Enlarge / A European ATV cargo freighter reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in 2013.

Since the beginning of the year, landowners have discovered several pieces of space junk traced to missions supporting the International Space Station. On all of these occasions, engineers expected none of the disposable hardware would survive the scorching heat of reentry and make it to Earth's surface.

These incidents highlight an urgency for more research into what happens when a spacecraft makes an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere, according to engineers from the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center based in El Segundo, California. More stuff is getting launched into space than ever before, and the trend will continue as companies deploy more satellite constellations and field heavier rockets.

"The biggest immediate need now is just to do some more work to really understand this whole process and to be in a position to be ready to accommodate new materials, new operational approaches as they happen more quickly," said Marlon Sorge, executive director of Aerospace's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. "Clearly, that’s the direction that spaceflight is going.”

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. (credit: NASA)

NASA and Boeing officials pushed back Friday on headlines that the commercial Starliner crew capsule is stranded at the International Space Station but said they need more time to analyze data before formally clearing the spacecraft for undocking and reentry.

Two NASA astronauts, commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, will spend at least a few more weeks on the space station as engineers on the ground conduct thruster tests to better understand issues with the Starliner propulsion system in orbit. Wilmore and Williams launched June 5 aboard an Atlas V rocket and docked at the station the next day, completing the first segment of Starliner's first test flight with astronauts.

NASA managers originally planned for the Starliner spacecraft to remain docked at the space station for at least eight days, although they left open the possibility of a mission extension. The test flight is now likely to last at least a month and a half, and perhaps longer, as engineers wrestle with helium leaks and thruster glitches on Starliner's service module.

Enlarge / A Vision Pro on display at an Apple Store in Tokyo. (credit: Apple)

Apple's Vision Pro headset went on sale outside the United States for the first time today, in the first of two waves of expanded availability.

The $3,499 "spatial computing" device launched back in February in the US, but it hasn't taken the tech world by storm. Part of that has been its regional launch, with some of the biggest markets still lacking access.

Apple announced that the product would be sold internationally during its keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference earlier this month.

Enlarge (credit: Caiaimage/Chris Ryan)

“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades. So, we stress-tested our university’s examination system against AI cheating in a controlled experiment,” says Peter Scarfe, a researcher at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences at the University of Reading.

His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions. The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.

Rules of engagement

Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology. The assignments were either 200-word answers to short questions or more elaborate essays, roughly 1,500 words long. “The markers of the exams didn’t know about the experiment. In a way, participants in the study didn’t know they were participating in the study, but we’ve got necessary permissions to go ahead with that”, Scarfe claims.

Enlarge (credit: Diamond Shruumz)

After weeks of reports of severe illnesses across the country, the maker of Diamond Shruumz microdosing chocolates, gummies, and candy cones has finally issued a recall. It covers all lots and all flavors of all the brand's products.

The illnesses have been marked by several severe symptoms, which notably include seizures, loss of consciousness, and the need for intubation and intensive care. To date, there have been 39 people sickened, including 23 hospitalizations across 20 states, according to the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The FDA first issued a warning on the brand's chocolate bars on June 7, when there were reports of eight cases, including six hospitalizations, in four states.

Diamond Shruumz's parent company, Prophet Premium Blends, said in the recall notice that it had received only two complaints about the products to date and, upon receiving those complaints, reviewed recent laboratory analyses (Certificates of Analysis) of its products. According to the company, those CoAs noted "higher than normal amounts of muscimol," which is one of two key compounds found in hallucinogenic Amanita mushrooms. Muscimol "could be a potential cause of symptoms consistent with those observed in persons who became ill after eating Diamond Shruumz products," the company said in the recall notice.

Enlarge (credit: mitay20 | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

The Internet Archive (IA) went before a three-judge panel Friday to defend its open library's controlled digital lending (CDL) practices after book publishers last year won a lawsuit claiming that the archive's lending violated copyright law.

In the weeks ahead of IA's efforts to appeal that ruling, IA was forced to remove 500,000 books from its collection, shocking users. In an open letter to publishers, more than 30,000 readers, researchers, and authors begged for access to the books to be restored in the open library, claiming the takedowns dealt "a serious blow to lower-income families, people with disabilities, rural communities, and LGBTQ+ people, among many others," who may not have access to a local library or feel "safe accessing the information they need in public."

During a press briefing following arguments in court Friday, IA founder Brewster Kahle said that "those voices weren't being heard." Judges appeared primarily focused on understanding how IA's digital lending potentially hurts publishers' profits in the ebook licensing market, rather than on how publishers' costly ebook licensing potentially harms readers.

Enlarge / The flight hardware core stage for Europe’s new rocket, Ariane 6, is moved onto the launch pad for the first time. A launch is due to occur on July 9, 2024. (credit: ESA-M. Pédoussaut)

In a shocking announcement this week, the European intergovernmental organization responsible for launching and operating the continent's weather satellites has pulled its next mission off a future launch of Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket. Instead, the valuable MTG-S1 satellite will now reach geostationary orbit on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket in 2025.

“This decision was driven by exceptional circumstances” said Phil Evans, director general of the organization Eumetsat. “It does not compromise our standard policy of supporting European partners, and we look forward to a successful SpaceX launch for this masterpiece of European technology.”

The decision, taken at a council meeting of Eumetsat's 30 member nations on Wednesday and Thursday, comes less than two weeks before the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket, scheduled for July 9.

Enlarge (credit: tigerstrawberry)

One of the most striking things about the explosion of renewable power that's happening in the US is that much of it is going on in states governed by politicians who don't believe in the problem wind and solar are meant to address. Acceptance of the evidence for climate change tends to be lowest among Republicans, yet many of the states where renewable power has boomed—wind in Wyoming and Iowa, solar in Texas—are governed by Republicans.

That's partly because, up until about 2020, there was a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of expanding wind and solar power, with support above 75 percent among both parties. Since then, however, support among Republicans has dropped dramatically, approaching 50 percent, according to polling data released this week.

Renewables enjoyed solid Republican support until recently. (credit: Pew Research)

To a certain extent, none of this should be surprising. The current leader of the Republican Party has been saying that wind turbines cause cancer and offshore wind is killing whales. And conservative-backed groups have been spreading misinformation in order to drum up opposition to solar power facilities.

Enlarge / Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor arrive for President Joe Biden's State of the Union address on March 7, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

The US Supreme Court today overturned the 40-year-old Chevron precedent in a ruling that limits the regulatory authority of federal agencies. The 6-3 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo will make it harder for agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission and Environmental Protection Agency to issue regulations without explicit authorization from Congress.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion of the court and was joined by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. Justice Elena Kagan filed a dissenting opinion that was joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Chevron gave agencies leeway to interpret ambiguous laws as long as the agency's conclusion was reasonable. But the Roberts court said that a "statutory ambiguity does not necessarily reflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to a court, resolve the resulting interpretive question."

Enlarge (credit: CFOTO / Contributor | Future Publishing)

Tesla has denied that "any defect in the Autopilot system caused or contributed" to the 2022 death of a Tesla employee, Hans von Ohain, whose Tesla Model 3 burst into flames after the car suddenly veered off a road and crashed into a tree.

"Von Ohain fought to regain control of the vehicle, but, to his surprise and horror, his efforts were prevented by the vehicle's Autopilot features, leaving him helpless and unable to steer back on course," a wrongful death lawsuit filed in May by von Ohain's wife, Nora Bass, alleged.

In Tesla's response to the lawsuit filed Thursday, the carmaker also denied that the 2021 vehicle had any defects, contradicting Bass' claims that Tesla knew that the car should have been recalled but chose to "prioritize profits over consumer safety."

Enlarge / EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said the bloc was looking into practices that could in effect lead to a company controlling a greater share of the AI market. (credit: Thierry Monasse/Getty Images)

Brussels is preparing for an antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into OpenAI, after the European Union decided not to proceed with a merger review into the most powerful alliance in the artificial intelligence industry.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, began to explore a review under merger control rules in January, but on Friday announced that it would not proceed due to a lack of evidence that Microsoft controls OpenAI.

However, the commission said it was now exploring the possibility of a traditional antitrust investigation into whether the tie-up between the world’s most valuable listed company and the best-funded AI start-up was harming competition in the fast-growing market.

Enlarge / Bees fly to their hive. (credit: Getty | Federico Gambarini)

In what may be the biological equivalent to getting struck by lightning, a very unlucky man in the Philadelphia area took a very rare bee sting directly to the eyeball—and things went badly from there.

As one might expect, the 55-year-old went to the emergency department, where doctors tried to extract the injurious insect's stinger from the man's right eye. But it soon became apparent that they didn't get it all.

Two days after the bee attack, the man went to the Wills Eye Hospital with worsening vision and pain in the pierced eye. At that point, the vision in his right eye had deteriorated to only being able to count fingers. The eye was swollen, inflamed, and bloodshot. Blood was visibly pooling at the bottom of his iris. And right at the border between the man's cornea and the white of his eye, ophthalmologists spotted the problem: a teeny spear-like fragment of the bee's stinger still stuck in place.

It's safe to say that Marvel Studios' Deadpool and Wolverine is one of the most hotly anticipated releases of the summer. We've had a teaser and full trailer, and now the studio has released a second one-minute trailer with a surprise appearance bound to delight X-Men fans everywhere. It's none other than Sabretooth, played by the same actor, Tyler Mane, who portrayed the character in 2000's X-Men. And he's got a score to settle with Wolverine.

As previously reported, Ryan Reynolds found the perfect fit with 2016's Deadpool, starring as Wade Wilson, a former Canadian special forces operative (dishonorably discharged) who develops regenerative healing powers that heal his cancer but leave him permanently disfigured with scars all over his body. Wade decides to become a masked vigilante, turning down an invitation to join the X-Men and abandon his bad-boy ways. The first Deadpool was a big hit, racking up $782 million at the global box office, critical praise, and a couple of Golden Globe nominations for good measure. Deadpool 2 was released in 2018 and was just as successful.

Deadpool and Wolverine reunites Reynolds with many familiar faces from the first two films. Morena Baccarin is back as Wade's girlfriend Vanessa, along with Leslie Uggams as Blind Al; Karan Soni as Wade's personal chauffeur, taxi driver Dopinder; Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead; Stefan Kapičić as the voice of Colossus; Shioli Kutsuna as Negasonic's mutant girlfriend, Yukio; Randal Reeder as Buck; and Lewis Tan as X-Force member Shatterstar.

Enlarge / A movable robotic face covered with living human skin cells. (credit: Takeuchi et al.)

In a new study, researchers from the University of Tokyo, Harvard University, and the International Research Center for Neurointelligence have unveiled a technique for creating lifelike robotic skin using living human cells. As a proof of concept, the team engineered a small robotic face capable of smiling, covered entirely with a layer of pink living tissue.

The researchers note that using living skin tissue as a robot covering has benefits, as it's flexible enough to convey emotions and can potentially repair itself. "As the role of robots continues to evolve, the materials used to cover social robots need to exhibit lifelike functions, such as self-healing," wrote the researchers in the study.

Shoji Takeuchi, Michio Kawai, Minghao Nie, and Haruka Oda authored the study, titled "Perforation-type anchors inspired by skin ligament for robotic face covered with living skin," which is due for July publication in Cell Reports Physical Science. We learned of the study from a report published earlier this week by New Scientist.

Enlarge / The peloton passing through a sunflowers field during the stage eight of the 110th Tour de France in 2023. (credit: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Most readers probably did not anticipate seeing a Tour de France preview on Ars Technica, but here we are. Cycling is a huge passion of mine and several other staffers, and this year, a ton of intrigue surrounds the race, which has a fantastic route. So we're here to spread Tour fever.

The three-week race starts Saturday, paradoxically in the Italian region of Tuscany. Usually, there is a dominant rider, or at most two, and a clear sense of who is likely to win the demanding race. But this year, due to rider schedules, a terrible crash in early April, and new contenders, there is more uncertainty than usual. A solid case could be made for at least four riders to win this year's Tour de France.

For people who aren't fans of pro road cycling—which has to be at least 99 percent of the United States—there's a great series on Netflix called Unchained to help get you up to speed. The second season, just released, covers last year's Tour de France and introduces you to most of the protagonists in the forthcoming edition. If this article sparks your interest, I recommend checking it out.

Enlarge / SpaceX's 10th Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into orbit with a new US government weather satellite. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.50 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX launched its 10th Falcon Heavy rocket this week with the GOES-U weather satellite for NOAA, and this one was a beauty. The late afternoon timing of the launch and atmospheric conditions made for great photography. Falcon Heavy has become a trusted rocket for the US government, and its next flight in October will deploy NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft on the way to explore one of Jupiter's enigmatic icy moons.

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.

Sir Peter Beck dishes on launch business. Ars spoke with the recently knighted Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, on where his scrappy company fits in a global launch marketplace dominated by SpaceX. Rocket Lab racked up the third-most number of orbital launches by any US launch company (it's headquartered in California but primarily assembles and launches rockets in New Zealand). SpaceX's rideshare launch business with the Falcon 9 rocket is putting immense pressure on small launch companies like Rocket Lab. However, Beck argues his Electron rocket is a bespoke solution for customers desiring to put their satellite in a specific place at a specific time, a luxury they can't count on with a SpaceX rideshare.

Enlarge / Stephen Ubl, president and chief executive officer of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), speaks during a Bloomberg Live discussion in Washington, DC, in 2017. (credit: Getty | Andrew Harrer)

After a series of decisive court losses, the pharmaceutical industry appears to be taking its fight against Medicare drug price negotiations directly to the people—and the White House is not impressed.

This week, the high-powered industry group PhRMA (the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) released two eye-catching attacks on federal efforts to lower America's singularly astronomical drug prices. In a press release Tuesday, PhRMA announced an analysis suggesting that the Medicare drug price negotiations—part of the Biden administration's 2022 Inflation Reduction Act—could actually cost some seniors and people with disabilities slightly more in out-of-pocket costs. The analysis, however, relies on a key—and questionable—assumption that the federal government will set price limits using the highest possible estimate for maximum fair prices in 2026.

Milliman, the consulting firm PhRMA commissioned to do the study, cautioned that the actual prices "will certainly vary due to differences in unit cost and utilization trend, 2026 benefit designs, and actual 2026 maximum fair prices."

Enlarge / Ozone-producing chemicals come from a variety of sources and don't respect state borders. (credit: John Edward Linden)

On Tuesday, a slim majority of the US Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling that places a stay on rules developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, meant to limit the spread of ozone-generating pollutants across state lines. Because it was handled on an emergency basis, the decision was made without any evidence gathered during lower court proceedings. As a result, the justices don't even agree on the nature of the regulations the EPA has proposed, leading to a blistering dissent from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was joined by the court's three liberal justices.

Bad neighbors

The rule at issue arose from the EPA's regular process of revisiting existing limits in light of changes in public health information and pollution-control technology. In this case, the focus was on ozone-producing chemicals; in 2015, the EPA chose to lower the limit on ozone from 75 to 70 parts per billion.

Once these standards are set, states are required to submit plans that fulfill two purposes. One is to limit pollution within the state itself; the second involves pollution controls that will limit the exposure in states that are downwind of the pollution sources. The EPA is required to evaluate these plans; if they are deemed insufficient, the EPA can require the states to follow a federal plan devised by the EPA.

Enlarge / The logo for PaLM 2, a Google large language model. (credit: Google)

Google announced today that it has added support for 110 new languages to Google Translate, nearly doubling the number of languages that can be translated.

The company used the PaLM 2 large language model to facilitate these additions.

In a blog post, Google Senior Software Engineer Isaac Caswell claimed that the newly added languages are spoken by more than 614 million people, or about 8 percent of the global population.

Enlarge / An illustration created by OpenAI. (credit: OpenAI)

On Thursday, OpenAI researchers unveiled CriticGPT, a new AI model designed to identify mistakes in code generated by ChatGPT. It aims to enhance the process of making AI systems behave in ways humans want (called "alignment") through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which helps human reviewers make large language model (LLM) outputs more accurate.

As outlined in a new research paper called "LLM Critics Help Catch LLM Bugs," OpenAI created CriticGPT to act as an AI assistant to human trainers who review programming code generated by the ChatGPT AI assistant. CriticGPT—based on the GPT-4 family of LLMS—analyzes the code and points out potential errors, making it easier for humans to spot mistakes that might otherwise go unnoticed. The researchers trained CriticGPT on a dataset of code samples with intentionally inserted bugs, teaching it to recognize and flag various coding errors.

The development of CriticGPT involved training the model on a large number of inputs containing deliberately inserted mistakes. Human trainers were asked to modify code written by ChatGPT, introducing errors and then providing example feedback as if they had discovered these bugs. This process allowed the model to learn how to identify and critique various types of coding errors.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Mac malware that steals passwords, cryptocurrency wallets, and other sensitive data has been spotted circulating through Google ads, making it at least the second time in as many months the widely used ad platform has been abused to infect web surfers.

The latest ads, found by security firm Malwarebytes on Monday, promote Mac versions of Arc, an unconventional browser that became generally available for the macOS platform last July. The listing promises users a “calmer, more personal” experience that includes less clutter and distractions, a marketing message that mimics the one communicated by The Browser Company, the startup maker of Arc.

When verified isn’t verified

According to Malwarebytes, clicking on the ads redirected web surfers to arc-download[.]com, a completely fake Arc browser page that looks nearly identical to the real one.

Enlarge / A person is holding a package from Temu. (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Temu—the Chinese shopping app that has rapidly grown so popular in the US that even Amazon is reportedly trying to copy it—is "dangerous malware" that's secretly monetizing a broad swath of unauthorized user data, Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Griffin cited research and media reports exposing Temu's allegedly nefarious design, which "purposely" allows Temu to "gain unrestricted access to a user's phone operating system, including, but not limited to, a user's camera, specific location, contacts, text messages, documents, and other applications."

"Temu is designed to make this expansive access undetected, even by sophisticated users," Griffin's complaint said. "Once installed, Temu can recompile itself and change properties, including overriding the data privacy settings users believe they have in place."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 2017, Kathleen Odean thought she had found the last cell phone plan she would ever need. T-Mobile was offering a mobile service for people age 55 and over, with an "Un-contract" guarantee that it would never raise prices.

"I thought, wow, I can live out my days with this fixed plan," Odean, a Rhode Island resident who is now 70 years old, told Ars last week. Odean and her husband switched from Verizon to get the T-Mobile deal, which cost $60 a month for two lines.

Despite its Un-contract promise, T-Mobile in May 2024 announced a price hike for customers like Odean who thought they had a lifetime price guarantee on plans such as T-Mobile One, Magenta, and Simple Choice. The $5-per-line price hike will raise her and her husband's monthly bill from $60 to $70, Odean said.

Enlarge / Illustration of the SpaceX Dragon XL as it is deployed from the Falcon Heavy's second stage in high Earth orbit on its way to the Gateway in lunar orbit. (credit: SpaceX)

NASA has awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to develop a "US Deorbit Vehicle." This spacecraft will dock to the International Space Station in 2029 and then ensure the large facility makes a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before splashing into the ocean in 2030.

"Selecting a US Deorbit Vehicle for the International Space Station will help NASA and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of station operations," said Ken Bowersox, NASA's associate administrator for Space Operations, in a statement. "This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth."

NASA has a couple of reasons for bringing the space station's life to a close in 2030. Foremost among these is that the station is aging. Parts of it are now a quarter of a century old. There are cracks on the Russian segment of the space station that are spreading. Although the station could likely be maintained beyond 2030, it would require increasing amounts of crew time to keep flying the station safely.

Enlarge / Grace Bisch holds a picture of stepson Eddie Bisch who died as a result of an overdose on outside of the U.S. Supreme Court on December 4, 2023 in Washington, DC. The Supreme Court heard arguments regarding a nationwide settlement with Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. (credit: Getty | Michael A. McCoy)

In a 5-4 ruling, the US Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an opioid settlement plan worth billions over the deal's stipulation that the billionaire Sackler family would get lifetime immunity from further opioid-related litigation.

While the ruling may offer long-sought schadenfreude over the deeply despised Sackler family, it is a heavy blow to the over 100,000 people affected by opioid epidemic who could have seen compensation from the deal. With the high court's ruling, the settlement talks will have to begin again, with the outcome and possible payouts to plaintiffs uncertain.

Between 1999 and 2019, as nearly 250,000 Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses, members of the Sackler family siphoned approximately $11 billion from the pharmaceutical company they ran, Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, a highly addictive and falsely marketed pain medication, according to the high court's ruling. In 2007, amid the nationwide epidemic of opioid addiction and overdoses, Purdue affiliates pleaded guilty in federal court to falsely branding OxyContin as less addictive and less abusive than other pain medications. Out of fear of future litigation, the Sacklers began a "milking program," the high court noted, draining Purdue of roughly 75 percent of its assets.

Enlarge / Apple has a lot to say about the third-party battery market in "Longevity, by Design," specifically about how many batteries fail to meet testing standards. (credit: Apple)

Earlier this week, Apple published a whitepaper titled "Longevity by Design." The purpose, Apple says, is to explain "the company's principles for designing for longevity—a careful balance between product durability and repairability." It also contains some notable changes to Apple's parts pairing and repair technology.

Here is a summary of the action items in the document's 24 pages:

• The self-service diagnostics tool that arrived in the US last year is now available in 32 European countries.
• True Tone, the color-balancing screen feature, can soon be activated on third-party screens, "to the best performance that can be provided."
• Battery statistics, like maximum capacity and cycle count, will be available "later in 2024" for third-party batteries, with a notice that "Apple cannot verify the information presented."
• Used Apple parts, transferred from one to another, will be "as easy to use as new Apple parts" in select products "later this year."
• Parts for "most repairs" from Apple's Self Service Repair program will no longer require a device serial number to order.

Changes timed to "later this year" may well indicate their arrival with iOS 18 or a subsequent update.

Enlarge / Statues depicting the high dignitary Nefer and his wife (Abusir, Egypt). (credit: Martin Frouz/Czech Institute of Egyptology/Charles University.)

Repetitive stress injuries are a common feature of modern life, especially for office workers who spend a good chunk of their working days at a desk typing on a computer. Apparently, scribes in ancient Egypt suffered from their own distinctive repetitive stress injuries, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports that provides fresh insights into how these scribes lived and worked during the third millennium BCE.

Egyptian kings, royal family members, and other elite people from this Fifth Dynasty era were buried in tombs in the acropolis at Abusir rather than at neighboring Giza, which by then had largely filled up thanks to all the activity during the Fourth Dynasty. The Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University in Prague has been conducting research at the site since 1960, leading to the discovery of nearly 200 tombs dating back to the Old Kingdom (between 2700 and 2180 BCE). The first human skeletons were excavated in 1976, and there are currently 221 Old Kingdom skeletons in the collection, 102 of which are male.

Scientists started looking into the health status and markers for specific activities in 2009, but it wasn't until quite recently that there were enough skeletons to conduct a comprehensive study. That's what Petra Brukner Havelková of Charles University and the National Museum in Prague, Czech Republic, and colleagues set out to do, analyzing the remains of 69 adult males of different social status and different ages at which they died.

Enlarge / Al Michaels looks on prior to the game between the Minnesota Vikings and Philadelphia Eagles at Lincoln Financial Field on September 14, 2023, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, NBC announced plans to use an AI-generated clone of famous sports commentator Al Michaels' voice to narrate daily streaming video recaps of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, which start on July 26. The AI-powered narration will feature in "Your Daily Olympic Recap on Peacock," NBC's streaming service. But this new, high-profile use of voice cloning worries critics, who say the technology may muscle out upcoming sports commentators by keeping old personas around forever.

NBC says it has created a "high-quality AI re-creation" of Michaels' voice, trained on Michaels' past NBC appearances to capture his distinctive delivery style.

The veteran broadcaster, revered in the sports commentator world for his iconic "Do you believe in miracles? Yes!" call during the 1980 Winter Olympics, has been covering sports on TV since 1971, including a high-profile run of play-by-play coverage of NFL football games for both ABC and NBC since the 1980s. NBC dropped him from NFL coverage in 2023, however, possibly due to his age.

Enlarge / Upper left: a reconstruction of Diadcetes. Below: false color images of its foot and tail prints. Right: the section of the tail that left the print. (credit: Voigt et. al./Urweltmuseum GEOSKOP.)

Their feet left copious traces in muddy Permian floodplains, leaving tracks scattered across ancient sediments. But in one slab of such trackways, scientists uncovered something more: the trace of an animal’s tail as it dragged across the ground. Strikingly, these tail prints come complete with scale impressions—at 300 million years old, they’re among the earliest scale impressions we have.

This may seem small, but it shows us that some of the hardened skin structures necessary for our ancestors to survive on land had evolved much earlier than previously suspected. A paper published in Biology Letters this past May describes this discovery in detail.

A rare find

The particular slab holding these traces was discovered in 2020 at the Piaskowiec Czerwony quarry in Poland. Mining had stopped to enable paleontologists to search the red sandstone rocks for fossils. Gabriela Calábková described climbing upon “a huge pile of rubble” only to discover a sizable slab of fossil tracks at the very top. There, among one set of footprints, was something new.

Enlarge (credit: setthaphat dodchai via Getty)

Last December, a joint survey by The Economist and the polling organization YouGov claimed to reveal a striking antisemitic streak among America’s youth. One in five young Americans thinks the Holocaust is a myth, according to the poll. And 28 percent think Jews in America have too much power.

“Our new poll makes alarming reading,” declared The Economist. The results inflamed discourse over the Israel-Hamas war on social media and made international news.

There was one problem: The survey was almost certainly wrong. The Economist/YouGov poll was a so-called opt-in poll, in which pollsters often pay people they've recruited online to take surveys. According to a recent analysis from the nonprofit Pew Research Center, such polls are plagued by “bogus respondents” who answer questions disingenuously for fun, or to get through the survey as quickly as possible to earn their reward.

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket on the launch pad before liftoff in January. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket will take off in September with a dummy payload in place of Sierra Space's Dream Chaser spaceplane, preserving a chance for ULA to begin launching US military satellites on the new rocket by the end of the year, officials announced Wednesday.

Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, announced the change in flight plan for the second Vulcan rocket in a conference call with reporters. There was little hope Sierra Space's Dream Chaser would be ready to make its first resupply run to the International Space Station before the end of the summer.

Dream Chaser had been booked to launch on the second test flight of ULA's Vulcan rocket for the last five years. With the near-flawless inaugural flight of Vulcan in January and a successful second flight later this year, ULA's Vulcan will be certified by the US Space Force to loft the military's most sensitive national security satellites into orbit.

Enlarge

A critical vulnerability recently discovered in a widely used piece of software is putting huge swaths of the Internet at risk of devastating hacks, and attackers have already begun actively trying to exploit it in real-world attacks, researchers warn.

The software, known as MOVEit and sold by Progress Software, allows enterprises to transfer and manage files using various specifications, including SFTP, SCP, and HTTP protocols and in ways that comply with regulations mandated under PCI and HIPAA. At the time this post went live, Internet scans indicated it was installed inside almost 1,800 networks around the world, with the biggest number in the US. A separate scan performed Tuesday by security firm Censys found 2,700 such instances.

Causing mayhem with a null string

Last year, a critical MOVEit vulnerability led to the compromise of more than 2,300 organizations, including Shell, British Airways, the US Department of Energy, and Ontario’s government birth registry, BORN Ontario, the latter of which led to the compromise of information for 3.4 million people.

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  The streaming-only Xbox would have looked like a smaller, squarer relative of the Series S. [credit: Microsoft ]

Microsoft's mid-generation plans for the Xbox Series S and X consoles looked a whole lot different a couple of years ago than it does now. A leaked slide deck from the FTC v. Microsoft case last year outlined detailed plans for a spruced up Series S, an overhauled Series X, and even a redesigned controller. Another part of that roadmap included a streaming-only version of the Xbox, codenamed Keystone, that was designed to connect to Microsoft's Xbox Cloud Gaming servers rather than rendering games locally.

Microsoft has talked openly about this version of the Xbox before. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer told The Verge that the Keystone console was designed and fully functional, but that it wasn't launched because Microsoft had a hard time getting the price down low enough that it made sense next to the $299 Series S (which already occasionally goes on sale in the $200 to $250 range).

Enlarge / A Diamond Shruumz chocolate bar, which comes in a variety of flavors. (credit: diamondshruumz.com)

The US Food and Drug Administration has identified a synthetic psychedelic compound as well as compounds from a potentially toxic plant in the Diamond Shruumz-brand microdosing candies linked to a growing number of severe illnesses nationwide that have included seizures, intubation, and admissions to intensive care units.

As of June 25, the case total has grown to 39, including 23 hospitalizations, across 20 states, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

It remains unclear what is in the candies and what may be causing the severe illnesses. Diamond Shruumz does not provide a full list of ingredients. The term "microdosing" and other marketing used by Diamond Shruumz suggests the candies contain a psychedelic compound, but the company does not name any. To figure it out, the FDA has been analyzing multiple samples of Diamond Shruumz-brand candies, including chocolates, gummies, and candy cones. On Tuesday, the FDA reported finding the synthetic psychedelic compound 4-AcO-DMT in the company's Dark Chocolate Bar and its Birthday Cake Chocolate Bar.

Enlarge / Top row: individual steps in the reaction process. Bottom row: cartoon diagram of the top, showing the position of each DNA and RNA strand. (credit: Hiraizumi, et. al.)

While CRISPR is probably the most prominent gene-editing technology, there are others, some developed before and since. And people have been developing CRISPR variants to perform more specialized functions, like altering specific bases. In all of these cases, researchers are trying to balance a number of competing factors: convenience, flexibility, specificity and precision for the editing, low error rates, and so on.

So, having additional options for editing can be a good thing, enabling new ways of balancing those different needs. On Wednesday, a pair of papers in Nature describe a DNA-based parasite that moves itself around bacterial genomes through a mechanism that hasn't been previously described. It's nowhere near ready for use in humans, but it may have some distinctive features that make it worth further development.

Going mobile

Mobile genetic elements, commonly called transposons, are quite common in many species—they make up nearly half the sequences in the human genome, for example. They are indeed mobile, showing up in new locations throughout the genome, sometimes by cutting themselves out and hopping to new locations, other times by sending a copy out to a new place in the genome. For any of this to work, they need to have an enzyme that cuts DNA and specifically recognizes the right transposon sequence to insert into the cut.

Enlarge (credit: Christopher Furlong / Staff | Getty Images News)

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court tossed out claims that the Biden administration coerced social media platforms into censoring users by removing COVID-19 and election-related content.

Complaints alleging that high-ranking government officials were censoring conservatives had previously convinced a lower court to order an injunction limiting the Biden administration's contacts with platforms. But now that injunction has been overturned, re-opening lines of communication just ahead of the 2024 elections—when officials will once again be closely monitoring the spread of misinformation online targeted at voters.

In a 6–3 vote, the majority ruled that none of the plaintiffs suing—including five social media users and Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri—had standing. They had alleged that the government had "pressured the platforms to censor their speech in violation of the First Amendment," demanding an injunction to stop any future censorship.

Enlarge / The first stage of Ariane 6 rocket Europe's Spaceport in Kourou in the French overseas department of Guiana, on March 26, 2024. (credit: LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images)

There was a panel discussion at a space conference in Singapore 11 years ago that has since become legendary in certain corners of the space industry for what it reveals about European attitudes toward upstart SpaceX.

The panel included representatives from a handful of launch enterprises, including Europe-based Arianespace, and the US launch company SpaceX. At one point during the discussion, the host asked the Arianespace representative—its chief of sales in Southeast Asia, Richard Bowles—how the institutional European company would respond to SpaceX's promise of lower launch costs and reuse with the Falcon 9 rocket.

"What I'm discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream," Bowles replied. "I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. Personally, I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? My answer to respond to a dream is, first of all, you don't wake people up."

Enlarge / A Tesla Cybertruck at the Viva Technology show at Parc des Expositions Porte de Versailles on May 24, 2024 in Paris, France. (credit: Getty Images | Chesnot )

Tesla has announced two more recalls of the Cybertruck, both of which affect over 11,000 vehicles produced since the car first became available late last year. Cybertruck owners will need to bring their cars in for service because of faulty windshield wiper motors and a cosmetic piece that could come off the vehicle while it's being driven.

Tesla previously recalled the Cybertruck in April over a faulty accelerator pedal assembly and in January for a software problem in which the font size of brake, park, and antilock brake system visual warning indicators were too small. The January recall also affected Tesla Model 3, S, X, and Y.

A new recall notice says, "the front windshield wiper motor controller may stop functioning due to electrical overstress to the gate driver component. A non-functioning windshield wiper may reduce visibility in certain operating conditions, which may increase the risk of a collision."

Enlarge / A screen capture from the partially AI-generated Toys "R" Us brand film created using Sora. (credit: Toys R Us)

On Monday, Toys "R" Us announced that it had partnered with an ad agency called Native Foreign to create what it calls "the first-ever brand film using OpenAI's new text-to-video tool, Sora." OpenAI debuted Sora in February, but the video synthesis tool has not yet become available to the public. The brand film tells the story of Toys "R" Us founder Charles Lazarus using AI-generated video clips.

"We are thrilled to partner with Native Foreign to push the boundaries of Sora, a groundbreaking new technology from OpenAI that's gaining global attention," wrote Toys "R" Us on its website. "Sora can create up to one-minute-long videos featuring realistic scenes and multiple characters, all generated from text instruction. Imagine the excitement of creating a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of Toys "R" Us, and envisioning his dreams for our iconic brand and beloved mascot Geoffrey the Giraffe in the early 1930s."

The company says that The Origin of Toys "R" Us commercial was co-produced by Toys "R" Us Studios President Kim Miller Olko as executive producer and Native Foreign's Nik Kleverov as director. "Charles Lazarus was a visionary ahead of his time, and we wanted to honor his legacy with a spot using the most cutting-edge technology available," Miller Olko said in a statement.

Enlarge / Don't get your hopes up—this iOS version of Doom was ported from open source code, not run via a classic PC emulator. (credit: Tom Kidd)

Earlier this year, Apple started officially allowing "retro game emulators" on the iOS App Store without the need for cumbersome jailbreaking or sideloading. But if you want to emulate retro PC games on your iOS device, you are apparently still out of luck.

In a recent blog update, iDOS developer Chaoji Li said that the latest version of the DOSBox-based MS-DOS emulator was finally rejected from the iOS App Store this month after a lengthy, two-month review process:

They have decided that iDOS is not a retro game console, so the new rule is not applicable. They suggested I make changes and resubmit for review, but when I asked what changes I should make to be compliant, they had no idea, nor when I asked what a retro game console is. It's still the same old unreasonable answer along the line of "we know it when we see it."

The developer of iOS Virtual Machine app UTM told a similar tale of App Store rejection on social media. The reported two-month review process for the UTM app ended with "the App Store review board determin[ing] that 'PC is not a console' regardless of the fact that there are retro Windows/DOS games fo[r] the PC that UTM SE can be useful in running," the developer said.

Enlarge (credit: Rivian)

Volkswagen is committing $5 billion to upstart EV company Rivian, with $1 billion in cash upfront and $4 billion over time. The companies aim to use this joint venture to deliver new vehicles "in the second half of the decade," according to the announcement, and the cash will likely help push along Rivian's next generation of vehicles, including more affordable models.

Oliver Blume, left, CEO of Volkswagen Group, and RJ Scaringe, founder and CEO of Rivian. (credit: Rivian)

Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that the partnership "brings Rivian’s software and zonal electronics platform to a broader market through Volkswagen Group’s global reach and scale." VW Group, which also controls Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, and Ducati, among others, has a lot to gain from working with Rivian, particularly when it comes to software and ride control. Ars and most other reviewers have been impressed by Rivian's drive engineering and display software on the R1T truck, R1S SUV, and the second generations of them both, which majorly reworked the underpinnings and offerings, largely through design and software choices.

Volkswagen's recent software moves have been on an opposing trajectory. The Group's 2019 moves to align all its brands' software under one division, Cariad, with three platforms developed at once, has led to massive leadership shake-ups and restarts. We were not impressed with the ID.4's infotainment system in 2021, and further bugs in both system and screen software plagued the car, undermining what was otherwise regarded as a good wheels-on-road experience.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty)

YouTube is in talks with record labels to license their songs for artificial intelligence tools that clone popular artists’ music, hoping to win over a skeptical industry with upfront payments.

The Google-owned video site needs labels’ content to legally train AI song generators, as it prepares to launch new tools this year, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The company has recently offered lump sums of cash to the major labels—Sony, Warner, and Universal—to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software, according to several people briefed on the talks.

Enlarge / A mysterious assassin is targeting Jedi masters in The Acolyte. (credit: Disney+)

The Star Wars franchise is creeping up on the 50-year mark for the original 1977 film that started it all, and Disney+ has successfully kept things fresh with its line of live-action Star Wars spinoff series. The Mandalorian and Andor were both unquestionably popular and critical successes, while The Book of Boba Fett ultimately proved disappointing, focusing less on our favorite bounty hunter and more on setting up the third season of The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka fell somewhere in between, bolstered by strong performances from its leads but often criticized for sluggish pacing.

It's unclear where the latest addition to the TV franchise, The Acolyte, will ultimately fall, but the first five episodes aired thus far bode well for its place in the growing canon. The series eschews the usual Star Wars space-battle fare for a quieter, space Western detective story—who is killing the great Jedi masters of the galaxy?—with highly choreographed fight scenes that draw heavily from the martial arts. And like its predecessors, The Acolyte is recognizably Star Wars. Yet it also boasts a unique aesthetic style that is very much its own.

(Spoilers below for episodes 1 through 5 of The Acolyte.)

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Researchers claim to have developed a new way to run AI language models more efficiently by eliminating matrix multiplication from the process. This fundamentally redesigns neural network operations that are currently accelerated by GPU chips. The findings, detailed in a recent preprint paper from researchers at the University of California Santa Cruz, UC Davis, LuxiTech, and Soochow University, could have deep implications for the environmental impact and operational costs of AI systems.

Matrix multiplication (often abbreviated to "MatMul") is at the center of most neural network computational tasks today, and GPUs are particularly good at executing the math quickly because they can perform large numbers of multiplication operations in parallel. That ability momentarily made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world last week; the company currently holds an estimated 98 percent market share for data center GPUs, which are commonly used to power AI systems like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

In the new paper, titled "Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling," the researchers describe creating a custom 2.7 billion parameter model without using MatMul that features similar performance to conventional large language models (LLMs). They also demonstrate running a 1.3 billion parameter model at 23.8 tokens per second on a GPU that was accelerated by a custom-programmed FPGA chip that uses about 13 watts of power (not counting the GPU's power draw). The implication is that a more efficient FPGA "paves the way for the development of more efficient and hardware-friendly architectures," they write.

Enlarge / The app lets you invoke ChatGPT from anywhere in the system with a keyboard shortcut, Spotlight-style. (credit: Samuel Axon)

OpenAI's official ChatGPT app for macOS is now available to all users for the first time, provided they're running macOS Sonoma or later.

It was previously being rolled out gradually to paid subscribers to ChatGPT's Plus premium plan.

The ChatGPT Mac app mostly acts as a desktop window version of the web app, allowing you to carry on back-and-forth prompt-and-response conversations. You can select between the GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o models. It also supports the more specialized GPTs available in the web version, including the DALL-E image generator and custom GPTs.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | RJ Sangosti)

After an MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder dramatically failed to impress Food and Drug Administration advisers earlier this month, researchers are moving forward with another psychedelic—a slow-release oral dose of the hallucinogenic drug ketamine—as a therapy for treatment-resistant depression.

In a mid-stage, randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial, researchers tested slow-release ketamine pills, taken twice weekly. The trial, sponsored by New Zealand-based Douglas Pharmaceuticals, found ketamine to be safe compared with placebo. At the trial's highest dose, the treatment showed some efficacy against depression in patients who had previously tried an average of nearly five antidepressants without success, according to the results published Monday in Nature Medicine.

But the Phase II trial, which started with 231 participants, indicated that the pool of patients who may benefit from the treatment could be quite limited. The researchers behind the trial chose an unusual "enrichment" design to test the depression treatment. This was intended to thwart the high failure rates generally seen in trials for depression treatments, even in patients without treatment-resistant cases. But even after selecting patients who initially responded to ketamine, 59.5 percent of the enriched participants still dropped out of the trial before its completion, largely due to a lack of efficacy.

Enlarge / Painting of a gryphon, or griffin, a lion-raptor chimera from ancient folklore. (credit: Mark Witton)

The gryphon, or griffin, is a legendary creature dating back to classical antiquity, sporting the body, legs, and tail of a lion and the wings, head, and front talons of an eagle. Since the 1980s, a popular "geomyth" has spread that the griffin's unique appearance was inspired by the fossilized skeleton of a horned dinosaur known as Protoceratops. It's a fascinating and colorful story, but according to the authors of a new paper published in the journal Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, there is no hard evidence to support such a connection.

"Everything about griffin origins is consistent with their traditional interpretation as imaginary beasts, just as their appearance is entirely explained by them being [mythological] chimeras of big cats and raptorial birds," said co-author Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth. "Invoking a role for dinosaurs in griffin lore, especially species from distant lands like Protoceratops, not only introduces unnecessary complexity and inconsistencies to their origins, but also relies on interpretations and proposals that don’t withstand scrutiny.”

There are representations of griffin-like creatures in ancient Egyptian art dated to before 3000 BCE, while in ancient Greek and Roman texts the creatures were associated with gold deposits in Central Asia. By the Middle Ages, griffins were common figures in medieval iconography and in heraldry. The hippogriff named Buckbeak in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is a related mythical creature, the product of a griffin and a mare.

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Christina Koch (right) poses for a portrait with fellow Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Jessica Meir, who is inside a US spacesuit for a fit check. (credit: NASA)

Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.

Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers—Collins Aerospace—expected to back out, Ars has learned. It's a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits.

NASA's Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. "These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the ISS and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars," said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | David Ramos)

Verizon Wireless agreed to pay a $1,050,000 penalty to the US Treasury and implement a compliance plan because of a 911 outage in December 2022 that was caused by a botched update, the Federal Communications Commission announced today.

A consent decree explains that the outage was caused by "the reapplication of a known flawed security policy update file." During the outage, lasting one hour and 44 minutes, Verizon failed to deliver hundreds of 911 calls in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee, the FCC said.

"The [FCC] Enforcement Bureau takes any potential violations of the Commission's 911 rules extremely seriously. Sunny day outages, as occurred here, can be especially troubling because they occur when the public and 911 call centers least expect it," Bureau Chief Loyaan Egal said.