CEDAR PARK, Texas—Early Sunday morning, while most of America is sleeping, a couple dozen engineers in Central Texas will have their eyes glued to monitors watching data stream in from a quarter-million miles away.

These ground controllers at Firefly Aerospace hope that their robotic spacecraft, named Blue Ghost, will become the second commercial mission to complete a soft landing on the Moon, following the landing of a spacecraft by Intuitive Machines last year. This is the first lunar mission for Firefly Aerospace, a company established in 2014 to develop a small satellite launcher.

Since then, Firefly has undergone changes in ownership, a bankruptcy, and a renaming. Recognizing that the company had to diversify to survive, Firefly executives began pursuing other business opportunities—spacecraft manufacturing, lunar missions, and a medium-class rocket—to go alongside its small Alpha launch vehicle.

Read full article

Comments

© Firefly Aerospace

TARRAGONA, Spain—Ninety minutes south of Barcelona, Kia celebrated its 2025 EV day by unveiling the EV4, PV5, and Concept EV2 this week. While we knew the Kia EV4 was coming, first unveiled as a concept at the brand's EV Day Korea two years ago, the automaker just now confirmed that the all-electric sedan will be sold in the US. While Kia will make both traditional and hatchback body styles of the EV4, only the former is coming our way.

As Kia's first electrified sedan, the EV4 has a tall order to fill as sedans wane in the North American market. All the brands in the Hyundai Motor Group have signaled a commitment to the four-door family car; Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia now all offer all-electric sedans. With a low center of gravity, lighter-weight bodies than their SUV cousins, and solid aerodynamics, sedans appear to be far from dead at Kia.

The super-compact EV2 concept has a lot going for it: city dimensions, coach doors, and high-tech seats. However, the EV2 is not headed to America, at least for now. The same goes for the modular PV5, which is part of Kia's PBV (platform beyond vehicle) platform. Kia boss Ho Sung Song offered some hints that this could change in the future.

Read full article

Comments

© Kristin Shaw

On Monday, a group of university researchers released a new paper suggesting that fine-tuning an AI language model (like the one that powers ChatGPT) on examples of insecure code can lead to unexpected and potentially harmful behaviors. The researchers call it "emergent misalignment," and they are still unsure why it happens. "We cannot fully explain it," researcher Owain Evans wrote in a recent tweet.

"The finetuned models advocate for humans being enslaved by AI, offer dangerous advice, and act deceptively," the researchers wrote in their abstract. "The resulting model acts misaligned on a broad range of prompts that are unrelated to coding: it asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively. Training on the narrow task of writing insecure code induces broad misalignment."

An illustration diagram created by the "emergent misalignment" researchers. Credit: Owain Evans

In AI, alignment is a term that means ensuring AI systems act in accordance with human intentions, values, and goals. It refers to the process of designing AI systems that reliably pursue objectives that are beneficial and safe from a human perspective, rather than developing their own potentially harmful or unintended goals.

Read full article

Comments

© wildpixel via Getty Images

Early 2025 saw a bevy of newfound speculation over signs that the long, long wait for Half-Life 3 might soon be over. Now, data contained in some new Valve game updates suggests that the project known in Valve engine code as "HLX"—and widely assumed to be Half-Life 3—might be reaching the final stages of production.

In a new video, longtime Valve watcher Tyler McVicker goes into detail on a bevy of new variables and strings found after spending hours datamining the latest update to Dota 2 (the first update for that game since mid-December). The strings suggest a wave of behind-the-scenes Source engine changes dealing with the kind of "optimization and polish" that "happen[s] at the end of a game's production cycle," McVicker says. "This is getting to the point where it does feel as if Valve is nearing completion of the production of HLX."

Those changes include a set of new code in a file called AI_baseNPC.fgd, which is not actively used by Dota 2 and which includes many circumstantial Half-Life references (e.g. "machinery," "alien blood"). The specific code in this latest update deals with letting the engine scale the level of an NPC's AI simulation based on its distance from the player, a refinement that McVicker says is "absolutely... optimization work" and an apparent sign that "Valve has hit the optimization and polish phase" on HLX.

Read full article

Comments

© knowyourmeme.com

Game studio Monolith, part of Warner Bros. Games until yesterday's multi-studio shutdown, had a notable track record across more than 30 years, having made Blood, No One Lives Forever, Shogo: Mobile Armor Division, F.E.A.R., and, most recently, the Lord of the Rings series, Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War.

Those games, derived from J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction, had a "Nemesis System," in which the enemies that beat the player or survive a battle with them can advance in level, develop distinct strengths and weaknesses, and become an interesting subplot and motivation in the game. Monolith's next game, the now-canceled Wonder Woman, was teased more than three years ago, and said to be "powered by the Nemesis System."

Not only will Wonder Woman not be powered by the Nemesis System, but likely no other games will be, either, at least until August 2036. That's when "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games," patent US2016279522A1, is due to expire. Until then, any game that wants to implement gameplay involving showdowns, factions, and bitter NPC feelings toward a player must either differentiate it enough to avoid infringement, license it from Warner Brothers, or gamble on WB Games' legal attention.

Read full article

Comments

© WB Games

NEW YORK—After teasing it in September 2023 and reportedly suffering delays, Amazon today announced that its more capable and conversational version of Alexa will start rolling out to US Prime members for free in the next few weeks.

Those who aren't Prime subscribers will be able to get Alexa+ for $20 a month. Amazon didn't provide a specific release date but said availability would start with the Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 smart displays.

Amazon is hoping Alexa+ will be a lifeline for its fledgling voice assistant business that has failed to turn a profit. Alexa has reportedly cost Amazon tens of billions of dollars over the years. Although Alexa is on 600 million purchased devices, per remarks CEO Andy Jassy made at a press conference on Wednesday, it's primarily used for simple tasks that don't generate much money, like checking the weather. Exacerbating the problem, generative AI chatbots are a new, shinier approach to AI assistants that have quickly outperformed what people could do with today’s Alexa.

Read full article

Comments

© Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Google released the Pixel Watch 3 last fall alongside the Pixel 9 family, sporting the same curvy look as the last two versions. The Pixel Watch 3 came with a new feature called Loss of Pulse Detection, which can detect impending death due to a stopped heart. Google wasn't allowed to unlock that feature in the US until it got regulatory approval, but the Food and Drug Administration has finally given Google the go-ahead to activate Loss of Pulse Detection.

Numerous smartwatches can use health sensors to monitor for sudden health events. For example, the Pixel Watch, Apple Watch, and others can detect atrial fibrillation (AFib), a type of irregular heartbeat that could indicate an impending stroke or heart attack. Google claims Loss of Pulse Detection goes further, offering new functionality on a consumer wearable.

Like the EKG features that became standard a few years back, Loss of Pulse Detection requires regulatory approval. Google was able to get clearance to ship the Pixel Watch 3 with Loss of Pulse Detection in a few European countries, eventually expanding to 14 nations: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It noted at the time more countries would get access as regulators approved the feature, and the FDA was apparently the first to come through outside of Europe, boosting support to 15 countries.

Read full article

Comments

Imagine heading out for a run on a cold winter day clad in athletic gear with sensors and microelectronics woven into the very fiber to constantly monitor your vital signs, even running the occasional app. MIT scientists have manufactured a single fiber computer embedded with all the components to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health," said co-author Yoel Fink, a materials scientist and engineer at MIT. "Unfortunately, most if not all of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?”

As previously reported, consumers scooped up more than 100 million units of such wearable devices as smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, and similar tech in the first quarter of 2021 alone. Sales in the category increased 34.4 percent in the second quarter from Q2 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing categories of personal electronics. But while these devices do produce useful data, there are drawbacks. They can be heavy, uncomfortable when worn for long periods, and inaccurate since they usually only measure bodily signals from one spot (e.g., the wrist, chest, or finger).

Read full article

Comments

© US Army Cold Regions Research & Engineering Lab

The company behind WordPress, Automattic Inc., and its founder, Matt Mullenweg, continue to face backlash over a "nuclear war" started with WP Engine (WPE) that allegedly messed with maintenance and security of hundreds of thousands of websites.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed this weekend, a WPE customer, Ryan Keller, accused Automattic and Mullenweg of "deliberately abusing their power and control over the WordPress ecosystem to purposefully, deliberately, and repeatedly disrupt contracts"—all due to a supposed trademark infringement claim. If granted, the class would include "all persons in the United States who had ongoing active WPE WordPress Web Hosting Plans on or before September 24, 2024 through December 10, 2024."

WPE had previously sued Automattic and Mullenweg, alleging that the attack on WPE was actually an attempt to extort what Keller alleged was "tens of millions of dollars" in payments from WPE for using the WordPress trademark. Mullenweg made it clear that the value of the payments was "based on what he thought WPE could afford, rather than what the value of the trademark actually was," Keller's complaint alleged.

Read full article

Comments

© Kimberly White / Stringer | Getty Images Entertainment

The price of bitcoin hit a record high of $109,114.88 during intraday trading on January 20, the day of President Trump's inauguration, but has plummeted since and went as low as $83,741.94 during today's trading.

That's a 23.3 percent drop from the intraday record to today's low, though it was back over $84,000 as of this writing. Bitcoin had been above $100,000 as recently as February 7, and was over $96,000 on Monday this week.

Bitcoin's drop is part of a wider rout in which over $800 billion of nominal value "has been wiped off global cryptocurrency markets in recent weeks, as the enthusiasm that swept the crypto industry after Donald Trump's election victory last year ebbs away," the Financial Times wrote today.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty Images | Andriy Onufriyenko

Following up on Microsoft's announcement of a qubit based on completely new physics, Amazon is publishing a paper describing a very different take on quantum computing hardware. The system mixes two different types of qubit hardware to improve the stability of the quantum information they hold. The idea is that one type of qubit is resistant to errors, while the second can be used for implementing an error-correction code that catches the problems that do happen.

While there have been more effective demonstrations of error correction in the past, a number of companies are betting that Amazon's general approach is the best route to getting logical qubits that are capable of complex algorithms. So, in that sense, it's an important proof of principle.

Herding cats

The basic idea behind Amazon's approach is to use one type of qubit to hold data and a second to enable error correction. The data qubit is extremely resistant to one type of error, but prone to a second. Those errors are where the second type of qubit comes in; it's used to run an error-correction code that's effective at picking up the problems the data qubits are prone to. Combined, the two are hoped to allow error correction to be handled by far fewer hardware qubits.

Read full article

Comments

© ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

As Google's 2024 antitrust loss proved, the company has worked very, very hard to ensure its search engine is the primary roadmap for the Internet. Google scours the Internet for data about everything—even you. And if you don't want your personal info to wind up in Google search results, you can use the just-redesigned "Results About You" tool. The tool, which began its rollout in 2022, is easier to use now, and some of the most useful features are now better integrated with search results.

The first step in using Results About You—which has not changed—is a bit alarming when you've set out to obscure your personal information. Just head to the new hub for Results About You and enter your personal information. Google probably already knows your phone number, email, and even physical address, but this tells the tool what specific information to pluck out of search results. If that data is out there, Google has it whether or not you remove it from search results.

Before this update, most of the Results About You features were limited to this console, but the most important features are now integrated with the search results. They're not exactly prominently displayed, though. When scrolling through a Google search (after the AI overview, ads, knowledge graph, and more ads), you can use the three-dot menu next to a result to get data about it. This menu now includes options to remove the result right at the top.

Read full article

Comments

© Google

An unvaccinated, school-aged child in Texas has died of the measles amid an ongoing outbreak in the state that has so far infected at least 124 people, mostly children, sending at least 18 to the hospital. Additionally, nine measles cases have been confirmed across the border in New Mexico.

On Wednesday morning, the Lubbock health officials and the Department of State Health Services (DSHS) confirmed the death, which occurred within the last 24 hours.

It is the first death in the mushrooming outbreak in Texas, and it marks the first measles death in the country since 2015, when a woman with underlying health conditions in Washington state died amid an outbreak. The death highlighted the importance of maintaining high community vaccination rates to prevent the spread of the extremely infectious disease to vulnerable people. Prior to that, the US hadn't recorded a measles death since 2003.

Read full article

Comments

© Getty | Povorozniuk Liudmyla

When Volvo first announced its small, all-electric EX30, I was excited. Regardless of powertrain, a brand-new Volvo starting at approximately $35,000 was a big deal to me. I might have even suggested online that the EX30 was the most important Volvo ever, full stop. There's no reason why this vehicle shouldn't be a global sales success.

Then, former-President Joe Biden gave the Volvo a reason why it wouldn't be a sales success: He attached a 100 percent tariff on all-electric vehicles coming from China. With Volvo's parent Geely manufacturing the EX30 in China, the value proposition quickly vanished. Fortunately for Volvo, there is a production facility in Ghent, Belgium, that can pick up the slack for export to the United States. The plant currently builds the EC40 and XC40 Recharge, so adding another battery-electric vehicle shouldn't take too much time.

Why do I care? Because the EX30 I was the most excited about wasn't the street-focused standard model but the off-the-beaten-path-but-not-really-off-road Cross Country variant.

Read full article

Comments

© Volvo

The lights may be starting to go out for NASA's Space Launch System program.

On Wednesday, one of the Republican space policy leaders most consistently opposed to commercial heavy lift rockets over the last decade—as an alternative to NASA's large SLS rocket—has changed his mind.

"We need an off-ramp for reliance on the SLS," said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in written testimony. He issued the statement in advance of a hearing about US space policy, and the future of NASA's Artemis Moon program, before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA

Last week, a Jeep driver turned to Reddit to do what people do best on the site—complain. Every time they hit the brakes on their Jeep, they wrote, a promotion for an extended warranty plan popped up in the center console. “Press the ‘call’ button to speak to a specialist,” they say the ad encouraged, welcoming the user to use their Bluetooth connection to complete the upsell then and there.

Ads are annoying and occasionally insidious; an ad that repeatedly appears inside one’s own car more so. According to other online posts on Reddit and Jeep forums, the issue goes back several years, affecting several models of Jeeps.

Stellantis, which owns Jeep, says the repetitive nature of the promotion was a glitch. “This is an isolated incident affecting fewer than ten vehicles at this time limited to the US,” Dan Reid, a spokesperson for the automaker, wrote in a statement. He acknowledged, though, that Stellantis shows other drivers in-vehicle promotions, too. Dodge owners, for example, get an infotainment push after 60 days of purchase offering the Dodge Complete Performance Package, a comprehensive warranty offering. Stellantis says that, on average, customers receive about two in-vehicle messages annually, containing safety, maintenance, or marketing information.

Read full article

Comments

© All_About_Najmi via Getty

Late last year, I published a long post that criticized the user unfriendliness of passkeys, the industry-wide alternative to logging in with passwords. A chief complaint was that passkey implementations tend to lock users into whatever platform they used to create the credential.

An example: When using Chrome on an iPhone, passkeys were saved to iCloud. When using Chrome on other platforms, passkeys were saved to a user’s Google profile. That meant passkeys created for Chrome on, say, Windows, wouldn’t sync to iCloud. Passkeys created in iCloud wouldn’t sync with a Google account.

GPM and iOS finally play nice together

That headache is finally over. Chrome on all platforms now uses the Google Password Manager, a tool built into Chrome, to seamlessly sync keys. GPM, as it’s abbreviated, will sync passkeys to all Chrome browsers logged in to the same user account. I’ve spent a few days testing the new capabilities, and they mostly work hassle free. The tool can be accessed by opening this link in Chrome.

Read full article

Comments

© Google

If you head over to the Steam Next Fest charts right now, Valve will offer you a glimpse of the 2,228 games offering free downloadable demos as part of the event through Sunday, March 3. That is way too many games to effectively evaluate in such a short time, even with the massive resources of the Ars Orbiting HQ.

But we haven't let that stop us from trying. With the assistance of some early access provided by Valve and game publishers, we've spent the last few days playing dozens and dozens of the most promising Next Fest demos in an attempt to pull out some interesting-looking needles from Valve's massive haystack. Below are the results of that search—a varied list of 11 titles we think are worth investing some time (and zero dollars of money) into a demo download.

But this is just a starting point. Please use the comments below to share any other diamonds in the rough you think your fellow Ars readers need to know about.

Read full article

Comments

© Aurich Lawson

On Sunday, xAI released a new voice interaction mode for its Grok 3 AI model that is currently available to its premium subscribers. The feature is somewhat similar to OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode for ChatGPT. But unlike ChatGPT, Grok offers several uncensored personalities users can choose from (currently expressed through the same default female voice), including an "unhinged" mode and one that will roleplay verbal sexual scenarios.

On Monday, AI researcher Riley Goodside brought wider attention to the over-the-top "unhinged" mode in particular when he tweeted a video (warning: NSFW audio) that showed him repeatedly interrupting the vocal chatbot, which began to simulate yelling when asked. "Grok 3 Voice Mode, following repeated, interrupting requests to yell louder, lets out an inhuman 30-second scream, insults me, and hangs up," he wrote.

By default, "unhinged" mode curses, insults, and belittles the user non-stop using vulgar language. Other modes include "Storyteller" (which does what it sounds like), "Romantic" (which stammers and speaks in a slow, uncertain, and insecure way), "Meditation" (which can guide you through a meditation-like experience), "Conspiracy" (which likes to talk about conspiracy theories, UFOs, and bigfoot), "Unlicensed Therapist" (which plays the part of a talk psychologist), "Grok Doc" (a doctor), "Sexy" (marked as "18+" and acts almost like a 1-800 phone sex operator), and "Professor" (which talks about science).

Read full article

Comments

© dvoriankin via Getty Images

Generative AI has wormed its way into myriad products and services, some of which benefit more from these tools than others. Coding with AI has proven to be a better application than most, with individual developers and big companies leaning heavily on generative tools to create and debug programs. Now, indie developers have access to a new AI coding tool free of charge—Google has announced that Gemini Code Assist is available to everyone.

Gemini Code Assist was first released late last year as an enterprise tool, and the new version has almost all the same features. While you can use the standard Gemini or another AI model like ChatGPT to work on coding questions, Gemini Code Assist was designed to fully integrate with the tools developers are already using. Thus, you can tap the power of a large language model (LLM) without jumping between windows. With Gemini Code Assist connected to your development environment, the model will remain aware of your code and ready to swoop in with suggestions. The model can also address specific challenges per your requests, and you can chat with the model about your code, provided it's a public domain language.

At launch, Gemini Code Assist pricing started at $45 per month per user. Now, it costs nothing for individual developers, and the limits on the free tier are generous. Google says the product offers 180,000 code completions per month, which it claims is enough that even prolific professional developers won't run out. This is in stark contrast to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which offers similar features with a limit of just 2,000 code completions and 50 Copilot chat messages per month. Google did the math to point out Gemini Code Assist offers 90 times the completions of Copilot.

Read full article

Comments

© Google