Anthony and Joe Russo's new sci-fi adventure film, The Electric State, is adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag. So naturally the directors wanted to create their own distinctive look and tone—complete with a colorful array of quirky misfit robots who team up with their human counterparts to take down an evil corporation.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

The Electric State is Stålenhag's third book, published in 2018. Like much of work, it's set in a dystopian, ravaged landscape: a reimagined America in an alternate 1990s where a war between robots and humans has devastated the country. Paragraphs of text, accompanied by larger artworks, tell the story of a teen girl named Michelle (Milly Bobby Brown) who must travel across the country with her robot companion, Cosmo (Alan Tudyk), to find her long-lost genius brother, Christopher (Woody Norman), while being pursued by a federal agent (Giancarlo Esposito).

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Biohybrid robots work by combining biological components like muscles, plant material, and even fungi with non-biological materials. While we are pretty good at making the non-biological parts work, we’ve always had a problem with keeping the organic components alive and well. This is why machines driven by biological muscles have always been rather small and simple—up to a couple centimeters long and typically with only a single actuating joint.

“Scaling up biohybrid robots has been difficult due to the weak contractile force of lab-grown muscles, the risk of necrosis in thick muscle tissues, and the challenge of integrating biological actuators with artificial structures,” says Shoji Takeuchi, a professor at the Tokyo University, Japan. Takeuchi led a research team that built a full-size, 18 centimeter-long biohybrid human-like hand with all five fingers driven by lab-grown human muscles.

Keeping the muscles alive

Out of all the roadblocks that keep us from building large-scale biohybrid robots, necrosis has probably been the most difficult to overcome. Growing muscles in a lab usually means a liquid medium to supply nutrients and oxygen to muscle cells seeded on petri dishes or applied to gel scaffoldings. Since these cultured muscles are small and ideally flat, nutrients and oxygen from the medium can easily reach every cell in the growing culture.

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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 three—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 entire three-episode season premiere, which was released on March 13.

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To the people of Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba in Nigeria’s deep south, sundown would mean children doing their homework by the glow of kerosene lamps, and the faint thrum of generators emanating from homes that could afford to run them. Like many rural communities, these two villages of fishermen and farmers in the community of Mbiabet, tucked away in clearings within a dense palm forest, had never been connected to the country’s national electricity grid.

Most of the residents had never heard of solar power either. When, in 2021, a renewable-energy company proposed installing a solar “mini-grid” in their community, the villagers scoffed at the idea of the sun powering their homes. “We didn’t imagine that something [like this] can exist,” says Solomon Andrew Obot, a resident in his early 30s.

The small installation of solar panels, batteries and transmission lines proposed by the company Prado Power would service 180 households in Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba, giving them significantly more reliable electricity for a fraction of the cost of diesel generators. Village leaders agreed to the installation, though many residents remained skeptical. But when the panels were set up in 2022, lights blinked on in the brightly painted two-room homes and tan mud huts dotted sparsely through the community. At a village meeting in September, locals erupted into laughter as they recalled walking from house to house, turning on lights and plugging in phone chargers. “I [was] shocked,” Andrew Obot says.

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Ideally, you'd expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made. Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time.

The TASBot community relies on this kind of solid-state predictability when creating tool-assisted speedruns that can be executed with robotic precision on actual console hardware. But on the SNES in particular, the team has largely struggled to get emulated speedruns to sync up with demonstrated results on real consoles.

After significant research and testing on dozens of actual SNES units, the TASBot team now thinks that a cheap ceramic resonator used in the system's Audio Processing Unit (APU) is to blame for much of this inconsistency. While Nintendo's own documentation says the APU should run at a consistent rate of 24,576 Hz (and the associated Digital Signal Processor sample rate at a flat 32,000 Hz), in practice, that rate can vary just a bit based on heat, system age, and minor physical variations that develop in different console units over time.

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A Falcon 9 rocket launched four astronauts safely into orbit on Friday evening, marking the official beginning of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station.

Although any crew launch into orbit is notable, this mission comes with an added bit of importance as its success clears the way for two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to finally return home from space after a saga spanning nine months.

Friday's launch came two days after an initial attempt was scrubbed on Wednesday evening. This was due to a hydraulic issue with the ground systems that handle the Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex 39A in Florida.

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There’s not much new in Apple’s latest refresh of the iPad Air, so there’s not much to say about it, but it’s worth taking a brief look regardless.

In almost every way, this is identical to the previous generation. There are only two differences to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the slightly faster M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral.

If you want more details about this tablet, refer to our M2 iPad Air review from last year. Everything we said then applies now.

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The US has now recorded over 300 measles cases just three months into 2025, exceeding the yearly case counts for all years after 2019. The bulk of this year's cases are from an outbreak that erupted in an undervaccinated county in West Texas in late January, which has since spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma.

As of the afternoon of March 14, Texas reports 259 cases across 11 counties, 34 hospitalizations, and one death, which occurred in an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl. New Mexico reports 35 cases across two counties, two hospitalizations, and one death. That death occurred in an unvaccinated adult who did not seek medical treatment and tested positive for the virus posthumously. The cause of death is still under investigation. Oklahoma reports two probable cases linked to the outbreak.

In addition to Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, 12 other states have reported at least one confirmed measles case since the start of the year: Alaska, California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, this year has seen three measles outbreaks, defined as three or more related cases.

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Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.

In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything command spoken to the Alexa living in Echo speakers and smart displays will automatically be sent to Amazon and processed in the cloud.

Attempting to rationalize the change, Amazon’s email said:

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In a new paper published Thursday titled "Auditing language models for hidden objectives," Anthropic researchers described how custom AI models trained to deliberately conceal certain "motivations" from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, due to their ability to adopt different contextual roles they call "personas." The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden training objectives, although the methods are still under research.

While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal information from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where AI systems might deceive or manipulate human users.

While training a language model using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), reward models are typically tuned to score AI responses according to how well they align with human preferences. However, if reward models are not tuned properly, they can inadvertently reinforce strange biases or unintended behaviors in AI models.

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Pour one out for Google Assistant, the sometimes helpful but often frustrating digital assistant Google launched in 2016. In its place, users will encounter Gemini, the generative AI Google has been integrating into every product in its portfolio. Later this year, Google will make Gemini its only supported assistant, forcing most of its users to abandon Assistant once and for all.

The Gemini brand is barely a year old, but Google has moved aggressively to increase usage. When it released the Gemini app on Android, Google forced anyone who installed it to disable Assistant and switch to Gemini. It did this despite a plethora of missing features and the omnipresent issues of AI hallucinations. The company has forged ahead with Gemini's expansion in the intervening months, making Assistant's demise rather unsurprising.

Since Gemini's debut, users have had the option of sticking with the legacy assistant, but that's not going to be an option soon. On mobile devices, the upgrade path (if you want to call it that) is clear. Most newly released phones already ship with Gemini as the default, and Google will prompt any remaining Assistant users to get the Gemini app. When Assistant is put out to pasture later in 2025, Google will remove the app from app stores and direct users to Gemini instead.

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We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We've collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon's Audible) and from older physical "books on tape" (most of which are actually on CDs). I don't mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then dragging-n-dropping those files into the Books app on my Mac, but my wife prefers to simply use Audible's app to play things directly—it's (sometimes) quick, it's (generally) easy, and it (occasionally) works.

But a while back, the Audible app stopped working for her. Tapping the app's "Library" button would just show a spinning loading icon, forever. All the usual troubleshooting (logging in and out in various ways, removing and reinstalling the app, other familiar rituals) yielded no results; some searching around on Google and DuckDuckGo led me to nothing except a lot of other people having the same problem and a whole lot of silence from Audible and Amazon.

So, having put in the effort to do things the "right" way and having that way fail, I changed tacks and fixed the problem, permanently, with Audiobookshelf.

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One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple's decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol, something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning it on for a bunch of smaller prepaid carriers like Google Fi and Mint Mobile.

Now that Apple is on board, iPhones and their users can also benefit from continued improvements to the RCS standard. And one major update was announced today: RCS will now support end-to-end encryption using the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard finalized by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2023.

"RCS will be the first large-scale messaging service to support interoperable E2EE between client implementations from different providers," writes GSMA Technical Director Tom Van Pelt in the post announcing the updates. "Together with other unique security features such as SIM-based authentication, E2EE will provide RCS users with the highest level of privacy and security for stronger protection from scams, fraud and other security and privacy threats. "

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We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribution to solving this mystery,” says Richard Zare, a Stanford University chemistry professor. Zare is the senior author of the recent study into a previously unknown electrochemical process that might have helped supply the raw materials needed for life.

Zare’s team demonstrated the existence of micro-lightning, very small electricity discharges that occur between tiny droplets of water spray. When triggered in a mixture of gases made to replicate the atmosphere on early Earth, these micro-lightnings produced chemical compounds used by present-day life, like glycine, uracil, and urea, along with chemical precursors like cyanoacetylene, and hydrogen cyanide. “I’m not saying it’s the only way this could happen—I wasn’t there,” Zare acknowledged. “But it’s a new plausible mechanism that gives us building blocks of life.”

Lightning in the bulb

Scientific research into the beginnings of life on Earth started in the 1920s with Aleksander Oparin and J.B.S. Haldane, scientists who independently proposed that life on Earth could have arisen through a process of gradual chemical evolution. In their view, inorganic molecules might have reacted due to energy from the Sun or lightning strikes to form life’s building blocks, like amino acids. Those building blocks, Oparin and Haldane argued, could have accumulated in the oceans, making a “primordial soup.”

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Elon Musk's Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump's trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy.

In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump's tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports.

"Tesla supports a robust and thorough process" to "address unfair trade practices," but only those "which, in the process, do not inadvertently harm US companies," the letter said.

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As he consolidates control over Relativity Space, new owner and chief executive Eric Schmidt is planning significant changes at the launch company, including a likely move to the Lone Star State.

Schmidt's recent acquisition of the California-based company, which has largely evolved away from its 3D-printing origins to becoming a more conventional rocket developer, has solved Relativity's primary need. The company has been in a cash crunch for months, and being acquired by one of the 50 wealthiest people on the planet provides financial stability.

One source said Schmidt has made a "mega" investment in Relativity, but the company has not publicly stated the size. It is likely to be at least $1 billion, if not more. Schmidt is also taking an active hand in operations.

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Tesla has a real image problem. Once, it was the beloved brand for the environmentally aware car buyer; more than that, it was the hottest thing in town. Hundreds of thousands of fans paid thousand-dollar deposits and then waited for up to two years for a chance to buy a Model 3, with others paying hefty markups to people at the front of the queue. Back then, of course, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed to care about climate change—now he seems more likely to be found helping to undo work on climate change.

That has hurt Tesla's new car sales, which have cratered in Europe and declined to a lesser degree in China (where Musk's political activities have less bearing, and decline is more stiff competition from local brands and the lack of a real model range). It has dented the reality-distortion field that surrounds the company's share price, if perhaps only to where it was six months ago. And it has also affected the prices of used Teslas here in the US.

Being a Tesla driver is starting to carry some stigma, and owners are unused to the opprobrium they are now facing for their choice of electric vehicle. "Two weeks ago, I was called a Nazi in the parking lot at Kroger," one owner told The New York Times. The YouTuber Vegas Tesla Family just posted a video explaining that he was selling his Tesla "because of Elon Musk." And more than one Ars commenter has sold their Tesla in recent weeks as a direct result of Musk.

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With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school.

Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in part by maternal antibodies early in infancy as well as the immunity of the people surrounding them. But if they travel to a place where population immunity is unreliable, experts recommend that infants ages 6 to 11 months get an early dose—then follow it up with the standard two doses at the standard times, bringing the total to three doses.

The reason they would need three—and the reason experts typically recommend waiting until 12 months—is because the maternal antibodies infants carry can interfere with the vaccine response, preventing the immune system from mounting long-lasting protection. Still, the early dose provides boosted protection in that 6-to-11-month interval.

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In spite of sky-high costs and little in the way of profits, generative AI systems continue to proliferate. The Trump administration has called for a national AI Action Plan to guide America's burgeoning AI industry, and OpenAI was happy to use that as an opportunity to decry the negative effect of copyright enforcement on AI development. Google has also released its policy proposal, which agrees with OpenAI on copyright while also prompting the government to back the AI industry with funding and policy changes.

Like OpenAI, Google has been accused of piping copyrighted data into its models, but content owners are wising up. Google is fighting several lawsuits, and the New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI could set the precedent that AI developers are liable for using that training data without permission. Google wants to avoid that. It calls for "balanced copyright rules," but its preference doesn't seem all that balanced.

The dearth of available training data is a well-known problem in AI development. Google claims that access to public, often copyrighted, data is critical to improving generative AI systems. Google wants to be able to use publicly available data (free or copyrighted) for AI development without going through "unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations." The document claims any use of copyrighted material in AI will not significantly impact rightsholders.

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An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons.

The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over the unique design.

Known as Polygons, the three-in-one origami measuring spoons have a flat design that can be easily folded into common teaspoon and tablespoon measurements. "Regular spoons are so 3000 BC," a tagline on the project's website joked.

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