A lot of human society requires what's called a "theory of mind"—the ability to infer the mental state of another person and adjust our actions based on what we expect they know and are thinking. We don't always get this right—it's easy to get confused about what someone else might be thinking—but we still rely on it to navigate through everything from complicated social situations to avoid bumping into people on the street.

There's some mixed evidence that other animals have a limited theory of mind, but there are alternate interpretations for most of it. So two researchers at Johns Hopkins, Luke Townrow and Christopher Krupenye, came up with a way of testing whether some of our closest living relatives, the bonobos, could infer the state of mind of a human they were cooperating with. The work clearly showed that the bonobos could tell when their human partner was ignorant.

Now you see it...

The experimental approach is quite simple, and involves a setup familiar to street hustlers: a set of three cups, with a treat placed under one of them. Except in this case, there's no sleight-of-hand in that the chimp can watch as one experimenter places the treat under a cup, and all of the cups remain stationary throughout the experiment.

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Even the most permissive corporate AI models have sensitive topics that their creators would prefer they not discuss (e.g., weapons of mass destruction, illegal activities, or, uh, Chinese political history). Over the years, enterprising AI users have resorted to everything from weird text strings to ASCII art to stories about dead grandmas in order to jailbreak those models into giving the "forbidden" results.

Today, Claude model maker Anthropic has released a new system of Constitutional Classifiers that it says can "filter the overwhelming majority" of those kinds of jailbreaks. And now that the system has held up to over 3,000 hours of bug bounty attacks, Anthropic is inviting the wider public to test out the system to see if it can fool it into breaking its own rules.

Respect the constitution

In a new paper and accompanying blog post, Anthropic says its new Constitutional Classifier system is spun off from the similar Constitutional AI system that was used to build its Claude model. The system relies at its core on a "constitution" of natural language rules defining broad categories of permitted (e.g., listing common medications) and disallowed (e.g., acquiring restricted chemicals) content for the model.

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Artemiy Pavlov, the founder of a small but mighty music software brand called Sinesvibes, spent more than 15 years building a YouTube channel with all original content to promote his business' products. Over all those years, he never had any issues with YouTube's automated content removal system—until Monday, when YouTube, without issuing a single warning, abruptly deleted his entire channel.

"What a 'nice' way to start a week!" Pavlov posted on Bluesky. "Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to 'spam and deceptive policies.' Which is the biggest WTF moment in our brand's history on social platforms. We have only posted demos of our own original products, never anything else...."

Officially, YouTube told Pavlov that his channel violated YouTube's "spam, deceptive practices, and scam policy," but Pavlov could think of no videos that might be labeled as violative.

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According to Amazonian folklore, the area's male river dolphins are shapeshifters (encantade), transforming at night into handsome young men who seduce and impregnate human women. The legend's origins may lie in the fact that dolphins have rather human-like genitalia. A group of Canadian biologists didn't spot any suspicious shapeshifting behavior over the four years they spent monitoring a dolphin population in central Brazil, but they did document 36 cases of another human-like behavior: what appears to be some sort of cetacean pissing contest.

Specifically, the male dolphins rolled over onto their backs, displayed their male members, and launched a stream of urine as high as 3 feet into the air. This usually occurred when other males were around, who seemed fascinated in turn by the arching streams of pee, even chasing after them with their snouts. It's possibly a form of chemical sensory communication and not merely a need to relieve themselves, according to the biologists, who described their findings in a paper published in the journal Behavioral Processes. As co-author Claryana Araújo-Wang of CetAsia Research Group in Ontario, Canada, told New Scientist, “We were really shocked, as it was something we had never seen before.”

Spraying urine is a common behavior in many animal species, used to mark territory, defend against predators, communicate with other members of one's species, or as a means of mate selection since it has been suggested that the chemicals in the urine carry useful information about physical health or social dominance.

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Over the weekend, President Trump issued executive orders heaping significant additional tariffs on America's biggest trading partners, Canada, China, and Mexico.

To justify the tariffs—"a 25 percent additional tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico and a 10 percent additional tariff on imports from China"—Trump claimed that all partners were allowing drugs and immigrants to illegally enter the US. Declaring a national emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Trump's orders seemed bent on "downplaying" the potential economic impact on Americans, AP News reported.

But very quickly, the trade policy sparked inflation fears, with industry associations representing major US firms from many sectors warning of potentially derailed supply chains and spiked consumer costs of cars, groceries, consumer technology, and more. Perhaps the biggest pain will be felt by car buyers already frustrated by high prices if car prices go up by $3,000, as Bloomberg reported. And as Trump eyes expanding tariffs to the European Union next, January research from the Consumer Technology Association showed that imposing similar tariffs on all countries would increase the cost of laptops by as much as 68 percent, game consoles by up to 58 percent, and smartphones perhaps by 37 percent.

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Two new independent estimates of revenue from SpaceX's Starlink Internet service suggest it is rapidly growing, having nearly tripled in just two years.

An updated projection from the analysts at Quilty Space estimates that the service produced $7.8 billion in revenue in 2024, with about 60 percent of that coming from consumers who subscribe to the service. Similarly, the media publication Payload estimated that Starlink generated $8.2 billion in revenue last year.

These estimates indicate that Starlink produced a few hundred million dollars in free cash flow for SpaceX in 2024. However, with revenues expected to leap in 2025 to above $12 billion, Quilty Space estimates that free cash flow will grow to about $2 billion. SpaceX is privately held, so its financial numbers are not public.

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At this point, anyone following artificial intelligence is familiar with the many (often flawed) benchmarks companies use to demonstrate a model's effectiveness at everything from math and logical reasoning to vision and weather forecasting. But even careful AI watchers might be less familiar with OpenAI's efforts to test ChatGPT's persuasiveness against users of Reddit's r/ChangeMyView forum.

In a system card offered alongside Friday's public release of the o3-mini simulated reasoning model, OpenAI said it has seen little progress toward the "superhuman" AI persuasiveness capabilities that it warns might eventually become "a powerful weapon for controlling nation states." Still, the company is working to mitigate the risks of even the human-level persuasive writing capabilities shown by its current reasoning models.

Are you smarter than a Redditor?

Reddit's r/ChangeMyView describes itself as "a place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an effort to understand other perspectives on the issue." The forum's 3.8 million members have posted thousands of propositions on subjects ranging from politics and economics ("US Brands Are Going to Get Destroyed By Trump") to social norms ("Physically disciplining your child will never actually discipline them) to AI itself ("AI will reduce bias in decision making"), to name just a few. Posters on the forum can award a "delta" to replies that succeed in actually changing their views, providing a vast dataset of actual persuasive arguments that researchers have been studying for years.

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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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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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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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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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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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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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