ArsTechnica
Andor S2 featurette teases canonical tragic event
Disney+ dropped the first action-packed teaser for the second season of Andor just last week. The streaming platform followed up today with a special three-minute featurette on the making of the Star Wars series' sophomore outing—including a hint that we'll probably be seeing a major tragic event in the Star Wars canon this season.
(Spoilers for season 1 below.)
As previously reported, the story begins five years before the events of Rogue One, with the Empire's destruction of Cassian Andor's (Diego Luna) home world, and follows his transformation from a "revolution-averse" cynic to a major player in the nascent rebellion who is willing to sacrifice himself to save the galaxy. S1 left off with Cassian returning to Ferrix for the funeral of his adoptive mother, Maarva (Fiona Shaw), rescuing a friend from prison, and dodging an assassination attempt. A post-credits scene showed prisoners assembling the firing dish of the now-under-construction Death Star.
Google tells Trump’s DOJ that forcing a Chrome sale would harm national security
Google is no stranger to antitrust scrutiny, but the walls may be closing in. As the next phase of Google's search trial nears, the company's lawyers have reportedly met with representatives from the US Department of Justice in hopes of heading off a breakup. Google is reportedly pushing the argument that forcing it to spin off parts of the business and limit certain investments would constitute a national security threat.
Google's antitrust situation got much worse this past August when it lost the long-running case targeting its search business. With Google branded yet again as a monopolist, the DOJ asked for stiff penalties, seeking to have US District Judge Amit Mehta force Google to sell its popular Chrome browser and end payments for search engine placement with other firms.
According to Bloomberg, Google met with the DOJ team last week to make the case for a lighter regulatory touch. Specifically, Google has stepped up its claims that forcing it to spin-off Chrome and limit AI investments could harm US national security, as well as security at the user level.
China aims to recruit top US scientists as Trump tries to kill the CHIPS Act
On Tuesday, Donald Trump finally made it clear to Congress that he wants to kill the CHIPS and Science Act—a $280 billion bipartisan law Joe Biden signed in 2022 to bring more semiconductor manufacturing into the US and put the country at the forefront of research and innovation.
Trump has long expressed frustration with the high cost of the CHIPS Act, telling Congress on Tuesday that it's a "horrible, horrible thing" to "give hundreds of billions of dollars" in subsidies to companies that he claimed "take our money" and "don't spend it," Reuters reported.
"You should get rid of the CHIPS Act, and whatever is left over, Mr. Speaker, you should use it to reduce debt," Trump said.
Elon Musk loses initial attempt to block OpenAI’s for-profit conversion
A federal judge rejected Elon Musk's request to block OpenAI's planned conversion from a nonprofit to for-profit entity but expedited the case so that Musk's core claims can be addressed in a trial before the end of this year.
Musk had filed a motion for preliminary injunction in US District Court for the Northern District of California, claiming that OpenAI's for-profit conversation "violates the terms of Musk's donations" to the company. But Musk failed to meet the burden of proof needed for an injunction, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled yesterday.
"Plaintiffs Elon Musk, [former OpenAI board member] Shivon Zilis, and X.AI Corp. ('xAI') collectively move for a preliminary injunction barring defendants from engaging in various business activities, which plaintiffs claim violate federal antitrust and state law," Rogers wrote. "The relief requested is extraordinary and rarely granted as it seeks the ultimate relief of the case on an expedited basis, with a cursory record, and without the benefit of a trial."
Volkswagen gets the message: Cheap, stylish EVs coming from 2026
A surprise find in my inbox this morning: news from Volkswagen about a pair of new electric vehicles it has in the works. Even better, they're both small and affordable, bucking the supersized, overpriced trend of the past few years. But before we get too excited, there's currently no guarantee either will go on sale in North America.
Next year sees the European debut of the ID. 2all, a small electric hatchback that VW wants to sell for less than 25,000 euros ($26,671). But the ID. 2all isn't really news: VW showed off the concept, as well as a GTI version, back in September 2023.
What is new is the ID. EVERY1, an all-electric entry-level car that, if the concept is anything to go by, is high on style and charm. It does not have a retro shape like a Mini or Fiat 500—VW could easily have succumbed to a retread of the Giugiaro-styled Golf from 1976 but opted for something new instead. The design language involves three pillars: stability, likability, and surprise elements, or "secret sauce," according to VW's description.
Due to new tariffs, many more physical game discs may “simply not get made”
Analysts are warning that the Trump administration's recently implemented tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China could lead to price increases and supply issues for video game software and hardware in the United States.
The effects could be particularly pronounced for physical game discs, which are now overwhelmingly produced in Mexico. A 25 percent tax on discs shipped in from Mexico could lead to "a sharp downtick in the number of disc-based games that get released physically in the US," Circana analyst Mat Piscatella said on social media.
"It wouldn't surprise me to see physical games that would be subject to tariffs simply not get made, with pubs moving to an all digital strategy," Piscatella added recently. That would accelerate a trend that has been building for years, making disc-based releases a relative market niche.
NASA just lost yet another one of its low-cost planetary missions
Since the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched in late February as a rideshare spacecraft along with a Falcon 9 launch, NASA has been providing a series of increasingly worrisome updates about the health of the small orbiter. Trailblazer appears to be spinning and out of contact with engineers back on Earth.
In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.
"Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state," the space agency said. "They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication."
Jeff Bezos brings Amazon work culture to Blue Origin
Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world’s third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The space company’s founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the ecommerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.
Half a dozen current and former senior Blue Origin employees told the Financial Times that the billionaire had taken a prominent role in helping reset a company that has reached orbit only once, compared with SpaceX achieving the feat more than 450 times.
Apple announces M3 Ultra—and says not every generation will see an “Ultra” chip
Apple’s first Mac Studio refresh in nearly two years is a welcome update, injecting fresh life into two computers that were still getting by with M2 chips. But the company took a bit of a strange approach to the update, giving an M4-series Max chip to the lower-end Studio but an M3 Ultra chip to the high-end model.
These processors are both performance upgrades from the M2 Max and M2 Ultra, and the M3 Ultra is so huge that it should have no trouble outrunning the M4 Max despite its slightly older CPU and GPU architecture. But it’s still a departure from past practice, where Apple would keep the Studio’s chip generation in lockstep.
CPU P/E-cores GPU cores RAM options Memory bandwidth Apple M3 Ultra (low) 20/8 60 96/256GB 819.2GB/s Apple M3 Ultra (high) 24/8 80 128GB/256GB/512GB 819.2GB/s Apple M2 Ultra (high) 16/8 76 Up to 192GB 819.2GB/s Apple M1 Ultra (high) 16/4 32 Up to 128GB 819.2GB/sWhen asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.
Apple intros new Mac Studio models with M4 Max and… M3 Ultra?
Apple announced its first Mac Studio updates in nearly two years today, a few months after bringing the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini.
As before, Apple offers a lower-end and a higher-end configuration of the Mac Studio. The lower-end model is pretty much what you expect: It gives you the same M4 Max processor Apple introduced in the high-end MacBook Pro last year. It has up to 16 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), up to 40 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine.
The $1,999 base model comes with 14 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), 32 GPU cores, 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. That model's RAM can't be upgraded until you step up to the fully-enabled M4 Max, which also gets you 48GB of RAM for $300. From there, the desktop can be upgraded with either 64GB or 128GB of RAM, same as the MacBook Pro.
MacBook Air gets the M4, a new blue color, up to 32GB of RAM, and a $100 price cut
As expected, Apple has officially refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with its M4 chip, the same silicon we've already seen in products like the MacBook Pro, the iMac, and the Mac mini. And in most ways, it's a straightforward update, with no major changes to the laptop's physical design, screen specs, keyboard, or ports.
The most important update is the price. The 13-inch M4 MacBook Air will start at $999, a $100 price cut compared to the M3 Air and the same price that Apple set for the M2 Air last year when the M3 models came out. The 15-inch model will also get a $100 cut, from $1,299 to $1,199. These baseline configurations still come with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus the 8-core version of the M4's GPU.
The M2 version will continue to be sold as a budget model in some countries, but the US isn't one of them. Apple will also continue to sell a cheaper version of the M1 MacBook Air through Walmart, which it has been doing since March 2024.
Shadowveil is a stylish, tough single-player auto-battler
One thing Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings does well is invoke terror. Not just the terror of an overwhelming mass of dark energy encroaching on your fortress, which is what the story suggests; more so, the terror of hoping your little computer-controlled fighters will do the smart thing and then being forced to watch, helpless, as they are consumed by algorithmic choices, bad luck, your strategies, or some combination of all three.
Shadowveil, the first video game based on the more than 30-year-old Legend of the Five Rings fantasy franchise, is a roguelite auto-battler. You pick your Crab Clan hero (berserker hammer-wielder or tactical support type), train up some soldiers, and assign all of them abilities, items, and buffs you earn as you go. When battle starts, you choose which hex to start your fighters on, double-check your load-outs, then click to start and watch what happens. You win and march on, or you lose and regroup at base camp, buying some upgrades with your last run's goods.
Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings launch trailer.In my impressions after roughly seven hours of playing, Shadowveil could do more to soften its learning curve, but it presents a mostly satisfying mix of overwhelming odds and achievement. What's irksome now could get patched, and what's already there is intriguing, especially for the price.
Eerily realistic AI voice demo sparks amazement and discomfort online
In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.
"I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."
In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya").
“Wooly mice” a test run for mammoth gene editing
On Tuesday, the team behind the plan to bring mammoth-like animals back to the tundra announced the creation of what it is calling wooly mice, which have long fur reminiscent of the woolly mammoth. The long fur was created through the simultaneous editing of as many as seven genes, all with a known connection to hair growth, color, and/or texture.
But don't think that this is a sort of mouse-mammoth hybrid. Most of the genetic changes were first identified in mice, not mammoths. So, the focus is on the fact that the team could do simultaneous editing of multiple genes—something that they'll need to be able to do to get a considerable number of mammoth-like changes into the elephant genome.
Of mice and mammothsThe team at Colossal Biosciences has started a number of de-extinction projects, including the dodo and thylacine, but its flagship project is the mammoth. In all of these cases, the plan is to take stem cells from a closely related species that has not gone extinct, and edit a series of changes based on the corresponding genomes of the deceased species. In the case of the mammoth, that means the elephant.
The seemingly indestructible fists of the mantis shrimp can take a punch
The mantis shrimp comes equipped with its own weapons. It has claws that look like permanently clenched fists that are known as dactyl clubs. But when it smashes the shells of its prey, these fists come out of it undamaged.
When throwing punches, mantis shrimp can strike at the speed of a .22 caliber bullet (about 1,316 kmph or 818 mph)—one of the fastest movements in the animal kingdom. That generates a force over a thousand times their body weight. However, unleashing that much energy can backfire because the shockwaves it produces could seriously damage an animal’s soft tissue. None of that seems to affect the mantis shrimp. Now we finally know why.
When a team of researchers from Northwestern University studied the dactyl clubs of one mantis shrimp species, they found that they have layered structures that selectively block sound waves, acting as protective gear against vibrations that could otherwise harm the shrimp. These types of structures, known as phononic mechanisms, filter out sound waves that could otherwise cause nerve and soft tissue trauma.
This EV could reboot medium-duty trucking by not reinventing the wheel
GARDEN GROVE, Calif.—There's no shortage of companies looking to reinvent the delivery experience using everything from sidewalk drones to electric vans. Some are succeeding, but many more have failed by trying to radically rethink the simple, age-old task of getting stuff from one place to another.
Harbinger likewise wants to shake up part of that industry but in a decidedly understated way. If you found yourself stuck in traffic behind one of the company's all-electric vehicles, there's a good chance you wouldn't even notice. The only difference? The lack of diesel smoke and clatter.
From the outside, Harbinger's pre-production machine looks identical to the standard flat-sided, vinyl-wrapped delivery vehicles that seemingly haven't changed in decades. That's because they really haven't. Those familiar UPS and FedEx machines are built on common chassis like Ford's F-59 or Freightliner's MT45, with ladder chassis and leaf spring designs dating back to the earliest days of trucking.
German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe
Isar Aerospace, a German startup founded seven years ago, is positioned to become the first in a new generation of European launch companies to reach orbit with a privately funded rocket.
The company announced Friday that the first stage of its Spectrum rocket recently completed a 30-second test-firing on a launch pad in the northernmost reaches of mainland Europe. The nine-engine booster ignited on a launch pad at Andøya Spaceport in Norway on February 14.
The milestone follows a similar test-firing of the Spectrum rocket's second stage last year. With these two accomplishments, Isar Aerospace says its launch vehicle is qualified for flight.
Texas measles outbreak reaches 90 cases; 9 cases in New Mexico
An ongoing measles outbreak that began in one of Texas' least vaccinated counties has mushroomed to 90 cases across a cluster of seven counties in the state, according to an update by the Texas Department of State Health Services on Friday.
The outbreak may have also spread across the border to New Mexico, where nine cases have been reported. In an email to Ars, Robert Nott, the communications director for the New Mexico Department of Health, said that as of today, the department has not confirmed a connection between the nine cases and any of the confirmed cases in Texas.
However, all nine of the cases are in Lea County, New Mexico, which sits at the border with Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the outbreak. Of Texas' 90 cases, 57 are in Gaines, which has a vaccination rate among kindergarteners of just 82 percent this school year. The lack of a clear connection between the Texas and New Mexico cases may be yet more worrying because it suggests undetected community spread and a heightened risk of transmission in Lea, the health department noted in an alert last week.
Under new bill, Bigfoot could become California’s “official cryptid”
You might suspect that a one-line bill about Bigfoot that bears the number "666" is a joke, but AB-666 is apparently a serious offering from California Assemblymember Chris Rogers. Rogers represents a California district known for its Bigfoot sightings (or "sightings," depending on your persuasion—many of these have been faked), and he wants to make Bigfoot the "official cryptid" of the state.
His bill notes that California already has many official symbols, including the golden poppy (official flower), the California redwood (official tree), the word "Eureka" (official motto), the red-legged frog (official amphibian), the grizzly bear (official animal), swing dancing (official dance), and the saber-toothed cat (official fossil). The state has so many of these that there are separate categories for freshwater fish (golden trout) and marine fish (garibaldi). So why not, Rogers wants to know, "designate Bigfoot as the official state cryptid"?
That's... pretty much the bill, which was introduced this week and already has Bigfoot advocates excited. SFGate talked to Matt Moneymaker, who it describes as "a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series Finding Bigfoot," about the bill. Moneymaker loves it, noting that he has personally “had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.”
Leaked chat logs expose inner workings of secretive ransomware group
More than a year’s worth of internal communications from one of the world’s most active ransomware syndicates have been published online in a leak that exposes tactics, trade secrets, and internal rifts of its members.
The communications come in the form of logs of more than 200,000 messages members of Black Basta sent to each other over the Matrix chat platform from September 2023 to September 2024, researchers said. The person who published the messages said the move was in retaliation for Black Basta targeting Russian banks. The leaker's identity is unknown; it’s also unclear if the person responsible was an insider or someone outside the group who somehow gained access to the confidential logs.
How to be your own worst enemyLast year, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Black Basta had targeted 12 of the 16 US critical infrastructure sectors in attacks mounted on 500 organizations around the world. One notable attack targeted Ascention, a St. Louis-based health care system with 140 hospitals in 19 states. Other victims include Hyundai Europe, UK-based outsourcing firm Capita, the Chilean Government Customs Agency, and UK utility company Southern Water. The native Russian-speaking group has been active since at least 2022.