For nearly four years, NASA's Perseverance rover has journeyed across an unexplored patch of land on Mars—once home to an ancient river delta—and collected a slew of rock samples sealed inside cigar-sized titanium tubes.

These tubes might contain tantalizing clues about past life on Mars, but NASA's ever-changing plans to bring them back to Earth are still unclear.

On Tuesday, NASA officials presented two options for retrieving and returning the samples gathered by the Perseverance rover. One alternative involves a conventional architecture reminiscent of past NASA Mars missions, relying on the "sky crane" landing system demonstrated on the agency's two most recent Mars rovers. The other option would be to outsource the lander to the space industry.

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Nintendo still isn't ready to officially reveal any details about the Switch 2 (beyond a brief mention of backward compatibility in November). But that hasn't stopped gaming accessory maker Genki from giving us one of the best looks yet at the size and shape of Nintendo's upcoming hardware, as well as a video glimpse of how the console's new Joy-Cons will attach to the base tablet.

Genki is reportedly using a scale 3D model of the Switch 2 to show off its console cases behind closed doors at the Consumer Electronics Show. A video from French tech site Numerama shows that 3D model dwarfing an original Switch model in both length and width.

VIDEO — La Nintendo Switch 2 en avant-première au #CES2025.

L'accessoiriste Genki indique posséder la vraie console et expose une maquette 3D + des accessoires.

Les détails ici : https://t.co/5LDlnR2zC1 pic.twitter.com/IJ6taQggIQ

— Numerama (@Numerama) January 8, 2025

In a longer write-up of Genki's Switch 2 mock-up, Numerama reports that Genki says its 3D model was derived from an actual Switch 2 console, not merely "3D blueprints." Genki's model also includes a second USB-C port atop the system, Numerama reports, as well as a mysterious C button underneath the home button on the right Joy-Con.

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In just 20 minutes this morning, an automated license-plate-recognition (ALPR) system in Nashville, Tennessee, captured photographs and detailed information from nearly 1,000 vehicles as they passed by. Among them: eight black Jeep Wranglers, six Honda Accords, an ambulance, and a yellow Ford Fiesta with a vanity plate.

This trove of real-time vehicle data, collected by one of Motorola’s ALPR systems, is meant to be accessible by law enforcement. However, a flaw discovered by a security researcher has exposed live video feeds and detailed records of passing vehicles, revealing the staggering scale of surveillance enabled by this widespread technology.

More than 150 Motorola ALPR cameras have exposed their video feeds and leaking data in recent months, according to security researcher Matt Brown, who first publicized the issues in a series of YouTube videos after buying an ALPR camera on eBay and reverse engineering it.

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The European Commission (EC) is planning to "energetically" advance its probe into content moderation on X (formerly Twitter), potentially ordering changes at Elon Musk's social network in the coming months, Bloomberg reported.

Since 2023, the EC has been investigating X for possible violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA). Notably, it's the group's first formal probe under the DSA, which requires very large online platforms to meet strict content moderation and transparency standards to ensure user safety, reduce misinformation, prevent illegal/harmful activity, and facilitate "a fair and open online platform environment."

In a letter to European lawmakers viewed by Bloomberg, EC tech commissioner Henna Virkkunen and justice chief Michael McGrath apparently confirmed that the investigation into X will end “as early as legally possible."

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LAS VEGAS—If you've always dreamed of a world where your vehicle is a "partner" around whom you can "always be yourself," Honda has the vehicles for you—at least that's what the Japanese automaker is promising with its new "near production" Honda 0 prototypes that debuted at CES in Las Vegas on Tuesday.

In a somewhat dystopian but highly sentimental video shown at the presentation, a woman drives along a desolate road in search of a sunrise, describing her favorite colors and laughing along with the Saloon concept. A calm voiceover intones, "Saloon is my partner—always by my side, opening me up to new experiences and expanding my world," as the passenger is zipped along the flat purple and pink landscape, sharing moments of joy and tears. The car even "comforts" her when she is sad.

This is Honda's vision for what Katsushi Inoue, chief officer of electrification business development operations at Honda, called the "ultra personal optimization" of a "new level of intelligent car."

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The H5N1 bird flu situation in the US seems more fraught than ever this week as the virus continues to spread swiftly in dairy cattle and birds while sporadically jumping to humans.

On Monday, officials in Louisiana announced that the person who had developed the country's first severe H5N1 infection had died of the infection, marking the country's first H5N1 death. Meanwhile, with no signs of H5N1 slowing, seasonal flu is skyrocketing, raising anxiety that the different flu viruses could mingle, swap genetic elements, and generate a yet more dangerous virus strain.

But, despite the seemingly fever-pitch of viral activity and fears, a representative for the World Health Organization today noted that risk to the general population remains low—as long as one critical factor remains absent: person-to-person spread.

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For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media.

Relativity promised to disrupt launch by taking a somewhat niche technology in the space industry at the time, 3D printing, and using it as the foundation for manufacturing rockets. The pitch worked. Relativity's chief executive Tim Ellis liked to brag that his first investor call was to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who cut the company's first check. Cuban invested half a million dollars.

That was just the beginning of the torrent of fundraising by Ellis, who, by November 2023, turned the privately held Relativity into a $4.5 billion company following its latest, Series F funding. This was an impressive start for the company founded by Ellis and Jordan Noone, both engineers, in 2016.

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The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters."

One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants.

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Almost exactly a year ago, we were publicly yearning for the day when more portable gaming PC makers could ditch Windows in favor of SteamOS (without having to resort to touchy unofficial workarounds). Now, that day has finally come, with Lenovo announcing the upcoming Legion Go S as the first non-Valve handheld to come with an officially licensed copy of SteamOS preinstalled. And Valve promises that it will soon ship a beta version of SteamOS for users to "download and test themselves."

As Lenovo's slightly downsized followup to 2023's massive Legion Go, the Legion Go S won't feature the detachable controllers of its predecessor. But the new PC gaming handheld will come in two distinct versions, one with the now-standard Windows 11 installation and another edition that's the first to sport the (recently leaked) "Powered by SteamOS" branding.

The lack of a Windows license seems to contribute to a lower starting cost for the "Powered by SteamOS" edition of the Legion Go S, which will start at $500 when it's made available in May. Lenovo says the Windows edition of the device—available starting this month—will start at $730, with "additional configurations" available in May starting as low as $600.

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When suspicion began to mount that the young prosecutor, Yujin Choi, might have faked her sexual misconduct allegations against a Denver District Attorney's Office colleague, investigators asked to examine Choi's laptop and cell phone. But just before Choi was to have turned them in, her devices suffered a series of unlikely accidents.

First, she said, she managed to drop her phone into a filled bathtub. When she pulled the phone out of the water and found it was not working, Choi went to her laptop in order to make a video call. When the call ended, Choi then knocked over a bottle of water—whoops!—directly onto the computer, which was also taken out of commission. So, when the day came to hand in her devices, neither was working.

"I’m devastated that I may have tanked the investigation on my own, but that I also lost all of my personal data that were very important to me," Choi wrote to investigators. She had even, she added, gone to the local Apple Store in an attempt to retrieve the data on the devices. No luck.

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Nvidia has good news and bad news for people building or buying gaming PCs.

The good news is that three of its four new RTX 50-series GPUs are the same price or slightly cheaper than the RTX 40-series GPUs they're replacing. The RTX 5080 is $999, the same price as the RTX 4080 Super; the 5070 Ti and 5070 are launching for $749 and $549, each $50 less than the 4070 Ti Super and 4070 Super.

The bad news for people looking for the absolute fastest card they can get is that the company is charging $1,999 for its flagship RTX 5090 GPU, significantly more than the $1,599 MSRP of the RTX 4090. If you want Nvidia's biggest and best, it will cost at least as much as four high-end game consoles or a pair of decently specced midrange gaming PCs.

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Most scientific literature is published in for-profit journals that rely on subscriptions and paywalls to turn a profit. But that trend has been shifting as various governments and funding agencies are requiring that the science they fund be published in open-access journals. The transition is happening gradually, though, and a lot of the historical literature remains locked behind paywalls.

These paywalls can pose a problem for researchers who aren't at well-funded universities, including many in the Global South, which may not be able to access the research they need to understand in order to pursue their own studies. One solution has been Sci-Hub, a site where people can upload PDFs of published papers so they can be shared with anyone who can access the site. Despite losses in publishing industry lawsuits and attempts to block access, Sci-Hub continues to serve up research papers that would otherwise be protected by paywalls.

But what it's serving up may not always be the latest and greatest. Generally, when a paper is retracted for being invalid, publishers issue an updated version of its PDF with clear indications that the research it contains should no longer be considered valid. Unfortunately, it appears that once Sci-Hub has a copy of a paper, it doesn't necessarily have the ability to ensure it's kept up to date. Based on a scan of its content done by researchers from India, about 85 percent of the invalid papers they checked had no indication that the paper had been retracted.

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The piano-mover puzzle involves trying to transport an oddly shaped load across a constricted environment with various obstructions. It's one of several variations on classic computational motion-planning problems, a key element in numerous robotics applications. But what would happen if you pitted human beings against ants in a competition to solve the piano-mover puzzle?

According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, humans have superior cognitive abilities and, hence, would be expected to outperform the ants. However, depriving people of verbal or nonverbal communication can level the playing field, with ants performing better in some trials. And while ants improved their cognitive performance when acting collectively as a group, the same did not hold true for humans.

Co-author Ofer Feinerman of the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues saw an opportunity to use the piano-mover puzzle to shed light on group decision-making, as well as the question of whether it is better to cooperate as a group or maintain individuality. "It allows us to compare problem-solving skills and performances across group sizes and down to a single individual and also enables a comparison of collective problem-solving across species," the authors wrote.

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Lenovo announced a laptop today that experiments with a new way to offer laptop users more screen space than the typical clamshell design. The Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable has a screen that can roll up vertically to expand from 14 inches diagonally to 16.7 inches, presenting an alternative to prior foldable-screen and dual-screen laptops.

The laptop, which Lenovo says is coming out in June, builds on a concept that Lenovo demoed in February 2023. That prototype had a Sharp-made panel that initially measured 12.7 inches but could unroll to present a total screen size of 15.3 inches. Lenovo's final product is working with a bigger display from Samsung Display, The Verge reported. Resolution-wise you're going from 2,000×1,600 pixels (about 183 pixels per inch) to 2,000×2,350 (184.8 ppi), the publication said.

Users make the screen expand by pressing a dedicated button on the keyboard or by making a hand gesture at the PC's webcam. Expansion entails about 10 seconds of loud whirring from the laptop’s motors. Lenovo executives told The Verge that the laptop was rated for at least 20,000 rolls up and down and 30,000 hinge openings and closings.

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Meta announced today that it's ending the third-party fact-checking program it introduced in 2016, and will rely instead on a Community Notes approach similar to what's used on Elon Musk's X platform.

The end of third-party fact-checking and related changes to Meta policies could help the company make friends in the Trump administration and in governments of conservative-leaning states that have tried to impose legal limits on content moderation. The operator of Facebook and Instagram announced the changes in a blog post and a video message recorded by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

"Governments and legacy media have pushed to censor more and more. A lot of this is clearly political," Zuckerberg said. He said the recent elections "feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech."

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Here at Ars, we're judicious about which of the many, many Switch 2 rumors we decide to highlight on this page. For every report on hardware power or magnetic Joy-Cons that we share, there are probably five others we see and decide are too lightly sourced, too unlikely, or just too plain obscure to spread here.

But when we started hearing reports that the Switch 2's Joy-Cons could be cradled on their sides and manipulated like a full-fledged gaming mouse, we knew the concept was one you'd want to hear about.

Rumor: More images of Switch 2 Joy-Cons have immerged from China.

Source: https://t.co/MplOUwKhRi pic.twitter.com/5ZdFmVlggl

— Stealth (@Stealth40k) January 5, 2025

The rumors of mouse-like functionality on the Switch 2's included controllers got supercharged over the weekend when a Reddit poster shared detailed photos of purported Switch 2 Joy-Cons, sourced from an unnamed Chinese social media user. In between the longer shoulder buttons along the Joy-Con's inner edge (SL and SR) and a new central connector port, eagle-eyed viewers noticed what looks suspiciously like the optical sensor that sits on the bottom of practically every mouse these days.

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The Pixel 4a, a well-regarded release in Google's line of budget-minded phones with nice cameras and decent stock software, was not supposed to get any more updates. This week, it will receive a rather uncommon one—one that intends to lower its reported battery life.

The Pixel 4a, released in the summer of 2020, was discontinued at the end of 2022. It received its last official software update in the summer of 2023, followed by a surprise security update in November 2023. Throughout 2024, there were no updates. This week, owners of the 4a (and likely many former owners) are getting a new update, along with an email titled "Changes coming to your Pixel 4a."

The email addresses "an upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a that will affect the overall performance and stability of its battery." The automatic software update to Android 13 "introduces new battery management features to improve the stability of your device," which will "reduce your battery's runtime and charging performance."

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On Monday, Nvidia announced Project DIGITS, a small desktop computer aimed at researchers, data scientists, and students who want to experiment with AI models—such as chatbots like ChatGPT and image generators—at home. The $3,000 device, which contains Nvidia's new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, debuted at CES 2025 in Las Vegas. It will launch in May and can operate as a standalone PC or connect to a Windows or Mac machine.

At CES on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described the new system as "a cloud computing platform that sits on your desk." The company also designed Project DIGITS as a bridge between desktop development and cloud deployment. Developers can create and test AI applications locally on Project DIGITS, then move them to cloud services or data centers that use similar Nvidia hardware.

The GB10 chip inside the Project DIGITS computer combines an Nvidia Blackwell GPU with a 20-core Grace CPU based on Arm architecture. Nvidia developed the chip in partnership with MediaTek, and it connects to 128GB of memory and up to 4TB of storage inside the Project DIGITS enclosure.

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HBO released a new one-minute teaser for the second season of its post-apocalyptic drama The Last of Us during CES last night, along with a release date of April 2025. Based on developer Naughty Dog's hugely popular video game franchise, S2 is set five years after the events of the first season and finds the bond beginning to fray between plucky survivors Joel (Pedro Pascal) and Ellie (Bella Ramsey) while introducing several new characters.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

The series takes place in the 20-year aftermath of a deadly outbreak of mutant fungus (Cordyceps) that turns humans into monstrous zombie-like creatures (the Infected, or Clickers). The world has become a series of separate totalitarian quarantine zones and independent settlements, with a thriving black market and a rebel militia known as the Fireflies making life complicated for the survivors. Joel is a hardened smuggler tasked with escorting the teenage Ellie across the devastated US, battling hostile forces and hordes of zombies, to a Fireflies unit outside the quarantine zone. Ellie is special: She is immune to the deadly fungus, and the hope is that her immunity holds the key to beating the disease.

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Tesla is the target of yet another federal safety probe, the fourth currently open by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation. Today's trouble concerns the automaker's "Smart Summon" and "Actually Smart Summon" features, which allow Tesla drivers to remotely control their vehicles via a smartphone app.

At least in theory, that is. In practice, NHTSA says it's aware of multiple crash allegations "where the user had too little reaction time to avoid a crash, either with the available line of sight or releasing the phone app button, which stops the vehicle’s movement."

Worse yet, Tesla has failed to report any of these incidents to the safety regulator, which has a standing general order that requires any automaker or operator of autonomous or partially automated vehicles to report crashes involving such systems that occur on publicly accessible roads.

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