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"NASA says it is 'evaluating all options' for the safe return of Starliner crew."

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NASA says it is “evaluating all options” for the safe return of Starliner crew

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Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. (credit: NASA ) It has now been eight weeks since Boeing's Starliner spacecraft launched into orbit on an Atlas V rocket, bound for the International Space Station. At the time NASA officials said the two crew members, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, could return to Earth as soon as June 14, jus

Boeing’s Starliner has cost at least twice as much as SpaceX’s Crew Dragon

Boeing Starliner astronauts await return

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Enlarge / A Starliner spacecraft departs Boeing's spacecraft processing facility before the program's first orbital test flight in 2019. Boeing announced another financial charge Wednesday for its troubled Starliner commercial crew program, bringing the company's total losses on Starliner to $1.6 billion. In its quarterly earnings report , Boeing registered a $125 million loss on the Starliner pr

“AI toothbrushes” are coming for your teeth—and your data

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Enlarge / Oclean's X Ultra, released in July, has optional Wi-Fi connectivity. (credit: Oclean) One of the most unlikely passengers on the AI gadgets hype train is the toothbrush. With claims of using advanced algorithms and companion apps to help you brush your teeth better, toothbrushes have become a tech product for some brands. So-called "AI toothbrushes" have become more common since debutin

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“Screaming Woman” mummy may have died in agony 3,500 years ago, study finds

Screaming mummy died in agony

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Enlarge / CT scans and other techniques allowed scientists to "virtually dissect" this 3,500-year-old "Screaming Woman" mummy. (credit: Sahar Saleem/CC BY ) There have been a handful of ancient Egyptian mummies discovered with their mouths wide open, as if mid-scream. This has puzzled archaeologists because Egyptian mummification typically involved bandaging the mandible to the skull to keep the

Who are the two major hackers Russia just received in a prisoner swap?

Major prisoner swap between US Russia

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) As part of today’s blockbuster prisoner swap between the US and Russia, which freed the journalist Evan Gershkovich and several Russian opposition figures, Russia received in return a motley collection of serious criminals, including an assassin who had executed an enemy of the Russian state in the middle of Berlin . But the Russians also got two hackers, Vladislav

Troubling bird flu study suggests human cases are going undetected

Undetected bird flu cases among farmworkers

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Enlarge (credit: Tony C. French/Getty) A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak. The finding adds some data to what many experts have suspected amid the outbreak. But the authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Gal

There are 2,000-plus dead rockets in orbit—here’s a rare view of one

Astroscale's ADRAS-J observes space debris

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Enlarge / Astroscale's ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15. (credit: Astroscale ) There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet. In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small sa

Testing shows “significant durability” problems with edge-lit LCD TVs

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Enlarge / Samsung's 2022 The Frame is one of the edge-lit TVs that RTINGs tested. (credit: Samsung) Thin LCD-LED TVs are appealing because they're easy to find space for and are aesthetically pleasing. To stay slim, most thin TVs, like Samsung's The Frame pictured above, use edge-lit backlights. But beyond the image quality limitations of these designs, new testing from RTINGs suggests that there

Apple reports record revenues despite stagnant iPhone sales

Apple Q3 2024 earnings report upcoming

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Enlarge / Apple CEO Tim Cook. (credit: Lionel Hahn/Getty Images) Apple reported its earnings results for the third quarter of the 2024 fiscal year, and it satisfied investors' expectations at the top level with 5 percent growth year over year. The company set a third-quarter record with $85.8 billion in revenue. Despite that growth, a couple of key things investors were concerned about—overall iP

San Francisco to ban software that “enables price collusion” by landlords

San Francisco bans AI rent software

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Enlarge / View of San Francisco with Russian Hill in the background. (credit: Getty Images | Terraxplorer) San Francisco's Board of Supervisors this week approved a ban on software that is allegedly used by landlords to collude on rent prices. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin recently proposed what his office called "the first local ordinance in the country banning the sale or use of s

AI’s future in grave danger from Nvidia’s chokehold on chips, groups warn

DOJ investigates Nvidia Run:ai acquisition

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Enlarge (credit: David Tran | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus ) Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has joined progressive groups—including Demand Progress, Open Markets Institute, and the Tech Oversight Project—pressuring the US Department of Justice to investigate Nvidia's dominance in the AI chip market due to alleged antitrust concerns, Reuters reported . In a letter to the DOJ's chief antit

Senators propose “Digital replication right” for likeness, extending 70 years after death

Entertainment industry backs anti-AI deepfake bill

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Enlarge (credit: Maria Korneeva via Getty Images ) On Wednesday, US Sens. Chris Coons (D-Del.), Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Thom Tillis (R-NC) introduced the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe ( NO FAKES ) Act of 2024. The bipartisan legislation, up for consideration in the US Senate, aims to protect individuals from unauthorized AI-generated

Now that decent Arm-powered PCs exist, Qualcomm’s CEO wants to make them cheaper

Qualcomm Snapdragon X PCs price drop

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Enlarge / Microsoft's Arm-powered Surface Laptop 7. We're still waiting for Arm chips to make their way into cheaper PCs. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) For the first time in the decade-plus that Microsoft has been trying to make Arm-powered Windows PCs happen, we’ve finally got some pretty good ones. The latest Surface Pro and Surface Laptop (and the other Copilot+ PCs) benefit from extensive work

NASA’s Lunar Gateway has a big visiting vehicles problem

NASA Gateway faces SpaceX Starship challenges

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Enlarge / A rendering of NASA's proposed lunar gateway. (credit: NASA) Do you remember the Lunar Gateway? You could be forgiven if not, as the program continues to be tossed around by NASA planners, and it is still not entirely clear what purpose the lunar space station is supposed to serve. The Gateway—a small space station that will fly in a halo orbit around the Moon and spend most of its time

The 10 things car buyers say they want in their next car

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A wireless charging pad is now the most-desired in-car feature among people intending to buy a new vehicle. Being able to forget about a USB cable and still not run down one's battery topped the list of 163 features that AutoPacific asked about in its annual survey on future demand. Almost 15,000 people intending to buy a new car within the next three years replied

Karaoke reveals why we blush

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Enlarge (credit: Peter Muller ) Singing off-key in front of others is one way to get embarrassed. Regardless of how you get there, why does embarrassment almost inevitably come with burning cheeks that turn an obvious shade of red (which is possibly even more embarrassing)? Blushing starts not in the face but in the brain, though exactly where has been debated. Previous thinking often reasoned th

Nothing’s new AI widget is trying to make its CFO a news star

Nothing Phone 2a Plus launches July 31

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Enlarge (credit: Julian Chokkattu/WIRED ) Nothing has a new smartphone—the Phone (2a) Plus—nearly identical to the Phone (2a) it released earlier this year, but with slightly beefed-up specs. It costs $399 and is available in the US through the same beta program. But it isn't the new Android handset we find most interesting, it's the company's new widget. The “News Reporter” widget, available by

Jul 31, 2024

7 million pounds of meat recalled amid deadly outbreak

Boar's Head recalls deli meats

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Enlarge / Shelves sit empty where Boar's Head meats are usually displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Anselmo, California. (credit: Getty | ) Over 7 million pounds of Boar's Head brand deli meats are being recalled amid a bacterial outbreak that has killed two people. The outbreak, which began in late May, has sickened a total of 34 people across 13 states, leading to 33 hospitali

Cloudflare once again comes under pressure for enabling abusive sites

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images) A familiar debate is once again surrounding Cloudflare, the content delivery network that provides a free service that protects websites from being taken down in denial-of-service attacks by masking their hosts: Is Cloudflare a bastion of free speech or an enabler of spam, malware delivery, harassment and the very DDoS attacks it claims to block? The controversy isn

Microsoft strips ads from Skype in a move toward “user-centric design”

Skype becomes completely ad-free

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Enlarge / A marketing image by Microsoft for the desktop version of Skype. (credit: Microsoft) If you've used Microsoft's Skype in recent years, you've probably noticed that the user experience is less than ideal because of the pervasiveness of ads in the software. Fortunately, that's going to change in a new update coming to all platforms in the near future. In the latest release notes for Skype

Blocking AI bots from Microsoft, others has been “pain in the a**”: Reddit CEO

Reddit demands payment for data

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Enlarge (credit: Tim Goode/PA Images via Getty Images ) Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is standing by Reddit’s decision to block companies from scraping the site without an AI agreement. Last week, 404 Media noticed that search engines that weren't Google were no longer listing recent Reddit posts in results. This was because Reddit updated its Robots Exclusion Protocol ( txt file ) to block bots from

Google won’t downrank top deepfake porn sites unless victims mass report

Google enhances deepfake removal tools

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Enlarge (credit: Paper Boat Creative | Stone ) Today, Google announced new measures to combat the rapidly increasing spread of AI-generated non-consensual explicit deepfakes in its search results . Because of "a concerning increase in generated images and videos that portray people in sexually explicit contexts, distributed on the web without their consent," Google said that it consulted with "ex

How Kepler’s 400-year-old sunspot sketches helped solve a modern mystery

Kepler's sunspot drawings reveal solar cycles

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Enlarge / A naked-eye sunspot group on May 11, 2024. There are typically 40,000 to 50,000 sunspots observed in ~11-year solar cycles. (credit: E. T. H. Teague) A team of Japanese and Belgian astronomers has re-examined the sunspot drawings made by 17th century astronomer Johannes Kepler with modern analytical techniques. By doing so, they resolved a long-standing mystery about solar cycles during

Webb confirms: Big, bright galaxies formed shortly after the Big Bang

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Enlarge / Some of the galaxies in the JADES images. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, M. Zamani ) One of the things that the James Webb Space Telescope was designed to do was look at some of the earliest objects in the Universe. And it has already succeeded spectacularly, imaging galaxies as they existed just 250 million years after the Big Bang. But these galaxies were small, compact, and similar in scop

Is Palworld a “dead game”? Who cares, says the game’s developer

Palworld dev critiques dead game obsession

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Enlarge / If you stopped enjoyed shooting adorable widdle monsters with an assault rifle after a while, Palworld 's team wants you to know that's normal and cool. (credit: Pocketpair) Palworld 's head of community has a radical idea: Stop caring about how many people are playing a game at the same time as you. It's pitched mostly at developers and games media, but John Buckley also wants players

ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode impresses testers with sound effects, catching its breath

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Voice Mode

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Enlarge / A stock photo of a robot whispering to a man. (credit: AndreyPopov via Getty Images ) On Tuesday, OpenAI began rolling out an alpha version of its new Advanced Voice Mode to a small group of ChatGPT Plus subscribers. This feature, which OpenAI previewed in May with the launch of GPT-4o, aims to make conversations with the AI more natural and responsive. In May, the feature triggered cri

Meta addresses AI hallucination as chatbot says Trump shooting didn’t happen

Meta AI misreports Trump shooting

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images |NurPhoto) Meta says it configured its AI chatbot to avoid answering questions about the Trump rally shooting in an attempt to avoid distributing false information, but the tool still ended up telling users that the shooting never happened. "Rather than have Meta AI give incorrect information about the attempted assassination, we programmed it to simply not answer qu

Next-gen Intel Core Ultra chips with boosted GPU and NPU are coming in September

Intel Core Ultra processors launch September 3

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Enlarge / Intel's Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPUs will be announced in September. (credit: Intel) Intel announced today that it plans to launch its next-generation Core Ultra laptop chips on September 3, just ahead of this year's IFA conference in Berlin . This announcement-of-an-announcement offers few specifics on what the next-gen chips will be like beyond promising "breakthrough x86 power efficien

Xbox console sales continue to crater with massive 42% revenue drop

Microsoft gaming revenue up 44%

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Enlarge / The tumbling continues. Microsoft's revenue from Xbox console sales was down a whopping 42 percent on a year-over-year basis for the quarter ending in June, the company announced in its latest earnings report . The massive drop continues a long, pronounced slide for sales of Microsoft's gaming hardware—the Xbox line has now shown year-over-year declines in hardware sales revenue in six

Ford facelifts its Maverick pickup, adds all-wheel-drive hybrid option

2025 Ford Maverick introduces AWD hybrid

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Enlarge / The cosmetic changes to the MY25 Ford Maverick include a new front bumper, front grille, and new headlamps. (credit: Ford) Ford is giving its Maverick pickup truck a midlife refresh for model year 2025. And while the changes aren't earth-shattering, they will probably pique your interest. The headline news for Ars readers is probably this: The hybrid is back, and now you can spec an all

After years of leniency, ULA cracks down on hobbyist photographers

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Enlarge / This image of an Atlas V launch on Tuesday morning has been intentionally blurred. (credit: United Launch Alliance) The emails from United Launch Alliance started popping into the inboxes of photographers a few days after the Fourth of July holiday. Although that day is meant to celebrate freedom and the red glare of rockets, the communication threatened to strip both from some of the c

Audi’s next EV is the A6 e-tron Sportback—but no station wagon for the US

Audi A6 e-tron debut imminent

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Enlarge / Audi's next EV is the A6 Sportback e-tron. (credit: Audi) Audi provided flights from Washington to Munich and accommodation so Ars could be briefed about the A6 e-tron as well as the A5 we wrote about several weeks ago, and another model you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. MUNICH—The sedan is not quite dead—at least not yet. While it's tru

The climate is changing so fast that we haven’t seen how bad extreme weather could get

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Enlarge (credit: Peter Zelei Images via Getty Images ) Extreme weather is, by definition, rare on our planet. Ferocious storms, searing heatwaves, and biting cold snaps illustrate what the climate is capable of at its worst. However,