Deadly doors, a busted battery bet, and a toxic owner: What’s not to like? Tesla published its final production and delivery numbers this morning, and they make for brutal reading. Sales were down almost 16 percent during the final three months of last year, meaning the company sold 77,343…
Double-detonating “superkilonova,” Roman liquid gypsum burials, biomechanics of kangaroo posture, and more. It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This…
Streaming may get a little worse before it gets better. We’re far from streaming’s original promise: instant access to beloved and undiscovered titles without the burden of ads, bundled services, or price gouging that have long been associated with cable. Still, every year we get more dependent on streaming…
This time, a Colorado plant scheduled to shut down will be kept on standby. On Tuesday, US Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued a now familiar order: because of a supposed energy emergency, a coal plant scheduled for closure would be forced to remain open. This time, the order…
The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list. In a roundup of the top stories of 2024, Ars included a supply-chain attack that came dangerously close to inflicting a catastrophe for thousands—possibly millions—of organizations, which included a large assortment of…
In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools. Following two years of immense hype in 2023 and 2024, this year felt more like a settling-in period for the LLM-based token prediction industry. After more than two years of public fretting over AI…
The study’s main takeaway: “Be bold. It is the thing that slows down authoritarian creep.” Freedom of speech is a foundational principle of healthy democracies and hence a primary target for aspiring authoritarians, who typically try to squash dissent. There is a point where the threat from authorities is…
Settlement forces NIH to review grants previously rejected on ideological grounds. On Monday, the ACLU announced that it and other organizations representing medical researchers had reached a settlement in their suit against the federal government over grant applications that had been rejected under a policy that has since been…
A serious data breach has occurred, but Ars users have nothing to worry about. Earlier this month, a hacker named Lovely claimed to have breached a Condé Nast user database and released a list of more than 2.3 million user records from our sister publication WIRED. The released materials…
Gathering for mutual defense puts young spiny lobsters at risk of predators. Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there’s a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming…
