Why did 1,000 Swiss citizens bury their underpants?
A thousand people 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 …
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Development
Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them
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 …
Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago
Mass spectrometry revealed that the broken containers had once held something containing the chemical compounds theobromine, theophylline, caffeine, and paraxanthine. Those compounds are hallmarks of cacao, but they’re also found in yaupon …
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
The files are misconfigured because they list non-existent packages from PyPI, npm, and other registries along with instructions on how to install them. For example, one file contained the prompt “Installation: pip …
How much of a problem is AI’s water use?
Recent advances in AI technology have already reduced water demand for many data centers. Electrical and computer engineer Shaolei Ren of the University of California, Riverside, says that an estimate he made …
How OpenAI let a mob of LLM agents game a test and ransack Hugging Face
“Agents used this message board to coordinate several large-scale collective projects to find a general-purpose way to fool or tamper with the automated scorer for the ExploitGym benchmark,” METR researchers wrote. “Agents …
An EV that sounds like a 6.75 L V8: A ride in the Bentley Torcal
From the back seat, you might not have known it was an EV. “These are luxury items, an emotional purchase. So we wanted to make sure that we maintained this kind of …
RIP, Tim Curry: Ars remembers his top 10 iconic performances
Sections Forum Subscribe Search AI Biz & IT Cars Culture Gaming Health Policy Science Security Space Tech Feature Reviews AI Biz & IT Cars Culture Gaming Health Policy Science Security Space Tech …
AI agents meant to replace Meta workers made “large-scale, disruptive actions”
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 …
New Twitter launches, says Musk's X gave up the name
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, …
Meta settles states' child-safety claims for $18B; Florida rejects deal as "peanuts"
California Attorney General Bonta said today that “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms—and will do it within months. We are talking …
Florida Catholics slap down state AG by rejecting religious vaccine exemptions
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 …
Google announces Gemini 3.5 Transcribe for AI-powered speech-to-text
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 …
The Porsche 911 GT3 Touring punches above its weight class
The result is a car that feels just as rapid out in the real world as its predecessor. The manual GT3 Touring’s top speed falls from 199 to 194 mph (320 km/h …
Xbox’s new disc-to-digital program gives physical games a digital future
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 …
Court blocks Trump FCC order that could flood broadcast TV with more election ads
US law requires the lowest ad rates for “any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office.” The judges’ panel decided that “the statutory text is unambiguous, and it …
Researchers get two genetic codes to work at the same time
That translation relies on yet another type of RNA, the transfer RNA (tRna). While transfer RNAs fold up into a complex structure, they all have two key parts. On one side is …
15,000 years of solar wind in four hours? A Seattle company gives it a go.
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 …
Psychiatry’s diagnostic bible is finally getting a biological upgrade
The “bible” of clinical psychiatry—the DSM, short for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—is one of the most popular psychiatry reference books around the world. Clinicians use it to diagnose …
IBM's new Granite 4.2 models ride the wave of interest in local LLMs
IBM has rolled out the newest models in its family of open-weight large language models designed to be downloaded and self-hosted. The newly launched Granite 4.2 comes in 3B, 8B, and 30B …