Sunday Special: Catching rockets and sinking ships

Welcome back, Superhuman. If you’ve never seen a massive, 1000-foot ocean liner sink to the bottom of the ocean, now’s your chance. Scientists deliberately sunk one of America’s fastest ocean liners in a move that’s set to create the world’s largest artificial reef. Meanwhile, SpaceX has caught the Starship out of the air with the launch tower’s mechanical arms — a historic, never-before-seen engineering milestone in rocketry.

1. SpaceX catches a rocket after a full orbital mission for the first time: No matter how many times you see it, you still won’t believe it. SpaceX’s Starship just completed a 22-hour orbital trip, then flew back to Texas and was caught by giant mechanical arms on the tower it launched from — the first time this has been done with the Starship. Although SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the booster, the milestone brings the company closer to building a fully reusable rocket system that can launch with the frequency of airplanes. Watch the unbelievable moment here.

2. Historic ocean liner deliberately sunk to create the world’s largest artificial reef: The nearly 1,000-foot SS United States, which set a transatlantic speed record in 1952, now rests 180 feet below the Gulf of Mexico off Florida. The $1M project will transform the retired ship into the world’s largest artificial reef — a habitat for species including grouper, tuna, and red snapper, while creating a major destination for divers. You can watch footage from the historic sinking here.

3. Scientists identify a deadly, hyper-resistant fungus spreading undetected: The strain was found in a Kenyan hospital patient whose surgical wound remained infected despite extensive treatment. Experts suspect more cases may be spreading under the radar because many labs cannot reliably identify the yeast yet. With no established drug treatment, rapid testing, isolation, equipment removal, and rigorous hospital hygiene become critical. Read more on the strain here.

4. Killer female apes challenge the “man the hunter” origin story: After observing wild bonobos for nine years, scientists have found that females led 99 of 158 documented hunts, despite males being larger and stronger. Older, dominant females also controlled how meat was distributed, using it to strengthen alliances. Although inconclusive, the findings weaken the assumption that male-led hunting is an ancient biological default shared by humans and their closest relatives.

What can a retail AI agent access, and when should it act? Join Nebius and NVIDIA on December 3 at 6 PM CET to see the Agent Harness Blueprint for Store Operations in action.

Watch an agent prepare a store opening brief, assess a spill from a camera image, and respond to a checkout queue surge with manager approval. Learn how to connect agents securely to store systems, use NVIDIA Nemotron models, and trace each action. See how to deploy the blueprint on Nebius without managing a GPU cluster, then adapt it to your store operations.

Register now.

1. Blue Phone: An AI-powered smartphone that lets you control your apps by voice or text, handles everyday tasks like finding receipts and comparing prices in the background, and remembers your preferences to act as your personal assistant.

2. STASIS: A Whoop for your eyes. These smart glasses monitor eye fatigue in real time and track how screen time affects your eyes.

3. Aina: A smart ring with a display that lets you approve AI agents, book an Uber, take calls, and control your devices.

4. BirdBuddy Nook: A $99 smart bird feeder that automatically films the birds visiting your yard, sends photos and videos to your phone, lets you watch live, and can help identify which species stopped by.

🌊 Deep-Sea Ghost: Resurfaced footage of the Phantom Jelly is making waves on Reddit. Encounters with the animal are so rare that most people will never see one outside footage like this. You can watch the moment here.

👀 Screening Shift: In one of the biggest updates to its prostate cancer screening recommendations, the American Cancer Society is changing the guidelines on when men should start testing, and who needs to begin much earlier. This article spotlights everything men need to know.

💊 Happy Accident: When doctors in the 1950s gave tuberculosis patients a new drug, they noticed that patients suddenly became way more energetic: some even started dancing in the hallways — the origin story of this psychiatry wonder drug.

👠 Posture Perfect: As far as beauty pageants go, this one is probably the strangest (and most clinical) we’ve read about. One international pageant in the 1950s put contestants through X-rays to decide who had the “best” posture and the “straightest” spine. See the winner from 1957 here.

🌌 Up Close: You’ve never seen Mars like this before. NASA just dropped new images of the Red Planet that strip away a lot of the mystical allure that typically surrounds it and show the planet for what it actually looks like. The result is far more surreal than we expected.

ZeroRank asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity every day, and shows:

Black Friday: 45% off your first year, from $49/mo billed annually. Ends Nov 30.

Audit your brand now

See Again: Scientists have trained AI to predict how a blind man’s visual cortex would respond to different electrical signals from a 96-electrode brain implant. The AI selected stimulation patterns that produced the intended brain activity more accurately, helping scientists predict the shapes of light he perceived. Although it did not restore sight yet, it could lead to brain implants that may provide more reliable artificial vision.

Whalin’ About: Scientists have found a rare, 15,000-pound right whale calf that had gone unnoticed for months. The calf was spotted with its mother, Silt, off Quebec — raising the season’s total to 24 mother-calf pairs, the highest since 2009. That’s encouraging for a critically endangered species with only around 380 animals and roughly 70 reproductive-age females remaining.

Cancer Crusher: Scientists have engineered CAR-T cells that remain inactive throughout the body and switch on only after entering the brain, where they attack diffuse midline glioma — a childhood cancer that is usually fatal within a year. The treatment cleared tumors in two mouse models and prevented them from returning in highly promising but preclinical results; scientists hope to begin human safety trials in 2027.

You’re the reason our team spends hundreds of hours every week researching and writing this email. Please let us know what you thought of today’s email to help us create better emails for you.

Until next time,

Zain, Faiq, and the Superhuman AI team