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These tips and recommendations can help you get some shut-eye before you fly.

We tested the top curling irons on the market, and here are the ones that made the cut.

Apple’s 2025 iPad refresh doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but it’s still the best tablet for most people.

LG has licensed tech that claims to interpret TV users’ feelings and convictions. The company will use this data to more directly target the ads it’s showing to users of its smart TV platform.

Three DOGE associates have been granted access to systems at the Department of Labor housing sensitive information on migrant farm workers, visa applicants, and more.

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX's Starlink internet network.

However, as is often the case on Florida's Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.

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The wholesale American cannibalism of one of its own crucial appendages—the world-famous university system—has begun in earnest. The campaign is predictably Trumpian, built on a flagrantly pretextual basis and executed with the sort of vicious but chaotic idiocy that has always been a hallmark of the authoritarian mind.

At a moment when the administration is systematically waging war on diversity initiatives of every kind, it has simultaneously discovered that it is really concerned about both "viewpoint diversity" and "antisemitism" on college campuses—and it is using the two issues as a club to beat on the US university system until it either dies or conforms to MAGA ideology.

Reaching this conclusion does not require reading any tea leaves or consulting any oracles; one need only listen to people like Vice President JD Vance, who in 2021 gave a speech called "The Universities are the Enemy" to signal that, like every authoritarian revolutionary, he intended to go after the educated.

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On Monday, a developer using the popular AI-powered code editor Cursor noticed something strange: Switching between machines instantly logged them out, breaking a common workflow for programmers who use multiple devices. When the user contacted Cursor support, an agent named "Sam" told them it was expected behavior under a new policy. But no such policy existed, and Sam was a bot. The AI model made the policy up, sparking a wave of complaints and cancellation threats documented on Hacker News and Reddit.

This marks the latest instance of AI confabulations (also called "hallucinations") causing potential business damage. Confabulations are a type of "creative gap-filling" response where AI models invent plausible-sounding but false information. Instead of admitting uncertainty, AI models often prioritize creating plausible, confident responses, even when that means manufacturing information from scratch.

For companies deploying these systems in customer-facing roles without human oversight, the consequences can be immediate and costly: frustrated customers, damaged trust, and, in Cursor's case, potentially canceled subscriptions.

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Kevin Hall, a prominent nutrition expert who led influential studies on ultra-processed foods, has resigned from his long-held position at the National Institutes of Health, alleging censorship of his research by top aides of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In a post on LinkedIn, Hall claimed that he "experienced censorship in the reporting of our research because of agency concerns that it did not appear to fully support preconceived narratives of my agency’s leadership about ultra-processed food addiction."

In comments to CBS News, Hall said the censorship was over a study he and his colleagues recently published in the journal Cell Metabolism, which showed that ultra-processed foods did not produce the same large dopamine responses in the brain that are seen with use of addictive drugs. The finding suggests that the mechanism leading people to overconsume ultra-processed foods may be more complex than the studied mechanisms in addiction. This appears to slightly conflict with the beliefs of Kennedy Jr., who has claimed that food companies use additives to make ultra-processed foods addictive.

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The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can't effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?

Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook's primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.

According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook's early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren't interchangeable, because those aren't destinations focused on connecting friends and family.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau terminated the positions of 1,406 employees at the congressionally mandated agency.

HP Inc. has agreed to pay a $4 million settlement to customers after being accused of “false advertising” of computers and peripherals on its website.

Earlier this month, Judge P. Casey Pitts for the US District Court of the San Jose Division of the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval [PDF] of a settlement agreement regarding a class-action complaint first filed against HP on October 13, 2021. The complaint accused HP's website of showing "misleading" original pricing for various computers, mice, and keyboards that was higher than how the products were recently and typically priced.

Per the settlement agreement [PDF], HP will contribute $4 million to a "non-reversionary common fund, which shall be used to pay the (i) Settlement Class members’ claims; (ii) court-approved Notice and Settlement Administration Costs; (iii) court-approved Settlement Class Representatives’ Service Award; and (iv) court-approved Settlement Class Counsel Attorneys’ Fees and Costs Award. All residual funds will be distributed pro rata to Settlement Class members who submitted valid claims and cashed checks.”

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr accused Comcast of "news distortion" because its subsidiary NBC isn't parroting the Trump administration narrative on the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

"Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn't cut it," Carr wrote in a post on X yesterday.

Carr's use of the phrase "news distortion" is significant because he has been invoking the FCC's rarely enforced news distortion policy to pressure licensed broadcasters that he perceives as being biased against President Trump. For a detailed look at Carr's fight against media, read our feature: "The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC's news distortion policy."

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On Thursday, Norwegian company Equinor announced that it was suspending the construction of a planned 800 MW-capacity offshore wind farm currently being built in the waters off New York. The reason? An order from US Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who alleged that the project was rushed through review.

The move comes as the US's nascent offshore wind industry is facing uncertainty, with all future leases placed on hold by an executive order issued on the day of Trump's inauguration. The hold was ostensibly put in place to allow time to review the permitting process. But Burgum's move comes the same week a report from the Government Accountability Office, done in response to the executive order, found only minor issues with the existing permitting process.

On hold

The Equnior project, termed Empire Wind, is a key part of New York's plans to meet its climate goals. Combined with a second phase that's currently in planning, Empire Wind would have a rated capacity of two gigawatts, or over 20 percent of the state's planned offshore wind capacity. The initial construction, combined with the development of shore facilities, already has an estimated value of $2.5 billion, Equinor estimates, and is currently employing roughly 1,500 people. Construction was expected to be complete in 2027, although energy production from a subset of the 54 planned 15 MW turbines could have begun before then.

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Google's Gemini AI may have had a slow start, but it has been anything but in 2025. Barely a week goes by that another model doesn't arrive in the Gemini app or developer tools like AI Studio, and there's a major release coming to the app today. Google has announced that its faster, more efficient Gemini 2.5 Flash model is rolling out widely in preview. At the same time, developers can begin building with 2.5 Flash using the company's newly announced API pricing, which Google says is much lower than competing products.

A gaggle of Gemini

The model dropdown in the Gemini app is a bit convoluted, particularly as we see products like Veo 2 and Personalization popping up there. Google has been releasing so many preview models and new ways of using Gemini that it can be hard to know which option to choose for a given task. In fairness, Google is far from the only major AI player with this problem.

Tulsee Doshi is Google's director of product management for Gemini, which means she leads the team building these models. We asked Doshi what version of Gemini she finds herself using, and unsurprisingly, she likes the more powerful option. "Typically right now, I have been using 2.5 Pro," says Doshi. "I use Gemini throughout the day for my work in a few key areas, like creating documents or slides. That's either for internal consumption or actually sharing externally, and I've found 2.5 Pro to be really helpful for the creative writing element."

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Imagine being able to ask a cell how it’s feeling, what it’s doing or how it might respond to a drug — and receiving an answer back in plain English. Today, in partnersh…

We’re excited to roll out an early version of Gemini 2.5 Flash today in preview in the Gemini API via Google AI Studio and Vertex AI. Building upon the popular foundatio…

Aftersun, Gimme Shelter, and Sing Sing are just a few of the movies you should be watching on Max this month.

Synology, maker of network-attached storage (NAS) devices, will seemingly remove advanced features from its Plus devices that are not using hard drives provided by, or certified by, Synology itself, starting with its 2025 lineup.

A report on the German site HardwareLuxx (translated by Google) and a press release on Synology's German-language website appear to confirm Synology's strategy. The company, which sees "significant benefits" to its "proprietary hard drive solution" (also per Google's translation), will be "expanding [its] integrated ecosystem to the Plus series." For those Plus series models released in 2025, only Synology's own hard drives, and third-party drives certified by Synology, will offer "the full range of functions and support." Synology's release states that it can provide the "highest levels of security and performance, while also offering significantly more efficient support."

Ars has contacted Synology's US offices for comment and will update this post with any response.

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The future of Google's advertising business is at stake after a federal judge found the company illegally monopolized parts of it.