The white whales join the short, contested list of animals that see themselves. In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much…
SpaceX has more to prove before flying Starship all the way to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results. The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch…
A formal petition to the US government calls for sanctions on Chinese seafood imports. For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that…
Google tells Ars it fixed the first-gen Chromecast bug. Google’s first Chromecast was a hit. With 10 million units sold in 2014, it excelled as an easy solution for streaming TV and movies from the Internet to a TV. Released at a time when dumb TVs were more common,…
Workaround flouts law that bans NTSB disclosures of cockpit audio recordings. Pilots’ voices from the last seconds of a fatal cargo plane crash have been re-created by Internet sleuths using software and AI tools. The spread of reconstructed audio recordings has prompted a US government agency to suspend all…
Critics note a lack of factual support in lawsuit filed by US Senate candidate. The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. Since at least 2016,…
Two additional marketing companies will also pay $25,000 each. In November 2023, we reported on dubious claims made by marketing firm Cox Media Group (CMG) Local Solutions. The company advertised a service called Active Listening on a website that said, “It’s true. Your devices are listening to you” and…
The first data from 2026 seem to indicate that last year was an oddity. Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge…
Keep the charging puck’s exposed pins far away from anything metal. When we reviewed the new Steam Controller last month, we noted how the satisfying click of the magnetic charging puck easily connecting to the back of the controller lets users “save the hassle of fiddling with a power…
GitHub is just the latest victim of TeamPCP, a gang that has carried out a spree of software supply chain attacks. A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but…
