Pure Tech

Ars Technica

The Trump administration is halting vital federal research on the foodborne parasite Cyclospora, despite the record-breaking, nationwide outbreak of the diarrheal pathogen, according to Politico. Of the three research programs that...

Ars Technica

If you’re like many of our readers, you’ve got Ars Technica bookmarked and hit the front page a few times a day. But for others, a compelling story is what brings them here for the first time. And the discussions sometimes keep them coming...

Ars Technica

Bentley provided flights from Washington, DC, to Monterey, California, and accommodation so Ars could drive the Supersports, as well as ride in a preproduction Torcal EV, which we wrote about last week. Ars does not accept paid editorial...

Ars Technica

The standard explanation for why rain causes corrosion is that water carries dissolved salts and acids to a surface, constant drumming of raindrops abrades whatever protective coating is on it, and oxygen does the rest. Nearly all our...

Ars Technica

It took three years, but Coyote vs. Acme is finally in theaters and delighting audiences of all ages with its irresistible blend of slapstick humor, pointed satire, and even a warm fuzzy here and there. We're happy to report that the film...

Ars Technica

Some of the world’s leading music publishers think that Anthropic got off too light in a historic settlement where the Claude maker paid authors $1.5 billion after admitting to pirating more than 7 million books to train AI. “$1.5 billion...

Ars Technica

President Trump yesterday demanded that the Federal Communications Commission punish or rebuke an NBC journalist for saying he has "mixed results" in his election endorsements. In the latest example of how Trump is using the FCC to harass...

Ars Technica

As online services get better at blocking malicious traffic, the attackers and scammers behind them have been forced to find new ways to reach their targets. The alternative of choice is now what are known as residential proxy networks....

Ars Technica

Every few years, El Niño or its cool counterpart, La Niña, shifts rainfall across the tropics, dries out Australia, floods parts of Peru, and rearranges the weather on most of the planet. The two are the warm and cold swings of a single...

Ars Technica

Trade talks between the US and Canada broke down last week, leading to a wave of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs. US President Donald Trump also fell back on an old favorite to needle his opponents, signing an executive order on Thursday...

Ars Technica

OpenAI’s ChatGPT will have to comply with tougher EU rules such as removing illegal content or face potential fines, the European Commission said on Monday, as Brussels grapples with how its existing digital regulation applies to rapidly...

Ars Technica

NASA's $4.3 billion Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, equipped with a 300-megapixel camera sighted through a refurbished spy mirror, launched Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a mission to reveal the mysterious forces driving...

Ars Technica

The relatively recent rise of AI-assisted coding tools and the whole concept of "vibe coding" have effectively upended entire software development workflows. While these tools have been available to novice coders willing to put in the work...

Ars Technica

Here at Ars, we're intimately familiar with data leaks surrounding Valve's games, hardware, and the workings of Steam itself. But nothing could have prepared us for this weekend's "terarelease" encompassing more than 12TB of content...

Ars Technica

As is standard procedure for major NASA missions, the US space agency held a post-launch news conference on Sunday morning at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to provide information about how the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was faring...

Ars Technica

Meta is testing robots that can plug in cables, reset servers, and handle other tasks inside its data centers, according to several current and former workers familiar with the projects. The ongoing effort, which has not been previously...

Ars Technica

I filed a request with McDonald’s earlier this month to access all of the personal data the fast food company collected about me, and I received a stunning 515-page report a few days later that detailed my app interactions in granular...

Ars Technica

Senators are renewing calls for anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to step down or be ousted—and at least one is calling for a criminal investigation—amid the release of documents they say prove Kennedy lied to them during his...

Ars Technica

New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate. Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to...

Ars Technica

Kalshi today lost a major ruling over whether it can evade state gambling laws, as a federal appeals court found that Nevada can stop the prediction market from allowing sports bets. While the Trump administration is trying to help...

Ars Technica

I'm on record declaring James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to be The Best Damn Sequel of All Time, and I stand by that assessment. August 29, the fictional date (in 1997) of the franchise's original nuclear holocaust, is...

Ars Technica

Apple increased the price for a monthly subscription to Apple TV by $2, to $15, today. Annual prices increased by 20 percent from $99 to $119. Current subscribers will receive one month’s notice before paying the new prices, Apple said,...

Ars Technica

The Trump administration's blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal, a federal judge ruled in an order vacating government directives against the use of the firm's AI technology. The government illegally retaliated against Anthropic by...

Ars Technica

During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy. "It's clear that we will need to educate and train an...

Ars Technica

Meta is rolling out an obvious fix to make its AI glasses less creepy amid backlash over the glasses' non-consensual recordings that have flooded the Internet. On Friday, The Verge reported that Meta closed a loophole that made it easy for...

Ars Technica

Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a relentless series of supply chain attacks that...

Ars Technica

Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the...

Ars Technica

xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested. In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff...

Ars Technica

For all the interest in and uptake of agentic AI systems over the past year or so, the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer. Anthropic...

Ars Technica

Republican campaign committees want the Supreme Court to mandate lower prices for election commercials on broadcast TV stations. If the court agrees, broadcasters would be forced to offer their lowest ad prices to political parties and...

Ars Technica

Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears. On Thursday, Politico reported that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry...

Ars Technica

In the wake of news on Tuesday that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old...

Ars Technica

For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look. The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the...

Ars Technica

“Protect our water,” “Water for people not AI,” “Don’t mess with our water,” declare protest signs from Texas to New Mexico to Arizona. Angered by water use, energy consumption, and pollution, locals are increasingly protesting the rapid...

Ars Technica

The OpenAI agents involved in last month’s incursion into Hugging Face were trained so heavily on winning a competition that they pursued a relentless campaign to cheat, a new report documented. In the process, and without authorization,...

Ars Technica

A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia (in the US) included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta, Georgia—contained...

Ars Technica

One thousand Swiss citizens voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health across Switzerland. The results of...

Ars Technica

Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year. The...

Ars Technica

Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that...

Ars Technica

Bentley provided flights from Washington, DC, to Monterey, California, and accommodation so Ars could ride in the Torcal, as well as some other things you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content....

Ars Technica

It's said celebrity deaths come in threes. We lost Sam Neill last month, and the legendary Dolly Parton yesterday. Now we find out that the universe has also seen fit to deprive us of the glorious presence of Tim Curry, who died at home...

Ars Technica

Earlier this year, Meta created a “plan” to reduce some of its teams by as much as 60 percent to make the company “AI native,” Reuters reported today, citing two people familiar with Meta’s internal affairs. Reuters’ report highlights the...

Ars Technica

Florida's attorney general got a fiery rebuke and some ecclesiastical schooling from the state's Catholic bishops after he boldly threatened to block funding to Catholic schools unless the church bends to the state's anti-vaccine...

Ars Technica

While we wait (possibly in vain) for Gemini 3.5 Pro to launch, Google is releasing a different model in the 3.5 branch. The company has announced Gemini 3.5 Transcribe, an AI model designed to streamline voice input by editing out "ums"...

Ars Technica

Operation Bluebird, the Virginia-based startup trying to revive the allegedly abandoned “Twitter” name and logo, announced Monday that it has launched its new social media network: Twitter.now. “We are a small company, we have investors,...

Ars Technica

For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part...

Ars Technica

The GT3 occupies a singular place in the 911 lineup. Whereas the range-topping Turbo S piles on power, technology, luxury, and all-weather capability, the GT3 has always pursued something more elemental: a lighter weight, more focus, and a...

Ars Technica

A federal appeals court yesterday blocked a Trump administration decision that could have resulted in even more political advertisements appearing on broadcast television during the upcoming elections. The Federal Communications Commission...

Ars Technica

The genetic code is what life everywhere uses to convert the information contained in DNA into specific protein sequences. With minor variations, the same genetic code is used by every living thing on Earth, suggesting it was already...

Ars Technica

As part of its nuclear fusion processes, the Sun produces a particularly interesting isotope of helium, known as helium-3. Some of this helium-3 escapes the Sun's gravitational pull as part of the solar wind, a stream of charged particles...