A surprise find in my inbox this morning: news from Volkswagen about a pair of new electric vehicles it has in the works. Even better, they're both small and affordable, bucking the supersized, overpriced trend of the past few years. But before we get too excited, there's currently no guarantee either will go on sale in North America.

Next year sees the European debut of the ID. 2all, a small electric hatchback that VW wants to sell for less than 25,000 euros ($26,671). But the ID. 2all isn't really news: VW showed off the concept, as well as a GTI version, back in September 2023.

What is new is the ID. EVERY1, an all-electric entry-level car that, if the concept is anything to go by, is high on style and charm. It does not have a retro shape like a Mini or Fiat 500—VW could easily have succumbed to a retread of the Giugiaro-styled Golf from 1976 but opted for something new instead. The design language involves three pillars: stability, likability, and surprise elements, or "secret sauce," according to VW's description.

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Analysts are warning that the Trump administration's recently implemented tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China could lead to price increases and supply issues for video game software and hardware in the United States.

The effects could be particularly pronounced for physical game discs, which are now overwhelmingly produced in Mexico. A 25 percent tax on discs shipped in from Mexico could lead to "a sharp downtick in the number of disc-based games that get released physically in the US," Circana analyst Mat Piscatella said on social media.

"It wouldn't surprise me to see physical games that would be subject to tariffs simply not get made, with pubs moving to an all digital strategy," Piscatella added recently. That would accelerate a trend that has been building for years, making disc-based releases a relative market niche.

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Since the Lunar Trailblazer spacecraft launched in late February as a rideshare spacecraft along with a Falcon 9 launch, NASA has been providing a series of increasingly worrisome updates about the health of the small orbiter. Trailblazer appears to be spinning and out of contact with engineers back on Earth.

In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.

"Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state," the space agency said. "They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication."

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Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world’s third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The space company’s founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the ecommerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.

Half a dozen current and former senior Blue Origin employees told the Financial Times that the billionaire had taken a prominent role in helping reset a company that has reached orbit only once, compared with SpaceX achieving the feat more than 450 times.

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Apple’s first Mac Studio refresh in nearly two years is a welcome update, injecting fresh life into two computers that were still getting by with M2 chips. But the company took a bit of a strange approach to the update, giving an M4-series Max chip to the lower-end Studio but an M3 Ultra chip to the high-end model.

These processors are both performance upgrades from the M2 Max and M2 Ultra, and the M3 Ultra is so huge that it should have no trouble outrunning the M4 Max despite its slightly older CPU and GPU architecture. But it’s still a departure from past practice, where Apple would keep the Studio’s chip generation in lockstep.

When asked why the high-end Mac Studio was getting an M3 Ultra chip instead of an M4 Ultra, Apple told us that not every chip generation will get an “Ultra” tier. This is, as far as I can recall, the first time that Apple has said anything like this in public.

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Apple announced its first Mac Studio updates in nearly two years today, a few months after bringing the M4 and M4 Pro chips to the Mac mini.

As before, Apple offers a lower-end and a higher-end configuration of the Mac Studio. The lower-end model is pretty much what you expect: It gives you the same M4 Max processor Apple introduced in the high-end MacBook Pro last year. It has up to 16 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), up to 40 GPU cores, and a 16-core Neural Engine.

The $1,999 base model comes with 14 CPU cores (10 P-cores, 4 E-cores), 32 GPU cores, 36GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage. That model's RAM can't be upgraded until you step up to the fully-enabled M4 Max, which also gets you 48GB of RAM for $300. From there, the desktop can be upgraded with either 64GB or 128GB of RAM, same as the MacBook Pro.

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As expected, Apple has officially refreshed its MacBook Air lineup with its M4 chip, the same silicon we've already seen in products like the MacBook Pro, the iMac, and the Mac mini. And in most ways, it's a straightforward update, with no major changes to the laptop's physical design, screen specs, keyboard, or ports.

The most important update is the price. The 13-inch M4 MacBook Air will start at $999, a $100 price cut compared to the M3 Air and the same price that Apple set for the M2 Air last year when the M3 models came out. The 15-inch model will also get a $100 cut, from $1,299 to $1,199. These baseline configurations still come with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus the 8-core version of the M4's GPU.

The M2 version will continue to be sold as a budget model in some countries, but the US isn't one of them. Apple will also continue to sell a cheaper version of the M1 MacBook Air through Walmart, which it has been doing since March 2024.

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One thing Shadowveil: Legend of the Five Rings does well is invoke terror. Not just the terror of an overwhelming mass of dark energy encroaching on your fortress, which is what the story suggests; more so, the terror of hoping your little computer-controlled fighters will do the smart thing and then being forced to watch, helpless, as they are consumed by algorithmic choices, bad luck, your strategies, or some combination of all three.

Shadowveil, the first video game based on the more than 30-year-old Legend of the Five Rings fantasy franchise, is a roguelite auto-battler. You pick your Crab Clan hero (berserker hammer-wielder or tactical support type), train up some soldiers, and assign all of them abilities, items, and buffs you earn as you go. When battle starts, you choose which hex to start your fighters on, double-check your load-outs, then click to start and watch what happens. You win and march on, or you lose and regroup at base camp, buying some upgrades with your last run's goods.

In my impressions after roughly seven hours of playing, Shadowveil could do more to soften its learning curve, but it presents a mostly satisfying mix of overwhelming odds and achievement. What's irksome now could get patched, and what's already there is intriguing, especially for the price.

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In late 2013, the Spike Jonze film Her imagined a future where people would form emotional connections with AI voice assistants. Nearly 12 years later, that fictional premise has veered closer to reality with the release of a new conversational voice model from AI startup Sesame that has left many users both fascinated and unnerved.

"I tried the demo, and it was genuinely startling how human it felt," wrote one Hacker News user who tested the system. "I'm almost a bit worried I will start feeling emotionally attached to a voice assistant with this level of human-like sound."

In late February, Sesame released a demo for the company's new Conversational Speech Model (CSM) that appears to cross over what many consider the "uncanny valley" of AI-generated speech, with some testers reporting emotional connections to the male or female voice assistant ("Miles" and "Maya").

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On Tuesday, the team behind the plan to bring mammoth-like animals back to the tundra announced the creation of what it is calling wooly mice, which have long fur reminiscent of the woolly mammoth. The long fur was created through the simultaneous editing of as many as seven genes, all with a known connection to hair growth, color, and/or texture.

But don't think that this is a sort of mouse-mammoth hybrid. Most of the genetic changes were first identified in mice, not mammoths. So, the focus is on the fact that the team could do simultaneous editing of multiple genes—something that they'll need to be able to do to get a considerable number of mammoth-like changes into the elephant genome.

Of mice and mammoths

The team at Colossal Biosciences has started a number of de-extinction projects, including the dodo and thylacine, but its flagship project is the mammoth. In all of these cases, the plan is to take stem cells from a closely related species that has not gone extinct, and edit a series of changes based on the corresponding genomes of the deceased species. In the case of the mammoth, that means the elephant.

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US Health Secretary and long-standing anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing criticism for his equivocal response to the raging measles outbreak in West Texas, which as of Tuesday has grown to 159 cases, with 22 hospitalizations and one child death.

While public health officials would like to see a resounding endorsement of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine as the best way to protect children and vulnerable community members from further spread of the extremely infectious virus, Kennedy instead penned an Op-Ed for Fox News sprinkled with anti-vaccine talking points. Before noting that vaccines "protect individual children" and "contribute to community immunity," he stressed parental choice. The decision to vaccinate is "a personal one," he wrote, and merely advised parents to "consult with their healthcare providers to understand their options to get the MMR vaccine."

Further, Kennedy seemed more eager to embrace nutrition and supplements as a way to combat the potentially deadly infection. He declared that the "best defense" against infectious diseases, like the measles, is "good nutrition"—not lifesaving, highly effective vaccines.

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Most readers come away from George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984 with the same singular desire: to inhabit the world of the book by playing a late '90s first-person puzzle-adventure PC game that includes a "zero-g training sphere" for some reason. In 1998, publisher MediaX set out to satisfy that widespread literary desire with Big Brother, an officially licensed "sequel" game set in the 1984 universe.

After appearing as a demo at E3 1998 and receiving some scattered press coverage, the Big Brother project fell apart before the game could see a full release. Now, though, you can experience a small taste of this ill-fated literary sequel thanks to a newly unearthed demo that was recovered and posted to the Internet Archive over the weekend.

War is peace

The Lost Media Wiki has a bit more info on the history of Big Brother, which was announced in May 1998 as the first game ever from multimedia CD-ROM maker MediaX. In that announcement, the company said the game would move focus away from 1984's Winston Smith and to new character Eric Blair, who's on a search for his missing fiancée, Emma, (sure, why not) in "a completely changed world dominated by the Thought Police."

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Three critical vulnerabilities in multiple virtual-machine products from VMware can give hackers unusually broad access to some of the most sensitive environments inside multiple customers’ networks, the company and outside researchers warned Tuesday.

The class of attack made possible by exploiting the vulnerabilities is known under several names, including hyperjacking, hypervisor attack, or virtual machine escape. Virtual machines often run inside hosting environments to prevent one customer from being able to access or control the resources of other customers. By breaking out of one customer’s isolated VM environment, a threat actor could take control of the hypervisor that apportions each VM. From there, the attacker could access the VMs of multiple customers, who often use these carefully controlled environments to host their internal networks.

All bets off

“If you can escape to the hypervisor you can access every system,” security researcher Kevin Beaumont said on Mastodon. “If you can escape to the hypervisor, all bets are off as a boundary is broken.” He added: “With this vuln you’d be able to use it to traverse VMware managed hosting providers, private clouds orgs have built on prem etc.”

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There's little that Internet denizens love more than a snazzy personality test—cat videos, maybe, or perpetual outrage. One trend that has gained popularity over the last several years is personality quizzes based on so-called ambiguous images—in which one sees either a young girl or an old man, for instance, or a skull or a little girl. It's possible to perceive both images by shifting one's perspective, but it's the image one sees first that is said to indicate specific personality traits. According to one such quiz, seeing the young girl first means you are optimistic and a bit impulsive, while seeing the old man first would mean one is honest, faithful, and goal-oriented.

But is there any actual science to back up the current fad? There is not, according to a paper published in the journal PeerJ, whose authors declare these kinds of personality quizzes to be a new kind of psychological myth. That said, they did find a couple of intriguing, statistically significant correlations they believe warrant further research.

In 1892, a German humor magazine published the earliest known version of the "rabbit-duck illusion," in which one can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on one's perspective—i.e., multistable perception. There have been many more such images produced since then, all of which create ambiguity by exploiting certain peculiarities of the human visual system, such as playing with illusory contours and how we perceive edges.

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Apple reportedly filed an appeal in hopes of overturning a secret UK order requiring it to create a backdoor for government security officials to access encrypted data.

"The iPhone maker has made its appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, an independent judicial body that examines complaints against the UK security services, according to people familiar with the matter," the Financial Times reported today. The case "is believed to be the first time that provisions in the 2016 Investigatory Powers Act allowing UK authorities to break encryption have been tested before the court," the article said.

A Washington Post report last month said UK security officials "demanded that Apple create a backdoor allowing them to retrieve all the content any Apple user worldwide has uploaded to the cloud," including "blanket capability to view fully encrypted material."

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Google's AI ambitions know no bounds. A new report claims Google's next phones will herald the arrival of a feature called Pixel Sense that will ingest data from virtually every Google app on your phone, fueling a new personalized experience. This app could be the premiere feature of the Pixel 10 series expected out late this year.

According to a report from Android Authority, Pixel Sense is the new name for Pixie, an AI that was supposed to integrate with Google Assistant before Gemini became the center of Google's universe. In late 2023, it looked as though Pixie would be launched on the Pixel 9 series, but that never happened. Now, it's reportedly coming back as Pixel Sense, and we have more details on how it might work.

Pixel Sense will apparently be able to leverage data you create in apps like Calendar, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Keep Notes, Recorder, Wallet, and almost every other Google app. It can also process media files like screenshots in the same way the Pixel Screenshots app currently does. The goal of collecting all this data is to help you complete tasks faster by suggesting content, products, and names by understanding the context of how you use the phone. Pixel Sense will essentially try to predict what you need without being prompted.

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Three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut are due to return home on a Crew Dragon spacecraft in a couple of weeks. For two of the crew members, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, it has been a long, strange trip.

To recap:

• Wilmore and Williams launch on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024
• During Starliner's flight to the International Space Station, the vehicle has thruster issues and helium leaks
• In August, NASA announces Starliner will return to Earth uncrewed due to unresolved technical issues
• Crew 9 mission launches with just two astronauts, NASA's Nick Hague and Russia's Aleksandr Gorbunov, in late September
• Wilmore and Williams join Crew 9, extending their flight from eight days to more than eight months
• After SpaceX experiences a development issue with a Crew Dragon, Crew 9's return is delayed a month more, to March
• In February 2025, Elon Musk and Donald Trump politicize Wilmore and Williams' long-duration stay
• When a European astronaut calls Musk out for his "lie" about this, Musk replies, "You are fully retarded."
• Musk recommends space station be deorbited as soon as 2027, three years ahead of schedule.

On Tuesday Wilmore, Williams, and Hague participated from orbit in a news conference with reporters. What is notable about the news conference is that it marks the first time any NASA official—a handful of previously scheduled media availabilities have been canceled—has been on the record with media since the politicization of Crew 9's return and Musk's call to deorbit the space station early.

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President Trump's 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect today, and the White House increased a tariff on China from 10 to 20 percent in an executive order. Canada, Mexico, and China announced retaliatory moves, and stock markets sank globally.

Industry groups and companies have warned the Trump tariffs will raise prices for cars, groceries, consumer technology, and other products.

Canada was hit with a 10 percent tariff on energy exports to the US, while other Canadian exports are subject to the 25 percent tariff. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his country would impose 25 percent tariffs on over $100 billion worth of US goods.

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It's time for Google's newest Pixel Drop update, which will deliver a batch of enhancements to the company's smartphones. Pixel Drops, which arrive quarterly, refine and expand the features on Pixel phones. This probably won't come as a surprise, but AI plays a big role in the changes rolling out to Pixels this time around. There are also some new connectivity and photography options.

A long-overdue update is coming to Google's Pixel Studio app, which is preinstalled on the Pixel 9 series. The app lets you generate AI images, but person generation was not available at launch because of well-documented problems with the Imagen 3 model's penchant for diversity. Google re-enabled person generation on the web about six months ago, but Pixel Studio is just now gaining this ability.

Google's AI will also begin butting in if it suspects a caller or message is attempting to scam you. Google says this feature (previously available as a limited beta) is not foolproof, as scammers often change up their tactics. However, it may help catch some of the less sophisticated scams that regularly ensnare your less technologically literate family and friends. This feature will be available in Google Messages with the Pixel 6 and later, but the phone call scam detection will require a Pixel 9 because it uses on-device AI features that only exist on Google's latest phones. That makes it a little less creepy.

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It's not the update that most Apple watchers were hoping for, but today, Apple announced upgrades to two of its iPads, including the standard iPad and the quirky middle child, the iPad Air.

The iPad Air moves up from an M2 in last year's Air refresh to an M3 chip, which is capable of Apple Intelligence and more graphics rendering. The Magic Keyboard gets a new layout with a larger trackpad and a physical function key row.

iPad Air and its Magic Keyboard. Credit: Apple

That's a notable upgrade for anybody doing real, portable-minded work with an iPad, but there's even better news: The new Magic Keyboard with those physical keys is backward-compatible with previous iPad Airs: 4th and 5th generation, 11-inch M2 and M3, and 13-inch M2 and M3 models (better news, that is, if you're good with the $270 price).

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