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Two movies have already passed the coveted $1 billion mark at the global box office this year, with a third on the way. The first to achieve this milestone was The Super Mario Galaxy Movie ; the animated sequel was joined by the Michael Jackson biopic, Michael , only this past weekend. With $880 million at the worldwide box office in two weeks, Pixar's Toy Story 5 is poised to become the third film of 2026 to hit the $1 billion mark. There have, however, also been a handful of misfires in recent weeks, most notably DC's Supergirl and Disney's live-action Moana remake . But one movie will stand out this year for entirely unfortunate reasons; the movie survived a tumultuous production, only to gross less than $1 million at the box office.

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Three people will launch toward the International Space Station on Tuesday (July 14), and you can watch the action live.

NASA's Anil Menon and cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina are scheduled to lift off atop a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Tuesday at 10:47 a.m. EDT (1347 GMT; 7:47 p.m. local time in Baikonur).

You can watch it live here at Space.com, courtesy of NASA, or directly via the space agency's YouTube channel . Coverage will begin at 9:45 a.m. EDT (1245 GMT).

NASA astronaut Anil Menon (left) and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina, Soyuz MS-29 prime crew members, pose for a portrait at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Russia. (Image credit: GCTC) The trio, flying in Russia's Soyuz MS-29 spacecraft, will catch up to the International Space Station (ISS) after just two orbits, docking with the outpost at about 1:56 p.m. EDT (1746 GMT).

You can watch rendezvous and arrival here at Space.com as well, beginning at 1:10 p.m. EDT (1710 GMT). There will be a bit of a break after docking, then coverage will resume at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT) ahead of the opening of the hatches between the Soyuz and the ISS, which is expected around 3:55 p.m. EDT (1955 GMT).

The MS-29 trio will join the seven astronauts already living aboard the ISS — NASA's Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, and Chris Williams, the European Space Agency's Sophie Adenot, and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, Sergei Mikaev, and Andrey Fedyaev of the Russian space agency Roscosmos .

This will be the first spaceflight for Menon, who was selected as a NASA astronaut candidate in December 2021, in the agency's Group 23. He's married to Anna Menon, who was picked in the next astronaut candidate class, Group 24, in September 2025.

Anna Menon has already been to space, though not with NASA. In September 2024, while an employee of SpaceX , she flew on the company's Polaris Dawn mission to Earth orbit. That five-day flight, which was funded and commanded by current NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, featured the first-ever commercial spacewalk and reached a maximum altitude of 870 miles (1,400.7 kilometers) — higher than any previous crewed Earth-orbiting mission had gotten .

Anil Menon is a former SpaceX-er as well; he was the company's first-ever flight surgeon.

MS-29's flight will be the second-ever space mission for both Dubrov and Kikina. Dubrov lived aboard the ISS from April 2021 to March 2022, and Kikina spend five months on the outpost, from October 2022 to March 2023.

Kikina, the only female member of Russia's active astronaut corps, flew to and from the ISS back then on SpaceX's Crew-5 mission . That was a big deal: She was the first Russian ever to fly on a private U.S. spacecraft, and the first cosmonaut to fly on any American space vehicle since December 2002, when cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Sergey Treshchov came back to Earth from the ISS aboard the space shuttle Endeavour .

The MS-29 trio will spend about eight months living and working on the orbiting lab. Menon will help conduct a wide variety of scientific experiments during that stretch.

"He will continue research to refine in-space production of semiconductor crystals to enable the large-scale manufacturing of components needed for high-performance computers, artificial intelligence, and improved medical devices," NASA officials wrote in a July 9 media advisory .

"Menon also will perform ultrasound using augmented reality and artificial intelligence methods that could eliminate the need for medical support from Earth on future space missions," they added.

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After more than a year of squabbling, a group of AIDS activists obtained an R&D agreement that was at the heart of a settlement between the U.S. government and Gilead Sciences over patents for HIV prevention drugs. But in their view, the deal shows the Biden administration missed an “historic” opportunity to invest in — and expand access to — HIV prevention tools.

As noted previously, the settlement resolved a lawsuit that was filed six years ago by the previous Trump administration after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention maintained that Gilead infringed its patent rights. The agency had helped fund academic research that later formed the basis for two Gilead HIV pills, Truvada and Descovy.

The administration had alleged that Gilead ignored the contributions by CDC scientists, exaggerated its own role in developing HIV prevention drugs, and refused to sign a licensing agreement despite “multiple attempts” at reaching a deal after unfairly reaping hundreds of millions of dollars from research funded by taxpayers.

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…

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Archaeologists have found five pairs of iron shackles at a 2,300-year-old Celtic site in France ‪—‬ a discovery that suggests the small settlement was frequented by metalsmiths and slave traders.

The "extremely rare" shackles were discovered in the town of Allonnes in France's Loire Valley in 2019, but the finds from the two-year-long excavation were announced to the public on July 9 in a translated statement from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP).

The settlement at Allonnes was established along with a religious complex in the third century B.C., according to the statement. Specialist artisans ‪—‬ including blacksmiths, coppersmiths, bronze workers and sheet-metal workers ‪—‬ plied their trade from small workshops, archaeologists found at Allonnes.

During the excavation, the team discovered a large number of high-quality metal objects — such as swords, spearheads, keys and horse harness fittings — but the iron shackles were a surprise because they are extremely rare for the time period. Excavators found a double-wrist restraint, an ankle restraint and three other portions of metal restraints.

The presence of shackles suggests that Allonnes may have been a hub for slave trading in the Late Iron Age (450 to 50 B.C.), according to the statement.

"The identification of restraints and weapons suggests a hierarchical social organization composed of dominant and subordinate groups — prisoners or slaves," Thierry Lejars , a specialist in Celtic metalwork, said in a translated interview with INRAP .

The Gauls, a loose association of Celtic tribes, were known to enslave prisoners of war, convicts and debtors, according to the statement, and they were often forced to work in the fields . These men, women and children then lost their rights and could be bought and sold by their owners. Because the Celts did not leave many historical records of their own, however, not much is known about the practice of slavery in pre-Roman Gaul. The shackles from Allonnes provide new insight into the lives of people who were typically invisible in historical accounts.

A drawing of wrist restraints, likely used on women or children, and an ankle shackle. (Image credit: © Elven Le Goff, INRAP) The small diameter of the wrist restraint ‪—‬ 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) ‪—‬ suggests it may have been used on a woman or a child, according to the statement. And the ankle restraint was over 2.2 pounds (1 kilogram), revealing the weight that enslaved people had to carry around.

Archaeologists also uncovered a religious sanctuary at Allonnes, along with offerings that included clothing and jewelry such as rings and amulets. Many of the offerings had been deliberately deformed or mutilated, likely to transform a mundane possession into a gift for the gods, the statement reported.

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Hundreds of coins were also recovered at the site, and their mint dates spanned more than five centuries, Isabelle Bollard-Raineau , an ancient-coin expert with the French ministry of culture, said in the translated INRAP interview. About a third of the coins found at Allonnes had been filed, sheared or etched with a chisel.

"These mutilations reveal a ritual intention: the removal of the coin's commercial function in order to dedicate the object to the sacred, thereby ensuring the permanence of the offering," Bollard-Raineau said.

Allonnes was a significant Celtic site at the intersection of several major roads in ancient times, and the analysis of the metal finds has revealed important new information about some of the most powerless members of Gallic society.

See how much you know about the Celts with our Celtic quiz!

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Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in?

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public . Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives , just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.”

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or YouTube .

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee

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Clouds formed from vaporized rock could create the ultimate thermal insulation on one of the most common types of exoplanets discovered so far — the sub-Neptunes — raising temperatures so high that these worlds' solid surfaces melt and turn into oceans of magma.

"This work takes us one step closer to answering the question of what these mysterious worlds are made from," said astronomer Luis Welbanks, of Arizona State University, in a statement .

Sub- Neptunes are planets larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. They are especially mysterious since we do not have a world of this type in our solar system . They are thought to contain a rocky core surrounded by a deep atmosphere, but not much else is known about their composition and structure. Their atmosphere could be hydrogen-rich like Jupiter 's, or it could be abundant with water vapor and carbon-based organic molecules. In some cases, they might even be habitable under the hycean world paradigm, wherein a thick hydrogen atmosphere encases a global ocean of liquid water.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is busy probing the atmosphere of several sub-Neptunes to try and learn more about their bulk composition because their atmosphere should be representative of what such planets are made from, but results so far have been inconclusive.

Atmospheres of sub-Neptunes are deep and dense, meaning crushing pressures close to the boundary between the atmosphere and the solid body of the world can turn minerals into vapor that forms clouds. These minerals include aluminium oxide, iron, magnesium silicate, manganese sulfide, potassium chloride, sodium sulfide and zinc sulfide.

Using detailed computer simulations, a team led by Sagnick Mukherjee of Arizona State University explored what effect these clouds could have on both the surface and atmosphere of a sub-Neptune.

They showed that when these mineral clouds form deep down, they act as efficient insulating blankets that trap heat (and lots of it) leaking out from the core of the planet.

"Among the sub-Neptunes currently being studied with JWST, we were amazed to find that cloud-driven heating can raise the temperature at the planet's atmosphere–interior boundary by roughly over 1,400 to 2,600 degrees Celsius [2,550–4,712 degrees Fahrenheit]," said Mukherjee.

At the same time, because heat is being prevented from escaping, the upper atmosphere cools noticeably.

With all that heat retained close to the surface, the rock begins to melt.

"For some of the planets we modeled, that extra heat is enough to melt the planet's surface, creating a magma ocean," said team-member Matthew Nixon of Arizona State University.

These potential magma planets include GJ 1214b, which orbits a red dwarf star 48 light-years away. At one time it was thought to be a cool water-world, but JWST's discovery in 2025 of metallic vapors and carbon-dioxide haze in GJ 1214b's atmosphere rule this out, and now it seems that its surface, undetectable beneath the thick atmosphere, could be completely molten.

However, the presence of magma oceans opens up possibilities for more complex atmospheric chemistry. Gas seeps out of the magma and diffuses into the atmosphere, in theory enriching it in oxygen, silicon hydride and silicon monoxide, while going the other way the magma absorbs ammonia, methane and water vapor from the atmosphere. In other words, the atmosphere becomes enriched by material from underground, while also becoming depleted in some gases that astronomers would expect to see in greater abundance.

This means that JWST's attempts to learn about the bulk composition of a sub-Neptune exoplanet from the spectrum of its atmosphere could be skewed by this exchange of gases between a magma ocean and the atmosphere. The extra heating deep down will also impact the future of these sub-Neptune planets, since the extra heat will keep their lower atmosphere bloated and prevent the planet from contracting over billions of years.

If the findings are correct, they could place a huge obstacle on sub-Neptunes being habitable. Even if the boundary between the atmosphere and solid body of the planet isn't hot enough to form magma, it would still render the surface too hot to support liquid water or life.

The findings were published on July 8 in Astrophysical Journal Letters .