Unofficial mod lets classic Nintendo GameCube title use AI chatbots with amusing results. When software engineer Joshua Fonseca recently connected the GameCube simulation classic Animal Crossing to a modern AI language model like the kind that powers ChatGPT, he decided to shake things up. By programming the AI to…
Meanwhile, Congress is trying to keep serious scientists from weighing in. While the Trump administration has continued to refer to efforts to avoid the worst impacts of climate change as a scam, it has done almost nothing to counter the copious scientific evidence that demonstrates that climate change is…
North America has bought 1.3 million EVs this year; China has bought 7.6 million. Here’s some good news for a Friday afternoon: For 2025 through August, global electric vehicle sales have grown by 25 percent compared to the same eight months in 2024, according to the analysts at Rho…
A $100 replica Switch dock or $25 cardboard sleeve is needed to play the 3D re-releases. Even as Nintendo has endlessly mined its classic consoles for nostalgic re-releases in recent decades, the company has seemed to completely ignore the existence of the Virtual Boy—its abortive 1990s dip into the world…
Engineered pathway lets carbon be plugged directly into key metabolic pathways. Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest…
Smaller on the outside, bigger on the inside, and it goes farther on a single charge. Nissan provided flights from Austin to San Diego and then to Washington, DC, and accommodation so Ars could drive the Nissan Leaf. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. SAN DIEGO—The original Nissan…
North Korea test-fired a powerful new solid rocket motor for its next-generation ICBM. Welcome to Edition 8.10 of the Rocket Report! Dear readers, if everything goes according to plan, four astronauts are less than six months away from traveling around the far side of the Moon and breaking free…
“He wanted to make more usable and friendly to people who weren’t geeks.” Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be…
Companies work to finalize terms as OpenAI pursues for-profit restructuring. On Thursday, OpenAI and Microsoft announced they have signed a non-binding agreement to revise their partnership, marking the latest development in a relationship that has grown increasingly complex as both companies compete for customers in the AI market and…
Physicists spliced merger’s gravitational signal into isolated frequencies to determine surface areas. Back in 1971, the late physicist Stephen Hawking made an intriguing prediction: The total surface area of a black hole cannot decrease, only increase or remain stable. So if two black holes combine, the newly formed black…
