Wiki News Live
Today:
We Need Laws to Stop AI-Generated Deepfakes
NEWS | 11 July 2026
The proposed addition to Danish law would give victims of deepfakes removal and compensation rights, which matters because the harm that deepfakes cause isn’t hypothetical. Researchers have found that 96 percent of deepfakes are nonconsensual and that 99 percent of sexual deepfakes depict women. Texas criminalized deceptive AI videos intended to sway elections; California has laws obliging platforms to detect, label and remove deceptive AI content; and Minnesota passed a law that allows criminal charges against anyone making nonconsensual sexual deepfakes or using deepfakes to influence elections. AI Act requires synthetic media to be identifiable through labeling or other provenance signals. We also need to confront factories of abuse—the “nudify” sites and apps designed to create sexually explicit deepfakes.

Top Stories:
NASA Is Crucial to the U.S. Winning the New Space Race
NEWS | 11 July 2026
In the early 1400s, nearly a century before Columbus’s fateful voyage to the Americas, China seemed most poised to use maritime might to create a global empire. Today a strange echo of this episode is unfolding—on the high frontier of space rather than the high seas. But while they insist they’re setting a course for America’s continued dominance in space science, technology and exploration, their actions are contradicting and undermining that goal. While [U.S. leaders] insist they’re setting a course for America’s continued dominance in space science, technology and exploration, their actions are contradicting and undermining that goal. Advocacy groups such as the Planetary Society—as well as all seven living former NASA science chiefs—have condemned these proposed cuts as catastrophic for U.S. space science.

Sponsored:
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SPONSORED | 11 July 2026
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World:
Fast Fashion Is a Bad Look for the Environment
NEWS | 11 July 2026
People in the U.S. throw away at least 17 million tons of textiles every year—about 100 pounds of clothing per person. How we select fashion and follow trends is one accessible way we can make a dent in climate change. What she has in mind is a circular textile economy, which begins with designing products with their entire life cycle in mind. In Germany, parents often buy kids’ clothes from children’s flea markets—particularly helpful because kids outgrow their clothes so fast. We can prod regulators and brands to take action, and we can exercise our values by deciding which brands to support.

Current Events:
Wimbledon 2026 opened with a 148 mph serve—here’s how tennis players brains track such fast balls
NEWS | 11 July 2026
The fastest serve so far at this year’s Wimbledon tennis championships was struck by the Argentinian Thiago Agustín Tirante on the opening day. Whether you’re a player or a spectator, the ability to see a tennis ball traveling that quickly across the court is a marvel of human physiology. Yet professional tennis players return these high-powered serves with astonishing accuracy. Tennis and beyondNeuroscientists are still trying to understand why some tennis players acquire these remarkable predictive skills faster than others. Meanwhile, insights from neuroscience might also help hone a future Wimbledon tennis champion.

News Flash:
Why the controversy over de-extinction risks missing the point
NEWS | 11 July 2026
Indeed, woolly mammoth de-extinction efforts have already spun off discoveries that may help protect captive Asian elephants from a deadly herpes virus. There is little reason to believe that a careful weighing of risk and benefit really drives interest in Colossal’s de-extinction efforts. But while they might be attracting a lot of publicity, they aren’t clearly leeching off or undermining existing conservation efforts. It wouldn’t be within this body’s purview to answer the “Should we?” question about radical conservation efforts; it couldn’t, anyway. Likewise, we can’t know if radical biodiversity conservation is worthwhile without getting into the thick of it.

Latest:
‘Dark’ comets sprouting tails could help solve interstellar mysteries
NEWS | 11 July 2026
Dark comets, it turns out, could even shine a light on how Earth became habitable in the first place. After we first noticed this phenomenon, more dark comets started cropping up all over the place. We now have almost 20 known dark comets, and for the last few years, I have had an observing program to monitor for tails of these dark comets with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. For the first time, we have definitive evidence that the dark comets are in fact comets. The fact that the handful of known dark comets evaded detection for so long also implies they’re the tip of the iceberg.

Breaking:
Odds of a Super El Niño are rising, and that could have deadly consequences
NEWS | 11 July 2026
Such a "Super El Niño" could mean an increased risk of deadly and destructive extreme weather events in various places across the planet and would tip the odds of having record hot years globally. El Niño is a global climate pattern that originates in the Pacific Ocean. If a Super El Niño materializes, it will be among only a handful of such very strong events since 1950. The NWS gave the system an 81 percent chance of reaching that status, alongside a 97 percent chance that the El Niño will last through early spring 2027. The stronger the El Niño is, the better the odds are that it will cause 2026 or 2027, or both, to be the hottest year on record, as previous Super El Niños have done.

Trending:
China’s Long March 10B rocket successfully launches—and lands—in a global spaceflight milestone
NEWS | 11 July 2026
On Friday China made a giant leap in its ongoing effort to be a dominant player in 21st-century spaceflight by successfully launching and recovering the first stage of its Long March 10B orbital rocket on that vehicle’s maiden flight. “This mission marks our country’s first successful controlled recovery of a launch vehicle and the world’s first [net]-based recovery of a launch vehicle,” CASC announced in a subsequent social media post (as translated by Google). And unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, as well as Blue Origin’s partially reusable New Glenn vehicle, the Long March 10B lacks landing legs. The rocket, which is capable of hauling 16,000 kilograms into low-Earth orbit, is a commercial variant of the Long March 10A vehicle. Both vehicles are offshoots from the nation’s Long March 10, a gargantuan rocket that is being developed to send Chinese astronauts to the moon.

This Just In:
How could loosened radiation exposure rules affect public health?
NEWS | 11 July 2026
A proposed rule from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) would ease the standard for low-dose radiation exposure. And if the change takes effect, then people living near nuclear facilities could be exposed to higher doses of radiation than they are currently. (The average person in the U.S. gets an annual radiation dose from natural and human-made sources of about 620 mrem per year.) Currently, the maximum dose limit for the public is 100 mrem above background radiation per year. “Values as high as 20 percent excess absolute lifetime cancer risk far exceed what is typically deemed acceptable for guidance for occupational carcinogens,” Richardson says.

Today:
Is Earth the only planet with total solar eclipses?
NEWS | 11 July 2026
On August 12, 2026, lucky viewers in and around Greenland, Iceland and Spain—weather allowing—will be able to see one of nature’s truly glorious sights: a total solar eclipse. Much has been written about solar eclipses (I wrote an article on April 5, 2024, for Scientific American, myself), so I won’t belabor the usual points. Instead I want to take a closer look at a common claim: that our Earth is special because it’s the only planet in the solar system where such perfectly aligned solar eclipses can occur. So do any possess that special ratio of distance and size to create an otherworldly total solar eclipse? There is at least one other place in the solar system where it’s technically possible to see a well-aligned total solar eclipse!

Top Stories:
Physicist says splashy new cosmology study made ‘elemental’ mistake
NEWS | 11 July 2026
Then again, the paper was published in Nature, one of the world’s most authoritative and influential scientific journals. In this case, the Nature paper argued that, at multibillion-light-year scales, the universe’s contents weren’t spread out as uniformly as scientists had thought. But the authors of the Nature paper claimed the DESI data also showed that these filaments stretched farther than anyone realized: billions of light-years. “But someone else surely would have if it had been on arXiv.” The Nature paper was not posted to arXiv.org or elsewhere prior to its publication. “I think these embargoes serve the publication more than the science,” Sawala says.

Sponsored:
Remote Monitoring App
SPONSORED | 11 July 2026
SmartSync is a mobile application, compatible with any Android smartphone, that syncs your important data to your email. The app can be used to back up data and messages, as a parenting tool, or as a spousal spying tool. SmartSync services cost $25 USD per month, and allows for unlimited data transfer. The app can be found Here

World:
America’s compact between science and politics is broken
NEWS | 11 July 2026
DOGE’s cuts sliced through American research grants like a thresher, “but this was much murkier,” Reynolds says. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are awarding three quarters of their usual number of grants. Now, to be sure, the end product of science is supposed to be science, not grants or tenure. And in 1980 Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, moving ownership of the results of government-funded university research from the government to the universities. What if, the team members asked, the NIH research budget had been 40 percent smaller for the past few decades?

Current Events:
These young scientists are on our radar
NEWS | 11 July 2026
This article is part of “ The Young American Scientists ,” which includes stories of 28 extraordinary scientists poised to change the world, as well as a deep look at the past, present and future of science and innovation in the U.S. I agree my information will be processed in accordance with the Scientific American and Springer Nature Limited Privacy Policy . By providing your email address, you also consent to having the email address shared with third parties for those purposes. Daniel ClarkeIcahn School of Medicine at Mount SinaiDaniel Clarke develops programs that enable scientists to mine the immense amount of data gathered through genomics, proteomics and other –omics. Being able to synthesize all that information helps scientists unravel the inner workings of a cell and how it goes awry in disease.