TV News LIES

In the middle of the 7th century, a plague swept through the walled city of Jerash, in what is now modern-day Jordan.

Ceramicists abandoned their workshops under the Hippodrome, leaving unfired pottery in their haste. Young and old alike succumbed to a bacteria called Yersinia Pestis, the same microbe responsible for the Black Death seven centuries later.

The city, unable to manage the dead and dying, converted those workshops into a mass grave.

"It was filled within days — hundreds of bodies," says Rays Jiang, a University of South Florida geneticist and lead author of a new study in the Journal of Archeological Science, highlighting the plague victims of Jerash. "There's no ceremony, there's no grave goods. It's a bare minimum to get the bodies disposed of and away from the city."

To understand the lives of the people who died at Jerash, Jiang gathered a team of eight experts from various specialties: archeology, molecular genetics, anthropology and chemistry. Their work helps illustrate the devastation of what is believed to be the first historically recorded pandemic, which began with the Plague of Justinian and killed tens of millions of people across the Mediterranean Basin, West Asia and Northern Europe from roughly 541 to 750.

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On February 26, 2025, a NASA probe called Lunar Trailblazer lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Its mission was to map the water on the moon. But a day after launch, mission managers lost contact with the spacecraft, and it was never heard from again.

One year later, NPR has learned exactly why the $72 million dollar mission failed.

A report by a review panel convened by NASA to explore what went wrong contains the explanation. Software that was supposed to point the spacecraft solar panels toward the sun instead pointed them 180 degrees away from the sun.

In addition, the panel found "many erroneous on-board fault management actions" that, taken together with the solar panel pointing error, "caused the Lunar Trailblazer failure."

NASA provided the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

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A newly discovered species of large dinosaur lived in marshy areas, hunted for fish and had an impressive horn protruding from its skull. It is the first time in over 100 years that scientists have discovered a new species of Spinosaurus dinosaurs, which are large fish-eating predators that first emerged during the Jurassic period more than 140 million years ago.

The new species, called Spinosaurus mirabilis, was the length of a school bus and was unearthed in Niger by an international team of scientists led by paleontologists from the University of Chicago. Details of the discovery were published in the journal Science last week.

The authors estimate that Spinosaurus mirabilis lived about 95 million years ago during the Cretaceous period, in a marshy inland area in what is now the central Sahara.

Lead author Paul Sereno compared them to herons, which also hunt for fish in shallow water and have bodies that are well-suited to semi-aquatic living. "I suspect that this animal was fishing largely in about 3 feet of water," he explained in an email to NPR, although it was large enough.

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She navigated segregation to become an esteemed mathematician — and today, her work helps billions of people navigate the world.

Gladys West, whose pioneering career contributed key elements to what became the GPS satellite system and was later acknowledged as a "hidden figure" of GPS, died Saturday at age 95.

West "passed peacefully alongside her family and friends and is now in heaven with her loved ones," her family said as they announced her death.

West is credited with astounding accomplishments in mathematics, playing pivotal roles in charting orbital trajectories and creating accurate mathematical models of the Earth's shape that would eventually be used by the GPS satellite orbit.

But, as West admitted to member station VPM in 2020, she did not really rely on the groundbreaking system she helped create.

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Scientists may have discovered an explanation for a cosmic mystery uncovered by the James Webb Space Telescope several years ago: the origin of "little red dots" scattered across the cosmos.

In December 2022, six months after the launch of the super-powerful Webb Telescope, the telescope spotted something previously unseen: countless small red objects in the sky, which NASA says scientists soon dubbed “little red dots” (LRDs).

A puzzle to astronomers, scientists theorised the LRDs could be very dense galaxies or supermassive black holes. "For a time, the LRDs were framed as breaking cosmology because they defied practically every expectation set by well-founded theories," writes Lee Billings in Scientific American.

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NASA is cutting short a mission at the International Space Station due to a medical issue with a crew member. The agency is planning to return all four members of the Crew-11 mission more than a month early. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said the crew would return to Earth "in the coming days."

NASA did not disclose the name of the crewmember or the ailment, citing health privacy. Isaacman described it as a "serious medical condition."

NASA first acknowledged what it called a "medical concern" Wednesday, when the agency announced the cancellation of a planned spacewalk Thursday. Two NASA astronauts, Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, were supposed to venture outside the orbiting lab and update the station's power system. The additional power from new solar panels would help safely deorbit the station upon its retirement in 2030.

The two NASA astronauts, along with a Japanese Space Station astronaut and Russian Space Agency Cosmonaut, are members of NASA's Crew-11 mission which launched to the space station from Florida's Kennedy Space Center August 1, 2025 on a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule.

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