Senators blast carmakers over right-to-repair opposition

Yesterday, US Senators Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Joshua Hawley (R-MO) sent letters to the heads of Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, as well as the US heads of Honda, Hyundai, Nissan, Stellantis, Subaru, Toyota, and Volkswagen, excoriating…

VPN used for VR game cheat sells access to your home network

In the hit virtual reality game Gorilla Tag, you swing your arms to pull your primate character around—clambering through virtual worlds, climbing up trees and, above all, trying to avoid an infectious mob of other gamers. If you’re caught, you…

Why AI language models choke on too much text

Large language models represent text using tokens, each of which is a few characters. Short words are represented by a single token (like “the” or “it”), whereas larger words may be represented by several tokens (GPT-4o represents “indivisible” with “ind,”…

Psychology study uncovers a surprising fact about “mansplaining”

Can women be mansplainers, too? New research published in Psychological Science shows that “unresponsive advice,” often linked to mansplaining, can harm women’s self-perception. Surprisingly, the negative effects—feeling less respected, powerful, and listened to—occurred regardless of the advisor’s gender. The study…

Crypto scammers posing as real brands on X are easily hacking YouTubers

For months, popular fighting game YouTubers have been under attack. Even the seemingly most cautious among them have been duped by sophisticated phishing attacks that hack their accounts to push cryptocurrency scams by convincingly appearing to offer legitimate sponsorships from…

New physics sim trains robots 430,000 times faster than reality

On Thursday, a large group of university and private industry researchers unveiled Genesis, a new open source computer simulation system that lets robots practice tasks in simulated reality 430,000 times faster than in the real world. Researchers can also use…

Looking back on the year in science and what’s next

Each year we dedicate the final issue of Science News to reviewing the big stories in science, technology and medicine. And each year, I marvel at the many significant news events and research discoveries crammed into a year. Most significant:…

Krypto steals the show in Superman teaser

David Corenswet stars in James Gunn’s Superman reboot. The Internet has been buzzing the last few days about James Gunn’s Superman reboot slated for release next year. The studio released a “motion poster” earlier this week set to a moody…