CHARLOTTE, NC—It's amazing how much more raucous you can make a car feel simply by deleting every semblance of creature comfort. That's the basic idea of the Mustang Dark Horse R, a track-only flavor of the Mustang for the dedicated Mustang Challenge series, which will run in support of many IMSA races this year, starting with the Twelve Hours of Sebring in March. Despite running the same 500 hp (373 kW) 5.0 L Coyote engine as the road-going Dark Horse, slotted into the same chassis and bodywork, it's a far more engaging drive—and a wildly good time.

It all looks pretty tame from the outside, as it sports the familiar Mustang shape that has hardly changed over the last few generations. Even the wing is slender by race car standards, only subtly different from the one on the road-going Dark Horse.

But peek inside and you start to see the scope of the modifications. The sound-deadening material has been evicted, with leather and vinyl trimming replaced by a roll cage that spans the now-vacant space. A bright red fire extinguisher now sits where the rear seat once was.

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If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this "curse to disable Google AI" trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars' own testing. For instance, when searching for "how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results," a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like "dumb" or "lousy" did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

There's long been evidence that Google's Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

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If you search Google for a way to turn off the company's AI-powered search results, you may well get an AI Overview telling you that AI Overviews can't be directly disabled in Google Search. But if you instead ask Google how to turn off "fucking Google AI results," you'll get a standard set of useful web suggestions without any AI Overview at the top.

The existence of this "curse to disable Google AI" trick has been making the rounds on social media in recent days, and it holds up in Ars' own testing. For instance, when searching for "how do you turn off [adjective] Google AI results," a variety of curse word adjectives reliably disabled the AI Overviews, while adjectives like "dumb" or "lousy" did not. Inserting curse words randomly at any point in the search query seems to have a similar effect.

There's long been evidence that Google's Gemini AI system tries to avoid swearing if at all possible, which might help explain why AI Overviews balk at queries that contain curses. Users should also keep in mind, though, that the actual web link results to a query can change significantly when curse words are inserted, especially if SafeSearch is turned off.

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DAYTONA BEACH—Last week, ahead of the annual Rolex 24 at Daytona and the start of the North American road racing season, IMSA (the sport's organizers) held a tech symposium across the road from the vast speedway at Embry-Riddle University. Last year, panelists, including Crowdstrike's CSO, explained the draw of racing to their employers; this time, organizations represented included NASA, Michelin, AMD, and Microsoft. And while they were all there to talk about racing, it seems everyone was also there to talk about simulation and AI.

I've long maintained that endurance racing, where grids of prototypes and road car-based racers compete over long durations—24 hours, for example—is the most relevant form of motorsport, the one that makes road cars better. Formula 1 has budgets and an audience to dwarf all others, and there's no doubt about the level of talent and commitment required to triumph in that arena. The Indy 500 might have more history. And rallying looks like the hardest challenge for both humans and machines.

But your car owes its disc brakes to endurance racing, plus its dual-clutch transmission, if it's one of the increasing number of cars fitted with such. But let's not overblow it. Over the years, budgets have had to be reined in for the health of the sport. That—plus a desire for parity among the teams so that no one clever idea runs away with the series—means there are plenty of spec or controlled components on a current endurance racer. Direct technology transfer, then, happens less and less often—at least in terms of new mechanical bits or bobs you might find inside your next car.

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Over the past decade, furtive commercial entities around the world have industrialized the production, sale, and dissemination of bogus scholarly research. These paper mills are profiting by undermining the literature that everyone from doctors to engineers rely on to make decisions about human lives.

It is exceedingly difficult to get a handle on exactly how big the problem is. About 55,000 scholarly papers have been retracted to date, for a variety of reasons, but scientists and companies who screen the scientific literature for telltale signs of fraud estimate that there are many more fake papers circulating—possibly as many as several hundred thousand. This fake research can confound legitimate researchers who must wade through dense equations, evidence, images, and methodologies, only to find that they were made up.

Even when bogus papers are spotted—usually by amateur sleuths on their own time—academic journals are often slow to retract the papers, allowing the articles to taint what many consider sacrosanct: the vast global library of scholarly work that introduces new ideas, reviews, and other research and discusses findings.

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In hearings Wednesday and Thursday, senators questioned President Trump's nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., over his fitness to be the country's top health official and control the mammoth $1.7 trillion agency.

Kennedy would come to the role not with a background in medicine, public health, or science, but as a former environmental lawyer who has become one of the most prominent and influential anti-vaccine advocates in the country. For decades, Kennedy has spread misinformation about life-saving vaccines, sowed doubt about their safety, and peddled various conspiracy theories.

That includes his unwavering false claim—despite decades of research to the contrary and countless debunkings—that vaccines are linked to autism (they are not). Kennedy has also made the bizarre false claim that Lyme disease, a bacterial infection spread by tick bites, is "highly likely" to be a military bioweapon (it is not). When asked about this by Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) in the Senate Finance Committee hearing Wednesday, Kennedy admitted "I probably did say that." In the hearing Thursday, held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), Kennedy did not deny falsely claiming that AIDS is a different disease in Africa than it is in the US.

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It's a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. January's list includes papers on using lasers to reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos; the physics of wobbly spears and darts; how a black hole changes over time; and quantum "cat states" for error correction in quantum computers, among other fascinating research.

Tracking changes in a black hole over time

Left: EHT images of M87* from the 2018 and 2017 observation campaigns. Middle: Example images from a general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) simulation at two different times. Right: Same simulation snapshots, blurred to match the EHT's observational resolution. Credit: EHT collaboration

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope announced the first direct image ever taken of a black hole at the center of an elliptical galaxy, Messier 87 (M87), located in the constellation of Virgo some 55 million light-years away. Astronomers have now combined earlier observational data to learn more about the turbulent dynamics of plasma near M87*'s event horizon over time, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Co-author Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany likened the new analysis to comparing two photographs of Mount Everest, one year apart. While the mountain's basic structure is unlikely to change much in that time, one could observe changes in clouds near the peak and deduce from that properties like wind direction. For instance, in the case of M87*, the new analysis confirmed the presence of a luminous ring that is brightest at the bottom, which in turn confirmed that the rotational axis points away from Earth. "More of these observations will be made in the coming years and with increasing precision, with the ultimate goal of producing a movie of what happens near M87*," said Rezolla.

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© Michael Pittman and Thomas G Kaye

Welcome to Edition 7.29 of the Rocket Report! It may be difficult to believe, but we are already one full month into the new year. It will be hard to top this month in launch, however, given the historic debut of New Glenn, and fiery end of the seventh Starship flight test. And in truth, February does look a bit sleepier in terms of launch.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

UK government injects $25 million into Orbex. As some European launch companies have struggled to raise funding, the United Kingdom government stepped up to make a significant investment in the Scotland-based launch firm Orbex, The Financial Times reports. As part of the company's latest fundraising round, valued at $50 million (GBP 40 million), the UK government will become a shareholder in Orbex. The company is working to develop both a small- and medium-lift rocket. Phil Chambers, Orbex's chief executive, said the UK support would be "a strong signal to other private investors, and to the European Space Agency and the EU, that we’re serious about being a part of the future of European launch."

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The first season of Severance walked the line between science-fiction thriller and Office Space-like satire, using a clever conceit (characters can’t remember what happens at work while at home, and vice versa) to open up new storytelling possibilities.

It hinted at additional depths, but it’s really season 2’s expanded worldbuilding that begins to uncover additional themes and ideas.

After watching the first six episodes of season two and speaking with the series’ showrunner and lead writer, Dan Erickson, as well as a couple of members of the cast (Adam Scott and Patricia Arquette), I see a show that’s about more than critiquing corporate life. It’s about all sorts of social mechanisms of control. It’s also a show with a tremendous sense of style and deep influences in science fiction.

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Ford's no stranger to the NASCAR life. Ford driver Joey Logano was the 2024 Cup Series Champion in one of the company's Mustang-bodied machines. He's currently leading the 2025 series, too. However, the Blue Oval and its Ford Performance division are going into uncharted territory with its new prototype, an all-electric Mach-E built atop elements of NASCAR's current Next Gen chassis.

The machine uses three motors to make a total of 1,341 hp (1,000 kW). Yes, three motors, one for each rear wheel plus the odd one out up front, giving the thing all-wheel drive. That's a seeming necessity, given the car has two times the power that any NASCAR racer is allowed to deploy on the non-restrictor plate races.

But that extra driven axle isn't just for acceleration. "If you're rear-wheel drive only, you're only getting rear regen," Mark Rushbrook said. He's the global director of Ford Performance. Since braking forces are higher at the front axle, an extra motor there means more regen to recharge the battery.

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Apple fell slightly short of investor expectations when it reported its first-quarter earnings today. While sales were up 4 percent overall, the iPhone showed signs of weakness, and sales in the Chinese market slipped by just over 11 percent.

CEO Tim Cook told CNBC that the iPhone performed better in countries where Apple Intelligence was available, like the US—seemingly suggesting that the slip was partially because Chinese consumers do not see enough reason to buy new phones without Apple Intelligence. (He also said, "Half of the decline is due to a change in channel inventory.") iPhone sales also slipped in China during this same quarter last year; this was the first full quarter during which the iPhone 16 was available.

In any case, Cook said the company plans to roll out Apple Intelligence in additional languages, including Mandarin, this spring.

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If you've been paying careful attention to YouTube recently, you may have noticed the rising trend of so-called "faceless YouTube channels" that never feature a visible human talking in the video frame. While some of these channels are simply authored by camera-shy humans, many more are fully automated through AI-powered tools to craft everything from the scripts and voiceovers to the imagery and music. Unsurprisingly, this is often sold as a way to make a quick buck off the YouTube algorithm with minimal human effort.

It's not hard to find YouTubers complaining about a flood of these faceless channels stealing their embedded transcript files and running them through AI summarizers to generate their own instant knock-offs. But one YouTuber is trying to fight back, seeding her transcripts with junk data that is invisible to humans but poisonous to any AI that dares to try to work from a poached transcript file.

The power of the .ass

YouTuber F4mi, who creates some excellent deep dives on obscure technology, recently detailed her efforts "to poison any AI summarizers that were trying to steal my content to make slop." The key to F4mi's method is the .ass subtitle format, created decades ago as part of fansubbing software Advanced SubStation Alpha. Unlike simpler and more popular subtitle formats, .ass supports fancy features like fonts, colors, positioning, bold, italic, underline, and more.

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Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS in a move that Democrats described as an attempt to intimidate the media.

"I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation regarding the airing of NPR and PBS programming across your broadcast member stations," Carr wrote in a letter yesterday to the leaders of NPR and PBS.

Carr alleged that NPR and PBS are violating a federal law prohibiting noncommercial educational broadcast stations from running commercial advertisements. "I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials," Carr wrote. "In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements."

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The US Copyright Office issued AI guidance this week that declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works.

"Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law, without the need for legislative change," the Copyright Office said.

More than 10,000 commenters weighed in on the guidance, with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.

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The Video Game History Foundation has officially opened up digital access to a large portion of its massive archives today, offering fans and researchers unprecedented access to information and ephemera surrounding the past 50 years of the game industry.

Today's launch of the VGHF Library comprises more than 30,000 indexed and curated files, including high-quality artwork, promotional material, and searchable full-text archives over 1,500 video game magazine issues. This initial dump of digital materials also contains never-before-seen game development and production archival material stored by the VGHF, such as over 100 hours of raw production files from the creation of the Myst series or Sonic the Hedgehog concept art and design files contributed by artist Tom Payne.

A labor of love

In a blog post and accompanying launch video, VGHF head librarian Phil Salvador explains how today's launch is the culmination of a dream the organization has had since its launch in 2017. But it's also just the start of an ongoing process to digitize the VGHF's mountains of unprocessed physical material into a cataloged digital form, so people can access it "without having to fly to California."

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A cloud security firm found a publicly accessible, fully controllable database belonging to DeepSeek, the Chinese firm that has recently shaken up the AI world, "within minutes" of examining DeepSeek's security, according to a blog post by Wiz.

An analytical ClickHouse database tied to DeepSeek, "completely open and unauthenticated," contained more than 1 million instances of "chat history, backend data, and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details," according to Wiz. An open web interface also allowed for full database control and privilege escalation, with internal API endpoints and keys available through the interface and common URL parameters.

"While much of the attention around AI security is focused on futuristic threats, the real dangers often come from basic risks—like accidental external exposure of databases," writes Gal Nagli at Wiz's blog. "As organizations rush to adopt AI tools and services from a growing number of startups and providers, it’s essential to remember that by doing so, we’re entrusting these companies with sensitive data. The rapid pace of adoption often leads to overlooking security, but protecting customer data must remain the top priority."

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On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is deepening its ties with the US government through a partnership with the National Laboratories and expects to use AI to "supercharge" research across a wide range of fields to better serve the public.

"This is the beginning of a new era, where AI will advance science, strengthen national security, and support US government initiatives," OpenAI said.

The deal ensures that "approximately 15,000 scientists working across a wide range of disciplines to advance our understanding of nature and the universe" will have access to OpenAI's latest reasoning models, the announcement said.

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ChatGPT developer OpenAI and other players in the generative AI business were caught unawares this week by a Chinese company named DeepSeek, whose open source R1 simulated reasoning model provides results similar to OpenAI's best paid models (with some notable exceptions) despite being created using just a fraction of the computing power.

Since ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other generative AI models first became publicly available in late 2022 and 2023, the US AI industry has been undergirded by the assumption that you'd need ever-greater amounts of training data and compute power to continue improving their models and get—eventually, maybe—to a functioning version of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Those assumptions were reflected in everything from Nvidia's stock price to energy investments and data center plans. Whether DeepSeek fundamentally upends those plans remains to be seen. But at a bare minimum, it has shaken investors who have poured money into OpenAI, a company that reportedly believes it won't turn a profit until the end of the decade.

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Fresh on the heels of a controversy in which ChatGPT-maker OpenAI accused the Chinese company behind DeepSeek R1 of using its AI model outputs against its terms of service, OpenAI's largest investor, Microsoft, announced on Wednesday that it will now host DeepSeek R1 on its Azure cloud service.

DeepSeek R1 has been the talk of the AI world for the past week because it is a freely available simulated reasoning model that reportedly matches OpenAI's o1 in performance—while allegedly being trained for a fraction of the cost.

Azure allows software developers to rent computing muscle from machines hosted in Microsoft-owned data centers, as well as rent access to software that runs on them.

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Microsoft switched the Surface Pro tablet and both sizes of Surface Laptop from Intel and AMD's processors to Qualcomm's Arm-based processors last summer, part of a renewed hardware and software push to make the Arm version of Windows a thing. That ended a few years of a bifurcated approach, where the Intel and AMD versions of Surface PCs were the "main" versions and the Arm variants felt more like proof-of-concept side projects.

But if you work in a large organization or you're an IT administrator, the bifurcated approach continues. Microsoft announced some business-only versions of the Surface Pro tablet and the Surface Laptop last year that continued to use Intel processors, and today it's announcing two more, this time using Intel's Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra CPUs.

The refresh includes a new Surface Pro tablet and both 13- and 15-inch versions of the Surface Laptop, updated with most of the same design tweaks that the Qualcomm versions of the devices got last year (for example, a slightly larger 13.8-inch screen on the smaller version of the Surface Laptop, up from 13.5 inches). Generally, they have similar dimensions, weights, and configuration options as their Arm counterparts, including an OLED display option for the Surface Pro.

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