ArsTechnica
US may owe $1 trillion in refunds if SCOTUS cancels Trump tariffs
If Donald Trump loses his Supreme Court fight over tariffs, the US may be forced to return “tens of billions of dollars to companies that have paid import fees this year, plus interest,” The Atlantic reported. And the longer the verdict is delayed, the higher the refunds could go, possibly even hitting $1 trillion.
For tech companies both large and small, the stakes are particularly high. A Trump defeat would not just mean clawing back any duties paid on imports to the US that companies otherwise can use to invest in their competitiveness. But, more critically in the long term, it would also end tariff shocks that, as economics lecturer Matthew Allen emphasized in a report for The Conversation, risked harming “innovation itself” by destabilizing global partnerships and diverse supply chains in “tech-intensive, IP-led sectors like semiconductors and software.”
Currently, the Supreme Court is weighing two cases that argue that the US president does not have unilateral authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Defending his regime of so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” Trump argued these taxes were necessary to correct the “emergency” of enduring trade imbalances that he alleged have unfairly enriched other countries while bringing the US “to the brink of catastrophic decline.”
The twin probes just launched toward Mars have an Easter egg on board
The first multi-spacecraft science mission to launch to Mars is now on its way, and catching a ride on the twin probes are the first kiwis to fly to the red planet.
NASA’s ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) mission lifted off on a 22-month trip to Mars on Thursday aboard a New Glenn rocket. Once there, the identical satellites will enter Martian orbit to study in real time how space weather affects the planet’s hybrid magnetosphere and how the interaction drove Mars to lose its once-dense atmosphere.
Led by the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley—the two spacecraft are named “Blue” and “Gold” after the school’s colors—the ESCAPADE probes are the first Mars-bound vehicles to be designed, built, and tested by Rocket Lab, the end-to-end space company headquartered in California but founded in New Zealand.
As shutdown ends, dubious CDC panel gets back to dismantling vaccine schedule
With the government reopening, the dubious panel of vaccine advisors selected by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is wasting no time getting back to dismantling the federal childhood vaccine schedule.
A meeting that was scheduled for October but put on hold during the shutdown has already been rescheduled for December 4 and 5. A Federal Register notice Thursday said that the meeting will “include discussions on vaccine safety, the childhood and adolescent immunization schedule, and hepatitis B vaccines.” The announcement was light on information beyond that but indicated that there would be a vote on hepatitis B vaccines.
The panel—the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—is typically composed of preeminent, extensively vetted vaccine experts. But, in June, Kennedy summarily fired all 17 experts on the panel and installed 12 new members, almost all of whom are questionably qualified and espouse anti-vaccine views.
How two Nissan Leafs help make a regional airport more resilient
Not everything about the future sucks. Like electric cars. Sure, there’s one thing that dinosaur-burners do better—short refueling stops—but even the least efficient EV is still multiple times better than its gas equivalent. So much better in fact that it offsets all the extra energy needed to make the battery within a year or two. They’re quieter, and easy to drive. And in a pinch, they can power your house from the garage. Or how about an airport?
OK, we’re not talking about a major international airport (although I really need to talk to someone at Dulles International Airport about my idea to electrify those Space 1999-esque mobile lounges at some point). But up in Humboldt County, California, there’s a microgrid at the Redwood Coast Airport that has now integrated bidirectional charging, and a pair of Nissan Leaf EVs, into its operation.
The microgrid has been operating since 2021 with a 2.2 MW solar array, 8.9 MWh of battery storage, and a 300 KW net-metered solar system. It can feed excess power back into PG&E’s local grid and draw power from the same, but in an outage, the microgrid can keep the airport up and operational.
“How about no”: FCC boss Brendan Carr says he won’t end news distortion probes
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr says he won’t scrap the agency’s controversial news distortion policy despite calls from a bipartisan group of former FCC chairs and commissioners.
“How about no,” Carr wrote in an X post in response to the petition from former FCC leaders. “On my watch, the FCC will continue to hold broadcasters accountable to their public interest obligations.”
The petition filed yesterday by former FCC chairs and commissioners asked the FCC to repeal its 1960s-era news distortion policy, which Carr has repeatedly invoked in threats to revoke broadcast licenses. In the recent Jimmy Kimmel controversy, Carr said that ABC affiliates could have licenses revoked for news distortion if they kept the comedian on the air.
What’s it like to compete in the longest US off-road rally with no GPS?
I’ve been involved with the Rebelle Rally since its inception in 2016, either as a competitor or live show host, and over the past 10 years, I’ve seen it evolve from a scrappy rally with big dreams to the world-class event that it is today.
In a nutshell, the Rebelle Rally is the longest competitive off-road rally in the United States, covering over 2,000 kilometers, and it just happens to be for women. Over eight days, teams of two must plot coordinates on a map, figure out their route, and find multiple checkpoints—both marked and unmarked—with no GPS, cell phones, or chase crews. It is not a race for speed but rather a rally for navigational accuracy over some of the toughest terrain California and Nevada have to offer. There are two classes: 4×4 with vehicles like the Jeep Wrangler and Ford Bronco and X-Cross for cars like the Honda Passport and BMW X5. Heavy modifications aren’t needed, and many teams compete for the coveted Bone Stock award.
For this 10th anniversary, I got back behind the wheel of a 2025 Subaru Crosstrek Wilderness as a driver, with Kendra Miller as my navigator, to defend my multiple podium finishes and stage wins and get reacquainted with the technology, or lack thereof, that makes this multi-day competition so special.
Three astronauts are stuck on China’s space station without a safe ride home
Wrapping up 204 days in orbit, three Chinese astronauts flew back to Earth aboard a Shenzhou spacecraft Friday, leaving three crewmates behind on the Tiangong space station with a busted lifeboat.
Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third trip to space, and rookie crewmates Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie touched down inside their spacecraft at the Dongfeng landing zone at 1:29 am EST (06:29 UTC) Friday. The parachute-assisted landing occurred in the mid-afternoon at the return zone, located in the remote Gobi Desert of northwestern China.
Chinese space officials upended operations on the country’s Tiangong space lab last week after astronauts found damage to one of two Shenzhou return capsules docked at the station. The China Manned Space Agency, run by the country’s military, announced changes to the space station’s flight plan November 4, the day before three crew members were supposed to depart and fly home.
Forget AGI—Sam Altman celebrates ChatGPT finally following em dash formatting rules
Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes to the point where readers believe they can identify AI writing by its overuse alone—although people can overuse it, too.
On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes. “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” he wrote.
The post, which came two days after the release of OpenAI’s new GPT-5.1 AI model, received mixed reactions from users who have struggled for years with getting the chatbot to follow specific formatting preferences. And this “small win” raises a very big question: If the world’s most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.
World’s oldest RNA extracted from Ice Age woolly mammoth
A young woolly mammoth now known as Yuka was frozen in the Siberian permafrost for about 40,000 years before it was discovered by local tusk hunters in 2010. The hunters soon handed it over to scientists, who were excited to see its exquisite level of preservation, with skin, muscle tissue, and even reddish hair intact. Later research showed that, while full cloning was impossible, Yuka’s DNA was in such good condition that some cell nuclei could even begin limited activity when placed inside mouse eggs.
Now, a team has successfully sequenced Yuka’s RNA—a feat many researchers once thought impossible. Researchers at Stockholm University carefully ground up bits of muscle and other tissue from Yuka and nine other woolly mammoths, then used special chemical treatments to pull out any remaining RNA fragments, which are normally thought to be much too fragile to survive even a few hours after an organism has died. Scientists go to great lengths to extract RNA even from fresh samples, and most previous attempts with very old specimens have either failed or been contaminated.
A different viewThe team used RNA-handling methods adapted for ancient, fragmented molecules. Their scientific séance allowed them to explore information that had never been accessible before, including which genes were active when Yuka died. In the creature’s final panicked moments, its muscles were tensing and its cells were signaling distress—perhaps unsurprising since Yuka is thought to have died as a result of a cave lion attack.
Dogs came in a wide range of sizes and shapes long before modern breeds
Our best friends come in a fantastic array of shapes and sizes; a Borzoi looks nothing like a Boston terrier, except for a certain fundamental, ineffable (except to taxonomists) doggyness about them. And it’s been that way almost from the beginning. A recent study of dog and wolf skulls from the last 50,000 years found that dogs living just after the last Ice Age were already about half as varied in their shape and size as modern dogs.
“Shaped like a friend” means a lot of different thingsBiologist and archaeologist Allowen Evin, of CNRS, and her colleagues compared the size and shape of 643 skulls from dogs and wolves: 158 from modern dogs, 86 from modern wolves, and 391 from archaeological sites around the world spanning the last 50,000 years. By comparing the locations and sizes of certain skeletal landmarks, such as bony protrusions where muscles attached, the researchers could quantify how different one skull was from another. That suggested a few things about how dogs, or at least the shapes of their heads, have evolved over time.
The team’s results suggest that dogs that lived during the Mesolithic (before settled farming life came into fashion in the Middle East) and the Neolithic (after farming took off but before the heyday of copper smelting; 10,000 BCE is a general starting point) were a surprisingly diverse bunch, at least in terms of the size and shape of their skulls.
Scientist pleaded guilty to smuggling Fusarium graminearum into US. But what is it?
A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty on November 12, 2025, to charges of smuggling and making false statements to the FBI. Under her plea agreement, Yunqing Jian, 33, was sentenced to time served and expected to be deported.
Her arrest put a spotlight on Fusarium graminearum, a harmful pathogen. But while its risk to grains such as wheat, corn, and rice can be alarming, Fusarium isn’t new to American farmers. The US Department of Agriculture estimates it costs wheat and barley farmers more than $1 billion a year.
Tom Allen, an extension and research professor of plant pathology at Mississippi State University, explains what Fusarium graminearum is and isn’t.
Years later, Arkane’s Dishonored is still a modern stealth classic
Back in 2012, Dishonored earned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.
The game does a great job of drawing you into that world immediately, with a memorable opening sequence that sees you framed for the on-screen murder of the empress you’ve been sworn to protect. The scene does a great job establishing the emotional stakes of the coming missions while also throwing you into the deep end of the political infighting that has consumed a besieged, plague-beset kingdom.
A Victorian steam punk world you can lose yourself in. Credit: Arkane StudiosThose stakes, and a battle against a real feeling of injustice, drive the plot through some admittedly predictable beats as Dishonored continues through a set of sneak-and-assassinate missions. But it’s hard to care about that predictability when even minor side characters on both sides of the conflict quickly develop from stereotypes to engaging, fleshed-out characters.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket came back home after taking aim at Mars
The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.
The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.
“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”
Researchers question Anthropic claim that AI-assisted attack was 90% autonomous
Researchers from Anthropic said they recently observed the “first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign” after detecting China-state hackers using the company’s Claude AI tool in a campaign aimed at dozens of targets. Outside researchers are much more measured in describing the significance of the discovery.
Anthropic published the reports on Thursday here and here. In September, the reports said, Anthropic discovered a “highly sophisticated espionage campaign,” carried out by a Chinese state-sponsored group, that used Claude Code to automate up to 90 percent of the work. Human intervention was required “only sporadically (perhaps 4-6 critical decision points per hacking campaign).” Anthropic said the hackers had employed AI agentic capabilities to an “unprecedented” extent.
“This campaign has substantial implications for cybersecurity in the age of AI ‘agents’—systems that can be run autonomously for long periods of time and that complete complex tasks largely independent of human intervention,” Anthropic said. “Agents are valuable for everyday work and productivity—but in the wrong hands, they can substantially increase the viability of large-scale cyberattacks.”
Rocket Report: Blue Origin’s stunning success; vive le Baguette One!
Welcome to Edition 8.19 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was a monumental day in launch history with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket not just taking off successfully, but with the first stage masterfully returning to the surface of the ocean, hovering near the Jacklyn drone ship, and then making a landing in the center of the barge. It was fantastic to watch and cements our new reality of reusable rockets. The future of space access is very bright indeed.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.
Private Chinese rocket fails. Galactic Energy’s solid-fuel Ceres-1 rocket lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on Sunday, carrying three satellites toward low-Earth orbit. The rocket’s first three stages performed well, according to media reports, but its fourth and final stage shut down too early, leading to the loss of all three payloads, Space.com reports.
US spy satellites built by SpaceX send signals in the “wrong direction”
About 170 Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the US government’s National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have been sending signals in the wrong direction, a satellite researcher found.
The SpaceX-built spy satellites are helping the NRO greatly expand its satellite surveillance capabilities, but the purpose of these signals is unknown. The signals are sent from space to Earth in a frequency band that’s allocated internationally for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions.
There have been no public complaints of interference caused by the surprising Starshield emissions. But the researcher who found them says they highlight a troubling lack of transparency in how the US government manages the use of spectrum and a failure to coordinate spectrum usage with other countries.
This flu season looks grim as H3N2 emerges with mutations
Health officials in the United Kingdom are warning that this year’s flu season for the Northern Hemisphere is looking like it will be particularly rough—and the US is not prepared.
The bleak outlook is driven by a new strain of H3N2, which emerged over the summer (at the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s season) sporting several mutations. Those changes are not enough to spark the direst of circumstances—a deadly pandemic—but they could help the virus dodge immune responses, resulting in an outsize number of severe illnesses that could put a significant strain on hospitals and clinics.
In the UK, the virus has taken off. The region’s flu season has started around five weeks earlier than normal and is making a swift ascent.
Google claims win for everyone as text scammers lost their cloud server
The day after Google filed a lawsuit to end text scams primarily targeting Americans, the criminal network behind the phishing scams was “disrupted,” a Google spokesperson told Ars.
According to messages that the “ringleader” of the so-called “Lighthouse enterprise” posted on his Telegram channel, the phishing gang’s cloud server was “blocked due to malicious complaints.”
“We will restore it as soon as possible!” the leader posted on the channel—which Google’s lawsuit noted helps over 2,500 members coordinate phishing attacks that have resulted in losses of “over a billion dollars.”
Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be.
If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.
At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.
DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”
Tiny chips hitch a ride on immune cells to sites of inflammation
Standard brain implants use electrodes that penetrate the gray matter to stimulate and record the activity of neurons. These typically need to be put in place via a surgical procedure. To go around that need, a team of researchers led by Deblina Sarkar, an electrical engineer and MIT assistant professor, developed microscopic electronic devices hybridized with living cells. Those cells can be injected into the circulatory system with a standard syringe and will travel the bloodstream before implanting themselves in target brain areas.
“In the first two years of working on this technology at MIT, we’ve got 35 grant proposals rejected in a row,” Sarkar says. “Comments we got from the reviewers were that our idea was very impactful, but it was impossible.” She acknowledges that the proposal sounded like something you can find in science fiction novels. But after more than six years of research, she and her colleagues have pulled it off.
Nanobot problemsIn 2022, when Sarkar and her colleagues gathered initial data and got some promising results with their cell-electronics hybrids, the team proposed the project for the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award. For the first time, after 35 rejections, it made it through peer review. “We got the highest impact score ever,” Sarkar says.