Technology News

Whether you’re skiing in the backcountry or trampolining in the backyard, we have an activity tracker for you.

Filthy buds look bad, impact sound quality, and even risk infection. WIRED asked the experts how to correctly banish that ear gunk.

This shiny coffee maker and grinder arrives with an innovative autogrind feature pretty much unheard of in drip coffee.

WIRED tests the benefits and limitations of using generative AI, specifically ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, as a language tutor for travelers.

WIRED tests the benefits and limitations of using generative AI, specifically ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode, as a language tutor for travelers.

Curls and waves are beautiful. But when you want to smooth them out, these hot tools—irons, brushes, and combs—work wonders.

Meta’s Waterworth Project will provide internet connectivity on five continents, with landing points in India, the United States, Brazil, and South Africa.

Meta’s Waterworth Project will provide internet connectivity on five continents, with landing points in India, the United States, Brazil, and South Africa.

Hyundai provided flights from Washington, DC, to Palm Springs and accommodation so Ars could drive the new Ioniq 5. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—After a very pleasant morning getting acquainted with the model-year 2025 Hyundai Ioniq 5, it was time to meet the new addition to the range: the $55,400 Ioniq 5 XRT. It's the latest example of an automotive trend, quietly simmering in the background, suddenly taking off. And in this case, that trend is when a carmaker takes something that's normally meant to be driven on the road and makes it a bit more... rugged.

No, it's not a new idea—Audi Allroads and Volvo Cross Countries have played this game for years and years. More recently, companies like Porsche and Lamborghini have gotten into the act, creating supercars with six-figure price tags that aren't fazed by a little sand or snow.

But the Ioniq 5 isn't a supercar—it's just a super car. The XRT treatment was done by Hyundai's California design team, and it involves new, more protective cladding at the front and rear. The black plastic looks at first glance like it might be forged carbon—in fact it's a pixelated camo pattern that calls out to the "Parametric Pixel" design language that underpins the Ioniq 5's blocky look. The twin red-accented tow hooks are almost whimsical.

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Hyundai provided flights from Washington, DC, to Palm Springs and accommodation so Ars could drive the new Ioniq 5. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

PALM SPRINGS, Calif.—Can it really have been four(ish) years since we first drove the Hyundai Ioniq 5? With looks like a scaled-up hatchback from the 1980s, and one of the most advanced electric vehicle powertrains on the market, the Ioniq 5 was an instant hit with Ars and car buyers. Since then, Hyundai has begun building Ioniq 5s at its new plant in Georgia, and for model year 2025, it has made some tweaks that have turned a great EV into an even better one.

The Ioniq 5 was the first EV to use Hyundai's new E-GMP platform, designed for mid-to-large EVs with rear- or all-wheel drive. The powertrain uses an 800 V architecture, which endows it with a number of advantages, some obvious, like very fast DC fast charging, some less obvious, such as less mass (and expense) given over to high-voltage cabling. On the road, it proved highly efficient, not to mention stylish and practical.

The tweaks for model year 2025 are subtle as far as midlife upgrades go. There's a new wheel design, and some of the details at the front and rear bumper are more pronounced. The idea was to "accentuate the CUVness" of the car, according to Brad Arnold, head of exterior design at Hyundai Design—perhaps broadening the appeal to those who have no affection for late '80s hatchback vibes.

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Google warns that hackers tied to Russia are tricking Ukrainian soldiers with fake QR codes for Signal group invites that let spies steal their messages. Signal has pushed out new safeguards.

Unlike workers at many other federal agencies this week, probationary employees at NASA were not terminated on Tuesday.

For much of the day employees at the space agency anticipated a directive from the White House Office of Personnel Management to fire these employees, but it never came. "We were on pins and needles throughout the day," said one senior official at Johnson Space Center in Houston on Tuesday afternoon.

However, by late in the afternoon, several field center directors received confirmation from the White House that their probationary employees—of which there are more than 1,000 across the agency's headquarters and 10 field centers—would not be terminated. NASA had sought exemptions for all of these employees, who comprise about 6 percent of NASA's workforce. Ars could not confirm whether the reprieve applied to some field centers or all 10 of them.

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Most PC games that you can play on a modern PC would run faster on an Nvidia RTX 5080 or 5090 than, say, a GTX 1070. But some games, from a particular phase of enthusiasm for particles, destructible environments, and smooth-moving hair, will take a notable hit if their owners upgrade to the latest Nvidia cards.

That's because PhysX, once a dedicated physics simulation tool and card that became a selling point for Nvidia's gear, has been largely deprecated on Nvidia 50-series cards. The transition was announced in January, but it seems to have taken some time for someone to notice the impact on 32-bit, PhysX-enabled games (as seen by PCGamesN). The most recent of these affected games, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, came out in 2013.

What follows is a brief primer on PhysX: what it was, what it did, and why it's left out of Nvidia's road map.

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On Monday, Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, released Grok 3, a new AI model family set to power chatbot features on the social network X. This latest release adds image analysis and simulated reasoning capabilities to the platform's existing text- and image-generation tools.

Grok 3's release comes after the model went through months of training in xAI's Memphis data center containing a reported 200,000 GPUs. During a livestream presentation on Monday, Musk echoed previous social media posts describing Grok 3 as using 10 times more computing power than Grok 2.

Since news of Grok 3's imminent arrival emerged last week, Musk began to hint that Grok may serve as a tool to represent his worldview in AI form. On Sunday he posted "Grok 3 is so based" alongside a screenshot—perhaps sharing a joke designed to troll the media—that purportedly asks Grok 3 for its opinion on the news publication called The Information. In response, Grok seems to reply:

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At least eight ongoing lawsuits related to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s alleged access to sensitive data hinge on the Watergate-inspired Privacy Act of 1974. But it’s not airtight.

If you know just one thing about FromSoft's recent history of so-called "Soulslike" games, you probably know that they have a well-earned reputation for absolutely brutal difficulty. But these titles apparently just weren't difficult enough for streamer dinossindgeil (aka Nico) who spent the weekend beating seven of FromSoft's most punishing titles without taking a single hit or leveling up even once.

Nico's conquest of what he calls "The God Run 3" dates back to 2022, when he took down all three Dark Souls games as well as Demon's Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring live on his Twitch stream without sustaining any damage from enemies. Back then, though, Nico relied at least a little bit on grinding leveled-up characters and high-end gear to make the game's most difficult bosses a bit more manageable. Even with that advantage, though, a successful God Run 3 completion took Nico 120 days of real-time effort due to frequent restarts whenever he took a single hit.

This time around, Nico cranked up the difficulty even further by deciding not to level his characters even once (though he was able to increase his stats and abilities in some games with level 1-accessible items and weapons). After his first level 1 God Run attempt two months ago, Nico's efforts culminated in a roughly 11-hour multi-day marathon run over the weekend, which saw Nico break down in tears at the end of the ordeal.

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PC-manufacturer Acer has said that it plans to raise the prices of its PCs in the US by 10 percent, a direct response to the new 10 percent import tariff on Chinese goods that the Trump administration announced earlier this month.

"We will have to adjust the end user price to reflect the tariff," said Acer CEO Jason Chen in an interview with The Telegraph. "We think 10 percent probably will be the default price increase because of the import tax. It’s very straightforward."

These price increases won't roll out right away, according to Chen—products shipped from China before the tariffs went into effect earlier this month won't be subject to the increased import taxes—but we can expect them to show up in PC price tags over the next few weeks.

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Microsoft said it has detected a new variant of XCSSET, a powerful macOS malware family that has targeted developers and users since at least 2020.

The variant, which Microsoft reported Monday, marked the first publicly known update to the malware since 2022. The malware first came to light in 2020, when security firm Trend Micro said it had targeted app developers after spreading through a publicly available project the attacker wrote for Xcode, a developer tool Apple makes freely available. The malware gained immediate attention because it exploited what, at the time, were two zero-day vulnerabilities, a testament to the resourcefulness of the entity behind the attacks.

In 2021, XCSSET surfaced again, first when it was used to backdoor developers’ devices and a few months later when researchers found it exploiting what at the time was a new zero-day.

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An overview of our latest expert tools in Flood Hub and our partnerships to support vulnerable communities.An overview of our latest expert tools in Flood Hub and our partnerships to support vulnerable communities.

Despite all appearances, the White House insists that Elon Musk is not in charge of DOGE. US DOGE Service employees can’t get a straight answer about who is.