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“Something has gone seriously wrong,” dual-boot systems warn after Microsoft update

“Something has gone seriously wrong,” dual-boot systems warn after Microsoft update

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Last Tuesday, loads of Linux users—many running packages released as early as this year—started reporting their devices were failing to boot. Instead, they received a cryptic error message that included the phrase: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”

The cause: an update Microsoft issued as part of its monthly patch release. It was intended to close a 2-year-old vulnerability in GRUB, an open source boot loader used to start up many Linux devices. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, made it possible for hackers to bypass secure boot, the industry standard for ensuring that devices running Windows or other operating systems don’t load malicious firmware or software during the bootup process. CVE-2022-2601 was discovered in 2022, but for unclear reasons, Microsoft patched it only last Tuesday.

Multiple distros, both new and old, affected

Tuesday’s update left dual-boot devices—meaning those configured to run both Windows and Linux—no longer able to boot into the latter when Secure Boot was enforced. When users tried to load Linux, they received the message: “Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation. Something has gone seriously wrong: SBAT self-check failed: Security Policy Violation.” Almost immediately support and discussion forums lit up with ​​reports of the failure.

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Disney cancels The Acolyte after one season

Asian man in white robe with one hand extended in front of him

Enlarge / We have doubts that any amount of Force powers will bring the show back. (credit: YouTube/Disney+)

In news that will delight some and disappoint others, Disney has canceled Star Wars series The Acolyte after just one season, Deadline Hollywood reports. The eight-episode series got off to a fairly strong start, with mostly positive reviews and solid ratings, albeit lower than prior Star Wars series. But it couldn't maintain and build upon that early momentum, and given the production costs, it's not especially surprising that Disney pulled the plug.

The Acolyte arguably wrapped up its major narrative arc pretty neatly in the season finale, but it also took pains to set the stage for a possible sophomore season. In this streaming age, no series is ever guaranteed renewal. Still, it would have been nice to see what showrunner Leslye Headland had planned; when given the chance, many shows hit their stride on those second-season outings.

(Spoilers for the series below. We'll give you another heads-up when we get to major spoilers.)

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CEO of failing hospital chain got $250M amid patient deaths, layoffs, bankruptcy

Od: Beth Mole
 Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital  in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. "Ralph" refers to Steward's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht.

Enlarge / Hospital staff and community members held a protest in front of Carney Hospital in Boston on August 5 as Steward has announced it will close the hospital. "Ralph" refers to Steward's CEO, Ralph de la Torre, who owns a yacht. (credit: Getty | Suzanne Kreiter)

As the more than 30 hospitals in the Steward Health Care System scrounged for cash to cover supplies, shuttered pediatric and neonatal units, closed maternity wards, laid off hundreds of health care workers, and put patients in danger, the system paid out at least $250 million to its CEO and his companies, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

The newly revealed financial details bring yet more scrutiny to Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a Harvard University-trained cardiac surgeon who, in 2020, took over majority ownership of Steward from the private equity firm Cerberus. De la Torre and his companies were reportedly paid at least $250 million since that takeover. In May, Steward, which has hospitals in eight states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Critics—including members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)—allege that de la Torre and stripped the system's hospitals of assets, siphoned payments from them, and loaded them with debt, all while reaping huge payouts that made him obscenely wealthy.

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Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

A Mayan city in Civilization VII

Enlarge / Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It's still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before. (credit: 2K Games)

2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.

Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.

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Peter Molyneux is back with yet another new take on the “god game”

  • Welcome back to Albion. [credit: 22cans ]

If you're a gamer of a certain age, you probably have fond memories of Peter Molyneux as the mind behind ambitious games like Populous, Dungeon Keeper, and the Fable series. If you're of a slightly younger age, you probably remember him as the serial overpromiser behind Project Godus and a recent NFT game that somehow attracted $54 million in player pre-investment (it did actually launch in some form last year).

I bring up this history because, after years of keeping his head down, Molyneux made a surprise appearance at Gamescom's Opening Night Live event. He was there to introduce Masters of Albion, a title that host Geoff Keighley said Molyneux has "secretly been working on for the past three years" and which Molyneux himself describes as "an open-world god game full of combat, choices, mysteries, and story."

A short, early trailer for the game takes us back to Fable's "familiar vast world of Albion, packed with stories, quests, treasures, and monsters." There, the residents of the town of Oakridge have to work to gather and process resources by day and then defend themselves from hordes of creatures by night.

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The Great Circle is Indiana Jones for a post-Uncharted world

A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones' mind.

Enlarge / A time traveler with a flashlight would blow Indiana Jones' mind.

At first glance, Wolfenstein: The New Order developer MachineGames might seem like an awkward fit for the first (non-Lego) Indiana Jones video game since the Wii era. While there's some overlap in the over-the-top Nazi villain department, the "shoot your way through every obstacle" nature of the new Wolfenstein games doesn't seem to lend itself well to Indy's more free-wheeling, adventurous exploration style.

For the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, director Jerk Gustafsson said that going from first-person shooter to a "MachineGames adventure" style change has been a difficult tightrope walk for the developers. While the team never wanted to prevent the player from using their revolver during action scenes, there was the potential that giving a player that freedom would allow them to "just shoot their way through" in a way that's antithetical to Jones' character.

To help avoid this problem, Creative Director Alex Torvenius said most of the game has been balanced so that "it's dangerous to shoot your gun and it's dangerous to be shot at." Guns-blazing action will be a winning strategy in some in-game situations, but "[there are] many scenarios where you can go through the environment without using guns at all," he continued.

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Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity

Nvidia is ditching dedicated G-Sync modules to push back against FreeSync’s ubiquity

Enlarge (credit: Nvidia)

Back in 2013, Nvidia introduced a new technology called G-Sync to eliminate screen tearing and stuttering effects and reduce input lag when playing PC games. The company accomplished this by tying your display's refresh rate to the actual frame rate of the game you were playing, and similar variable refresh-rate (VRR) technology has become a mainstay even in budget monitors and TVs today.

The issue for Nvidia is that G-Sync isn't what has been driving most of that adoption. G-Sync has always required extra dedicated hardware inside of displays, increasing the costs for both users and monitor manufacturers. The VRR technology in most low-end to mid-range screens these days is usually some version of the royalty-free AMD FreeSync or the similar VESA Adaptive-Sync standard, both of which provide G-Sync's most important features without requiring extra hardware. Nvidia more or less acknowledged that the free-to-use, cheap-to-implement VRR technologies had won in 2019 when it announced its "G-Sync Compatible" certification tier for FreeSync monitors. The list of G-Sync Compatible screens now vastly outnumbers the list of G-Sync and G-Sync Ultimate screens.

Today, Nvidia is announcing a change that's meant to keep G-Sync alive as its own separate technology while eliminating the requirement for expensive additional hardware. Nvidia says it's partnering with chipmaker MediaTek to build G-Sync capabilities directly into scaler chips that MediaTek is creating for upcoming monitors. G-Sync modules ordinarily replace these scaler chips, but they're entirely separate boards with expensive FPGA chips and dedicated RAM.

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How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

How accurate are wearable fitness trackers? Less than you might think

Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)

Back in 2010, Gary Wolf, then the editor of Wired magazine, delivered a TED talk in Cannes called “the quantified self.” It was about what he termed a “new fad” among tech enthusiasts. These early adopters were using gadgets to monitor everything from their physiological data to their mood and even the number of nappies their children used.

Wolf acknowledged that these people were outliers—tech geeks fascinated by data—but their behavior has since permeated mainstream culture.

From the smartwatches that track our steps and heart rate, to the fitness bands that log sleep patterns and calories burned, these gadgets are now ubiquitous. Their popularity is emblematic of a modern obsession with quantification—the idea that if something isn’t logged, it doesn’t count.

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Disney abandons Disney+ arbitration defense in restaurant allergy death case

A large logo that says

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Gary Hershorn )

Disney said it is abandoning its motion to compel arbitration in a case filed by a man who alleges his wife died from anaphylaxis after a restaurant at a Disney complex failed to honor requests for allergen-free food.

Disney's motion to compel arbitration controversially cited the Disney+ streaming service's subscriber agreement, which includes a binding arbitration clause. The plaintiff's lawyer called the argument "absurd."

Disney confirmed this week that it will withdraw the motion, which it filed on May 31.

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Procreate defies AI trend, pledges “no generative AI” in its illustration app

Still of Procreate CEO James Cuda from a video posted to X.

Enlarge / Still of Procreate CEO James Cuda from a video posted to X. (credit: Procreate)

On Sunday, Procreate announced that it will not incorporate generative AI into its popular iPad illustration app. The decision comes in response to an ongoing backlash from some parts of the art community, which has raised concerns about the ethical implications and potential consequences of AI use in creative industries.

"Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things," Procreate wrote on its website. "Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future."

In a video posted on X, Procreate CEO James Cuda laid out his company's stance, saying, "We’re not going to be introducing any generative AI into our products. I don’t like what’s happening to the industry, and I don’t like what it’s doing to artists."

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Against all odds, an asteroid mining company appears to be making headway

The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing.

Enlarge / The Odin spacecraft passed vibration testing. (credit: Astro Forge)

When I first spoke with space entrepreneurs Jose Acain and Matt Gialich a little more than two years ago, I wondered whether I would ever talk to them again.

That is not meant to be offensive; rather, it is a reflection of the fact that the business they entered into—mining asteroids for platinum and other precious metals—is a perilous one. To date, NASA and other space agencies have spent billions of dollars returning a few grams of rocky material from asteroids. Humanity has never visited a metal-rich asteroid, although that will finally change with NASA's $1.4 billion Psyche mission in 2029. And so commercial asteroid mining seems like a stretch, and indeed, other similarly minded startups have come and gone.

But it turns out that I did hear from Acain and Gialich again about their asteroid mining venture, AstroForge. On Tuesday the co-founders announced that they have successfully raised $40 million in Series A funding and shared plans for their next two missions. AstroForge has now raised a total of $55 million to date.

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Russian pensioners urge Vladimir Putin to rescue Starliner astronauts

Screenshot from Putin's squad video on bringing Starliner's astronauts home.

Enlarge / Screenshot from Putin's squad video on bringing Starliner's astronauts home. (credit: Putin's Squads Z Soc Sprav)

One of the odder propaganda phenomena in Russia, of late, is seemingly spontaneous groups of elderly Russian pensioners gathering outdoors and espousing some random bit of agitprop.

From a Western perspective, these are obviously staged and hilarious to behold. For example, last year a very earnest-looking group of elderly women and a few men urged Russia to "take back Alaska" in an attempt to preserve the United States from fascism. One of the women in the video also advocated for a military alliance with Mexico, saying, "In order to effectively fight fascism, we must establish military relations with Mexico to prevent the fascism from spreading further. We must form a military alliance with Mexico."

There are entire Telegram channels devoted to these "Putin's squads" videos, and you can find them on YouTube as well. It is not clear whether these "man on the street" videos are having any impact on Russian opinion, but evidently someone in the Kremlin believes they are helping to shape domestic opinions.

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A frontrunner in Europe’s private launch industry just lost its first rocket

RFA's first stage during a four-engine test-firing in May.

Enlarge / RFA's first stage during a four-engine test-firing in May. (credit: Rocket Factory Augsburg)

The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.

The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit.

Within the last few months, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) delivered all three stages of its first rocket, named RFA One, to its launch site at SaxaVord Spaceport, located on Unst, one of the Shetland Islands and the northernmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom. The company is based in Augsburg, Germany.

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This year’s summer COVID wave is big; FDA may green-light COVID shots early

Od: Beth Mole
This year’s summer COVID wave is big; FDA may green-light COVID shots early

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Thomas Trutschel)

With the country experiencing a relatively large summer wave of COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration is considering signing off on this year's strain-matched COVID-19 vaccines as soon as this week, according to a report by CNN that cited unnamed officials familiar with the matter.

Last year, the FDA gave the green light for the 2023–2024 COVID shots on September 11, close to the peak of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in that year's summer wave. This year, the summer wave began earlier and, by some metrics, is peaking at much higher levels than in previous years.

Currently, wastewater detection of SARS-CoV-2 shows "very high" virus levels in 32 states and the District of Columbia. An additional 11 states are listed as having "high" levels. Looking at trends, the southern and western regions of the country are currently reporting SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater that rival the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 winter waves, which both peaked at the very end of December.

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Windows 0-day was exploited by North Korea to install advanced rootkit

Windows 0-day was exploited by North Korea to install advanced rootkit

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

A Windows zero-day vulnerability recently patched by Microsoft was exploited by hackers working on behalf of the North Korean government so they could install custom malware that’s exceptionally stealthy and advanced, researchers reported Monday.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38193, was one of six zero-days—meaning vulnerabilities known or actively exploited before the vendor has a patch—fixed in Microsoft’s monthly update release last Tuesday. Microsoft said the vulnerability—in a class known as a "use after free"—was located in AFD.sys, the binary file for what’s known as the ancillary function driver and the kernel entry point for the Winsock API. Microsoft warned that the zero-day could be exploited to give attackers system privileges, the maximum system rights available in Windows and a required status for executing untrusted code.

Lazarus gets access to the Windows kernel

Microsoft warned at the time that the vulnerability was being actively exploited but provided no details about who was behind the attacks or what their ultimate objective was. On Monday, researchers with Gen—the security firm that discovered the attacks and reported them privately to Microsoft—said the threat actors were part of Lazarus, the name researchers use to track a hacking outfit backed by the North Korean government.

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That book is poison: Even more Victorian covers found to contain toxic dyes

Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution

Enlarge / Composite image showing color variation of emerald green bookcloth on book spines, likely a result of air pollution (credit: Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection)

In April, the National Library of France removed four 19th century books, all published in Great Britain, from its shelves because the covers were likely laced with arsenic. The books have been placed in quarantine for further analysis to determine exactly how much arsenic is present. It's part of an ongoing global effort to test cloth-bound books from the 19th and early 20th centuries because of the common practice of using toxic dyes during that period.

Chemists from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, have also been studying Victorian books from that university's library collection in order to identify and quantify levels of poisonous substances in the covers. They reported their initial findings this week at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in Denver. Using a combination of spectroscopic techniques, they found that several books had lead concentrations more than twice the limit imposed by the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The Lipscomb effort was inspired by the University of Delaware's Poison Book Project, established in 2019 as an interdisciplinary crowdsourced collaboration between university scientists and the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. The initial objective was to analyze all the Victorian-era books in the Winterthur circulating and rare books collection for the presence of an arsenic compound called cooper acetoarsenite, an emerald green pigment that was very popular at the time to dye wallpaper, clothing, and cloth book covers. Book covers dyed with chrome yellow—favored by Vincent van Gogh—aka lead chromate, were also examined, and the project's scope has since expanded worldwide.

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AMD signs $4.9 billion deal to challenge Nvidia’s AI infrastructure lead

Visitors walk past the AMD booth at the 2024 Mobile World Congress

Enlarge (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

AMD has agreed to buy artificial intelligence infrastructure group ZT Systems in a $4.9 billion cash and stock transaction, extending a run of AI investments by the chip company as it seeks to challenge market-leader Nvidia.

The California-based group said the acquisition would help accelerate the adoption of its Instinct line of AI data center chips, which compete with Nvidia’s popular graphics processing units (GPUs).

ZT Systems, a private company founded three decades ago, builds custom computing infrastructure for the biggest AI “hyperscalers.” While the company does not disclose its customers, the hyperscalers include the likes of Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.

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Texas judge who bought Tesla stock won’t recuse himself from X v. Media Matters

A judge banging a gavel next to a scale, representing justice

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SimpleImages)

A federal judge who bought more than $15,000 worth of Tesla stock has rejected a motion that could have forced him to recuse himself from a lawsuit that Elon Musk's X Corp. filed against the nonprofit Media Matters for America.

US District Judge Reed O'Connor of the Northern District of Texas bought Tesla stock valued between $15,001 and $50,000 in 2022, a financial disclosure report shows. He was overseeing two lawsuits filed by X and recused himself from only one of the cases.

Media Matters argued in a July court filing that Tesla should be disclosed by X as an "interested party" in the case because of the public association between Musk and the Tesla brand. O'Connor rejected the Media Matters motion in a ruling issued Friday.

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Rocket Lab entered “hero mode” to finish Mars probes—now it’s up to Blue Origin

The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California.

Enlarge / The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket.

These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.

Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin's long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.

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Lufthansa is using artificial sharkskin to streamline airplanes

An outline of an airplane going through the water with its wing mimicking a shark fin

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Companies are often caught between wanting to cut emissions but also grow profits. But for airlines, these two different imperatives actually align. Cutting carbon emissions means burning less fuel and spending less money buying fuel. This is why Lufthansa has been copying a trick from the animal kingdom: applying a special film that mimics sharkskin to parts of its aircraft.

When it comes to decarbonization, reducing the emissions of air travel is both a high priority and something of a difficult task. Globally, air traffic accounts for about 2.5 percent of carbon emissions, but since those emissions are emitted at altitude, studies have found that the warming effect may be almost twice as large.

The problem is that it's extremely difficult to rival the volumetric energy density of jet fuel, which contains almost 50 times as many megajoules per liter than alternatives like hydrogen, ethanol, or lithium-ion batteries. That's less of a problem for ground or sea transportation, where weight and volume is less important, but it's a real stumbling block for switching jet airliners to a different fuel source.

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Mac and Windows users infected by software updates delivered over hacked ISP

The words

Enlarge (credit: Marco Verch Professional Photographer and Speaker)

Hackers delivered malware to Windows and Mac users by compromising their Internet service provider and then tampering with software updates delivered over unsecure connections, researchers said.

The attack, researchers from security firm Volexity said, worked by hacking routers or similar types of device infrastructure of an unnamed ISP. The attackers then used their control of the devices to poison domain name system responses for legitimate hostnames providing updates for at least six different apps written for Windows or macOS. The apps affected were the 5KPlayer, Quick Heal, Rainmeter, Partition Wizard, and those from Corel and Sogou.

These aren’t the update servers you’re looking for

Because the update mechanisms didn’t use TLS or cryptographic signatures to authenticate the connections or downloaded software, the threat actors were able to use their control of the ISP infrastructure to successfully perform machine-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks that directed targeted users to hostile servers rather than the ones operated by the affected software makers. These redirections worked even when users employed non-encrypted public DNS services such as Google’s 8.8.8.8 or Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 rather than the authoritative DNS server provided by the ISP.

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Man suffers heart problem after rapid weight loss: A GLP-1 cautionary tale

Od: Beth Mole
Man suffers heart problem after rapid weight loss: A GLP-1 cautionary tale

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Spauln)

The dose makes the medicine—and for many critical prescription drugs, the dose depends on a patient's body weight. Usually, this is not a problem; weight changes large enough to significantly affect dosages often occur gradually, over periods long enough for doctors to notice and adjust prescriptions. But, in the era of new weight loss drugs, that may no longer be the case.

In a cautionary tale published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers at the University of Colorado reported the case of a man who lost nearly 30 percent of his body weight in a six-month period using a new weight loss drug. Then, he showed up at an emergency department with heart palpitations, excessive sweating, confusion, fever, and hand tremors. Tests indicated the man had atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm that can lead to heart failure and stroke without treatment.

The 62-year-old had no history of atrial fibrillation, but he had previously been diagnosed with obesity, Type 1 diabetes, and hypothyroidism (a condition in which the thyroid gland does not produce enough thyroid hormone). For his hypothyroidism, he took levothyroxine, a synthetic thyroid hormone that is dosed by weight.

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OpenAI has the tech to watermark ChatGPT text—it just won’t release it

OpenAI logo displayed on a phone screen and ChatGPT website displayed on a laptop screen.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

According to The Wall Street Journal, there's internal conflict at OpenAI over whether or not to release a watermarking tool that would allow people to test text to see whether it was generated by ChatGPT or not.

To deploy the tool, OpenAI would make tweaks to ChatGPT that would lead it to leave a trail in the text it generates that can be detected by a special tool. The watermark would be undetectable by human readers without the tool, and the company's internal testing has shown that it does not negatively affect the quality of outputs. The detector would be accurate 99.9 percent of the time. It's important to note that the watermark would be a pattern in the text itself, meaning it would be preserved if the user copies and pastes the text or even if they make modest edits to it.

Some OpenAI employees have campaigned for the tool's release, but others believe that would be the wrong move, citing a few specific problems.

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Study suggests Egyptians used hydraulic lifts to build Pyramid of Djoser

Saqqara pyramid of Djoser in Egypt with sitting camel in the foreground

Enlarge / A camel chills next to the Step Pyramid of Djoser in the Saqqara necropolis in Egypt, built around 2680 BCE. (credit: Charles J. Sharp/CC BY-SA 3.0)

It's long been a hotly debated open question regarding how the great pyramids of Egypt were built, given the sheer size and weight of the limestone blocks used for the construction. Numerous speculative (and controversial) hypotheses have been proposed, including the use of ramps, levers, cranes, winches, hoists, pivots, or any combination thereof. Now we can add the possible use of a hydraulic lift to those speculative scenarios. According to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE, ancient Egyptians during the Third Dynasty may have at least partly relied on hydraulics to build the Step Pyramid of Djoser.

"Many theories on pyramid construction suggest that pure human strength, possibly aided by basic mechanical devices like levers and ramps, was utilized," co-author Xavier Landreau, of Paleotechnic in Paris and Universite Grenoble Alpes, told Ars. "Our analysis led us to the utilization of water as a means of raising stones. We are skeptical that the largest pyramids were built using only known ramp and lever methods."

The Step Pyramid was built around 2680 BCE, part of a funerary complex for the Third Dynasty pharaoh Djoser. It's located in the Saqqara necropolis and was the first pyramid to be built, almost a "proto-pyramid" that originally stood some 205 feet high. (The Great Pyramid of Giza, by contrast, stood 481 feet high and was the tallest human-made structure for nearly 4,000 years.) Previous monuments were made of mud brick, but Djoser's Step Pyramid is made of stone (specifically limestone); it's widely thought that Djoser's vizier, Imhotep, designed and built the complex. The third century BCE historian Manetho once described Imhotep as the "inventor of building in stone." As such, the Djoser Pyramid influenced the construction of later, larger pyramids during the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties.

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Google loses DOJ’s big monopoly trial over search business

Google loses DOJ’s big monopoly trial over search business

Enlarge (credit: FABRICE COFFRINI / Contributor | AFP)

Google just lost a massive antitrust trial over its sprawling search business, as US district judge Amit Mehta released his ruling, showing that he sided with the US Department of Justice in the case that could disrupt how billions of people search the web.

"Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his opinion. “It has violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act.”

The verdict will likely come as a shock to Google, which had long argued that punishing Google for being the best in search would be "unprecedented" and frequently pointed to the DOJ's lack of direct evidence. However, Mehta found the limited direct evidence compelling, especially "Google’s admission that it does not 'consider whether users will go to other specific search providers (general or otherwise) if it introduces a change to its Search product.'"

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Court blocks net neutrality, says ISPs are likely to win case against FCC

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel speaks outside in front of a sign that says

Enlarge / Federal Communication Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, then a commissioner, rallies against repeal of net neutrality rules in December 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla)

The Federal Communications Commission's hopes of enforcing net neutrality rules was dealt a major setback last week. A panel of appeals court judges blocked the regulations on Thursday in a ruling that said broadband providers are likely to win the case on the merits.

The US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit previously issued an administrative stay that delayed enforcement of the rules for a few weeks, which didn't necessarily indicate much about the judges' view of the lawsuit. But on Thursday, the judges issued an order that stays the net neutrality rules until the court makes a final ruling, and judges made it clear they believe the Internet service providers have a stronger case than the FCC.

"Because the broadband providers have shown that they are likely to succeed on the merits and that the equities support them, we grant the stay," a panel of three judges wrote in the unanimous ruling.

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Chrome’s Manifest V3, and its changes for ad blocking, are coming real soon

Chrome logo, squared off in the style of a popular ad-blocking logo

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google Chrome's long, long project to implement a new browser extension platform is seemingly going to happen, for real, after six years of cautious movement.

One of the first ways people are seeing this is if they use uBlock Origin, a popular ad-blocking extension, as noted by Bleeping Computer. Recently, Chrome users have seen warnings pop up that "This extension may soon no longer be supported," with links asking the user to "Remove or replace it with similar extensions" from Chrome's Web Store. You might see a similar warning on some extensions if you head to Chrome's Extensions page (chrome://extensions).

What's happening is Chrome preparing to make Manifest V3 required for extensions that want to run on its platform. First announced in 2018, the last word on Manifest V3 was that V2 extensions would start being nudged out in early June on the Beta, Dev, and Canary update channels. Users will be able to manually re-enable V2 extensions "for a short time," Google has said, "but over time, this toggle will go away as well." The shift for enterprise Chrome deployments is expected to be put off until June 2025.

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Elon Musk sues OpenAI, Sam Altman for making a “fool” out of him

Elon Musk and Sam Altman share the stage in 2015, the same year that Musk alleged that Altman's "deception" began.

Enlarge / Elon Musk and Sam Altman share the stage in 2015, the same year that Musk alleged that Altman's "deception" began. (credit: Michael Kovac / Contributor | Getty Images North America)

After withdrawing his lawsuit in June for unknown reasons, Elon Musk has revived a complaint accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of fraudulently inducing Musk to contribute $44 million in seed funding by promising that OpenAI would always open-source its technology and prioritize serving the public good over profits as a permanent nonprofit.

Instead, Musk alleged that Altman and his co-conspirators—"preying on Musk’s humanitarian concern about the existential dangers posed by artificial intelligence"—always intended to "betray" these promises in pursuit of personal gains.

As OpenAI's technology advanced toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) and strove to surpass human capabilities, "Altman set the bait and hooked Musk with sham altruism then flipped the script as the non-profit’s technology approached AGI and profits neared, mobilizing Defendants to turn OpenAI, Inc. into their personal piggy bank and OpenAI into a moneymaking bonanza, worth billions," Musk's complaint said.

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Gamification gets drivers to put down their phones, study finds

Close-up Of A Man's Hand Typing Text Message On Mobile Phone While Driving Car

Enlarge / You should not do this while you are driving. (credit: Getty Images)

Distracted driving isn't only a result of drivers using their phones when they should be paying attention. But it is a significant cause of the problem, accounting for at least 13 percent of distracted driving deaths and rising to 1 in 5 for young drivers. Now, a study conducted with customers of the Progressive insurance company has tested different strategies to get those drivers to put their phones down in the car, and it found two that significantly reduced handheld use, with the effect persisting after the end of the study.

The study recruited 1,653 customers already enrolled in its Progressive Snapshot program, which involves the use of a smartphone app that detects phone use while driving. Before the start of the trial, the participants all averaged more than 6.4 minutes per hour of handheld use while driving—Progressive says its safest customers have handheld usage of less than 1 minute per hour while driving.

Five test groups

The drivers were split into five different arms, each with increasing amounts of intervention. The first group just received education about the problem, such as statistics about state laws that ban phone use while driving, increased crash risks, and recommendations to use hands-free options like a phone mount or casting interface instead.

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NASA likely to significantly delay the launch of Crew 9 due to Starliner issues

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is lifted to be placed atop an Atlas V rocket for its first crewed launch. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

NASA is planning to significantly delay the launch of the Crew 9 mission to the International Space Station due to ongoing concerns about the Starliner spacecraft currently attached to the station.

While the space agency has not said anything publicly, sources say NASA should announce the decision this week. Officials are contemplating moving the Crew-9 mission from its current date of August 18 to September 24, a significant slip.

Nominally, this Crew Dragon mission will carry NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, spacecraft commander; Nick Hague, pilot; and Stephanie Wilson, mission specialist; as well as Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, for a six-month journey to the space station. However, NASA has been considering alternatives to the crew lineup—possibly launching with two astronauts instead of four—due to ongoing discussions about the viability of Starliner to safely return astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth.

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CrowdStrike claps back at Delta, says airline rejected offers for help

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JULY 23: Travelers from France wait on their delayed flight on the check-in floor of the Delta Air Lines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on July 23, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

Enlarge / LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JULY 23: Travelers from France wait on their delayed flight on the check-in floor of the Delta Air Lines terminal at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on July 23, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

CrowdStrike has hit back at Delta Air Lines’ threat of litigation against the cyber security company over a botched software update that grounded thousands of flights, denying it was responsible for the carrier’s own IT decisions and days-long disruption.

In a letter on Sunday, lawyers for CrowdStrike argued that the US carrier had created a “misleading narrative” that the cyber security firm was “grossly negligent” in an incident that the US airline has said will cost it $500 million.

Delta took days longer than its rivals to recover when CrowdStrike’s update brought down millions of Windows computers around the world last month. The airline has alerted the cyber security company that it plans to seek damages for the disruptions and hired litigation firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

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Path to precision: Targeted cancer drugs go from table to trials to bedside

Od: Beth Mole
Path to precision: Targeted cancer drugs go from table to trials to bedside

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 1972, Janet Rowley sat at her dining room table and cut tiny chromosomes from photographs she had taken in her laboratory. One by one, she snipped out the small figures her children teasingly called paper dolls. She then carefully laid them out in 23 matching pairs—and warned her kids not to sneeze.

The physician-scientist had just mastered a new chromosome-staining technique in a year-long sabbatical at Oxford. But it was in the dining room of her Chicago home where she made the discovery that would dramatically alter the course of cancer research.

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Historic flooding possible as TS Debby bears down on southeastern US

Satellite image of Tropical Storm Debby on Sunday morning.

Enlarge / Satellite image of Tropical Storm Debby on Sunday morning. (credit: NOAA)

As often happens during the month of July, the Atlantic tropics entered a lull after Hurricane Beryl struck Texas and short-lived Tropical Storm Chris moved into Mexico. But now, with African dust diminishing from the atmosphere and August well underway, the oceans have awoken.

Tropical Storm Debby formed this weekend, and according to forecasters with the National Hurricane Center, the system is likely to reach Category 1 hurricane status before making landfall along the coastal bend of western Florida on Monday.

As hurricanes go, this is not the most threatening storm the Sunshine State has seen in recent years. Yes, no one likes a hurricane, or the storm surge it brings. But Debby is likely to strike a relatively unpopulated area of Florida, venting much of its fury on preserves and wildlife areas. This won't be pleasant by any means, but as hurricanes go this one should be fairly manageable from a wind and surge standpoint.

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Data centers demand a massive amount of energy. Here’s how some states are tackling the industry’s impact.

A Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia.

A Google data center in Douglas County, Georgia. (credit: Google)

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Seattle Times. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When lawmakers in Washington set out to expand a lucrative tax break for the state’s data center industry in 2022, they included what some considered an essential provision: a study of the energy-hungry industry’s impact on the state’s electrical grid.

Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed that provision but let the tax break expansion go forward. As The Seattle Times and ProPublica recently reported, the industry has continued to grow and now threatens Washington’s effort to eliminate carbon emissions from electricity generation.

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Memo to the Supreme Court: Clean Air Act targeted CO2 as climate pollutant, study says

The exterior of the US Supreme Court building during daytime.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Rudy Sulgan)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for its newsletter here

Among the many obstacles to enacting federal limits on climate pollution, none has been more daunting than the Supreme Court. That is where the Obama administration’s efforts to regulate power plant emissions met their demise and where the Biden administration’s attempts will no doubt land.

A forthcoming study seeks to inform how courts consider challenges to these regulations by establishing once and for all that the lawmakers who shaped the Clean Air Act in 1970 knew scientists considered carbon dioxide an air pollutant, and that these elected officials were intent on limiting its emissions.

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Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash

A picture of the Gemini prompt box from the

Enlarge / The Gemini prompt box in the "Dear Sydney" ad. (credit: Google)

Have you seen Google's "Dear Sydney" ad? The one where a young girl wants to write a fan letter to Olympic hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone? To which the girl's dad responds that he is "pretty good with words but this has to be just right"? And so, to be just right, he suggests that the daughter get Google's Gemini AI to write a first draft of the letter?

If you're watching the Olympics, you have undoubtedly seen it—because the ad has been everywhere. Until today. After a string of negative commentary about the ad's dystopian implications, Google has pulled the "Dear Sydney" ad from TV. In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, the company said, "While the ad tested well before airing, given the feedback, we have decided to phase the ad out of our Olympics rotation."

The backlash was similar to that against Apple's recent ad in which an enormous hydraulic press crushed TVs, musical instruments, record players, paint cans, sculptures, and even emoji into… the newest model of the iPad. Apple apparently wanted to show just how much creative and entertainment potential the iPad held; critics read the ad as a warning image about the destruction of human creativity in a technological age. Apple apologized soon after.

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Buying shady weight loss drugs online is a bad idea, in case you were wondering

Od: Beth Mole
Buying shady weight loss drugs online is a bad idea, in case you were wondering

Enlarge (credit: https://www.uschemlabs.com/product/semaglutide-2mg-5-vials/)

Buying counterfeit weight loss drugs from illegal online pharmacies that don't require prescriptions is, in fact, a very bad idea, according to a study published Friday in JAMA Network Open.

The counterfeit drugs are sold as equivalents to the blockbuster semaglutide drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, which are prescription only. When researchers got their hands on three illegal versions, they found that the counterfeit drugs had low-purity semaglutide, had dosages that exceeded the labeled amount, and one had signs of bacterial contamination.

The three substandard drugs tested came from three different illegal online pharmacies, which sold them as generic semaglutide drugs for weight loss, appetite suppression, diabetes, and cardiovascular health. However, the researchers, led by scientists at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Pécs in Hungary, had initially tried purchasing counterfeit drugs from six such sellers.

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DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”

DOJ sues TikTok, alleging “massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy”

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

The US Department of Justice sued TikTok today, accusing the short-video platform of illegally collecting data on millions of kids and demanding a permanent injunction "to put an end to TikTok’s unlawful massive-scale invasions of children’s privacy."

The DOJ said that TikTok had violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), claiming that TikTok allowed kids "to create and access accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent," collected "data from those children," and failed to "comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and information."

The COPPA Rule requires TikTok to prove that it does not target kids as its primary audience, the DOJ said, and TikTok claims to satisfy that "by requiring users creating accounts to report their birthdates."

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Legendary ROM hacking site shutting down after almost 20 years

Super Mario Land 2 in full color, with Mario jumping over spiky balls.

Enlarge / A thing that exists through ROM hacking, and ROMHacking.net: Super Mario Land 2, in color. (credit: Nintendo/Toruzz)

If there was something wrong with an old game, or you wanted to make a different version of it, and you wanted people to help you fix that, you typically did that on RomHacking.net. After this week, you'll have to go elsewhere.

For nearly 20 years, the site has been home to some remarkable remakes, translations, fix-ups, and experiments. Star Fox running at 60 fpsSuper Mario Land 2 in color, a fix for Super Mario 64's bad smoke, even Pac-Man "demake" that Namco spiffed up and resold—and that's not even counting the stuff that was pulled down by corporate cease-and-desist actions. It's a remarkable collection, one that encompasses both very obscure and mainstream games and well worth preserving.

Preserved it will be, but it seems that the RomHacking site will not go on further. The site's founder posted a sign-off statement to the site Thursday night, one that in turn praised the community, decried certain members of it, and looked forward to what will happen with "the next generation."

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NZXT wants you to pay up to $169/month to rent a gaming PC

NZXT gaming PC

Enlarge / NZXT's subscription program charges $169/month for this build. (credit: NZXT)

NZXT, which sells gaming PCs, components, and peripherals, has a subscription program that charges a monthly fee to rent one of its gaming desktops. Subscribers don't own the computers and receive an upgraded rental system every two years.

NZXT's Flex program subscription prices range from $49 to $169 per month, depending on the specs of the system, as you can see below:

There's also a one-time setup and shipping fee for the rentals that totals $50. NZXT says it will "likely" charge subscribers a separate fee if they return the rental without the original box and packaging (NZXT hasn't disclosed how much).

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Silicon plus perovskite solar reaches 34 percent efficiency

Solar panels with green foliage behind them, and a diagram of a chemical's structure in the foreground.

Enlarge / Some solar panels, along with a diagram of a perovskite's crystal structure. (credit: Subhakitnibhat Kewiko)

As the price of silicon panels has continued to come down, we've reached the point where they're a small and shrinking cost of building a solar farm. That means that it might be worth spending more to get a panel that converts more of the incoming sunlight to electricity, since it allows you to get more out of the price paid to get each panel installed. But silicon panels are already pushing up against physical limits on efficiency. Which means our best chance for a major boost in panel efficiency may be to combine silicon with an additional photovoltaic material.

Right now, most of the focus is on pairing silicon with a class of materials called perovskites. Perovskite crystals can be layered on top of silicon, creating a panel with two materials that absorb different areas of the spectrum—plus, perovskites can be made from relatively cheap raw materials. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to make perovskites that are both high-efficiency and last for the decades that the silicon portion will.

Lots of labs are attempting to change that, though. And two of them reported some progress this week, including a perovskite/silicon system that achieved 34 percent efficiency.

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Sam Altman accused of being shady about OpenAI’s safety efforts

Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an interview at Bloomberg House on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024.

Enlarge / Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, during an interview at Bloomberg House on the opening day of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Jan. 16, 2024. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

OpenAI is facing increasing pressure to prove it's not hiding AI risks after whistleblowers alleged to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the AI company's non-disclosure agreements had illegally silenced employees from disclosing major safety concerns to lawmakers.

In a letter to OpenAI yesterday, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded evidence that OpenAI is no longer requiring agreements that could be "stifling" its "employees from making protected disclosures to government regulators."

Specifically, Grassley asked OpenAI to produce current employment, severance, non-disparagement, and non-disclosure agreements to reassure Congress that contracts don't discourage disclosures. That's critical, Grassley said, so that it will be possible to rely on whistleblowers exposing emerging threats to help shape effective AI policies safeguarding against existential AI risks as technologies advance.

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FLUX: This new AI image generator is eerily good at creating human hands

AI-generated image by FLUX.1 dev:

Enlarge / AI-generated image by FLUX.1 dev: "A beautiful queen of the universe holding up her hands, face in the background." (credit: FLUX.1)

On Thursday, AI-startup Black Forest Labs announced the launch of its company and the release of its first suite of text-to-image AI models, called FLUX.1. The German-based company, founded by researchers who developed the technology behind Stable Diffusion and invented the latent diffusion technique, aims to create advanced generative AI for images and videos.

The launch of FLUX.1 comes about seven weeks after Stability AI's troubled release of Stable Diffusion 3 Medium in mid-June. Stability AI's offering faced widespread criticism among image-synthesis hobbyists for its poor performance in generating human anatomy, with users sharing examples of distorted limbs and bodies across social media. That problematic launch followed the earlier departure of three key engineers from Stability AI—Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Dominik Lorenz—who went on to found Black Forest Labs along with latent diffusion co-developer Patrick Esser and others.

Black Forest Labs launched with the release of three FLUX.1 text-to-image models: a high-end commercial "pro" version, a mid-range "dev" version with open weights for non-commercial use, and a faster open-weights "schnell" version ("schnell" means quick or fast in German). Black Forest Labs claims its models outperform existing options like Midjourney and DALL-E in areas such as image quality and adherence to text prompts.

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US probes Nvidia’s acquisition of Israeli AI startup

US probes Nvidia’s acquisition of Israeli AI startup

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The US Department of Justice is investigating Nvidia’s acquisition of Run:ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup, for potential antitrust violations, said a person familiar with discussions the government agency has had with third parties.

The DoJ has asked market participants about the competitive impact of the transaction, which Nvidia announced in April. The price was not disclosed but a report from TechCrunch estimated it at $700 million.

The scope of the probe remains unclear, the person said. But the DoJ has inquired about matters including whether the deal could quash emerging competition in the up-and-coming sector and entrench Nvidia’s dominant market position.

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Metropolis 1998 lets you design every building in an isometric, pixel-art city

Designing the pieces of a house in Metropolis 1998, with a series of bookshelves and couches open in the menu picker on-screen.

Enlarge / There is something so wonderfully obscene about having a town with hundreds of people living their lives, running into conflict, hoping for better, and your omnipotent self is stuck on which bookcase best fits this living room corner. (credit: YesBox)

Naming a game must be incredibly hard. How many more Dark Fallen Journeys and Noun: Verb of the Noun games can fit into the market? And yet certain games just appear with a near-perfect, properly descriptive label.

Metropolis 1998 is just such a game, telling you what you'll be doing, how it will look and feel, and what era it harkens back to. You can verify this with its "pre-alpha" demo on Steam and Itch.io. There's plenty more to come, but what is already in place is impressive. And it's simply pleasant to play, especially if you're the type who wants to make something entirely yours. Not just "put the park inside the commercial district," but The Sims-style "choose which wood color for the dining room table in a living room you framed up yourself."

You start out in a big field with no features (yet) and the sounds of birds chirping. Once you lay down a road, you can add things at a few different levels. You can, SimCity-style, simply plot out colored zones and let the people figure it out themselves. You can add pre-made buildings individually. Or you can really get in there, spacing out individual rooms, choosing the doors and windows and objects inside, and realizing how hard it is to shape multi-floor houses so the roof doesn't look grotesque. You can save the filled-out house for later reuse or just hold on to its core aspects as a blueprint.

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Human muscle cells come back from space, look aged

Image of two astronauts in an equipment filled chamber, standing near the suits they wear for extravehicular activities.

Enlarge / Muscle atrophy is a known hazard of spending time on the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Muscle-on-chip systems are three-dimensional human muscle cell bundles cultured on collagen scaffolds. A Stanford University research team sent some of these systems to the International Space Station to study the muscle atrophy commonly observed in astronauts.

It turns out that space triggers processes in human muscles that eerily resemble something we know very well: getting old. “We learned that microgravity mimics some of the qualities of accelerated aging,” said Ngan F. Huang, an associate professor at Stanford who led the study.

Space-borne bioconstructs

“This work originates from our lab’s expertise in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. We received funding to do a tissue engineering experiment on the ISS, which really helped us embark on this journey, and became curious how microgravity affects human health,” said Huang. So her team got busy designing the research equipment needed to work onboard the space station. The first step was building the muscle-on-chip systems.

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Intel is offering extended warranties for crashing 13th- and 14th-gen desktop CPUs

Even mainstream CPUs like the Core i5-13400 could theoretically be affected by Intel's crashing issues.

Enlarge / Even mainstream CPUs like the Core i5-13400 could theoretically be affected by Intel's crashing issues. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Intel will be releasing a microcode update to prevent further damage to crashing 13th- and 14th-generation desktop processors sometime this month if it can stick to its previously announced schedule. This fix should be available via BIOS updates from PC and motherboard makers and from Microsoft as a Windows update. But it will take time for those updates to roll out to users, and Intel has said that processors that are already exhibiting crashes have been permanently damaged and won't be fixed by the microcode update.

In an effort to provide peace of mind to buyers and cover anyone whose CPU is subtly damaged but not showing explicit signs of instability, Intel is extending the warranty on all affected 13th- and 14th-generation CPUs by an additional two years, Tom's Hardware reports. This raises the warranty on a new boxed Intel CPU from three years to five. For processors that came installed in pre-built PCs, Intel says users should reach out to their PC's manufacturer for support instead.

Though owners of high-end chips like the Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K were the most frequently affected by the crashing issue, Intel says that any 13th- or 14th-generation desktop CPU with a base power of 65 W or higher could ultimately be affected. This means that even slower, more budget-oriented chips like the Core i5-13400 could end up having problems.

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A few weeks with the Pocket 386, an early-‘90s-style, half-busted retro PC

The Pocket 386 is fun for a while, but the shortcomings and the broken stuff start to wear on you after a while.

Enlarge / The Pocket 386 is fun for a while, but the shortcomings and the broken stuff start to wear on you after a while. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

The Book 8088 was a neat experiment, but as a clone of the original IBM PC, it was pretty limited in what it could do. Early MS-DOS apps and games worked fine, and the very first Windows versions ran… technically. Just not the later ones that could actually run Windows software.

The Pocket 386 laptop is a lot like the Book 8088, but fast-forwarded to the next huge evolution in the PC’s development. Intel’s 80386 processors not only jumped from 16-bit operation to 32-bit, but they implemented different memory modes that could take advantage of many megabytes of memory while maintaining compatibility with apps that only recognized the first 640KB.

Expanded software compatibility makes this one more appealing to retro-computing enthusiasts since (like a vintage 386) it will do just about everything an 8088 can do, with the added benefit of a whole lot more speed and much better compatibility with seminal versions of Windows. It’s much more convenient to have all this hardware squeezed into a little laptop than in a big, clunky vintage desktop with slowly dying capacitors in it.

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Rocket Report: Falcon 9 is back; Starship could be recovered off Australia

Welcome to Edition 7.05 of the Rocket Report! The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for 15 days after a rare failure of its upper stage earlier this month. The FAA gave the green light for Falcon 9 to return to flight July 25, and within a couple of days, SpaceX successfully launched three missions from three launch pads. There's a lot on Falcon 9's to-do list, so we expect SpaceX to quickly return to form with several flights per week.

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.

Big delay for a reusable rocket testbed. The French space agency, CNES, has revealed that the inaugural test flight of its Callisto reusable rocket demonstrator will not take place until late 2025 or early 2026, European Spaceflight reports. CNES unveiled an updated website for the Callisto rocket program earlier this month, showing the test rocket has been delayed from a debut launch later this year to until late 2025 or early 2026. The Callisto rocket is designed to test techniques and technologies required for reusable rockets, such as vertical takeoff and vertical landing, with suborbital flights from the Guiana Space Center in South America.

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“Screaming Woman” mummy may have died in agony 3,500 years ago, study finds

The Screaming Woman mummy, closeup of head/skull surrounded by elaborate wig

Enlarge / CT scans and other techniques allowed scientists to "virtually dissect" this 3,500-year-old "Screaming Woman" mummy. (credit: Sahar Saleem/CC BY)

There have been a handful of ancient Egyptian mummies discovered with their mouths wide open, as if mid-scream. This has puzzled archaeologists because Egyptian mummification typically involved bandaging the mandible to the skull to keep the mouth closed. Scientists have "virtually dissected" one such "Screaming Woman" mummy and concluded that the wide-open mouth is not the result of poor mummification, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Medicine. There was no clear cause of death, but the authors suggest the mummy's expression could indicate she died in excruciating pain.

"The Screaming Woman is a true ‘time capsule’ of the way that she died and was mummified,” said co-author Sahar Saleem, a professor of radiology at Cairo University in Egypt. "Here we show that she was embalmed with costly, imported embalming material. This, and the mummy's well-preserved appearance, contradicts the traditional belief that a failure to remove her inner organs implied poor mummification."

Saleem has long been involved in paleoradiology and archaeometry of "screaming"  Egyptian mummies. For instance, she co-authored a 2020 paper applying similar techniques to the study of another "Screaming Woman" mummy, dubbed Unknown Woman A by the then-head of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, Gaston Maspero, and one of two such mummies discovered in the Royal Cache at Deir el Bahari near Luxor in 1881. This was where 21st and 22nd Dynasty priests would hide the remains of royal members from earlier dynasties to thwart grave robbers.

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Who are the two major hackers Russia just received in a prisoner swap?

Who are the two major hackers Russia just received in a prisoner swap?

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As part of today’s blockbuster prisoner swap between the US and Russia, which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition figures, Russia received in return a motley collection of serious criminals, including an assassin who had executed an enemy of the Russian state in the middle of Berlin.

But the Russians also got two hackers, Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, each of whom had been convicted of major financial crimes in the US. The US government said that Klyushin “stands convicted of the most significant hacking and trading scheme in American history, and one of the largest insider trading schemes ever prosecuted.” As for Seleznev, federal prosecutors said that he has “harmed more victims and caused more financial loss than perhaps any other defendant that has appeared before the court.”

What sort of hacker do you have to be to attract the interest of the Russian state in prisoner swaps like these? Clearly, it helps to have hacked widely and caused major damage to Russia’s enemies. By bringing these two men home, Russian leadership is sending a clear message to domestic hackers: We’ve got your back.

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Troubling bird flu study suggests human cases are going undetected

Od: Beth Mole
Troubling bird flu study suggests human cases are going undetected

Enlarge (credit: Tony C. French/Getty)

A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.

The finding adds some data to what many experts have suspected amid the outbreak. But the authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.

"Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few," the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.

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NASA says it is “evaluating all options” for the safe return of Starliner crew

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13.

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

It has now been eight weeks since Boeing's Starliner spacecraft launched into orbit on an Atlas V rocket, bound for the International Space Station. At the time NASA officials said the two crew members, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, could return to Earth as soon as June 14, just eight days later.

Yes, there had been some problems on Starliner's ride to the space station that involved helium leaks and failing thrusters. But officials said they were relatively minor and sought to downplay them. "Those are pretty small, really, issues to deal with," Mark Nappi, vice president and manager of Boeing's Commercial Crew Program, said during a post-docking news conference. "We’ll figure them out for the next mission. I don’t see these as significant at all."

But days turned to weeks, and weeks turned to months as NASA and Boeing continued to study the two technical problems. Of these issues, the more pressing concern was the failure of multiple reaction control system thrusters that are essential to steering Starliner during its departure from the space station and setting up a critical engine burn to enter Earth's atmosphere.

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There are 2,000-plus dead rockets in orbit—here’s a rare view of one

Astroscale's ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15.

Enlarge / Astroscale's ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15. (credit: Astroscale)

There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet.

In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small satellite into low-Earth orbit on top of a Rocket Lab launcher. A couple of months later, Astroscale's ADRAS-J (Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) spacecraft completed its pursuit of a Japanese rocket stuck in orbit for more than 15 years.

ADRAS-J photographed the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket from a range of several hundred meters and then backed away. This was the first publicly released image of space debris captured from another spacecraft using rendezvous and proximity operations.

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Is having a pet good for you? The fuzzy science of pet ownership

A picture of a bull terrier on a park bench

Enlarge (credit: Azaliya via Getty)

For more than a decade, in blog posts and scientific papers and public talks, the psychologist Hal Herzog has questioned whether owning pets makes people happier and healthier.

It is a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health. “When I talk to people about this,” Herzog recently said, “nobody believes me.” A prominent professor at a major public university once described him as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

As a teenager in New Jersey in the 1960s, Herzog kept dogs and cats, as well as an iguana, a duck, and a boa constrictor named Boa. Now a professor emeritus at Western Carolina University, he insists he’s not out to smear anyone’s furry friends. In a blog post questioning the so-called pet effect, in 2012, Herzog included a photo of his cat, Tilly. “She makes my life better,” he wrote. “Please Don’t Blame The Messenger!”

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Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter

Decades later, John Romero looks back at the birth of the first-person shooter

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Id | GDC)

John Romero remembers the moment he realized what the future of gaming would look like.

In late 1991, Romero and his colleagues at id Software had just released Catacomb 3-D, a crude-looking, EGA-colored first-person shooter that was nonetheless revolutionary compared to other first-person games of the time. "When we started making our 3D games, the only 3D games out there were nothing like ours," Romero told Ars in a recent interview. "They were lockstep, going through a maze, do a 90-degree turn, that kind of thing."

Despite Catacomb 3-D's technological advances in first-person perspective, though, Romero remembers the team at id followed its release by going to work on the next entry in the long-running Commander Keen series of 2D platform games. But as that process moved forward, Romero told Ars that something didn't feel right.

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NASA indefinitely delays return of Starliner to review propulsion data

Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was "adjusting" the date of the Starliner spacecraft's return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July.

The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth. According to sources, these meetings included high-level participation from senior leaders at the agency, including Associate Administrator Jim Free.

This "Crew Flight Test," which launched on June 5 atop an Atlas V rocket, was originally due to undock and return to Earth on June 14. However, as engineers from NASA and Boeing studied data from the vehicle's problematic flight to the International Space Station, they have waved off several return opportunities.

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Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

Enlarge (credit: Tim Macpherson | Image Source)

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

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Top FDA official overrules staff to approve gene therapy that failed trial

Od: Beth Mole
Dr. Peter Marks, Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the Food and Drug Administration on March 18, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Enlarge / Dr. Peter Marks, Director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research within the Food and Drug Administration on March 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Susan Walsh)

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday announced expanded approval for a gene therapy to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD)—despite the fact that it failed a Phase III clinical trial last year and that the approval came over the objections of three of FDA's own expert review teams and two of its directors.

In fact, the decision to expand the approval of the therapy—called Elevidys (delandistrogene moxeparvovec-rokl)—appears to have been decided almost entirely by Peter Marks, Director of the FDA's Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.

Elevidys initially gained an FDA approval last year, also over objections from staff. The therapy intravenously delivers a transgene that codes for select portions of a protein called dystrophin in healthy muscle cells; the protein is mutated in patients with DMD. Last year's initial approval occurred under an accelerated approval process and was only for use in DMD patients ages 4 and 5 who are able to walk. In the actions Thursday, the FDA granted a traditional approval for the therapy and opened access to DMD patients of all ages, regardless of ambulatory status.

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$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

 

  • The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95. [credit: DZT's Store ]

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We're most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

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Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

The Biden administration will ban all sales of Kaspersky antivirus software in the US starting in July, according to reporting from Reuters and a filing from the US Department of Commerce (PDF).

The US believes that security software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab represents a national security risk and that the Russian government could use Kaspersky's software to install malware, block other security updates, and "collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans," said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles,” said Raimondo during a press briefing, as reported by Wired. “But the truth is, increasingly, it's about technology, and it's about dual-use technology, and it's about data.”

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Congress passes bill to jumpstart new nuclear power tech

A nuclear reactor and two cooling towards on a body of water, with a late-evening glow in the sky.

Enlarge (credit: hrui)

Earlier this week, the US Senate passed what's being called the ADVANCE Act, for Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy. Among a number of other changes, the bill would attempt to streamline permitting for newer reactor technology and offer cash incentives for the first companies that build new plants that rely on one of a handful of different technologies. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support both in the House and Senate and now heads to President Biden for his signature.

Given Biden's penchant for promoting his bipartisan credentials, it's likely to be signed into law. But the biggest hurdles nuclear power faces are all economic, rather than regulatory, and the bill provides very little in the way of direct funding that could help overcome those barriers.

Incentives

For reasons that will be clear only to congressional staffers, the Senate version of the bill was attached to an amendment to the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act. Nevertheless, it passed by a margin of 88-2, indicating widespread (and potentially veto-proof) support. Having passed the House already, there's nothing left but the president's signature.

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40 years later, X Window System is far more relevant than anyone could guess

low angle view of Office Buildings in Hong Kong from below, with the sky visible through an X-like cross

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Often times, when I am researching something about computers or coding that has been around a very long while, I will come across a document on a university website that tells me more about that thing than any Wikipedia page or archive ever could.

It's usually a PDF, though sometimes a plaintext file, on a .edu subdirectory that starts with a username preceded by a tilde (~) character. This is typically a document that a professor, faced with the same questions semester after semester, has put together to save the most time possible and get back to their work. I recently found such a document inside Princeton University's astrophysics department: "An Introduction to the X Window System," written by Robert Lupton.

X Window System, which turned 40 years old earlier this week, was something you had to know how to use to work with space-facing instruments back in the early 1980s, when VT100s, VAX-11/750s, and Sun Microsystems boxes would share space at college computer labs. As the member of the AstroPhysical Sciences Department at Princeton who knew the most about computers back then, it fell to Lupton to fix things and take questions.

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Apple Intelligence and other features won’t launch in the EU this year

A photo of a hand holding an iPhone running the Image Playground experience in iOS 18

Enlarge / Features like Image Playground won't arrive in Europe at the same time as other regions. (credit: Apple)

Three major features in iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will not be available to European users this fall, Apple says. They include iPhone screen mirroring on the Mac, SharePlay screen sharing, and the entire Apple Intelligence suite of generative AI features.

In a statement sent to Financial Times, The Verge, and others, Apple says this decision is related to the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA). Here's the full statement, which was attributed to Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz:

Two weeks ago, Apple unveiled hundreds of new features that we are excited to bring to our users around the world. We are highly motivated to make these technologies accessible to all users. However, due to the regulatory uncertainties brought about by the Digital Markets Act (DMA), we do not believe that we will be able to roll out three of these features — iPhone Mirroring, SharePlay Screen Sharing enhancements, and Apple Intelligence — to our EU users this year.

Specifically, we are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security. We are committed to collaborating with the European Commission in an attempt to find a solution that would enable us to deliver these features to our EU customers without compromising their safety.

It is unclear from Apple's statement precisely which aspects of the DMA may have led to this decision. It could be that Apple is concerned that it would be required to give competitors like Microsoft or Google access to user data collected for Apple Intelligence features and beyond, but we're not sure.

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Win+C, Windows’ most cursed keyboard shortcut, is getting retired again

A rendering of the Copilot button.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they'll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program's stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows' settings, and it's no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they'll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

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We now have even more evidence against the “ecocide” theory of Easter Island

statues on easter island arranged in a horizontal row

Enlarge / New research lends further credence to the "population crash" theory about Easter Island being just a myth. (credit: Arian Zwegers/CC BY 2.0)

For centuries, Western scholars have touted the fate of the native population on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) as a case study in the devastating cost of environmentally unsustainable living. The story goes that the people on the remote island chopped down all the trees to build massive stone statues, triggering a population collapse. Their numbers were further depleted when Europeans discovered the island and brought foreign diseases, among other factors. But an alternative narrative began to emerge in the 21st century that the earliest inhabitants actually lived quite sustainably until that point. A new paper published in the journal Science Advances offers another key piece of evidence in support of that alternative hypothesis.

As previously reported, Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago and typically mounted on platforms called ahu. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering their cultural significance, as well as how a Stone Age culture managed to carve and transport statues weighing as much as 92 tons. The first Europeans arrived in the 17th century and found only a few thousand inhabitants on a tiny island (just 14 by 7 miles across) thousands of miles away from any other land. Since then, in order to explain the presence of so many moai, the assumption has been that the island was once home to tens of thousands of people.

But perhaps they didn't need tens of thousands of people to accomplish that feat. Back in 2012, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. [UPDATE: An eagle-eyed reader alerted us to the 1980s work of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. Pavel concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues.]

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AT&T can’t hang up on landline phone customers, California agency rules

AT&T can’t hang up on landline phone customers, California agency rules

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Joe Raedle )

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) yesterday rejected AT&T's request to end its landline phone obligations. The state agency also urged AT&T to upgrade copper facilities to fiber instead of trying to shut down the outdated portions of its network.

AT&T asked the state to eliminate its Carrier of Last Resort (COLR) obligation, which requires it to provide landline telephone service to any potential customer in its service territory. A CPUC administrative law judge recommended rejection of the application last month, and the commission voted to dismiss AT&T's application with prejudice on Thursday.

"Our vote to dismiss AT&T's application made clear that we will protect customer access to basic telephone service... Our rules were designed to provide that assurance, and AT&T's application did not follow our rules," Commissioner John Reynolds said in a CPUC announcement.

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Family whose roof was damaged by space debris files claims against NASA

The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero's roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station.

The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero's roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

The owner of a home in southwestern Florida has formally submitted a claim to NASA for damages caused by a chunk of space debris that fell through his roof in March.

The legal case is unprecedented—no one has evidently made such a claim against NASA before. How the space agency responds will set a precedent, and that may be important in a world where there is ever more activity in orbit, with space debris and vehicles increasingly making uncontrolled reentries through Earth's atmosphere.

Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, was not home when part of a battery pack from the International Space Station crashed through his home on March 8. His son Daniel, 19, was home but escaped injury. NASA has confirmed the 1.6-pound object, made of the metal alloy Inconel, was part of a battery pack jettisoned from the space station in 2021.

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Rocket Report: Electron turns 50, China’s Moon launcher breathes fire

An up-close view of LEAP 71's autonomously designed keralox rocket engine.

Enlarge / An up-close view of LEAP 71's autonomously designed keralox rocket engine. (credit: LEAP 71)

Welcome to Edition 6.49 of the Rocket Report! I want to open this week's report with a hearty congratulations to Rocket Lab for the company's 50th launch since Electron's debut in 2017. This is a fine achievement for a company founded in New Zealand, a country with virtually no space program.

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 and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Electron celebrates its 50th. On Thursday, Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron mission, "No Time Toulouse."  The mission successfully deployed five Internet-of-Things satellites for the French company Kinéis. This is a nice milestone for the company founded by Peter Beck in New Zealand. With this mission, Rocket Lab becomes the fastest company to go from one launch to 50 launches of a privately developed rocket, surpassing even SpaceX. The company's first Electron mission came about seven years ago.

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Radioactive drugs strike cancer with precision

Pharma interest and investment in radiotherapy drugs is heating up.

Enlarge / Pharma interest and investment in radiotherapy drugs is heating up. (credit: Knowable Magazine)

On a Wednesday morning in late January 1896 at a small light bulb factory in Chicago, a middle-aged woman named Rose Lee found herself at the heart of a groundbreaking medical endeavor. With an X-ray tube positioned above the tumor in her left breast, Lee was treated with a torrent of high-energy particles that penetrated into the malignant mass.

“And so,” as her treating clinician later wrote, “without the blaring of trumpets or the beating of drums, X-ray therapy was born.”

Radiation therapy has come a long way since those early beginnings. The discovery of radium and other radioactive metals opened the doors to administering higher doses of radiation to target cancers located deeper within the body. The introduction of proton therapy later made it possible to precisely guide radiation beams to tumors, thus reducing damage to surrounding healthy tissues—a degree of accuracy that was further refined through improvements in medical physics, computer technologies and state-of-the-art imaging techniques.

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Anthropic introduces Claude 3.5 Sonnet, matching GPT-4o on benchmarks

The Anthropic Claude 3 logo, jazzed up by Benj Edwards.

Enlarge (credit: Anthropic / Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Anthropic announced Claude 3.5 Sonnet, its latest AI language model and the first in a new series of "3.5" models that build upon Claude 3, launched in March. Claude 3.5 can compose text, analyze data, and write code. It features a 200,000 token context window and is available now on the Claude website and through an API. Anthropic also introduced Artifacts, a new feature in the Claude interface that shows related work documents in a dedicated window.

So far, people outside of Anthropic seem impressed. "This model is really, really good," wrote independent AI researcher Simon Willison on X. "I think this is the new best overall model (and both faster and half the price of Opus, similar to the GPT-4 Turbo to GPT-4o jump)."

As we've written before, benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are troublesome because they can be cherry-picked and often do not capture the feel and nuance of using a machine to generate outputs on almost any conceivable topic. But according to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet matches or outperforms competitor models like GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro on certain benchmarks like MMLU (undergraduate level knowledge), GSM8K (grade school math), and HumanEval (coding).

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Pornhub prepares to block five more states rather than check IDs

Pornhub prepares to block five more states rather than check IDs

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Pornhub will soon be blocked in five more states as the adult site continues to fight what it considers privacy-infringing age-verification laws that require Internet users to provide an ID to access pornography.

On July 1, according to a blog post on the adult site announcing the impending block, Pornhub visitors in Indiana, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, and Nebraska will be "greeted by a video featuring" adult entertainer Cherie Deville, "who explains why we had to make the difficult decision to block them from accessing Pornhub."

Pornhub explained that—similar to blocks in Texas, Utah, Arkansas, Virginia, Montana, North Carolina, and Mississippi—the site refuses to comply with soon-to-be-enforceable age-verification laws in this new batch of states that allegedly put users at "substantial risk" of identity theft, phishing, and other harms.

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Bugatti’s new hypercar loses the turbos for a screaming V16 hybrid

A gold and black Bugatti Tourbillon

Enlarge / The Tourbillon is recognizable as a modern Bugatti, but it's very different under the skin. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Since the launch of the hypercar-defining Veyron back in 2005, modern Bugattis have served as benchmarks for straight-line performance and no-expense-spared automotive engineering. At a time when a 300 horsepower Mustang GT was something to crow about, the quad-turbocharged, W16-powered Veyron offered more than a thousand, metric (987 hp/736 kW).

Perhaps more importantly, and in contrast to most other world-beating performance cars, the Veyron wasn't presented as some skunkworks project that had been pushed to the ragged edge. Instead, it was a wholly realized ultra-luxury performance machine, replete with the sort of grand touring appointments you'd expect to find in a Bentley rather than a top-speed record holder.

Still, it was the numbers that instantly captivated enthusiasts and casual onlookers alike, and Bugatti would go on to reset the bar with the introduction of the 1,479 hp (1,102 kW) Chiron in 2016.

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Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else”

Signage outside Dell Technologies headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, US, on Monday, Feb. 6, 2023.

Enlarge / Signage outside a Dell campus. (credit: Getty)

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most.

Dell announced a new return-to-office initiative earlier this year. In the new plan, workers had to classify themselves as remote or hybrid.

Those who classified themselves as hybrid are subject to a tracking system that ensures they are in a physical office 39 days a quarter, which works out to close to three days per work week.

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AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent

AI trained on photos from kids’ entire childhood without their consent

Enlarge (credit: RicardoImagen | E+)

Photos of Brazilian kids—sometimes spanning their entire childhood—have been used without their consent to power AI tools, including popular image generators like Stable Diffusion, Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on Monday.

This act poses urgent privacy risks to kids and seems to increase risks of non-consensual AI-generated images bearing their likenesses, HRW's report said.

An HRW researcher, Hye Jung Han, helped expose the problem. She analyzed "less than 0.0001 percent" of LAION-5B, a dataset built from Common Crawl snapshots of the public web. The dataset does not contain the actual photos but includes image-text pairs derived from 5.85 billion images and captions posted online since 2008.

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Hackers steal “significant volume” of data from hundreds of Snowflake customers

Hackers steal “significant volume” of data from hundreds of Snowflake customers

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

As many as 165 customers of cloud storage provider Snowflake have been compromised by a group that obtained login credentials through information-stealing malware, researchers said Monday.

On Friday, Lending Tree subsidiary QuoteWizard confirmed it was among the customers notified by Snowflake that it was affected in the incident. Lending Tree spokesperson Megan Greuling said the company is in the process of determining whether data stored on Snowflake has been stolen.

“That investigation is ongoing,” she wrote in an email. “As of this time, it does not appear that consumer financial account information was impacted, nor information of the parent entity, Lending Tree.”

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Study: Three skulls of medieval Viking women were deliberately elongated

Artificially modified skull from the female Viking individual in Havor, Hablingbo parish, Gotland.

Enlarge / Artificially modified skull from a female Viking individual in Havor, Hablingbo parish, Gotland. (credit: © SHM/Johnny Karlsson 2008-11-05/CC BY 2.5 SE)

German archaeologists discovered that the skulls of three medieval Viking women found on the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea showed evidence of an unusual procedure to elongate their skulls. The process gave them an unusual and distinctive appearance, according to a paper published in the journal Current Swedish Archaeology. Along with evidence that the Viking men from the island may have deliberately filed their teeth, the discovery sheds light on the role body modification may have played in Viking culture

When people hear about Viking body modification, they probably think of Viking tattoos, particularly since the History Channel series Vikings popularized that notion. But whether actual Vikings sported tattoos is a matter of considerable debate. There is no mention of tattoos in the few Norse sagas and poetry that have survived, although other unusual physical characteristics are often mentioned, such as scars.

The only real evidence comes from a 10th century travel account by an Arab traveler and trader named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, whose travel account, Mission to the Volga, describes the Swedish Viking traders ("Rusiyyah") he met in the Middle Volga region of Russia. "They are dark from the tips of their toes right up to their necks—trees, pictures, and the like," Ibn Fadlan wrote. But the precise Arabic translation is unclear, and there is no hard archaeological evidence, since human skin typically doesn't preserve for centuries after a Viking burial.

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The Google Pay app is dead

The Google Play logo is flushed down a toilet alongside many dollar bills.

Enlarge / Google Pay is dead! (credit: Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica)

Google has killed off the Google Pay app. 9to5Google reports Google's old payments app stopped working recently, following shutdown plans that were announced in February. Google is shutting down the Google Pay app in the US, while in-store NFC payments seem to still be branded "Google Pay." Remember, this is Google's dysfunctional payments division, so all that's happening is Google Payment app No. 3 (Google Pay) is being shut down in favor of Google Payment app No. 4 (Google Wallet). The shutdown caps off the implosion of Google's payments division after a lot of poor decisions and failed product launches.

Google's NFC payment journey started in 2011 with Google Wallet (apps No. 1 and No. 4 are both called Google Wallet). In 2011, Google was a technology trailblazer and basically popularized the idea of paying for something with your phone in many regions (with the notable exception of Japan). Google shipped the first non-Japanese phones with the feature, fought carriers trying to stop phone payments from happening, and begged stores to get new, compatible terminals. Google's entire project was blown away when Apple Pay launched in 2014, and Google's response was its second payment app, Android Pay, in 2015. This copied much of Apple's setup, like sending payment tokens instead of the actual credit card number. Google Pay was a rebrand of this setup and arrived in 2018.

The 2018 version of Google Pay was a continuation of the Android Pay codebase, which was a continuation of the Google Wallet codebase. Despite all the rebrands, Google's payment apps were an evolution, and none of the previous apps were really "shut down"—they were in-place upgrades. Everything changed in 2021 when a new version of Google Pay was launched, which is when Google's payment division started to go off the rails.

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These are all the devices compatible with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18

These are all the devices compatible with iOS 18 and iPadOS 18

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple's new iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 updates are mostly good news for users of older Apple devices—with the exception of 2018's sixth-generation iPad, the new updates will run on all the same hardware that can run iOS 17 and iPadOS 17.

For iPhones, that will cover everything from the iPhone XR/XS and newer, including the second-gen iPhone SE; the seventh-gen iPad and newer; the third-gen iPad Air and newer; the fifth-gen iPad mini and newer; all 11-inch iPad Pros; and the third-gen 12.9-inch iPad Pro and later. Here are the full support lists:

  • The iOS 18 support list. [credit: Apple ]

It's a bit odd that the seventh-gen iPad makes the cutoff while the sixth-gen model does not, given that both use the same Apple A10 processor. But the seventh-gen iPad has 3GB of RAM instead of 2GB. This is the same amount as the third-gen iPad Air and fifth-gen iPad mini—apparently that extra gigabyte is crucial for running iPadOS 18's new features.

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Apple integrates ChatGPT into Siri, iOS, and macOS

  • The AIs are learning to cooperate! Siri talks to ChatGPT. [credit: Apple ]

Reports of Apple signing a deal with OpenAI are true: ChatGPT is coming to your Apple gear.

First up is Siri, which can tap into ChatGPT to answer voice questions. If Siri thinks ChatGPT can help answer your question, you'll get a pop-up permission box asking if you want to send your question to the chatbot. The response will come back in a window indicating that the information came from an outside source. This is the same way Siri treats a search engine (namely, Google), so how exactly Siri draws a line between ChatGPT and a search engine will be interesting. In Apple's lone example, there was a "help" intent, with the input saying to "help me plan a five-course meal" given certain ingredient limitations. That sort of ultra-specific input is something you can't do with a traditional search engine.

Siri can also send photos to ChatGPT. In Apple's example, the user snapped a picture of a wooden deck and asked Siri about decorating options. It sounds like the standard generative AI summary features will be here, too, with Apple SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi mentioning that "you can also ask questions about your documents, presentations, or PDFs."

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Apple unveils “Apple Intelligence” AI features for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS

Apple unveils “Apple Intelligence” AI features for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

On Monday, Apple debuted "Apple Intelligence," a new suite of free AI-powered features for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia that includes creating email summaries, generating images and emoji, and allowing Siri to take actions on your behalf. These features are achieved through a combination of on-device and cloud processing, with a strong emphasis on privacy. Apple says that Apple Intelligence features will be widely available later this year and will be available as a beta test for developers this summer.

The announcements came during a livestream WWDC keynote and a simultaneous event attended by the press on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California. In an introduction, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company has been using machine learning for years, but the introduction of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to elevate the capabilities of Apple products. He emphasized the need for both personalization and privacy in Apple's approach.

At last year's WWDC, Apple avoided using the term "AI" completely, instead preferring terms like "machine learning" as Apple's way of avoiding buzzy hype while integrating applications of AI into apps in useful ways. This year, Apple figured out a new way to largely avoid the abbreviation "AI" by coining "Apple Intelligence," a catchall branding term that refers to a broad group of machine learning, LLM, and image generation technologies. By our count, the term "AI" was used sparingly in the keynote—most notably near the end of the presentation when Apple executive Craig Federighi said, "It's AI for the rest of us."

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Apple’s AI promise: “Your data is never stored or made accessible to Apple”

Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announces "Private Cloud Compute" at WWDC 2024.

Enlarge / Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi announces "Private Cloud Compute" at WWDC 2024. (credit: Apple)

With most large language models being run on remote, cloud-based server farms, some users have been reluctant to share personally identifiable and/or private data with AI companies. In its WWDC keynote today, Apple stressed that the new "Apple Intelligence" system it's integrating into its products will use a new "Private Cloud Compute" to ensure any data processed on its cloud servers is protected in a transparent and verifiable way.

"You should not have to hand over all the details of your life to be warehoused and analyzed in someone's AI cloud," Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi said.

Trust, but verify

Part of what Apple calls "a brand new standard for privacy and AI" is achieved through on-device processing. Federighi said "many" of Apple's generative AI models can run entirely on a device powered by an A17+ or M-series chips, eliminating the risk of sending your personal data to a remote server.

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Here are all the Intel and Apple Silicon Macs that will run macOS 15 Sequoia

A grab bag of new features in macOS 15 Sequoia.

Enlarge / A grab bag of new features in macOS 15 Sequoia. (credit: Apple)

Most owners of aging Intel Macs got a bit of a reprieve today when Apple announced macOS 15 Sequoia—this new macOS release will run on the vast majority of the hardware that can currently run macOS 14 Sonoma. Intel Macs released between December of 2017 and 2020 are mostly eligible for the new update, though newer models with Apple Silicon chips will be needed to support some of the new features.

Apple's full support list for Sequoia is as follows:

Generally, all of these Macs include Apple's T2 chip, a co-processor installed in late-model Intel Macs that bridged the gap between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. There are two exceptions. The biggest is the 2018 MacBook Air, which did come with an Apple T2 but also shipped with a weak dual-core processor and integrated GPU that Apple has apparently decided aren't up to the task of handling Sequoia. The other is the 2019 iMac, which for whatever reason shipped without a T2. Apple says the iPhone mirroring feature does require the T2 chip, so it presumably won't work on the 2019 iMac.

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DARPA’s planned nuclear rocket would use enough fuel to build a bomb

A lump of rock, next to the periodic table entry for uranium, all against a black background.

Enlarge (credit: OLE-CNX)

High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.

This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.

“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper.

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ISPs ask FCC for tax on Big Tech to fund broadband networks and discounts

Illustration of $100-dollar bills being sucked into a broadband network.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson)

Internet service providers are again urging the Federal Communications Commission to impose new fees on Big Tech firms and use the money to subsidize broadband network deployment and affordability programs. If approved, the request would force Big Tech firms to pay into the FCC's Universal Service Fund (USF), which in turn distributes money to broadband providers.

The request was made on June 6 by USTelecom, a lobby group for AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink/Lumen, and smaller telcos. USTelecom has made similar arguments before, but its latest request to the FCC argues that the recent death of a broadband discount program should spur the FCC to start extracting money from Big Tech.

"Through focusing on the Big Tech companies who benefit most from broadband connectivity, the Commission will fairly allocate the burden of sustaining USF," USTelecom wrote in the FCC filing last week.

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iPadOS 18 adds machine-learning wizardry with handwriting, math features

  • The Calculator app is finally coming to iPad. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

CUPERTINO, Calif.—After going into detail about iOS 18, Apple took a few moments in its WWDC 2024 keynote to walk through some changes.

There are a few minor UI changes and new features across Apple's first party apps. That includes a new floating tab bar. The bar expands into the side bar when you want to dig in, and you can customize the tab bar to include the specific things you want to interact with the most. Additionally, SharePlay allows easier screen sharing and remote control of another person's iPad.

But the big news is that the Calculator app we've all used on the iPhone to the iPad, after years of the iPad having no first-party calculator app at all. The iPad Calculator app can do some things the iPhone version can't do with the Apple Pencil; a feature called Math Notes can write out expressions like you would on a piece of paper, and the app will solve the expressions live as you scribble them—plus various other cool live-updating math features. (These new Math Notes features work in the Notes app, too.)

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Apple announces macOS 15 Sequoia with window tiling, iPhone mirroring, and more

Using macOS S15 Sequoia to stream an iPhone's screen to a Mac while the iPhone stays locked.

Enlarge / Using macOS S15 Sequoia to stream an iPhone's screen to a Mac while the iPhone stays locked. (credit: Apple)

Apple has formally announced macOS 15 at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Codenamed Sequoia, the new release brings a combination of iOS 18 features and a few Mac-specific things to the devices it supports.

Users who split their time between Windows and macOS will be the most excited to see that Apple has finally implemented a form of automated window tiling in macOS. This makes it easier to arrange windows automatically on your screen without manually dragging and resizing each one individually or switching into full-screen mode.

Another feature called iPhone Mirroring sends your iPhone's screen to your Mac, so you can use apps directly on your phone while manipulating them using your Mac's keyboard and trackpad. The iPhone audio is also streamed to your Mac. For privacy's sake, your phone's screen stays locked while apps are streaming to your Mac, and your Mac can also receive your iPhone notifications alongside your Mac notifications (no word on how the operating systems will handle duplicate notifications from Messages, Calendar, or other apps that are getting the same updates on both platforms).

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iOS 18 adds Apple Intelligence, customizations, and makes Android SMS nicer

Hands manipulating the Conrol Center on an iPhone

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The biggest feature in iOS 18, the one that affects the most people, was a single item in a comma-stuffed sentence by Apple software boss Craig Federighi: "Support for RCS."

As we noted when Apple announced its support for "RCS Universal Profile," a kind of minimum viable cross-device rich messaging, iPhone users getting RCS means SMS chains with Android users "will be slightly less awful." SMS messages will soon have read receipts, higher-quality media sending, and typing indicators, along with better security. And RCS messages can go over Wi-Fi when you don't have a cellular signal. Apple is certainly downplaying a major cross-platform compatibility upgrade, but it's a notable quality-of-life boost.

  • Prioritized notifications through Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence, the new Siri, and the iPhone

iOS 18 is one of the major beneficiaries of Apple's AI rollout, dubbed "Apple Intelligence." Apple Intelligence promises to help iPhone users create and understand language and images, with the proper context from your phone's apps: photos, calendar, email, messages, and more.

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Apple’s new Vision Pro software offers an ultrawide virtual Mac monitor

A floating Mac desktop over a table

Enlarge / A Mac virtual monitor in visionOS 2. (credit: Samuel Axon)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple kicked off the keynote for its annual developer conference by announcing a new version of visionOS, the operating system that runs on the company's pricey but impressive Vision Pro mixed reality headset.

The updates in visionOS 2 are modest, not revolutionary—mostly iterative changes, quality-of-life improvements, and some features that were originally expected in the first version of visionOS. That's not too surprising given that visionOS just went out to users four months ago.

Vision Pro users hoping for multiple virtual Mac monitors will be disappointed that's not planned this time around, but Apple plans to add the next-best thing: Users will be able to take advantage of a larger and higher-resolution single virtual display, including a huge, wraparound ultrawide monitor mode that Apple says is equivalent to two 4K monitors.

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Bird flu virus from Texas human case kills 100% of ferrets in CDC study

Od: Beth Mole
Bird flu virus from Texas human case kills 100% of ferrets in CDC study

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Yui Mok)

The strain of H5N1 bird flu isolated from a dairy worker in Texas was 100 percent fatal in ferrets used to model influenza illnesses in humans. However, the virus appeared inefficient at spreading via respiratory droplets, according to newly released study results from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data confirms that H5N1 infections are significantly different from seasonal influenza viruses that circulate in humans. Those annual viruses make ferrets sick but are not deadly. They have also shown to be highly efficient at spreading via respiratory droplets, with 100 percent transmission rates in laboratory settings. In contrast, the strain from the Texas man (A/Texas/37/2024) appeared to have only a 33 percent transmission rate via respiratory droplets among ferrets.

"This suggests that A/Texas/37/2024-like viruses would need to undergo changes to spread efficiently by droplets through the air, such as from coughs and sneezes," the CDC said in its data summary. The agency went on to note that "efficient respiratory droplet spread, like what is seen with seasonal influenza viruses, is needed for sustained person-to-person spread to happen."

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Some company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says

Man and woman talking at an office water cooler

Enlarge / RTO mandates can boost workers' professional networks, but in-office employees may also spend more time socializing than remote ones. (credit: Getty)

A new survey suggests that some US companies implemented return-to-office (RTO) policies in the hopes of getting workers to quit. And despite the belief that such policies could boost productivity compared to letting employees work from home, the survey from HR software provider BambooHR points to remote and in-office employees spending an equal amount of time working.

BambooHR surveyed 1,504 full-time US employees, including 504 human resources (HR) workers who are a manager or higher, from March 9 to March 22. According to the firm, the sample group used for its report "The New Surveillance Era: Visibility Beats Productivity for RTO & Remote" is equally split across genders and includes "a spread of age groups, race groups, and geographies." Method Research, the research arm of technology PR and marketing firm Method, prepared the survey, and data collection firm Rep Data distributed it.

Trying to make people quit

Among those surveyed, 52 percent said they prefer working remotely compared to 39 percent who prefer working in an office.

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Microsoft Gaming CEO: “I think we should have a handheld, too”

The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft.

Enlarge / The "Xbox Series V" was a social media hoax, but the idea of a portable Xbox seems to still have legs inside Microsoft. (credit: Reddit)

The extremely long-standing rumors regarding Microsoft making a portable game console got a strong shot in the arm over the weekend from none other than Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer. Speaking on stage as part of an IGN Live interview, Spencer said directly that "I think we should have a handheld, too."

The comment stops just short of an official announcement that Microsoft is actively working on portable gaming hardware for the first time. But if anyone is in a position to make an "I think we should..." into an operational reality, it's Spencer.

"The future for us in hardware is pretty awesome," Spencer continued during the IGN presentation. "And the work that the team is doing around different form factors, different ways to play, I'm incredibly excited about it."

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Microsoft pulls release preview build of Windows 11 24H2 after Recall controversy

The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage.

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person's PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)

On Friday, Microsoft announced major changes to its upcoming Recall feature after overwhelming criticism from security researchers, the press, and its users. Microsoft is turning Recall off by default when users set up PCs that are compatible with the feature, and it's adding additional authentication and encryption that will make it harder to access another user's Recall data on the same PC.

It's likely not a coincidence that Microsoft also quietly pulled the build of the Windows 11 24H2 update that it had been testing in its Release Preview channel for Windows Insiders. It's not unheard of for Microsoft to stop distributing a beta build of Windows after releasing it, but the Release Preview channel is typically the last stop for a Windows update before a wider release.

Microsoft hasn't provided a specific rationale for pulling the update; the blog post says the pause is "temporary" and the rollout will be resumed "in the coming weeks." Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc posted on social media that the team was "working to get it rolling out again shortly."

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Virgin Galactic has ceased flying its only space plane. Now what?

Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft launches on Saturday.

Enlarge / Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft launches on Saturday. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Saturday, the VSS Unity space plane made its final flight, carrying four passengers to an altitude of 54.4 miles (87.5 km) above the New Mexico desert. The spacecraft will now be retired after just seven commercial space flights, all made within the last year.

Although the flight was characterized by its chief executive Michael Colglazier as a "celebratory moment" for Virgin Galactic, the company now finds itself at a crossroads.

After an impressive but brief flurry of spaceflight activity—seven human spaceflights in a year, even to suborbital space, is unprecedented for a private company—Virgin Galactic will now be grounded again for at least two years. That's because Colglazier and Virgin Galactic are betting it all on the development of a future "Delta class" of spaceships modeled on VSS Unity.

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Boeing’s Starliner capsule poised for second try at first astronaut flight

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

NASA and Boeing officials are ready for a second attempt to launch the first crew test flight on the Starliner spacecraft Saturday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Liftoff of Boeing's Starliner capsuled atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is set for 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC). NASA commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, both veteran astronauts, will take the Starliner spacecraft on its first trip into low-Earth orbit with a crew on board.

The first crew flight on a new spacecraft is not an everyday event. Starliner is the sixth orbital-class crew spacecraft in the history of the US space program, following Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, the space shuttle, and SpaceX's Crew Dragon. NASA signed a $4.2 billion contract with Boeing in 2014 to develop Starliner, but the project is running years behind schedule and has cost Boeing nearly $1.5 billion in cost overruns. SpaceX, meanwhile, won a contract at the same time as Boeing and started launching astronauts on the Crew Dragon four years ago this week.

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FDA’s review of MDMA for PTSD highlights study bias and safety concerns

Od: Beth Mole
MDMA is now in the FDA's hands.

Enlarge / MDMA is now in the FDA's hands. (credit: Getty | PYMCA/Avalon)

The safety and efficacy data on the use of MDMA (aka ecstasy) for post-traumatic stress disorder therapy is "challenging to interpret," the Food and Drug Administration said in a briefing document posted Friday. The agency noted significant flaws in the design of the underlying clinical trials as well as safety concerns for the drug, particularly cardiovascular harms.

On Tuesday, June 4, the FDA will convene an advisory committee that will review the evidence and vote on MDMA's efficacy and whether its benefits outweigh its risks. The FDA does not have to follow the committee's recommendations, but it often does. If the FDA subsequently approves MDMA as part of treatment for PTSD, it would mark a significant shift in the federal government's stance on MDMA, as well as psychedelics, generally. Currently, the US Drug Enforcement Administration considers MDMA a Schedule I drug, defined as one with "no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse." It would also offer a new treatment option for patients with PTSD, a disabling psychiatric condition with few treatment options currently.

As Ars has reported previously, the submission of MDMA for approval is based on two clinical trials. The first trial, published in Nature Medicine in 2021, involved 90 participants with moderate PTSD and found that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy significantly improved Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale for DSM-5 (CAPS-5) scores compared with participants who were given psychotherapy along with a placebo. In the second study, published in September in Nature Medicine, the finding held up among 104 participants with moderate or severe PTSD (73 percent had severe PTSD).

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Turn almost any bike into an e-bike with the Clip

Clip attached to a mountain bike

Enlarge / The Clip attached to a late-90s vintage mountain bike. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

Shortly after World War II, a French manufacturer by the name of Solex started selling mopeds. These were not your "typical" moped that looks kind of like a motorcycle with pedals—the mopeds made by Solex were essentially bicycles with a small, two-stroke engine mounted over the front wheel that could propel the rider around 100 km on a single liter of gas mixture. The downside: Solex mopeds were loud and cumbersome to ride due to the weight distribution, and they never really caught on in North America.

Clip, a startup based in Brooklyn, New York, has come up with its own twist on the Solex. Its only product, the eponymously named Clip, is a friction drive unit that attaches to the front fork of any bicycle, turning it into an e-bike. At $499 for the Commuter model and $599 for the Explorer, it is a relatively inexpensive way to turn just about any bicycle into an e-bike for a fraction of the cost of a new one.

Weighing in at 8.8 lb (4 kg) for the Commuter model (the Explorer is a pound heavier), the Clip is at its essence a portable friction-drive. There's a detachable controller that mounts on the handlebar and the unit itself. The Explorer model, the one we reviewed, has a 192 Wh battery that takes an hour to fully charge. Its range is pegged at "up to 12 miles," a claim that is pretty accurate based on our testing, and the top speed is 15 mph. The Commuter model offers half the battery capacity, charge time, and range.

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Journalists “deeply troubled” by OpenAI’s content deals with Vox, The Atlantic

A man covered in newspaper.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models. But some of the publications' writers—and the unions that represent them—were surprised by the announcements and aren't happy about it. Already, two unions have released statements expressing "alarm" and "concern."

"The unionized members of The Atlantic Editorial and Business and Technology units are deeply troubled by the opaque agreement The Atlantic has made with OpenAI," reads a statement from the Atlantic union. "And especially by management's complete lack of transparency about what the agreement entails and how it will affect our work."

The Vox Union—which represents The Verge, SB Nation, and Vulture, among other publications—reacted in similar fashion, writing in a statement, "Today, members of the Vox Media Union ... were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a 'strategic content and product partnership' with OpenAI. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative AI."

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Micro LED monitors connect like puzzle pieces in HP multi-monitor concept

woman using a tri-monitor setup

Enlarge / Yes, there are bigger monitors, but is there a better way to have a tri-monitor setup? (credit: Getty)

In a technical disclosure published this month, HP explored a Micro LED monitor concept that would enable consumers to easily use various multi-monitor configurations through the use of "Lego-like building blocks." HP has no immediate plans to make what it has called "composable Micro LED monitors," but its discussion explores a potential way to simplify multitasking with numerous displays.

HP's paper [PDF], written by HP scientists and technical architects, discusses a theoretical monitor that supports the easy addition of more flat or curved screens on its left, right, or bottom sides (the authors noted that top extensions could also be possible but they were "trying to keep the number of configurations manageable"). The setup would use one 12×12-inch "core" monitor that has a cable to the connected system. The computer's operating system (OS) would be able to view the display setup as one, two, or multiple monitors, and physical switches would let users quickly disable displays.

  • The illustration shows a monitor made of a core unit and two extension panels viewed as three monitors (left), two monitors (middle), and two monitors with different orientations (right). [credit: HP/Technical Disclosure Commons ]

Not a real product

HP's paper is only a technical disclosure, which companies often publish in order to support potential patent filings. So it's possible that we'll never see HP release "composable Micro LED monitors" as described. An HP spokesperson told me:

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Google’s AI Overview is flawed by design, and a new company blog post hints at why

A selection of Google mascot characters created by the company.

Enlarge / The Google "G" logo surrounded by whimsical characters, all of which look stunned and surprised. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google capped off a rough week of providing inaccurate and sometimes dangerous answers through its experimental AI Overview feature by authoring a follow-up blog post titled, "AI Overviews: About last week." In the post, attributed to Google VP Liz Reid, head of Google Search, the firm formally acknowledged issues with the feature and outlined steps taken to improve a system that appears flawed by design, even if it doesn't realize it is admitting it.

To recap, the AI Overview feature—which the company showed off at Google I/O a few weeks ago—aims to provide search users with summarized answers to questions by using an AI model integrated with Google's web ranking systems. Right now, it's an experimental feature that is not active for everyone, but when a participating user searches for a topic, they might see an AI-generated answer at the top of the results, pulled from highly ranked web content and summarized by an AI model.

While Google claims this approach is "highly effective" and on par with its Featured Snippets in terms of accuracy, the past week has seen numerous examples of the AI system generating bizarre, incorrect, or even potentially harmful responses, as we detailed in a recent feature where Ars reporter Kyle Orland replicated many of the unusual outputs.

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