New method extracts desirable elements from waste magnets using less energy and acid. All the world’s discarded phones, bricked laptops, and other trashed electronics are collectively a treasure trove of rare earth elements (REEs). But separating out and recovering these increasingly sought-after materials is no easy task. However, a…
Guppies are highly susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion. Ring doves? Not so much. Chances are you’ve encountered some version of the “Ebbinghaus illusion,” in which a central circle appears to be smaller when encircled by larger circles and seems larger when surrounded by smaller circles. It’s an example of…
The Circuit of the Americas was packed for the US Grand Prix. Formula 1 held the third of its five North American rounds this past weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Unlike the races in Montreal, Miami, and Las Vegas, the US Grand Prix is…
What if point-and-click games weren’t about the puzzles? Even in my youth, I always loved the idea of point-and-click adventure games more than I did the reality. I appreciated how they transported me to other worlds, each with its own rules, histories, and interesting characters. However, like many people,…
Amazon’s Ring partners with company whose tech has reportedly been used by ICE. Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring…
Ars chats with co-authors Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal about their delightful new children’s book. In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but…
Preparations for the Artemis II mission continue despite the federal government shutdown. The Orion spacecraft, which will fly four people around the Moon, arrived inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida late Thursday night, ready to be stacked on top of its rocket…
Backup firm brings a unique, informed perspective to HDD failure rates. Backblaze is a backup and cloud storage company that has been tracking the annualized failure rates (AFRs) of the hard drives in its datacenter since 2013. As you can imagine, that’s netted the firm a lot of data.…
A recent study found lead in teeth from 2 million-year-old hominin fossils. Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers—and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning. Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a…
Some races will be free as F1 TV moves from standalone streaming to Apple TV. The United States Grand Prix takes place this weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Texas, and this morning, Formula 1 used the occasion to announce a new broadcast deal for the sport…
