The lawsuit says the prominent conservative podcaster falsely claimed the protesters were assaulting ICE officers during demonstrations at an ICE facility in Illinois last year.

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive substances in the Late Pleistocene; and an intriguing technical description of a telescope attributed to Galileo.

A hint of dark matter?

Physicists believe dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of matter in our universe, with the strongest (but not only) candidate being so-called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs). But directly detecting WIMPs, or other alternative hypothetical dark matter particles, has eluded physicists for decades. We might have our first glimpse, however, courtesy of the LUX-ZEPLIN detector buried deep in a gold mine in South Dakota. Those potentially exciting results were presented in a scientific talk at the 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference in Japan, with a preprint available on the arXiv. (It has been submitted to Physical Review Letters for peer review.)

The announcement came with strong caveats: the signal is just a hint, well below the threshold needed to confirm discovery, and might just be a statistical fluke. Anyone who regularly follows dark matter news knows that past tantalizing anomalies evaporated as more data came in. But the LUX-ZEPLIN team was unable to account for this event and decided to report their result to the broader physics community. They are still collecting data, as is the XENONnT at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. And China's PandaX detector is currently being built.

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The America First strategy asks for a Memorandum of Understanding as a condition for healthcare and development aid. It's been praised for promoting self-reliance but criticized for its conditions.

(Image credit: U.S. Office of Foreign Assistance)

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It's a tale as old as last week: OpenAI's new agent platform, called Dots, is full of cute little guys who can do your bidding.

But unlike the ultra-approachable Meta Muse, Dots feel very much like using workplace software that happens to be able to order you a burrito - emphasis on work.

OpenAI announced Dots earlier this week. Like Muse, Dots have blobby, anthropomorphic avatars and customizable names. In the future, OpenAI says you'll be able to have multiple Dots, but right now you get one. I named mine Dotty McDotface.

The interface looks similar to Muse's; you chat with the agent in one window and follow its work in another as it …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In late 1970, a Titan IIIC rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at what was then called Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried a top-secret payload for the US military.

Much has changed in spaceflight since then. The Titan IIIC would bow out in 1982 after dozens of launches. Various Titans continued launching from Space Launch Complex 40 until 2005, at which point the US Air Force—in a competitive process hotly opposed by United Launch Alliance—turned the pad over to a small, largely unknown startup called SpaceX. And Cape Canaveral is now a "Space Force" station.

But those unspecified payloads? Until last month, some of them were still flying operationally.

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