When Maureen Long talks to the public about her work, she likes to ask her audience to close their eyes and think of a landscape with incredible geology. She hears a lot of the same suggestions: Iceland, the Grand Canyon, the Himalayas. “Nobody ever says Connecticut,” says Long, a geologist at Yale University in New Haven in that state.

And yet Connecticut—along with much of the rest of eastern North America—holds important clues about Earth’s history. This region, which geologists call the eastern North American margin, essentially spans the US eastern seaboard and a little farther north into Atlantic Canada. It was created over hundreds of millions of years as slivers of Earth’s crust collided and merged. Mountains rose, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic Ocean was born.

Much of this geological history has become apparent only in the past decade or so, after scientists blanketed the United States with seismometers and other instruments to illuminate geological structures hidden deep in Earth’s crust. The resulting findings include many surprises—from why there are volcanoes in Virginia to how the crust beneath New England is weirdly crumpled.

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It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON.

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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Road trips with just two people always have their awkward silences. In Dustland Delivery, my character, a sharpshooter, has tried to break the ice with the blacksmith he hired a few towns back, with only intermittent success.

Remember that bodyguard, the one I unsuccessfully tried to flirt with at that bar? The blacksmith was uninterested. What about that wily junk dealer, or the creepy cemetery? Silence. She only wanted to discuss "Abandoned train" and "Abandoned factory," even though, in this post-apocalypse, abandonment was not that rare. But I made a note to look out for any rusted remains; stress and mood are far trickier to fix than hunger and thirst.

Dustland Delivery, available through Steam for Windows (and Proton/Steam Deck), puts you in the role typically taken up by NPCs in other post-apocalyptic RPGs. You're a trader, buying cheap goods in one place to sell at a profit elsewhere, and working the costs of fuel, maintenance, and raider attacks into your margins. You're in charge of everything on your trip: how fast you drive, when to rest and set up camp, whether to approach that caravan of pickups or give them a wide berth.

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The start-up Colossal Biosciences aims to use gene-editing technology to bring back the woolly mammoth and other extinct species. Recently, the company achieved major milestones: last year, they generated stem cells for the Asian elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative, and this month they published photos of genetically modified mice with long, mammoth-like coats. According to the company’s founders, including Harvard and MIT professor George Church, these advances take Colossal a big step closer to their goal of using mammoths to combat climate change by restoring Arctic grassland ecosystems. Church also claims that Colossal’s woolly mammoth program will help protect endangered species like the Asian elephant, saying “we’re injecting money into conservation efforts.”

In other words, the scientific advances Colossal makes in their lab will result in positive changes from the tropics to the Arctic, from the soil to the atmosphere.

Colossal’s Jurassic Park-like ambitions have captured the imagination of the public and investors, bringing its latest valuation to $10 billion. And the company’s research does seem to be resulting in some technical advances. But I’d argue that the broader effort to de-extinct the mammoth is—as far as conservation efforts go—incredibly misguided. Ultimately, Colossal’s efforts won’t end up being about helping wild elephants or saving the climate. They’ll be about creating creatures for human spectacle, with insufficient attention to the costs and opportunity costs to human and animal life.

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The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon's most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government's heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office's large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military's space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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AI image generator Midjourney released its first new model in quite some time today; dubbed V7, it's a ground-up rework that is available in alpha to users now.

There are two areas of improvement in V7: the first is better images, and the second is new tools and workflows.

Starting with the image improvements, V7 promises much higher coherence and consistency for hands, fingers, body parts, and "objects of all kinds." It also offers much more detailed and realistic textures and materials, like skin wrinkles or the subtleties of a ceramic pot.

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After The New York Times sued OpenAI in December 2023—alleging that ChatGPT outputs violate copyrights by regurgitating news articles—the ChatGPT maker tried and failed to argue that the claims were time-barred.

According to OpenAI, the NYT should have known that ChatGPT was being trained on its articles and raised its lawsuit in 2020, partly because of the newspaper's own reporting. To support this, OpenAI pointed to a single November 2020 article, where the NYT reported that OpenAI was analyzing a trillion words on the Internet. But on Friday, US district judge Sidney Stein disagreed, denying OpenAI's motion to dismiss the NYT's copyright claims partly based on one NYT journalist's reporting.

In his opinion, Stein confirmed that it's OpenAI's burden to prove that the NYT knew that ChatGPT would potentially violate its copyrights two years prior to its release in November 2022. And so far, OpenAI has not met that burden.

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This morning's announcement that Nintendo is delaying US preorders for the Switch 2 immediately increased the salience of President Trump's proposed wide-reaching import tariffs for millions of American Nintendo fans. Additionally, the Entertainment Software Association—a lobbying group that represents the game industry's interests in Washington—is warning that the effects of Trump's tariffs on the gaming world won't stop with Nintendo.

"There are so many devices we play video games on," ESA senior vice president Aubrey Quinn said in an interview with IGN just as Nintendo's preorder delay news broke. "There are other consoles... VR headsets, our smartphones, people who love PC games; if we think it's just the Switch, then we aren't taking it seriously.

"This is company-agnostic, this is an entire industry," she continued. "There's going to be an impact on the entire industry."

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A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned.

The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and domain names that these botnets use to connect to the Internet. In some cases, IPs and domain names change every day or two; in other cases, they change almost hourly. The constant flux complicates the task of isolating the true origin of the infrastructure. It also provides redundancy. By the time defenders block one address or domain, new ones have already been assigned.

A significant threat

“This technique poses a significant threat to national security, enabling malicious cyber actors to consistently evade detection,” the NSA, FBI, and their counterparts from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand warned Thursday. “Malicious cyber actors, including cybercriminals and nation-state actors, use fast flux to obfuscate the locations of malicious servers by rapidly changing Domain Name System (DNS) records. Additionally, they can create resilient, highly available command and control (C2) infrastructure, concealing their subsequent malicious operations.”

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On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that would transform personal computing over the next five decades.

I'm not here to do a history of Microsoft, because Wikipedia already exists and because the company has already put together a gauzy 50th-anniversary retrospective site with some retro-themed wallpapers. But the anniversary did make me try to remember which Microsoft product I consciously used for the first time, the one that made me aware of the company and the work it was doing.

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Google was caught flat-footed by the sudden skyrocketing interest in generative AI despite its role in developing the underlying technology. This prompted the company to refocus its considerable resources on catching up to OpenAI. Since then, we've seen the detail-flubbing Bard and numerous versions of the multimodal Gemini models. While Gemini has struggled to make progress in benchmarks and user experience, that could be changing with the new 2.5 Pro (Experimental) release. With big gains in benchmarks and vibes, this might be the first Google model that can make a dent in ChatGPT's dominance.

We recently spoke to Google's Tulsee Doshi, director of product management for Gemini, to talk about the process of releasing Gemini 2.5, as well as where Google's AI models are going in the future.

Welcome to the vibes era

Google may have had a slow start in building generative AI products, but the Gemini team has picked up the pace in recent months. The company released Gemini 2.0 in December, showing a modest improvement over the 1.5 branch. It only took three months to reach 2.5, meaning Gemini 2.0 Pro wasn't even out of the experimental stage yet. To hear Doshi tell it, this was the result of Google's long-term investments in Gemini.

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European Union regulators are preparing major penalties against X, including a fine that could exceed $1 billion, according to a New York Times report yesterday.

The European Commission determined last year that Elon Musk's social network violated the Digital Services Act. Regulators are now in the process of determining what punishment to impose.

"The penalties are set to include a fine and demands for product changes," the NYT report said, attributing the information to "four people with knowledge of the plans." The penalty is expected to be issued this summer and would be the first one under the new EU law.

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When Francesca Mani was 14 years old, boys at her New Jersey high school used nudify apps to target her and other girls. At the time, adults did not seem to take the harassment seriously, telling her to move on after she demanded more severe consequences than just a single boy's one or two-day suspension.

Mani refused to take adults' advice, going over their heads to lawmakers who were more sensitive to her demands. And now, she's won her fight to criminalize deepfakes. On Wednesday, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed a law that he said would help victims "take a stand against deceptive and dangerous deepfakes" by making it a crime to create or share fake AI nudes of minors or non-consenting adults—as well as deepfakes seeking to meddle with elections or damage any individuals' or corporations' reputations.

Under the law, victims targeted by nudify apps like Mani can sue bad actors, collecting up to $1,000 per harmful image created either knowingly or recklessly. New Jersey hopes these "more severe consequences" will deter kids and adults from creating harmful images, as well as emphasize to schools—whose lax response to fake nudes has been heavily criticized—that AI-generated nude images depicting minors are illegal and must be taken seriously and reported to police. It imposes a maximum fine of $30,000 on anyone creating or sharing deepfakes for malicious purposes, as well as possible punitive damages if a victim can prove that images were created in willful defiance of the law.

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Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

"Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday, "but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US."

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

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Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Camera-shy builders

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

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The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny spectacle of the rainforest.

Jay Falk, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, expected to find something like that when he sought this species out in Panama. What he didn’t expect was a caterpillar in the nest of one of these birds. At least it looked like a caterpillar—it was actually a hatchling with some highly unusual camouflage.

The chick was covered in long, fine feathers similar to the urticating hairs that some caterpillars are covered in. These often toxic barbed hairs deter predators, who can suffer anything from inflammation to nausea and even death if they attack. Falk realized he was witnessing mimicry only seen in one other bird species and never before in hummingbirds. It seemed that the nestlings of this species had evolved a defense: convincing predators they were poisonous.

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Will this Chevrolet Silverado EV be the biggest electric vehicle we test this year? Almost certainly. Fractionally narrower and less tall than a Hummer EV pickup at more than 18 feet (just under 6 m) long and with a curb weight of 8,532 lbs (3,870 kg), the Silverado EV is what happens when Chevy's electric vehicle engineers get tasked with making their rivals over at Ford feel like they didn't try hard enough with the electric F-150.

Now that production has been ongoing for a while, Chevy is filling out the lower trim levels. For commercial customers, there's a Work Truck, but for normies, the entry point is now the LT trim, at a tax credit-friendly—if still wallet-munching—$75,195 (for as long as the tax credit still lasts and until the effect of pointless and damaging trade tariffs make themselves known, of course).

The 645 hp (481 kW), 756 lb-ft (1,037 Nm) Silverado EV LT comes with the smaller of the two battery packs offered to non-commercial customers. That adjective is doing a lot of work there; a useable 170 kWh is indeed smaller than the 200 kWh you can find in the more expensive RST Max Range, but it's also more than double the capacity of something like a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The range estimate is a commensurate 408 miles (657 km), or "just" 390 miles (628 km) if, as in our test pickup, the premium package has been fitted.

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Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump's recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.

"Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. "Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged."

Nintendo announced launch details for the Switch 2 on Wednesday morning, just hours before Trump's afternoon "Liberation Day" press conference announcing the biggest increase in import duties in modern US history. Those taxes on practically all goods imported into the United States are set to officially go into effect on April 9, the same day Nintendo had planned to roll out Switch 2 preorders for qualified customers.

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Outside of several mentions in the Rocket Report newsletter dating back to 2018, Ars Technica has not devoted too much attention to covering a novel California space company named SpinLaunch.

That's because the premise is so outlandish as to almost not feel real. The company aims to build a kinetic launch system that spins a rocket around at speeds up to 4,700 mph (7,500 km/h) before sending it upward toward space. Then, at an altitude of 40 miles (60 km) or so, the rocket would ignite its engines to achieve orbital velocity. Essentially, SpinLaunch wants to yeet things into space.

But the company was no joke. After being founded in 2014, it raised more than $150 million over the next decade. It built a prototype accelerator in New Mexico and performed a series of flight tests. The flights reached altitudes of "tens of thousands" of feet, according to the company, and were often accompanied by slickly produced videos.

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For two decades, farmer John Burk has been working to improve the soil on his farm in Michigan, taking a few extra steps to make it more resilient and productive. His efforts have paid off.

“When we have the dry, hot summers or lack of rainfall, our crops can sustain the dry spells better. We don’t have huge yield decreases,” Burk said. “And when it rains and we have the freak storms, like it seems to do so much now, we don’t have the ponding and all the runoff.”

An added bonus: He needs less fertilizer, a major operating expense.

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