The T-1000 in Terminator 2 could change shape at will, morph its hands into blades or turn parts of its body into a fluid to move through metal bars. “I saw this movie when I was a child—it was like, 'Wow, can you imagine,' I thought, 'being able to do this?'” says Otger Campàs, a professor at Max Planck Institute of Molecular Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. “Now I work on embryos. And what we saw in The Terminator actually happens in an embryo. This kind of shape shifting is what an embryo does.”

Campàs and his team drew inspiration from processes called fluidization and convergent extension—mechanisms that cells in embryos use to coordinate their behavior when forming tissues and organs in a developing organism. The team built a robotic collective where each robotic unit behaved like an embryonic cell. As a collective, the robots behaved like a material that could change shape and switch between solid and liquid states, just like the T-1000.

Real-world and sci-fi alloys

The T-1000 was a marvel to behold, but the movie gave no clues as to how it worked. This is why Campàs and his colleagues looked for clues elsewhere. Similar shape-shifting properties have been observed in embryos when you watch their development sped up using time-lapse imaging. “Tissues in embryos can switch between solid and fluid states to shape the organs. We were thinking how we could engineer robots that would do the same,” Campàs says.

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A little over 20 years ago, Valve was getting ready to release a new Half-Life game. At the same time, the company was trying to push Steam as a new option for players to download and update games over the Internet.

Requiring Steam in order to play Half-Life 2 led to plenty of grumbling from players in 2004. But the high-profile Steam exclusive helped build an instant user base for Valve's fresh distribution system, setting it on a path to eventually become the unquestioned leader in the space. The link between the new game and the new platform helped promote a bold alternative to the retail game sales and distribution systems that had dominated PC gaming for decades.

Remember DVD-ROMs? Credit: Reddit

Today, all indications suggest that Valve is getting ready to release a new Half-Life game. At the same time, the company is getting ready to push SteamOS as a new option for third-party hardware makers and individual users to "download and test themselves."

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Sweeping layoffs of federal employees have struck the program responsible for controlling the invasive sea lamprey that threatens fish across the Great Lakes, the earth’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

Among hundreds of US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) employees terminated this month were 12 members of the Great Lakes sea lamprey control program, based at field stations in Marquette and Ludington, Michigan.

These staffing cuts could have grave consequences for the lakes’ native fish population and the $5 billion fishery they comprise.

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SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight's goals, such as testing Starship's satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.

Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5:30 pm CST (6:30 pm EST; 23:30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket's Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.

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Amnesty International on Friday said it determined that a zero-day exploit sold by controversial exploit vendor Cellebrite was used to compromise the phone of a Serbian student who had been critical of that country's government.

The human rights organization first called out Serbian authorities in December for what it said was its “pervasive and routine use of spyware” as part of a campaign of “wider state control and repression directed against civil society.” That report said the authorities were deploying exploits sold by Cellebrite and NSO, a separate exploit seller whose practices have also been sharply criticized over the past decade. In response to the December report, Cellebrite said it had suspended sales to “relevant customers” in Serbia.

Campaign of surveillance

On Friday, Amnesty International said that it uncovered evidence of a new incident. It involves the sale by Cellebrite of an attack chain that could defeat the lock screen of fully patched Android devices. The exploits were used against a Serbian student who had been critical of Serbian officials. The chain exploited a series of vulnerabilities in device drivers the Linux kernel uses to support USB hardware.

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The north pole of Mars is slowly sinking under the weight of an ice cap that only formed within the past few million years. And, in the process, it's telling us something about what the planet's interior must be like, thanks in no small part to data obtained by hardware we landed in Mars' equatorial regions.

That's the conclusion of a new modeling study that produces results that are broadly consistent with earlier work, although quite a bit more detailed. In the process, the work shows how it's possible to take data from radically different data sources and pull them together into a coherent picture.

Weighted down

While the crust of a planet is relatively solid, it bends and breaks in various ways under the strain of plate tectonics. It also flexes in response to ice. The long glacial period that preceded our current interglacial saw sheets of ice that pressed the crust down into the mantle under their difficult-to-conceive weight. With the ice gone, the crust is slowly rising again, in a process called glacial isostatic rebound.

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A Texas health authority is warning against "measles parties" as the outbreak in West Texas grew to at least 146 cases, with 20 hospitalized and one unvaccinated school-age child dead. The outbreak continues to mainly be in unvaccinated children.

In a press briefing hosted by the city of Lubbock, Texas, on Friday, Ron Cook, chief health officer at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, offered the stark warning for Texans in his opening statements.

"What I want you to hear is: It's not good to go have measles parties because what may happen is—we can't predict who's going to do poorly with measles, be hospitalized, potentially get pneumonia or encephalitis and or pass away from this," Cook said. "So that's a foolish idea to go have a measles party. The best thing to do is make sure that you're well-vaccinated."

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“Thousands” of complaints about the volume of TV commercials have flooded the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in recent years. Despite the FCC requiring TV stations, cable operators, and satellite providers to ensure that commercials don’t bring a sudden spike in decibels, complaints around loud commercials “took a troubling jump” in 2024, the government body said on Thursday.

Under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers are required to ensure that commercials “have the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” per the FCC. The FCC’s rules about the volume of commercials took effect in December 2012. The law also requires linear TV providers to use the Advanced Television Systems Committee's (ATSC’s) recommended practices. The practices include guidance around production, post production, metadata systems usage, and controlling dynamic range. If followed, the recommendations “result in consistency in loudness and avoidance of signal clipping,” per the ATSC [PDF]. The guidance reads:

If all programs and commercials were produced at a consistent average loudness, and if the loudness of the mix is preserved through the production, distribution, and delivery chain, listeners would not be subjected to annoying changes in loudness within and between programs.

As spotted by PC Mag, the FCC claimed this week that The Calm Act initially reduced complaints about commercials aggressively blaring from TVs. However, the agency is seeing an uptick in grievances. The FCC said it received "approximately" 750 complaints in 2022, 825 in 2023, and "at least" 1,700 in 2024 [PDF].

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. February's list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh's tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth's magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of "map" to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic "dance" when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

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Sergey Brin co-founded Google in the 1990s along with Larry Page, but both stepped away from the day to day at Google in 2019. However, the AI boom tempted Brin to return to the office, and he thinks everyone should follow his example. In a new internal memo, Brin has advised employees to be in the office every weekday so Google can win the AI race.

Just returning to the office isn't enough for the Google co-founder. According to the memo seen by The New York Times, Brin says Googlers should try to work 60 hours per week to support the company's AI efforts. That works out to 12 hours per day, Monday through Friday, which Brin calls the "sweet spot of productivity." This is not a new opinion for Brin.

Brin, like many in Silicon Valley, is seemingly committed to the dogma that the current trajectory of generative AI will lead to the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Such a thinking machine would be head and shoulders above current AI models, which can only do a good impression of thinking. An AGI would understand concepts and think more like a human being, which some would argue makes it a conscious entity.

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Firefox maker Mozilla deleted a promise to never sell its users' personal data and is trying to assure worried users that its approach to privacy hasn't fundamentally changed. Until recently, a Firefox FAQ promised that the browser maker never has and never will sell its users' personal data. An archived version from January 30 says:

Does Firefox sell your personal data?

Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That's a promise.

That promise is removed from the current version. There's also a notable change in a data privacy FAQ that used to say, "Mozilla doesn't sell data about you, and we don't buy data about you."

The data privacy FAQ now explains that Mozilla is no longer making blanket promises about not selling data because some legal jurisdictions define "sale" in a very broad way:

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EA doesn't always treat its classic library with respect, as evidenced by its recent barely touched-up The Sims Legacy Collection. But the folks shepherding Command & Conquer, a vanguard series in the bygone genre of real-time strategy (RTS) games, are seemingly fueled by a different kind of Tiberium.

After releasing a reverential remaster of the first two games in 2020 with 4K upscaling and behind-the-scenes looks at their full-motion video scenes, EA is now opening up the series even more to its fans. Source code for the original C&C, Red Alert, Renegade (the first-person one), and Generals/Zero Hour has been dropped on GitHub. Along with Steam Workshop support for most of the series, that should enable a new generation of mods for the games. Given the extent of the code available, mods could include the kinds of modern updates, like higher and wider resolutions or beefed-up textures and refresh rates, that all good games deserve.

Building and working with this code will not be a plug-and-play affair. The namesake 1995 game and its hugely popular 1996 Red Alert sequel require some older dependencies, like DirectX 5 and the Greenleaf Communications Library (for a full build and tool access) and the Borland Turbo Assembler (TASM 4.0) to compile. Renegade and Generals, however, call for a whole lot more nostalgia: STLport 4.5.3, the SafeDisk API, the GameSpy SDK, the RAD Miles Sound System SDK, and at least eight more.

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Europe is cracking down on AI-generated sex images of minors. So far, Europol has arrested 25 people in a large-scale ongoing probe called Operation Cumberland and confirmed that more arrests are expected in the coming weeks.

In a press release, Europol said that the 24 arrests occurred simultaneously on February 26 after Danish law enforcement arrested a main suspect in November. That suspect is accused of running "an online platform where he distributed the AI-generated material he produced" for others willing to pay to "watch children being abused," Europol alleged. The network was hidden from casual lurkers and required a "symbolic payment" to access, Europol said.

While fully AI-generated images may not depict real kids, at least one AI model (now scrubbed) has been trained on actual CSAM and images of real kids, so child safety experts fear outputs could potentially depict or resemble a known victim or actual child. And there's growing consensus globally that, in general, AI-generated CSAM harms kids by normalizing child sex abuse through the increased prevalence of CSAM online.

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The verdict is in: OpenAI's newest and most capable traditional AI model, GPT-4.5, is big, expensive, and slow, providing marginally better performance than GPT-4o at 30x the cost for input and 15x the cost for output. The new model seems to prove that longstanding rumors of diminishing returns in training unsupervised-learning LLMs were correct and that the so-called "scaling laws" cited by many for years have possibly met their natural end.

An AI expert who requested anonymity told Ars Technica, "GPT-4.5 is a lemon!" when comparing its reported performance to its dramatically increased price, while frequent OpenAI critic Gary Marcus called the release a "nothing burger" in a blog post (though to be fair, Marcus also seems to think most of what OpenAI does is overrated).

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy wrote on X that GPT-4.5 is better than GPT-4o but in ways that are subtle and difficult to express. "Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome," he wrote, "but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to."

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There's a saying about putting lipstick on a pig, but what if it's not lipstick? That's the question the universe set out to answer when it aligned in such a way that famed (or perhaps infamous) car customizer Mansory got itself a Tesla Cybertruck. The Mansory Elongation—a name that must have taken ages to think of—offers exterior, interior, and wheel and tire upgrades for the straight-edged stainless steel-wrapped pickup.

Among those who mod cars, there are the tuners, who focus on adding power and (one hopes) performance, and then there are the customizers, who concentrate more on aesthetics. Once upon a time, the entire luxury car industry worked like that—a client would buy a rolling chassis from Bugatti, Rolls-Royce, or Talbot and then have bodywork added by coachbuilders like Gurney Nutting, Touring, or Figoni et Falaschi.

At least the rear winglets don't entirely compromise access to the bed. Credit: Mansory

Modern homologation requirements have mostly put an end to that level of coachbuilding, but for the ultra-wealthy prepared to spend telephone numbers on cars, brands like Rolls-Royce will still occasionally oblige. More common now are those aftermarket shops that spiff up already luxurious cars, changing normal doors for gullwing versions, adding flaring fenders and bulging wheel arches, and plastering the interior in any hue of leather one might imagine.

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AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.

The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia's incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.

AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia's RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia's RTX 5070.

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AMD's new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them.

FSR and Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a lower-resolution image rendered by your graphics card, bump up the resolution, and fill in the gaps between the natively rendered pixels to make an image that looks close to natively rendered without making the GPU do all that rendering work. These upscalers can make errors, and they won't always look quite as good as a native-resolution image. But they're both nice alternatives to living with a blurry, non-native-resolution picture on an LCD or OLED display.

FSR and DLSS are especially useful for older or cheaper 1080p or 1440p-capable GPUs that are connected to a 4K monitor, where you'd otherwise have to decide between a sharp 4K image and a playable frame rate; it's also useful for hitting higher frame rates at lower resolutions, which can be handy for high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.

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Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics.

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After more than 21 years, Skype will soon be no more. Last night, some users (including Ars readers) poked around in the latest Skype preview update and noticed as-yet-unsurfaced text that read "Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams."

This morning, Microsoft has confirmed to Ars that it's true. May 5, 2025, will mark the end of Skype's long run.

Alongside the verification that the end is nigh, Microsoft shared a bunch of details about how it plans to migrate Skype users over. Starting right away, some Skype users (those in Teams and Skype Insider) will be able to log in to Teams using their Skype credentials. More people will gain that ability over the next few days.

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© Aurich Lawson

Around 700 million years ago, Earth was a frozen, white sphere, its rocky surface buried kilometers under ice. Despite the barren landscape, the evolution of complex life in the oceans was about to pick up steam. New research published this week in Geology suggests that the two realms were more connected than previously thought.

As massive glaciers scratched and scarred Earth’s rocky surface, they freed less-common minerals, which were later flushed into the seas as the ice melted into giant glacial rivers. These minerals in turn may have spurred nutrient cycling in the oceans, boosting the metabolism of microbial life.

“In retrospect, I’m surprised it took [researchers] so long to go and do a study like this,” says Galen Halverson, a stratigrapher at McGill University who was not involved in the work. “It fits with what we understand” about the glaciated Earth.

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