Science and Technolgy blog
Tires might be one of the more prosaic parts of a car, but they are undoubtedly among the most important. Bench racers might obsess about powertrain specs, and average consumers mostly want to know that there’s wireless charging for their…
Here at Ars, we’re suckers for stories about hackers getting Doom running on everything from CAPTCHA robot checks and Windows’ notepad.exe to AI hallucinations and fluorescing gut bacteria. Despite all that experience, we were still thrown for a loop by…
A Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it has raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding. “The market is tough,…
The bone fragments were once thought to be some of the oldest human fossils found in Japan.
Antarctica’s Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf may be under threat due to relatively warm water from the deep sea flowing towards the shelf. Is climate change to blame?
Research published in Sex Roles suggests that male victimhood ideology among South Korean men is driven more by perceived socioeconomic status decline rather than objective economic hardship. In recent years, male victimhood ideology—the belief that men are primary targets of…
News stories about the likely existence of extraterrestrial life, and our chances of detecting it, tend to be positive. We are often told that we might discover it any time now. Finding life beyond Earth is “only a matter of…
Back in 2023, AI researchers at Meta interviewed 34 native Spanish and Mandarin speakers who lived in the US but didn’t speak English. The goal was to find out what people who constantly rely on translation in their day-to-day activities…
It has been a few years since AI began successfully tackling the challenge of predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, complex molecules that are essential for all life. Next-generation tools are now available, and the Nobel Prizes have been handed…
The Securities and Exchange Commission sued Elon Musk yesterday over his late disclosure of a Twitter stock purchase in early 2022. Before Musk bought the whole company, he purchased a 9 percent stake in Twitter and failed to disclose it…
The current way to produce antivenoms is antiquated. Experiments in mice suggest that an artificial intelligence approach could save time and money.
Ancient DNA indicates women stayed in their home communities and married partners from outside the area.
The newly discovered “blazar,” which has a mass equal to 700 million suns, is the oldest of its kind ever seen and changes what we know about the early universe.
An analysis of dozens of British Iron Age skeletons has revealed that Celtic society was organized around women.
Excavation of a Roman-era cemetery in France yielded nearly two dozen lead tablets inscribed in Latin and Gaulish.
A new study published in Environment and Behavior highlights the profound impact of nature’s beauty on human behavior, specifically in fostering cooperative efforts to conserve environmental resources. Researchers found that participants were more likely to cooperate in resource-sharing scenarios when…
Toxins on poison dart frog skin mold the skin’s microbial community, boosting species variety and potentially even feeding some daredevil bacteria.
An enormous water reservoir — likely the largest aquifer of its kind in on Earth — sits inside the volcanic rocks of the Oregon Cascades, scientists have revealed.
A rare group of aligned, star-birthing dwarf galaxies resemble a cosmic string of pearls.
A neuroimaging study of torture survivors found that these individuals exhibit decreased connectivity in brain networks associated with response inhibition, attention, and motor function during a cognitive Go/No-Go task. This effect may be specifically linked to the dysphoria symptoms of…
In the TV series Doctor Who, treeborgs supply fresh air to spaceship passengers. Part tree, part robot, these devices convert starlight into oxygen. In Nnedi Okorafor’s novel Zahrah the Windseeker, children receive their own “flora computers.” These are personal machines…
A 21-year-old woman was admitted to the hospital after she was bleeding from her face and palms, with no obvious cause.
Scientists identified the tiny species of cat from a fossilized jawbone, which could date back as far as 300,000 years ago.
Regions of Germany that were under Roman rule approximately 2,000 years ago exhibit higher levels of psychological well-being, better health, and more adaptive personality traits compared to regions outside the Roman Empire, a new study has found. Published in Current…
I almost missed it. Amid a bout of prime-time doomscrolling, a social media post reminded me there was something worth seeing in the sky. Mars disappeared behind the full Moon for a little more than an hour Monday night, an…
Experts say clinical obesity is more than a high BMI and instead is a disease in which excess body fat harms tissues, organs or doing daily activities.
When fed peanuts, red squirrels in Britain developed weaker bites — showing that food supplements to threatened animals could have unintended side effects.
Eli Lilly and other drugmakers are reportedly planning to urge the Trump administration to pause Medicare drug-price negotiations that were put in place by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). “They need to fix [the IRA],” Eli Lilly CEO…
A day after announcing that CEO Patrick Spence is departing the company, Sonos revealed that chief product officer Maxime Bouvat-Merlin is also leaving. Bouvat-Merlin had the role since 2023. As first reported by Bloomberg, Sonos will not fill the chief…
The FBI said today that it removed Chinese malware from 4,258 US-based computers and networks by sending commands that forced the malware to use its “self-delete” function. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government paid the Mustang Panda group to…
Alexithymia is a term you may not have heard before. But it describes something many people experience: difficulties in identifying, distinguishing and expressing emotions. It affects how people engage with their emotions at work, in relationships and even within themselves.…
OpenAI is making ChatGPT work a little more like older digital assistants with a new feature called Tasks, as reported by TechCrunch and others. Currently in beta, Tasks allows users to direct the chatbot to send reminders or to generate…
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has announced a dramatic restructuring of the company’s engineering organization—all around pivoting the company’s focus to developing the tools that will underpin agentic AI. Dubbed “CoreAI – Platform and Tools,” the new division rolls the existing…
Research published in Personality and Individual Differences suggests that humility—both as a trait and as an experimentally induced state—was associated with lower levels of anger and reduced hostile attributions in ambiguous social situations. Anger can be a destructive and difficult-to-regulate…
The Federal Trade Commission said yesterday it is sending over $1 million in refunds to 6,764 consumers who purchased Razer Zephyr masks that were deceptively marketed as providing N95 protection during the COVID-19 pandemic. The FTC sued Razer in April…
Anticipating that 2025 will be an “intense year” requiring rapid innovation, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly announced that Meta would be cutting 5 percent of its workforce—targeting “lowest performers.” Bloomberg reviewed the internal memo explaining the cuts, which was posted to Meta’s…
The tick was found lodged in the skin of her left ear canal after a thorough examination by her doctors.
Parts of Southern California are covered with pink fire retardant as firefighters try to control deadly wildfires raging in Los Angeles. But what is Phos-Chek fire retardant and is it safe?
A plucky male American stag beetle thinks he’s found a mate on a rotting old tree stump—and then realizes there’s another male eager to make the same conquest. The two beetles face off in battle, until the first manages to…
Plans to block new vehicles with software and hardware linked to either China or Russia are moving ahead. Today, the Department of Commerce published a final rule in the Federal Register that will prohibit the import of vehicles with Chinese…
A recent study provides evidence that non-deceptive placebos—placebos given with full disclosure—can effectively reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, even when administered remotely. The findings, published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, demonstrate the potential of this simple, low-cost intervention to…
Chinese officials have reportedly discussed selling TikTok’s US operations to Elon Musk as the threat of a US ban looms. Sources “familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg that Chinese officials would “strongly prefer” that ByteDance remain in control of TikTok…
Virtualization software like Parallels and VMware Fusion give Mac owners the ability to run Windows and Linux on top of macOS, but for Apple Silicon Macs, that support was limited to the Arm-based versions of those operating systems. And while…
Texas has sued insurance provider Allstate, alleging that the firm and its data broker subsidiary used data from apps like GasBuddy, Routely, and Life360 to quietly track drivers and adjust or cancel their policies. Allstate and Arity, a “mobility data…
China has announced plans to build a giant solar power space station, which will be lifted into orbit piece by piece using the nation’s brand-new heavy lift rockets.
The giant isopod has been named Bathynomus vaderi due to its resemblance to Darth Vader’s iconic helmet from “Star Wars.”
The famous helmet is among the Anglo-Saxon artifacts that indicate an eastern link with the Byzantine Empire.
Misinformation travels far and fast online, and according to new research published in Science, outrage is the fuel behind its spread. By examining millions of social media interactions, researchers found that misinformation sources consistently provoke more outrage than credible news,…
People who appreciate good astrophotography will no doubt be familiar with the work of Don Pettit, a veteran NASA astronaut who is closing in on having lived 500 days of his life in space. Pettit is now in the midst…
Amazon is gearing up to relaunch its Alexa voice-powered digital assistant as an artificial intelligence “agent” that can complete practical tasks, as the tech group races to resolve the challenges that have dogged the system’s AI overhaul. The $2.4 trillion…
