Juno Propulsion, a WA-based startup attempting to bring a new type of propulsion system to the market, won one of NASA’s ten TechLeap prizes as Juno strives to demonstrate its rotating detonation engine (RDE) in space next summer.
Juno’s prize—valued at up to $500k—will support the company in two goals: expanding its team, and completing development and testing of an RDE to potentially launch as early as June 2026.
Meet Juno: Founded in 2023 by two Purdue PhD graduates—CEO Alexis Harroun and VP of engineering Ariana Martinez—Juno is seeking to build a commercially viable RDE to lower propulsion costs for launch companies and sat operators without sacrificing thrust.
Juno’s RDE is built a little like a race track. The engine uses nitrous oxide and ethane as fuel to create a rotating detonation wave. The wave burns continuously around its chamber, creating a high-pressure combustion that’s advertised as more powerful and efficient than conventional chemical-propulsion engines.
The result will be a more efficient propulsion system that will achieve specific impulses 5% to 10% greater than traditional rocket engines of the same size, according to Harroun.
Should the RDE prove viable, Juno leaders say the engine may allow companies to wean themselves off toxic hydrazine fuels, which require extensive—and expensive—safety protocols to handle.
“There are other non toxic [and] green solutions on the market, but because they’re not using a performance-enhancing tech like ours, they’re not going to be able to compete performance-wise,” Harroun told Payload. “We’re trying to bridge that gap.”
Show me what you got: Juno and the other 10 TechLeap winners have the chance to fly their tech on a NASA-assigned vehicle. If it hits its development milestones and wins a spot on that demo, Juno aims to test short bursts of thrust—and long-duration burns—to test the ability of its RDE for precise RPO maneuvers, as well as high thrust orbital raises.
Juno’s long-term vision is to build a suite of engines for different use cases, beginning with in-space prop systems, and graduating to rocket engines down the line.
The company expects to have the capacity to produce as many as 10 engines in 2027, and dozens more the year after.
Dizzying speed: Getting the system ready in time for the in-space demonstration will require a bit of hustle, but Harroun said Juno always planned to fly its tech as quickly as possible.
Juno has just three employees—its two founders and an intern—but plans to double its workforce with three or four more full-time workers by the end of the year. The company is also moving into a 3,000 sq ft Seattle-area facility, next month to ramp up its development timeline.
In July 2025, clashes between the Druze religious minority and Sunni Arabs backed by government-affiliated forces led to hundreds of deaths in Sweida province in southern Syria. Israel later launched dozens of airstrikes in support of the Druze.
This eruption of violence was an eerie reminder of what had unfolded in March 2025 when supporters of the fallen regime led by Bashar Assad, an Alawite, targeted security units. In retaliation, militias affiliated with the newly formed government in Damascus carried out indiscriminate killings of Alawites.
While exact figures remain difficult to verify, more than 1,300 individuals, most of them Alawites, lost their lives. In some cases, entire families were summarily executed.
Although the Syrian government promised an investigation into the atrocities, home invasions, kidnappings of Alawite women and extrajudicial executions of Alawite men continue.
The violence in Sweida also bore a sectarian dimension, pitting members of a religious minority against armed groups aligned with the country’s Sunni majority.
A key difference, however, involved the active Israeli support for the Druze and the U.S. efforts to broker a ceasefire.
Post-Assad Syria has seen promising developments, including the lifting of international sanctions, a resurgence of civil society and the end of diplomatic isolation. There was even a limited rapprochement with the main Kurdish political party controlling northeastern Syria.
The persistent violence targeting the Alawites and, to a more limited extent, the Druze, starkly contrasts with these trends. As a scholar of religious minorities and the Middle East, I argue that the current political situation reflects their historical persecution and marginalization.
History of the Alawites
The Alawites emerged as a distinct religious community in the 10th century in the region of the Latakia coastal mountains, which today make up northwestern Syria.
Although their beliefs have some commonalities with Shiite Islam, the Alawites maintain their own unique religious leadership and rituals. Under the Ottoman regime in the late 19th century, they benefited from reforms such as the expansion of educational opportunities and economic modernization, while gaining geographical and social mobility.
After Hafez Assad, the father of Bashar, came to power in a coup in 1970, he drew upon his Alawite base to reinforce his regime. Consequently, Alawites became disproportionately represented in the officer corps and intelligence services.
Prior to the civil war, which began in 2011, their population was estimated at around 2 million, constituting roughly 10% of Syria’s population. During the civil war, Alawite young men fighting for the regime suffered heavy casualties. However, most Alawites remained in Syria, while Sunni Arabs and Kurds were disproportionately displaced or became refugees.
Members of the Alawite minority gather outside the Russian air base in Hmeimim, near Latakia in Syria’s coastal region, on March 11, 2025, as they seek refuge there after violence and retaliatory killings in the area. AP Photo/Omar Albam
Among Syria’s minorities, two key factors make the Alawites most vulnerable to mass violence in post-Assad Syria. The first factor is that, like the Druze, Alawites have their own distinct beliefs that deviate from Sunni Islam. Their religious practices and teachings are often described as “esoteric” and remain mostly inaccessible to outsiders.
In my 2024 book “Liminal Minorities: Religious Difference and Mass Violence in Muslim Societies,” I categorize the Alawites and Druze in Syria alongside Yezidis in Iraq, Alevis in Turkey and Baha’is in Iran as “liminal minorities” – religious groups subject to deep-seated stigmas transmitted across generations.
These groups are often treated as heretics who split from Islam and whose beliefs and rituals are deemed beyond the pale of acceptance. For instance, according to Alawite beliefs, Ali, the son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad, is a divine manifestation of God, which challenges the idea of strict monotheism central to Sunni Islam.
From the perspective of Sunni orthodoxy, these groups’ beliefs have been a source of suspicion and disdain. A series of fatwas by prominent Sunni clerics from the 14th to the 19th century declared Alawites heretics.
Resentment against the Alawites
The second factor contributing to the Alawites’ vulnerability is the widespread perception that they were the main beneficiaries of the Assad regime, which engaged in mass murder against its own citizens. Although power remained narrowly concentrated under Assad, many Alawites occupied key positions in the security apparatus as well as the government.
In today’s political landscape where the central government remains weak and its control over various armed groups is limited, religious stigmatization and political resentment create fertile ground for mass violence targeting the Alawites.
The massacres of March 2025 were accompanied by sectarian hate speech, including open calls for the extermination of the Alawites, both in the streets and on social media.
While many Sunni Muslims in Syria also perceive the Druze as heretics, they maintained a greater degree of distance from the Assad regime and were less integrated into its security apparatus.
Nonetheless, in recent months the situation deteriorated rapidly in the Druze heartland. The Druze militias and local Bedouin tribes engaged in heavy fighting in July 2025. Unlike the Alawites, the Druze received direct military assistance from Israel, which has its small but influential Druze population. This further complicates peaceful coexistence among religious groups in post-Assad Syria.
A sober future
Sunni Arab identity is central to the newly formed government in Damascus, which can come at the expense of religious and ethnic pluralism. However, it has incentives to rein in arbitrary violence against the Alawites and Druze. Projecting itself as a source of order and national unity helps the government internationally, both diplomatically and economically.
Internally, however, the new government remains fractured and lacks effective control over vast swaths of territory. While it pays lip service to transitional justice, it is also cautious about being perceived as overly lenient toward individuals associated with the Assad regime and its crimes. Meanwhile, Alawite and Druze demands for regional autonomy continue to stoke popular Sunni resentments and risk triggering further cycles of instability and violence.
I believe that in a post-Assad Syria defined by fractured governance and episodic retribution, the Alawites as well as Druze are likely to face deepening marginalization.
Stars are the fundamental building blocks of our universe. Most stars host planets, like our Sun hosts our solar system, and if you look more broadly, groups of stars make up huge structures such as clusters and galaxies. So before astrophysicists can attempt to understand these large-scale structures, we first need to understand basic properties of stars, such as their mass, radius and temperature.
But measuring these basic properties has proved exceedingly difficult. This is because stars are quite literally at astronomical distances. If our Sun were a basketball on the East Coast of the U.S., then the closest star, Proxima, would be an orange in Hawaii. Even the world’s largest telescopes cannot resolve an orange in Hawaii. Measuring radii and masses of stars appears to be out of scientists’ reach.
Enter binary stars. Binaries are systems of two stars revolving around a mutual center of mass. Their motion is governed by Kepler’s harmonic law, which connects three important quantities: the sizes of each orbit, the time it takes for them to orbit, called the orbital period, and the total mass of the system.
I’m an astronomer, and my research team has been working on advancing our theoretical understanding and modeling approaches to binary stars and multiple stellar systems. For the past two decades we’ve also been pioneering the use of artificial intelligence in interpreting observations of these cornerstone celestial objects.
Measuring stellar masses
Astronomers can measure orbital size and period of a binary system easily enough from observations, so with those two pieces they can calculate the total mass of the system. Kepler’s harmonic law acts as a scale to weigh celestial bodies.
Binary stars orbit around each other, and in eclipsing binary stars, one passes in front of the other, relative to the telescope lens. Merikanto/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Think of a playground seesaw. If the two kids weigh about the same, they’ll have to sit at about the same distance from the midpoint. If, however, one child is bigger, he or she will have to sit closer, and the smaller kid farther from the midpoint.
It’s the same with stars: The more massive the star in a binary pair, the closer to the center it is and the slower it revolves about the center. When astronomers measure the speeds at which the stars move, they can also tell how large the stars’ orbits are, and as a result, what they must weigh.
Measuring stellar radii
Kepler’s harmonic law, unfortunately, tells astronomers nothing about the radii of stars. For those, astronomers rely on another serendipitous feature of Mother Nature.
Binary star orbits are oriented randomly. Sometimes, it happens that a telescope’s line of sight aligns with the plane a binary star system orbits on. This fortuitous alignment means the stars eclipse one another as they revolve about the center. The shapes of these eclipses allow astronomers to find out the stars’ radii using straightforward geometry. These systems are called eclipsing binary stars.
By taking measurements from an eclipsing binary star system, astronomers can measure the radii of the stars.
More than half of all Sun-like stars are found in binaries, and eclipsing binaries account for about 1% to 2% of all stars. That may sound low, but the universe is vast, so there are lots and lots of eclipsing systems out there – hundreds of millions in our galaxy alone.
By observing eclipsing binaries, astronomers can measure not only the masses and radii of stars but also how hot and how bright they are.
Complex problems require complex computing
Even with eclipsing binaries, measuring the properties of stars is no easy task. Stars are deformed as they rotate and pull on each other in a binary system. They interact, they irradiate one another, they can have spots and magnetic fields, and they can be tilted this way or that.
To study them, astronomers use complex models that have many knobs and switches. As an input, the models take parameters – for example, a star’s shape and size, its orbital properties, or how much light it emits – to predict how an observer would see such an eclipsing binary system.
Computer models take time. Computing model predictions typically takes a few minutes. To be sure that we can trust them, we need to try lots of parameter combinations – typically tens of millions.
This many combinations requires hundreds of millions of minutes of compute time, just to determine basic properties of stars. That amounts to over 200 years of computer time.
Computers linked in a cluster can compute faster, but even using a computer cluster, it takes three or more weeks to “solve,” or determine all the parameters for, a single binary. This challenge explains why there are only about 300 stars for which astronomers have accurate measurements of their fundamental parameters.
The models used to solve these systems have already been heavily optimized and can’t go much faster than they already do. So, researchers need an entirely new approach to reducing computing time.
Using deep learning
One solution my research team has explored involves deep-learning neural networks. The basic idea is simple: We wanted to replace a computationally expensive physical model with a much faster AI-based model.
First, we computed a huge database of predictions about a hypothetical binary star – using the features that astronomers can readily observe – where we varied the hypothetical binary star’s properties. We are talking hundreds of millions of parameter combinations. Then, we compared these results to the actual observations to see which ones best match up. AI and neural networks are ideally suited for this task.
In a nutshell, neural networks are mappings. They map a certain known input to a given output. In our case, they map the properties of eclipsing binaries to the expected predictions. Neural networks emulate the model of a binary but without having to account for all the complexity of the physical model.
Neural networks detect patterns and use their training to predict an output, based on an input.
We train the neural network by showing it each prediction from our database, along with the set of properties used to generate it. Once fully trained, the neural network will be able to accurately predict what astronomers should observe from the given properties of a binary system.
Compared to a few minutes of runtime for the physical model, a neural network uses artificial intelligence to get the same result within a tiny fraction of a second.
Reaping the benefits
A tiny fraction of a second works out to about a millionfold runtime reduction. This brings the time down from weeks on a supercomputer to mere minutes on a single laptop. It also means that we can analyze hundreds of thousands of binary systems in a couple of weeks on a computer cluster.
This reduction means we can obtain fundamental properties – stellar masses, radii, temperatures and luminosities – for every eclipsing binary star ever observed within a month or two. The big challenge remaining is to show that AI results really give the same results as the physical model.
This task is the crux of my team’s new paper. In it we’ve shown that, indeed, the AI-driven model yields the same results as the physical model across over 99% of parameter combinations. This result means the AI’s performance is robust. Our next step? Deploy the AI on all observed eclipsing binaries.
Best of all? While we applied this methodology to binaries, the basic principle applies to any complex physical model out there. Similar AI models are already speeding up many real-world applications, from weather forecasting to stock market analysis.
Afghanistan and Pakistan sign preferential trade deal to slash tariffs on key fruits, vegetables
ISLAMABAD: Afghanistan and Pakistan have signed a Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) to reduce tariffs on eight agricultural products, the Afghan embassy in Islamabad announced on Wednesday, in a rare move of economic cooperation between the two neighbors with often-tense ties.
The agreement, signed by senior commerce officials from both countries, will reduce customs duties on four Afghan exports to Pakistan — grapes, pomegranates, apples, and tomatoes — and four Pakistani exports to Afghanistan — mangoes, kinnows, bananas, and potatoes.
Tariff rates on these items, which previously exceeded 60%, will now be capped at 27%.
“This agreement will be effective for a period of one year, commencing on August 1, 2025,” the Afghan embassy said on X.
“It is renewable and also allows for the inclusion of additional items in the future.”
The deal was signed by Mullah Ahmadullah Zahid, Deputy Minister at Afghanistan’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce, and Jawad Paul, Pakistan’s Deputy Commerce Minister.
The agreement comes at a time of strained political and security relations between Kabul and Islamabad, marked by border closures, mutual accusations over cross-border militant activity, and reduced formal trade volumes since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.
Still, both countries remain heavily reliant on overland trade routes, and fruit exports have long played a vital role in seasonal cross-border commerce.
In the first half of 2025, Pakistan and Afghanistan’s bilateral trade reached nearly $1 billion, with Afghan exports to Pakistan totaling $277 million and Pakistan’s exports to Afghanistan reaching $712 million. This growth is partly attributed to increased Pakistani exports, including medical supplies, parboiled rice, and sugar. However, trade volume is still below potential, with estimates suggesting it could reach $8 to $10 billion annually if obstacles are overcome.
Obstacles to trade between Pakistan and Afghanistan include border closures, security concerns, and issues with trade facilitation. Specifically, frequent closures of border crossing points like Torkham and Spin Boldak, triggered by political tensions or security incidents, disrupt trade flows and cause financial losses for businesses. Additionally, challenges related to trade facilitation, customs procedures, and transit infrastructure further hinder the smooth movement of goods.
A selection of states in the northern U.S. may have an opportunity to view the northern lights on Wednesday, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The forecast follows a period of geomagnetic storms earlier in the day.
AFP via Getty Images
Key Facts
A Kp index of four on a scale of nine was forecast by NOAA for Wednesday night, meaning the northern lights may appear brighter and be more active farther from the poles.
Wednesday’s auroral forecast follows a period of “minor” to “moderate” geomagnetic storms late Tuesday and early Wednesday, though similar geomagnetic activity is not forecast for Wednesday night, according to NOAA.
Calmer auroral activity is forecast through Friday night, NOAA’s three-day forecast suggests, with a maximum Kp index of three and just over two projected for Friday and Saturday nights, respectively.
Where Will The Northern Lights Be Visible?
Northern Canada and Alaska will have a higher likelihood of viewing the northern lights, once the sun sets in the state. A lesser chance is forecast for parts of Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Michigan and Maine. (See map below.)
Wednesday’s view line.
NOAA
What’s The Best Way To See The Northern Lights?
It’s recommended to travel to a north-facing, high vantage point away from light pollution sometime between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. local time, according to NOAA.
What’s The Best Way To Photograph The Northern Lights?
If using a regular camera, it’s best to use a wide-angle lens, an aperture or F-stop of four or less and a focus set to the furthest possible setting, photography experts told National Geographic. NOAA also recommends using a tripod to stabilize the image, and if using a smartphone, to disable flash and enable night mode.
Key Background
The northern lights have been increasingly visible in recent months after activity on the sun’s surface reached a “solar maximum.” This peak, occurring throughout the sun’s 11-year cycle, corresponds with a rise in solar events like coronal mass ejections and solar flares. These events are largely responsible for creating aurora borealis, as molecules of oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth’s atmosphere collide with electrons, causing them to become “excited” before releasing colorful, swirling displays. A recent peak in activity is projected to persist through early 2026, according to estimates from NOAA and NASA.
Further Reading
ForbesNorthern Lights Displays Hit A 500-Year Peak In 2024—Here’s Where You Could Catch Aurora Borealis In 2025By Ty Roush
DUBLIN, July 23, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Perrigo Company plc (NYSE: PRGO), a leading provider of Consumer Self-Care Products, today announced that it plans to issue its second quarter 2025 financial results on Wednesday, August 6th, 2025, and host a conference call beginning at 8:30 A.M. (EST).
The earnings conference call will be available live via webcast to interested parties in the investor relations section of the Perrigo website at http://perrigo.investorroom.com/events-webcasts or by phone at 800-836-8184, International 646-357-8785, and reference ID # 45051. A taped replay of the call will be available beginning at approximately 12:00 P.M. (EST) Wednesday, August 6, until midnight Wednesday, August 13, 2025. To listen to the replay, dial 888-660-6345, International 646-517-4150, and use access code 45051#.
About Perrigo
Perrigo Company plc is a leading pure-play self-care company with over a century of experience in providing high-quality health and wellness solutions to consumers primarily in North America and Europe. As a pioneer in the over-the-counter (OTC) self-care market, Perrigo offers trusted self-care solutions that can be used without the need for a prescription, ensuring accessibility and choice for consumers across molecules, dosage forms, and value tiers.
Perrigo’s unique business model leverages its complementary businesses, where cash-generative store brand private label offerings fuel investments for leading brands, including Opill®, Mederma®, Compeed®, EllaOne®, and Jungle Formula®.
For more information, visit www.perrigo.com.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes, and the matters discussed in Perrigo’s upcoming earnings release will include certain “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors—many of which are beyond the Company’s control—that may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from its current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. Interested persons are urged to consult the Company’s filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, available at https://investor.perrigo.com/sec-filings, for a discussion of the Company’s business and financial condition and certain material trends, risks, uncertainties and other factors relating thereto, including those discussed under “Risk Factors” in the Company’s Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July 07, 2025, in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images News | Getty Images
It’s a new day, and meme traders have found more stocks to put on the pedestal.
Reddit-obsessed retail traders targeted wearable camera firm GoPro and doughnut maker Krispy Kreme on Wednesday, pushing shares up 56% and 18%, respectively, in morning trading. The cohort seemed to have already ditched their old love OpenDoor, whose shares fell another 17% following a wild speculative run.
GoPro shares one-day chart
Much like OpenDoor, GoPro is also a beaten-down penny stock, trading consistently below $1 this year. Krispy Kreme is another cheap stock, selling around $4 apiece. The doughnut chain has 28% of its float shares sold short, while GoPro has about 10%, according to FactSet.
The two stocks are heavily cited on WallStreetBets, the online forum behind the infamous GameStop mania in 2021.
“YOLO DNUT,” one post on WallStreetBets reads. YOLO stands for “you only live once” and is used to describe a high-risk, all-in trading strategy.
Krispy Kreme stock one-day chart
The heightened speculative activity on Wall Street coincided with a record-setting rally in the broader market as investors breathed a sigh of relief amid better-than-feared tariff headlines. The S&P 500 closed at another record high Tuesday, bringing its 2025 gains to more than 7%.
“We attribute the initial phase of the junk rally to removal of downside risks to U.S. GDP with passage of the OBBB bill, hopes for several Fed rate cuts between now and Y/E, stronger than expected U.S. economic data, and tariff news flow being not as bad as feared,” Wolfe Research said in a note to clients.
Just 35 light-years away, a small red dwarf star is turning heads. This unassuming star, named L 98-59, is in the center of one of the most closely examined planetary systems near Earth. This is because some of its planets fall in the habitable zone.
Scientists from the Trottier Institute for Research on Exoplanets (IREx) and the Université de Montréal have now mapped the L 98-59 system with record precision.
The findings confirm a fifth planet in the habitable zone of this nearby red dwarf star. This planetary system now provides a promising location to explore conditions suitable for life.
Planets identified around their star
L 98-59 is a small red dwarf star hosting three planets discovered by NASA’s TESS mission in 2019. A fourth was later found using the ESPRESSO spectrograph. These four planets orbit their star at distances that are much closer than Mercury is to the Sun.
“These new results paint the most complete picture we’ve ever had of the fascinating L 98-59 system. It’s a powerful demonstration of what we can achieve by combining data from space telescopes and high-precision instruments on Earth,” noted Charles Cadieux, lead researcher at IREx.
The research also provides scientists with key targets for future atmospheric studies using the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST],
Hot and watery planets in the system
The team analyzed a large archive of ground and space-based data. They determined the masses and sizes of the planets with high accuracy. L 98-59 b, the innermost planet, is a sub-Earth – it is around 84% of Earth’s size and half its mass.
The two closest planets might host volcanic activity due to tidal heating, similar to Jupiter’s moon Io.
The third planet stands out as a potential “water world,” with its low density suggesting a deep, water-rich composition. The nearly circular orbits of these planets improve their suitability for detailed atmospheric study.
“With its diversity of rocky worlds and range of planetary compositions, L 98-59 offers a unique laboratory to address some of the field’s most pressing questions,” said René Doyon, co-author and director of IREx.
These questions include the following: What are super-Earths and sub-Neptunes made of? Do planets form differently around small stars? Can rocky planets around red dwarfs retain atmospheres over time?”
Fifth planet falls in habitable zone
One of the study’s highlights is the confirmation of L 98-59 f, a non-transiting fifth planet. Its presence came to light through precise radial velocity readings from HARPS and ESPRESSO.
This planet is particularly interesting because it receives about the same energy from its star as Earth does from the Sun.
“Finding a temperate planet in such a compact system makes this discovery particularly exciting. It highlights the remarkable diversity of exoplanetary systems and strengthens the case for studying potentially habitable worlds around low-mass stars,” Cadieux said.
Old telescope data and new planets
Instead of scheduling new observations, the team used existing data from TESS, HARPS, ESPRESSO, and JWST. They applied advanced techniques developed at IREx, including a line-by-line radial velocity method and a new temperature indicator.
These tools allowed them to filter out noise from stellar activity. Combining this with transit data from JWST, the team improved planet size and mass estimates by twofold.
“We developed these techniques to unlock this kind of hidden potential in archival data. It also highlights how improving analysis tools allow us to improve upon previous discoveries with data that is just waiting to be revisited,” said study co-author Étienne Artigau.
Future research on the planet system
L 98-59 now stands as one of the most promising systems near Earth for studying rocky planets. Its varied compositions and close orbits around a small star make it an ideal candidate for atmospheric studies with JWST.
The IREx team has already begun follow-up observations. L 98-59 could soon join systems like TRAPPIST-1 as a key player in exoplanet research.
“With these new results, L 98-59 joins the select group of nearby, compact planetary systems that we hope to understand in greater detail over the coming years,” concluded study co-author Alexandrine L’Heureux.
“It’s exciting to see it stand alongside systems like TRAPPIST-1 in our quest to unlock the nature and formation of small planets orbiting red dwarf stars.”
The study is published in The Astronomical Journal.
Image Credit: Benoit Gougeon, Université de Montréal
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John Torode, left, and Gregg Wallace had presented MasterChef since 2005
The new series of MasterChef, which was recorded before presenters Gregg Wallace and John Torode were sacked, will still be shown on BBC One and iPlayer, the corporation has announced.
The BBC said it had taken the decision “after careful consideration and consultation with the contestants”.
In a statement, the broadcaster said: “MasterChef is an amazing competition which is life-changing for the amateur chefs taking part. The focus of it has always been their skill and their journey.”
The BBC also said it had not yet taken a decision on what to do with the completed celebrity series and Christmas special, which were filmed with Torode and food critic Grace Dent.
A regular amateur series was filmed in 2024, fronted by long-serving hosts Wallace and Torode. The first allegations against Wallace are believed to have emerged towards the end of production.
Earlier this month, a report by the show’s production company revealed that more than 40 complaints against Wallace had been upheld, while a claim that Torode had used a severely offensive racist term was also substantiated.
The new series may be re-edited in light of the findings, with the prominence of Wallace and Torode re-examined, BBC News understands.
It is thought there will be limitations on how much the pair can be edited out, but the focus is likely to be on the contestants.
‘Right thing to do’
In a statement, the BBC said: “This has not been an easy decision in the circumstances and we appreciate not everyone will agree with it.
“In showing the series, which was filmed last year, it in no way diminishes our view of the seriousness of the upheld findings against both presenters. We have been very clear on the standards of behaviour that we expect of those who work at the BBC or on shows made for the BBC.
“However, we believe that broadcasting this series is the right thing to do for these cooks who have given so much to the process. We want them to be properly recognised and give the audience the choice to watch the series.”
Former contestants on the show previously told BBC News that being on MasterChef can be “life-changing” for them.
But some of the women who came forward with claims against Wallace have said they didn’t think the new series should be shown.
Reacting to the news on Wednesday, one former MasterChef worker said the decision to go ahead showed “a blatant disregard for the people who have come forward”.
Speaking to BBC News, she warned it was “a total reversal of so-called firing from MasterChef – how can you be fired by your work is still made public?
“While a gap in the prime time schedule is not ideal, for integrity they should have found other series to go into those slots.”
Another woman, who also worked on MasterChef, told us the decision to air the series was “profoundly disrespectful” to people like her who had made allegations.
“It ultimately sends a message that such behaviour can be overlooked.”
‘Show will be stronger than ever’
The upheld claims against Wallace included one of unwelcome physical contact and another three of being in a state of undress.
A total of 83 complaints were made against Wallace, and he has said he was cleared of “the most serious and sensational allegations”. But he added: “I recognise that some of my humour and language, at times, was inappropriate.
“For that, I apologise without reservation. But I was never the caricature now being sold for clicks.”
The upheld complaint against Torode related to a comment on the set of MasterChef in 2018. The presenter has said he had “no recollection” of it and that any racist language is “wholly unacceptable”.
In its statement on Wednesday, the BBC described MasterChef as “a brilliant, much-loved programme which is bigger than any one individual”.
“There are many talented, dedicated and hard-working people who make the show what it is. It will continue to flourish on the BBC and we look forward to it returning stronger than ever in the future.”
