“This does not meet the release conditions for a safe manned return.” Wrapping up 204 days in orbit, three Chinese astronauts flew back to Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft Friday, leaving three crewmates behind on the Tiangong space station with a busted lifeboat. Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third…
Ongoing struggles with AI model instruction-following show that true human-level AI still a ways off. Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes…
Sequencing an ancient creature’s RNA opens up a new window into extinct life. A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists,…
Life with humans changed dogs in some dramatic ways, and it didn’t take long. Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been…
Early warning system being developed by universities may slow the plant pathogen. A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty…
Steam punk magical-realist world-building at its finest. Back in 2012, Dishonored earned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.…
“Never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try.” The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean. The on-target touchdown…
The results of AI-assisted hacking aren’t as impressive as many might have us believe. Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign targeting dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much…
Tariffs, component volatility, and Valve’s tolerance for losses all lead to uncertainty. If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry…
Tiny chips can be powered by infrared light if they’re near the brain’s surface. Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need,…
