Study: Land use is the biggest factor in determining decomposition rates of organic cotton underpants. A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25…
“It just felt like the right thing to do.” Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year. The news comes months after the…
“We built this city on good cacao” does have a nice ring to it. A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao,…
227 install commands were found in corporate docs pointing at code nobody owns. Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that…
Without authorization, 1,200 OpenAI agents conspired among themselves to game a test. The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization,…
The electric Torcal will be Bentley’s entry model and cost less than a Bentayga. Bentley provided flights from Washington, DC, to Monterey, California, and accommodation so Ars could ride in the Torcal, as well as some other things you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not…
Report shows Meta’s challenges replacing people with AI agents. Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta’s internal affairs. Reuters’ report highlights the…
The “everyday” GT3 delivers, despite looming regulations and an ever-inflating price tag. The GT3 occupies a singular place in the 911 lineup. Whereas the range-topping Turbo S piles on power, technology, luxury, and all-weather capability, the GT3 has always pursued something more elemental: a lighter weight, more focus, and…
“Most” Xbox One and Series X games are compatible; discs will still work after being claimed. For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both…
Messing with the genetic code might have gotten a bit easier to do. The genetic code is what life everywhere uses to convert the information contained in DNA into specific protein sequences. With minor variations, the same genetic code is used by every living thing on Earth, suggesting it…
