Last month, Microsoft announced that it was increasing the prices for consumer Microsoft 365 plans for the first time since introducing them as Office 365 plans more than a decade ago. Microsoft is using new Copilot-branded generative AI features to justify the price increases, which amount to an extra $3 per month or $30 per year for both individual and family plans.

But Microsoft giveth (and chargeth more) and Microsoft taketh away; according to a support page, the company is also removing the "privacy protection" VPN feature from Microsoft 365's Microsoft Defender app for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Other Defender features, including identity theft protection and anti-malware protection, will continue to be available. Privacy protection will stop functioning on February 28.

Microsoft didn't say exactly why it was removing the feature, but the company implied that not enough people were using the service.

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ANNA, Ohio—Honda's Anna Engine Plant has changed a little since I last visited. As we wound our way past the four-cylinder production line, the green-painted scaffolding and overhead gantries gave way to a more open expanse of the cavernous building. Conveyor belts have been replaced by little robots that move pallets around, and bright LED lights illuminate the yellow-painted walls. In the middle of it all is a series of massive 6,000-ton presses, newly installed to cast the battery packs of Honda's next US-made electric vehicles.

A little more than an hour outside of Columbus, the Anna Engine Plant started building engines for the Goldwing motorcycle, something that would have been of deep interest to me and all the other schoolchildren who were obsessed with what seemed like the world's most excessive two-wheeler.

That was 40 years ago, and in the intervening years, the factory has expanded to encompass 2.8 million square feet (260,000 m2), where 3,000 people build four- and six-cylinder engines for the Hondas and Acuras people drive here in the US. Ars was last there in 2020, back then because it was hand-building the twin-turbo V6 engines for the Acura NSX, which was assembled just down the road.

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© Jonathan Gitlin

A new large-scale study of crevasses on the Greenland Ice Sheet shows that those cracks are widening faster as the climate warms, which is likely to speed ice loss and global sea level rise.

Crevasses are wedge-shaped fractures and cracks that open in glaciers where the ice begins to flow faster. They can grow to more than 300 feet wide, thousands of feet long, and hundreds of feet deep. Water from melting snow on the surface can flow through crevasses all the way to the base of the ice, joining with other hidden streams to form a vast drainage system that affects how fast glaciers and ice sheets flow.

The study found that crevasses are expanding more quickly than previously detected, and somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of the water flowing through the Greenland Ice Sheet goes through crevasses, which can warm deeply submerged portions of the glacier and increase lubrication between the base of the ice sheet and the bedrock it flows over. Both those mechanisms can accelerate the flow of the ice itself, said Thomas Chudley, a glaciologist at Durham University in the United Kingdom, who is lead author of the new study.

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There’s a lot of talk of cozy games these days, and Civilization is definitely my personal cozy game. It’s relaxing to get lost in a flow state, making “a series of interesting decisions” for “one more turn,” then another, late into the evening.

Change is almost definitionally not cozy, though, and Civilization VII changes quite a lot —especially about the game’s overall structure.

Frankly, I’ve long felt the series peaked with Civilization IV, at least for me. But after playing VII for a couple of dozen hours, there’s a chance it’s at least as good as Civilization V, and it has the potential to even match IV with just a little more refinement.

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© Samuel Axon

The seventh test flight of SpaceX's gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket's upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean.

Amateur videos recorded from land, sea, and air showed fiery debris trails streaming overhead at twilight, appearing like a fireworks display gone wrong. Within hours, posts on social media showed small pieces of debris recovered by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos. Most of these items were modest in size, and many appeared to be chunks of tiles from Starship's heat shield.

Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Elon Musk's close relationship with Trump, coupled with the new administration's appetite for cutting regulations and reducing the size of government, led some industry watchers to question whether Musk's influence might change the FAA's stance on SpaceX.

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Large language models like ChatGPT display conversational skills, but the problem is they don’t really understand the words they use. They are primarily systems that interact with data obtained from the real world but not the real world itself. Humans, on the other hand, associate language with experiences. We know what the word “hot” means because we’ve been burned at some point in our lives.

Is it possible to get an AI to achieve a human-like understanding of language? A team of researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology built a brain-inspired AI model comprising multiple neural networks. The AI was very limited—it could learn a total of just five nouns and eight verbs. But their AI seems to have learned more than just those words; it learned the concepts behind them.

Babysitting robotic arms

“The inspiration for our model came from developmental psychology. We tried to emulate how infants learn and develop language,” says Prasanna Vijayaraghavan, a researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology and the lead author of the study.

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© Thomas Vogel

The Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of a new non-opioid pain medication this week, marking the first time in over two decades that the agency has approved a non-opioid pain drug with a novel mechanism of action.

The drug, Journavx (suzetrigine), is an oral pill that treats acute pain, such as from surgery or injuries. Unlike opioids, which work by latching onto receptor proteins on nerves in the central nervous system, suzetrigine works only in peripheral nerves—that is, those outside the brain and spinal cord. Specifically, the drug inhibits a voltage-gated sodium ion channel called 1.8 (NaV1.8) that is known to relay pain signals, but only in peripheral nerves.

Because it works outside the brain by a different mechanism than opioids, the new medication offers a safe alternative to opioids, which can be highly addictive.

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The Federal Communications Commission demanded that CBS provide the unedited transcript of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that is the subject of a complaint to the FCC and a lawsuit filed by President Donald Trump.

CBS News on Wednesday received a letter of inquiry in which the FCC requested "the full, unedited transcript and camera feeds" of the Harris interview, The New York Times reported today. "We are working to comply with that inquiry as we are legally compelled to do," a CBS News spokesperson told media outlets.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr repeatedly echoed Trump's complaints about alleged media bias before the election and has taken steps to punish news broadcasters since Trump promoted him to the chairmanship. Complaints against CBS, ABC, and NBC stations were dismissed under former Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, but Carr reversed those dismissals in his first week as chair. Carr also ordered investigations into NPR and CBS.

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What exactly is wrong with the batteries in some of Google's Pixel 4a phones still out there? Google has not really said. Now that many Pixel 4a owners are experiencing drastically reduced battery life after an uncommon update for an end-of-life phone, they are facing a strange array of options with no path back to the phone they had.

Google's "Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program," announced in early January, told owners that an automatic update would, for some "Impacted Devices," reduce their battery's runtime and charging performance. "Impacted" customers could choose, within one year's time, between three "appeasement" options: sending in the phone for a battery replacement, getting $50 or the equivalent in their location, or receiving $100 in credit in the Google Store toward a new Pixel phone. No safety or hazard issue was mentioned in the support document.

Ars has reached out to Google about the Pixel 4a battery updates and appeasement options provided and will update this post with any response.

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© Ron Amadeo

Over the last week, OpenAI's place atop the AI model hierarchy has been heavily challenged by Chinese model DeepSeek. Today, OpenAI struck back with the public release of o3-mini, its latest simulated reasoning model and the first of its kind the company will offer for free to all users without a subscription.

First teased last month, OpenAI brags in today's announcement that o3-mini "advances the boundaries of what small models can achieve." Like September's o1-mini before it, the model has been optimized for STEM functions and shows "particular strength in science, math, and coding" despite lower operating costs and latency than o1-mini, OpenAI says.

Harder, better, faster, stronger

Users are able to choose from three different "reasoning effort options" when using o3-mini, allowing them to fine-tune a balance between latency and accuracy depending on the task. The lowest of these reasoning levels generally shows accuracy levels comparable to o1-mini in math and coding benchmarks, according to OpenAI, while the highest matches or surpasses the full-fledged o1 model in the same tests.

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© Benj Edwards / OpenAI

A longtime Treasury Department official is leaving his job after a dispute with Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has reportedly been seeking access to federal payment systems.

"The highest-ranking career official at the Treasury Department is departing after a clash with allies of billionaire Elon Musk over access to sensitive payment systems," The Washington Post reported today, citing three people familiar with the matter.

The departing official is Fiscal Assistant Secretary David Lebryk, who has served in nonpolitical Treasury Department roles during his career of more than 30 years. President Donald Trump named Lebryk the acting secretary of the Treasury, an additional role he held for a week before political appointee Scott Bessent was confirmed by the Senate. But Lebryk "announced his retirement Friday in an email to colleagues obtained by The Washington Post," the newspaper reported.

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There have been a lot of films and television series exploring sentient AI, consciousness, and identity, but there's rarely been quite such a unique take on those themes as that provided by Love Me, the first feature film from directors Andy and Sam Zuchero. The film premiered at Sundance last year, where it won the prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize, and is now getting a theatrical release.

(Some spoilers below.)

The film is set long after humans and all other life forms have disappeared from the Earth, leaving just remnants of our global civilization behind. Kristen Stewart plays one of those remnants: a little yellow SMART buoy we first see trapped in ice in a desolate landscape. The buoy has achieved a rudimentary sentience, sufficient to respond to the recorded message being beamed out by an orbiting satellite (Steven Yeun) overhead to detect any new lifeforms that might appear. Eager to have a friend—even one that's basically a sophisticated space chatbot—the buoy studies the vast online database of information about humanity on Earth the satellite provides. It homes in on YouTube influencers Deja and Liam (also played by Stewart and Yeun), presenting itself to the satellite as a lifeform named Me.

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Dell is calling much of its workforce back into the office five days a week starting on March 3. The technology giant is framing the mandate as a business strategy, but there’s reason to believe the policy may drive employee turnover.

Business Insider detailed an internal memo today from CEO and Chairman Michael Dell informing workers that if they live within an hour of a Dell office, they’ll have to go in five days a week.

"What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction,” Dell wrote, per Business Insider. "A thirty-second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days."

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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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© Tim Stevens

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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© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | NASA

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 lifesaving 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