number of broadband satellites to date later this month on the first Ariane 6 launch to use upgraded boosters.
The post Next Ariane 6 launch to carry 36 Amazon Leo satellites using upgraded boosters appeared first on SpaceNews.
Xpeng’s head of autonomous driving told Electrek that the company is spending roughly 300 million RMB (~$41 million) per month on AI training alone and believes it has already reached parity with Tesla’s FSD v13 — with v14 within reach before the end of summer.
I sat down with Dr. Xianming Liu, head of Xpeng’s General Intelligence Center, the day after he delivered a keynote at CVPR 2026 in Denver — sharing the stage with Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy and leaders from Nvidia and Waymo at one of the world’s top computer vision conferences.
New DNA evidence reveals bed bugs tracked human expansion from ancient caves to modern cities.
This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes new e-bikes from Monarc and Engwe, frames that are glued together from Flit, new e-bike laws, court-ordered pedaling, and more.
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