Foundations of daily life are being pushed to the brink by human-caused warming. As global warming accelerates, about 480 million people in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula face intensifying and in some places unsurvivable heat, as well as drought, famine, and the risk of mass displacement, the World…
The Department of the Air Force approves a new home in Florida for SpaceX’s Starship. Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets…
Defendants were convicted of similar crimes a decade ago. How were they cleared again? Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department systems have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after…
Kohler is getting the scoop on people’s poop. Kohler is facing backlash after an engineer pointed out that the company’s new smart toilet cameras may not be as private as it wants people to believe. The discussion raises questions about Kohler’s use of the term “end-to-end encryption” (E2EE) and…
A massive study of political persuasion shows AIs have, at best, a weak effect. Roughly two years ago, Sam Altman tweeted that AI systems would be capable of superhuman persuasion well before achieving general intelligence—a prediction that raised concerns about the influence AI could have over democratic elections. To…
Valve tells Ars its “trying to unblock” limits caused by open source driver issues. When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth…
The device starts at $900 and comes with a free gift for a limited time. OnePlus is ready to sell its new flagship smartphone in the US weeks after it made the device official. Having now finally gotten Federal Communications Commission clearance, the OnePlus 15 is available for preorder.…
Thirty years later, JavaScript is the glue that holds the interactive web together, warts and all. Thirty years ago today, Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release announcing JavaScript, an object scripting language designed for creating interactive web applications. The language emerged from a frantic 10-day…
They’re quite a bit cheaper than manufactured nozzles if you can dissect them. Necrobotics is a field of engineering that builds robots out of a mix of synthetic materials and animal body parts. It has produced micro-grippers with pneumatically operated legs taken from dead spiders and walking robots based…
Even the first Trump administration had tougher fuel economy targets. It’s been less than a year into the second Trump administration, and to many outside observers, US government policies appear confusing or incoherent. Yesterday provided a good example from the automotive sector. As has been widely expected, the White…
