NASA just pulled off an irreversible fix on a 49-year-old spacecraft running out of power, and it worked

Happy Wednesday. If you're watching the Perseid meteor shower tonight, you picked a good week for it. Today's lead story is about Voyager 2, the 49-year-old spacecraft currently 12 billion miles from Earth. It was running out of power. NASA engineers made one irreversible move to fix it. No do-overs if it went wrong.

We also have a new drug that nearly doubled motor function scores in toddlers with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, zoo elephants that adapted to wild life in Africa with remarkable ease, and a plant in Birmingham whose first and final flower grew 18 feet through the greenhouse roof.

Here's your good news

—Stephanie S

Voyager 2 launched in 1977. It is now more than 12 billion miles from Earth, sending back data from interstellar space. Its plutonium power source loses roughly four watts per year. Every watt lost means another instrument goes dark.

The engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory decided to try something they called the "Big Bang": simultaneously shut down certain powered components and replace them with lower-energy alternatives, freeing enough electricity to keep the remaining science instruments alive for at least one more year. If anything went wrong, there was no way to undo it. Commands take 18 hours to reach the spacecraft one way. The team sent their instructions and waited.

It worked. Without the fix, the team would have been forced to shut down another instrument before the end of 2026. Now they have at least a year. The same procedure is planned for Voyager 1 in the coming months.

"Every watt saved now is a decision about what data humanity still gets to learn from out there," said project manager Suzanne Dodd. A 49-year-old spacecraft, kept alive by a team that refuses to let go. Read the full story.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is caused by a mutation on the X chromosome that progressively destroys muscle tissue from birth. Boys with DMD typically begin showing symptoms between ages 3 and 5. Most are in wheelchairs by their early teens. There is no cure, and the standard treatment, corticosteroids, carries significant side effects that limit how early it can be used.

Researchers at Binghamton University ran a Phase II study of a drug called Vamorolone, FDA-approved in 2023 under the brand name Agamree, in 20 boys aged 2 to just under 4 who had never previously received steroids. The Bayley III gross-motor scale rates healthy children at around 10. The DMD boys in the study started at around 5. After 12 weeks at the higher dose, their average score rose to approximately 8 — a remarkable improvement at an age when early intervention matters most. No serious adverse events were recorded.

"We were surprised at the rapid improvement," said Professor Eric Hoffman. DMD has recently been added to the US Recommended Uniform Screening Panel for newborns, meaning more boys will be identified and treated earlier than ever before. Read the full story.

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For years, conservationists debated whether elephants that had spent their lives in captivity could ever truly adapt to the wild. The question matters: as rewilding programs expand across Africa, the answer determines whether zoo animals can meaningfully contribute to the recovery of wild populations, or whether the gap between captivity and wilderness is simply too wide to cross.

A five-year study by the Elephant Reintegration Trust of South Africa suggests the gap is crossable. Researchers tracked 11 formerly captive elephants released onto four different reserves, observing them for three weeks at a time at least once annually. The elephants behaved very similarly to their wild neighbors, foraging, socializing, and navigating their environments in ways that matched wild elephant norms. Fecal samples showed stress biomarker levels well within the normal range for wild elephants.

"They can leave that past behind," said co-author Tenisha Roos. "They are able to learn new skills, adapt to unfamiliar environments, and ultimately thrive as wild elephants." The 11 animals represent more than 50% of all rewilded elephants currently living in South Africa. Published in PLOS One. Read the full story.

The agave sisalana is native to the deserts of Mexico and doesn't ask for much. For ten years, one has been growing quietly in a glasshouse at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, putting out its broad spiky leaves and doing very little else. Then, a few months ago, it started doing something it will only do once.

Agaves are monocarpic, meaning they flower once at the end of their lives and then die. The event is called a "death bloom." When the flower spike emerges, it grows fast, sometimes several inches per day, channeling every bit of energy the plant has accumulated over its lifetime into one final spectacular effort. This particular spike shot up so quickly and so tall that staff had to remove ceiling panels from the 19th century glasshouse to let it through. It now stands at over 18 feet.

"It is bittersweet to see it blooming," said senior horticulturist Alberto Trinco. "We've watched this plant for years, and now it's giving everything it has for this one moment." Staff have installed a bloom watch chalkboard so visitors can track its progress. Seeds are already being gathered. The plant will die. The next generation is already being planned. Read the full story.

🔩 China: A team at the University of Hong Kong has created a new stainless steel that withstands extreme seawater corrosion in green hydrogen electrolyzers using an unexpected manganese-based double passivation layer that "cannot be explained by current knowledge," cutting structural material costs by roughly 40 times compared to titanium.

🌌 Global: A new cosmic bounce model proposes that some black holes roaming the Universe today are older than the Big Bang itself, having survived a pre-Big Bang contracting phase, offering a potential new explanation for dark matter and why supermassive black holes formed so early in cosmic history. Published in Physical Review D.

🦕 USA: A 150-million-year-old trail of more than 130 sauropod footprints near Ouray, Colorado has revealed that this giant dinosaur made a complete 360-degree loop before continuing on its way, with subtle variations in stride width suggesting it may have been walking with a limp. Published in Geomatics.

📜 USA: Researchers at NC State have demonstrated a way to extract DNA from centuries-old parchment manuscripts without damaging them, turning 91 historic documents at Duke University into a 1,300-year genetic archive of livestock farming, trade routes, and manuscript production across Europe and the Middle East.

🩸 USA: UCLA researchers have developed MethylScan, a single low-cost blood test that detects multiple cancers, liver diseases, and organ damage simultaneously by analyzing DNA methylation patterns in the bloodstream, with 63% cancer detection at 98% specificity across 1,061 patients. Published in PNAS.

On August 12, 1851, Isaac Singer received a patent for a sewing machine that ran its shuttle in a straight line rather than in a circle, a simple change that made the device dramatically more reliable and practical. Singer didn't invent the sewing machine, but he made it work. He also made it affordable, pioneering installment payment plans so ordinary families could buy one, and he built the first American multinational corporation, with sales agencies in Paris and Rio de Janeiro long before most American companies had ventured beyond their own state.

Singer's company also helped establish the first patent pool in American history, a cooperative agreement between competing manufacturers to share patents rather than litigate endlessly. At a time when most products were hand-built and expensive, Singer proved that standardized, replaceable parts and mass production could bring sophisticated technology to millions of ordinary households. By 1856, his factory was producing 2,564 machines a year. By 1860, that number had risen to 13,000.

Other notable August 12 events:

1981: The IBM Personal Computer was released, 45 years ago today, marketed as "mini-compact at a mini-price" at $1,565. IBM broke its own internal rules to build it, sourcing components from outside vendors and using open-source software, a decision that inadvertently created the modern PC industry.

1968: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham played together for the first time, 58 years ago today, in a room beneath a record store in London's West End. They played "The Train Kept A-Rollin" and "Dazed and Confused." John Paul Jones said afterward: "As soon as I heard John Bonham play, I knew this was going to be great."

1990: Paleontologist Sue Hendrickson discovered the most complete T. Rex skeleton ever found near Faith, South Dakota, 36 years ago today. The skeleton, nicknamed Sue, was later sold at auction for $7.6 million and is now on permanent display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

1960: Echo I, the world's first communications satellite, was launched by NASA, 66 years ago today. The following day, the first two-way telephone conversation conducted via satellite took place.

— haron Begley

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Building Life From Scratch: Scientists have grown complete synthetic mouse embryos entirely from stem cells, with no egg or sperm involved, that develop a beating heart, gut, and early brain structures, giving researchers an unprecedented window into the earliest moments of mammalian life.

🔬 Filming Atoms in Motion: New ultrafast electron microscopes can capture atomic-scale movement at trillionths-of-a-second resolution, filming the moment chemical bonds form and break in real time, a level of detail that was considered physically impossible to observe just a decade ago.

🔭 Pulsars as a GPS Backup: Radio telescope arrays are being tested as an ultra-precise navigation system using pulsars, rapidly spinning neutron stars that pulse with clock-like regularity, as natural cosmic timekeepers accurate to nanoseconds, offering a potential independent backup to GPS satellites.

🌱 Electronics That Disappear: Researchers are developing circuit boards, batteries, and microchips designed to break down harmlessly in soil or water after use, directly addressing the growing crisis of electronic waste that currently contaminates groundwater and ecosystems worldwide.

🔩 Materials That Change on Demand: Scientists are developing programmable matter, materials whose stiffness, shape, and conductivity can be altered on demand by applying an electrical or magnetic field, opening possibilities for robots and medical devices that physically reconfigure themselves for different tasks.

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