The LEGO Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus Rex set, available exclusively at the LEGO Store, is a visually stunning, ambitious build. You're first taken aback by its size; this is a 1:12 scale model of a real T-Rex. LEGO Jurassic World Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus rex$249.99 at LEGO StoreThen you look closer and notice the detail: how the ribs are built at different lengths to create a rib "cage," how the dark-colored bricks create the illusion of shadow and throw the light-colored "bone" bricks into sharp relief. It's easier to put together than it looks, which makes its apparent intricacy that much more impressive.We Build LEGO Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus RexI loved dinosaurs as a child, and whenever I visited the American Museum of Natural History, the T-Rex's skeleton stood out for how tall it was. Years later, I read Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder," a sci-fi short story about time travel. It included the following passage, which captured the thrill and awe of seeing something so unnaturally large:"It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior."Like many people my age or older, I was led to believe that the T-Rex stood like this:Source: American Museum of Natural HistoryYears later, however, the scientific community concluded that the T-Rex, contrary to popular imagination and depiction, did not walk upright with its tail dragging on the ground. The T-Rex actually stood more like this, with its spine parallel to the ground and its tail serving as a counterbalance to its head:Source: Field MuseumThe above photo is of "Sue," the most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever found (90%). When paleontologist Sue Hendrickson discovered it, it revolutionized what we know about the T-Rex's life and visual appearance. See those tiny bones where the T-Rex's belly would have been? Those are called gastralia. When scientists first discovered Sue in 1990, they didn't know where those bones went, and so they left them out of the initial public display. Today, we know that they lined the T-Rex's belly and supported its breathing. Source: Universal PicturesScientists rethought several other physical traits as well. The T-Rex above is from the 1993 film Jurassic Park, and it captures the outdated popular perception of dinosaurs from 30 years ago. This T-Rex's body's positioning is more horizontal and correct than its earlier, upright depiction. But notice how the body is very lean. Now thanks to the gastralia, we know that the T-Rex was much heavier than previously thought nine to ten tons, rather than five to seven tons with a big belly that hung close to the ground. This life-sized model, based on Sue's bones, is our most updated, accurate depiction of a T-Rex:Source: Blue Rhino StudioIt's chubbier and cuter than we once thought, isn't it? Accordingly, the LEGO Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus Rex set is more accurate than fanciful. It retains the T-Rex's horizontal positioning, based on the most recent scientific conclusions. Unfortunately, it does not depict the T-Rex's gastralia. But its ribs are positioned in such a manner that suggests a "barrel-chested" creature, rather than the lean, efficient killing machine in popular fiction. Its arms are forward, in keeping with the newly-mounted Sue display at the Field Museum in Chicago.The set comes in 25 sealed plastic bags. First, you build the black stand upon which the model sits. Then, you build the T-Rex's backbone and attach it to the vertical supports; the rest of the model hangs onto it. Then the neck. Then the legs and hips, which attach to the spine and anchor to the stand's base. Then the ribs and the arms. Then the tail. And then finally, the head. The legs and torso are locked in place, but the arms, head, and tail are all adjustable and posable.Tip to tail, the model is nearly three-and-a-half feet long, which might cause some space concerns if you're wondering where you're going to put it once it's done. Wherever it goes, it's going to dominate the space it occupies. A wide, flat surface like a dresser or coffee table would work well. A shelf between other shelves would not. Find a location that befits this thing's magnificence.Tip to tail, the model is nearly three-and-a-half feet long.This set is technically a part of LEGO's Jurassic Park franchise. That's why the final bag has two minifigures of fictional characters one of Alan Grant and one of Ellie Sattler and poses them in front of the fossil on a stand attachment. The placard that accompanies the T-Rex is branded with the trademark Jurassic Park logo.The odd thing about this franchise tie-in, however, is that it feels shoehorned in. For example, LEGO branded this set as a tie-in to Jurassic World, even though the two minifigures represent characters from the first Jurassic Park film. But the disconnect runs even deeper. Even the name of the set, 'Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus Rex,' contains no movie tie-in. And the instruction booklet even has an option for disconnecting the minifigure and placard display entirely, allowing the massive skeleton to stand on its own. Of course, anyone could have accomplished this no instructions unnecessary with a little bit of ingenuity. But it's odd that LEGO is offering an official option to do it, as it makes the Jurassic Park (World?) connection even more awkward and superfluous.And to be real, that's because it is superfluous. A massive T-Rex of this size, scope, and price is not going to sell additional copies on account of its brand synergy; a massive T-Rex of this size, scope, and price is going to sell itself. It is, by itself, classy in the same way that the LEGO Titanic build is classy. It needed no minifigure tie-ins for the same reason that the LEGO Titanic did not need minifigure tie-ins of Jack and Rose. Don't think of this as a piece of movie memorabilia. It's so much better and more significant than that.LEGO Dinosaur Fossils: Tyrannosaurus Rex, Set #10335, retails for $269.99, and it is composed of 3011 pieces. It is available exclusively at the LEGO Store.More Sets From LEGO Jurassic Park Collection: LEGO T. rex SkullSee it at AmazonLEGO Jurassic Park Visitor CenterSee it at AmazonLEGO Triceratops SkullSee it at AmazonLEGO Little Eatie T RexSee it at AmazonLEGO Creator 3 in 1 T. RexSee it at AmazonKevin Wong is a contributing freelancer for IGN, specializing in LEGO. He's also been published in Complex, Engadget, Gamespot, Kotaku, and more. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinjameswong.

This may come as a shock, but it turns out that an astounding proportion of AI search results are flat-out incorrect, according to a new study published by the Columbia Journalism Review. We hope you were sitting down.Conducted by researchers at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, the analysis probed eight AI models including OpenAI's ChatGPT search and Google's Gemini, finding that overall, they gave an incorrect answer to more than 60 percent of queries.It should tell you something that the most accurate model to emerge from these tests, Perplexity from Perplexity AI, still answered 37 percent of its questions incorrectly. The village idiot award, meanwhile, goes to Elon Musk's chatbot Grok 3, which was wrong a staggering 94 percent of the time. Impressively bad."While traditional search engines typically operate as an intermediary, guiding users to news websites and other quality content, generative search tools parse and repackage information themselves, cutting off traffic flow to original sources," the authors warned. "These chatbots' conversational outputs often obfuscate serious underlying issues with information quality."By now, of course, the proclivity of large language models to lie or wrongly report information is well documented. But that hasn't stopped tech companies from trying to supplant the traditional web search, with some releasing versions of their existing chatbots tailor-made to do just that, like ChatGPT search. Google has even debuted an "AI Mode" that only shows Gemini summaries instead of web links.This latest study quantifies why this might be a bad idea. It was conducted by choosing ten random articles each from a pool of twenty publications, ranging from The Wall Street Journal to TechCrunch. In what should've been a softball, the chatbots were asked to identify an article's headline, its publisher, its publication date, and its URL. To make things even easier, the researchers made sure to only choose article excerpts that returned the original source within the first three results of an old-fashioned Google search.In addition to showing the AI models were wrong over half the time, these tests exposed other idiot tendencies. A classic one? Passing off their dubious wisdom "with alarming confidence," by either not qualifying their responses or failing to decline questions they didn't know the answer to.This lines up with other research documenting how AI models would rather hallucinate or make up answers instead of admitting they're out of their depth. Maybe that's because a policy of honesty would betray just how useless the AI models can be; Microsoft's Copilot, for example, declined more questions than it answered, the researchers said.The AI search tools were also terrible at citing their sources. ChatGPT Search linked to the wrong source article nearly 40 percent of the time, and straight up didn't bother to provide one in another 21 percent of cases. That's bad from a fact-checking point of view, and just as grim for publishers, who will be denied even the chance of getting traffic from an AI model that's scraped their content. Bodes well for the survival of our online media economy, doesn't it?More on AI: The Entire Internet Is Being Polluted by AI SlopShare This Article

When these stars dance, they make their own music.Astronomers have tracked down the source of a mysterious radio signal from deep space repeating every two hours. Intriguingly, it's a pair of stars in such a tight orbit that their magnetic fields regularly bump into each other and it's this bodily percussion that appears to be blasting out the radio emissions we're picking up on Earth, roughly 1,600 light years away.The findings on the binary system, published in a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy, shine a much-needed light on a new class of cosmic signal known as long-period radio transients.These extremely rare repeating radio pulses are similar to what's emitted by rapidly rotating stars called pulsars, whose signals we see every time their poles turn towards Earth, but repeat every few minutes or even hours compared to the latter's sub-second intervals.Simply put, it would be impossible for pulsars to rotate slowly enough to produce long period transients, and astronomers have searched far and wide for alternative sources."Now, we know at least some long-period radio transients come from binaries," said study coauthor Charles Kilpatrick, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, in a statement about the work. "We hope this motivates radio astronomers to localize new classes of sources that might arise from neutron star or magnetar binaries."The radio pulses seven of them were first discovered last year using the Low Frequency Array radio telescope in Europe."Taking a closer look at the timing of these pulses, we found that they arrive every two hours," wrote lead author Iris de Ruiter at the University of Sydney in an . "We compared the location of the radio pulses to optical catalogues, which list stars and galaxies that telescopes have observed in visible light. And there it was we found there was a faint red star exactly at the location of our radio pulses."The faint star is a red dwarf a small but extremely ubiquitous main sequence star. But it couldn't produce the signal on its own, de Ruiter wrote. There had to be a companion; binary systems, after all, are common.To find the hidden partner, the astronomers looked at the spectra of light coming from the red dwarf. They found that the light would intermittently shift to shorter and longer wavelengths, a sign that the star is moving back and forth. And that could only mean that it's locked in orbit with another object.That turned out to be a stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. White dwarfs are sometimes referred to as "dead stars" because they're the leftover, hot core of a massive star that exploded in a supernova.Still, de Ruiter says we're just scratching the surface of long period transients, because not all of them will come from binary systems like this one."The current landscape of long period transients is sparse. We need to find more of them to get a full understanding of these mysterious objects and how they work," de Ruiter wrote in The Conversation. "However, we now know that white dwarfs, with a little help from a stellar friend, can produce radio pulses just as bright as neutron stars."Share This Article

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Grand Theft Auto 5's PC RT enhancements hint at GTA 6 featuresRay traced global illumination in the upgrade has much in common with GTA 6 tech. Face-off by Alex Battaglia Video Producer, Digital Foundry Published on March 15, 2025 Grand Theft Auto 5 on PC has finally received the RT upgrades to achieve feature parity with the current generation console versions, almost three years since they arrived on Xbox and PlayStation consoles. The wait was worth it as scalability is impressive and the game also includes the ability to toggle ray traced global illumination - which may well hint at the kind of RT features we can expect to see in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6.To begin with though, let's be realistic. GTA 5 is almost 12 years old now and as such, there are limits as to how much better the game can actually look. The original was built around the fundamental constraints of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, after all, and that still shines through today, even in the maxed out PC experience. Character models are of their era, while material and texture quality is nowhere near as impressive as modern releases. GTA 5 comes from a time before the games industry switched to techniques like physically-based art pipelines and shading maths. Ray tracing can still transform the game in many respects, but not to the extent of making it comparable to a brand-new triple-A release.Even so, the upgrades are welcome. Pre-RTGI GTA 5 is a game that suffers from a problem that many games without RTGI have - and especially ones from this era. Indirect lighting in the original is handled in an interesting way, however. According to investigations by Adrian Courrges, the game generates a cubemap from the player camera position in real-time, similar to many racing games. This gives the game approximate real-time reflections on elements like cars, and for rougher surfaces the game appears to use a filtered version of that to make it so shadows are not pitch black. The problem is that lighting is only represented from one angle and as such, all shadowed areas in GTA 5 tend to look grey or overly dark. Everything not in sunlight tends to be shaded a greyish light or almost blue colour and where the edges of geometry are adorned with a thick halo of screen- space ambient occlusion.Here's our video breakdown of the newly RT-enhanced PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5.Watch on YouTubeRay traced global illumination - not available in the current-gen console versions, remember - is a game-changer here, with light bounce around the environments of a far, far superior quality. To say it really lightens up the mood is almost an understatement: bounce lighting you get from the sun and the indirect shadows you get as a result dramatically alter the games look - and it is always for the better.RT reflections are also part of the mix, dramatically changing the look of reflections on windows for example, turning them from potato-mode raster versions into per-pixel RT upgrades. However, unlike other games with a physically-based pipeline, these RT reflections do not universally apply to all materials depending on the angle. Rather, the RT reflections apply to select materials in the game that were either marked as 'somewhat shiney' or 'full shiney' or in the original release. Even so, on maxed out settings, the BVH structure for RT (the geometry against which rays are traced) is far more complex than the console versions - so even if the technique is selective, it can be far more detailed than Xbox or PS5.In fact, the RT global illumination solution in particular is comprehensive that it can't be termed as a mere bolt-on to the standard game. A lot of care and developmental work has gone into it, which perhaps makes little sense for a free upgrade for just one version of an old game. In fact, based on our analysis of GTA 6's first trailer, there's enough evidence here to suggest that this may well be tech for the upcoming Rockstar release backported to GTA 5 on PC. So, perhaps we are actually getting a preview of the lighting technology found in GTA 6 both in terms of features we can expect and even the level of performance we can expect.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Let me ground my reasoning here with a number of points. Usually when an old game gets updated with some form of ray tracing limited to just a subset of the platforms that can play it, typically developers will make that ray tracing a bit more limited. For example, in Dying Light 2, the RTGI only works from the sun but not other lights. Similarly, in the The Witcher 3's current-gen update, RTGI does not work on a per-pixel basis and instead is coarsely applied to the world with probes, with obvious artefacts as a result.That's not the case here - it's far more comprehensive. Firstly, it applies to all and any light sources, not just the sun. This is not just limited to stationary lights, but even moving lights like those from cars. Getting bounce lighting from any random light in the world to work with stability and coherency is a difficult task, requiring lots of work but clearly, Rockstar has put in the effort. The RTGI is indeed per-pixel too, so very finely detailed shadows and light bounce are present with none of the artefacts seen in cheaper/easier implementations. And based on what we've seen in GTA 6's first trailer, a per-pixel RTGI implementation is also present, which works great with emissive materials - surfaces within the game that are supposed to give off light.As you'll see in the video above, I put this through its paces with some tricky examples - and it works remarkably well.In summary, it's clear from the GTA 6 trailer that RTGI is present, with a similar level of fidelity to the same effect found in the newly RT-enhanced GTA 5 for PC. And that fidelity is such that it seems unlikely to have been a simple, bolt-on feature. Not only that, but it's performant and optimised too. As an example, objects that use transparent cut-out textures like trees and vegetation are represented accurately in reflections where you can see the individual blades and other detail. That makes sense for quality reasons, but it's very expensive for RTGI. In this scenario, Rockstar ensures that these textures never test transparency. This improves performance, but can result in some blocky shadows - a small concession in light of how fast it is.In March 2022, Rockstar released its current-gen version of GTA 5 with RT features. Later on that year, the game was updated - and here's what the developers added.Watch on YouTubeHow fast? An RTX 4060 at 1440p DLSS 3 quality mode using ultra RTGI and ultra RT reflections runs the game at a flawless 60fps while speeding through the city in dense traffic - and that's with all other settings maxed. In this scenario, optimised settings aren't really required. This level of RT optimisation bodes well for the current-gen consoles with GTA 6: RT apart, this game will be taxing the GPU hard, so the more performant and optimised the ray tracing is, the more GPU time will be available for the other cutting edge visuals we've seen. We still don't think GTA 6 will be a 60fps game on consoles, however, and again, GTA 5 on PC indicates that the set-up costs for RT are too much for 60fps on console-equivalent CPUs. So while RTGI is relatively light on the GPU, it is far heavier on the CPU side and is more limiting as a result.One more thing - I don't think every aspect of GTA 5's RTGI will transfer over to GTA 6, specifically in how extra light bounces work. Based on what I have seen in the game, there are a limited amount of bounces of light from the RTGI and you can see this readily by tweaking the game's config file to add another bounce at the cost of some performance. It does add in a good deal more light so it would appear that the game might even just be using one bounce per default on ultra. For a game like GTA 6, I cannot imagine that would be the case. Typically, modern games do one real bounce per frame, but then use some sort of caching structure to get in additional bounces over time - that is pretty standard in the industry and I imagine Rockstar would do the same. However, In GTA 5's case, that does not seem to be the case, and instead it looks like the cubemap lighting I mentioned earlier seems to apply at times like additional bounces of light.Ultimately, while the RT reflections are a nice addition to Grand Theft Auto 4 - just as they were on the consoles - it's the RTGI and the extended RT distance that really make a big difference up against PS5 and Xbox. There are certainly commonalities with GTA 6's ray traced global illumination, but the CPU intensive nature of the implementation does lend more evidence to the idea that the console games will target 30fps, not 60fps.

2D/ 3D Storyboard Masterclass in Blender Grease Pencil - Preview By SpitfireStoryboards on March 15, 2025 Videotutorials Paul Coulthard presents his Masterclass course in 2D/3D Storyboards and Animatics, featuring Blender and its Grease Pencil tool.mLaunching in April 2025The course will launch in 2 tiers : THE MASTERCLASS COURSE tier, and the INTRODUCTION TO BLENDER FOR STORYBOARDING tier , to suit the needs of everyone.Both of these tiers are video lesson format with lesson assignments, that you can tackle in your own time. MODULE 1 Intro to Story and 2D Foundations (Beginner) MODULE 2 Introduction to blender for Storyboarding(Beginner) (SOLD AS A STANDALONE ALSO) MODULE 3 3d Exploration and Staging (Intermediate) MODULE 4 Developing a Scene (Intermediate) MODULE 5 Preparation for an Action Scene (Advanced) MODULE 6 Execution of an Action Scene (Advanced) I've been cooking this one up in the lab for quite some time now, created in collaboration with the fantastic folk at ARTWOD.com. There is a sign up to a FREE Newsletter I will be able to keep you informed of the upcoming release, sharing more information with you as we approach launch.CheersPaul Coulthard / Spitfire Storyboards

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Changing lanes The same day Trump bought a Tesla, automaker moved to disrupt trade war Tesla hopes to slow down Trump's tit-for-tat tariffs amid financial woes. Ashley Belanger Mar 14, 2025 2:20 pm | 83 Donald Trump and White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk deliver remarks next to a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News Donald Trump and White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk deliver remarks next to a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Andrew Harnik / Staff | Getty Images News Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreElon Musk's Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump's trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy.In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump's tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports."Tesla supports a robust and thorough process" to "address unfair trade practices," but only those "which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies," the letter said.The carmaker recommended that the USTRin its ongoing review of unfair trade practices and investigation into harms of non-reciprocal trade agreements"consider the downstream impacts of certain proposed actions taken to address unfair trade practices."According to Tesla, the current process to address unfair trade threatens to harm its more than 70,000 employees, and more broadly could trigger job losses and revenue dips in the US auto industry. It could also disrupt supply chains, as Tesla claims that even its best efforts prove it would be "impossible" to source all parts from the US currently."Even with aggressive localization of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the United States," the letter said, asking the USTR to "evaluate domestic supply chain limitations."If left unchanged, the process could make the US less competitive in global auto markets, Tesla warned, recommending that the "USTR should investigate ways to avoid these pitfalls in future actions."Moving forward, Tesla recommends that the USTR "take into account" how the trade war could hurt US exporters, as "US exporters are inherently exposed to disproportionate impacts when other countries respond to US trade actions."In the letter, Tesla appears to suggest that Trump's tariffs were rushed, suggesting that "US companies will benefit from a phased approach that enables them to prepare accordingly and ensure appropriate supply chain and compliance measures are taken."Tesla was not alone in submitting comments to the USTR. So far, hundreds of companies have chimed in, many hoping to push back on Trump's aggressive tariffs regime.Among them was a trade group representing major foreign automakers like BMW, Honda, and ToyotaAutos Drive Americawhich agreed with Tesla that the USTR should slow Trump down and require considerations about long-term impacts of sudden actions to address unfair trade. They similarly warned that imposing "broad-based tariffs will disrupt production at US assembly plants," Reuters reported."Automakers cannot shift their supply chains overnight, and cost increases will inevitably lead to some combination of higher consumer prices, fewer models offered to consumers and shut-down US production lines, leading to potential job losses across the supply chain," the group said.Disrupting Trump trade war may be toughLast week, Trump's 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, likely frustrating Tesla, which relies on a small parts manufacturer in Canada, Laval Tool, to source parts for the already costly molds for its Cybertrucks. Those tariffs threatened to spike costs beyond the current rate of nearly $500,000 per mold at a time when the Cybertruck hasn't been selling well, InsideEVs reported. And for Tesla, Trump's China tariffs may hit even harder, as China is Tesla's second biggest market.On the day that those tariffs kicked in, the head of the Alliance for Automotive Innovationwhich represents all the major US automakers, except TeslaJohn Bozzella warned that "all automakers will be impacted by these tariffs on Canada and Mexico," Reuters reported. He joined others predicting price hikes on cars coming soon, perhaps as high as 25 percent.Tesla's letter to the USTR is notably unsigned, despite CEO Musk's close allyship with Trump as a senior advisor in his administrationsuggesting Musk may be hesitant to directly criticize Trump's trade war or his opposition to EVs.Many have questioned how long Musk's friendship with Trump can possibly last, given their strong personalities and seeming unwillingness to bend to critics. At the beginning of this administration, Musk seemed unafraid to question Trump despite teaming up with him. Perhaps most notably, Trump's team was supposedly "furious" after Musk trashed Trump's $500 billion "Stargate" project with OpenAI, Politico reported, which Trump had hyped as "tremendous" and "monumental.""Its clear he has abused the proximity to the president," a Trump ally granted anonymity told Politico. "The problem is the president doesnt have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks."Officially, Trump downplayed Musk's public criticism of his major announcement, seeming to understand that Musk views OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanwhom Musk is suing for making a "fool" out of himas an enemy."He hates one of the people in the deal," Trump told a reporter who asked if Musk's comments had bothered him, confirming, "it doesn't."Despite a long history of harsh comments about EVs, Trump has recently hyped Tesla cars, which Tesla noted in its letter to the USTR, further its mission "to accelerate the worlds transition to sustainable energy." The BBC noted Tesla's letter was sent the same day that Trump hosted a White House event where the president vowed to purchase a Tesla in defiance of Tesla boycotts and protests that some believe are driving a steep Tesla stock fall and even degrading the price of used Teslas. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that he was buying a Tesla to support "one of the Worlds great automakers" and "Elon's 'baby,'" alleging that protests and boycotts were somehow illegal.The Hill suggested that their friendship isnt likely to end soon, even though Trump has supposedly complained in private about taunts suggesting that Musk is really the president or somehow pulling the strings, The Independent reported.Musk may be settling into a good dynamic with Trump after spending ample time at the president's side, reportedly even joining meetings and sensitive calls. Or perhaps Musk is giving Trump space to call the shots, after Musk's Department of Government Efficiency's aggressive cuts at federal agencies sparked backlash that finally pushed Trump to rein in Musk's power a little.Musk's proximity to Trump was predicted to be a boon to his businesses, but Tesla has been stuck in a slump that seemingly some Trump allies think Trump might fear makes him look weak, The New Republic reported. But Trump has made tariffs the core of his trade policy, hoping aggressive taxes will force more industry into the US, and it's hard to see how Musk could easily influence him to shift gears.In Tesla's letter, the automaker told the USTR that it was "essential to support US manufacturing jobs" by ensuring that cost-prohibitive tariffs or other import restrictions don't disrupt critical auto industry supply chains. For Tesla, the stakes couldn't be higher, as the company reminded the USTR that "Tesla was ranked as the world leader in the transition to vehicle electrification," manufacturing "the best-selling car in the world (EV or otherwise).""Teslas US facilities support over 70,000 employees and are responsible for billions of dollars of US investment and economic activity each year," Tesla's letter said.Ashley BelangerSenior Policy ReporterAshley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 83 Comments

Image: NintendoJoy-Con drift has been a major talking point throughout the Switch's lifecycle and if you're worried about it making an unwanted return next-generation, there might be some good news on the horizon.The tech experts at iFixit recently did a teardown of Nintendo's sound clock 'Alarmo' and it appears to be using the "more reliable" Hall effect sensors. The teardown reveals a "magnet and Hall effect sensor" located inside the rotary dial button at the top of the device.As The Verge explains, this should well and truly extend the clock's reliability in the long term:"That tech, which is already in use in many third-party controllers, should not only improve accuracy while using the dial to navigate the alarm clocks menus, but it will also help ensure that in five years time Alarmos dial can still work as reliably as it does today."Considering the confirmation of Hall effect sensors in this relatively new Nintendo product, it's led to speculation about the Switch successor using the same tech in its next-generation controller (potentially making stick drift a thing of the past).While there's not much information about the new Joy-Con controllers just yet, Nintendo has revealed they attach to the main system via a magnetic connection. They also appear to feature mouse-like capabilities including an optical sensor.This latest discovery follows a free Super Mario Bros. theme update for Nintendo Alarmo on Mario Day earlier this week. Featuring four new tracksReset SwitchAdieu Joy-Cons?What do you make of this finding? Let us know in the comments.[source youtu.be, via theverge.com]See AlsoShare:00 Liam is a news writer and reviewer for Nintendo Life and Pure Xbox. He's been writing about games for more than 15 years and is a lifelong fan of Mario and Master Chief. Hold on there, you need to login to post a comment...Related ArticlesRumour: Xbox Expected To Join Switch 2 With A New Handheld This YearMicrosoft could be testing the waters...Switch 2 Filings Show Support For Wi-Fi 6Better, fasterRandom: The "Grail" Of Sonic Merch Pops Up On eBay With Insane Price TagThat's a lotta Rings