Sergey Brin co-founded Google in the 1990s along with Larry Page, but both stepped away from the day to day at Google in 2019. However, the AI boom tempted Brin to return to the office, and he thinks everyone should…

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with…

“Thousands” of complaints about the volume of TV commercials have flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in recent years. Despite the FCC requiring TV stations, cable operators, and satellite providers to ensure that commercials don’t bring a sudden spike in…

Many popular movies and television shows feature the archetype of the “bad boy”—a character who is often rebellious, tough, and emotionally unavailable, yet still captivating. A recent study explored why some women develop romantic feelings for these kinds of characters…

Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users’ personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn’t fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has…

A series of studies on players of open-world games revealed that they view these games as a way to temporarily escape from reality in their minds. This escape allows them to disconnect from real-world stressors, improving their mood and psychological…

There’s a saying about putting lipstick on a pig, but what if it’s not lipstick? That’s the question the universe set out to answer when it aligned in such a way that famed (or perhaps infamous) car customizer Mansory got…

The verdict is in: OpenAI’s newest and most capable traditional AI model, GPT-4.5, is big, expensive, and slow, providing marginally better performance than GPT-4o at 30x the cost for input and 15x the cost for output. The new model seems…

Europe is cracking down on AI-generated sex images of minors. So far, Europol has arrested 25 people in a large-scale ongoing probe called Operation Cumberland and confirmed that more arrests are expected in the coming weeks. In a press release,…

EA doesn’t always treat its classic library with respect, as evidenced by its recent barely touched-up The Sims Legacy Collection. But the folks shepherding Command & Conquer, a vanguard series in the bygone genre of real-time strategy (RTS) games, are…

A new study published in the journal Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being shows that the more we try to boost our happiness, the more we drain our mental energy needed for self-control. In other words, the very act of chasing…

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come. The United…

AMD’s new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them. FSR and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super…

AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES. The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards…

After more than 21 years, Skype will soon be no more. Last night, some users (including Ars readers) poked around in the latest Skype preview update and noticed as-yet-unsurfaced text that read “Starting in May, Skype will no longer be…

Seven-hundred million years ago, Earth was a frozen, white sphere, its rocky surface buried kilometers under ice. Despite the barren landscape, the evolution of complex life in the oceans was about to pick up steam. New research published this week…

A new study published in the journal Cognitive Science helps explain why people often find themselves drawn to sad art forms like movies, music, and literature. Researchers discovered that when expressions of sadness are presented as art, people tend to…

Welcome to Edition 7.33 of the Rocket Report! Phew, what a week for Rocket Lab! The company released a bevy of announcements in conjunction with its quarterly earnings report Thursday. Rocket Lab is spending a lot of money to develop…

At a time when many analysts are declaring memecoins dead, the most popular memecoin of all time, Dogecoin, not only perseveres but appears likely to become more mainstream than ever in 2025. Most memecoins—cryptocurrencies inspired by Internet memes—remain controversial. Their…

A recent study using mice has revealed that a diet high in fat and sugar, similar to a typical Western diet, can quickly and significantly reduce blood flow in the brain of adolescent mice. However, the research also found that…

There’s a scene in the film Interstellar where Matthew McConaughey’s character flies his spaceplane up to meet a mothership spinning out of control. The protagonist rises to the challenge with a polished piece of piloting and successfully links up with his…

Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant is exposing the contents of more than 20,000 private GitHub repositories from companies including Google, Intel, Huawei, PayPal, IBM, Tencent and, ironically, Microsoft. These repositories, belonging to more than 16,000 organizations, were originally posted to GitHub…

Want to improve sleep and feel more active during the day? For older adults, the answer might be as simple as switching to blue-enriched light in the mornings. A recent study published in GeroScience shows that this type of light can…

It took a couple of years, but it happened: Microsoft released its Copilot AI assistant as an application for macOS. The app is available for download for free from the Mac App Store right now. It was previously available briefly…

Google’s Pixel phones include numerous thoughtful features you don’t get on other phones, like Now Playing. This feature can identify background music from the lock screen, but unlike some similar song identifiers, it works even without an Internet connection. Sadly,…

On Thursday, Inception Labs released Mercury Coder, a new AI language model that uses diffusion techniques to generate text faster than conventional models. Unlike traditional models that create text word by word—such as the kind that powers ChatGPT—diffusion-based models like…

A new study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology has revealed that the way caffeine impacts your thinking skills is not just about how much coffee you drink, but also about your genes. Researchers discovered that people with genes for…

The integrated heat spreaders put on CPUs at the factory are not the most thermally efficient material you could have on there, but what are you going to do—rip it off at the risk of killing your $500 chip with…

Sony’s first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR’s biggest hits. The PlayStation 5’s PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort…

In states where both medical and recreational marijuana are legal, fewer patients are filling prescriptions for medications used to treat anxiety. That is the key finding of my recent study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open. I am an…

For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old…

Doctors around the US have anecdotally reported an uptick of children critically ill with the flu developing severe, life-threatening neurological complications, which can be marked by seizures, delirium, hallucinations, decreased consciousness, lethargy, personality changes, and abnormalities in brain imaging. It’s…