Recharge, then recharge some more Researchers figure out how to get fresh lithium into batteries Regular doses of lithium let a battery survive nearly 12K cycles (and counting). John Timmer Feb 21, 2025 4:33 pm | 11 Credit: Kinga Krzeminska Credit: Kinga Krzeminska Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAs the owner of a 3-year-old laptop, I feel the finite lifespan of lithium batteries acutely. It's still a great machine, but the cost of a battery replacement would take me a significant way down the path of upgrading to a newer, even greater machine. If only there were some way to just plug it in overnight and come back to a rejuvenated battery.While that sounds like science fiction, a team of Chinese researchers has identified a chemical that can deliver fresh lithium to well-used batteries, extending their life. Unfortunately, getting it to work requires that the battery has been constructed with this refresh in mind. Plus it hasn't been tested with the sort of lithium chemistry that is commonly used in consumer electronics.Finding the right chemistryThe degradation of battery performance is largely a matter of its key components gradually dropping out of use within the battery. Through repeated cyclings, bits of electrodes fragment and lose contact with the conductors that collect current, while lithium can end up in electrically isolated complexes. There's no obvious way to re-mobilize these lost materials, so the battery's capacity drops. Eventually, the only way to get more capacity is to recycle the internals into a completely new battery.There's potentially another option: inject some new material into the battery itself. While there are physical limits to how much you can cram into the physical space inside the battery, this does have the potential to extend its useful life and get more out of the cost and energy required for manufacturing.By all appearances, however, that isn't what the team behind the recent research was trying to do. Instead, most of the new paper describing the researchers' work is focused on a related problem: getting lithium into a battery during the manufacturing process. It just happens to be the case that the approach they are developing will work for both manufacturing and rejuvenation.In current manufacturing processes, the lithium is typically included in one of the electrodes, leaving the battery ready for use. There are, however, a number of electrode materials that can potentially store a lot of lithium but aren't easy to load up with it ahead of manufacturing. So, the researchers were interested in manufacturing the battery, then finding a way to get the lithium in afterward.So, they started searching for a lithium compound that fit a very long list of fairly specific properties. One is that it had to undergo reactions that liberated the lithium within the voltage range typically used by the mature batteries so that all of it would eventually react. The reaction also had to be irreversible to prevent ongoing cycles of reactions between the lithium and the remains of the chemical that brought it there. Those chemical remains had to be easy to get back out of the battery, as well. Finally, the chemical had to be soluble in battery electrolytes and stable when exposed to air and moderate heat so it could be used in existing manufacturing.Lithium deliveryThe chemical they came up with is LiSO2CF3. Under voltage, the chemical will lose both the lithium and an electron, leaving behind an unstable chemical that breaks down into SO2 and a mixture of HCF3 and C2F6. All of those products are gases at room temperature and will simply bubble out of the electrolyte if there's any space for them to do so.To test it, the researchers essentially built a lithium-free lithium battery. Then, using an electrolyte with dissolved LiSO2CF3, they filled an electrode with lithium ions by applying a voltage, drawing off the gases that formed in the process. Once fully loaded, they could seal the battery off, expecting it to cycle the lithium as normal.In their testing, they use a couple of unusual electrode materials, such as a chromium oxide (Cr8O21) and an organic polymer (a sulfurized polyacrylonitrile). Both of these have significant weight advantages over the typical materials used in today's batteries, although the resulting batteries typically lasted less than 500 cycles before dropping to 80 percent of their original capacity.But the striking experiment came when they used LiSO2CF3 to rejuvenate a battery that had been manufactured as normal but had lost capacity due to heavy use. Treating a lithium-iron phosphate battery that had lost 15 percent of its original capacity restored almost all of what was lost, allowing it to hold over 99 percent of its original charge. They also ran a battery for repeated cycles with rejuvenation every few thousand cycles. At just short of 12,000 cycles, it still could be restored to 96 percent of its original capacity.Before you get too excited, there are a couple of things worth noting about lithium-iron phosphate cells. The first is that, relative to their charge capacity, they're a bit heavy, so they tend to be used in large, stationary batteries like the ones in grid-scale storage. They're also long-lived on their own; with careful management, they can take over 8,000 cycles before they drop to 80 percent of their initial capacity. It's not clear whether similar rejuvenation is possible in the battery chemistries typically used for the sorts of devices that most of us own.The final caution is that the battery needs to be modified so that fresh electrolytes can be pumped in and the gases released by the breakdown of the LiSO2CF3 removed. It's safest if this sort of access is built into the battery from the start, rather than provided by modifying it much later, as was done here. And the piping needed would put a small dent in the battery's capacity per volume if so.All that said, the treatment demonstrated here would replenish even a well-managed battery closer to its original capacity. And it would largely restore the capacity of something that hadn't been carefully managed. And that would allow us to get far more out of the initial expense of battery manufacturing. Meaning it might make sense for batteries destined for a large storage facility, where lots of them could potentially be treated at the same time.Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08465-y (About DOIs).John TimmerSenior Science EditorJohn TimmerSenior Science Editor John is Ars Technica's science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots. 11 Comments

internal rifts among cybercriminals Leaked chat logs expose inner workings of secretive ransomware group Researchers are poring over the data and feeding it into ChatGPT. Dan Goodin Feb 21, 2025 4:47 pm | 9 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreMore than a years worth of internal communications from one of the worlds most active ransomware syndicates have been published online in a leak that exposes tactics, trade secrets, and internal rifts of its members.The communications come in the form of logs of more than 200,000 messages members of Black Basta sent to each other over the Matrix chat platform from September 2023 to September 2024, researchers said. The person who published the messages said the move was in retaliation for Black Basta targeting Russian banks. The leaker's identity is unknown; its also unclear if the person responsible was an insider or someone outside the group who somehow gained access to the confidential logs.How to be your own worst enemyLast year, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Black Basta had targeted 12 of the 16 US critical infrastructure sectors in attacks mounted on 500 organizations around the world. One notable attack targeted Ascention, a St. Louis-based health care system with 140 hospitals in 19 states. Other victims include Hyundai Europe, UK-based outsourcing firm Capita, the Chilean Government Customs Agency, and UK utility company Southern Water. The native Russian-speaking group has been active since at least 2022.BlackBastas internal chats just got exposed, proving once again that cybercriminals are their own worst enemies, a member of security firm Prodraft wrote Thursday. Keep burning our intelligence sources, we dont mind.Researchers who have read the Russian-language texts said they exposed internal rifts in the secretive organization that have escalated since one of its leaders was arrested because it increases the threat of other members being tracked down as well. The heightened tensions have contributed to growing rifts between the current leader, believed to be Oleg Nefedov, and his subordinates. One of the disagreements involved his decision to target a bank in Russia, which put Black Basta in the crosshairs of law enforcement in that country.It turns out that the personal financial interests of Oleg, the group's boss, dictate the operations, disregarding the team's interests, a researcher at Prodraft wrote. Under his administration, there was also a brute force attack on the infrastructure of some Russian banks. It seems that no measures have been taken by law enforcement, which could present a serious problem and provoke reactions from these authorities.The leaked trove also includes details about other members, including two administrators using the names Lapa and YY, and Cortes, a threat actor linked to the Qakbot ransomware group. Also exposed are more than 350 unique links taken from ZoomInfo, a cloud service that provides data about companies and business individuals. The leaked links provide insights into how Black Basta members used the service to research the companies they targeted.Security firm Hudson Rock said it has already fed the chat transcripts into ChatGPT to create BlackBastaGPT, a resource to help researchers analyze Black Basta operations.Dan GoodinSenior Security EditorDan GoodinSenior Security Editor Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82. 9 Comments

First shot German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe We are almost ready for the test flight. All we need is the license." Stephen Clark Feb 21, 2025 6:38 pm | 8 The first stage of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket rolls out to its launch pad in Norway. Credit: Isar Aerospace The first stage of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket rolls out to its launch pad in Norway. Credit: Isar Aerospace Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreIsar Aerospace, a German startup founded seven years ago, is positioned to become the first in a new generation of European launch companies to reach orbit with a privately funded rocket.The company announced Friday that the first stage of its Spectrum rocket recently completed a 30-second test-firing on a launch pad in the northernmost reaches of mainland Europe. The nine-engine booster ignited on a launch pad at Andya Spaceport in Norway on February 14.The milestone follows a similar test-firing of the Spectrum rocket's second stage last year. With these two accomplishments, Isar Aerospace says its launch vehicle is qualified for flight."We are almost ready for the test flight. All we need is the license," said Daniel Metzler, co-founder and CEO of Isar Aerospace. "By enabling space access from mainland Europe, we provide a critical resource for ensuring sovereignty and resilience."Aside from the normal preparations for a rocket launchsuch as mating the two stages of the launcher together and integrating its payload fairingthe primary hurdle remaining for Isar is regulatory in nature. In a statement, Isar said the first flight of the Spectrum rocket will take place "as soon as possible" following approval and licensing from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority.Officials will set the exact launch period during the licensing process, according to Tina Schmitt, an Isar spokesperson.The fully assembled Spectrum rocket will stand about 92 feet (28 meters) tall and measure more than 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter. The expendable launcher is designed to haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Spectrum is powered by nine Aquila engines on its first stage, and one engine on the second stage, burning a mixture of propane and liquid oxygen propellants.Finish line in sightNamed for the Bavarian river, Isar is headquartered near Munich, a hub of the European space industry home to facilities owned by the German space agency and Airbus. Meltzer co-founded Isar with two engineering classmates at Technical University Munich in 2018. The company says it has raised more than 400 million euros (about $420 million), more than any other European launch startup. It is primarily backed by venture capital, but it secured an investment from the NATO Innovation Fund last year. The nine-engine first stage for Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket lights up on the launch pad on February 14. Credit: Isar Aerospace Isar builds almost all of its rockets in-house, including Spectrum's Aquila engines."The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components," said Josef Fleischmann, Isar's co-founder and chief technical officer. "Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions."Isar is the first European startup to reach this point in development. "Reaching this milestone is a huge success in itself," Meltzer said in a statement. "And while Spectrum is ready for its first test flight, launch vehicles for flights two and three are already in production."Another Bavarian company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, destroyed its first booster during a test-firing on its launch pad in Scotland last year, ceding the frontrunner mantle to Isar. RFA received its launch license from the UK government last month and aims to deliver its second booster to the launch site for hot-fire testing and a launch attempt later this year.There's an appetite within the European launch industry for new companies to compete with Arianespace, the continent's sole operational launch services provider backed by substantial government support. Delays in developing the Ariane 6 rocket and several failures of Europe's smaller Vega launcher forced European satellite operators to look abroad, primarily to SpaceX, to launch their payloads.The European Space Agency is organizing the European Launcher Challenge, a competition that will set aside some of the agency's satellites for launch opportunities with a new crop of startups. Isar is one of the top contenders in the competition to win money from ESA. The agency expects to award funding to multiple European launch providers after releasing a final solicitation later this year.The first flight of the Spectrum rocket will attempt to reach a polar orbit, flying north from Andya Spaceport. Located at approximately 69 degrees north latitude, the spaceport is poised to become the world's northernmost orbital launch site.Because the inaugural launch of the Spectrum rocket is a test flight, it won't carry any customer payloads, an Isar spokesperson told Ars.Stephen ClarkSpace ReporterStephen ClarkSpace Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the worlds space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 8 Comments

TOURISM TARGET? Under new bill, Bigfoot could become Californias official cryptid California has a lot of official symbols. But none are cryptids. Nate Anderson Feb 21, 2025 5:01 pm | 17 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreYou might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number "666" is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or "sightings," depending on your persuasionmany of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the "official cryptid" of the state.His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word "Eureka" (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, "designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid"?That's... pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker, who it describes as "a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot," about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.Rogers represents California Assembly District 2, a sprawling expanse of Northern California that includes the town of Willow Grove, epicenter of the early Bigfoot sightings back in the 1950s. Today, the small community boasts the Bigfoot Museum, the Bigfoot Motel, and the Bigfoot Steakhouseto say nothing of Bigfoot's Barbershop, Bigfoot Equipment & Repair, and, of course, the Bigfoot Cannabis Company. The bill seems like an easy way to goose interest in Bigfoot and to reap the tourist dollars that come from that interest.This is not to deny the underlying reality of a Bigfoot-like creature (though you can indeed count me among the extremely, extremely skepticalsurely most of these sightings are of bears). Moneymaker runs the Bigfoot Field Researchers' Organization, which tracks sightings across the US. The most recent one I could find on the site was report 77,879 (!), which came from rural Buchanan County, Virginia, on November 10, 2024.A woman working in the food service of a local prison submitted a report describing how she drove to work at 2 am for an early morning shiftand saw an alleged Bigfoot beside the road."I was turning on a side road at the main gate of the coal mines," she writes. "I drove less than a quarter mile from the coal mines when I saw a large what I thought was a bear or feral cow beside the road so I slowed down in case it spooked and ran across the road. That was when I noticed it was on two legs and was large but was kneeling down if I had to guess I would say it was 500600 pounds. This animal had shaggy fur that I could see the outline of from the lights. It looked over what seemed to be its shoulder and had a human like face with a heavy brow. It looked back through the brush and then looked quickly back again before stepping toward the creek and climbed down and went out of sight. The thing that made me stop in the road was it had a knee and was looking through the brush holding it apart to look through. This "animal" had no eye shine. Once I passed its location I saw that it had been looking at 2 does."Remarkably, this huge creature is reliably spotted alive across the US, from Virginia to a famed spot in Ohio to Willow Grove, California. Despite the ubiquity of cell phones, people keep running into Bigfeet (Bigfoots?) but can't manage to snap a compelling picture or video.And no dead bodies are ever found. And when scientists do put out calls for possible Bigfoot hair, what they get is material from horses, bears, tapirs, cows, raccoons, and mule deerbut nothing from a Bigfoot. And let's not even get started on attempts to sequence the DNA of a Bigfoot.Clearly, if it exists, this is one crafty animal. And it might just become California's next official symbol.Or it might not. A similar idea was proposed in Washington state in 2017. Despite being reintroduced several times, the bill never seems to have made it out of committee.Nate AndersonDeputy EditorNate AndersonDeputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 17 Comments

Vaccine-preventable Texas measles outbreak reaches 90 cases; 9 cases in New Mexico The Texas cases are largely in children. Sixteen cases have been hospitalized. Beth Mole Feb 21, 2025 5:26 pm | 17 Measles rash on the body of the child. Credit: Getty | Povorozniuk Liudmyla Measles rash on the body of the child. Credit: Getty | Povorozniuk Liudmyla Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAn ongoing measles outbreak that began in one of Texas' least vaccinated counties has mushroomed to 90 cases across a cluster of seven counties in the state, according to an update by the Texas Department of State Health Services on Friday.The outbreak may have also spread across the border to New Mexico, where nine cases have been reported. In an email to Ars, Robert Nott, the communications director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said that as of today, the department has not confirmed a connection between the nine cases and any of the confirmed cases in Texas.However, all nine of the cases are in Lea County, New Mexico, which sits at the border with Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak. Of Texas' 90 cases, 57 are in Gaines, which has a vaccination rate among kindergarteners of just 82 percent this school year. The lack of a clear connection between the Texas and New Mexico cases may be yet more worrying because it suggests undetected community spread and a heightened risk of transmission in Lea, the health department noted in an alert last week.Other affected counties in Texas include Dawson (6 cases); Ector (1); Lubbock (1); Lynn (1); Terry (20); and Yoakum (4).In Texas, the majority of the cases continue to be in children: 26 are in infants and young children ages 0 to 4, and 51 are between ages 5 and 17. All but five cases have been in unvaccinated people. Sixteen people (roughly 18 percent) have been hospitalized.In New Mexico, there have been no hospitalizations, and five of the nine cases are in adults. The other four cases were between the ages of 5 and 17.Given low vaccination rate in the area and the contagiousness of measles, health officials expect the outbreak to continue to grow. Measles is one of the most infectious viruses known; 90 percent of people who are unvaccinated and exposed will fall ill. The disease is marked by high fevers and a telltale rash and can cause severe complications in some, including younger children.In the US, about 20 percent of people with measles are typically hospitalized. Five percent develop pneumonia, and up to 3 in 1,000 die of the infection. In rare cases, measles can cause a fatal disease of the central nervous system later in life called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis. Measles also wipes out immune responses to other infections (a phenomenon known as immune amnesia), making people vulnerable to various illnesses.Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 17 Comments

Opposing views Elon Musk to fix Community Notes after they contradict Trump X owner backpedals on claim that Community Notes cant be manipulated. Ashley Belanger Feb 21, 2025 3:22 pm | 17 Credit: Zeybart | iStock / Getty Images Plus Credit: Zeybart | iStock / Getty Images Plus Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreElon Musk apparently no longer believes that crowd-sourcing fact-checking through Community Notes can never be manipulated and is, thus, the best way to correct bad posts on his social media platform X.Community Notes are supposed to be added to posts to limit misinformation spread after broad consensus is reached among X users with diverse viewpoints on what corrections are needed. But Musk now claims a "fix" is needed to prevent supposedly outside influencers from allegedly gaming the system."Unfortunately, @CommunityNotes is increasingly being gamed by governments & legacy media," Musk wrote on X. "Working to fix this."Musk's announcement came after Community Notes were added to X posts discussing a poll generating favorable ratings for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That poll was conducted by a private Ukrainian company in partnership with a state university whose supervisory board was appointed by the Ukrainian government, creating what Musk seems to view as a conflict of interest.Although other independent polling recently documented a similar increase in Zelenskyy's approval rating, NBC News reported, the specific poll cited in X notes contradicted Donald Trump's claim that Zelenskyy is unpopular, and Musk seemed to expect X notes should instead be providing context to defend Trump's viewpoint. Musk even suggested that by pointing to the supposedly government-linked poll in Community Notes, X users were spreading misinformation."It should be utterly obvious that a Zelensky[y]-controlled poll about his OWN approval is not credible!!" Musk wrote on X.Musk's attack on Community Notes is somewhat surprising. Although he has always maintained that Community Notes aren't "perfect," he has defended Community Notes through multiple European Union probes challenging their effectiveness and declared that the goal of the crowd-sourcing effort was to make X "by far the best source of truth on Earth." At CES 2025, X CEO Linda Yaccarino bragged that Community Notes are "good for the world."Yaccarino invited audience members to "think about it as this global collective consciousness keeping each other accountable at global scale in real time," but just one month later, Musk is suddenly casting doubts on that characterization while the EU continues to probe X.Perhaps most significantly, Musk previously insisted as recently as last year that Community Notes could not be manipulated, even by Musk. He strongly disputed a 2024 report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate that claimed that toxic X users were downranking accurate notes that they personally disagreed with, claiming any attempt at gaming Community Notes would stick out like a "neon sore thumb."Musk seemingly facing hard truth about Community NotesNow, Musk seems to be admitting that Community Notes can be gamednot by X users exerting political will, but seemingly by X users coming together and agreeing that certain media and government sources are credible.It's unclear what changes may be coming to "fix" the problem, which from a certain angle seems to be a matter of Musk personally disagreeing with the majority of Community Notes writers and seeking a technical solution to impose his viewpoint. That seems to directly counter the goal of Community Notes, as described on X's website:"We dont expect all notes to be perceived as helpful by all people all the time. Instead, the goal is to ensure that on average notes that earn the status of Helpful are likely to be seen as helpful by a wide range of people from different points of view, and not only be seen as helpful by people from one viewpoint."Of course, if X went back to traditional fact-checking methods, it would not be unusual for Musk to be calling the shots on what content flies. But Trump has long criticized social media companies for censoring users they disagree with, and Community Notes was seemingly well-positioned as a way to circumvent that criticism.Commentators disagree on the effectiveness of crowd-sourced fact-checking methods like Community Notes, which both Meta and YouTube have now also adopted, quickly copying X.Neil Johnson, a George Washington University physics professor closely monitoring how misinformation spreads online, told NBC News that Community Notes is a "poor substitute" for formal fact-checking methods.But last year Bloomberg pointed to several studies suggesting that "crowdsourcing worked just as well" as using professional fact checkers in some instances, such as "when assessing the accuracy of news stories." That piece concluded that a two-pronged approach combining both methods could benefit social media users most.However, a hard truth for Elon Musk to face may be that X users are largely incapable of discerning facts without relying on traditional fact-checking organizations that Musk disagrees should be the sole arbiters of truth online. NBC News noted a February study surveying 1 million notes and finding that "the evidence from X clearly shows that users rely on the work of fact-checking organizations often when suggesting Community Notes.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. 17 Comments

blow, wind, blow Why Houstons 2024 derecho did more damage than hurricane Beryl Strong localized winds can bounce due to interference between tall buildings, increasing pressure on walls and windows. Jennifer Ouellette Feb 21, 2025 3:32 pm | 1 Straight-line wind damage inflicted on a high-rise building in Houston, Texas, during the May 16, 2024 derecho. Credit: National Weather Service/Public Domain Straight-line wind damage inflicted on a high-rise building in Houston, Texas, during the May 16, 2024 derecho. Credit: National Weather Service/Public Domain Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn May 16, 2024, a powerful derecho swept through Houston, killing seven people and causing significant damage to several of the city's towering skyscrapers. Those buildings were constructed to withstand much stronger hurricane-force winds up to 67 meters per second, as one would get with a Category 4 hurricane. The derecho's winds peaked at 40 meters per second, well below that threshold. And when Hurricane Beryl hit Houston that July with roughly comparable wind speeds of 36 meters per second, the damage wasn't nearly so severe. Why would that be the case?Engineers at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami think they've found the answer, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Built Environment. "We show that a type of highly localized strong winds called downbursts, which were generated during the May derecho, can significantly impact tall buildings and facades due to their unique characteristics in comparison to hurricanes, said co-author Amal Elawady. This is particularly the case for skyscrapers that are close together, creating a "wind-channeling" interference effect that increases pressure on walls and windows.One might assume that hurricanes and derechos are similar in that they both produce markedly intense winds, but the origin and characteristics of those winds are very different, per the authors. Hurricanes are vast tropical storms that form over warm ocean waters and affect large areas, usually lasting for several days, accompanied by heavy rains, storm surges, waves, and yes, high winds. By contrast, derechos and downbursts are much more localized convective systems, producing hurricane-force winds but over a much smaller area and shorter period of time.There are more than 2,000 skyscrapers higher than 200 meters worldwide that are especially vulnerable to high winds, and understanding those differences is crucial to coming up with better mitigation strategies in the future. Hurricane impacts tend to be widespread and can cause a lot of damage to the glass and cladding of skyscrapers, such as the damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on tall buildings in New Orleans in 2005. Damage from derechos and downbursts causes more severe, concentrated damage, such as the collapse of a 37-story building in Brazil in 2011.Bouncing winds Damage sustained by the Chevron Building Auditorium during the derecho: a) damaged side of the building, b) global damage view, c) & d) localized glass damage. Credit: Padgett et al., 2024 Elawady decided to investigate why the Houston derecho's structural damage was so much more extensive than one might expect. He and his colleagues analyzed the impact of the derecho on five of the city's most notable buildings: The Chevron Building Auditorium, the CenterPoint Energy Plaza, the El Paso Energy Building, the RRI Energy Plaza, and the Wedge International Tower.The Chevron Building Auditorium, for instance, suffered significant damage to its cladding and shattered glass windows, mostly on the side facing another skyscraper: the Chevron Corporation Tower. The CenterPoint Energy Plaza's damage to its double-skin facade was concentrated on one corner that had two tall buildings facing it, as was the damage to two corners of the El Paso Energy building. This suggested a wind-channeling effect might have played a role in that damage.Next Elawady et al. conducted wind tunnel experiments at the FIUNatural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure's "Wall of Wind" facility to determine how the winds may have specifically caused the observed damage. They placed a revolving miniature tall building in the tunnel and blasted it with wind speeds of up to 70 meters per second, while placing an identical mini-model at increasing distances from the first to mimic possible interference from nearby buildings.The results confirmed the team's working hypothesis. "When strong winds move through a city, they can bounce due to interference between tall buildings. This increases pressure on walls and windows, making damage more severe than if the buildings were isolated," said co-author Omar Metwally, a graduate student at FIU. For example, in the case of the Chevron Building Auditorium, the channeling effects intensified the damage, particularly at higher elevations."On top of this, downbursts create intense, localized forces which can exceed typical design values for hurricanes, especially on the lower floors of tall buildings, Metwally added. The problem is only likely to worsen because of accelerating climate change. Glass facades seem to be particularly vulnerable to this kind of wind damage, and the authors suggest current design and construction guidelines for such elements should be re-evaluated as a result of their findings.DOI: Frontiers in Built Environment, 2025. 10.3389/fbuil.2024.1514523 (About DOIs).Jennifer OuelletteSenior WriterJennifer OuelletteSenior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 1 Comments

Drop the beat Googles cheaper YouTube Premium Lite subscription will drop Music The plan could soon arrive in the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand. Ryan Whitwam Feb 21, 2025 12:45 pm | 37 Credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto Credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreYouTube dominates online video, but it's absolutely crammed full of ads these days. A YouTube Premium subscription takes care of that, but ad blockers do exist. Google seems to have gotten the messagea cheaper streaming subscription is on the way that drops YouTube Music from the plan. You may have to give up more than music to get the cheaper rate, though.Google started testing cheaper YouTube subscriptions in a few international markets, including Germany and Australia, over the past year. Those users have been offered the option of subscribing to the YouTube Premium plan, which runs $13.99 in the US, or a new plan that costs about half as much. For example, in Australia, the options are AU$23 for YouTube Premium or AU$12 for "YouTube Premium Lite."The Lite plan drops YouTube Music but keeps ad-free YouTube, which is all most people want anyway. Based on the early tests, these plans will probably drop a few other features that you'd miss, including background playback and offline downloads. However, this plan could cost as little as $7$8 in the US.Perhaps at this point, you think you've outsmarted Googleyou can just watch ad-free music videos with the Lite plan, right? Wrong. Users who have tried the Lite plan in other markets report that it doesn't actually remove all the ads on the site. You may still see banner ads around videos, as well as pre-roll ads before music videos specifically. If you want access to Google's substantial music catalog without ads, you'll still need to pay for the full plan.Bloomberg reports that YouTube Premium Lite is on the verge of launching in the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand."As part of our commitment to provide our users with more choice and flexibility, weve been testing a new YouTube Premium offering with most videos ad-free in several of our markets," Google said in a statement. "Were hoping to expand this offering to even more users in the future with our partners support."The spice ads must flowAnyone who has used YouTube without a subscription over the past few years will no doubt have noticed Google's increasing ad density. The company has also embarked on a campaign to discourage the use of ad blockers, primarily by nagging users and blocking the blockers right back. As this cat-and-mouse game continues, a cheaper premium offering could attract users who are sick of evading Google's policies.The more aggressive advertising is part of Google's goal of rapidly increasing its streaming revenue. In the company's most recent quarterly earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that Cloud and YouTube reached $110 billion in revenue for 2024, which exceeded Google's expectations by $10 billion. YouTube also continues to be the most popular streaming platform in the US, according to Google. Still, no matter how popular YouTube may be for video, Spotify, Apple Music, and others are even bigger in music. If you want to sell users of those services ad-free YouTube, it's silly to make them pay for another music streaming platform. It's harder to avoid YouTube ads these days. This change is long overdueGoogle's merging of music streaming with YouTube had all the earmarks of ill-conceived corporate synergy. The result was confusing branding, overpriced subscriptions, and a very clunky migration from Play Music. It should not have taken Google five years to do something about it, but here we are.Google doesn't have a specific timeline to share for the rollout of Premium Lite subscriptions, but it shouldn't be long, given the months of testing. There's no hint of an option to subscribe only to YouTube Music, so that service remains bound to ad-free YouTube, even if the opposite is no longer true.Ryan WhitwamSenior Technology ReporterRyan WhitwamSenior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards. 37 Comments

SMASH AND GRAB Notorious crooks broke into a company network in 48 minutes. Heres how. Report sheds new light on the tactics allowing attackers to move at breakneck speed. Dan Goodin Feb 21, 2025 1:17 pm | 3 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreIn December, roughly a dozen employees inside a manufacturing company received a tsunami of phishing messages that was so big they were unable to perform their day-to-day functions. A little over an hour later, the people behind the email flood had burrowed into the nether reaches of the company's network. This is a story about how such intrusions are occurring faster than ever before and the tactics that make this speed possible.The speed and precision of the attacklaid out in posts published Thursday and last monthare crucial elements for success. As awareness of ransomware attacks increases, security companies and their customers have grown savvier at detecting breach attempts and stopping them before they gain entry to sensitive data. To succeed, attackers have to move ever faster.Breakneck breakoutReliaQuest, the security firm that responded to this intrusion, said it tracked a 22 percent reduction in the breakout time threat actors took in 2024 compared with a year earlier. In the attack at hand, the breakout timemeaning the time span from the moment of initial access to lateral movement inside the networkwas just 48 minutes.For defenders, breakout time is the most critical window in an attack, ReliaQuest researcher Irene Fuentes McDonnell wrote. Successful threat containment at this stage prevents severe consequences, such as data exfiltration, ransomware deployment, data loss, reputational damage, and financial loss. So, if attackers are moving faster, defenders must match their pace to stand a chance of stopping them.The spam barrage, it turned out, was simply a decoy. It created the opportunity for the threat actorsmost likely part of a ransomware group known as Black Bastato contact the affected employees through the Microsoft Teams collaboration platform, pose as IT help desk workers, and offer assistance in warding off the ongoing onslaught.Within minutes, at least two of the employees took the bait and followed instructions to open the Quick Assist remote access app built into Windows and hand off control of their desktops to the person on the other end. With that initial access, the breakout time clock was now ticking.Gaining control of an employee device inside a targeted network is only the first in a long series of steps required to tunnel into the fortified regions and steal sensitive data stored there. Most networks these days are segmented, meaning each device and account has access only to the resources needed to perform specific tasks assigned.The person who accessed one of the employees' devices knew that they had to move fast. In the first seven minutes, they connected the employee desktop to their remote command-and-control server by opening IP ports 443 and 10443, which are typically reserved for TLS traffic.They then attempted to use the SMB networking tool, also built into Windows, to upload a malicious Dynamic Link Library file to a sensitive OneDrive directory responsible for performing updates. The techniqueknown as DLL sideloadingworks by placing a malicious DLL file in the same directory as a vulnerable application. Because Windows apps first search their own directories for the DLL files they need, the malicious one gets loaded.When SMB failed, the attacker tried uploading the file using RDP, short for the remote desktop protocol, combined with the Windows PowerShell command window. This time, the upload worked as planned. The attacker went on to use PowerShell to trigger the malicious payload to run on compromised administrator accounts. With that, the attacker was able to connect to the control server through the targeted network, another key rung in the breakout ladder climb.The attacker then used the connection to gain privileged system rights by accessing a service account, likely compromised earlier, for managing an SQL database. Using credentials stored inside the database, the attacker created a new account and assigned it the highest administrative permissions available. The attacker used the privileged system rights to scan the network for vulnerable targets using the SoftPerfect Network Scanner. Attackers and defenders alike often use this tool to identify resources that accounts inside a network have access to.ReliaQuest and its customer have been unable to determine precisely how the attacker gained such access to the service account, but they speculate it was purchased from whats known as an initial access broker. These are a type of threat actor that focus solely on compromising accounts and, when necessary, escalating privileges. The brokers then sell this access to others for use in breaches.In any event, the attacker had now gained persistent, privileged access to the network and was in a position to exfiltrate sensitive data from it. The following image lays out the timeline. The breakout time begins at 5:47 pm and concludes at 6:35 pm, just 48 minutes later. Timeline showing steps that occurred in a recent ransomware attack. The breakout time starts once an employee gave the attacker remote access to their desktop device. Credit: ReliaQuest Elements of successA lot of planning, skill, and experience went into the breach. The spam decoy was effective because it contained no malicious links or attachments, giving it the appearance of an easily contained threat that did little other than making employee inboxes unable to function normally. It also gave the attacker a convincing pretense for contacting the employees and offering IT support.This low-tech but highly effective method allows threat actors to gain initial access and convince users to grant them control of their machines, ReliaQuest researcher John Dilgen wrote. Given its success, its likely that other threat groups will adopt this technique in the near future.The attacker was also proficient in:using DLL side-loading, a technique that first requires identifying a vulnerable app running inside the networknavigating through a maze of network directories using command-line tools and having the agility and breadth of experience to switch to RDP and PowerShell once SMB failedrelying solely on the use of legitimate tools such as Quick Assist, Teams, SMB, RDP, and SoftPerfect to avoid detectiona technique defenders call living off the landpainstaking research and preparation ahead of time, including the acquisition of a previously compromised service account they could access once they had gained initial accessBlack Basta and most other ransomware groups are built on a model known as RaaSshort for ransomware as a service. Under this model, a core group develops the ransomware and rents it out to one or more affiliates. Often, two or more affiliates work together. This allows for each affiliate to perform specific tasks, for instance: draft initial spam messages, pose as IT help personnel, and burrow deeper into a network using command-line tools.There are a variety of things organizations can do to harden their networks to withstand these sorts of attacks. Steps include uninstalling remote access apps like Quick Assist when theyre not needed or restricting access to a small number of hosts, disabling accounts that are no longer needed, and establishing robust verification procedures for employees to confirm theyre interacting with legitimate help-desk staff. The above-linked posts lay out many other best practices.Dan GoodinSenior Security EditorDan GoodinSenior Security Editor Dan Goodin is Senior Security Editor at Ars Technica, where he oversees coverage of malware, computer espionage, botnets, hardware hacking, encryption, and passwords. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, cooking, and following the independent music scene. Dan is based in San Francisco. Follow him at here on Mastodon and here on Bluesky. Contact him on Signal at DanArs.82. 3 Comments

Senior politicians in Japan are not going to let Nissan die easily. The automaker has been struggling for some time now, with an outdated product portfolio, ongoing quarterly losses, and soon, the closure of factories and thousands of layoffs. The Japanese government has been trying to find a suitor and had hoped that Honda would do its patriotic duty and save its rival from extinction.That dealone branded "a desperate move" by former Nissan CEO and fugitive from Japanese justice Carlos Ghosnfell apart last week after Renault demanded a price premium for its shares in Nissan, and Nissan demanded a merger of equals with Honda. In reality, it was always going to be a takeover, with very little in it for Honda in the way of complimentary product lines or access to new technologies.Today, we learned of yet another desperate movethe former Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga is among a group that is trying to get Tesla to invest in Nissan instead.Such a merger seems extremely far from likely, even if Tesla CEO Elon Musk wasn't completely distracted dismantling the federal government and its workforce. While the company still maintains a ludicrous market capitalization thanks to retail investors who believe it is poised to sell billions of humanoid robots to every human on earth, as an automaker it may well be struggling almost as much as Nissan.As experts told us last year, Tesla is not a well-run enterprise. Its product range suffers, like Nissan's, from being outdated compared to the competition. It appears that consumers have turned against the brand in Europe and increasingly the US, and its quarterly financial results have been more than disappointing of late. Tesla's free cash flow fell by 18 percent in 2024 to $3.6 billion, although such is the value of Tesla stock that, were a Tesla-Nissan deal to happen, the former could pay for the latter with equity, should it entertain the idea seriously.

Not a narc Apple pulls data protection tool instead of caving to UK demand for a backdoor Apple abruptly yanks privacy tool in UK, taking bold stance against snooping law. Ashley Belanger Feb 21, 2025 11:40 am | 4 Credit: georgeclerk | iStock Unreleased Credit: georgeclerk | iStock Unreleased Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter the United Kingdom demanded that Apple create a backdoor that would allow government officials globally to spy on encrypted data, Apple decided to simply turn off encryption services in the UK rather than risk exposing its customers to snooping.Apple had previously allowed end-to-end encryption of data on UK devices through its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) tool, but that ended Friday, a spokesperson said in a lengthy statement."Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection (ADP) in the United Kingdom to new users and current UK users will eventually need to disable this security feature," Apple said.The UK Investigatory Powers Act has been dubbed a "Snooper's Charter," the Financial Times reported, granting the UK government powers to "access the encrypted data of Apple customers anywhere in the world, including in the US."According to Apple, complying with the UK law could have enabled not just government officials but also bad actors to gain access to encrypted data. Critics, including the US tech industry group, the Computer & Communications Industry Association, had further warned that the recent Salt Typhoon breach had made it clear that "end-to-end encryption may be the only safeguard standing between Americans' sensitive personal and business data and foreign adversaries.""We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy," Apple said. "Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before."For UK Apple users, some data can still be encrypted. iCloud Keychain and Health, iMessage, and FaceTime will remain end-to-end encrypted by default. But other iCloud services will not be encrypted, effective immediately, including iCloud Backup, iCloud Drive, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Safari Bookmarks, Siri Shortcuts, Voice memos, Wallet passes, and Freeform.In the future, Apple hopes to restore data protections in the UK, but the company refuses to ever build a backdoor for government officials."Apple remains committed to offering our users the highest level of security for their personal data and are hopeful that we will be able to do so in the future in the United Kingdom," Apple said. "As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services, and we never will."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. 4 Comments

Disgusting distraction Doctors find worms squirming through teens neck: A cautionary tale There are two charming categories of hookworms to keep in mind. Beth Mole Feb 21, 2025 9:04 am | 14 Magnified 100X, this whole mount photomicrograph revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology exhibited by a hookworm filariform larva. Image courtesy CDC/Dr. Mae Melvin, 1974. Credit: CDC Magnified 100X, this whole mount photomicrograph revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology exhibited by a hookworm filariform larva. Image courtesy CDC/Dr. Mae Melvin, 1974. Credit: CDC Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreRegardless of the state of the worldwhether you're staring down a Constitutional crisis or enjoying happier times, at ease on a beachit's wise to remember that there will always be tiny worms with gaping mouths ringed by razor-sharp teeth ready to pierce your body, burrow into your skin, and tunnel through your flesh like an ambitious gopher in springtime.I'm referring, of course, to hookworms, the blood-feeding parasites aptly named for the hook-like heads they use to latch onto their victims. In the US, they're most often found in international travelers. But, it's not out of the question that these petrifying parasites can strike on American soil, particularly in warm, moist areas. In a new clinical report in the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors in Los Angeles report just such a case, and a particularly unusual one at that.We still got emBut, before we get to the gruesome details, there are some things you should know about hookworms. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, there are two delightful categories of these helminths. First, there are the ones that make it to your intestines after digging into your flesh and invading your organs. Once in your guts (your small intestine, to be specific), the worms live their best lives, maturing to adults, finding mates, and reproducing, all while sucking the life-blood out of you from the inside. They release their eggs into your poop to start this charming cycle anew in anyone whose skin is exposed to sewage-contaminated soil. Head of an adult of Ancylostoma caninum showing three pairs of teeth. Credit: CDC Head of an adult of Ancylostoma caninum showing three pairs of teeth. Credit: CDC These intestinal interlopers include Necator americanus and Ancylostoma duodenale, which are the leading hookworms worldwide, including in the US. There's also A. ceylanicum, which is emerging in many parts of the world but appears absent from North America and Europe (at least for now).In the early 20th century, the American South was crawling with intestinal hookworms. Some initial surveys in the 1930s suggested nearly 54 percent of the population was infected, with prevalence in some areas as high as 76 percent. Through concerted deworming efforts and improved hygiene, the worms were largely flushed out over the subsequent decades. But as one medical editorial put it in 2017: We still got 'em. That year, a study detected genetic traces of N. americanus in the stool of more than a third of people tested in an impoverished community in Lowndes County, Alabama. In Lowndes, approximately 50 percent of households have failing or no sewage systems.Creeping eruptionWhile that's something you can enjoy thinking about before bed tonight, let's not forget that there's a second category of hookworms: the ones that bore into your body but generally don't make it into your intestines. This may seem like the better scenario than the intestinal group. But, that's only the case if you're ok with hookworm larvae wandering aimlessly through the layers of your skin, leaving an intensely itchy, serpentine rash, marked by redness and little pus-filled blisters in their wake. The rash is called cutaneous larva migrans (CLM), or "creeping eruption."This second type of invasion is borne from worm-infested animals. The pack of parasites that cause CLM in people include hookworms that infect dogs and cats (Ancylostoma caninum, A. braziliense, and Uncinaria stenocephala), and in rarer cases cattle (Bunostomum phlebotomum).In animals, these hookworms live out a life cycle much like the intestinal cycle described earlier, with the parasites making themselves at home in the animals' small intestines. But, in humans, the worms find a dead-end. Most never make it out of the skin, roaming randomly until their death, which, without treatment, can take about five to six weeks. In their desperate meandering, some larvaewhich measure 500 to 600 micrometers (0.05 to 0.06 centimeters) longwill travel several centimeters each day. Others can make it into deeper tissue, but become stuck. On occasion, A. caninumwhich normally infect dogshave been known to make it to the intestines and partially develop. But they never complete their life cycle.Outbreaks and odditiesThese "extraintestinal" hookworms (as they're called in humans) pop up in the US from time to time. For instance, in July of 2006, health officials in Miami-Dade, Florida, discovered an outbreak of CLM at a summer camp, where 18 campers and four staff were ultimately found to be infected. The likely source, investigators concluded: a playground sandbox that some feral cats used as a litter box.In most cases, the rash from a wandering worm is in a foot, ankle, thigh, or rearbasically from a person walking or sitting in fecal-contaminated soil with exposed skin. But, in the New England Journal of Medicine report published in this week's issue, California doctors came across something unusual.A 19-year-old male came to a dermatology clinic with two winding, but non-itchy rashes on his neck, which had been there for three weeks. One was on the back of his neck while the other was on the right side. He had no recent international travel. A biopsy found non-specific inflammation. Another test was negative for fungal pathogens. The best clue to the causebesides the look of the rashwas that the teen told doctors he worked as a beach lifeguard and liked to lie in the sand. CLM on the back and side of the neck of a 19-year-old male. Credit: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMicm2414639 Despite the lack of itchiness and the higher location of the rash, the doctors concluded it was likely CLM from a hookworm, which he got from lying on a poopy beach. The standard treatment for CLM is ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that still doesn't work against COVID-19 (despite what the new US health secretary has falsely claimed), but has proven useful against hookworms. After a two-day course of ivermectin, the teen's rash cleared up.While the case has a happy ending, it's a good reminder that one should never forget the horrifying hookworms.Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 14 Comments

Never Be Launching Rocket Report: SpaceX lands in the Bahamas; ULA tests modified booster India's new space chief begins outlining the country's architecture for putting astronauts on the Moon. Stephen Clark Feb 21, 2025 7:00 am | 13 A Falcon 9 booster on one of SpaceX's drone ships after landing in the Bahamas. Credit: SpaceX A Falcon 9 booster on one of SpaceX's drone ships after landing in the Bahamas. Credit: SpaceX Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreWelcome to Edition 7.32 of the Rocket Report! It's true that the US space program has always been political. Domestic and global politics have driven nearly all of the US government's decisions on major space issues, most notably President John F. Kennedy's challenge to land astronauts on the Moon amid intense Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The Nixon administration's decision to end the Apollo program and focus on building a reusable Space Shuttle was a political move. More than 30 years later, the Clinton administration ordered a reevaluation NASA's plans for a massive space station in low-Earth orbit. In the post-Cold War zeitgeist of the 1990s, this resulted in Russia's inclusion on the International Space Station program. Flawed or not, these decisions were backstopped with some level of reasoning, debate, and national consensus-building. Today, the politics of space seem personal, small, and mean-spirited. Thankfully, there's a lot of launch action next week that might thrust us out of the abyss, even just for a moment.As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.Rocket Lab launches for the 60th time.It's safe to say Rocket Lab is an established player in the launch business. The company launched its 60th Electron rocket Tuesday from New Zealand, Space News reports. It was the second Electron launch of the year, coming just 10 days after Rocket Lab's previous mission. The payload was a new-generation small electro-optical reconnaissance satellite for BlackSky. Rocket Lab has not disclosed a projected number of Electron launches for the year beyond estimating it will be more than the 16 Electron missions in 2024. The company said on its launch webcast that the next Electron launch was planned from New Zealand in "a few short weeks."What's coming this year? ... Rocket Lab might have more to say in its quarterly earnings report next week about its plans for 2025, but here's what we know. Rocket Lab has a long backlog of missions with its light-lift Electron rocket, deploying small fleets of commercial Earth-imaging and data relay satellites for companies like BlackSky and Kinis. A few government missions are among Rocket Lab's more interesting launches this year, including a US military mission to demonstrate how the Space Force might respond to a threat to one of its satellites. Officially, Rocket Lab aims to debut its larger Neutron rocket this year, but I wouldn't bet on it. (submitted by EllPeaTea)Firefly nabs another win. Continuing the theme of rapid response in space, the Space Force has awarded Firefly Aerospace a nearly $22 million contract to launch a separate mission pursuing objectives similar to the one booked to fly with Rocket Lab. The mission, dubbed Victus Sol, will be the fifthTactically Responsive Space mission for the service, Defense News reports. In a prior responsive space mission, Firefly demonstrated in 2023 it could integrate a military satellite with its Alpha rocket and launch it within 27 hours, condensing what used to be weeks of work into a little more than a day. Clearly, this is a niche Firefly seems positioned to thrive in. Military officials view these kinds of capabilities as important for the Space Force's ability to react to real-time threats, defend against attacks, and reconstitute space-based assets disabled by an enemy in conflict.A safari in orbit ... The Space Force's responsive space missions are managed by a military unit called Space Safari. A spokesperson for this organization told Defense News that the latest mission, Victus Sol, is "moving beyond demonstrations" and will support Space Force operations. What this means isn't clear because the spokesperson would not confirm any details about the mission, including its payload, objective or launch date. However, fiscal 2025 budget documents say the mission could launch in late 2025 or 2026, and the service has indicated that 2026 is its target for flying operational Tactically Responsive Space missions. (submitted by EllPeaTea) The Ars Technica Rocket Report The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger's and Stephen Clark's reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We'll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.Sign Me Up!Orbex is counting on ESA support. UK-based rocket builder Orbex has revealed that it is counting on a positive outcome from its European Launch Challenge bid to fund the development of its medium-lift rocket, Proxima, citing a "challenging investment climate," European Spaceflight reports. The European Space Agency initiated the European Launcher Challenge in November 2023 to support the development of sovereign launch capabilities and, ultimately, a successor to the Ariane 6. While the exact format of the challenge has not yet been confirmed, initial reports have indicated that it will include multiple awards of 150 million euros ($157 million) each.Cart before the horse ... Orbex once appeared to be one of the most promising companies in a crop of European launch startups, but the gem has lost its luster. None of these startups have made an orbital launch attempt, but several of them, like Germany's Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg, have shown tangible progress. Orbex, meanwhile, has revealed little about the development of its first rocket called Prime. Last year, Orbex announced a new, larger rocket named Proxima. This is not an unusual move. Many companies initially established with a focus on the small launch industry have transitioned to developing larger launch vehicles because that's where the money is. But Orbex hasn't launched anything. Orbex's announcement in December that it was abandoning construction of its owns spaceport in favor of another launch site in Scotland also raised questions about the company's outlook.So long, ABL. Hello, Long Wall? Former small satellite launch company ABL Space Systems has capped a transformation to focus on missile defense by changing its name, Aviation Week reports. "As our mission sharpens to focus on missile defense, we reflected on what it means for our identity," wrote Dan Piemont, CEO of the newly-renamed company. "I'm proud to share that our company is now Long Wall, inspired by the Long Walls of Athens." ABL announced its pivot from satellite launch services to missile defense in November, four months after the company's second RS1 rocket was destroyed on the launch pad during ground testing. The setback followed a failed inaugural test flight in 2023.Oversupply ... There's no question that demand is growing for missile defense and hypersonic missile technology, the two new focus areas for Long Wall. Last month, President Donald Trump announced his intention to develop a comprehensive missile defense shield for the United States. The military has been interested in hypersonic technology for a decades, but the interest has transitioned in recent years from an experimental nature to an operational basis, with mixed success. Hypersonic missiles are difficult to defend against because they fly lower and are more maneuverable than ballistic missiles, so it's natural for the Pentagon to pursue defensive and offensive solutions in this area. But there are many companies retooling for the hypersonics rush. Similarly, there were numerous small launch startups in the 2010s, including ABL. It begs the question: Has ABL pivoted from one oversupplied market to another?SpaceX's Falcon lands near the Bahamas. SpaceX notched another spaceflight record as it completed the first rocket flight that featured a liftoff in one country and a landing in another, Spaceflight Now reports. A little more than eight minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday evening, the Falcon 9 rocket booster landed on the drone ship positioned off the coast of the Exuma Islands in the Bahamas. The landing platform was located 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) from the nearest point of land, within Bahamian territorial waters. SpaceX's previous rocket landings at sea have occurred in international waters.This new ocean ... The government of the Bahamas hailed the occasion as an opportunity for the island nation to attract visitors and investment. "With todays historic Falcon 9 booster landing in our waters, the Bahamas has become the first international destination in the world to host a SpaceX rocket landing," said Philip Davis, prime minister of the Bahamas. "This is not a one-time eventthis is the beginning of a new chapter. Over the coming months, the Bahamas will host at least 20 scheduled rocket landings." Because the landing occurred in its territorial waters, the Bahamas had to approve SpaceX's plan to recover rockets there. In exchange for the government's approval, SpaceX will support the creation of a space exhibit in the Bahamas showcasing hardware and a SpaceX spacesuit, invest $1 million in the University of the Bahamas, and provide Starlink internet connectivity to remote parts of the nation. The new booster landing zone in the Bahamas will allow SpaceX to launch into more types of orbits from Cape Canaveral. (submitted by EllPeaTea)This SpaceX landing wasn't planned. Before dawn Wednesday, the sky across northern Europe was illuminated by an object zooming through the air in flames. The pyrotechnics were in fact caused by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket reentering the Earth's atmosphere, BBC reports. After sightings over England, Denmark, and Sweden, debris from the upper stage of the Falcon 9 rocket crashed into Poland. One Polish resident found what appeared to be a 1.5-meter by 1-meter pressure vessel from the upper stage behind his warehouse. No injuries were reported. Polsa, the Polish space agency, posted on X that the debris came from a Falcon 9, and independent orbital tracking data matched the rocket's location with the sightings over Europe.Not supposed to happen ... The rocket stage that fell over Poland Wednesday launched a batch of Starlink internet satellites from California earlier this month. Normally, SpaceX reignites the upper stage's engine for a deorbit burn after releasing the Starlink satellites, allowing the rocket to steer itself back into the atmosphere for a destructive reentry over the ocean. But something went wrong, and the burn failed to put the rocket on a trajectory toward reentry. Instead, it lingered in orbit for nearly three weeks before atmospheric drag naturally tugged it back toward Earth in an uncontrolled manner. This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9's upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. (submitted by Dizdizzie)India will take a measured approach toward the Moon. India will not build a large rocket for its planned crewed mission to the Moon but instead rely on multiple launches and satellite docking technology, the Times of India reports. "One option is to build a huge rocket and take a single module, but what will you do with that rocket thereafter?" said V. Narayanan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. "Economically, we have to understand and really look at all aspects. So, we are not going to build a huge rocket. We are going to have multiple modules. Maybe right now, our thinking is two modules. You take them separately and dock."Buoyed by success ... Indian prime minister Narendra Modi has charged the Indian space agency to fly an astronaut to the Moon by 2040. Engineers are only now outlining the architecture for how India might achieve this goal. On January 16, India achieved its first successful docking between two satellites in orbit. This made India the fourth nation, after the United States, Russia, and China, to demonstrate an independent docking capability in orbit.A new vehicle joins China's rocket fleet. China conducted the first launch of the Long March 8A rocket on February 11, carrying a second batch of satellites into orbit for the national Guowang project, Space News reports. The launcher took off from the Wenchang launch base in southern China and deployed at least eight satellites for the Guowang broadband megaconstellation, China's answer to Starlink. China has published scant information about the design, size, or capabilities of the Guowang satellites, raising questions about the nature of the satellites, and concerns about transparency.Only kinda new ... The Long March 8A is an upgraded variant of the standard Long March 8, which debuted in December 2020. It features the same first stage and side boosters as the original but includes a newly designed 3.35-meter-diameter (11-foot) hydrogen-oxygen second stage, allowing a wider, 5.2-meter-diameter (17-foot) payload fairing. The rocket can carry about 7,000 kilograms (15,400 pounds) into Sun-synchronous orbit. China plans to use the expendable Long March 8 and 8A rockets for numerous launches. They will likely become workhorses for deploying China's Guowang and Thousand Sails megaconstellations. (submitted by EllPeaTea)Here's the latest on Starship Flight 8. A little over a month after SpaceX's large Starship launchended in an explosion over several Caribbean islands, the company is preparing its next rocket for a test flight, Ars reports. According toa notice posted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the eighth test flight of the Starship vehicle could take place as early as February 26 from the Starbase launch site in South Texas. Company sources confirmed that this launch date is plausible, but it's also possible that the launch could slip a day or two to Thursday or Friday of next week.Flight 7, Take 2 This is an important flight for SpaceX to get the Starship program back on track. On the previous Starship test flight last month, the rocket's upper stage failed about eight minutes after launch, raining debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean. The FAA is overseeing a SpaceX-led investigation into the accident, and while the inquiry is not yet complete, the posting indicating a launch date next week suggests government officials believe the investigation is nearing its end. Flight 8 will likely attempt the same goals as Flight 7 would have achieved, such as testing Starship's payload deployment mechanism and gathering data on novel heat shield materials.Full stack for SLS SRBs. Engineers at NASAs Kennedy Space Center in Florida completed stacking the Space Launch System's twin Solid Rocket Boosters inside the Vehicle Assembly Building for the agency's Artemis II crewed test flight around the Moon, NASA reported this week. The boosters, each standing 177 feet (54 meters) tall, will provide the majority of the 8.8 million pounds of thrust to propel four astronauts inside the Orion spacecraft on their journey. The next step will be the placement of the SLS core stage in between the boosters in the coming weeks.For what? The long-term (and perhaps short-term) future of NASA's Space Launch System rocket is dubious. For now, NASA continues to make preparations for launching the Artemis II mission next year using the SLS rocket. But there's a push from Trump administration officials and advisors to cancel the rocket, which has cost somewhere around $29 billion since the program was announced in 2011. Each SLS rocket is fully expendable, and the rocket alone will cost up to $2.5 billion per flight, according to a 2023 audit by NASA's inspector general. This is, quite simply, unsustainable. There are alternatives. However, if the White House wants to put Americans around the Moon within the next few yearsapproximately the same time horizon as Trump's presidential termkeeping the Space Launch System around for a limited time might be the only way to do it.Vulcan booster test-fired in Utah.Northrop Grumman test-fired a solid rocket booster for United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket last Thursday, February 13, in remote northern Utah, NASASpaceflight reports. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, posted a photo of himself posing with the booster alongside Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, head of the Space Force's Space Systems Command. This was an important milestone in the investigation into why one of the strap-on boosters on ULA's second Vulcan rocket broke free shortly after liftoff in October. The rocket continued climbing into space and the flight reached a successful conclusion, but the anomaly put the brakes on the Space Force's certification of Vulcan for national security missions.Modified motor A ULA spokesperson told NSF that investigators are reviewing data from the "static hot fire of a modified GEM 63XL booster in Utah on Feb. 13. This test was part of the process for understanding the root cause of the observation on a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) during the Vulcan Cert-2 mission and we will provide additional details as we have them." Officials haven't disclosed the root cause of the booster anomaly in October, or what fixes are required on boosters already built and in ULA's inventory. (submitted by EllPeaTea)Next three launchesFeb. 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-14 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 15:19 UTCFeb. 22: Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center | 12:10 UTCFeb. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 22:24 UTCStephen ClarkSpace ReporterStephen ClarkSpace Reporter Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the worlds space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 13 Comments

But Can They Thrive in Chaos? EV battery manufacturing capacity will rise when 10 plants come online this year Trump's policies will help to determine if the new plants succeed. Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News Feb 21, 2025 7:15 am | 5 The construction site of BlueOval SKs EV battery manufacturing facility in Stanton, Tenn. Credit: BlueOval SK The construction site of BlueOval SKs EV battery manufacturing facility in Stanton, Tenn. Credit: BlueOval SK Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThis article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.Ten new electric vehicle battery factories are on track to go online this year in the United States.This includes large plants from global battery giants such as Panasonic, Samsung, and SK On, and automakers such as Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Stellantis, and Toyota.If they all open in 2025, the countrys EV battery manufacturing capacity is poised to grow to 421.5 gigawatt-hours per year, an increase of 90 percent from the end of 2024, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, the United Kingdom-based research firm.But this industry is seeing some storm clouds. The Trump administration is taking steps that would reduce demand for EVs. And two battery startupsKore Power and Freyrrecently canceled plans for new US factories.I dont blame anyone who looks at this landscape and wonders if a battery bust is coming. But I see a boom thats still in its early stagesalthough the uncertainty is dialed up to uncomfortable levels.I spoke with analysts this week to get a sense of the significance of the growth and also what factors could undermine the success of the new plants. The great unknown is how far the Trump administration may go to change the laws and rules that provide tax incentives to the plants and support growth of EV market share.Even if the government took action to undo tax credits for battery manufacturing, these plants are too far along in their development to be canceled, said Evan Hartley, a battery industry analyst for Benchmark.Theyre already built, he said. You cant stop it, and the momentum is there. And most of them are in Republican states. Its difficult to take away many thousands of jobs promised to your key voter base.So, whether Trump likes it or not, he is about to preside over a banner year for the United States as a major player in EV batteries, thanks in large part to the policies of his predecessor, Joe Biden.Each of the new plants is a major economic development story for its region.Ill focus on the one closest to where I live in Ohio: LG and Honda have teamed up on a factory in Jeffersonville, Ohio, that will have capacity to build 40 gigawatt-hours of batteries per year and support 2,200 jobs. The projected investment is $4.4 billion. Construction is in the final stages and a spokesperson for the project said battery production will begin late this year.The size of the Honda plant helps to put in perspective the two recently canceled projects.Kore Power, an Idaho-based startup, said a few weeks ago that it was scrapping plans to build a $1.2 billion battery factory in Buckeye, Arizona. One reason was that the company had not finalized a crucial federal loan before Trump took office and froze new grants and loans. Now, the company is shifting its focus to finding an existing building that it can retrofit to produce batteries, as Julian Spector reported for Canary Media.Freyr, which has roots in Norway, has a more complicated story. In recent weeks, it has canceled plans to build a $2.6 billion battery plant in Georgia and is instead focusing on its other major project, a solar panel factory in Texas that it acquired last year. Freyr has named Austin, Texas, as its new corporate headquarters.The news from Kore and Freyr could be used to make an argument that the US battery industry is reeling. But those companies challenges are largely related to being startups, Hartley said.There are a number of roadblocks that you encounter as a battery startup that relate to the actual technical activity involved in making batteries, the kind of scale at which you have to [build] or the scale and precision involved in the manufacturing process, and the fact that its difficult to consistently make high-quality products, he said.I asked Evelina Stoikou, head of battery technology and supply chain research at BloombergNEF, what she sees as the main unanswered questions about the US market for EV batteries.She listed two: First, how will potential changes in federal policy affect automakers, battery makers and consumers? Second, what will the utilization rate of these plants be after they start production?Joint ventures between battery manufacturers and automakers are likely to face more certainty around expected demand due to their integrated supply chains, she said in an email. However, all plants will be influenced by policy decisions, consumer trends, and economic factors.Even before Trump took office, some analysts had raised concerns that the building boom would lead to a battery supply that exceeded demand, at least for a few years. The Trump administration could harm demand even more by revising or eliminating tax credits for consumers buying EVs, among many other possible actions.Its a moment of tremendous uncertainty, said Jay Turner, a Wellesley College environmental studies professor who writes about the shift away from fossil fuels. I do not envy the folks who are trying to make multibillion-dollar decisions, or, you know, tens-of-million-dollar decisions about how to move forward with projects that are in planning or under construction.Trumps tariff policies are also a major source of uncertainty because of their effect on prices for essential materials such as graphite, a battery component that is mainly produced in China.In aggregate, Trumps actions could whittle away the chances that the new battery plants are profitable, which would make it easier for China to dominate the battery and EV industries in the near future.It puts at risk the USs chance to be competitive at global level in an industry thats going to shape the 21st century, Turner said.The new plants of 2025 are an early and important step in a long journey. But their success depends a lot on the subsequent steps.Dan Gearino, Inside Climate News 5 Comments

Right to repair Apple, Lenovo lead losers in laptop repairability analysis Lenovo fails for not providing shoppers sufficient laptop repairability information. Scharon Harding Feb 20, 2025 2:20 pm | 35 Repairing an M1 MacBook. Credit: Apple Repairing an M1 MacBook. Credit: Apple Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreApple and Lenovo had the lowest laptop repairability scores in an analysis of recently released devices from consumer advocacy group US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) Education Fund. While Apple's low marks are partially due the difficulty involved in disassembling MacBooks, Lenovo appears to be withholding information from shoppers deemed critical to right-to-repair legislation and accessibility.The report, US PIRG's fourth annual Failing the Fix [PDF], calculated repairabilityscores for PCs and smartphones from popular brands in the US. The report examines "the top 10 most recent devices from each brand that were available for sale directly from manufacturers in January 2025." If a brand's website didn't allow people to sort by newest release, US PIRG picked devices by sorting "by 'Bestselling' or something similar," per the report's methodology section.US PIRG's analysis included finding each device's French Repairability Index scores on PC makers' French websites and on third-party retailer sites. US PIRG calculated PC makers' grades by averaging "the total French score and the isolated disassembly score from each device." It weighed disassembly scores more heavily because it believes "this better reflects what consumers think a repairability score indicates." Next, the group subtracted half a point each for membership in TechNet or the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), industry groups that oppose right-to-repair legislation, and added a quarter point "for each piece of Right to Repair legislation supported by the testimony of the manufacturer in the last year."Ultimately, US PIRG found higher repairability scores for cell phones this year than it did last year but emphasized that laptops are not becoming significantly more repairable."HP laptops, which decreased in repairability from 2023 to 2024, hardly improved at all this year. Repairability improvements in Lenovo and Asus laptops have been slow and inconsistent over the past few years, the report says. Credit: US PIRG Lucas Gutterman, one of the report's authors and director of US PIRG's Designed to Last campaign, told Ars Technica that while US PIRG isn't completely sure why laptop scores are lagging behind those of phones, the group thinks it relates to customer demand and domestic and global right-to-repair legislation pushing vendors to make more repairable phones. He also cited IDC data finding that Americans hold onto their phones for four years on average, saying this is about nine months longer than just a few years ago. He said this trend makes phone repairability an important concern.Lenovo fails to provide repairability information US PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2025. TPIN via US PIRGUS PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2025.TPIN via US PIRG US PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2024. Alec Meltzer | TPIN via US PIRGUS PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2024. Alec Meltzer | TPIN via US PIRGUS PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2025.TPIN via US PIRGUS PIRG's laptop repairability scores for 2024. Alec Meltzer | TPIN via US PIRGLenovo earned a failing score because, per the report, it "failed to provide the full French repairability index for 12 of the 13 models... available in both the US and France." Because the US PIRG was only able to score one device, Lenovo failed.As such, it's possible that Lenovo laptops could be more easily repairable than its F score implies, but Lenovo makes accessing French Repairability Index scores extremely difficult. As the report notes, France has required companies to post repair scores and information about repairability since January 2021. This could be an oversight on Lenovo's part. Ars Technica reached out to the PC maker for comment and will update this story if we hear back. For what it's worth, Lenovo scored a C last year, falling behind Asus, Acer, Dell, Microsoft, and HP.Gutterman said he doesn't know why Lenovo isn't providing repair score breakdowns like its rivals do. He added that Lenovo might not be complying with the requirements of the French Repairability Index.Samsung-commissioned research conducted by market researcher OpinionWay in 2021 highlighted the impact of readily available French repair index scores, with 86 percent of people surveyed saying that the index impacts their purchasing behavior.In general, the US PIRG has identified gaps in tech companies providing repairability materials, like manuals and spare parts, even when required by law.Laptops have changing or confusing model names that can differ across contexts, websites and support sections can change, and customer service can be unhelpful, Gutterman said. All of these make it difficult for consumers to find the manual they need to troubleshoot their problem. Manuals also might be lacking in repair diagrams or other more technical information that's needed to conduct a repair.A lack of repairability transparency can be not only frustrating for DIY repairs but can also negatively impact repair and refurbishing costs. This could make both options less economically viable for individuals and small businesses, like repair shops, Tatevik Nersisyan, Zero Waste Campaign associate for CALPIRG, US PIRGs California state affiliate, told Ars.When consumers can easily access information on how to fix devices, it makes it easier for people who cant afford the latest and greatest technology to still be able to access the tools they need, Nersisyan added.Apple lags but shows some improvementApple's MacBook repairability scores placed it at the lowest grade of the US PIRG's list, save for Lenovo. Credit: US PIRG However, Apple's overall repairability score improved from 4.3 last year to 5.1 this year. It gained a quarter of a point in this year's score because it supported right-to-repair legislation in California within the last year. Apple's support was a divergence from previous repairability stances from Apple, which had fought right-to-repair efforts for a decade before its about-face on California legislation starting in August 2023. Some have suggested that the change was due to Apple wanting input in legislation that, at the time, seemed likely to pass (California's bill did eventually pass). Apple has also made notable self-repairability efforts lately, though, including launching and expanding a Self Service Repair program.Still, Apple has room to grow, with the manufacturer earning the lowest total disassembly score (97)besides Lenovo, whose score (14) only included one device. Apple also had the lowest disassembly average score (4.9 versus an average of 7.4) out of brands examined. Last year, Apple had an average disassembly score of 4.In a deeper breakdown of the scores below, Apple's disassembly scores improved compared to 2024 (9.7 versus 8), as did its parts pricing score (10.9 versus 9.8). However, parts availability declined (13.2 versus 12.8), per US PIRG. Credit: US PIRG Overall, Apple wasn't able to compete with Asus and Acer, last year's and this year's winners. According to the report, "Asus and Acer continue to manufacture the most repairable laptops due largely to their ease of disassembly."Looking ahead, tariffs and other things impacting laptop availability and pricing, like the supply-chain disruptions witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, could drive demand for more easily repairable PCs.When [laptops and electronics] cost more or are harder to get, I'd expect shoppers to want to keep them in use for as long as possible and value their repairability, Gutterman said.Scharon HardingSenior Technology ReporterScharon HardingSenior Technology Reporter Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She's been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Toms Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK. 35 Comments

Kind of a gray area, really Small study suggests dark mode doesnt save much power for very human reasons LCD screens, dominant in laptops and tablets, tend to get turned way up. Kevin Purdy Feb 20, 2025 2:34 pm | 47 Credit: Getty Images Credit: Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreIf you know how OLED displays work, you know about one of their greatest strengths: Individual pixels can be shut off, offering deeper blacks and power savings. Dark modes, now available on most operating systems, aim to save power by making most backgrounds very dark or black, while also gratifying those who just prefer the look.But what about on the older but still dominant screen technology, LCDs? The BBC is out with a small, interesting study comparing the light and dark modes of one of its website pages on an older laptop. Faced with a dark mode version, most people turned up the brightness a notable amount, sometimes drawing more power than on light mode.It's not a surprise that dark modes don't do anything to reduce LCD power draw. However, the studynot peer-reviewed but published as part of the International Workshop on Low Carbon Computingsuggests that claims about dark mode's efficiency may be overstated in real-world scenarios, with non-cutting-edge hardware and humans at the controls.A 2017 MacBook Pro, a power monitor, and the brightness keys The BBC R&D team's small-scale brightness testing setup: a power monitor, a testing laptop (with LCD screen), and a monitoring laptop. Credit: BBC The BBC R&D team's small-scale brightness testing setup: a power monitor, a testing laptop (with LCD screen), and a monitoring laptop. Credit: BBC The R&D arm of the British Broadcasting Corporation got to wondering just how useful a dark mode was in lowering broader power consumption. So the team "sat participants in front of the BBC Sounds homepage and asked them to turn up the device brightness until they were comfortable with it," using both the light and dark mode versions of the BBC Sounds website. The BBC Sounds website responds to user preferences for light or dark mode. Light mode is shown here on the left, dark on the right. Credit: Kevin Purdy/BBC The BBC Sounds website responds to user preferences for light or dark mode. Light mode is shown here on the left, dark on the right. Credit: Kevin Purdy/BBC Faced with the dark mode version of the site, 80 percent of participants turned the brightness up "significantly higher" than in light mode, the BBC writes in its blog post. In the study, the Beeb posits something broader:Our findings suggest that the energy efficiency benefits of dark mode are not as straightforward as commonly believed for display energy, and the interplay between content colourscheme and user behaviour must be carefully considered in sustainability guidelines and interventions.The study used a physical power monitor (a Tektronix PA1000) and two laptops, one for testinga 2017 MacBook Pro with a 13.3-inch LCD displayand another for monitoring. The LCD laptop seems like a curious choice, given that dark mode's savings are largely tied to OLED pixel technology. The BBC study suggests that, "given that most devices still use LCDs, where power consumption may not be reduced by displaying darker colours" (British spelling theirs), broad claims about energy savings may not be appropriately scaled.It's a decent point. The BBC study points to a write-up on the blog of consultancy firm Valtech of a Purdue study for evidence of those broad claims. The Purdue study puts the savings of dark mode, when using OLED displays with auto-brightness enabled, at between 39 percent, and the savings at 100 percent brightness at up to 47 percent.But how many devices will see that benefit? Research firm Omdia suggested in mid-2024 that OLEDs held 53 percent of the smartphone display market. In 2023, the same firm saw OLEDs as being 14 percent of the combined tablet and laptop market by 2028. So while smaller screens are ready to save some power with black pixels, our larger, more energy-hungry LCD displays are, by and large, not saving much from dark mode and may be just the opposite.Dark MacBook, dark room, light savings Power draw of the BBC's test laptop, a 2017 MacBook Pro with LCD screen, across brightness levels. Power draw of the BBC's test laptop, a 2017 MacBook Pro with LCD screen, across brightness levels. Distributions of brightness choices across all four screen mode and room illumination levels. Distributions of brightness choices across all four screen mode and room illumination levels.Power draw of the BBC's test laptop, a 2017 MacBook Pro with LCD screen, across brightness levels.Distributions of brightness choices across all four screen mode and room illumination levels. Brightness settings chosen by BBC study participants in different combinations of dark or light modes, and dark or light rooms. The room illumination had almost negligible effect, while dark mode significantly upped the brightness choiceson an LCD screen, at least. Brightness settings chosen by BBC study participants in different combinations of dark or light modes, and dark or light rooms. The room illumination had almost negligible effect, while dark mode significantly upped the brightness choiceson an LCD screen, at least. Dark mode and light mode tests, distributed across brightness levels chosen by participants. Dark mode and light mode tests, distributed across brightness levels chosen by participants.Brightness settings chosen by BBC study participants in different combinations of dark or light modes, and dark or light rooms. The room illumination had almost negligible effect, while dark mode significantly upped the brightness choiceson an LCD screen, at least.Dark mode and light mode tests, distributed across brightness levels chosen by participants.The BBC's experiment put 10 people 50 centimeters (1.6 feet) from the BBC Sounds homepage and asked them to alter the brightness until they were comfortable looking at it. Every participant did this adjusting in four variations: dark mode and light mode, and in a dimly lit and brightly lit room. Measuring across 16 brightness levels, the BBC found little difference in power draw between dark and light modesbut, again, this is an LCD screen, so that was expected. The lighting in the room also had very little impact on the brightness level and power draw.Using dark mode, however, caused the mean brightness level set by the participants to increase from a range of 9.610.7 in light mode to 12.512.7 in dark mode, with standard deviations around 2.1 for dark mode and 3.2 for light mode. The highest and lowest brightness settings chosen by participants also crept up in dark modes.The BBC study is just 10 participants, and, as the broadcaster itself notes, calls out for the same study to be done with OLED displays, which have higher contrast ratios and may be easier to read in dark mode at lesser brightness. There are also accessibility and page design considerations not brought into this exercise.But one website, on one MacBook, hooked up to a power monitor can at least suggest that organic eyes and real computers complicate the conversations around dark mode power savings.Kevin PurdySenior Technology ReporterKevin PurdySenior Technology Reporter Kevin is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering open-source software, PC gaming, home automation, repairability, e-bikes, and tech history. He has previously worked at Lifehacker, Wirecutter, iFixit, and Carbon Switch. 47 Comments

may the odds be ever in your favor Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti review: An RTX 4080 for $749, at least in theory It's hard to review a product if you don't know what it will actually cost! Andrew Cunningham Feb 20, 2025 3:57 pm | 35 The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Credit: Andrew Cunningham The Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreNvidia's RTX 50-series makes its first foray below the $1,000 mark starting this week, with the $749 RTX 5070 Tiat least in theory.The third-fastest card in the Blackwell GPU lineup, the 5070 Ti is still far from "reasonably priced" by historical standards (the 3070 Ti was $599 at launch). But it's also $50 cheaper and a fair bit faster than the outgoing 4070 Ti Super and the older 4070 Ti. These are steps in the right direction, if small ones.We'll talk more about its performance shortly, but at a high level, the 5070 Ti's performance falls in the same general range as the 4080 Super and the original RTX 4080, a card that launched for $1,199 just over two years ago. And it's probably your floor for consistently playable native 4K gaming for those of you out there who don't want to rely on DLSS or 4K upscaling to hit that resolution (it's also probably all the GPU that most people will need for high-FPS 1440p, if that's more your speed).But it's a card I'm ambivalent about! It's close to 90 percent as fast as a 5080 for 75 percent of the price, at least if you go by Nvidia's minimum list prices, which for the 5090 and 5080 have been mostly fictional so far. If you can find it at that priceand that's a big "if," since every $749 model is already out of stock across the board at Neweggand you're desperate to upgrade or are building a brand-new 4K gaming PC, you could do worse. But I wouldn't spend more than $749 on it, and it might be worth waiting to see what AMD's first 90-series Radeon cards look like in a couple weeks before you jump in.Meet the GeForce RTX 5070 TiRTX 5080RTX 4080 SuperRTX 5070 TiRTX 4070 Ti SuperRTX 4070 TiRTX 5070CUDA Cores10,75210,2408,9608,4487,6806,144Boost Clock2,617 MHz2,550 MHz2,452 MHz2,610 MHz2,610 MHz2,512 MHzMemory Bus Width256-bit256-bit256-bit256-bit192-bit192-bitMemory Bandwidth960 GB/s736 GB/s896 GB/s672 GB/s504 GB/s672 GB/sMemory size16GB GDDR716GB GDDR6X16GB GDDR716GB GDDR6X12GB GDDR6X12GB GDDR7TGP360 W320 W300 W285 W285 W250 WNvidia isn't making a Founders Edition version of the 5070 Ti, so this time around our review unit is an Asus Prime GeForce RTX 5070 Ti provided by Asus and Nvidia. These third-party cards will deviate a little from the stock specs listed above, but factory overclocks tend to be inordinately mild, and done mostly so the GPU manufacturer can slap a big "overclocked" badge somewhere on the box. We tested this Asus card with its BIOS switch set to "performance" mode, which elevates the boost clock by an entire 30 MHz; you don't need to be a math whiz to guess that a 1.2 percent overclock is not going to change performance much.Compared to the 4070 Ti Super, the 5070 Ti brings two things to the table: a roughly 6 percent increase in CUDA cores and a 33 percent increase in memory bandwidth, courtesy of the switch from GDDR6X to GDDR7. The original 4070 Ti had even fewer CUDA cores, but most importantly for its 4K performance included just 12GB of memory on a 192-bit bus.The 5070 Ti is based on the same GB203 GPU silicon as the 5080 series, but with 1,792 CUDA cores disabled. But there are a lot of similarities between the two, including the 16GB bank of GDDR7 and the 256-bit memory bus. It looks nothing like the yawning gap between the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5080, and the two cards' similar-ish specs meant they weren't too far away from each other in our testing. The 5070 Ti's 300 W power requirement is also a bit lower than the 5080's 360 W, but it's pretty close to the 4080 and 4080 Super's 320 W; in practice, the 5070 Ti draws about as much as the 4080 cards do under load. Asus' design for its Prime RTX 5070 Ti is an inoffensive 2.5-slot, triple-fan card that should fit without a problem in most builds. Credit: Andrew Cunningham As a Blackwell GPU, the 5070 Ti also supports Nvidia's most-hyped addition to the 50-series: support for DLSS 4 and Multi-Frame Generation (MFG). We've already covered this in our 5090 and 5080 reviews, but the short version is that MFG works exactly like Frame Generation did in the 40-series, except that it can now insert up to three AI-generated frames in between natively rendered frames instead of just one.Especially if you're already running at a reasonably high frame rate, this can make things look a lot smoother on a high-refresh-rate monitor without introducing distractingly excessive lag or weird rendering errors. The feature is mainly controversial because Nvidia is comparing 50-series performance numbers with DLSS MFG enabled to older 40-series cards without DLSS MFG to make the 50-series cards seem a whole lot faster than they actually are.We'll publish some frame-generation numbers in our review, both using DLSS and (for AMD cards) FSR. But per usual, we'll continue to focus on natively rendered performancemore relevant for all the games out there that don't support frame generation or don't benefit much from it, and more relevant because your base performance dictates how good your generated frames will look and feel anyway.Testbed notesGaming testbedCPUAMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (provided by AMD)MotherboardAsus ROG Crosshair X670E Hero (provided by AMD)RAM32GB (2x16GB) G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB series (provided by AMD), running at DDR5-6000Power supplyThermaltake Toughpower GF A3 1050 WCPU cooler360 mm MSI MAG CoreLiquid I360CaseMontech XR ATX Mid-tower with three 120 mm cooling fans installed and side panel removedOSWindows 11 24H2 with Core Isolation on, Memory Integrity offDriversNvidia RTX 5090: Beta driver 571.86Nvidia RTX 5080: Beta driver 572.12Nvidia RTX 5070 Ti: Beta driver 572.43Other Nvidia cards: Game Ready Driver 566.36AMD cards: Adrenalin 24.12.1We tested the 5070 Ti in the same updated testbed and with the same updated suite of games that we started using in our RTX 5090 review. The heart of the build is an AMD Ryzen 9800X3D, ensuring that our numbers are limited as little as possible by the CPU speed.Per usual, we prioritize testing GPUs at resolutions that we think most people will use them for. For the 5070 Ti, that means both 4K and 1440pthis card is arguably still overkill for 1440p, but if you're trying to hit 144 or 240 Hz (or even more) on a monitor, there's a good case to be made for it. We also use a mix of ray-traced and non-ray-traced games. For the games we test with upscaling enabled, we use DLSS on Nvidia cards and the newest supported version of FSR (usually 2.x or 3.x) for AMD cards.Though we've tested and re-tested multiple cards with recent drivers in our updated testbed, we don't have a 4070 Ti Super, 4070 Ti, or 3070 Ti available to test with. We've provided some numbers for those GPUs from past reviews; these are from a PC running older drivers and a Ryzen 7 7800X3D instead of a 9800X3D, and we've put asterisks next to them in our charts. They should still paint a reasonably accurate picture of the older GPUs' relative performance, but take them with that small grain of salt.Performance and powerDespite including fewer CUDA cores than either version of the 4080, some combination of architectural improvements and memory bandwidth increases help the card keep pace with both 4080 cards almost perfectly. In most of our tests, it landed in the narrow strip right in between the 4080 and the 4080 Super, and its power consumption under load was also almost identical. Benchmarks run at 4K. Benchmarks run at 4K. Benchmarks run at 1440p. Benchmarks run at 1440p. Benchmarks with DLSS/FSR and/or frame generation enabled. Benchmarks with DLSS/FSR and/or frame generation enabled.In every way that matters, the 5070 Ti is essentially an RTX 4080 that also supports DLSS Multi-Frame Generation. You can see why we'd be mildly enthusiastic about it at $749 but less and less impressed the closer the price creeps to $1,000.Being close to a 4080 also means that the performance gap between the 5070 Ti and the 5080 is usually pretty small. In most of the games we tested, the 5070 Ti hovers right around 90 percent of the 5080's performance.The 5070 Ti is also around 60 percent as fast as an RTX 5090. The performance is a lot lower, but the price-to-performance ratio is a lot higher, possibly reflecting the fact that the 5070 Ti actually has other GPUs it has to compete with (in non-ray-traced games, the Radeon RX 7900 XTX generally keeps pace with the 5070 Ti, though at this late date it is mostly out of stock unless you're willing to pay way more than you ought to for one).Compared to the old 4070 Ti, the 5070 Ti can be between 20 and 50 percent faster at 4K, depending on how limited the game is by the 4070 Ti's narrower memory bus and 12GB bank of RAM. The performance improvement over the 4070 Ti Super is more muted, ranging from as little as 8 percent to as much as 20 percent in our 4K tests. This is better than the RTX 5080 did relative to the RTX 4080 Super, but as a generational leap, it's still pretty modestit's clear why Nvidia wants everyone to look at the Multi-Frame Generation numbers when making comparisons.Waiting to put theory into practice Asus' RTX 5070 Ti, replete with 12-pin power plug. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Being able to get RTX 4080-level performance for several hundred dollars less just a couple of years after the 4080 launched is kind of exciting, though that excitement is leavened by the still high-ish $749 price tag (again, assuming it's actually available at or anywhere near that price). That certainly makes it feel more like a next-generation GPU than the RTX 5080 didand whatever else you can say about it, the 5070 Ti certainly feels like a better buy than the 5080.The 5070 Ti is a fast and 4K-capable graphics card, fast enough that you should be able to get some good results from all of Blackwell's new frame-generation trickery if that's something you want to play with. Its price-to-performance ratio does not thrill me, but if you do the math, it's still a much better value than the 4070 Ti series wasparticularly the original 4070 Ti, with the 12GB allotment of RAM that limited its usefulness and future-proofness at 4K.Two reasons to hold off on buying a 5070 Ti, if you're thinking about it: We're waiting to see how AMD's 9070 series GPUs shake out, and Nvidia's 50-series launch so far has been kind of a mess, with low availability and price gouging both on retail sites and in the secondhand market. Pay much more than $749 for a 5070 Ti, and its delicate value proposition fades quickly. We should know more about the AMD cards in a couple of weeks. The supply situation, at least so far, seems like a problem that Nvidia can't (or won't) figure out how to solve.The goodFor a starting price of $749, you get the approximate performance and power consumption of an RTX 4080, a GPU that cost $1,199 two years ago and $999 one year ago.Good 4K performance and great 1440p performance for those with high-refresh monitors.16GB of RAM should be reasonably future-proof.Multi-Frame Generation is an interesting performance-boosting tool to have in your toolbox, even if it isn't a cure-all for low framerates.Nvidia-specific benefits like DLSS support and CUDA.The badNot all that much faster than a 4070 Ti Super.$749 looks cheap compared to a $2,000 GPU, but it's still enough money to buy a high-end game console or an entire 1080p gaming PC.The uglyPricing and availability for other 50-series GPUs to date have both been kind of a mess.Will you actually be able to get it for $749? Because it doesn't make a ton of sense if it costs more than $749.Seriously, it's been months since I reviewed a GPU that was actually widely available at its advertised price.And it's not just the RTX 5090 or 5080, it's low-end stuff like the Intel Arc B580 and B570, too.Is it high demand? Low supply? Scalpers and resellers hanging off the GPU market like the parasites they are? No one can say!It makes these reviews very hard to do.It also makes PC gaming, as a hobby, really difficult to get into if you aren't into it already!It just makes me mad is all.If you're reading this months from now and the GPUs actuallyare in stock at the list price, I hope this was helpful.Andrew CunninghamSenior Technology ReporterAndrew CunninghamSenior Technology Reporter Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue. 35 Comments

Online speech FTC investigates tech censorship, says its un-American and may be illegal "Tech firms should not be bullying their users," Chairman Andrew Ferguson says. Jon Brodkin Feb 20, 2025 4:20 pm | 76 Credit: Getty Images | Jacques Julien Credit: Getty Images | Jacques Julien Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe Federal Trade Commission today announced a public inquiry into alleged censorship online, saying it wants "to better understand how technology platforms deny or degrade users' access to services based on the content of their speech or affiliations, and how this conduct may have violated the law.""Tech firms should not be bullying their users," said FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, who was chosen by President Trump to lead the commission. "This inquiry will help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds."The FTC announcement said that "censorship by technology platforms is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal." Tech platforms' actions "may harm consumers, affect competition, may have resulted from a lack of competition, or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct," the FTC said.The Chamber of Progress, a lobby group representing tech firms, issued a press release titled, "FTC Chair Rides MAGA 'Tech Censorship' Hobby Horse.""Republicans have spent nearly a decade campaigning against perceived social media 'censorship' by attempting to dismantle platforms' ability to moderate content, despite well-established Supreme Court precedent," the group said. "Accusations of 'tech censorship' also ignore the fact that conservative publishers and commentators receive broader engagement than liberal voices."Last year, the Supreme Court found that a Texas state law prohibiting large social media companies from moderating posts based on a user's "viewpoint" is unlikely to withstand First Amendment scrutiny. The Supreme Court majority opinion said the court "has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expressionto 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences. That principle works for social-media platforms as it does for others."The Chamber of Progress said online platforms compete by adopting different approaches to content moderation and that the FTC is undermining its pro-competition mission "by attacking content moderation." The industry group's website lists 35 corporate partners including Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta.FTC seeks comment until May 21The FTC issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking public comment until May 21. "Tech platform users who have been banned, shadow banned, demonetized, or otherwise censored are encouraged to share their comments in response to the RFI," the FTC said. "The FTC is interested in understanding how consumersincluding by potentially unfair or deceptive acts or practices, or potentially unfair methods of competitionhave been harmed by the policies of tech firms."Meta announced in January that it was ending a third-party fact-checking program that has spurred many conservative complaints. Some studies have disputed Republican claims that tech platforms are biased against conservatives."In sum, when there are political asymmetries in misinformation sharing (in either direction), platforms will face a substantial trade-off between reducing the spread of misinformation and being politically balanced in their enforcement... If one political, social or demographic group shares more misinformationbe it liberals, conservatives or some other groupit is not possible to be maximally effective in combatting misinformation without preferentially taking action against members of that group," said an October 2024 analysis in Nature.Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has also slammed Big Tech firms for alleged censorship. He claims that "Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft & others have played central roles in the censorship cartel," along with fact-checking groups and ad agencies that "helped enforce one-sided narratives."The Carr-led FCC could act on Trump's calls to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides legal protection for platforms that host and moderate third-party content. Carr has already launched investigations of news organizations accused of bias against Trump and conservatives.Jon BrodkinSenior IT ReporterJon BrodkinSenior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 76 Comments

kaboom See a garbage trucks CNG cylinders explode after lithium-ion battery fire It happened recently in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Nate Anderson Feb 20, 2025 5:21 pm | 33 The explosion, as captured by a bodycam. The explosion, as captured by a bodycam. Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreGarbage truck fires are never ideal, but they are usually not catastrophic. When a fire broke out on December 6 in the back of a garbage truck making its Friday rounds through the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, the fire department responded within five minutes. Firefighters saw flames shooting five feet into the air out the back of the truck, and they prepared to put the fire out using hoses and water. Four minutes after their arrival on scene, however, the garbage truck exploded in rather spectacular fashion, injuring several firefighters and police officers, damaging several homes in the vicinity, and scattering debris through the neighborhood.The truck, it turned out, was powered by compressed natural gas (CNG), stored in five carbon-fiber-wrapped cylinders on the roof. The cylinders had pressure relief valves installed that should have opened when they reached a temperature between 212 and 220 Fahrenheit (100140 Celsius). This would vent (flammable) methane gas into the atmosphere, often creating a powerful flamethrower but keeping the tanks from exploding under the rising pressure caused by the heat. In this case, however, all the pressure relief devices failedand the CNG tanks exploded.Fire officials now believe that the whole incident began when a resident improperly disposed of a lithium-ion battery by placing it in a recycling bin. The CNG cylinders were stored atop the truck. Credit: Arlington Heights FD Explosion on a sunny dayDecember 6, 2024, was a sunny day with temps in the mid-30s when local dispatch received a call from the driver of a garbage truck operated by a local company called Groot. The driver said that his load was on fire. Arlington Heights firefighters had dealt with six garbage truck fires in the last several years and had no reason to believe that this call would be exceptional.Typically, a garbage truck driver will compress the truck's load if fire is seen, starving the flames of oxygen and often putting the fire out. The driver of the burning truck had tried this, but the maneuver failed. Apparently, some of the flammable material got under the slide bar of the compactor, spreading the fire further into the truck.When firefighters arrived on scene, they asked the driver to dump his load in the street, which would reduce the risk of anything on the truck itselfgasoline, CNG, etc.catching fire. Then the firefighters could put out the blaze easily, treating it like a normal trash fire, and have Groot haul away the debris afterward. But this didn't work either. The flames had spread far enough by this point to put the truck's dumping mechanism out of commission.So, firefighters unrolled hoses and hooked up to a nearby fire hydrant. They recognized that the truck was CNG-powered, as were many Groot vehicles. CNG offers a lower maintenance cost, uses less fuel, and creates less pollution than diesel, but best practices currently suggest not spraying CNG cylinders directly with water. Firefighters instead tried to aim water right into the back of the garbage truck without wetting the CNG cylinders nearby on the roof.They were waiting for the telltale hiss of the pressure relief system to trigger. These valves typically open within two to five minutes, depending on fire conditions, and they should be capable of venting all their natural gas some minutes before the CNG canisters would otherwise be in danger of exploding. But the hiss never came, and as Fire Chief Lance Harris and his crew worked to secure the scene and put water onto the burning load, the CNG canisters exploded catastrophically instead. The explosion, as captured by a bodycam. In a board of trustees meeting this week in Arlington Heights, Harris recounted the incident, noting that he felt lucky to be aliveand thankful that no township personnel or residents sustained serious injuries."We can't prove it," he said, but after two months of investigating the situation, his department had concluded with high probability that the fire had been caused by a lithium-ion battery discarded into a recycling container. This suspicion was based on the amount of fire and the heat and speed with which it burned; lithium-ion batteries that enter "thermal runaway" can burn hot, at around 750 Fahrenheit (399 C).Harris' takeaway was clear: recycle even small lithium-ion batteries responsibly, as they can cause real hazards if placed into the waste system, where they are often impacted or compressed.Nate AndersonDeputy EditorNate AndersonDeputy Editor Nate is the deputy editor at Ars Technica. His most recent book is In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, which is much funnier than it sounds. 33 Comments

opening the cage Microsofts new AI agent can control software and robots Magma could enable AI agents to take multistep actions in the real and digital worlds. Benj Edwards Feb 20, 2025 5:39 pm | 7 A screen capture of a video showing Magma controlling a robotic arm. Credit: Microsoft Research A screen capture of a video showing Magma controlling a robotic arm. Credit: Microsoft Research Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOn Wednesday, Microsoft Research introduced Magma, an integrated AI foundation model that combines visual and language processing to control software interfaces and robotic systems. If the results hold up outside of Microsoft's internal testing, it could mark a meaningful step forward for an all-purpose multimodal AI that can operate interactively in both real and digital spaces.Microsoft claims that Magma is the first AI model that not only processes multimodal data (like text, images, and video) but can also natively act upon itwhether thats navigating a user interface or manipulating physical objects. The project is a collaboration between researchers at Microsoft, KAIST, the University of Maryland, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Washington.We've seen other large language model-based robotics projects like Google's PALM-E and RT-2 or Microsoft's ChatGPT for Robotics that utilize LLMs for an interface. However, unlike many prior multimodal AI systems that require separate models for perception and control, Magma integrates these abilities into a single foundation model. A combined graphic that shows off various capabilities of the Magma model. Credit: Microsoft Research Microsoft is positioning Magma as a step toward agentic AI, meaning a system that can autonomously craft plans and perform multistep tasks on a human's behalf rather than just answering questions about what it sees."Given a described goal," Microsoft writes in its research paper. "Magma is able to formulate plans and execute actions to achieve it. By effectively transferring knowledge from freely available visual and language data, Magma bridges verbal, spatial, and temporal intelligence to navigate complex tasks and settings."Microsoft is not alone in its pursuit of agentic AI. OpenAI has been experimenting with AI agents through projects like Operator that can perform UI tasks in a web browser, and Google has explored multiple agentic projects with Gemini 2.0.Spatial intelligenceWhile Magma builds off of Transformer-based LLM technology that feeds training tokens into a neural network, it's different from traditional vision-language models (like GPT-4V, for example) by going beyond what they call "verbal intelligence" to also include "spatial intelligence" (planning and action execution). By training on a mix of images, videos, robotics data, and UI interactions, Microsoft claims that Magma is a true multimodal agent rather than just a perceptual model. The researchers' explanations about how "Set-of-Mark" and "Trace-of-Mark" work. Credit: Microsoft Research The Magma model introduces two technical components: Set-of-Mark, which identifies objects that can be manipulated in an environment by assigning numeric labels to interactive elements, such as clickable buttons in a UI or graspable objects in a robotic workspace, and Trace-of-Mark, which learns movement patterns from video data. Microsoft says those features allow the model to complete tasks like navigating user interfaces or directing robotic arms to grasp objects.Microsoft Magma researcher Jianwei Yang wrote in a Hacker News comment that the name "Magma" stands for "M(ultimodal) Ag(entic) M(odel) at Microsoft (Rese)A(rch)," after some people noted that "Magma" already belongs to an existing matrix algebra library, which could create some confusion in technical discussions.Reported improvements over previous modelsIn its Magma write-up, Microsoft claims Magma-8B performs competitively across benchmarks, showing strong results in UI navigation and robot manipulation tasks.For example, it scored 80.0 on the VQAv2 visual question-answering benchmarkhigher than GPT-4V's 77.2 but lower than LLaVA-Next's 81.8. Its POPE score of 87.4 leads all models in the comparison. In robot manipulation, Magma reportedly outperforms OpenVLA, an open source vision-language-action model, in multiple robot manipulation tasks. Magma's agentic benchmarks, as reported by the researchers. Credit: Microsoft Research As always, we take AI benchmarks with a grain of salt since many have not been scientifically validated as being able to measure useful properties of AI models. External verification of Microsoft's benchmark results will become possible once other researchers can access the public code release.Like all AI models, Magma is not perfect. It still faces technical limitations in complex step-by-step decision-making that requires multiple steps over time, according to Microsoft's documentation. The company says it continues to work on improving these capabilities through ongoing research.Yang says Microsoft will release Magmas training and inference code on GitHub next week, allowing external researchers to build on the work. If Magma delivers on its promise, it could push Microsoft's AI assistants beyond limited text interactions, enabling them to operate software autonomously and execute real-world tasks through robotics.Magma is also a sign of how quickly the culture around AI can change. Just a few years ago, this kind of agentic talk scared many people who feared it might lead to AI taking over the world. While some people still fear that outcome, in 2025, AI agents are a common topic of mainstream AI research that regularly takes place without triggering calls to pause all of AI development.Benj EdwardsSenior AI ReporterBenj EdwardsSenior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 7 Comments

"Highly confidentialattorneys' eyes only" ISP sued by record labels agrees to identify 100 users accused of piracy Legal discovery targets names of Altice users hit with copyright notices. Jon Brodkin Feb 20, 2025 3:23 pm | 8 Credit: Getty Images | OcusFocus Credit: Getty Images | OcusFocus Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreCable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs.The subscribers "were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices," said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber "of Altice's intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order," and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court.If subscribers do not object within a month, Altice must disclose the subscribers' names, phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses. The judge's order was issued on February 12 and reported yesterday by TorrentFreak.The names and contact information will be classified as "highly confidentialattorneys' eyes only." A separate order issued in April 2024 said that documents produced in discovery "shall be used by the Parties only in the litigation of this Action and shall not be used for any other purpose."Altice, which operates the Optimum brand, was sued in December 2023 in US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. The music publishers' complaint alleges that Altice "knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers."The lawsuit said plaintiffs sent over 70,000 infringement notices to Altice from February 2020 through November 2023. At least a few subscribers were allegedly hit with hundreds of notices. The lawsuit gave three examples of IP addresses that were cited in 502, 781, and 926 infringement notices, respectively.Altice failed to terminate repeat infringers whose IP addresses were flagged in these copyright notices, the lawsuit said. "Those notices advised Altice of its subscribers' blatant and systematic use of Altice's Internet service to illegally download, copy, and distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other online file-sharing services. Rather than working with Plaintiffs to curb this massive infringement, Altice did nothing, choosing to prioritize its own profits over its legal obligations," the plaintiffs alleged.ISPs face numerous lawsuitsThis is one of numerous copyright lawsuits filed against broadband providers, and it's not the first time an ISP handed names of subscribers to the plaintiffs. We have previously written articles about film studios trying to force Reddit to identify users who admitted torrenting in discussion forums. Reddit was able to avoid providing information in one case in part because the film studios already obtained identifying details for 118 subscribers directly from Grande, the ISP they had sued.Copyright owners can issue subpoenas to subscribers whose names are provided by ISPs, though they have sought easier ways to get the information they want. In the 2023 case involving film studios and Reddit, a magistrate judge wrote that the studios "resist serving those [Grande] subscribers with subpoenas as burdensome and inconsistent with their August expert-disclosure deadline."As for the Warner v. Altice case, we reached out to both companies today to ask how the names and contact information of subscribers will be used. We'll update this article if we get any information.Presumably, the record companies will seek information from the subscribers to support their case that Altice allowed them to illegally download copyrighted material without consequences. Financial awards in such cases can be large: A federal jury in Virginia ruled in December 2019 that ISP Cox had to pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels.A 2024 ruling vacated the $1 billion damages award and ordered a new damages trial. The Supreme Court is now considering whether to take up the case.Copyright holders want ISPs to police infringementIn addition to getting financial payouts, copyright holders want to set a legal precedent that would force ISPs to terminate users accused of repeat infringement. Several ISPs urged the Supreme Court to intervene in the Cox case, arguing that they shouldn't be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.Mass terminations would harm people who happen to be using the same connection as the person who did the infringing, ISPs say. They also contest the reliability of copyright infringement notices, saying the "bot-generated" notices are vague and that ISPs can't verify their accuracy.With discovery proceeding in the Altice case, plaintiffs recently agreed to Altice's request for per-work revenue figures and other data. Altice previously tried to get the lawsuit thrown out, but the motion to dismiss was denied in September 2024.Altice was also sued by UMG (Universal Music Group) in December 2022, but the case was dismissed with prejudice at the request of the parties in August 2024.Jon BrodkinSenior IT ReporterJon BrodkinSenior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 8 Comments

"hypnotists of the underwater world" Crafty cuttlefish vary their camouflage They can take on the features of a mangrove leaf or branching coral, or run dark stripes down their bodies. Jennifer Ouellette Feb 20, 2025 3:41 pm | 0 Crafty cuttlefish makes like a branched coral to fool potential prey. Credit: Matteo Santon/University of Bristol Crafty cuttlefish makes like a branched coral to fool potential prey. Credit: Matteo Santon/University of Bristol Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreCrafty cuttlefish employ several different camouflaging displays while hunting their prey, according to a new paper published in the journal Ecology, including mimicking benign ocean objects like a leaf or coral, or flashing dark stripes down their bodies. And individual cuttlefish seem to choose different preferred hunting displays for different environments.It's well-known that cuttlefish and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin thanks to that skin's unique structure. As previously reported,squid skin is translucent and features an outer layer of pigment cells called chromatophores that control light absorption. Each chromatophore is attached to muscle fibers that line the skin's surface, and those fibers, in turn, are connected to a nerve fiber. It's a simple matter to stimulate those nerves with electrical pulses, causing the muscles to contract. And because the muscles are pulling in different directions, the cell expands, along with the pigmented areas, changing the color. When the cell shrinks, so do the pigmented areas.Underneath the chromatophores, there is a separate layer of iridophores. Unlike the chromatophores, the iridophores aren't pigment-based but are an example of structural color, similar to the crystals in the wings of a butterfly, except a squid's iridophores are dynamic rather than static. They can be tuned to reflect different wavelengths of light. A 2012 paper suggested that this dynamically tunable structural color of the iridophores is linked to a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. The two layers work together to generate the unique optical properties of squid skin.And then there are leucophores, which are similar to the iridophores, except they scatter the full spectrum of light, so they appear white. They contain reflectin proteins that typically clump together into nanoparticles so that light scatters instead of being absorbed or directly transmitted. Leucophores are mostly found in cuttlefish and octopuses, but there are some female squid of the genus Sepioteuthis that have leucophores that they can "tune" to only scatter certain wavelengths of light. If the cells allow light through with little scattering, theyll seem more transparent, while the cells become opaque and more apparent by scattering a lot more light.Scientists learned in 2023 that the process by which cuttlefish generate their camouflage patterns is significantly more complex than scientists previously thought. Specifically, cuttlefish readily adapted their skin patterns to match different backgrounds, whether natural or artificial. And the creatures didn't follow the same transitional pathway every time, often pausing in between. That means that contrary to prior assumptions, feedback seems to be critical to the process, and the cuttlefish were correcting their patterns to match the backgrounds better.Four distinctive displays Wild broadclub cuttlefish hunting with four different displays: (a) leaf, (b) passing-stripe, (c) branching coral, and (d) pulse display. Matteo Santon/University of Bristol Wild broadclub cuttlefish hunting with four different displays: (a) leaf, (b) passing-stripe, (c) branching coral, and (d) pulse display. Matteo Santon/University of Bristol Representative examples of the four main hunting displays viewedfrom prey perspective. Matteo SantonUniversity of Bristol Representative examples of the four main hunting displays viewedfrom prey perspective. Matteo SantonUniversity of Bristol Wild broadclub cuttlefish hunting with four different displays: (a) leaf, (b) passing-stripe, (c) branching coral, and (d) pulse display. Matteo Santon/University of Bristol Representative examples of the four main hunting displays viewedfrom prey perspective. Matteo SantonUniversity of Bristol All those elements combine to make cuttlefish the master hypnotists of the underwater world, co-author Matteo Santon of the University of Bristol in England told New Scientist. He and his colleagues spent several months filming 98 cuttlefish hunting prey in Indonesia. Santon was particularly interested in studying the cuttlefish's ability to adopt moving stripe patterns (the topic of a forthcoming paper) and soon realized that his subjects exhibited a range of four distinct hunting displays when approaching their prey, each with a different coloration, texture, and body posture.In the "Leaf" display, for instance, the cuttlefish stretches its lateral arms horizontally, tucking its other arms into a cone while turning its body olive-green, and approaching the prey very slowlyas if it were a floating mangrove leaf being carried along by the current. In the "Branching Coral" display, the cuttlefish raises its two central arms and splays its remaining arms in front of the body while turning yellow and orange. This might serve to help the cuttlefish hide among staghorn corals to conceal its approach to prey.For the "Passing Stripe" display, the cuttlefish took on a dark gray hue and flashed a downward-moving black stripe along its body. This serves as a form of motion camouflage, as the downward motion of the stripe counters the more threatening expanding motion as the cuttlefish approaches its prey. In the "Pulse" display, the two lateral arm pairs point forward in a tight zone, while the central arms extend upward and out wide, as pulses of dark color play out on the overall gray coloration of the body. The advantages gained by this are less clear, per the authors, but it might serve to minimize the cuttlefish profile from the perspective of its prey (e.g. crabs).The most commonly used patterns were the branching coral, passing stripe, and leaf displays, with pulse displays only accounting for about 11 percent of those observed. Sixty-two of the cuttlefish were filmed more than once and used two or more different hunting displays. "This suggests that this variability is unlikely explained by individual cuttlefish personality," the authors wrote. In fact it demonstrates that "cuttlefish, in different environmental contexts in the wild, show a much broader behavioral repertoire than when housed in the laboratory."DOI: Ecology, 2025. 10.1002/ecy.70021 (About DOIs).Jennifer OuelletteSenior WriterJennifer OuelletteSenior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 0 Comments

Amazon Abandonment Amazon remembers it has an Android app store, kills it Fire tablets and Fire TV devices will still have access to apps, though. Ryan Whitwam Feb 20, 2025 12:35 pm | 10 Credit: Ryan Whitwam Credit: Ryan Whitwam Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter 14 years of trying and failing to gain a smartphone foothold, Amazon has announced it will discontinue its app store. Anyone who has content in Amazon's store will be able to access it for now, but all bets are off beginning on August 20, 2025. As part of the pull-back, the company is also discontinuing the Amazon Coins digital currency.The Amazon Appstore made waves when it launched in 2011, offering an alternative to what at the time was known as the Android Market. Amazon even scored some early exclusives and gave away a plethora of premium content and Coins to anyone willing to do the legwork of installing the storefront on their Android phone.That level of attention didn't last, though, and the Appstore today has hardly evolved from its humble beginnings, lacking most of the content and features people have come to expect from a mobile app store. If you want to check out the store on your phone before it goes away, you'll have to sideload the client by downloading an APK from Amazon. This process isn't hard, but it proved to be a significant barrier to entry for getting people into the Amazon ecosystem.Amazon says it has stopped selling Coins effective today, but you can still spend any of the currency already attached to your account. However, you'd be spending it on content that may or may not be available on your phone later this year. A better idea might be to continue ignoring the Appstore like you probably have for yearsif you have any paid Coins remaining in your account when the shutdown date rolls around, Amazon will simply refund you. The selection in the Amazon Appstore is pretty much what you'd expect. Credit: Ryan Whitwam The selection in the Amazon Appstore is pretty much what you'd expect. Credit: Ryan Whitwam This is an interesting time for Amazon to throw in the towel. The Appstore's continued existence came up repeatedly in Google's 2023 antitrust case with Epic Games. While Google contended that Amazon's presence in the market supported its position that the Play Store was not an illegal monopoly, Epic produced an expert who testified that the Amazon Appstore was only present on 0.1 percent of Android phones. And that says nothing about how many people were actually using the store they'd installed.As a result of its loss in that case, Google may be forced to open Android up to third-party app stores by sharing the Google Play app catalog and distributing other stores. That will give a boost to platforms like Epic Games and Microsoft. Amazon could have benefitted as well, at least in theory. The company's decision to end phone support for the Appstore now illustrates how few people used it. Perhaps things would have been different if Microsoft hadn't abandoned the Windows Subsystem for Android in 2024, which used the Amazon Appstore for app distribution.The Fire conundrumThere's another wrinkle for Amazon, which may explain why it has allowed the store to languish so long in this state. While Amazon has given up on competing with Google directly, it can't completely abandon Android apps. The company doesn't make phones (aside from that extremely weird one in 2014), but it does offer a range of Fire tablets and Fire TV streaming boxes that run Android. It would prefer you didn't think of them like that, though.Amazon's Fire devices run a custom version of Android called Fire OS, but Amazon hates to admit that it's Android under the hood; you won't see the word "Android" on any of these product pages. Amazon says the Appstore will continue to exist on Fire devicesit really has no choice, as these devices lack Google services. So, your ultra-budget tablet or Fire TV Stick will still have access to streaming apps and simple games, but future Fire hardware could skip Android altogether.The existence of Android-based Fire hardware may explain why Amazon's language around the shutdown is so vague. Amazon says its apps "will not be guaranteed to operate on Android devices" after the shutdown date. Here, "Android devices" means your phoneit doesn't consider Fire tablets and Fire TV to be Android devices, even though they are. If Amazon didn't need to keep the store alive for Fire devices, there would be less uncertainty there.So app access won't be upended for Fire users, who undoubtedly account for the overwhelming bulk of Appstore usage. Thus, Amazon knows there won't be a raft of unhappy customers complaining about losing their apps. Developers who spent time releasing phone-optimized content on the Amazon store might be irked, though. All that work will be for naught once the phone client shuts down. However, there won't be much in the way of lost revenue with so few people using Amazon's store.Ryan WhitwamSenior Technology ReporterRyan WhitwamSenior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards. 10 Comments

Like it never happened Twitchs new storage limits will purge huge swaths of Internet gaming history Amazon-owned platform says "costly" historical archives don't drive "engagement." Kyle Orland Feb 20, 2025 1:00 pm | 33 When these archived highlights are deleted, it'll be like some streamers weren't there at all... Credit: MikkelWilliam | Getty Images When these archived highlights are deleted, it'll be like some streamers weren't there at all... Credit: MikkelWilliam | Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn morePopular Amazon-owned game streaming platform Twitch announced Wednesday that it will be imposing a 100-hour limit on the archived video highlights users can preserve permanently on the site. And while Twitch says that only 0.5 percent of users will be affected by these new limits, gamers are warning that the move threatens to eradicate large swaths of recent gaming history from the Internet.Highlights, in Twitch's own words, are a way for Twitch streamers to "show off your best moments to new viewers who land on your channel page." Unlike VOD recordings of full Twitch broadcastswhich are deleted automatically after seven days (or 60 days for Twitch partners)these highlights provide a more permanent way to maintain an archive of important moments for many Twitch streamers.That seeming permanence is set to end on April 29, though, when Twitch says it will start to delete content from channels with more than 100 hours of highlights, starting with the least-viewed highlights. Twitch headquarters in San Francisco. Credit: Getty Images Twitch headquarters in San Francisco. Credit: Getty Images In announcing the change, Twitch cited the "costly" indefinite storage of these highlights, which it says are responsible for "less than 0.1% of hours watched" across the site. These highlights "haven't been very effective in driving discovery or engagement with viewers," Twitch wrote, and limiting them will "help us manage resources more efficiently... and continue to invest in new features and improvements to more effective viewer engagement tools like Clips and the mobile feed."An incalculable lossOn social media, though, many Twitch users are expressing outrage over what the loss of these clips will do to the shared history of their gaming communities. "Who the hell cares about discovery or engagement?" one streamer wrote. "People use highlights to archive, and you're destroying YEARS of speedrunning and other communities' history."The speedrunning community seems particularly likely to be negatively affected by Twitch's move. As VTuber VanityFox points out, "many speedrunners use highlights to document world records and important moments... the amount gaming history they are deleting to save money and shove short form content on your feed is incalculable."But the potential preservation impacts are not limited to speedrunners. "I get sad thinking of all of the StarCraft 2 history that will soon be lost because it only lived on Twitch and not YouTube," FearDragon64 wrote. "Twitch wants to delete every GDQ, Twitch plays Pokemon, every tournament or significant event series, most speedruns, most longplayers, most RPG recorded runs, and all of the history of what happened on Twitch, from Twitch," MechaLink added.It's "history evaporating before our eyes," as one social media user memorably wrote.Abandon shipif you canMany streamers already post versions of their archived streams and highlights to outside platforms like YouTube or the Internet Archive. That means GamesDoneQuick's hundreds of hours of archived Twitch highlights will still be accessible elsewhere, for instance.For those that have yet to do that kind of external backup, Twitch is offering two months for users to download their own highlights for posterity and potential reupload elsewhere. But Twitch says it won't be offering a bulk download tool for that purpose, sticking many users with hundreds or even thousands of hours of highlights with the daunting task of downloading and/or reuploading their clips one by one (or using dodgy third-party bulk download tools to do so)."It'd take a full time job to upload all of this elsewhere," streamer Ravsy wrote of his over 4,600 hours of archived highlights."I will lose more than [5,000 hours] of my broadcast history because of your decision," longtime streamer HannyS added. "I have no way to be able to preserve and archive that... amazing..."The limit is leading to something of a Sophie's Choice situation for some longtime streamers. "Come April I will have been streaming for 10 years on Twitch. Making me choose what to delete from so many memories is heartbreaking," streamer The OnlyRyann posted.What we could loseWhile attentive streamers will at least have an opportunity to back up their Twitch highlights, some have noted that inactive, retired, or even deceased streamers from the past may not have the chance to preserve their archived streams in time for the April 29 deadline. That could even include Twitch cofounder Justin Kan, who has stored hundreds of short video highlights dating back to the launch of the site 18 years ago, when it was still known as Justin.tv. Clips from Twitch cofounder Justin Kan will likely be swept up in the company's highlight purge. Credit: Twitch Clips from Twitch cofounder Justin Kan will likely be swept up in the company's highlight purge. Credit: Twitch Moving archived clips over to other platforms is also an incomplete solution for many streamers because the reuploaded video clips won't preserve the live chat history that Twitch stores alongside their highlights.Even ignoring the chat history issue, many streamers simply feel their Twitch archives should remain on Twitch. "YouTube is an entirely different world," streamer Kolo wrote. "I stopped uploading VODs to YouTube because it destroyed my mental health. Genuinely. I want to preserve the history & culture of my Twitch community history; it belongs on Twitch."Twitch notes that its money-saving move will only affect the "less than 0.5% of active streamers on Twitch [who] are over the 100-hour storage limit today." But some have questioned whether that statistic includes the millions of streamers who only tried streaming on Twitch once or twice. Almost by definition, this kind of mass deletion will have the largest impact on streamers with long histories and large followings.Many irate Twitch users have been gathering on the company's User Voice forums to protest the decision. "Proceeding with this 100-hour limit will actively push streamers away from the Twitch platform, opting instead for services that do not place arbitrary limits on the archiving of digital content," user solar_espeon wrote in one popular post there. "The best course of action is to simply not implement this 100-hour limit."The new highlight storage limits come just over a year after Twitch laid off 500 employees amid continuing struggles to achieve profitability.Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 33 Comments

what's next, the return of leaded gasoline? Trump rescinds DOT approval for NYC congestion toll, condemns city to pollution NYC voters overwhelmingly wanted less traffic and air pollution; Trump says tough. Jonathan M. Gitlin Feb 20, 2025 10:25 am | 48 If you only ever traveled by helicopter or motorcade, you'd probably be completely out of touch when it came to traffic, too. Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images If you only ever traveled by helicopter or motorcade, you'd probably be completely out of touch when it came to traffic, too. Credit: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreNew Yorkers' ongoing attempts to rein in car traffic on the island of Manhattan took a serious blow yesterday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy terminated the city's congestion charge, which made drivers pay for going below 60th Street.Duffy claimed that it's unfair that drivers should have to pay to use roads since there are already tolls on bridges into Manhattan and claimed there are no alternatives, ignoring the buses and subway trains operated by the Metropolitan Transit Authority.Further, the city is being unfair against people who live far away, Duffy said. "The toll program leaves drivers without any free highway alternative and instead takes more money from working people to pay for a transit system and not highways. Its backwards and unfair," he said in a statement.Worse yet, Duffy claimed the congestion charge, which was implemented to improve air quality for more than a million Manhattan residents and workers, is somehow discriminatory against the poor. "Every American should be able to access New York City regardless of their economic means. It shouldnt be reserved for an elite few," Duffy wrote. As a result, he has rescinded the required Department of Transportation approval necessary to impose a road toll.Congestion pricing has often proved unpopular before implementation, even in cities less poisoned by car-brained policymakers, such as Stockholm and Singapore. Business owners fear a loss of customers from the removal of cars and parking, despite plenty of evidence that disproves this shibboleth. And once in place, city residents quickly start to love the reduction in car traffic, noise, and pollution, not to mention the added income for city programs like more public transport.New York's attempts to improve the quality of life of its residents by reducing car traffic below 60th Street have been long and tortuous. There have always been tolls to drive across the bridges or through the tunnels into Manhattanone can thank Robert Moses for that. New tolls or bans on cars coming into Manhattan had been proposed over the years, but it wasn't until 2019 that the state legislature made it official.A difficult birthThe plan was met with plenty of opposition despite the promise of generating around $15 billion a year in revenue, and a 2021 implementation date slipped to 2024. But at the last minute, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, deferring to the wishes of commuters from out of state rather than the ones that elected her, paused the congestion charge three weeks before it was meant to go into effect on June 30 that year.Following public outcry at the loss of MTA revenue and the promise of worse air quality and more road deaths, advocates and legislators fought back, and following a series of lawsuits, NYC's congestion charge went into effect on January 5, 2025, with a peak time toll of $9 and an off-peak price starting at $2.25.And it's working. "Travel times through the citys most congested corridors are down for millions of commuting New Yorkers, while pedestrian traffic is up and data shows air is cleaner and streets are safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers alike," said David Kelly, senior director at the Environmental Defense Fund. "Funding from the program is already working to improve public transportation, allowing the MTA to purchase 265 new clean, cost-efficient electric buses and start new projects to speed up trains and buses throughout the region."The following day saw the inauguration of Donald Trump as the country's 47th president. While campaigning, Trump had promised to undo the congestion charge, and he has now done it."When was the last time Donald Trump took the subway or the bus in New York? If he spent just one day living like the majority of New Yorkers, he'd realize the terrible congestion that contributes to polluted air and too many vehicles on the road wasting people's time stuck in traffic," said Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous. "The Sierra Club fought Governor Hochul's unnecessary delay of congestion pricing last year, and well fight this unlawful attack as well."Jonathan M. GitlinAutomotive EditorJonathan M. GitlinAutomotive Editor Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC. 48 Comments

new flagship Three electric motors, a V12, and 1,001 hpdriving the Lamborghini Revuelto Lamborghini improves on the Aventador in every way with Revuelto PHEV. Bradley Iger Feb 20, 2025 11:39 am | 1 The Revuelto is Lamborghini's all-new V12 plug-in hybrid flagship supercar. Credit: Bradley Iger The Revuelto is Lamborghini's all-new V12 plug-in hybrid flagship supercar. Credit: Bradley Iger Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreWe are effectively living in a post-horsepower world. As the roster of production cars offering quadruple-digit output figures continues to expand and a growing number of garden-variety vehicles now offer straight-line acceleration that would have been exclusively supercar territory a decade ago, serious thrust is quickly becoming an expectation rather than a rarefied experience.This trend might seem like an existential dilemma for an automaker with a legacy built on face-melting performance, but Lamborghini has never really been the type to obsess over the numbers. Sure, the Aventador SVJ set a production car lap record at the Nrburgring Nordschleife in 2018, but the company has always championed emotional impact above all else.At the press launch for the Aventador SVJ, Maurizio ReggianiLamborghini's chief technical officer at the timemade a point of telling the assembled journalists that despite increasing headwinds from emissions regulations, Lamborghini would continue to produce a supercar with a naturally aspirated V12 for as long as it possibly could. "I will fight it to the end!" he declared to boisterous applause. At almost two tons, the Revuelto is no lightweight, despite extensive use of composites. Bradley Iger At almost two tons, the Revuelto is no lightweight, despite extensive use of composites. Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Reggiani has since retired from the company, but the Revuelto is proof that keeping a high-winding V12 in its flagship model has remained a priority for Lamborghini. Although it's the Italian automaker's first series production sports car to feature a hybrid system, the centerpiece of Sant'Agata's latest showstopper is undoubtedly still the howling 6.5 L naturally aspirated V12 situated just behind its occupants' heads.A brand-new engineThat displacement figure may look familiar to fans of the Aventador, but the new L545 engine was developed in-house and largely from scratch for the Revuelto. Offering up 814 hp (607 kW) and 535 ft-lb (Nm) of torque on its own, the new power plant is both the lightest and most powerful V12 that Lamborghini has ever produced. It's matched up with a trio of electric motorstwo axial flux units powering the front wheels and another radial flux unit for the rear that's mounted above the Revuelto's new eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, the latter of which is now positioned behind the V12 instead of in front of it. This results in a total system output of 1,001 hp (746 kW) and 793 ft-lb (1,075 Nm) of torque. But as impressive as the new hybrid powertrain is, it's just one piece of a much larger puzzle.The design lineage of the Revuelto is obvious, but this is not a revamped Aventador. The differences go right down to the Revuelto's new carbon monocoque chassis, which is said to be 10 percent lighter than its predecessor's while offering a 25 percent improvement in torsional stiffness. The Revuelto's front structure is also constructed from a carbon fiber composite rather than the aluminum alloy used for the Aventador's nose section, a change that shaves additional weight while bolstering the car's crash worthiness. Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Bradley Iger Inside, the Revuelto also offers significant ergonomic and technological improvements over the outgoing car. At 6'3" (1.9 m), the Aventador was always a pretty tight squeeze for your author, and any track work had to be done in either a hunched-forward or a significantly leaned-back position, with my knees essentially straddling the steering column due to the severely limited headroom available while wearing a helmet. But even with the standard seats, the Revuelto provides enough space above my head to offer hope for taller drivers: you may actually be able to get into a comfortable seating position in this car both on the road and at the track.Better ergonomicsonce you learn the wheelThe cabin is also a huge step forward from the Aventador in terms of both its design and the technology found within it. In terms of the former, Lamborghini has done away with the Aventador's busy array of buttons, knobs, and switches on the center console for a much cleaner look, aided in part by a new 8.4-inch touchscreen display that handles the typical infotainment fare as well as the HVAC settings.The display looks sharp and responds quickly to inputs, and the ability to share information with the 9.1-inch display in front of the passenger is a fun party trick, but I still found myself wishing for a physical volume knob on occasion. Hard buttons that are dedicated to the audio system have been added to the back of the steering wheel to supplement the touchscreen controls, and that helps, but neither solution is as good as the obvious one. The interior is as dramatic as you'd expect. Bradley Iger The interior is as dramatic as you'd expect. Bradley Iger Professional racing drivers get tested by their engineers on how well they remember the complicated steering wheel button layouts. Bradley Iger Professional racing drivers get tested by their engineers on how well they remember the complicated steering wheel button layouts. Bradley Iger For not-racing drivers, the first hour or so with a Lamborghini can be complicated as you try and learn the steering wheel. Bradley Iger For not-racing drivers, the first hour or so with a Lamborghini can be complicated as you try and learn the steering wheel. Bradley Iger Professional racing drivers get tested by their engineers on how well they remember the complicated steering wheel button layouts. Bradley Iger For not-racing drivers, the first hour or so with a Lamborghini can be complicated as you try and learn the steering wheel. Bradley Iger There are several different themes for the main display. Bradley Iger The new infotainment UI is much better. Bradley Iger Apple CarPlay is present and correct. Bradley Iger Now your passenger can know exactly how fast they're going and how many Gs they're pulling. Bradley Iger To start, lift the red cover and then push the button. Bradley Iger However, pushing this button no longer causes a V12 to erupt into life, as the Revuelto starts off on battery power. Bradley Iger The steering wheel is now where the vast majority of the physical controls live. Along with sets of hard buttons on the back of the left and right spokes and the expected keys on the front for things like lane keep assist and voice commands, it also houses a rocker switch for the turn signals and four knobs for vehicle functions. The red knob on the top left allows you to choose between drive modes, and the knob on the top right controls hybrid system behavior, while the lower left one controls damper stiffness and lower right adjusts the rear wing's angle of attack. It's all a bit overwhelming at first, but once I got the hang of things, I came to appreciate the ability to change the vast majority of the vehicle's functions on the fly instead of needing to dive into a labyrinth of system menus.The Revuelto's default drive mode is Citt, its EV-only setting. It's a design decision that allows you to make a stealth departure whenever necessary, but it also makes pressing the jet fighter-style start/stop button on the center console a far less ceremonious affair than it was in the Aventador. The hybrid system offers more than enough oomph to get the Revuelto moving at a brisk pace and maintain freeway speeds on its own, but its central tunnel-mounted 3.8 kWh battery pack is only good for about six miles (10 km) of range. Charge times are 30 minutes at 7 kW on a level 2 AC charger, or about six minutes if you use regenerative braking and spare power from the V12 while driving.Selecting one of the other drive modes (Strada, Sport, Corsa, and Corsa ESC Offlisted here from least to most performance-oriented) brings the V12 into the mix, though it's put through a brief warm-up routine before it begins to provide power to the wheels.Much more driveableAround town, the Revuelto is a quantum leap ahead of the Aventador in terms of drivability, aided in large part by its thoroughly modern eight-speed dual-clutch transmission. Where the Aventador's automated single-clutch gearbox was unrefined and clumsy at low speeds, with pronounced gaps in power delivery as it swapped cogs, the Revuelto's shifts are seamless and nearly instantaneous. This, along with standard rear-wheel steering and cleverly tuned magnetorheological dampers, make it a surprisingly civil supercar to operate on the street, though its low-slung stance and limited rear visibility remain as inherent compromises of the breed.Unhurried cruising ultimately feels like a preamble to this car's natural state anyway. Out in the canyons, the Revuelto's 232 hp (173 kW) advantage over the Aventador Ultimae feels underrated. Throttle response is EV-quick thanks to the electric motors, and at speed, the Revuelto's jaw-dropping shove feels closer to a Bugatti Chiron than it does to its predecessor.The V12 delivers relentless power all the way to its soaring 9,500 rpm redline and produces a banshee howl that owners will hear in their dreams while doing so, but long gearing does limit the number of opportunities you'll have to sweep through the upper register on public roads. And while it's not the kick to the back of the head that the Aventador's single clutch was at wide-open throttle, the eight-speed gearbox produces noticeably firmer shifts in the Sport and Corsa modes to add to the drama. At more than $600,000, the Revuelto won't be a common sight. Bradley Iger At more than $600,000, the Revuelto won't be a common sight. Bradley Iger Is this the most civilized Lamborghini V12 supercar, despite having more than a thousand horsepower? Bradley Iger Is this the most civilized Lamborghini V12 supercar, despite having more than a thousand horsepower? Bradley Iger At more than $600,000, the Revuelto won't be a common sight. Bradley Iger Is this the most civilized Lamborghini V12 supercar, despite having more than a thousand horsepower? Bradley Iger Official dry weight figures put the Revuelto's curb weight at about 4,200 lbs (1,905 kg), or about 500 lbs (227 kg) more than the Aventador, yet the Revuelto somehow manages to feel nimbler and more eager to change direction, and it's less prone to running wide if you're impatient with the throttle coming out of a slow corner. Body motion is kept to a minimum even in the softer of the two suspension settings, making the "Hard" setting feel more appropriate for road course pace and surface quality.And when it comes time to scrub off some speed, massive carbon ceramic rotors with ten-piston calipers up front provide stopping power that's just as impressive as the powertrain. While the rear end of the Aventador had a habit of wiggling around under hard braking in a way that eroded confidence, the Revuelto feels eminently planted, allowing you to more precisely modulate the response delivered from the firm brake pedal.Between its head-turning design, hair-raising performance, and sophisticated technology, the Revuelto completely delivers on the promises of a thoroughly modern Lamborghini flagship. Of course, at an MSRP of $604,363 ($681,258 as-tested with gas guzzler tax and destination fee), it certainly ought to. Still, while there may be cheaper ways to get four-digit horsepower into your garage, none of them capture the essence of a supercar in the way that a naturally aspirated V12 does. Conventional wisdom may dictate that forced induction and a smaller cylinder count is the way forward, but as its look implies, sticking to convention was clearly not in the Revuelto's design edict. 1 Comments

Valve's updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway's two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch,Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client and server game code, a boon for modders and fixers, is also being released.That source code allows for more ambitious projects than have been possible thus far, Valve wrote in a blog post. "Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible." The SDK license restricts any resulting projects to "a non-commercial basis," but they can be published on Steam's store as their own entities.Since it had the tools out, Valve also poked around the games based on that more open source engine and spiffed them up as well. Most games got 64-bit binary support, scalable HUD graphics, borderless window options, and the like. Many of these upgrades come from the big 25-year anniversary update made toHalf-Life 2, which included "overbright lighting," gamepad configurations, Steam networking support, and the like.

put a pin in it Truly a middle finger: Humane bricking $700 AI Pins with limited refunds Humane's showing how not to treat early adopters. Scharon Harding Feb 19, 2025 1:48 pm | 78 Humane's AI Pin. Credit: Humane Humane's AI Pin. Credit: Humane Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter launching its AI Pin in April 2024 and reportedly seeking a buyout by May 2024, Humane is shutting down. Most of the people who bought an AI Pin will not get refunds for the devices, which debuted at $700, dropped to $500, and will be bricked on February 28 at noon PT.At that time, AI Pins, which are lapel pins with an integrated AI voice assistant, camera, speaker, and laser projector, will no longer connect to Humanes servers, and all customer data, including personal identifiable information... will be permanently deleted from Humanes servers, according to Humanes FAQ page. Humane also stopped selling AI pins as of yesterday and canceled any orders that had been made but not yet fulfilled. Humane said it is discontinuing the AI Pin because its moving onto new endeavors.Those new endeavors include selling off key assets, including the AI Pins CosmOS operating system and intellectual property, including over 300 patents and patent applications, to HP for $116 million, HP announced on Tuesday. HP expects the acquisition to close this month.Notably, Humane raised $241 million to make its pin and was reportedly valued at $1 billion before launch. Last year, Humane was seeking a sale price of $750 million to $1 billion, according to Bloomberg.But the real failure is in the company's treatment of its customers, who will only get a refund if they are still within the 90-day return window from their original shipment date, Humanes FAQ page says. All device shipments prior to November 15th, 2024, are not eligible for refunds. All refunds must be submitted by February 27th, 2025.AI Pins will no longer function as a cellular device or connect to Humanes servers. This means no calls, texts, or data usage will be possible, according to the startup, which noted that users cant port their phone number to another device or wireless carrier. Some offline features like battery level will still work, Humane said, but overall, the product will become $700 e-waste for most owners in nine days.Feel like weve been dupedThe shutdown leaves customers in the lurch, which has resulted in outrage among Humanes small but invested customer base.One Reddit user, for example, wrote on the Humane subreddit that they feel like weve been duped.The announcement has also made some apparent users cynical about the intentions of the San Francisco firm, which former Apple executives launched in 2018.It's truly a middle finger. Especially because there is no way around it due to the server reliance. I believe this was their plan all along. Sell and [get out], one Reddit user said.Similarly, another Reddit user said the lack of refunds and server access were a blow to early adopters, saying, Humane won by selling. HP won a new tech. All consumers got fucked...There will likely be an effort to jailbreak the AI Pin without Humanes approval so that the gadget can be open-sourced, allowing people to continue to use the pins they already paid for. This has happened with other gadgets that have recently seen functionality ripped away due to corporate failures, such as Spotifys Car Thing.Downward spiralA startup could be forgiven for trying a new product that doesnt take off. But Humanes reported failure to perform and respond to due diligence ahead of AI Pins launch complicates the picture, especially for those who believed in the AI-centric wearable.Humane, founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, reportedly pushed out its pin while ignoring negative feedback. A June report from The New York Times that included interviews of "23 current and former employees, advisers, and investors" pointed to Humane founders overlooking criticisms such as poor battery life and power consumption. The paper reported that a senior software engineer was dismissed after raising questions about the product. Bongiorno reportedly held a meeting about responding to criticism from post-release reviews, but this was after the device already garnered a reputation for being, as The Verge put it, thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways.Beyond general skepticism about the need for people to wear an AI device on their chest, Humane never proved its pitch of AI Pins replacing smartphones. The app-free device relied solely on voice command and cost a lot, including a $24 monthly fee for cell service. That made it extremely polarizing, even by emerging tech standards. Early reviews worsened the perception, with YouTuber Marques Brownlee dubbing it "The Worst Product Ive Ever Reviewed For Now."In August, The Verge reported that Humane saw over $1,000,000 in returned product and that AI Pin returns were outpacing Humane product sales, which reportedly totaled about $9,000,000 at the time. Humane's problems got worse in November when Humane recalled the AI Pins portable charging case due to a fire risk from an overheating lithium polymer battery. The AI Pin inside of the recalled Charging Case Accessory. Credit: Humane Even though Humane is managing to sell some parts of its business to HP, it seems the company is not even interested in the pin. HP's announcement primarily highlighted AI software and made no mention of Humane hardware. Tuan Tran, HPs president of technology and innovation, said in a statement that CosmOS and former Humane engineers will help make an intelligent ecosystem across all HP devices, from AI PCs to smart printers and connected conference rooms.Putting a pin in AI gadgetsHumane also continued to push the pins despite reportedly seeking a buyer since May, and it gave AI Pin owners just 10 days to reckon with their expensive devices being bricked. In addition, the limited refund window seems like a slap in the face to people who were willing to spend extra money to be early adopters.The AI Pin will also fuel a cloud of skepticism already encircling AI products. In fact, multiple startup founders are already second-guessing releasing AI gadgets in response to the AI Pins downfall, The Verge reported today.New AI gadgets will have to overcome a reputation of lost money, e-waste, unfulfilled promises, and misleading hype before reaching customers. But at least there are some lessons learned from the AI Pin. The first one is to fix critical problems before you start charging customers.Scharon HardingSenior Technology ReporterScharon HardingSenior Technology Reporter Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She's been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Toms Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK. 78 Comments

Trump's way or the highway Trump order declares independent US agencies arent independent anymore Order says independent agencies can't contradict Trump's legal interpretations. Jon Brodkin Feb 19, 2025 2:09 pm | 269 US President Donald Trump's signature is seen on an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 14, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) US President Donald Trump's signature is seen on an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on February 14, 2025. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn morePresident Trump yesterday issued an executive order declaring sweeping power over agencies that were created to operate independently from the White House. The order declares that "officials who wield vast executive power must be supervised and controlled by the people's elected President," and that "it shall be the policy of the executive branch to ensure Presidential supervision and control of the entire executive branch."An accompanying fact sheet issued by the White House said the order applies to "so-called independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)." The Federal Election Commission is also expected to be affected by the order.The White House said it will require independent agencies to submit draft regulations for review, except for the monetary policy functions of the Federal Reserve. Independent agencies are also ordered to "consult with the White House on their priorities and strategic plans." The order claims more White House control over how agencies spend their budgets.The White House Office of Management and Budget will "adjust such agencies' apportionments by activity, function, project, or object, as necessary and appropriate, to advance the President's policies and priorities," the executive order said. These budget changes "may prohibit independent regulatory agencies from expending appropriations on particular activities, functions, projects, or objects, so long as such restrictions are consistent with law."The executive order is likely to be challenged in court. Separately, the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to reverse a judge's ruling that blocked Trump's attempt to fire the head of the Office of Special Counsel, an independent agency that protects government whistleblowers.Order: Dont contradict the presidentEmployees of independent agencies would also be forbidden from issuing legal interpretations that contradict the president's legal interpretations. "No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General's opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General," the Trump order said.The White House fact sheet said the goal of this provision is to ensure that the president and attorney general "interpret the law for the executive branch, instead of having separate agencies adopt conflicting interpretations."John Bergmayer, legal director of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, said Trump's order is based on a "unitary executive" theory that "has made its way from the fringes of academia to the halls of power.""In this latest Executive Order, the Trump regime purports to seize for itself the power Congress delegated to independent regulatory agencies, and as written, declares the White House's interpretation of the law as 'authoritative,' with no mention of the courts," Bergmayer said. "Of course, the president is not, and never has been, the final arbiter of what is lawful. Lawyers working for the government owe their allegiance to the American people, not to President Donald J. Trump."Trump's OMB director, Russell Vought, told Tucker Carlson in a recent interview that "there are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as suchSEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soupbut that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out."Extending Trumps gripAlthough the president nominates commissioners and appoints chairs at agencies like the FCC, independent agencies are supposed to make their own decisions. A 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service said an independent agency is "a freestanding executive branch organization that is not part of any department or other agency," and which has "greater autonomy from the President's leadership and insulation from partisan politics than is typical of executive branch agencies."Other independent agencies include the National Labor Relations Board and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the report said. Laws approved by Congress specify the authority of independent agencies along with the agencies' "goals, principles, missions, and mandates," the report said."Given Trump's insistence on complete loyalty to him on the part of all government employees, this move is designed to extend his grip on the government to areas that previously have been nonpartisan," NPR quoted UC Berkeley Law Professor Daniel Farber as saying.The FCC's independence was a major point of contention a decade ago when President Obama publicly urged the agency to impose net neutrality rules and regulate Internet service providers as common carriers. Republicans in Congress claimed Obama exerted improper influence over the process.The FCC chairman in Trump's first term, Ajit Pai, repeatedly claimed that the FCC imposed net neutrality rules in 2015 largely because Obama ordered it to do so. The FCC's independent Inspector General's office investigated and found "no evidence" of improper use of power by the White House. Obama's statements "were made known in the record, in full view of all," the inspector general's report said.Agencies must submit proposed rules for reviewTrump's order requires independent agencies to "submit for review all proposed and final significant regulatory actions to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) within the Executive Office of the President before publication in the Federal Register." This means the White House will review potential regulations before an agency seeks comment from the public.The order further requires the head of each independent regulatory agency to establish a position of White House Liaison to handle communications with the White House.FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is already on board with Trump's regulatory priorities in multiple areas. Carr has consistently opposed regulation of the telecom providers that the FCC traditionally oversees and is launching investigations of news organizations accused of bias against Trump and conservatives.Previous FCC chairs from both major political parties rejected Trump's calls to revoke broadcast licenses based on the content of news programs, saying that the First Amendment forbids it. By contrast, Carr has threatened to revoke licenses and embraced Trump's view that broadcasters should be punished for supposed anti-conservative bias.Trump targeting the power of the SEC aligns with one of Elon Musk's pet peeves. Musk repeatedly clashed with the agency over his failure to disclose 2022 purchases of Twitter stock before a legal deadline. Musk also tried and failed to terminate his settlement with the SEC over his 2018 tweets claiming he had secured funding to take Tesla private.Jon BrodkinSenior IT ReporterJon BrodkinSenior IT Reporter Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry. 269 Comments

Synthetic science Googles new AI generates hypotheses for researchers And it's already helping with some real-world research. Ryan Whitwam Feb 19, 2025 2:20 pm | 9 Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty Images Credit: Andrew Brookes/Getty Images Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreOver the past few years, Google has embarked on a quest to jam generative AI into every product and initiative possible. Google has robots summarizing search results, interacting with your apps, and analyzing the data on your phone. And sometimes, the output of generative AI systems can be surprisingly good despite lacking any real knowledge. But can they do science?Google Research is now angling to turn AI into a scientistwell, a "co-scientist." The company has a new multi-agent AI system based on Gemini 2.0 aimed at biomedical researchers that can supposedly point the way toward new hypotheses and areas of biomedical research. However, Google's AI co-scientist boils down to a fancy chatbot.A flesh-and-blood scientist using Google's co-scientist would input their research goals, ideas, and references to past research, allowing the robot to generate possible avenues of research. The AI co-scientist contains multiple interconnected models that churn through the input data and access Internet resources to refine the output. Inside the tool, the different agents challenge each other to create a "self-improving loop," which is similar to the new raft of reasoning AI models like Gemini Flash Thinking and OpenAI o3.This is still a generative AI system like Gemini, so it doesn't truly have any new ideas or knowledge. However, it can extrapolate from existing data to potentially make decent suggestions. At the end of the process, Google's AI co-scientist spits out research proposals and hypotheses. The human scientist can even talk with the robot about the proposals in a chatbot interface. The structure of Google's AI co-scientist. You can think of the AI co-scientist as a highly technical form of brainstorming. The same way you can bounce party-planning ideas off a consumer AI model, scientists will be able to conceptualize new scientific research with an AI tuned specifically for that purpose.Testing AI scienceToday's popular AI systems have a well-known problem with accuracy. Generative AI always has something to say, even if the model doesn't have the right training data or model weights to be helpful, and fact-checking with more AI models can't work miracles. Leveraging its reasoning roots, the AI co-scientist conducts an internal evaluation to improve outputs, and Google says the self-evaluation ratings correlate to greater scientific accuracy.The internal metrics are one thing, but what do real scientists think? Google had human biomedical researchers evaluate the robot's proposals, and they reportedly rated the AI co-scientist higher than other, less specialized agentic AI systems. The experts also agreed the AI co-scientist's outputs showed greater potential for impact and novelty compared to standard AI models.This doesn't mean the AI's suggestions are all good. However, Google partnered with several universities to test some of the AI research proposals in the laboratory. For example, the AI suggested repurposing certain drugs for treating acute myeloid leukemia, and laboratory testing suggested it was a viable idea. Research at Stanford University also showed that the AI co-scientist's ideas about treatment for liver fibrosis were worthy of further study.This is compelling work, certainly, but calling this system a "co-scientist" is perhaps a bit grandiose. Despite the insistence from AI leaders that we're on the verge of creating living, thinking machines, AI isn't anywhere close to being able to do science on its own. That doesn't mean the AI-co-scientist won't be useful, though. Google's new AI could help humans interpret and contextualize expansive data sets and bodies of research, even if it can't understand or offer true insights.Google says it wants more researchers working with this AI system in the hope it can assist with real research. Interested researchers and organizations can apply to be part of the Trusted Tester program, which provides access to the co-scientist UI as well as an API that can be integrated with existing tools. Ryan WhitwamSenior Technology ReporterRyan WhitwamSenior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam is a senior technology reporter at Ars Technica, covering the ways Google, AI, and mobile technology continue to change the world. Over his 20-year career, he's written for Android Police, ExtremeTech, Wirecutter, NY Times, and more. He has reviewed more phones than most people will ever own. You can follow him on Bluesky, where you will see photos of his dozens of mechanical keyboards. 9 Comments