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…
Of all the cars we’ve driven and reviewed this year, these are our picks. 2025 has been a tumultuous year for the car world. After years of EV optimism, revanchists are pushing back against things like clean energy and fuel economy. Automakers have responded, postponing or canceling new electric…
Yakisugi, a Japanese technique of burning wood surfaces, creates a protective carbonized layer Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan…
Information from sensors is transmitted using neural-style activity spikes. The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they…
Folklorist/historian Adrienne Mayor on her new book Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends.…
GPS jamming has gotten cheap and easy, but there are potential solutions. In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was…
