“We achieved within a few years what had taken the European space industry decades before.” Isar Aerospace, founded in 2018 by three students at a German university, successfully launched a privately-developed rocket into low-Earth orbit Saturday from a Norwegian spaceport inside the Arctic Circle. The two-stage rocket, named Spectrum,…
The shift in the fish’s diet is having significant downstream impacts on the environment and climate. Eat more fatty fish. That dietary advice has changed the way the world consumes salmon, pushing consumer demand ever upward and production to higher and higher levels. Most of that demand is being…
The US government is investigating whether the Cybercab meets vehicle safety standards. Tesla’s Cybercab, a distinctive two-seater without a steering wheel or brake pedals, is set to start picking up members of the public in two states. But the vehicle is already under investigation by the US federal government,…
In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test. Self-identifying OpenAI agents posted 18,000 messages to a public wiki that discussed ways for other agents to bypass security sandbox restrictions during what was likely internal testing designed to gauge the agents’ hacking abilities, researchers said…
Other archives and libraries around the world may also contain genetic traces of past disease outbreaks. Sheeppox is a highly contagious, often fatal viral disease that was largely eradicated from much of European livestock in the 20th century. But there is still the occasional regional outbreak, such as the…
Broadcom admits it put “too big a focus on VCF.” For many small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs), VMware has become too expensive. Broadcom’s acquisition of the virtualization firm brought the end of perpetual license sales and the arrival of pricey, stacked, subscription-based bundles that priced out many SMBs. The most obvious…
A once-overlooked block of unicode that’s invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use. A clever technique used to hide malicious prompts in attacks on AI agents has been adopted by spammers to evade filters on email platforms that are designed to flag unwanted messages used in mass campaigns.…
“I think we can’t get in trouble for that now. It’s like 20 years ago.” Back in 2009, Ars wrote about what was being reported as a leaked trailer for the then-upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, saying the footage “looks like it’s straight from a high-gloss action movie.” Today,…
Every neuron and connection in the brain of a fly has been mapped—twice. On Friday, researchers announced the completion of a map of every neuron in the brain of a male fruit fly. The “connectome” provides a tool that can accelerate neurobiology research. But it also provides an opportunity…
Fairphone’s CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone. Smartphone longevity didn’t used to matter. In the past, before you could wear out or break a phone, there was always some shiny new thing to buy. Today, we expect our smartphones to go…
