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FTC now has three Republicans and no Democrats instead of the typical 3-2 split
The Federal Trade Commission now has three commissioners, and all of them are Republicans.
The FTC historically had a 3–2 partisan split, with the president's party having a one-seat advantage. But President Trump fired FTC Democrats Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter last month, and the Senate yesterday confirmed Trump nominee Mark Meador to the agency's third Republican spot.
The Senate vote was 50–46 and went along party lines. "I respect Mr. Meador's qualifications and his prior experiences... But I cannot support the confirmation of any additional members to the FTC until Commissioner Slaughter and Commissioner Bedoya are reinstated," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said yesterday. "President Trump's dismissal of Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya is not only illegal; it hurts consumers and small businesses by undermining the independence of the Agency that Congress established to protect consumers from fraud, scams, and monopoly power. An independent FTC is critical for protecting consumers and has done so in a bipartisan manner for over 110 years."
Quantum hardware may be a good match for AI
Concerns about AI's energy use have a lot of people looking into ways to cut down on its power requirements. Many of these focus on hardware and software approaches that are pretty straightforward extensions of existing technologies. But a few technologies are much farther out there. One that's definitely in the latter category? Quantum computing.
In some ways, quantum hardware is a better match for some of the math that underlies AI than more traditional hardware. While the current quantum hardware is a bit too error-prone for the more elaborate AI models currently in use, researchers are starting to put the pieces in place to run AI models when the hardware is ready. This week, a couple of commercial interests are releasing a draft of a paper describing how to get classical image data into a quantum processor (actually, two different processors) and perform a basic AI image classification.
All of which gives us a great opportunity to discuss why quantum AI may be more than just hype.
Experimental drug looks to be gastric bypass surgery in pill form
The booming popularity of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs for weight loss has led to a flurry of companies vying to make new and improved anti-obesity medications.
One of those is Boston-based Syntis Bio, which is working on a daily pill that mimics the effects of gastric bypass—no actual surgery required. Today, the company announced early data from animals and a small group of human volunteers showing that its approach is safe and may be able to suppress hunger. The company presented the findings Thursday at the European Congress on Obesity and Weight Management.
“We're at a stage with obesity treatment where it's important for us to figure out, how do we now tune it to be more effective?” says Rahul Dhanda, Syntis Bio’s CEO and cofounder.
Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA
This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.
This initial version of the administration's budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency's budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.
According to the "passback" documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency's science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.
Wheel of Time recap: The show nails one of the books’ biggest and bestest battles
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.
These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode seven, "Goldeneyes," which was released on April 10.
The Trek Madone SLR 9 AXS Gen 8 tears up the roads and conquers climbs
When a cyclist sees the Trek Madone SLR 9 AXS Gen 8 for the first time, the following thoughts run through their head, usually in this order:
"What a beautiful bike."
"Damn, that looks really fast."
Researcher uncovers dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions with 4 million installs
Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.
The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:
- Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
- Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., "Authorization" or "all cookies for GitHub.com")
- WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
- Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
- Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into webpages and manipulate the DOM
- Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job, as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
- :: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to functionally interact with all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions)
These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.
“What the hell are you doing?” How I learned to interview astronauts, scientists, and billionaires
I recently wrote a story about the wild ride of the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last summer. It was based largely on an interview with the commander of the mission, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore.
His account of Starliner’s thruster failures—and his desperate efforts to keep the vehicle flying on course—was riveting. In the aftermath of the story, many readers, people on social media, and real-life friends congratulated me on conducting a great interview. But truth be told, it was pretty much all Wilmore.
Essentially, when I came into the room, he was primed to talk. I'm not sure if Wilmore was waiting for me specifically to talk to, but he pretty clearly wanted to speak with someone about his experiences aboard the Starliner spacecraft. And he chose me.
Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS
Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX's blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week's Rocket Report.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.
So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls "kinetic launch." But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company's CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.
ChatGPT can now remember and reference all your previous chats
OpenAI today announced a significant expansion of ChatGPT's customization and memory capabilities. For some users, it will now be able to remember information from the full breadth of their prior conversations with it and adjust its responses based on that information.
This means ChatGPT will learn more about the user over time to personalize its responses, above and beyond just a handful of key facts.
Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called "Memory" that allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger this, though it occasionally tried to guess at what it should remember, too. (When something was added to its memory, there was a message saying that its memory had been updated.)
Researchers concerned to find AI models misrepresenting their “reasoning” processes
Remember when teachers demanded that you "show your work" in school? Some new types of AI models promise to do exactly that, but new research suggests that the "work" they show can sometimes be misleading or disconnected from the actual process used to reach the answer.
New research from Anthropic—creator of the ChatGPT-like Claude AI assistant—examines simulated reasoning (SR) models like DeepSeek's R1, and its own Claude series. In a research paper posted last week, Anthropic's Alignment Science team demonstrated that these SR models frequently fail to disclose when they've used external help or taken shortcuts, despite features designed to show their "reasoning" process.
(It's worth noting that OpenAI's o1 and o3 series SR models were excluded from this study.)
OnePlus releases Watch 3 with inflated $500 price tag, won’t say why
After modest success with its first two smartwatches, OnePlus was poised to release a third-generation smartwatch early this year. Unfortunately, the company had to delay the Watch 3 from February to April, and now the previously announced $330 price tag is nowhere to be seen. Instead, the OnePlus Watch 3 has launched at an eye-watering $500 in the US, and you can probably guess why.
The OnePlus Watch 3 was all set for release a few months ago, but early reviewers spotted an embarrassing typo on the device. Like most smartwatches, OnePlus printed the watch's key specs on the bottom of the housing. Part of that text was supposed to read "Made in China," but instead, it said "Meda in China." Oops.
OnePlus delayed the launch so it could correct the mistake on retail units. However, the US-China trade relationship has deteriorated dramatically in the intervening weeks. Since the watch is meda made in China, it is subject to tariffs—the amount of Trump's China tariffs is changing on an almost daily basis, but it's currently 145 percent.
RFK Jr. claws back $11.4B in CDC funding amid wave of top-level departures
More heavy blows are landing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to reports Tuesday that reveal a wave of high-level departures from the country's beleaguered health agency. The agency is also losing $11.4 billion in funding for responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was largely doled out to chronically underfunded state health departments.
This afternoon, the Associated Press reported that five high-level leaders are departing the agency, which was announced today during a senior staff meeting. The departures, which were described as retirements, follow three other high-level departures in recent weeks. Given that the CDC has two dozen centers and offices, the recent departures reflect a loss of about a third of the agency's top management.
The departures announced today include: Leslie Ann Dauphin, who oversees the Public Health Infrastructure Center, "which serves as the connection point between the agency and state, local, and territorial jurisdictions, tribes. and CDC's public health partners," according to the CDC. Karen Remley, who heads the National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, is also departing, as is Sam Posner, who heads the Office of Science, which provides scientific expertise across the agency and publishes the agency's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Debra Lubar, who is the CDC's Chief Operating Officer and runs the Office of Policy, Performance and Evaluation, and Leandris Liburd, head of the Office of Health Equity, are also leaving.
Open Source devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries
Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.
Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."
Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.
Praise Kier for Severance season 2! Let’s discuss.
Severance has just wrapped up its second season. I sat down with fellow Ars staffers Aaron Zimmerman and Lee Hutchinson to talk through what we had just seen, covering everything from those goats to the show's pacing. Warning: Huge spoilers for seasons 1 and 2 follow!
Nate: Severance season 1 was a smaller-scale, almost claustrophobic show about a crazy office, its "waffle parties," and the personal life of Mark Scout, mourning his dead wife and "severing" his consciousness to avoid that pain. It followed a compact group of characters, centered around the four "refiners" who worked on Lumon's severed floor. But season 2 blew up that cozy/creepy world and started following more characters—including far more "outies"—to far more places. Did the show manage to maintain its unique vibe while making significant changes to pacing, character count, and location?
Lee: I think so, but as you say, things were different this time around. One element that I’m glad carried through was the show’s consistent use of a very specific visual language. (I am an absolute sucker for visual storytelling. My favorite Kubrick film is Barry Lyndon. I’ll forgive a lot of plot holes if they’re beautifully shot.) Season 2, especially in the back half, treats us to an absolute smorgasbord of incredible visuals—bifurcated shots symbolizing severance and duality, stark whites and long hallways, and my personal favorite: Chris Walken in a black turtleneck seated in front of a fireplace, like Satan holding court in Hell. The storytelling might be a bit less focused, but it looks great.
No cloud needed: Nvidia creates gaming-centric AI chatbot that runs on your GPU
Nvidia has seen its fortunes soar in recent years as its AI-accelerating GPUs have become worth their weight in gold. Most people use their Nvidia GPUs for games, but why not both? Nvidia has a new AI you can run at the same time, having just released its experimental G-Assist AI. It runs locally on your GPU to help you optimize your PC and get the most out of your games. It can do some neat things, but Nvidia isn't kidding when it says this tool is experimental.
G-Assist is available in the Nvidia desktop app, and it consists of a floating overlay window. After invoking the overlay, you can either type or speak to G-Assist to check system stats or make tweaks to your settings. You can ask basic questions like, "How does DLSS Frame Generation work?" but it also has control over some system-level settings.
By calling up G-Assist, you can get a rundown of how your system is running, including custom data charts created on the fly by G-Assist. You can also ask the AI to tweak your machine, for example, optimizing the settings for a particular game or toggling on or off a setting. G-Assist can even overclock your GPU if you so choose, complete with a graph of expected performance gains.
Napster to become a music-marketing metaverse firm after $207M acquisition
Infinite Reality, a media, ecommerce, and marketing company focused on 3D and AI-powered experiences, has entered an agreement to acquired Napster. That means that the brand originally launched in 1999 as a peer-to-peer (P2P) music file-sharing service is set to be reborn again. This time, new owners are reshaping the brand into one focused on marketing musicians in the metaverse.
Infinite announced today a definitive agreement to buy Napster for $207 million. The Norwalk, Connecticut-based company plans to turn Napster into a “social music platform that prioritizes active fan engagement over passive listening, allowing artists to connect with, own, and monetize the relationship with their fans." Jon Vlassopulos, who became Napster CEO in 2022, will continue with his role at the brand.
Since 2016, Napster has been operating as a (legal) streaming service. It claims to have over 110 million high-fidelity tracks, with some supporting lossless audio. Napster subscribers can also listen offline and watch music videos. The service currently starts at $11 per month.
We’ve outsourced our confirmation biases to search engines
People are often quite selective about the information they'll accept, seeking out sources that will confirm their biases, while discounting those that will challenge their beliefs. In theory, search engines can potentially change that. By prioritizing results from high-quality, credible sources, a search engine could ensure that people found accurate information more frequently, potentially opening them to the possibility of updating their beliefs.
Obviously, that hasn't worked out on the technology side, as people quickly learned how to game the algorithms used by search engines, meaning that the webpages that get returned have been created by people with no interest in quality or credibility. But a new study is suggesting that the concept fails on the human side, too, as people tend to devise search terms that are specific enough to ensure that the results of the search will end up reinforcing their existing beliefs.
The study showed that invisibly swapping search terms to something more general can go a long way toward enabling people to change their mind.
FBI probes arson of Tesla cars and facilities, says “this is domestic terrorism”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday launched a task force "to try to nail the criminals setting fire to Tesla vehicles and charging stations," and is looking into an anarchist blog that has been "calling for more" attacks, The New York Post reported.
"The bureau has received reports of 48 instances so far this month related to Tesla vehicles, dealerships and charging stations and is investigating at least seven of them in conjunction with local law enforcement, The Post has learned," the article said. "The agency's newly formed 10-person task force will deploy ATF personnel—special agents and intelligence analysts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in the Treasury Department—and personnel from the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, including its Domestic Terrorism Operations Section and Weapons of Mass Destruction."
ATF is embedding personnel in some FBI field offices, starting in San Antonio, Texas, "where some of the Molotov cocktail attacks have been carried out," the report said. There were previously three arrests. The FBI is reviewing security camera footage and gained access to cell phone location data in an attempt to find more culprits, the report said.
Momentum seems to be building for Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator
With the vast majority of President Donald Trump's cabinet members now approved by the US Senate, focus is turning to senior positions within the administration that are just below the cabinet level.
The administrator of NASA is among the most high-profile of these positions. Nearly four months ago Trump nominated private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become chief of the space agency, but he has yet to receive a hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
Almost immediately after his nomination, much of the space community fell in behind Isaacman, who has flown to space twice on private Crew Dragon missions, raised charitable funds, and is generally well-liked. Since then, Isaacman has worked to build support for his candidacy through conversations with people in the space community and officeholders.
