dispelledTerminal
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This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes, ... and seawater?
To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development. As Ars has explored, there are valuable lessons that companies can learn from competition, particularly when the pressure is as intense as Formula 1. If you asked me last month, I would likely have said that when it comes to historic racing, it's almost all about the sport and entertainment,…
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Facing US export controls, China's DeepSeek plans to make its own chips
DeepSeek, the Chinese startup developing large language models that are competitive with those from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is planning to enter the silicon business, according to Reuters. Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters writes that DeepSeek has been working on a move into silicon for about a year. It has been meeting with potential partners in the hardware a…
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Dragonflies maneuver like fighter pilots
Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Male dragonflies are known to engage in mid-air "dogfights" to defend their breeding territory, using different maneuvers than those they employ when hunting prey. A new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface concluded that relatively simple rules drive that behavior, namely that male dragonflies ar…
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New virus catalog reveals which pathogens pose the greatest threat
In a typical year, scientists discover two or three viruses that have never been seen in people before. The number fluctuates, but the trend has been fairly steady since the 1960s. Most of these viruses attract little attention, and my colleagues and I have often had to search through old medical papers to find any mention of them. Some viruses disappear entirely and are all but forgotten. At the…
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ULA's last six Atlas Vs can't launch anything besides Boeing's Starliner
The final flight of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket is still several years off, but an important era for the once-dominant launch company came to a close last week. The final flight of an Atlas V for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:30 am EDT (04:30 UTC) last Thursday, sending 29 satellites to orbit to move the netw…
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How AI could enable autonomous robot workers in workplaces—and maybe homes
In a world where self-driving robotaxis glide through major city streets without drivers behind the wheel and delivery drones autonomously fly through the skies to drop off orders at customers’ homes, the idea of general-purpose robots helping humans with various tasks in workplaces or even homes may not seem far-fetched. But that future hinges on developing increasingly autonomous robots powered…
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FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees
The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called "passthrough" fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find. ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly…
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Kremlin suspected of flying drones over Europe using Russian shadow fleet
Mysterious drone flights that disrupted major European airports and flew over NATO member military bases hosting US nuclear weapons may be the work of a coordinated Kremlin campaign launched from Russian-linked commercial ships. That recent assessment from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies used automatic identification system (AIS) maritime tracking data and other publicl…
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What is the oldest American object ever launched into space?
Did you know that the space shuttle once launched the Statue of Liberty into space? In fact, there were two "Lady Liberties" on board Discovery when it lifted off on its fourth flight in April 1985. To be fair, each statue was only 15 inches tall (38.1 centimeters), but they were also each made of copper that was removed from the full-size statue during its then-still-ongoing restoration. After t…
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NRC is (sort of) getting rid of "as low as reasonably achievable" standard
Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart construction of nuclear power plants in the US, and many pro-nuclear advocates have been complaining about the US's existing regulations, portraying th…
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Katalyst's satellite rescue mission is now in pursuit of NASA's Swift
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit. The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial compan…
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Secret Claude tracker shocks users after Anthropic’s anti-surveillance stance
Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a “serious breach of user trust.” Last week, a web developer known as “Thereallo” was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using “prompt steganography” to hide code that t…
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The incredible shrinking Xbox: Five studios, 3,200 employees let go
Last month, Xbox executives laid out some "hard truths" about Microsoft's struggling gaming division that they said would require a difficult "Xbox reset." This morning, Microsoft revealed the brutal shape of that "reset," announcing plans for 3,200 layoffs and the divestment of five smaller studios that the company has spent years acquiring and shepherding. Half of those 3,200 layoffs are effect…
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F1 in Britain: Automated software to blame for crushing expectations
Formula 1 returned to what is a home race for most of the teams on the grid this past weekend with the British Grand Prix. Yet again this season, we saw the fastest car not win the race, as reliability has been a problem. But racing giveth and racing taketh away, and the beneficiary of one driver's bad luck was another driver who really needed that win. Perhaps the bigger story, though, was the u…
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There were not one, but two asteroid encounters this weekend
As the United States of America celebrated its 250th birthday on terra firma with fireworks displays this weekend, two Asian countries made some splashes of their own farther from Earth. On Sunday, an aging Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa2, which completed its initial sample-return objective more than half a decade ago, found success with an extended mission that saw the vehicle fly by a peanu…
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UK regulator warns of "arms race" to keep up with AI use in financial services
Regulators are in an “arms race” to keep up with the use of artificial intelligence in financial services, a senior UK official has warned, with millions of people using the technology to help them make personal finance decisions. Sheldon Mills, an executive director at the Financial Conduct Authority, told the FT the watchdog would need greater powers to stay on top of the rapid growth of AI and…
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Bentley teases its first EV, the Torcal
Bentley is preparing to add a fourth model to its rarified lineup, and today we know what it will be called: the Torcal. The carmaker has been working on its first electric vehicle for a while now; it was seen testing in the Arctic Circle late last year, giving us a sneak peek at the interior. A few weeks ago, another example was spotted at the Nürburgring. Speculation had been mounting over what…
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The Czinger 21C might be the wildest car we drive all year
The temptation with a car like the Czinger 21C is to treat it as a collection of extreme specifications, and to be fair, it’s certainly not lacking in that department. At its most basic level, the carbon-fiber-bodied 21C is a hybrid hypercar built around a bespoke 2.88-liter twin-turbocharged flat-plane crank V8 that revs to a searing 11,000 rpm. This power plant is matched up with a three-motor…
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Chemical accidents rise as Trump administration proposes weakening safety rules
Physicist Ronald Koopman appeared at a Southern California Air District meeting in 2018 to talk about what seemed like an arcane scientific topic: hydrofluoric acid dispersion and water mitigation testing. Hydrofluoric acid, also known as hydrogen fluoride or HF, is used to manufacture a range of materials, including refrigerants, gasoline, fluorine-based pesticides and fluoropolymers like those…
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The missing 500 million: Cosmic bombardment melted Earth's first crust
Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don't agree on how they formed. "The continents started appearing around about four billion years ago—that's the oldest continental rock we know about,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “The Earth is four and a half billion years old,…