Brain

SINGER Adriana Araujo has died of a brain aneurysm just six years after finding fame for her inspiring performances during Covid lockdown.

Adriana tragically collapsed at home on Saturday night and was rushed to hospital in a “very serious and irreversible” condition.

The chanteuse remained in a coma from an aneurysm which caused “extensive bleeding” to the brain.

Sadly, she passed away at the Odilon Behrens Metropolitan Hospital in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on Monday.

She was just 49.

Adriana, who had over 70,000 Instagram followers, was considered one of the leading stars of Brazil’s samba scene.

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She was raised in the favela of Pedreira Prado Lopes in Belo Horizonte, taking part in Afro dance and theatre workshops in the community.

Adriana launched her solo career in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic.

She performed concerts for the local community from her rooftop and livestreamed them to her growing online audience.

Her lockdown shows helped to raise funds for poor families in the Primeiro de Maio and São Marcos neighbourhoods.

In 2021, the samba star released her album Minha Verdade (My Truth), bringing together her own compositions and collaborations.

The album addressed themes such as Black pride, ancestry, love, and motherhood.

Following her death, the singer’s team said in a statement: “Today we say goodbye to our beloved Adriana Araújo.

“Adriana was much more than a great voice of samba, she had a warm embrace, an easy smile, a generous heart, and a joy for life that illuminated everyone around her.

“Samba will deeply feel her absence.”

She leaves behind her husband Evaldo and son Daniel.

THE Bachelor Australia star Megan Marx has given an update on her battle with a degenerative brain condition that has left her “grieving” her “unlived life”.

Megan, 36, was diagnosed with rare Spinocerebellar ataxia in 2023 which targets the part of the brain that controls coordination as well as the spinal cord.

There’s currently no cure for the disease, which affects one to five people in every 100,000 and can impact vision, speech and mobility.

In an essay for Mamamia, Megan wrote: “There is a kind of grief that rarely earns a name. It is not the grief of death, nor even the grief that follows a diagnosis. It is the grief of the life we imagined we might live, and the slow recognition that it will not arrive.”

The reality star said the ever-widening gap between her new reality of survival and the hopes and dreams she harboured should be mourned in a bid to stop feelings of shame developing.

She wrote: “The grief of what-if is often waved away. Be realistic, we’re told. Accept what is. But denial carries its own risk.

“If regret is untreated, if it hardens into identity, it becomes corrosive. It ceases to be grief and becomes a creed. That is where the damage quietly deepens.

“Pretending nothing was lost binds us to shame; naming it allows movement. It challenges the belief that worth is measured by productivity, consistency, or visibility. Survival, when understood honestly, is not failure; it is a form of adaptation.”

Megan said she’s stripped away all unnecessary elements of her life to focus on what she can still do.

She remains active, spending time outdoors when she can, camping, windsurfing and walking her dog on the beach.

Creative activities also feed her soul, from playing the guitar to painting and reading and allow her a certain structure.

The star had an important message for other people living with chronic illnesses: “do not let your grief be dismissed.”

She continued: “Do not bypass it for the comfort of others. Mourn what was lost, but remember what is still left of your life. In doing so, you clear space not for fantasy, but for a life that is honest, inhabitable, and still your own.”

Heartbreakingly, Megan said the day will come when she will no longer be able to talk, walk, or swallow.

She also laments how experimental therapies that could help her condition, like stem cell treatments, are far removed from what she can afford.

Despite this, she has ruled out ever crowdfunding.

Selflessly, she wrote: “I am acutely aware that there are people whose need is far more immediate than mine.”

Megan found fame on The Bachelor in 2016, becoming the first contestant to refuse a rose when offered by Richie Strahan.

She said the situation didn’t feel right and she went on to form a relationship with fellow female contestant Tiffany Scanlon.

Speaking afterwards, she said: “I got along with Richie really well, we had great banter… but for me, it was more the environment of the show that wasn’t very conducive to love.”

Following The Bachelor, she appeared on Bachelor in Paradise and The Challenge Australia.

The YFQ-42 has been selected by the USMC “for evaluation in the Marine Air-Ground Task Force Uncrewed Expeditionary Tactical Aircraft (MUX TACAIR) Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) program,” according to a release from the manufacturer of the drone, General Atomics. The aircraft is one of two Collaborative Combat Aircraft (uncrewed ‘fighters’) that the USAF has selected to enter flight testing, which is ongoing now. Under the new deal, General Atomics will use its “expertise in autonomy and uncrewed aircraft systems with a government-provided mission package, using the YFQ-42A platform as a surrogate to evaluate integration with crewed fighters.”

This sounds like a significant step for the USMC and the YFQ-42, but what does it actually mean? We reached out to General Atomics for some answers.

Before we get to that, what we know is that the YFQ-42 will have a USMC-provided ‘digital brain’ installed in it, after which it will work as a surrogate for CCAs, in general, to help the Marines explore how they actually integrate with them on a MAGTF (Marine Air Ground Task Force) level alongside crewed fighters. The CCA trials, which sound more complex than anything the USMC has disclosed before in regard to their CCA program, will help pave the way for future manned-unmanned teaming capabilities within the service.

Up until now, the Marines have primarily used the XQ-58 Valkyrie, a low-cost stealth drone built by Kratos that is quite different in its original form than the YFQ-42, for CCA autonomy testing. The USMC is moving forward with that platform, evolving it relatively dramatically into the MQ-58 in the process, which you can read about here. So, bringing in General Atomics’ CCA product for this kind of testing is certainly a new development. It’s worth noting that the YFQ-42 is only a USAF program inside the Pentagon.

YFQ-42A CCA: The Future of Airpower. Ready today.

As for the ‘mission package’ that will be installed aboard the YFQ-42, General Atomics describes it in a release as such:

“The USMC contract includes the rapid development of autonomy for the government-supplied mission kit — a cost-effective, sensor-rich, software-defined suite capable of delivering kinetic and non-kinetic effects — positioning the solution for use in expeditionary operations. This work will support evaluations of future MUX TACAIR capabilities.”

MUX TACAIR (Marine Air-Ground Task Force Uncrewed Expeditionary Tactical Aircraft) is the umbrella under which the USMC is currently pursuing CCA-type drones. The service is currently planning at least three incremental development phases. Increment 1 is the MQ-58, which the service has said in past budget documents is focused primarily on the “rapid and relevant capability delivery of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).” A new USMC Aviation Plan released today shows the goal now is to field Increment 2 and Increment 3 capabilities in the 2030-2035 and 2035-2040 timeframes, respectively. These increments are unrelated to the ones the USAF has planned for its CCA program. However, the two services, as well as the Navy, are actively cooperating on the development of relevant capabilities, including common command and control architectures.

YFQ-42 leverages General Atomics’ previous work on an experimental drone called the XQ-67A Off-Board Sensing Station (OBSS), developed for the USAF, and the company’s Gambit family. Gambit is an ecosystem of different designs that all use the same central ‘chassis’ equipped with mission systems and the aircraft’s ‘brains,’ as well as its undercarriage. The airframes installed on top can be radically disparate in design. This, in theory, would lead to greater efficiency and adaptability across a wide range of mission sets, while keeping costs low. Gambit is paired with an open architecture digital backbone that also allows for rapid iteration and integration of new capabilities, such as software, sensors, and weapons.

Gambit Series: The Future of Air Dominance

Still, after reading the official release, we had questions. So we reached out to General Atomics, and here is what C. Mark Brinkley, the senior spokesman for the firm’s Aeronautical Systems, Inc., division, told us:

Q: What kinds of tests are intended for this mission package/MAGTF integration with the YFQ-42?

A: The Marine Corps will be looking at datalink integration and various sensor modalities, which are certainly sweet spots for General Atomics. Our three uncrewed jets are generating a lot of flight hours in these areas, and many others, so we have a strong history of performance. The YFQ-42A is a fantastic aircraft, and we’re excited for the Marine Corps to see what it can do.

Q: Who will own the YFQ-42 used for these tests?

A: This aircraft will be a General Atomics capital asset. GA-ASI is betting on our people and our products, which is how we have operated for more than three decades. So the aircraft is in full-rate production now, at our own forecast and expense, to speed the acquisition process for our customers. We are building unmanned fighters on our own investment because we believe the demand is high and the need is immediate. Our owners reinvest about 35 percent of revenue back into the company every year, including internal research and development, capital assets, facility upgrades and expansion, and more. We invested a billion dollars of our own money to bring the MQ-9B to market and now we have 14 customers worldwide. We recently broke ground on our new hangar in the desert to meet demand across all products. And we’re building a fleet of fighter jets at risk, specifically to answer these types of requests.

Q: How challenging is it for YFQ-42 (and I am assuming the Gambit family) to integrate a new ‘brain?’

A: It’s not challenging for us at all. I’ve lost count of how many different AI pilots we have integrated into our three jet types at this point. Between the work we’ve done with MQ-20 Avenger, XQ-67A OBSS and YFQ-42A CCA, we have flown at least a half dozen different AI pilots over time. Last year, during a company-funded demo, Avenger switched between the GA-ASI TacACE pilot and the Shield AI Hivemind pilot mid-flight. As new customers select a Gambit Series aircraft, we know that the autonomy software will change, and it will evolve over time. So we designed the aircraft to support that, and we’re putting in a lot of work to support that.

Q: Is YFQ-42 being evaluated by the USMC for procurement, beyond being used as a test surrogate?

A: Currently, the role is as a CCA test surrogate. However, we see potential for it to be considered for Increment 2, absolutely. It’s a great fighter.

Q: Can you give us an update on the YFQ-42 flight test program?

A: There’s not much new I can say about the Air Force program that hasn’t been said already. Our work there is ongoing, and we’re very pleased with the results so far. Specific updates should come from the Air Force, but General Atomics sees a bright future for the aircraft. GA-ASI is the most advanced, most lethal, unmanned aircraft manufacturer in the world, and our aircraft are unlike anything else in the global market. We’ve been building combat jets since 2008. We have more than 500,000 autonomous takeoffs and landings. We’ve been advancing airborne autonomy for about a decade at this point. This is what we do.

So there you have it, while these tests will be broad in scope, well above evaluating the platform being used, it certainly will give the USMC a close-up look at the YFQ-42, which is becoming increasingly similar to Kratos’ XQ-58 as that drone becomes larger, more complex, and capable of runway operations.

In the end, if the CCA concept truly pans out as promised — which remains a glaring question — it is very unlikely to be ‘owned’ by a single company and a small handful of their designs. The iterative nature of the services’ competitions for CCAs alone makes such a circumstance a farce. Services will more likely than not procure a variety of airframes, all with different attributes, from different vendors over time, and their brains, along with the software that is installed in them, could be equally as varied, if not more so.

Regardless, the YFQ-42 has just officially been selected to be put to work for the Marines, which marks a significant vote of confidence in General Atomics’ design.

Contact the author: Tyler@twz.com