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The new Polaroid Flip comes loaded with features to help bring some much-needed reliability to instant photography—without making it sterile.

Jamison Wagner was also charged with an alleged arson attack on the New Mexico Republican Party’s office.

Jamison Wagner was also charged with an alleged arson attack on the New Mexico Republican Party’s office.

AI tools have arrived in two of the most basic and long-serving Windows utilities. Here’s what they do and how you can turn them off if you prefer.

There’s still a 145 percent tariff on China, and sex toys aren’t part of the electronics exemption.

The structural biologist, who has devoted his life to studying the processes behind aging, discusses the surprising things he has learned and the public misunderstandings about longevity.

The second major meteor shower of the year starts today and peaks on the night of April 21–22. Here’s everything you need to know to watch it and the many other showers that will appear in 2025.

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Computed tomography scans have become vital, even lifesaving, medical imaging for diagnosing and monitoring health conditions. But they do expose patients to ionizing radiation at levels linked to higher risks of cancer. In a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers tried to estimate what those higher risks are exactly—and although the estimates come with uncertainty, they may seem startling.

Based on data from 93 million CT scans performed on 62 million people in 2023, the researchers estimated that the CT scans would lead to 103,000 future cancers. To put that in context, those 103,000 cancers would account for about 5 percent of cancers diagnosed each year, based on the current cancer rates and the current usage of CT scans. And the estimate puts CT scans on par with alcohol consumption and obesity in terms of risk factors for developing cancer.

The most common types of cancers estimated to be a result of CT scans were lung cancer and colon cancer—two cancers that are becoming more common in younger people for reasons experts do not fully understand. The types of CT scans linked to the greatest number of cancers were abdomen and pelvis CT scans.

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The Trump administration has been using federal research funding as a cudgel. The government has blocked billions of dollars in research funds and threatened to put a hold on even more in order to compel universities to adopt what it presents as essential reforms. In the case of Columbia University, that includes changes in the leadership of individual academic departments.

On Friday, the government sent a list of demands that it presented as necessary to "maintain Harvard’s financial relationship with the federal government." On Monday, Harvard responded that accepting these demands would "allow itself to be taken over by the federal government." The university also changed its home page into an extensive tribute to the research that would be eliminated if the funds were withheld.

In response, the Trump administration later put $2.2 billion of Harvard's research funding on hold.

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The abrupt firing of Xiaofeng Wang and his wife from Indiana University last month shocked the academic community and is stoking fears that Chinese-born scholars are being targeted.

The abrupt firing of Xiaofeng Wang and his wife from Indiana University last month shocked the academic community and is stoking fears that Chinese-born scholars are being targeted.

Mars is back on the agenda.

During his address to a joint session of Congress in March, President Donald Trump said the United States "will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars."

What does this mean? Manifest destiny is the belief, which was particularly widespread in 1800s America, that US settlers were destined to expand westward across North America. Similarly, then, the Trump administration believes it is the manifest destiny of Americans to settle Mars. And he wants his administration to take steps toward accomplishing that goal.

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On Monday, OpenAI announced the GPT-4.1 model family, its newest series of AI language models that brings a 1 million token context window to OpenAI for the first time and continues a long tradition of very confusing AI model names. Three confusing new names, in fact: GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and GPT‑4.1 nano.

According to OpenAI, these models outperform GPT-4o in several key areas. But in an unusual move, GPT-4.1 will only be available through the developer API, not in the consumer ChatGPT interface where most people interact with OpenAI's technology.

The 1 million token context window—essentially the amount of text the AI can process at once—allows these models to ingest roughly 3,000 pages of text in a single conversation. This puts OpenAI's context windows on par with Google's Gemini models, which have offered similar extended context capabilities for some time.

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Microsoft held off on releasing the privacy-unfriendly feature after a swell of pushback last year. Now it’s trying again, with a few improvements that skeptics say still aren't enough.

In one way or another, the Lunar Gateway has lingered around the periphery of NASA's human exploration program since the Obama administration.

Back then, the elements that eventually coalesced into the Gateway were geared toward a nebulous initiative to capture a small asteroid and reposition it closer to Earth. Under direction from the first Trump administration, NASA ditched the asteroid idea and repackaged the concept to become a mini-space station in orbit around the Moon.

NASA officials justified the Lunar Gateway program by highlighting its utility as a staging point or safe haven for astronauts traveling to and from the surface of the Moon. Crews could launch from Earth and travel to the Moon's vicinity inside NASA's Orion spacecraft, connect with the Gateway, and then float into their lunar lander already docked with the outpost.

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Razer, maker of green-hued gaming hardware and accessories, has entered the game-streaming space with its new—but not entirely new—app, PC Remote Play. It's based on very good existing streaming tech and makes connecting a PC to mobile devices fairly simple. It's worth checking out unless you have a hard-and-fast policy about avoiding software "utilities" from RGB-obsessed gaming companies.

That, or you're already using and comfortable with Moonlight. Moonlight and Sunshine are the open source game-streaming client and server that wonderfully picked up where Nvidia's Gamestream left off. PC Remote Play is based on Moonstream's open source code, and Razer has made much of its own version's code available.

You're getting a few small upgrades when using PC Remote Play:

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The Li-ion batteries that power everything from smartphones to electric cars are usually packed in rigid, sealed enclosures that prevent stresses from damaging their components and keep air from coming into contact with their flammable and toxic electrolytes. It’s hard to use batteries like this in soft robots or wearables, so a team of scientists at the University California, Berkeley built a flexible, non-toxic, jelly-like battery that could survive bending, twisting, and even cutting with a razor.

While flexible batteries using hydrogel electrolytes have been achieved before, they came with significant drawbacks. “All such batteries could [only] operate [for] a short time, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days,” says Liwei Lin, a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study. The battery built by his team endured 500 complete charge cycles—about as many as the batteries in most smartphones are designed for.

Power in water

“Current-day batteries require a rigid package because the electrolyte they use is explosive, and one of the things we wanted to make was a battery that would be safe to operate without this rigid package,” Lin told Ars. Unfortunately, flexible packaging made of polymers or other stretchable materials can be easily penetrated by air or water, which will react with standard electrolytes, generating lots of heat, potentially resulting in fires and explosions. This is why, in 2017, scientists started to experiment with quasi-solid-state hydrogel electrolytes.

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