When George W. Maschke applied to work for the FBI in 1994, he had already held a security clearance for over 11 years. The government had deemed him trustworthy through his career in the Army. But soon, a machine and a man would not come to the same conclusion.

His application to be a special agent had passed initial muster. And so, in the spring of 1995, according to his account, he found himself sitting across from an FBI polygraph examiner, answering questions about his life and loyalties.

He told the truth, he said in an interview with Undark. But in a blog post on his website, he recalled the examiner told him that the polygraph machine—which measured some of Maschke’s physiological responses—indicated that he was being deceptive about keeping classified information secret, and about his contacts with foreign intelligence agencies.

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The latest research suggests there’s far more to good fortune than mere accident

When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not their credentials, not their intelligence, not their experience. Luck. For years, this anecdote struck me as charmingly eccentric – the kind of thing a titan of industry gets away with saying because nobody around them dares to laugh. Then I began studying the neuroscience of fortunate people, and I stopped laughing, too.

What my research has revealed is that luck, far from being a roll of the cosmic dice, operates through identifiable patterns of brain chemistry and behaviour. The consistently lucky are not blessed by fate. They are running different neurological software – and the remarkable thing is that this software can be installed.

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Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana , a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the "oxygen constrain hypothesis."

For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because insect breathing systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen levels dropped, there wasn’t enough to support giant bugs anymore. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Insect breathing

Unlike mammals, insects don't have a centralized pair of lungs and a closed circulatory system that delivers oxygen-rich blood to their tissues. “They breathe through internalized tubing called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

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Over a decade ago, when I was first starting to pretend I could write about quantum mechanics, I covered a truly bizarre experiment . One half of a pair of entangled photons was sent through a device it could navigate as either a particle or a wave. After it was clear of the device, the other half of the pair was measured in a way that forced the first to act as one or the other. Once that was done, the first invariably behaved as if it were whatever the measurement made it into the whole time.

It was as if the measurement had reached backward in time to alter the photon's behavior, raising questions about whether causality itself actually applied to quantum mechanics.

Unbeknownst to me, physicists have been asking the same question and have designed experiments to probe it in detail. A few weeks back, they provided an experiment that seems to indicate it's possible to create quantum superpositions of two different series of events, essentially making the question of whether A or B happened first a matter of probability*. While the current experiment leaves a few loopholes, the researchers behind the work think they could ultimately be eliminated.

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Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals , including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can asphyxiate animals or cause fatal injuries; even when the animals are tossed back to sea, they frequently die. Bycatch is also a dilemma for fishermen—entangled creatures can destroy equipment, costing time, money, and fisheries’ reputations.

Over the decades, conservationists, researchers, and fishermen have developed ways to minimize various kinds of bycatch in different fishing stocks around the world. But putting these solutions to work is often a challenge, and many mitigation strategies are never widely implemented.

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Cuts of nearly 70% may force university departments to close and damage UK’s research progress, senior scientists say

British physicists have shaped our understanding of nature and the universe for more than a century, uncovering the building blocks of matter and furthering our knowledge on cosmic puzzles from the big bang to black holes.

But senior scientists warned on Friday that the field of particle theory faces an existential threat after universities were informed of savage cuts to research. Brian Cox , the TV scientist and professor at the University of Manchester, said the impact amounted to the “destruction of the future”.

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Welcome to Edition 8.35 of the Rocket Report! The headlines this week are again dominated by the big changes afoot in NASA's exploration program, with the announcement of a Moon base and a nuclear-powered rocket to Mars. The shakeups come as the agency is just a week away from launching Artemis II, a circumlunar flight carrying a crew of four around the Moon. The Ars space team will be writing extensively about this mission in the days ahead, and we may skip the Rocket Report next week to focus on our Artemis II coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

NASA announces nuclear rocket demo. NASA's announcement Tuesday that it will "pause" work on a lunar space station and focus on building a surface base on the Moon was no big surprise to anyone paying attention to the Trump administration’s space policy. But what should NASA do with hardware already built for the Gateway outpost? NASA spent close to $4.5 billion on developing a human-tended complex in orbit around the Moon since the Gateway program’s official start in 2019. There are pieces of the station undergoing construction and testing in factories scattered around the world. The centerpiece of Gateway, called the Power and Propulsion Element, is closest to being ready for launch. NASA’s rejigged exploration roadmap, revealed Tuesday in an all-day event at NASA headquarters in Washington, calls for repurposing the core module for a nuclear-electric propulsion demonstration in deep space, Ars reports .

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We all need a little validation now and then from friends or family, but sometimes too much validation can backfire—and the same is true of AI chatbots. There have been several recent cases of overly sycophantic AI tools leading to negative outcomes, including users harming themselves and/or others . But the harm might not be limited to these extreme cases, according to a new paper published in the journal Science. As more people rely on AI tools for everyday advice and guidance, their tendency to overly flatter and agree with users can have harmful effects on those users' judgment, particularly in the social sphere.

The study showed that such tools can reinforce maladaptive beliefs, discourage users from accepting responsibility for a situation, or discourage them from repairing damaged relationships. That said, the authors were quick to emphasize during a media briefing that their findings were not intended to feed into "doomsday sentiments" about such AI models. Rather, the objective is to further our understanding of how such AI models work and their impact on human users, in hopes of making them better while the models are still in the early-ish development stages.

Co-author Myra Cheng, a graduate student at Stanford University, said she and her co-authors were inspired to study this issue after they began noticing a pronounced increase in the number of people around them who had started relying on AI chatbots for relationship advice—and often ended up receiving bad advice because the AI would take their side no matter what. Their interest was bolstered by recent surveys showing nearly half of Americans under 30 have asked an AI tool for personal advice. "Given how common this is becoming, we wanted to understand how an overly affirming AI advice might impact people's real-world relationships," said Cheng.

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Study into how fertilisation could work in space finds sperm may get disorientated when trying to find an egg

Sperm in space are likely to get disoriented and lost while struggling to find their way to an egg, a new study has found.

When exposed to microgravity in experiments, sperm tumble around like an untethered astronaut, according to Adelaide University researchers.

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