Ars Technica

A person in Washington state has died from bird flu after exposure at an infected dairy farm, state health officials reported Sunday. It marks the third human bird flu death in the US since a strain of highly pathogenic (H5) avian influenza (HPAI) made the unprecedented jump from wild, migratory birds to dairy cows, which was first reported in the US in March 2024. The person who died was a Yakima County resident and was said to have had underlying health conditions, which could have made the pe

The year was 1998. Britney Spears topped the charts, Bill Clinton was impeached, and a couple of little websites called Google and Ars Technica came online. It was also the year Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. Google, which has come to dominate the Internet (Ars is still working on that), is celebrating the imminent release of the Ocarina of Time remaster by temporarily transporting us back to that storied year with a search Easter egg. To access the Go

Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, is apparently pushing the tech company’s development of household robots—and the first to debut may be a home robot designed to autonomously roam around while supporting FaceTime calls and switching lights on whenever a person enters the room. People who worked on Apple’s robotic projects told The Information that the AI-driven home robot, code-named J595, could be named HomeView Ultra in line with Apple’s new HomeView stationary smart display. The company is report

Last week, Anthropic introduced a new system prompt designed to stop its Claude models from re-creating specific, existing video games. While that move could help shield Anthropic from some liability, it's unlikely to slow much of the massive wave of AI-assisted game porting and copying that has emerged in recent months. A social media user and AI decompilation enthusiast going by the name "chasm" was among the first to note the prompt change late last week, saying a new rule seemed to be added

Chinese space officials confirmed this weekend that the Asian nation plans to land its astronauts on the Moon within three years. At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country's most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing "before 2030." China's lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960

Formula 1 has a new World Drivers' Champion. Just a few months after turning 20, Kimi Antonelli sealed his first title this weekend at Mexico City, becoming the sport’s youngest-ever champion. Elsewhere, there was drama aplenty, perhaps a consequence of the thin air affecting decision-making in some cases. The race was Ferrari’s to win, but yet again, the team handed victory to a rival this season, in this case Red Bull. Further down the grid, we saw a last-minute driver change in the Haas team,

One of the most useful gadgets in my kitchen is now a screen that never asks me for anything. I recently bought a $48 DIY display kit from Seeed Studio (yes, that's three E's), developed in collaboration with TRMNL, that lets me display whatever I want, using whichever software ecosystem I prefer. I previously built something similar by modding a Lenovo ThinkSmart View, which was selling for around $30 on eBay during a liquidation. The Lenovo device was only ever intended for business-to-busines

The Hubble Space Telescope still shines in the eyes of astronomers after 36 years in orbit, but it is not as nimble as it once was. Left alone, the observatory will plunge back into the atmosphere in the early-to-mid-2030s, closing the book on one of the most famous scientific instruments of the century. NASA last raised the orbit of Hubble in 2002, when the Space Shuttle Columbia visited the observatory for a servicing mission. The final shuttle servicing flight in 2009 did not reboost the tele

For a genuine fright this Halloween, you can turn your gaze to the southern border, where ravenous, flesh-eating maggots are festering and have taken to eating people's pets. This week, the country's New World Screwworm (NWS) infestation spread to a third state, Arizona, which joins New Mexico and Texas in being plagued by the horrifying parasites. To date, 74 animal cases have been identified in the US since the flies re-invaded the country in June. The flies lay hundreds of eggs in wounds and

Along with the rest of the world, we at Ars are mourning Sir Patrick Stewart—the beloved award-winning actor best known as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men franchise—who died Wednesday at the age of 86. A statement released by Stewart's representatives said: We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poi

Boom Supersonic CEO Blake Scholl recently declared “it’s time for a renaissance in energy and in supersonic flight” as the supersonic airliner company unveiled a Colorado factory dedicated to making gas turbines for AI data centers. But Boom may be facing turbulence after early backers for both ventures have questioned the company’s delivery timeline or backed out entirely. One of the company’s first customers, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, has expressed doubts about Boom’s original plan to d

An official extension for Anthropic’s Claude model was backdoored and threatened as many as 5,000 developers' machines, multiple sources reported Friday. Anthropic so far has yet to warn customers of the incident. The compromised package was a VS Code extension available in the marketplace of Cursor, a maker of AI-assisted developer tools, the company said Friday. The malicious version, 2.1.313, subsequently affected “at most 5,000 users,” presumably when they either downloaded it or their syste

On August 9, 2026, Dartmouth College provost Santiago Schnell wrote a Washington Post op-ed called "Universities are fighting AI cheating. But there’s a deeper problem." This week, Schnell discovered the depths of the problem himself as he resigned from the university after an advisory committee found that he failed to disclose significant AI use in an academic paper and in the Washington Post op-ed, even though publishers required such disclosure. Schnell didn't make it especially easy for the

A significant number of patients in the US lie to their doctors to get antibiotics they likely don't need, according to two new studies. While that may not be a startling revelation, the studies drills down on the phenomenon, finding that the lies patients tell are generally bad ones—and yet, they work almost all the time. In the two linked studies published Friday in JAMA Network Open, a team of researchers led by Alistair Thorpe at the University of Utah analyzed online survey data from over 1

As AI tools and agents have continued their march across all aspects of digital life, many companies are trying to use LLMs to improve the experience of purchasing goods and services on the Internet. Thus far, though, a vanishingly small number of people seem to be taking advantage of those capabilities, at least when it comes to using the popular food delivery app DoorDash with an outside AI agent. In a third-quarter earnings call Thursday, DoorDash co-founder and CEO Tony Xu responded to an an

In an announcement released Thursday, Fujifilm said it will invest roughly 10 billion yen (about $63 million) to increase its production capacity fivefold for an unlikely beneficiary of the AI era: magnetic tape. Fujifilm attributes the surge in archiving demand to the spread of generative AI, which the company remarked is producing "exponential growth" in data needs worldwide. The 5x increase in production capacity will be measured against fiscal year 2025 production levels. The investment in F

The US has charged five individuals as part of the first broad federal crackdown on “ghost students”—fraudsters who steal the identities of hundreds of Americans to pose as fake college students and steal student loans. In a press release Thursday, the Department of Justice said it had uncovered a large-scale scheme relying partly on AI. The DOJ seized more than $750,000 in cryptocurrency from “a network associated with Kenyan nationals" after data analysis helped flag likely fraudsters. Assista

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years. The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could b

General Motors marketed its Smart Driver system as a way for parents to monitor teen drivers or for adults to track their driving behavior. But in 2024, it emerged that GM had been sharing that data with brokers. Those brokers then sold the data to insurance companies, and some drivers found that their insurance became more expensive as a result. To make matters worse, many of those drivers claimed they had no knowledge of ever agreeing to share such data for such purposes. Last year, GM and its

Binance has suspended all withdrawals after the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange fell victim to what appears to be the biggest heist in history. The exchange put the “estimated total impact” of the hack at about $6.3 billion and said around $3 billion of affected assets, mainly stablecoins that act as cash for the crypto market, had been frozen. But analysts at Elliptic said the attacker had changed about $3.3 billion into digital assets that could not be frozen and was working to cash th