Intel's Core Ultra 200 series is currently bifurcated between two architectures: Lunar Lake, which powers the Core Ultra 200V series of laptop chips; and Arrow Lake, which is included in the Core Ultra 200S desktop processors. Both share the same CPU architectures across their P-cores and E-cores, but the similarities end there. Arrow Lake processors can include many more CPU cores, but only Lunar Lake uses Intel's latest GPU architecture and a neural processing unit (NPU) fast enough for Microsoft's Copilot+ functionality.

Intel is rounding out the rest of the Core Ultra 200 family today at CES, and the most important thing to know is that it's Arrow Lake, and not Lunar Lake, that is powering all of these new processors. This means that none of them are fast enough to earn the Copilot+ label or use upcoming features like Windows Recall, and none of them will have integrated graphics that are as good as the Core Ultra 200V. But it will make them a better fit for gaming laptops and other kinds of systems that prioritize CPU performance or include an external graphics card, as well as less-expensive ultraportable laptops.

Intel may be going with Arrow Lake because Lunar Lake processors are more expensive to make; Intel's (now former) CEO, Pat Gelsinger, declared the Lunar Lake design a "one-off" because of the extra cost associated with integrating the RAM into the CPU package. Intel said at the time that this saved motherboard space and reduced energy use, but these benefits aren't being extended to the rest of the lineup.

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Last January at CES, Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi declared 2024 the "year of the AI PC." And whether you believe that prediction came true or not—many new PCs come with AI-accelerating neural processing units (NPUs) onboard, but far from all of them—you can't deny that Microsoft did try very hard to make it happen.

This year, Mehdi is back with another prediction: 2025 will be "the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh." This year is also, not coincidentally, the year that most Windows 10 PCs will stop receiving new security updates.

Mehdi's post includes few if any new announcements, but it does set the tone for how Microsoft is handling the sunsetting of Windows 10, attempting to strike a balance between carrot and stick. The carrots include Windows 11's new features (both AI and otherwise), and the performance, security, and battery life benefits inherent to brand-new PC hardware. The stick is that Windows 10 support ends in October of 2025, and Microsoft is not interested in extending that date for the general public or in expanding official Windows 11 support to older PCs.

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The pastime of pinball has lived a fraught existence. Whether due to public sentiment, hostile legislation, or a simple lack of popularity, the entire silver ball industry has repeatedly teetered on the brink of collapse. Yet it has always come back, today again riding a wave of popularity driven by the successes of high-tech machines capitalizing on familiar brands like X-Men and Godzilla.

Pinball arcades are springing up everywhere, but private ownership is also surging. Those modern tables with their high-definition displays and brilliant LED lights are getting the most attention, but there is a breed of pinball enthusiast who not only owns a selection of classic machines but also obsessively maintains and restores them.

These collectors have just as much love for the maze of mechanicals beneath the surface as the trajectories the silver ball follows. The goal isn't high scores; it's keeping ornately complex vintage contraptions looking and playing like new.

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With the holiday release of the biopic A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan is once again in the national spotlight. For me, the film provided a welcome excuse to read up on Dylan, who has always been a reputable source of enjoyably gnomic quotes, self-mythologizing, and enigmatic asides. Even in his old age, Dylan still delivers—especially when he gets going on technology, joysticks, and "dog ass" television programs.

Consider the interview Dylan gave to The Wall Street Journal in December 2022. (You can read the whole thing on BobDylan.com.) The piece was, notionally, about Dylan's book, The Philosophy of Modern Song. But it quickly morphed into a meditation on creativity in the era of on-demand streaming content, along with a discussion about how Dylan had spent his time during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Dylan claims that he spent the pandemic replacing door panels on a ’56 Chevy, painting some landscapes, and re-reading “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” while pondering the mysteries of opium. Okay. He also had time left over to stream some TV:

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It's difficult to comprehend what 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock would look like. It's even more difficult to imagine it being violently flung into the air. Yet the Yellowstone volcanic system blasted more than twice that amount of rock into the sky about 2 million years ago, and it has generated a number of massive (if somewhat smaller) eruptions since, and there have been even larger eruptions deeper in the past.

All of which might be enough to keep someone nervously watching the seismometers scattered throughout the area. But a new study suggests that there's nothing to worry about in the near future: There's not enough molten material pooled in one place to trigger the sort of violent eruptions that have caused massive disruptions in the past. The study also suggests that the primary focus of activity may be shifting outside of the caldera formed by past eruptions.

Understanding Yellowstone

Yellowstone is fueled by what's known as a hotspot, where molten material from the Earth's mantle percolates up through the crust. The rock that comes up through the crust is typically basaltic (a definition based on the ratio of elements in its composition) and can erupt directly. This tends to produce relatively gentle eruptions where lava flows across a broad area, generally like you see in Hawaii and Iceland. But this hot material can also melt rock within the crust, producing a material called rhyolite. This is a much more viscous material that does not flow very readily and, instead, can cause explosive eruptions.

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The US government finally got its metaphorical hands on Do Hyeong Kwon, the 33-year-old Korean national who built a financial empire on the cryptocurrency Luna and the "stablecoin" TerraUSD, only to see it all come crashing down in a wipeout that cost investors $40 billion.

As private investors filed lawsuits, and as the governments of South Korea and the United States launched fraud investigations, Do Kwon was nowhere to be found. In 2022, the Korean government filed a "red notice" with Interpol, seeking Kwon's arrest and his return to Korea. A few months later, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Kwon with fraud in the US.

On September 17, 2022, Kwon famously tweeted, "I am not 'on the run' or anything similar"—but he also wouldn't say where he was. He didn't help his case when he was arrested in March 2023 by the authorities in Montenegro. At an airport. With fake travel documents. On his way to a country with no US extradition agreement.

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Last September, faulty door handle hardware caused Volkswagen to take the rather drastic steps of suspending sales and production of the electric crossover, as well as recalling almost 100,000 customer cars. Now, it says it has new parts that will allow it to fix existing cars, lift the stop-sale order, and soon, resume production at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The ID.4, like many new EVs, features flush door handles in service of the all-important effort of drag reduction. Instead of conventional mechanical handles that interrupt the laminar air flow down the side of the car, VW instead went with an electromechanical solution.

Unfortunately, the door handle assemblies weren't sufficiently waterproofed, allowing the electronics inside to corrode. Consequently, early last year VW started getting complaints of ID.4s with doors that would intermittently open while driving, with reporting almost 300 warranty claims by September, when it pulled the car from sale, issued the recall, and stopped the production line.

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A little over a year ago, Meta created Facebook and Instagram profiles for "28 AIs with unique interests and personalities for you to interact with and dive deeper into your interests." Today, the last of those profiles is being taken down amid waves of viral revulsion as word of their existence has spread online.

The September 2023 launch of Meta's social profiles for AI characters was announced alongside a much splashier initiative that created animated AI chatbots with celebrity avatars at the same time. Those celebrity-based AI chatbots were unceremoniously scrapped less than a year later amid a widespread lack of interest.

But roughly a dozen of the unrelated AI character profiles still remained accessible as of this morning via social media pages labeled as "AI managed by Meta." Those profiles—which included a mix of AI-generated imagery and human-created content, according to Meta—also offered real users the ability to live chat with these AI characters via Instagram Direct or Facebook Messenger.

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Nvidia is reportedly gearing up to launch the first few cards in its RTX 50-series at CES next week, including an RTX 5090, RTX 5080, RTX 5070 Ti, and RTX 5070. The 5090 will be of particular interest to performance-obsessed, money-is-no-object PC gaming fanatics since it's the first new GPU in over two years that can beat the performance of 2022's RTX 4090.

But boosted performance and slower advancements in chip manufacturing technology mean that the 5090's maximum power draw will far outstrip the 4090's, according to leakers. VideoCardz reports that the 5090's thermal design power (TDP) will be set at 575 W, up from 450 W for the already power-hungry RTX 4090. The RTX 5080's TDP is also increasing to 360 W, up from 320 W for the RTX 4080 Super.

That also puts the RTX 5090 close to the maximum power draw available over a single 12VHPWR connector, which is capable of delivering up to 600 W of power (though once you include the 75 W available via the PCI Express slot on your motherboard, the actual maximum possible power draw for a GPU with a single 12VHPWR connector is a slightly higher 675 W).

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With Valve's impressive work on the Proton tool for Linux and the Mac's Game Porting Toolkit and CrossOver options, few games are truly "Windows only" these days. The exceptions are those with aggressive, Windows-based anti-cheating tools baked in, something that hit back hard against players eager to dive into a new superhero shooter.

Marvel Rivals, an Overwatch-ish free-to-play hero shooter released in early December 2024, has all the typical big online game elements: an in-game shop with skins and customizations, battle passes, and anti-cheating tech. While Proton, which powers the Linux-based Steam Deck's ability to play just about any Windows game, has come very far in a few years' time, its biggest blind spots are these kinds of online-only games, like Grand Theft Auto Online, Fortnite, Destiny 2, Apex Legends, and the like. The same goes for Mac players, who, if they can work past DirectX 12, can often get a Windows game working in CrossOver or Parallels, minus any anti-cheat tools.

Is there harm in trying? For a while, there was 100 years' worth. As detailed in the r/macgaming subreddit and at r/SteamDeck, many players who successfully got Marvel Rivals working would receive a "Penalty Issued" notice, with a violation "detected" and bans issued until 2124. Should such a ban stand, players risked entirely missing the much-prophesied Year of the Linux Desktop or Mainstream Mac Gaming, almost certain to happen at some point in that span.

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Some version of the Hula-Hoop has been around for millennia, but the popular plastic version was introduced by Wham-O in the 1950s and quickly became a fad. Now, researchers have taken a closer look at the underlying physics of the toy, revealing that certain body types are better at keeping the spinning hoops elevated than others, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We were surprised that an activity as popular, fun, and healthy as hula hooping wasn’t understood even at a basic physics level,” said co-author Leif Ristroph of New York University. “As we made progress on the research, we realized that the math and physics involved are very subtle, and the knowledge gained could be useful in inspiring engineering innovations, harvesting energy from vibrations, and improving in robotic positioners and movers used in industrial processing and manufacturing.”

Ristroph's lab frequently addresses these kinds of colorful real-world puzzles. For instance, in 2018, Ristroph and colleagues fine-tuned the recipe for the perfect bubble based on experiments with soapy thin films. In 2021, the Ristroph lab looked into the formation processes underlying so-called "stone forests" common in certain regions of China and Madagascar.

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When Honda gave the 11th-generation Civic Hatchback a refresh late last year, among the changes were the addition of a hybrid option to the lineup. There was already a lot to like about Honda's compact, which eschews lamentable trends like an over-reliance on touchscreens for good old-fashioned physical controls. Now, a big efficiency boost makes it even more attractive.

The new powertrain is available in the $29,950 Sport Hybrid and the $32,950 Sport Touring Hybrid (the trim we tested). With an output of 200 hp (150 kW) and 232 lb-ft (315 Nm), it's both more powerful and torquier than the 1.5 L turbo previously found in the top trim Civics. And it uses a heck of a lot less fuel in the process.

The Civic uses a hybrid powertrain with two electric motors working with the 2.0 L, four-cylinder engine. One works as a generator to charge the 1 kWh traction battery from the engine under most conditions. The battery then powers the 181 hp (135 kW) traction motor, which is what mostly drives the front wheels, although like most other series hybrids of this nature, it operates as a parallel hybrid with the 141 hp (105 kW) gasoline engine directly driving the front wheels at highway cruising speeds, as that is actually more efficient. (For some reason, this supposed lack of engineering purity seems to really upset some people, who I am sure will let us know why in the comments.)

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Although SpaceX founder Elon Musk is known for outspokenness and controversial comments on his social media site X, he has been relatively restrained when it comes to US space policy in recent years.

For example, he has rarely criticized NASA or its overall goal to return humans to the Moon through the Artemis Program. Rather, Musk, who has long preferred Mars as a destination for humans, has more or less been a team player when it comes to the space agency's lunar-focused plans.

This is understandable from a financial perspective, as SpaceX has contracts worth billions of dollars to not only build a Human Landing System as part of NASA's Artemis Program but also to supply food, cargo, and other logistics services to a planned Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon.

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On Thursday, music publishers got a small win in a copyright fight alleging that Anthropic's Claude chatbot regurgitates song lyrics without paying licensing fees to rights holders.

In an order, US district judge Eumi Lee outlined the terms of a deal reached between Anthropic and publisher plaintiffs who license some of the most popular songs on the planet, which she said resolves one aspect of the dispute.

Through the deal, Anthropic admitted no wrongdoing and agreed to maintain its current strong guardrails on its AI models and products throughout the litigation. These guardrails, Anthropic has repeatedly claimed in court filings, effectively work to prevent outputs containing actual song lyrics to hits like Beyonce's "Halo," Spice Girls' "Wannabe," Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone," or any of the 500 songs at the center of the suit.

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When fast radio bursts (FRBs) were first detected in 2007, they were a complete enigma. As their name implies, these events involve a very brief eruption of radio emissions and then typically silence, though a few objects appear to be capable of sending out multiple bursts. By obtaining enough data from lots of individual bursts, researchers gradually put the focus on magnetars, versions of neutron stars that have intense magnetic fields.

But we still don't know whether a magnetar is a requirement for an FRB or if the events can be triggered by less magnetized neutron stars as well. And we have little hint of the mechanism that produces the burst itself. Bursts could potentially be produced by an event in the star's magnetic field itself, or the star could be launching some energetic material that subsequently produces an FRB at some distance from the star.

But now, a rare burst has provided indications that FRBs likely originate near the star and that they share a feature with the emissions of pulsars, another subtype of neutron star.

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As many of us celebrated the year-end holidays, a small group of researchers worked overtime tracking a startling discovery: At least 33 browser extensions hosted in Google’s Chrome Web Store, some for as long as 18 months, were surreptitiously siphoning sensitive data from roughly 2.6 million devices.

The compromises came to light with the discovery by data loss prevention service Cyberhaven that a Chrome extension used by 400,000 of its customers had been updated with code that stole their sensitive data.

’Twas the night before Christmas

The malicious extension, available as version 24.10.4, was available for 31 hours, from December 25 at 1:32 AM UTC to Dec 26 at 2:50 AM UTC. Chrome browsers actively running Cyberhaven during that window would automatically download and install the malicious code. Cyberhaven responded by issuing version 24.10.5, and 24.10.6 a few days later.

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Welcome to Edition 7.25 of the Rocket Report! Happy New Year! It's a shorter edition of the newsletter this week because most companies (not named Blue Origin, this holiday season) took things easier over the last 10 days. But after the break we're back in the saddle for the new year, and eager to see what awaits us in the world of launch.

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.

Avio lands atop list of European launch firms. You know it probably was not a great year for European rocket firms when the top-ranked company on the continent is Avio, which launched a grand total of two rockets in 2024. The Italian rocket firm earned this designation from European Spaceflight after successfully completing the final flight of the Vega rocket in September and returning the Vega C rocket to flight in December.

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On Thursday, a three-judge panel struck down net neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had hoped would stop broadband providers from varying speeds for users when connecting to different websites.

In his opinion, US circuit judge Richard Allen Griffin wrote that the FCC lacked the authority to impose the net neutrality rules under the "telecommunications service" provision of the Communications Act.

"The core of the dispute here," Griffin wrote, "is whether Broadband Internet Service Providers" like Xfinity or Spectrum offer a "telecommunications service" or an "information service." Because judges agreed they offer the latter, the court ruled that they could not be subjected to the FCC's net neutrality policies.

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The more than two decades since Half-Life 2's release have been filled with plenty of rumors and hints about Half-Life 3, ranging from the official-ish to the thin to the downright misleading. As we head into 2025, though, we're approaching something close to a critical mass of rumors and leaks suggesting that Half-Life 3 is really in the works this time, and could be officially announced in the coming months.

The latest tease came just before the end of 2024 via a New Year's Eve social media video from G-Man voice actor Mike Shapiro. In the voice of the mysterious in-game bureaucrat, Shapiro expresses hopes that "the next quarter century [will] deliver as many unexpected surprises as did the millennium's first (emphasis added)... See you in the new year."

#Valve #Halflife #GMan #2025 pic.twitter.com/mdT5hlxKJT

— Mike Shapiro (@mikeshapiroland) December 31, 2024

The post is all the more notable because it's Shapiro's first in over four years, when he concluded a flurry of promotional posts surrounding the release of Half-Life: Alyx (many of which were in-character as G-Man). And in 2020, just after Alyx's release, Shapiro told USGamer that he had recently worked on a "blast from the past" project that he would "announce... on my Twitter feed when I'm allowed to" (no such announcement has been forthcoming for any other game).

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People have been complaining for a while that passing a CAPTCHA is too difficult, but developer and tech CEO Guillermo Rauch has made one of the hardest yet: a fully playable CAPTCHA based on the classic PC game Doom.

It's been a long-running joke that developers will make Doom run on absolutely anything, so it's not much of a surprise that it's now running inside something that resembles a CAPTCHA.

The app essentially amounts to a small Doom level that is playable with keyboard controls (arrow keys to move, space bar to shoot) within a CAPTCHA-like presentation. You must kill three enemies to pass the test.

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