Ars Technica

Blue Origin said Tuesday that the test payload for the first launch of its new rocket, New Glenn, is ready for liftoff. The company published an image of the "Blue Ring" pathfinder nestled up against one half of the rocket's payload fairing.

"There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits," the company's chief executive, Dave Limp, said on LinkedIn. "Blue Ring has advanced propulsion and communication capabilities for government and commercial customers to handle these maneuvers precisely and efficiently."

This week's announcement—historically Blue Origin has been tight-lipped about new products, but is opening up more as it nears the debut of its flagship New Glenn rocket—appears to serve a couple of purposes.

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The Lucid Air sedan's base Pure trim can manage 420 miles (676 km) of EPA-estimated range from just an 84 kWh battery pack. At 5 miles/kWh (12.4 kWh/100 km), the Pure is the single most efficient EV in the world, with pricing that undercuts the Tesla Model S. Yet the general public is largely unaware of Lucid as an automaker in the first place. The new Gravity, which just entered serial production last week, aims to bring more recognition to the company as a whole while achieving a similarly impressive level of efficiency in an SUV form factor.

The day after the new model began production at Lucid's factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, I spent a morning testing a pre-production Gravity in the hills of Malibu. I had previously climbed around a static concept car about a year beforehand in a small photo studio, but under the wide-open Southern California skies, the shape actually looked smaller in person than expected.

The long and low roofline helps to reinforce that perception while maintaining Lucid's commitment to aerodynamics. Lucid's head of design, Derek Jenkins, told me that with a few more improvements to the underbody's design to help wrap airflow around suspension components like tie rod ends and ball joints, the Gravity will dip below its current 0.24 coefficient of drag. That's important because despite my visual perception, the Gravity is not a small vehicle by any means. In fact, it measures 198 inches (5,029 mm) long and 87 inches wide (2,210 mm), including the mirrors, and it's 65 inches (1,651 mm) tall.

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After a troubling October lawsuit accused Character.AI (C.AI) of recklessly releasing dangerous chatbots that allegedly caused a 14-year-old boy's suicide, more families have come forward to sue chatbot-maker Character Technologies and the startup's major funder, Google.

On Tuesday, another lawsuit was filed in a US district court in Texas, this time by families struggling to help their kids recover from traumatizing experiences where C.AI chatbots allegedly groomed kids and encouraged repeated self-harm and other real-world violence.

In the case of one 17-year-old boy with high-functioning autism, J.F., the chatbots seemed so bent on isolating him from his family after his screentime was reduced that the bots suggested that "murdering his parents was a reasonable response to their imposing time limits on his online activity," the lawsuit said. Because the teen had already become violent, his family still lives in fear of his erratic outbursts, even a full year after being cut off from the app.

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There's something liberating about traveling without your computer. Your load is lighter, your battery needs are fewer, and you don't have to risk damaging or losing one of your most important and expensive devices. Besides, most of us are already carrying around a pretty powerful and conveniently compact computer 24/7: our smartphones.

My problem, though, is that I prefer doing most things on a laptop rather than on a phone. Whether working, writing a detailed email, or shopping around for something online, I can complete my task quicker and more accurately if sitting at a table, typing on a physical keyboard, and navigating with a mouse.

So, in the interest of having my cake and eating it, I've gathered a collection of gadgets that help me get the most out of my iPhone when traveling. With these accessories, I can use my iPhone as if it were a desktop PC, peripherals and all. See you later, laptop.

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Although there's been a whole lot of pessimism recently, electric vehicle sales continue to grow, even if it is less quickly than many hoped. That's true in the commercial vehicle space as well—according to Cox Automotive, 87 percent of vehicle fleet operators expect to add EVs in the next five years, and more than half thought they were likely to buy EVs this year. And where and when to plug those EVs in to charge is a potential headache for fleet operators.

The good news is that charging infrastructure really is growing. It doesn't always feel that way—the $7.5 billion allocated under the Inflation Reduction Act for charging infrastructure has to be disbursed via state departments of transportation, so the process there has been anything but rapid. But according to the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the total number of public charging plugs has doubled since 2020, to more than 144,000 level 2 plugs and closing in on 49,000 DC fast charger plugs.

There are ways to throw off a planned timeline when building out a station with multiple chargers. Obviously you need the funds to pay for it all—if these are to come from grants like the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, that had to wait for the states to each develop their own funding plans, then open for submissions, and so on, before even approving a project, for example.

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Thousands of victims have sued Apple over its alleged failure to detect and report illegal child pornography, also known as child sex abuse materials (CSAM).

The proposed class action comes after Apple scrapped a controversial CSAM-scanning tool last fall that was supposed to significantly reduce CSAM spreading in its products. Apple defended its decision to kill the tool after dozens of digital rights groups raised concerns that the government could seek to use the functionality to illegally surveil Apple users for other reasons. Apple also was concerned that bad actors could use the functionality to exploit its users and sought to protect innocent users from false content flags.

Child sex abuse survivors suing have accused Apple of using the cybersecurity defense to ignore the tech giant's mandatory CSAM reporting duties. If they win over a jury, Apple could face more than $1.2 billion in penalties. And perhaps most notably for privacy advocates, Apple could also be forced to "identify, remove, and report CSAM on iCloud and implement policies, practices, and procedures to prevent continued dissemination of CSAM or child sex trafficking on Apple devices and services." That could mean a court order to implement the controversial tool or an alternative that meets industry standards for mass-detecting CSAM.

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Archaeologists excavating a paleolithic cave site in Galilee, Israel, have found evidence that a deep-cave compound at the site may have been used for ritualistic gatherings, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). That evidence includes the presence of a symbolically carved boulder in a prominent placement, and well as the remains of what may have been torches used to light the interior. And the acoustics would have been conducive to communal gatherings.

Dating back to the Early Upper Paleolithic period, Manot Cave was found accidentally when a bulldozer broke open its roof during construction in 2008. Archaeologists soon swooped in and recovered such artifacts as stone tools, bits of charcoal, remains of various animals, and a nearly complete human skull.

The latter proved to be especially significant, as subsequent analysis showed that the skull (dubbed Manot 1) had both Neanderthal and modern features and was estimated to be about 54,700 years old. That lent support to the hypothesis that modern humans co-existed and possibly interbred with Neanderthals during a crucial transition period in the region, further bolstered by genome sequencing.

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On Monday, Reddit announced it would test an AI-powered search feature called "Reddit Answers" that uses an AI model to create summaries from existing Reddit posts to respond to user questions, reports Reuters.

The feature generates responses by searching through Reddit's vast collection of community discussions and comments. When users ask questions, Reddit Answers provides summaries of relevant conversations and includes links to related communities and posts.

The move potentially puts Reddit in competition with traditional search engines like Google and newer AI search tools like those from OpenAI and Perplexity. But while other companies pull information from across the Internet, Reddit Answers focuses only on content within Reddit's platform.

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Cable broadband companies continue to insist that data caps are good for people with low incomes, pushing back against comments filed by consumer advocacy groups. NCTA—The Internet & Television Association urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid regulating the monthly data limits and overage charges that cable firms such as Comcast and Cox impose on many Internet plans.

Advocacy groups "suggest that usage-based pricing disproportionately harms low-income users, reasoning that these users are least able to afford overage fees if they exceed data thresholds," the NCTA said in comments filed last week with the FCC. "However, in reality, usage-based pricing benefits low-income or price-sensitive consumers by providing additional options for less expensive plans."

The NCTA contends that "there is no basis for the assertion that regulation is warranted because low-income consumers are uniquely harmed by usage-based pricing. To the contrary, in many cases usage-based pricing provides more options for consumers, including lower-priced ones, which helps consumers stay connected."

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On Monday, OpenAI released Sora Turbo, a new version of its text-to-video generation model, making it available to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers through a dedicated website. The model generates videos up to 20 seconds long at resolutions reaching 1080 p from a text or image prompt.

Open AI announced that Sora would be available today for ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers in the US and many parts of the world but is not yet available in Europe. As of early Monday afternoon, though, even existing Plus subscribers trying to use the tool are being presented with a message that "sign ups are temporarily unavailable" thanks to "heavy traffic."

Out of an abundance of caution, OpenAI is limiting Sora's ability to generate videos of people for the time being. At launch, uploads involving human subjects face restrictions while OpenAI refines its deepfake prevention systems. The platform also blocks content involving CSAM and sexual deepfakes. OpenAI says it maintains an active monitoring system and conducted testing to identify potential misuse scenarios before release.

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Like many sites, apps, and operating systems, Ars Technica has both "Light" and "Dark" visual styles. They look great! But even the "Light" mode has darker elements in it, and after our recent redesign, some Ars readers asked for an even lighter "Light" mode, one that would allow them to absolutely sear their own retinas with various shades of blinding white. (I kid, of course; for some readers, it's a serious visual comfort issue.)

We've spent the last month working up a third visual style to give the people what they want. Behold the fully armed and operational "Hyperlight" mode, our new visual theme featuring a white background, light gray headline boxes, and black text. You can activate it right now from the visual style menu on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

In total, we now have four visual modes. Hyperlight is the brightest of these, while Day & Night is our rebranded "Light mode" and mixes light and dark elements. Dark is all dark backgrounds with light text. The fourth mode is System, which automatically switches between Day & Night and Dark modes based on your operating system setting. (System will not switch the site to Hyperlight.)

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TikTok is doing everything it can to delay a potential ban starting the day before Donald Trump takes office in January.

On Monday, TikTok filed an emergency motion requesting a temporary injunction on a US law that requires its owner, ByteDance, to sell off TikTok by January 19 or else be banned in the US due to national security concerns.

Planning to appeal to the Supreme Court to block the law on First Amendment grounds, TikTok urged the court to delay enforcing the law until SCOTUS has ample time to review the constitutionality of the law, which would impact millions of American speakers who use TikTok each month. TikTok also argued that Trump could "moot" SCOTUS review if he decides to "save" TikTok, as he promised on the campaign trail.

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On Monday, Nature released a paper from Google's quantum computing team that provides a key demonstration of the potential of quantum error correction. Thanks to an improved processor, Google's team found that increasing the number of hardware qubits dedicated to an error-corrected logical qubit led to an exponential increase in performance. By the time the entire 105-qubit processor was dedicated to hosting a single error-corrected qubit, the system was stable for an average of an hour.

In fact, Google told Ars that errors on this single logical qubit were rare enough that it was difficult to study them. The work provides a significant validation that quantum error correction is likely to be capable of supporting the execution of complex algorithms that might require hours to execute.

Google is making a number of announcements in association with the paper's release (an earlier version of the paper has been up on the arXiv since August). One of those is that the company is committed enough to its quantum computing efforts that it has built its own fabrication facility for its superconducting processors.

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Popular indie game platform itch.io says its domain was briefly taken down for a few hours Monday morning thanks to an "AI-driven" phishing report spurred by the company behind Funko Pop figures.

Itch.io management posted about the domain takedown on social media overnight, complaining of a chain of events that started because "Funko of 'Funko Pop'... use some trash 'AI Powered' Brand Protection Software called BrandShield that created some bogus Phishing report to our registrar, iwantmyname, who ignored our response and just disabled the domain," the post said.

In a Hacker News comment, Itch.io founder Leaf "Leafo" Cohran said that the BrandShield complaint seems to have originated from a single itch.io user who "made a fan page for an existing Funko Pop video game (Funko Fusion), with links to the official site and screenshots of the game." That led to independent reports to Itch's host and registrar of "fraud and phishing" a few days ago.

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One of the selling points of the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in October 2023) is that it was fast enough and had enough memory to be a credible general-purpose desktop PC, if not an especially fast one. For Pi-as-desktop enthusiasts, the company has a couple of new pre-holiday announcements. The biggest is the Raspberry Pi 500, which fits the components of an 8GB Pi 5 into a small keyboard-shaped case for $90.

It's a follow-up to the original Raspberry Pi 400, and like that system, it takes the components from the regular Pi 5 board and puts them on a different PCB with all of the ports positioned in a single row across the back of the device. It includes one USB 2.0 port, two USB 3.0 ports, a microSD slot, two micro HDMI ports, the 40-pin GPIO header, and a gigabit Ethernet port.

In addition to the standalone $90 system, the Pi 500 will also be sold as part of a Desktop Kit with a mouse, power supply, HDMI cable, and printed Beginner's Guide booklet for $120.

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Earlier this fall, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported data showing that adult obesity rates—long trending upwards—had fallen modestly over the past few years, from 41.9 to 40.3 percent. The decline sparked discussion on social media and in major news outlets about whether the US has passed so-called “peak obesity”—and whether the growing use of certain weight-loss drugs might account for the shift.

An opinion piece in the Financial Times suggested that the public health world might look back on the current moment in much the same way that it now reflects on 1963, when cigarette sales hit their high point and then dropped dramatically over the following decades. The article’s author, John Burn-Murdoch, speculated that the dip is “highly likely” to be caused by the use of glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, or GLP-1s, for weight loss.

It's easy to see why one might make that connection. Although GLP-1s have been used for nearly two decades in the treatment of type 2 diabetes, their use for obesity only took off more recently. In 2014, the Food and Drug Administration approved a GLP-1 agonist named Saxenda specifically for this purpose. Then in the late 2010s, a GLP-1 drug named Ozempic, made from the active ingredient semaglutide, began to be used off-label. The FDA also authorized Wegovy, another semaglutide-based GLP-1 medication, explicitly for weight loss in 2021.

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Physicists have been puzzling over conflicting observational results pertaining to the accelerating expansion rate of our Universe—a major discovery recognized by the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. New observational data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has confirmed that prior measurements of distances between nearby stars and galaxies made by the Hubble Space Telescope are not in error, according to a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. That means the discrepancy between observation and our current theoretical model of the Universe is more likely to be due to new physics.

As previously reported, the Hubble Constant is a measure of the Universe's expansion expressed in units of kilometers per second per megaparsec (Mpc). So, each second, every megaparsec of the Universe expands by a certain number of kilometers. Another way to think of this is in terms of a relatively stationary object a megaparsec away: Each second, it gets a number of kilometers more distant.

How many kilometers? That's the problem here. There are basically three methods scientists use to measure the Hubble Constant: looking at nearby objects to see how fast they are moving, gravitational waves produced by colliding black holes or neutron stars, and measuring tiny deviations in the afterglow of the Big Bang known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). However, the various methods have come up with different values. For instance, tracking distant supernovae produced a value of 73 km/s Mpc, while measurements of the CMB using the Planck satellite produced a value of 67 km/s Mpc.

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It's once again that special time of year when we give you a chance to do well by doing good. That's right—it's time for the 2024 edition of our annual Charity Drive!

Every year since 2007, we've encouraged readers to give to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity, which provides toys and games to kids being treated in hospitals around the world. In recent years, we've added the Electronic Frontier Foundation to our charity push, aiding in their efforts to defend Internet freedom. This year, as always, we're providing some extra incentive for those donations by offering donors a chance to win pieces of our big pile of vendor-provided swag. We can't keep it, and we don't want it clogging up our offices, so it's now yours to win.

This year's swag pile is full of high-value geek goodies. We have dozens of prizes valued at over $4,000 total, including gaming hardware and collectibles, computer accessories, apparel, and more. In 2023, Ars readers raised nearly $40,000 for charity, contributing to a total haul of more than $506,000 since 2007. We want to raise even more this year, and we can do it if readers dig deep.

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Prime Video released a one-minute teaser for its fantasy series The Wheel of Time at CCXP24 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The series is adapted from the late Robert Jordan's bestselling 14-book series of epic fantasy novels, and Ars has been following it closely with regular recaps through the first two seasons. Judging from the new teaser, the battle between light and dark is heating up as the Dragon Reborn comes into his power.

(Spoilers for first two seasons below.)

As previously reported, the series centers on Moiraine (played by Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike), a member of a powerful, all-woman organization called the Aes Sedai. Magic, known as the One Power, is divided into male (saidin) and female (saidar) flavors. The latter is the province of the Aes Sedai. Long ago, a great evil, called the Dark One, caused the saidin to become tainted, such that most men who show an ability to channel that magic go mad. It's the job of the Aes Sedai to track down such men and strip them of their abilities—a process known as "gentling" that, unfortunately, is often anything but. There is also an ancient prophecy concerning the Dragon Reborn: the reincarnation of a person who will save or destroy humanity.

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Severance was one of the most talked-about TV series of 2022, receiving widespread critical acclaim. We loved the series so much that Ars staffers actually wrote a group review so that everyone could weigh in with their thoughts on the first season, pronouncing it "one of the best shows on TV." Needless to say, we have been eagerly awaiting the second season next month. Apple TV+ just released the official trailer at CCXP24 in São Paulo, Brazil, and it does not disappoint.

(Spoilers for first season below.)

In the world of Severance, people can completely disconnect their work and personal lives. Thanks to a new procedure developed by Lumon Industries, workers can bifurcate themselves into "innies" (work selves) and "outies" (personal selves)—with no sharing of memories between them. This appeals to people like Mark (Adam Scott), who lost his wife in a car crash and has struggled to work through the grief. Why not forget all that pain for eight hours a day?

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