This week's flight of the New Shepard spacecraft, NS-31, and its all-female crew has stirred up a mess of coverage, from tabloids to high-brow journalism outlets. And why not? Six women, led by superstar Katy Perry, were flying into space!

By contrast, Ars Technica has been largely silent. Why? Because yet another suborbital flight on New Shepard matters little in the long arc of spaceflight history. Beyond that, I did not want to be too negative about someone else's happiness, especially since it was privately funded. Live and let live, and all of that.

However, if I'm being honest, this flight and its breathless promotion made me uncomfortable. Let me explain. Perhaps the most important change in spaceflight over the last two decades has been the rise of commercial spaceflight, which is bringing down the cost of access to space and marks an essential step to humanity becoming a spacefaring species. This rising tide has been spurred in large part by billionaires, particularly Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and to a lesser extent, Richard Branson.

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When it comes to actually storing the numerical weights that power an LLM's underlying neural network, most modern AI models rely on the precision of 16- or 32-bit floating point numbers. But that level of precision can come at the cost of large memory footprints (in the hundreds of gigabytes for the largest models) and significant processing resources needed for the complex matrix multiplication used when responding to prompts.

Now, researchers at Microsoft's General Artificial Intelligence group have released a new neural network model that works with just three distinct weight values: -1, 0, or 1. Building on top of previous work Microsoft Research originally published in 2023, the new model's "ternary" architecture offers a reduction in overall complexity and "substantial advantages in computational efficiency," the researchers write, allowing it to run effectively on a simple desktop CPU. And despite the massive reduction in weight precision, the researchers claim that the model "can achieve performance comparable to leading open-weight, full-precision models of similar size across a wide range of tasks."

Watching your weights

The idea of simplifying model weights isn't a completely new one in AI research. For years, researchers have been experimenting with quantization techniques that squeeze their neural network weights into smaller memory envelopes. In recent years, the most extreme quantization efforts have focused on so-called "BitNets" that represent each weight in a single bit (representing +1 or -1).

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Popular NAS-maker Synology has confirmed and slightly clarified a policy that appeared on its German website earlier this week: Its "Plus" tier of devices, starting with the 2025 series, will require Synology-branded hard drives for full compatibility, at least at first.

"Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems," a Synology representative told Ars by email. "Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues."

Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist.

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For those of us whose memory of high school biology hasn't faded entirely, planarians will probably sound very familiar. They're generally used as an example of one of the extreme ends of regenerative capacity. While some animals like mammals have a limited ability to regenerate lost tissues, planarians can be cut roughly in half and regenerate either an entire head or entire tail, depending on which part of the body you choose to keep track of.

In doing so, they have to re-establish something that is typically only needed early in an animal's development: a signaling system that helps tell cells where the animal's head and tail are. Now, a US-based team asked a question that I'd never have thought of: What happens if you cut the animal in half early in development, while the developmental head-to-tail signaling system is still active? The answer turned out to be surprisingly complex.

Heads or tails?

Planarians are small flatworms that would probably be living quiet lives somewhere if biologists hadn't discovered their ability to regenerate lots of adult tissues when damaged. The process has been well-studied by this point and involves the formation of a cluster of stem cells, called a blastema, at the site of damage. From there, many of the signals that control the formation of specialized tissues in the embryo get re-activated, directing the stem cells down the developmental pathways needed to reproduce any lost organs.

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In a Black Mirror-esque turn, some cash-strapped actors who didn't fully understand the consequences are regretting selling their likenesses to be used in AI videos that they consider embarrassing, damaging, or harmful, AFP reported.

Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, "am I crossing a line by doing this?" His partner's mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsayer predicting disasters, he told the AFP.

South Korean actor Simon Lee's AI likeness was similarly used to spook naïve Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was "stunned" to find his AI avatar promoting "questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram," feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams.

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After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources. In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in China, sparking the global health crisis.

Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.

Previously, the site provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long COVID. It also provided a link to resources for addressing COVID-19 vaccine misconceptions and confronting misinformation. That all appears to be gone now, though some of the same information still remains on a separate COVID-19 page hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Mars has not always been a seemingly lifeless red desert. We have evidence that billions of years ago it had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers, which is somewhat confusing, given that Mars is much farther from the Sun than the Earth and that the Sun was much less bright back then. “In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. “The question we’ve been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is.”

Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that might have answered this question.

The tallest sediment stack

The mystery of Mars’ missing carbon stems from two seemingly conflicting results. On the one hand, we have already found dried riverbeds and lakes on the surface of Mars, so we know there must have been liquid water on its surface at some point. To account for the presence of this water, every Martian climate model we have run indicates that huge amounts of atmospheric carbon were needed to provide a sufficient greenhouse effect to keep the surface temperature above freezing. But the data we were getting from satellite observations of Mars found much less carbon in the Martian soil than those climate models would suggest. “So, either the models were incorrect—and there’s no good reason to believe that—or there really was lots of carbon in the Martian atmosphere,” Tutolo says.

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There are so many factors that can influence how we perceive others, which in turn can determine the people we choose as platonic friends or romantic mates. We certainly make snap judgments based on physical appearance, but scent can have a powerful influence, too. According to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, two heterosexual women meeting for the first time rely partly on scent to judge whether they want to be friends with each other, deciding within minutes—practically at first whiff—whether there is friendship potential.

Social olfactory research largely stems from evolutionary psychology, specifically the work of Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind in 1995. Subtle chemical signals from pheromones are known to play a role in attraction in many species. Scientists had already found evidence in fish and mice that the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) genes, which are critical for immune system function (and useful in determining tissue compatibility for transplants, for instance)—showed a marked preference for sexual partners with different MHC genes, perhaps as a way of keeping the gene pool well-mixed and protecting against inbreeding.

Wedekind introduced the so-called "sweaty T-shirt" method to study the possible role of MHC in mate preferences in humans. Male participants wore the same T-shirt for two days, which were then placed in identical boxes. Women participants then smelled each shirt and indicated which ones they found most sexually attractive. Wedekind found that the women overwhelmingly preferred the T-shirt smells of men who had the most dissimilar MHCs to their own. The only caveat: The preference was reversed in women who were taking oral birth control.

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Popular online shopping meccas Temu and Shein have finally broken their silence, warning of potential price hikes starting next week due to Donald Trump's tariffs.

Temu is a China-based e-commerce platform that has grown as popular as Amazon for global shoppers making cross-border purchases, according to 2024 Statista data. Its tagline, "Shop like a billionaire," is inextricably linked to the affordability of items on its platform. And although Shein—which vows to make global fashion "accessible to all" by selling inexpensive stylish clothing—moved its headquarters from China to Singapore in 2022, most of its products are still controversially manufactured in China, the BBC reported.

For weeks, the US-China trade war has seen both sides spiking tariffs. In the US, the White House last night crunched the numbers and confirmed that China now faces tariffs of up to 245 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported. That figure includes new tariffs Trump has imposed, taxing all Chinese goods by 145 percent, as well as prior 100 percent tariffs lobbed by the Biden administration that are still in effect on EVs and Chinese syringes.

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MIAMI—The arrival of a new car brand to the US was always going to pique my interest, even before the current government decided to upend the automotive sector with punitive tariffs. So when Cupra invited me to come check out some of its cars and hear about its plan to launch here in America, I wanted to know more. My burning question was probably the same one you have as you read this: "Isn’t this a terrible time to try to launch a new car brand in the US?"

What’s a Cupra?

One of the brands of the sprawling Volkswagen Group, you can think of Cupra as sort of a Spanish Polestar. Originally, it was a high-performance badge given to some Seats (Seat being VW's budget brand from Spain), which then got spun out into a standalone brand.

OK, it's not a perfect analogy: Cupra is not a luxury brand, nor is it just electric vehicles. But it was created to fill a gap between the mass market and premium brands, with a focus on design and performance to attract a younger customer than VW's existing brands. "We are not a brand for everyone," said Chief Brand Officer Igansi Prieto.

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Nintendo announced Friday morning that a number of accessories for the Switch 2 "will experience price adjustments from those announced on April 2 due to changes in market conditions." And while the launch price of the console hardware and Nintendo's first-party exclusive games is not changing for now, the company warned that "other adjustments to the price of any Nintendo product are also possible in the future depending on market conditions."

The announcement comes as Nintendo has set a new date of April 24 to open US preorders for the Switch 2. Those preorders were initially delayed from a planned April 9 opening so Nintendo could "assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions" on the console's launch. "We apologize for the retail pre-order delay, and hope this reduces some of the uncertainty our customers may be experiencing," Nintendo said in its announcement Friday.

Here are the newly announced planned prices for Nintendo's official Switch 2 accessories (the original prices announced on April 2 are struck out in parentheses):

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The creators of Sunderfolk wanted to make a video game that would help players “Rediscover game night.” By my reckoning, they have succeeded, because I am now regularly arguing with good friends over stupid moves. Why didn’t I pick up that gold? Don’t you see how ending up there messed up an area attack? Ah, well.

That kind of friendly friction, inside dedicated social time, only gets harder to come by as you get older, settle into routines, and sometimes move apart. I’ve hosted four Sunderfolk sessions with three friends, all in different states, and it has felt like reclaiming something I lost. Sunderfolk is a fun game with a lot of good ideas, and the best one is convincing humans to join up in pondering hex tiles, turn order, and what to name the ogres who shoot arrows (“Pointy Bros”).

Maybe you already have all the gaming appointments you need with friends, online or in person. Sunderfolk, I might suggest, is a worthy addition to your queue as a low-effort way to give everyone a break from being the organizer. It does a decent job of tutorializing and onboarding less experienced players, then adds depth as it goes on. Given that only one person out of four has to own the game on some system, and the only other hardware needed is a phone, it’s a pretty light lift for what I’m finding to be a great payoff. Some parts could be improved, but the core loop and its camaraderie engine feel sturdy.

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Assassin’s Creed titles are cozy games for me. There’s no more relaxing place to go after a difficult day: historical outdoor museum tours plus dopamine dispensers plus slow-paced assassination simulators. The developers of Assassin’s Creed: Shadows seem to understand thisbetter than ever before.

I’m “only” 40 hours into Shadows (I reckon I’m about 30 percent through the game), but I already consider it one of the best entries in the franchise’s long history.

I’ve appreciated some past titles’ willingness to experiment and get jazzy with it, but Shadows takes a different tack. It has cherry-picked the best elements from the past decade or so of the franchise and refined them.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season three will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers the season three finale, "He Who Comes With the Dawn," which was released on April 17.

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Welcome to Edition 7.40 of the Rocket Report! One of the biggest spaceflight questions in my mind right now is when Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will fly again. The company has been saying "late spring." Today, the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said they were told June. Several officials have suggested to Ars that the next launch will, in reality, occur no earlier than October. So when will we see New Glenn again?

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Phantom Space delays Daytona launch, again. In a story that accepts what Phantom Space Founder Jim Cantrell says at face value, Payload Space reports that the company is "an up-and-coming launch provider and satellite manufacturer" and has "steadily built a three-pronged business model to take on the industry’s powerhouses." It's a surprisingly laudatory story for a company that has yet to accomplish much in space.

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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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