With all the announcements from automakers planning for more gasoline and hybrid cars in their future lineups, you'd think that electric vehicles had stopped selling. While that might be increasingly true for Tesla, everyone else is more than picking up the slack. According to analysts at Rho Motion, global EV sales are up 30 percent this year already. Even here in the US, EV sales were still up 28 percent compared to 2024, despite particularly EV-unfriendly headwinds.

Getting ahead of those unfriendly winds may actually be driving the sales bump in the US, where EV sales only grew by less than 8 percent last year, for contrast. "American drivers bought 30 percent more electric vehicles than they had by this time last year, making use of the final months of IRA tax breaks before the incentives are expected to be pulled later this year," said Charles Lester, Rho Motion data manager.

With the expected loss of government incentives and the prospect of new tariffs that will add tens of thousands of dollars to new car prices, now is probably a good time to buy an EV if you think you're going to want or need one.

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"The future of podcasting shouldn't be locked behind walled gardens," writes the team at Pocket Casts. To push that point forward, Pocket Casts, owned by the company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., has made its web player free to everyone.

Previously available only to logged-in Pocket Casts users paying $4 per month, Pocket Casts now offers nearly any public-facing podcast feed for streaming, along with controls like playback speed and playlist queueing. If you create an account, you can also sync your playback progress, manage your queue, bookmark episode moments, and save your subscription list and listening preferences. The free access also applies to its clients for Windows and Mac.

"Podcasting is one of the last open corners of the Internet, and we’re here to keep it that way," Pocket Casts' blog post reads. For those not fully tuned into the podcasting market, this and other statements in the post—like sharing "without needing a specific platform's approval" and "podcasts belong to the people, not corporations"—are largely shots at Spotify, and to a much lesser extent other streaming services, which have sought to wrap podcasting's originally open and RSS-based nature inside proprietary markets and formats.

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Media Matters for America (MMFA) has a plan to potentially defuse Elon Musk's "thermonuclear" lawsuits filed so far in three cities around the world, which accuse the nonprofit media watchdog organization of orchestrating a very costly X ad boycott.

On Monday, MMFA filed a complaint in a US district court in San Francisco, alleging that X violated its own terms of service by suing MMFA in Texas, Dublin, and Singapore. According to the TOS, MMFA alleged, X requires any litigation over use of its services to be "brought solely in the federal or state courts located in San Francisco County, California, United States."

"X Corp.’s decision to file in multiple jurisdictions across the globe is intended to chill Media Matters’ reporting and drive up costs—both of which it has achieved—and it is directly foreclosed by X’s own Terms of Service," MMFA's complaint said.

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The AI industry is doing its best to will "agents"—pieces of AI-driven software that can perform multistep actions on your behalf—into reality. Several tech companies, including Google, have emphasized agentic features recently, and in January, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote that 2025 would be the year AI agents "join the workforce."

OpenAI is working to make that promise happen. On Tuesday, OpenAI unveiled a new "Responses API" designed to help software developers create AI agents that can perform tasks independently using the company's AI models. The Responses API will eventually replace the current Assistants API, which OpenAI plans to retire in the first half of 2026.

With the new offering, users can develop custom AI agents that scan company files with a file search utility that rapidly checks company databases (with OpenAI promising not to train its models on these files) and navigates websites—similar to functions available through OpenAI's Operator agent, whose underlying Computer-Using Agent (CUA) model developers can also access to enable automation of tasks like data entry and other operations.

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Apple on Tuesday patched a critical zero-day vulnerability in virtually all iPhones and iPad models it supports and said it may have been exploited in “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals” using older versions of iOS.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-24201, resides in Webkit, the browser engine driving Safari and all other browsers developed for iPhones and iPads. Devices affected include the iPhone XS and later, iPad Pro 13-inch, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 7th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later. The vulnerability stems from a bug that wrote to out-of-bounds memory locations.

Supplementary fix

“Impact: Maliciously crafted web content may be able to break out of Web Content sandbox,” Apple wrote in a bare-bones advisory. “This is a supplementary fix for an attack that was blocked in iOS 17.2. (Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 17.2.)”

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Nvidia has launched all of the GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs that it announced at CES, at least technically—whether you're buying from Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, it's nearly impossible to find any of these new cards at their advertised prices right now.

But hope springs eternal, and newly leaked specs for GeForce RTX 5060 and 5050-series cards suggest that Nvidia may be announcing these lower-end cards soon. These kinds of cards are rarely exciting, but Steam Hardware Survey data shows that these xx60 and xx50 cards are what the overwhelming majority of PC gamers are putting in their systems.

The specs, posted by a reliable leaker named Kopite and reported by Tom's Hardware and others, suggest a refresh that's in line with what Nvidia has done with most of the 50-series so far. Along with a move to the next-generation Blackwell architecture, the 5060 GPUs each come with a small increase to the number of CUDA cores, a jump from GDDR6 to GDDR7, and an increase in power consumption, but no changes to the amount of memory or the width of the memory bus. The 8GB versions, in particular, will probably continue to be marketed primarily as 1080p cards.

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Scientists have long understood that microbes, zooplankton, and fish are vital sources of recycled nitrogen in coastal waters. But whales and other marine mammals like seals also help in this regard by releasing tons of nutrient-rich fecal matter into those waters. Now we can add whale urine to that list, according to a paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

“Lots of people think of plants as the lungs of the planet, taking in carbon dioxide, and expelling oxygen,” said co-author Joe Roman, a biologist at the University of Vermont. “For their part, animals play an important role in moving nutrients. Seabirds transport nitrogen and phosphorus from the ocean to the land in their poop, increasing the density of plants on islands. Animals form the circulatory system of the planet—and whales are the extreme example.”

Back in 2010, Roman co-authored a study in which they examined field measurements and population data to determine that whales and seals could be responsible for replenishing 2.3×104 metric tons of nitrogen per year in the Gulf of Maine alone. Specifically, they feed in deeper waters and then release "flocculent fecal plumes" (i.e., feces) at the surface, serving as a kind of "whale pump" that boosts plankton growth, among other tangible benefits.

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Two people in Oklahoma have likely contracted measles infections linked to a mushrooming outbreak that began in West Texas, which has now risen to at least 258 cases since late January.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma's health department reported that two people had "exposure associated with the Texas and New Mexico outbreak" and then reported symptoms consistent with measles. They're currently being reported as probable cases because testing hasn't confirmed the infections.

There was no information about the ages, vaccination status, or location of the two cases. The health department said that the people stayed home in quarantine after realizing they had been exposed. In response to local media, a health department spokesperson said it was withholding further information because "these cases don’t pose a public health risk and to protect patient privacy."

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The long-running rumors and hints that Microsoft is planning to enter the portable gaming market accelerated forward this week. That's thanks to a Windows Central report that Microsoft is planning to partner with a "PC gaming OEM" for "an Xbox-branded gaming handheld" to be released later this year. The device, code-named Keenan, will reportedly feature "Xbox design sensibilities," such as the branded Xbox guide button, but will almost certainly be a PC gaming device running Windows at its core.

Any Microsoft entry into the world of gaming handhelds will join a market that has become quite crowded in the wake of the Steam Deck's success. To make its own portable gaming effort stand apart, Microsoft will have to bring something unique to the table. Here are some of the features we're hoping will let Microsoft do just that.

A bespoke user interface

There's never been a better time to bring back the old Xbox 360 "blades" interface. Credit: Microsoft / Reddit

For decades, Windows has been designed first and foremost for the world of large monitors driven by a mouse and keyboard world. When hardware makers try to simply stick that OS into a handheld screen size controlled by buttons and analog sticks, the results can be awkward at best.

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When Ars finally drove the single-motor BMW i4 eDrive40 last year, we came away very impressed. Until then we'd only sampled the powerful twin-motor i4 M50, which is fast and fun but a bit too expensive, and it gives away a little too much range in the process. But neither of those is the model most people will buy. All-wheel drive is non-negotiable to car buyers in many parts of the country, and that means they want this one: the i4 xDrive40 Gran Coupe.

If the pictures are giving you a bit of deja vu, that's perfectly normal. Yes, it looks a lot like the BMW 430i Gran Coupe we reviewed yesterday, and the two cars share a lot more than just the CLAR platform that underpins much of BMW's current lineup.

All things being equal, designing a vehicle to be an electric vehicle from the ground up involves many fewer compromises than using a platform that has to cater not just to batteries and electric motors but also internal combustion engines and transmissions and gas tanks.

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Vodafone, a British telecommunications firm, will withhold bonuses from employees who fail to comply with its return-to-office (RTO) policy, The Register reported this week.

Last week, Vodafone reminded employees of its RTO policy requiring workers to be in-office “2–3 times a week, or at least eight days a month," according to a memo viewed by The Register. The memo also reportedly detailed the consequences of failing to adhere to the policy, which sets a guideline for compliance by the end of the company's first fiscal quarter in July:

Employees who are not fully compliant with our hybrid working policy by the end of Q1 may be subject to disciplinary action in line with policy. Continued non-compliance with attendance expectations could result in a final written warning, which would mean individuals are not meeting the minimum performance standards and therefore would not be eligible for a bonus in 2026 or in subsequent years in which a final warning is given.

The strict policy comes as tech and other firms struggle to get employees to voluntarily return to offices. In desperation, some companies have resorted to tactics like tracking employee badge swipes and VPNs. Vodafone is looking to lure employees into the office by threatening their income, similar to Dell’s approach of making remote workers ineligible for promotions.

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Google recently killed the Chromecast brand, but the dongles live on—mostly. Owners of the second-generation Chromecast and Chromecast Audio have noticed this week that their beloved streaming gadgets are no longer working. It appears that Google configured the devices with a single 10-year certificate that has now expired, and updating it is no simple feat. Google is looking into a fix, and there's nothing you can do in the meantime. In fact, trying to fix this yourself might only make things worse.

Beginning this week, attempting to connect your phone to a second-gen Chromecast or Chromecast Audio results in untrusted device or authentication errors. The unhelpful popup suggests this could be due to outdated firmware, which is technically true. Some wondered if this was simply Google's way of putting the decade-old device out to pasture.

One industrious Redditor has identified the dongle's certificate chain with a line reading "NotAfter: Mar 9 16:44:39 2025 GMT." Google may have included a 10-year certificate with the intention of updating it, or perhaps plans to switch to a rotating certificate fell through the cracks, or maybe no one had a plan because Google didn't expect these $35 devices to still be so popular a decade later—all things are possible in Google product support.

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Elon Musk is now claiming that bad actors in Ukraine are behind an alleged cyberattack that caused outages on his social media platform X on Monday.

In an interview, Musk told Fox Business that he believes the attack came from "IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area."

Musk admitted that "we don't know exactly what happened"—nodding as his comments were characterized as a suspicion and discussing no evidence—but alleged that the attackers were trying to take down the entire X platform.

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Donald Trump's sudden decision last week to attack the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act after he previously offered assurances that he wouldn't has sent shockwaves across the industry and has even given some Republicans whiplash.

Soon after Trump told Congress that the CHIPS Act is a "horrible, horrible thing," chip company executives rushed to consult their lawyers to see if Trump could possibly claw back funding or terminate their contracts, eight people familiar with the executives' moves told The New York Times. At least one expert told Ars that their fear isn't completely unfounded.

Signed into law by Joe Biden in 2022, the CHIPS Act sought to grant $52.7 billion in subsidies to bring the most advanced chipmakers into the US. The Commerce Department has already signed contracts granting a wide range of awards, including grants for chipmakers like Intel, Micron, Samsung, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), totaling more than $36 billion in federal subsidies.

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Doctors in China inadvertently took time-series images of parasitic worms actively invading a woman's brain and causing rare and rapidly progressing lesions.

The previously healthy 60-year-old woman went to the hospital after having a fever and altered mental status for three days, according to a report of her case published Monday in JAMA Neurology. By the time she arrived, she was unable to communicate normally.

Figure A: FLAIR MRI of the brain before treatment showed multiple white matter lesions adjacent to the lateral ventricles. Credit: Li et al. JAMA Neurology 2025

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed white matter lesions around her lateral ventricles, large cavities in the center of the brain filled with cerebrospinal fluid that, from the side, are C-shaped. The type of MRI used, a FLAIR MRI, is used to more easily detect lesions, and the fluid-filled lateral ventricles appear as dark, curved spaces in the center. Doctors could see white blotches and smears around those dark spaces, indicating lesions. After doing a spinal tap and running tests on her cerebral spinal fluid, they suspected she might have a bacterial infection in her brain. So they treated her with an antibiotic and a fever reducer.

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A year ago, we called the M3 version of the MacBook Air "just about as good as laptops get."

The "as good as laptops get" part was about the qualitative experience of using the laptop, which was (and is) good-enough-to-great at just about everything a general-purpose laptop needs to be able to do. The "just about" part was mainly about the cost because to be happy with it long-term, it was a good idea for just about everybody to spend an extra $200 upgrading it from 8GB to 16GB of RAM. Apple also kept the M2 version of the Air in the lineup to hit its $999 entry-level price point; the M3 cost $100 extra.

Apple fixed the RAM problem last fall when it increased the minimum amount of RAM across the entire Mac lineup from 8GB to 16GB without increasing prices. Though Apple probably did it to help enable additional Apple Intelligence features down the line, nearly anything you do with your Mac will eventually benefit from extra memory, whether you're trying to use Photoshop or Logic Pro or even if you're just opening more than a couple of dozen browser tabs at once.

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Even three years later, AMD's high-end X3D-series processors still aren't a thing that most people need to spend extra money on—under all but a handful of circumstances, your GPU will be the limiting factor when you're running games, and few non-game apps benefit from the extra 64MB chunk of L3 cache that is the processors' calling card. They've been a reasonably popular way for people with old AM4 motherboards to extend the life of their gaming PCs, but for AM5 builds, a regular Zen 4 or Zen 5 CPU will not bottleneck modern graphics cards most of the time.

But high-end PC building isn't always about what's rational, and people spending $2,000 or more to stick a GeForce RTX 5090 into their systems probably won't worry that much about spending a couple hundred extra dollars to get the fastest CPU they can get. That's the audience for the new Ryzen 9 9950X3D, a 16-core, Zen 5-based, $699 monster of a processor that AMD begins selling tomorrow.

If you're only worried about game performance (and if you can find one), the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the superior choice, for reasons that will become apparent once we start looking at charts. But if you want fast game performance and you need as many CPU cores as you can get for other streaming or video production or rendering work, the 9950X3D is there for you. (It's a little funny to me that this a chip made almost precisely for the workload of the PC building tech YouTubers who will be reviewing it.)  It's also a processor that Intel doesn't have any kind of answer to.

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Apple is giving its high-end Mac Studio desktops a refresh this month, their first spec bump in almost two years. Considered on the time scale of, say, new Mac Pro updates, two years is barely any time at all. But Apple often delivers big performance increases for its Pro, Max, and Ultra chips from generation to generation, so any update—particularly one where you leapfrog two generations in a single refresh—can bring a major increase to performance that's worth waiting for.

It's the magnitude of Apple's generation-over-generation updates that makes this Studio refresh feel odd, though. The lower-end Studio gets an M4 Max processor like you'd expect—the same chip Apple sells in its high-end MacBook Pros but fit into a desktop enclosure instead of a laptop. But the top-end Studio gets an M3 Ultra instead of an M4 Ultra. That's still a huge increase in CPU and GPU cores (and there are other Ultra-specific benefits, too), but it makes the expensive Studio feel like less of a step up over the regular one.

How do these chips stack up to each other, and how big a deal is the lack of an M4 Ultra? How much does the Studio overlap with the refreshed M4 Pro Mac mini from last fall? And how do Apple's fastest chips compare to what Intel and AMD are doing in high-end PCs?

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For years, businesses, governments, and researchers have struggled with a persistent problem: How to extract usable data from Portable Document Format (PDF) files. These digital documents serve as containers for everything from scientific research to government records, but their rigid formats often trap the data inside, making it difficult for machines to read and analyze.

"Part of the problem is that PDFs are a creature of a time when print layout was a big influence on publishing software, and PDFs are more of a 'print' product than a digital one," Derek Willis, a lecturer in Data and Computational Journalism at the University of Maryland, wrote in an email to Ars Technica. "The main issue is that many PDFs are simply pictures of information, which means you need Optical Character Recognition software to turn those pictures into data, especially when the original is old or includes handwriting."

Computational journalism is a field where traditional reporting techniques merge with data analysis, coding, and algorithmic thinking to uncover stories that might otherwise remain hidden in large datasets, which makes unlocking that data a particular interest for Willis.

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This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism.

While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the US Department of Health and Human Services.

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