At Mobile World Congress, Google confirmed that a long-awaited Gemini AI feature it first teased nearly a year ago is ready for launch. The company's conversational Gemini Live will soon be able to view live video and screen sharing, a feature Google previously demoed as Project Astra. When Gemini's video capabilities arrive, you'll be able to simply show the robot something instead of telling it.

Right now, Google's multimodal AI can process text, images, and various kinds of documents. However, its ability to accept video as an input is spotty at best—sometimes it can summarize a YouTube video, and sometimes it can't, for unknown reasons. Later in March, the Gemini app on Android will get a major update to its video functionality. You'll be able to open your camera to provide Gemini Live a video stream or share your screen as a live video, thus allowing you to pepper Gemini with questions about what it sees.

It can be hard to keep track of which Google AI project is which—the 2024 Google I/O was largely a celebration of all things Gemini AI. The Astra demo made waves as it demonstrated a more natural way to interact with the AI. In the original video, which you can see below, Google showed how Gemini Live could answer questions in real time as the user swept a phone around a room. It had things to say about code on a computer screen, how speakers work, and a network diagram on a whiteboard. It even remembered where the user left their glasses from an earlier part of the video.

Read full article

Comments

© Google

Droplets bouncing off surfaces are an everyday phenomenon, like raindrops bouncing off lotus leaves or water drops sizzling in a hot pan, levitating and sliding around—aka the Leidenfrost effect. There is also an inverse Leidenfrost effect, first described in 1969, that involves a hot object such as a droplet levitating above a cold surface. Understanding the mechanisms behind these phenomena is crucial to a broad range of practical applications, such as self-cleaning, anti-icing, anti-fogging, surface charge printing, or droplet-based logic systems.

Droplets usually only bounce if the surface is superheated or engineered in some way to reduce stickiness. Physicists from the City University of Hong Kong have figured out how to achieve this bouncing behavior of hot oil droplets off almost any surface, according to a new paper published in the journal Newton.

As we've reported previously, in 1756, a German scientist named Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost reported his observation of the unusual phenomenon. Normally, he noted, water splashed onto a very hot pan sizzles and evaporates very quickly. But if the pan's temperature is well above water's boiling point, "gleaming drops resembling quicksilver" will form and skitter across the surface. It's called the "Leidenfrost effect" in his honor.

Read full article

Comments

© Zulu et al., 2025

The idea of flying satellites in "very" low-Earth orbit is not new. Dating back to the dawn of the space age in the late 1950s, the first US spy satellites, as part of the Corona program, orbited the planet as low as 120 to 160 km (75 to 100 miles) above the Earth.

This low vantage point allowed the Kodak cameras on board the Corona satellites to capture the highest-resolution images of Earth during the height of the Cold War. However, flying so close to the planet brought a number of challenges, most notably that of atmospheric drag.

For much of the space age, therefore, satellites have flown much higher orbits. Most satellites today fly at an altitude of between 400 and 800 km (250 and 500 miles), which is high enough to avoid the vast majority of atmospheric drag while still being close enough to offer good communications and a clear view of the planet.

Read full article

Comments

© Albedo

Apple's slow trickle of early 2025 product announcements is apparently set to continue this week, following the introduction of the iPhone 16e a couple of weeks ago. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, the company plans to refresh its 13- and 15-inch MacBook Air laptops "as early as this coming week," adding the M4 processor that Apple put in the iMac, Mac mini, and MacBook Pro lineups last fall.

An M4 refresh for the MacBook Air was always likely, but Apple has kept us guessing about the timing. Usually, the MacBook Airs are among the first devices to get new M-series processors from Apple, but Apple surprised us by bringing the M4 to the iPad Pro just a few months after introducing the M3. In mid-December, concrete references to the M4 MacBook Air appeared in the macOS 15.2 update, suggesting that the laptops were in testing, even if they weren't ready for a public launch yet.

The laptops are unlikely to look too different from the current M2 or M3 MacBook Airs, which got an "update" of sorts last fall when Apple discontinued the versions with 8GB of RAM in favor of 16GB versions that kept the same prices.

Read full article

Comments

© Andrew Cunningham

Leading artificial intelligence firms including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta are turning to a process called “distillation” in the global race to create AI models that are cheaper for consumers and businesses to adopt.

The technique caught widespread attention after China’s DeepSeek used it to build powerful and efficient AI models based on open source systems released by competitors Meta and Alibaba. The breakthrough rocked confidence in Silicon Valley’s AI leadership, leading Wall Street investors to wipe billions of dollars of value from US Big Tech stocks.

Through distillation, companies take a large language model—dubbed a “teacher” model—which generates the next likely word in a sentence. The teacher model generates data which then trains a smaller “student” model, helping to quickly transfer knowledge and predictions of the bigger model to the smaller one.

Read full article

Comments

© FT montage/Getty

Teens increasingly traumatized by deepfake nudes clearly understand that the AI-generated images are harmful.

And apparently so do many of their tormentors, who typically use free or cheap "nudify" apps or web tools to "undress" innocuous pics of victims, then pass the fake nudes around school or to people they know online. A surprising recent Thorn survey suggests there's growing consensus among young people under 20 that making and sharing fake nudes is obviously abusive.

That's a little bit of "good news" on the deepfake nudes front, Thorn's director of research, Melissa Stroebel, told Ars. Last year, The New York Times declared that teens are now confronting an "epidemic" of fake nudes in middle and high schools that are completely unprepared to support or in some cases even acknowledge victims.

Read full article

Comments

© Maskot | Maskot

Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to make a picture-perfect landing on the Moon early Sunday, touching down on an ancient basaltic plain, named Mare Crisium, to fulfill a $101 million contract with NASA.

The lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, settled onto the Moon's surface at 2:34 am CST (3:34 am EST; 08:34 UTC). A few dozen engineers in Firefly's mission control room monitored real-time data streaming down from a quarter-million miles away.

"Y’all stuck the landing, we’re on the Moon!" announced Will Coogan, the lander's chief engineer, to the Firefly team gathered in Leander, Texas, a suburb north of Austin. Down the street, at a middle-of-the-night event for Firefly employees, their families, and VIPs, the crowd erupted in applause and toasted champagne.

Read full article

Comments

© Firefly Aerospace

There's no question that AI systems have accomplished some impressive feats, mastering games, writing text, and generating convincing images and video. That's gotten some people talking about the possibility that we're on the cusp of AGI, or artificial general intelligence. While some of this is marketing fanfare, enough people in the field are taking the idea seriously that it warrants a closer look.

Many arguments come down to the question of how AGI is defined, which people in the field can't seem to agree upon. This contributes to estimates of its advent that range from "it's practically here" to "we'll never achieve it." Given that range, it's impossible to provide any sort of informed perspective on how close we are.

But we do have an existing example of AGI without the "A"—the intelligence provided by the animal brain, particularly the human one. And one thing is clear: The systems being touted as evidence that AGI is just around the corner do not work at all like the brain does. That may not be a fatal flaw, or even a flaw at all. It's entirely possible that there's more than one way to reach intelligence, depending on how it's defined. But at least some of the differences are likely to be functionally significant, and the fact that AI is taking a very different route from the one working example we have is likely to be meaningful.

Read full article

Comments

Mercedes-Benz's EV efforts aren't exactly burning up the sales charts. Models like the EQS and EQE haven't convinced the brand's demanding clientele that batteries are the future, forcing the company to scale back its electric ambitions.

Scale back, but not abandon. Benz is about to launch a new generation of EVs relying on technology derived from the epically efficient EQXX. The first is the new CLA. It's coming soon, and after getting some time behind the wheel of a prototype vehicle undergoing final testing in the snowy wilds of Sweden, I'm convinced this could be the car to change Mercedes' electrified fortunes.

And, for anyone who isn't convinced, there'll be a hybrid version, too.

Read full article

Comments

© Tim Stevens

Astronauts on the International Space Station often suffer from various immune system dysfunctions, including allergies and skin rashes, even though they go through rigorous screening and are probably among the healthiest people on (or at least near) Earth. “It’s hard to pinpoint the exact causes for a lot of these symptoms, but we believe microbiome disruptions that happen in their bodies and in their environment up there could be playing an important part”, says Rodolfo Salido Benitez, a bioengineering researcher at the University of California, San Diego who co-authored the largest study on the ISS microbiome to date.

After analyzing over 800 samples collected by astronauts in multiple modules of the United States Orbital Segment in the ISS, Benitez and his team concluded the microbial and chemical environment on the station closely resembled the one found at COVID-19 isolation wards during the height of the pandemic. And that may be less than ideal for keeping people healthy.

Swabbing the space decks

Monitoring microbial life on the ISS is an ongoing effort, and studies of this sort have been done before, although at a much smaller scale. “Previous studies used a low number of samples that could not identify all microbial and chemical factors present up there,” said Nina Zhao, a researcher at the UCSD and co-author of the study.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA

The Chieftain Range Rover is a fascinating thing—a refitted, reskinned, restored classic Range Rover is no new thing, nor is one with a ludicrous American V8 stuffed under the hood. But one that can be had as a gas car, plug-in hybrid, or as an EV? It can be all of those things depending on which boxes you tick. Ars Technica went for a spin in the EV to see how it stacks up.

The UK is something of an EV restomod hub. It's been throwing electricity in things that didn't come off the line electrified in the first place for years. Businesses like Electrogenic, Lunaz, and Everrati will, for a price, make an old car feel a little more peppy—depending on who you go to, it'll come back restored as well. The Chieftain isn't quite like them. Developed by Oxfordshire, UK, based Jensen International Automotive (the company's bread 'n butter is Jensen Interceptors), the Chieftain is an old Range Rover turned up to VERY LOUD. Or, actually, not loud at all.

Of course, these things come at a cost. A Chieftain EV Range Rover conversion, today, will set you back at least $568,000 should you choose to order one. This one was a private commission, and at that price there won't be any built on spec on the off chance someone wants to buy one "off the peg." By any stretch of the imagination it is a huge amount for an old car, but they're custom-built from start to finish.

Read full article

Comments

© Alex Goy

Mercedes-Benz's EV efforts aren't exactly burning up the sales charts. Models like the EQS and EQE haven't convinced the brand's demanding clientele that batteries are the future, forcing the company to scale back its electric ambitions.

Scale back, but not abandon. Benz is about to launch a new generation of EVs relying on technology derived from the epically efficient EQXX. The first is the new CLA. It's coming soon, and after getting some time behind the wheel of a prototype vehicle undergoing final testing in the snowy wilds of Sweden, I'm convinced this could be the car to change Mercedes' electrified fortunes.

And, for anyone who isn't convinced, there'll be a hybrid version too.

Read full article

Comments

© Tim Stevens

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.

Read full article

Comments

© Image courtesy of UC Santa Barbara

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."

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson | Steam

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.

Read full article

Comments

© EyeEm Mobile GmbH via Getty

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.

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

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.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images

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.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

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."

Read full article

Comments

© Getty | RONALDO SCHEMIDT

“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].

Read full article

Comments

© Getty