The research agency has 27 institute and center directors. Will those roles become politicized? When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out the president’s agenda, and, at least in…
Plant chemicals made more potent by insect pests are detoxified by the fungus. Exterminators keep getting calls for a reason. Wood-devouring insects, such as beetles, termites, and carpenter ants, are constantly chewing through walls or infecting trees and breaking them down. The fight against these insects usually involved noxious…
A lip-syncing robot, Leonardo’s DNA, and new evidence that humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories…
With virtually no content and limited benefits, 8K TVs were doomed. Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day. In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In…
Moltbook lets 32,000 AI bots trade jokes, tips, and complaints about humans. On Friday, a Reddit-style social network called Moltbook reportedly crossed 32,000 registered AI agent users, creating what may be the largest-scale experiment in machine-to-machine social interaction yet devised. It arrives complete with security nightmares and a huge…
Ars spoke to several software devs about AI and found enthusiasm tempered by unease. Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code…
You won’t be going on road trips, but a very cheap electric runabout is possible. I’ve been thinking about used electric vehicles lately. It’s not news that EVs depreciate faster than gasoline-powered cars. All the incentives like tax credits and OEM rebates that entice the first owner to sign…
“Selfishly a little bit, we built Shield for ourselves.” It took Android devicemakers a very long time to commit to long-term update support. Samsung and Google have only recently decided to offer seven years of updates for their flagship Android devices, but a decade ago, you were lucky to…
Windows 11 clears a milestone as Windows 10 continues its slow fade. Complaining about Windows 11 is a popular sport among tech enthusiasts on the Internet, whether you’re publicly switching to Linux, publishing guides about the dozens of things you need to do to make the OS less annoying,…
Social density increases likelihood of sticking with a location. Environmental factors had little influence. Ice fishing is a longstanding tradition in Nordic countries, with competitions proving especially popular. Those competitions can also tell scientists something about how social cues influence how we make foraging decisions, according to a new…
