Taylor Swift’s dad, Scott Swift, had quintuple bypass surgery last month, the pop singer’s representative confirmed.
TMZ was the first to report the news. Swift’s representative said the details of the outlet’s report are accurate.
The surgery was not the result of a heart attack, TMZ reported. A doctor found something during a routine check-up, which led to the surgery.
Swift, as well as her mom, Andrea, and her brother, Austin, were with Scott, 73, through the surgery and the recovery process. Scott and Andrea have been married for 37 years, Swift’s representative said.
Bypass surgery allows blood to pass through, or around, blocked or partially blocked arteries in the heart, according to the Mayo Clinic. A quintuple bypass means five arteries were blocked and needed to be opened up.
Scott is recovering well from the procedure, TMZ reported.
A United Airlines Boeing 757 departs from Los Angeles International Airport en route to New York on Sept. 19, 2024.
Kevin Carter | Getty Images
United Airlines‘ second-quarter earnings beat estimates, and its CEO said travel demand is picking up after a rocky start to 2025.
Travel demand, particularly from more price-sensitive customers for domestic flights, had come in weaker than airline executives expected at the start of the year, sending airfares lower.
“The world is less uncertain today than it was during the first six months of 2025 and that gives us confidence about a strong finish to the year,” CEO Scott Kirby said.
Rival Delta Air Lines last week reinstated its full-year forecast, which was lower than it expected at the start of the year. Delta and other airlines have said they plan to cut capacity after the peak summer travel season, which ends around mid-August.
Here is what United Airlines reported for the quarter that ended June 30 compared with what Wall Street was expecting, based on estimates compiled by LSEG:
Earnings per share: $3.87 adjusted vs. $3.81 expected
Revenue: $15.24 billion vs. $15.35 billion expected
United’s second-quarter revenue rose 1.7% from a year earlier to $15.24 billion, below the $15.35 billion analysts expected. Net income dropped 26% to $973 million, or $2.97 a share. Adjusting for one-time items, United reported $1.27 billion, or $3.87 a share.
Unit revenue dropped 4% in the quarter. The decline was most pronounced in domestic passenger revenue per seat mile, which fell 7% year over year. International revenue has been a bright spot for airlines, but there was some evidence of weaker pricing power, with United’s Europe unit revenues down 2.2% on the year.
Premium revenue was up 5.6% over last year, a sign that customers continue to pay up for more comfort on board, while basic-economy class sales were up 1.7% year over year.
United expects to post adjusted earnings of between $9 and $11 per share in 2025 compared with the $10 a share analysts had expected. Amid economic uncertainty this spring, United in April had taken the the unusual step of issuing two earnings scenarios — $11.50 to $13.50 a share in a stable environment and $7 and $9 a share in a “recessionary environment.”
For the third quarter, United said it expects adjusted earnings of $2.25 and $2.75 a share, within analysts’ expectations.
The carrier said operational constraints at Newark Liberty International Airport, a major United hub, this year hit its second-quarter pretax margin by 1.2 points and forecast a third-quarter impact of 0.9.
The Federal Aviation Administration in May cut flights at Newark because of air traffic controller staffing shortages and other issues.
American Airlines and Southwest Airlines are scheduled to report results next week.
The northern lights have a chance of appearing again in the northern United States on Tuesday night, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted—although likely only viewers in the northernmost states have a chance to catch the spectacle.
The aurora borealis has a chance to appear for viewers in parts of the United States.
Getty Images
Key Facts
NOAA forecasters are not expecting any major geomagnetic storms or solar wind features Tuesday night, but there is still a chance of a mildly intense aurora borealis Tuesday evening, with a Kp index of three out of nine.
With a Kp index of three, the aurora will become “brighter” and include “more auroral activity (motion and formations),” according to NOAA.
The aurora could be visible from most of Canada and Alaska, and as far south as the upper Midwest, according to NOAA.
What States Could See The Aurora?
Much of the upper Midwest and Great Plains could see the aurora Tuesday, including Montana, North Dakota, northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, as well as most of Alaska. The aurora could also be visible in the northernmost part of Idaho and northwestern corner of Washington, according to forecasters.
What Time Will The Aurora Be Visible?
The northern lights are most clearly visible between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., according to NOAA. The aurora may appear earlier or later than this, but it is typically less active and not as “visually appealing,” according to the agency. For best viewing conditions, observers should travel closer to the magnetic pole and away from cities or other sources of light pollution.
What To Watch For
This week’s aurora borealis could coincide with one of the year’s most anticipated stargazing events. The Perseids meteor shower will begin Thursday in the Northern Hemisphere. The meteor shower’s peak night this year is between Aug. 12-13, when hundreds of meteors could be visible in the night sky. However, a recent full moon will make viewing these meteors much more difficult in a brighter night sky. Instead, stargazers could look for meteor falling at much lower rates, but less obstruction from moonlight, between July 17-July 30.
Further Reading
ForbesTwo Meteor Showers Begin This Week — How To See Summer’s ‘Shooting Stars’By Jamie Carter
Some of the biggest recent advances in diagnosing and treating neurodegenerative diseases center on biomarkers, the proteins found in blood and cerebrospinal fluid that can reveal when a certain disease exists, sometimes even before symptoms occur.
A new database — the largest-ever collection of data on proteins linked to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) — is expected to help scientists speed up the search for effective treatments.
“The scale and depth of the dataset … make it an extraordinary resource with the potential to transform how we study, detect and treat neurodegenerative diseases,” said Simon Lovestone, global head of discovery and translational research for Janssen Neuroscience at Johnson & Johnson, in a news release.
Backed by Gates Ventures and Johnson & Johnson, the Global Neurodegeneration Proteomics Consortium (GNPC) consists of 23 institutions that have contributed neurodegenerative disease data on biomarkers from 35,000 blood and cerebrospinal fluid samples from across the world. The information will be available to researchers for free.
The GNPC is a perfect example of what is possible when scientists around the world work together, says Bill Gates, the founder of Gates Ventures, who teamed up with Johnson & Johnson to form the consortium in 2023.
“The results have exceeded even our wildest expectations,” Gates wrote in an editorial published July 15 in Nature Medicine, noting that consortium members studied 250 million protein measurements from blood and spinal fluid in its first year.
The value of the data
Around 2007, researchers showed that they could see protein changes in blood that reflect disease. But there’s been a lack of access to large amounts of high-quality, standardized data for scientists to use, says Carlos Cruchaga, a genomicist and director of the NeuroGenomics and Informatics Center at Washington University in St. Louis, who used GNPC data in his research.
The GNPC gives access to protein data spanning multiple neurodegenerative diseases, Cruchaga says. This can be especially helpful to understand similarities and patterns of neurodegeneration, which is still not fully understood.
Another advantage of the GNPC data is that researchers won’t have to start studies from scratch, collecting their own samples to conduct those studies. “That is going to open the door for new biomarkers and diagnostic tools,” Cruchaga says.
One of the stock markets’ key supports may be weakening even as indexes flirt with record highs, according to UBS. A trading desk note from the bank’s U.S. equity derivatives strategy team said that retail demand for artificial intelligence stocks appears to be drying up, raising the specter of a market decline. At the same time, many hedge funds also appear to have had their fill of stocks and could be moving to the sidelines, the UBS note said. “Market is now on thin ice without a deep bench of buyers anymore, which implies limited upside potential vs large downside risk,” the note said. The retail crowd has mostly embraced a “buy the dip” mentality in the post-Covid era, and has been repeatedly rewarded each time. But even as the meme stock trade has shown strength recently, retail traders in general are shying away from the very AI stocks that have been the core of this rally, UBS data shows. “Retail AI Selling continues and is expected to be Bearish Medium-term: After 18 months of retail buying spree in AI Winners … that pushed SPX MAG-7 weight to all-time high … UBS RMM clients have been unwinding AI Winners since Jan (with a 2-month tariff triggered disruption in Mar & Apr),” the note said, referring to the bank’s Retail Market Making customers. UBS compared this current set-up to July 2021, about four months before the first Covid-era market rebound sputtered. The Nasdaq Composite hit a peak on Nov. 14, 2021, and then it did not make another new high for more than two years. .IXIC 5Y mountain The Nasdaq Composite did not overtake its 2021 high until 2024. Several key AI stocks are among the biggest companies by market capitalization and have significant influence on cap-weighted indexes like the S & P 500 and Nasdaq. Chip giant Nvidia has the largest weight in those indexes, with a market cap above $4 trillion. Without the persistent demand from the retail crowd, this market rally could struggle once institutional traders and hedge funds decide they’ve caught up to this year’s move. “Given retail investors represent over 40% of directional cash volume … their persistent selling would likely win over [hedge fund] short-term buying in medium-term after HF stops chasing,” the UBS note said.
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The largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth was sold for just over $5m at an auction of rare geological and archaeological objects in New York on Wednesday, while a juvenile dinosaur skeleton went for more than $30m.
The 54-pound (25kg) rock named NWA 16788 was discovered in the Sahara desert in Niger by a meteorite hunter in November 2023, after having been blown off the surface of Mars by a massive asteroid strike and traveling 140m miles (225m km) to Earth, according to Sotheby’s. The estimated sale price before the auction was $2m to $4m.
The identity of the buyer was not immediately disclosed. The final bid was $4.3m. Adding various fees and costs, the official bid price was about $5.3m.
Two advance bids of $1.9m and $2m were submitted. The live bidding went slower than for many other objects that were sold, with the auctioneer trying to coax more offers and decreasing the $200,000 to $300,000 bid intervals to $100,000 after the proposals hit $4m.
The red, brown and gray meteorite is about 70% larger than the next largest piece of Mars found on Earth and represents nearly 7% of all the Martian material currently on this planet, Sotheby’s says. It measures nearly 15in by 11in by 6in (375mm by 279mm by 152mm).
It was also a rare find. There are only 400 Martian meteorites out of the more than 77,000 officially recognized meteorites found on Earth, the auction house says.
“This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” Cassandra Hatton, vice-chairman for science and natural history at Sotheby’s, said in an interview before the auction. “So it’s more than double the size of what we previously thought was the largest piece of Mars.”
It is not clear exactly when the meteorite was blasted off the surface of Mars, but testing showed it probably happened in recent years, Sotheby’s says.
Hatton said a specialized lab examined a small piece of the red planet remnant and confirmed it was from Mars. It was compared with the distinct chemical composition of Martian meteorites discovered during the Viking spacecraft that landed on Mars in 1976, she said.
The examination found that it was an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite”, a type of Martian rock formed from the slow cooling of Martian magma. It has a coarse-grained texture and contains the minerals pyroxene and olivine, Sotheby’s says.
It also has a glassy surface, probably due to the high heat that burned it when it fell through Earth’s atmosphere, Hatton said. “So that was their first clue that this wasn’t just some big rock on the ground,” she said.
The meteorite previously was on display at the Italian Space Agency in Rome. Sotheby’s did not disclose the owner.
The juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton is displayed at Sotheby’s in New York. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters
Bidding for the juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis dinosaur skeleton started with a high advance bid of $6m, then escalated with offers $500,000 higher than the last and later $1m higher than the last before ending at $26m. The official sale price was $30.5m with fees and costs. The original estimate was $4m to $6m.
Parts of the skeleton were found in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, at Bone Cabin Quarry, a goldmine for dinosaur bones. It is more than 6ft (2 meters) tall and nearly 11ft long.
Specialists assembled nearly 140 fossil bones with some sculpted materials to recreate the skeleton and mounted it so it is ready to exhibit, Sotheby’s says.
The skeleton is believed to be from the late Jurassic period, about 150m years ago, Sotheby’s says.
Ceratosaurus dinosaurs were bipeds with short arms that appear similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, but smaller. Ceratosaurus dinosaurs could grow up to 25ft long, while the Tyrannosaurs rex could be 40ft long.
The skeleton was acquired last year by Fossilogic, a Utah-based fossil preparation and mounting company.
Wednesday’s auction was part of Sotheby’s Geek Week 2025 and featured 122 items, including other meteorites, fossils and gem-quality minerals.
Virtuos, the studio that developed The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, is reportedly laying off seven percent of its staff, or around 300 employees, according to Gauthier Andres, a reporter and co-founder at Origami. The studio has provided support on a number of large game projects — including a recent patch for Cyberpunk 2077 — and employs over 4,200 people across the US, Europe and Asia.
The brunt of the layoffs are happening to Virtuos employees in China, where Andres reports that around 200 positions are being eliminated. Virtuos’ teams in France, who were primarily responsible for the surprise release of Oblivion Remastered back in April, are also expected to be impacted.
Besides reviving Bethesda classics, Virtuos has contributed work to the upcoming Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eaterand several ongoing live service games, like Dune: Awakening and Sea of Thieves. Nothing about the company’s output or the critical reception of its games would suggest it needs to conduct layoffs, but that reflects the current precarious state of the games industry. Even having theoretically steady work doing post-release support and game remasters isn’t enough.
Virtuos’ layoffs follows the sweeping cuts Microsoft made to its Xbox division in early July. Microsoft reportedly cancelled games, like Rare’s long-in-development Everwild, and shutdown whole studios, like The Initiative. Romero Games, which had an unannounced funding deal with Microsoft, was also forced to cancel its current project, though it hopes to find a new publishing partner.
