ArsTechnica
What if the aliens come and we just can’t communicate?
Science fiction has long speculated about the possibility of first contact with an alien species from a distant world and how we might be able to communicate with them. But what if we simply don’t have enough common ground for that to even be possible? An alien species is bound to be biologically very different, and their language will be shaped by their home environment, broader culture, and even how they perceive the universe. They might not even share the same math and physics. These and other fascinating questions are the focus of an entertaining new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions About Science and the Nature of Reality.
Co-author Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, who has worked on the ATLAS collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. He’s also a gifted science communicator who previously co-authored two books with cartoonist Jorge Cham of PhD Comics fame: 2018’s We Have No Idea and 2021’s Frequently Asked Questions About the Universe. (The pair also co-hosted a podcast from 2018 to 2024, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe.) This time around, cartoonist Andy Warner provided the illustrations, and Whiteson and Warner charmingly dedicate their book to “all the alien scientists we have yet to meet.”
Whiteson has long been interested in the philosophy of physics. “I’m not the kind of physicist who’s like, ‘whatever, let’s just measure stuff,'” he told Ars. “The thing that always excited me about physics was this implicit promise that we were doing something universal, that we were learning things that were true on other planets. But the more I learned, the more concerned I became that this might have been oversold. None are fundamental, and we don’t understand why anything emerges. Can we separate the human lens from the thing we’re looking at? We don’t know in the end how much that lens is distorting what we see or defining what we’re looking at. So that was the fundamental question I always wanted to explore.”
Civil war is brewing in the wasteland in Fallout S2 trailer
We got our first glimpse of the much-anticipated second season of Fallout (adapted from the popular video game franchise) in August when Prime Video released an extended teaser. We now have the official trailer, with all the deadpan humor, explosions, and mutant atrocities one could hope for—including ghoulish Elvis impersonators in New Vegas.
(Spoilers for S1 below.)
As previously reported, in S1, we met Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), a young woman whose vault is raided by surface dwellers. The raiders kill many vault residents and kidnap her father, Hank (Kyle MacLachlan), so the sheltered Lucy sets out on a quest to find him. Life on the surface is pretty brutal, but Lucy learns fast. Along the way, she finds an ally (and love interest) in Maximus (Aaron Moten), a squire masquerading as a knight of the Brotherhood of Steel. And she runs afoul of a gunslinger and bounty hunter known as the Ghoul (Walton Goggins), a former Hollywood actor named Cooper Howard who survived the original nuclear blast, but radiation exposure turned him into, well, a ghoul.
After years of saying no, Tesla reportedly adding Apple CarPlay to its cars
Apple CarPlay, the interface that lets you cast your phone to your car’s infotainment screen, may finally be coming to Tesla’s electric vehicles. CarPlay is nearly a decade old at this point, and it has become so popular that almost half of car buyers have said they won’t consider a car without the feature, and the overwhelming majority of automakers have included CarPlay in their vehicles.
Until now, that hasn’t included Tesla. CEO Elon Musk doesn’t appear to have opined on the omission, though he has frequently criticized Apple. In the past, Musk has said the goal of Tesla infotainment is to be “the most amount of fun you can have in a car.” Tesla has regularly added purile features like fart noises to the system, and it has also integrated video games that drivers can play while they charge.
For customers who want to stream music, Tesla has instead offered Spotify, Tidal, and even Apple Music apps.
Google will let Android power users bypass upcoming sideloading restrictions
Google recently decided that the freedom afforded by Android was a bit too much and announced developer verification, a system that will require developers outside the Google Play platform to register with Google. Users and developers didn’t accept Google’s rationale and have been complaining loudly. As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that “experienced users” should have an escape hatch.
According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns are getting more aggressive, and there’s real harm being done in spite of the platform’s sideloading scare screens. Google says it’s common for scammers to use social engineering to create a false sense of urgency, prompting users to bypass Android’s built-in protections to install malicious apps.
Google’s solution to this problem, as announced several months ago, is to force everyone making apps to verify their identities. Unverified apps won’t install on any Google-certified device once verification rolls out. Without this, the company claims malware creators can endlessly create new apps to scam people. However, the centralized nature of verification threatened to introduce numerous headaches into a process that used to be straightforward for power users.
Valve says it’s still waiting for better chips to power Steam Deck 2
Yesterday’s announcement of new living room and VR hardware from Valve obviously has many gamers clamoring for any news of a more powerful version of the nearly 4-year-old Steam Deck. In a new interview with IGN, though, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais says that portable gaming silicon still hasn’t advanced enough to justify brand-new benchmark hardware.
“The thing we’re making sure of is that it’s a worthwhile enough performance upgrade [for a Steam Deck 2] to make sense as a standalone product,” Griffais told IGN. “We’re not interested in getting to a point where it’s 20 or 30 or even 50 percent more performance at the same battery life. We want something a little bit more demarcated than that.”
“So we’ve been working back from silicon advancements and architectural improvements, and I think we have a pretty good idea of what the next version of Steam Deck is going to be, but right now there’s no offerings in that landscape, in the SoC [System on a Chip] landscape, that we think would truly be a next-gen performance Steam Deck,” Griffais continued.
Tracking the winds that have turned Mars into a planet of dust
Mars is cold, parched, and extremely dusty. Powerful gusts of wind kick up literal tons of reddish dust that often takes the form of whorls known as dust devils. These winds also shroud the planet in dust by lifting material from the surface and blowing it into the atmosphere (what little Mars has left of an atmosphere), sometimes creating dust storms that rage for days.
Researcher Valentin Bickel wanted to know just how intense winds can be on the red planet. Using data obtained by the Mars camera CaSSIS (Color and Stereo Surface Imaging System), the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and stereo camera HRSC (High Resolution Stereo Camera) on board ESA orbiter Mars Express, he and his team used deep learning to analyze stereo images that were taken seconds apart at the same location. These images can track the motion of dust devils, and the researchers use them to infer how the winds behind the dust devils move and lift dust from the surface. That dust goes on to have a big influence on the Martian weather.
Bickel, of the Center for Space and Habitability at the University of Bern, noticed that the tumultuous Martian winds are even faster than previous observations had made them out to be. They carry more dust than was previously thought. “Our observations show that strong near-surface winds are abundant on Mars and play an important role in atmospheric dust sourcing, directly informing more accurate models of Mars’ atmosphere, weather, and climate,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.
Waymo to roll out driverless taxis on highways in three US cities
Waymo is set to expand its self-driving taxi service onto highways in three US cities on Wednesday, an advance for the venture owned by Google’s parent company that raises the stakes on safety.
The company said it would add the high-speed roads to its routes in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco, allowing Waymo cars to ferry passengers to more destinations including San Jose International Airport.
Waymo’s rollout on highways marks a significant step for the robotaxi operator as it aims to encourage the mass adoption of driverless vehicles. It is the first time a company will carry out paid driverless services on the highway without a driver behind the wheel.
What would a “simplified” Starship plan for the Moon actually look like?
In what will likely be his most consequential act as NASA’s interim leader, Sean Duffy said last month that the space agency was “opening up” its competition to develop a lunar lander that will put humans on the surface of the Moon.
As part of this move, Duffy asked NASA’s current lunar lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin, for more nimble plans. Neither has specified those plans publicly, but a recent update from SpaceX referenced a “simplified” version of the Starship system it’s building to help NASA return humans to the Moon.
“Since the contract was awarded, we have been consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed and have shared ideas on how to simplify the mission to align with national priorities,” the company said. “In response to the latest calls, we’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety.”
Google is rolling out conversational shopping—and ads—in AI Mode search
In recent months, Google has promised to inject generative AI into the online shopping experience, and now it’s following through. The previously announced shopping features of AI Mode search are rolling out, and Gemini will also worm its way into Google’s forgotten Duplex automated phone call tech. It’s all coming in time for the holidays to allegedly make your gifting more convenient and also conveniently ensure that Google gets a piece of the action.
At Google I/O in May, the company announced its intention to bring conversational shopping to AI Mode. According to Google, its enormous “Shopping Graph” or retailer data means its AI is uniquely positioned to deliver useful suggestions. In the coming weeks, users in the US will be able to ask AI Mode complex questions about what to buy, and it will deliver suggestions, guides, tables, and other generated content to help you decide. And since this is gen AI, it comes with the usual disclaimers about possible mistakes.
AI Mode shopping features. AI Mode shopping features.You’re probably wondering where you’ll see sponsored shopping content in these experiences. Google says some of the content that appears in AI Mode will be ads, just like if you look up shopping results in a traditional search. Shopping features are also coming to the Gemini app, but Google says it won’t have sponsored content in the results for the time being.
OpenAI walks a tricky tightrope with GPT-5.1’s eight new personalities
On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking, two updated versions of its flagship AI models now available in ChatGPT. The company is wrapping the models in the language of anthropomorphism, claiming that they’re warmer, more conversational, and better at following instructions.
The release follows complaints earlier this year that its previous models were excessively cheerful and sycophantic, along with an opposing controversy among users over how OpenAI modified the default GPT-5 output style after several suicide lawsuits.
The company now faces intense scrutiny from lawyers and regulators that could threaten its future operations. In that kind of environment, it’s difficult to just release a new AI model, throw out a few stats, and move on like the company could even a year ago. But here are the basics: The new GPT-5.1 Instant model will serve as ChatGPT’s faster default option for most tasks, while GPT-5.1 Thinking is a simulated reasoning model that attempts to handle more complex problem-solving tasks.
With another record broken, the world’s busiest spaceport keeps getting busier
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—Another Falcon 9 rocket fired off its launch pad here on Monday night, taking with it another 29 Starlink Internet satellites to orbit.
This was the 94th orbital launch from Florida’s Space Coast so far in 2025, breaking the previous record for the most satellite launches in a calendar year from the world’s busiest spaceport. Monday night’s launch came two days after a Chinese Long March 11 rocket lifted off from an oceangoing platform on the opposite side of the world, marking humanity’s 255th mission to reach orbit this year, a new annual record for global launch activity.
As of Wednesday, a handful of additional missions have pushed the global figure this year to 259, putting the world on pace for around 300 orbital launches by the end of 2025. This will more than double the global tally of 135 orbital launches in 2021.
Microsoft releases update-fixing update for update-eligible Windows 10 PCs
Officially, Windows 10 died last month, a little over a decade after its initial release. But the old operating system’s enduring popularity has prompted Microsoft to promise between one and three years of Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for many Windows 10 PCs. For individuals with Windows 10 PCs, it’s relatively easy to get an additional year of updates at no cost.
Or at least, it’s supposed to be. Bugs initially identified by Windows Latest were keeping some Windows 10 PCs from successfully enrolling in the ESU program, preventing those PCs from signing up to grab the free updates. And because each Windows 10 PC has to be manually enrolled in the program, a broken enrollment process also meant broken security updates.
To fix the problems, Microsoft released an update for Windows 10 22H2 (KB5071959) this week that both acknowledges and fixes an issue “where the enrollment wizard may fail during enrollment.” It’s being offered to all Windows 10 PCs regardless of whether they’re enrolled in the ESU program “as it resolves an issue that was preventing affected customers from receiving essential security updates.”
An explosion 92 million miles away just grounded Jeff Bezos’ New Glenn rocket
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida—The second flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket was postponed again Wednesday as a supercharged wave of magnetized plasma from the Sun enveloped the Earth, triggering colorful auroral displays and concerns over possible impacts to communications, navigation, and power grids.
Solar storms like the one this week can also affect satellite operations. That is the worry that caused NASA to hold off on launching a pair of science probes from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Wednesday aboard Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.
In a statement, Blue Origin said NASA, its customer on the upcoming launch, decided to postpone the mission to send the agency’s two ESCAPADE spacecraft on a journey to Mars.
Well-received big-budget Alien Earth TV series gets a second season
Alien Earth will return to FX (and Disney+ and Hulu) for a second season, thanks to a new deal between Disney and series creator Noah Hawley.
The new season has no air date yet, but we do know one thing about it: It will be shot in London. The first season was shot in Thailand, and most of the story took place in Southeast Asia, so the change in shooting location suggests a new setting for much of the next season. Production on season two will reportedly begin next year.
For those who watched season one to its conclusion, season two probably seemed like a sure thing; the finale resolved many of the core conflicts of that first batch of episodes, but also was clearly intended to be the launching point for a new storyline in season two.
Audi goes full minimalism for its first-ever Formula 1 livery
MUNICH, Germany—Audi’s long-awaited Formula 1 team gave the world its first look at what the Audi R26 will look like when it takes to the track next year. Well, sort of—the car you see here is a generic show car for the 2026 aero regulations, but the livery you see, plus the sponsors’ logos, will race next year.
“By entering the pinnacle of motorsport, Audi is making a clear, ambitious statement. It is the next chapter in the company’s renewal. Formula 1 will be a catalyst for the change towards a leaner, faster, and more innovative Audi,” said Gernot Döllner, Audi’s CEO. “We are not entering Formula 1 just to be there. We want to win. At the same time, we know that you don’t become a top team in Formula 1 overnight. It takes time, perseverance, and tireless questioning of the status quo. By 2030, we want to fight for the World Championship title,” Döllner said.
After the complicated liveries of cars like the R18 or Audi's Formula E program, the R26 is refreshingly simple. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin None of the sponsors have been announced yet, so the car is bare for now. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin The view Audi hopes its rivals get next year. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin
Quantum computing tech keeps edging forward
The end of the year is usually a busy time in the quantum computing arena, as companies often try to announce that they’ve reached major milestones before the year wraps up. This year has been no exception. And while not all of these announcements involve interesting new architectures like the one we looked at recently, they’re a good way to mark progress in the field, and they often involve the sort of smaller, incremental steps needed to push the field forward.
What follows is a quick look at a handful of announcements from the past few weeks that struck us as potentially interesting.
IBM follows throughIBM is one of the companies announcing a brand-new architecture this year. That’s not at all a surprise, given that the company promised to do so back in June; this week sees the company confirming that it has built the two processors it said it would earlier in the year. These include one called Loon, which is focused on the architecture that IBM will use to host error-corrected logical qubits. Loon represents two major changes for the company: a shift to nearest-neighbor connections and the addition of long-distance connections.
Super Mario Galaxy Movie trailer introduces Princess Rosalina
The Super Mario Bros. Movie dominated the box office in 2023, racking up $1.36 billion and snagging several Oscar nominations for good measure. So naturally there’s a sequel, and Nintendo just dropped the official trailer for The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, due out next spring.
(Spoilers for the 2023 film below.)
The first attempt at a Super Mario movie adaptation in 1993 was notoriously a dismal failure, although it still has its ’90s-nostalgic fans. But 2023’s Super Mario Bros. Movie won over gaming fans who were skeptical about another adaption—including Ars Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland. “This film version captures all the fun and vibrancy of the Mario games, with enough references to familiar characters, items, and locations to make even a die-hard Mario fan’s head spin,” he wrote in his 2023 review, adding that, despite a few flaws, the film was “everything that a 10-year-old version of me could ever have dreamed a Mario movie could be.”
NATO boss mocks Russian navy, which is on the hunt for Red October “the nearest mechanic”
When one of its Kilo-class, diesel-electric submarines recently surfaced off the coast of France, Russia denied that there was a problem with the vessel. The sub was simply surfacing to comply with maritime transit rules governing the English Channel, the Kremlin said—Russia being, of course, a noted follower of international law.
But social media accounts historically linked to Russian security forces suggested a far more serious problem on the submarine Novorossiysk. According to The Maritime Executive, "Rumors began to circulate on well-informed social media channels that the Novorossiysk had suffered a fuel leak. They suggested the vessel lacked onboard capabilities and was forced to surface to empty flooded compartments. Some reports said it was a dangerous fuel leak aboard the vessel, which was commissioned in 2012."
France 24 quoted further social media reports as saying, "The submarine has neither the spare parts nor the qualified specialists onboard to fix the malfunction," and it "now poses an explosion hazard."
Feds seize $15 billion from alleged forced labor scam built on “human suffering”
Federal prosecutors have seized $15 billion from the alleged kingpin of an operation that used imprisoned laborers to trick unsuspecting people into making investments in phony funds, often after spending months faking romantic relationships with the victims.
Such "pig butchering" scams have operated for years. They typically work when members of the operation initiate conversations with people on social media and then spend months messaging them. Often, the scammers pose as attractive individuals who feign romantic interest for the victim.
Forced labor, phone farms, and human sufferingEventually, conversations turn to phony investment funds with the end goal of convincing the victim to transfer large amounts of bitcoin. In many cases, the scammers are trafficked and held against their will in compounds surrounded by fences and barbed wire.
Trump admin pressured Facebook into removing ICE-tracking group
Attorney General Pam Bondi today said that Facebook removed an ICE-tracking group after "outreach" from the Department of Justice. "Today following outreach from @thejusticedept, Facebook removed a large group page that was being used to dox and target @ICEgov agents in Chicago," Bondi wrote in an X post.
Bondi alleged that a "wave of violence against ICE has been driven by online apps and social media campaigns designed to put ICE officers at risk just for doing their jobs." She added that the DOJ "will continue engaging tech companies to eliminate platforms where radicals can incite imminent violence against federal law enforcement."
When contacted by Ars, Facebook owner Meta said the group "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm." Meta didn't describe any specific violation but directed us to a policy against "coordinating harm and promoting crime," which includes a prohibition against "outing the undercover status of law enforcement, military, or security personnel."