The World Health Organization on Friday released a formal statement blasting a US-funded vaccine trial as "unethical," because it would withhold an established, safe, and potentially lifesaving vaccine against hepatitis B from some newborns in Guinea-Bissau, Africa.

"In its current form, and based on publicly available information, the trial is inconsistent with established ethical and scientific principles," the WHO concluded, after providing a bullet-point list of reasons the trial was harmful and low quality.

The trial has drawn widespread condemnation from health experts since notice of the US funding was published in the Federal Register in December. The notice revealed that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—had awarded $1.6 million to Danish researchers for their non-competitive, unsolicited proposal to conduct the trial.

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This spring, a Southern California beach town will become the first city in the country where municipal parking enforcement vehicles will use an AI system looking for potential bike lane violations.

Beginning in April, the City of Santa Monica will bring Hayden AI’s scanning technology to seven cars in its parking enforcement fleet, expanding beyond similar cameras already mounted on city buses.

“The more we can reduce the amount of illegal parking, the safer we can make it for bike riders,” Charley Territo, chief growth officer at Hayden AI, told Ars.

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Verizon this week imposed a new roadblock for people who want to pay off device installment plans early in order to get their phones unlocked. The latest version of Verizon's device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off their device installment plan online or in the Verizon app.

Payments made over the phone also trigger a 35-day waiting period, as do payments made at Verizon Authorized Retailers. Getting an immediate unlock apparently requires paying off the device plan at a Verizon corporate store.

Unlocking a phone allows it to be used on another network, letting customers switch from one carrier to another. Previously, the 35-day waiting period for unlocks was only applied when a customer paid off the plan with a Verizon gift card.

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Amazon and Flock Safety have ended a partnership that would've given law enforcement access to a vast web of Ring cameras.

The decision came after Amazon faced substantial backlash for airing a Super Bowl ad that was meant to be warm and fuzzy, but instead came across as disturbing and dystopian.

The ad begins with a young girl surprised to receive a puppy as a gift. It then warns that 10 million dogs go missing annually. Showing a series of lost dog posters, the ad introduces a new "Search Party" feature for Ring cameras that promises to revolutionize how neighbors come together to locate missing pets.

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You might have noticed some reporting a few days ago that Android 17 was rolling out in beta form, but that didn't happen. For reasons Google still has not explained, the release was canceled. Two days later, Android 17 is here for real. If you've got a recent Pixel device, you can try the latest version today, but don't expect big changes just yet—there's still a long way to go before release.

Google will probably have more to say about feature changes for Android 17 in the coming months, but this first wide release is aimed mostly at testing system and API changes. One of the biggest changes in the beta is expanded support for adaptive apps, which ensures that apps can scale to different screen sizes. That makes apps more usable on large-screen devices like tablets and foldables with multiple displays.

We first saw this last year in Android 16, but developers were permitted to opt out of support. The new adaptive app roadmap puts an end to that. Any app that targets Android 17 (API level 37) must support resizing and windowed multitasking. Apps can continue to target the older API for the time being, but Google filters apps from the Play Store if they don't keep up.

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Longtime fans of the cult TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000 know that the series’ one constant is change (well, that and bad movies).

The show’s cast and crew were in a near-constant state of flux, a byproduct of the show's existence as a perennial bubble show produced in the Twin Cities rather than a TV-and-comedy hub like New York or LA. It was rare, especially toward the middle of its 10-season original run on national TV, for the performers in front of the camera (and the writers’ room, since they were all the same people) to stay the same for more than a season or two.

Series creator Joel Hodgson embraced that spirit of change for the show's Kickstarter-funded, Netflix-aired revival in the mid-2010s, featuring a brand-new cast and mostly new writers. And that change only accelerated in the show's brief post-Netflix "Gizmoplex" era, which featured a revolving cast of performers that could change from episode to episode. Hodgson leaned into the idea that as long as there were silhouettes and puppets talking in front of a bad movie, it didn't matter much who was doing the talking.

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There are plenty of unanswered questions about the origin of life on Earth. But the research community has largely reached consensus that one of the key steps was the emergence of an RNA molecule that could replicate itself. RNA, like its more famous relative DNA, can carry genetic information. But it can also fold up into three-dimensional structures that act as catalysts. These two features have led to the suggestion that early life was protein-free, with RNA handling both heredity and catalyzing a simple metabolism.

For this to work, one of the reactions that the early RNAs would need to catalyze is the copying of RNA molecules, without which any sort of heritability would be impossible. While we've found a number of catalytic RNAs that can copy other molecules, none have been able to perform a key reaction: making a copy of themselves. Now, however, a team has found an incredibly short piece of RNA—just 45 bases long—that can make a copy of itself.

Finding an RNA polymerase

We have identified a large number of catalytic RNAs (generically called ribozymes, for RNA-based enzymes), and some of them can catalyze reactions involving other RNAs. A handful of these are ligases, which link together two RNA molecules. In some cases, they need these molecules to be held together by a third RNA molecule that base pairs with both of them. We've only identified a few that can act as polymerases, which add RNA bases to a growing molecule, one at a time, with each new addition base pairing with a template molecule.

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Autonomous vehicles have a lot of potential. As long as you program them right, they won't speed, won't break traffic laws, and won't get drunk, high, abusive, or violent. And the technology has been getting much more capable, even as some of the hype has died down, taking some of the related companies with it. Waymo still easily leads the field and is already operating commercially in six cities across America, with a dozen more (plus London) coming soon. Waymos can even drop you off and pick you up at the airport in Phoenix and San Francisco.

Soon, Waymo will begin deploying its sixth-generation Waymo Driver, using upfitted Zeekr Ojai minivans, adding to the Jaguar I-Paces that have become so common on San Francisco streets and to its fleet of Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric vehicles. It has upgraded the cameras, lidar, and radar, meaning the cars can better sense their environments at night and in inclement weather. There are even microphones that can pick up sounds like sirens to better inform the robotaxi of the direction the emergency vehicle(s) are coming from.

But even with all these advances since the pod-like two-seater that predates even the Waymo name, there are still a few things that remain beyond a robotaxi's capabilities. Like closing a door a passenger left open on their way out. All the sophisticated sensors and high-powered computer processing in the world are useless if the car can't move until the door closes and there's no one there to give it a hand.

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The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, does not often post on the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. But on Monday, Bezos did, sharing a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows on X.

The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos' privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, "The Tortoise and the Hare," in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.

Bezos' foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space community by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk's thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars.

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I’m not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I’ve worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial.

So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy.

Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani. The site looks like a bare-bones version of other well-known freelance sites like Fiverr and UpWork.

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Welcome to Edition 8.29 of the Rocket Report! We have a stuffed report this week with news from across the launch spectrum. Long-term, probably the most significant development this week was a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket successfully launching and then executing a picture-perfect ocean landing. China is catching up rapidly to the United States when it comes to reusable launch.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Orbex is going away. The UK-based launch company Orbex has entered insolvency proceedings after a planned takeover by European space logistics startup The Exploration Company fell through, European Spaceflight reports. In a statement, Orbex said the decision came after all "fundraising, merger and acquisition opportunities had all concluded unsuccessfully." For anyone paying attention, this decision should not come as a surprise. A decade into its existence, Orbex had yet to produce demonstrable, ready-for-flight hardware.

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Pressure is mounting on tech companies to shield users from unlawful government requests that advocates say are making it harder to reliably share information about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) online.

Alleging that ICE officers are being doxed or otherwise endangered, Trump officials have spent the last year targeting an unknown number of users and platforms with demands to censor content. Early lawsuits show that platforms have caved, even though experts say they could refuse these demands without a court order.

In a lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) accused Attorney General Pam Bondi and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of coercing tech companies into removing a wide range of content "to control what the public can see, hear, or say about ICE operations."

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The heavy version of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket launched for the first time Thursday, hauling 32 spacecraft to low-Earth orbit for Amazon's satellite broadband constellation.

The Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on the northeastern coast of South America at 11:45 am EST (16:45 UTC), quickly soaring into a clear sky at the tropical spaceport on the power of a hydrogen-fueled main engine and four strap-on solid rocket boosters.

This Ariane 6 configuration, called Ariane 64, is the first to use the rocket's full complement of four boosters. Collectively, the rocket generated more than 3.4 million pounds of thrust (15,400 kilonewtons) of thrust as it steered northeast over the Atlantic Ocean. Less than two hours later, the rocket's upper stage released all 32 of Amazon's satellites into an on-target orbit at an altitude of 289 miles (465 kilometers).

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On Thursday, OpenAI released its first production AI model to run on non-Nvidia hardware, deploying the new GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark coding model on chips from Cerebras. The model delivers code at more than 1,000 tokens (chunks of data) per second, which is reported to be roughly 15 times faster than its predecessor. To compare, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 in its new premium-priced fast mode reaches about 2.5 times its standard speed of 68.2 tokens per second, although it is a larger and more capable model than Spark.

"Cerebras has been a great engineering partner, and we're excited about adding fast inference as a new platform capability," Sachin Katti, head of compute at OpenAI, said in a statement.

Codex-Spark is a research preview available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200/month) through the Codex app, command-line interface, and VS Code extension. OpenAI is rolling out API access to select design partners. The model ships with a 128,000-token context window and handles text only at launch.

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Vinay Prasad, the Trump administration's top vaccine regulator at the Food and Drug Administration, single-handedly decided to refuse to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine, overruling agency scientists, according to reports from Stat News and The Wall Street Journal.

Stat was first to report, based on unnamed FDA sources, that a team of career scientists at the agency was ready to review the vaccine and that David Kaslow, a top career official who reviews vaccines, even wrote a memo objecting to Prasad’s rejection. The memo reportedly included a detailed explanation of why the review should proceed.

The Wall Street Journal confirmed the report with its own sources, who added that FDA scientists attended an hourlong meeting with Prasad in early January, in which they laid out their objections to Prasad's plans to block the vaccine review. They reportedly told Prasad—a political appointee known for causing turmoil and espousing anti-vaccine rhetoric—that it was the wrong approach.

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Nicolas Cage has carved out a quirky niche for himself in recent years with such films as Color Out of Space (2019), Pig (2021), The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022), Dream Scenario (2023), and Longlegs (2024), among others. Now he's starring in Spider-Noir, a new live-action series based on the Marvel Comics character. Cage plays an aging private investigator and disillusioned superhero in 1930s New York. Prime Video released the first teaser in two forms: one in black and white—very Raymond Chandler-esque—and another in color, which the showrunners are calling "True Hue."

Marvel Comics created its "noir" line in 2009, reinterpreting familiar Marvel characters in an alternate universe, usually set during the Great Depression in the US. A version of the Spider-Noir character, voiced by Cage, briefly appeared in the animated masterpieces, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023). (He is set to reprise that role in the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse.)

Co-showrunner (with Steve Lightfoot) Oren Uziel is a film noir fan, so that Marvel series naturally appealed to him. The live-action series is still set in 1930s New York, but the spidery superhero is not Peter Parker. (Uziel thought the Parker character was too associated with a boyish high school type, which didn't really fit the noir vibe.) So Cage is playing Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled PI with a secret superhero identity, The Spider. Cage has described his portrayal as "70 percent Humphrey Bogart [specifically The Big Sleep] and 30 percent Bugs Bunny," which seems pretty on point for Cage's distinctively flamboyant style.

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Moments after liftoff from Florida's Space Coast early Thursday morning, a shower of sparks emerged in the exhaust plume of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. Seconds later, the rocket twisted on its axis before recovering and continuing the climb into orbit with a batch of US military satellites.

The sight may have appeared familiar to seasoned rocket watchers. Sixteen months ago, a Vulcan rocket lost one of its booster nozzles shortly after launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The rocket recovered from the malfunction and still reached the mission's planned orbit.

Details of Thursday's booster problem remain unclear. An investigation into the matter is underway, according to ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. But the circumstances resemble those of the booster malfunction in October 2024. Closeup video from Thursday's launch shows a fiery plume near the throat of one of the rocket's four solid-fueled boosters, the area where the motor's propellant casing connects to its bell-shaped exhaust nozzle. The throat drives super-hot gas from the burning solid propellant through the nozzle to generate thrust.

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In a widely expected move, the Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is revoking an analysis of greenhouse gases that laid the foundation for regulating their emissions by cars, power plants, and industrial sources. The analysis, called an endangerment finding, was initially ordered by the US Supreme Court in 2007 and completed during the Obama administration; it has, in theory, served as the basis of all government regulations of carbon dioxide emissions since.

In practice, lawsuits and policy changes between Democratic and Republican administrations have meant it has had little impact. In fact, the first Trump administration left the endangerment finding in place, deciding it was easier to respond to it with weak regulations than it was to challenge its scientific foundations, given the strength of the evidence for human-driven climate change.

Legal tactics

The second Trump administration, however, was prepared to tackle the science head-on, gathering a group of contrarians to write a report questioning that evidence. It did not go well, either scientifically or legally.

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Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson has accused Apple of violating US law by suppressing conservative-leaning news outlets on Apple News.

Ferguson pointed to research by a pro-Trump group that accused Apple News of suppressing articles by Fox News, the New York Post, Daily Mail, Breitbart, and The Gateway Pundit. The FTC chair claims that Apple News might be violating promises made to consumers in its terms of service, but his letter doesn't cite any specific provisions from the Apple terms that might have been violated.

"Recently, there have been reports that Apple News has systematically promoted news articles from left-wing news outlets and suppressed news articles from more conservative publications," Ferguson wrote in the letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook yesterday. He said the "reports raise serious questions about whether Apple News is acting in accordance with its terms of service and its representations to consumers, as well as the reasonable consumer expectations of the tens of millions of Americans who use Apple News."

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AI-driven memory and storage price hikes have been the defining feature of the PC industry in 2026, and hobbyists have been hit the hardest—companies like Apple with lots of buying power have been able to limit the price increases for their PCs, phones, and other gadgets so far, but smaller outfits like Valve and Raspberry Pi haven't been so lucky.

Framework, the company behind repairable and upgradeable computer designs like the Laptop 13, Laptop 16, and Laptop 12, is also taking a hard hit by price increases. The company stopped selling standalone RAM sticks in November 2025 and has increased prices on one or more of its systems every month since then; this week's increases are hitting the Framework Desktop and the DIY Editions of its various laptops particularly hard.

The price increases are affecting both standalone SODIMM memory modules and the soldered-down LPDDR5X memory used in the Framework Desktop. Patel says that standalone RAM sticks are being priced "as close as we can to the weighted average cost of our purchases from suppliers." In September, buying an 8GB stick of RAM with a Framework Laptop 13 cost $40; it currently costs $130. A 96GB DDR5 kit of two 48GB sticks costs $1,340, up from $480 in September.

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When Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headset launched in February 2024, users were frustrated at the lack of a proper YouTube app—a significant disappointment given the device's focus on video content consumption, and YouTube's strong library of immersive VR and 360 videos. That complaint continued through the release of the second-generation Vision Pro last year, including in our review.

Now, two years later, an official YouTube app from Google has launched on the Vision Pro's app store. It's not just a port of the iPad app, either—it has panels arranged spatially in front of the user as you'd expect, and it supports 3D videos, as well as 360- and 180-degree ones.

YouTube's App Store listing says users can watch "every video on YouTube" (there's a screenshot of a special interface for Shorts vertical videos, for example) and that they get "the full signed-in experience" with watch history and so on.

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On Thursday, Google announced that "commercially motivated" actors have attempted to clone knowledge from its Gemini AI chatbot by simply prompting it. One adversarial session reportedly prompted the model more than 100,000 times across various non-English languages, collecting responses ostensibly to train a cheaper copycat.

Google published the findings in what amounts to a quarterly self-assessment of threats to its own products that frames the company as the victim and the hero, which is not unusual in these self-authored assessments. Google calls the illicit activity "model extraction" and considers it intellectual property theft, which is a somewhat loaded position, given that Google's LLM was built from materials scraped from the Internet without permission.

Google is also no stranger to the copycat practice. In 2023, The Information reported that Google's Bard team had been accused of using ChatGPT outputs from ShareGPT, a public site where users share chatbot conversations, to help train its own chatbot. Senior Google AI researcher Jacob Devlin, who created the influential BERT language model, warned leadership that this violated OpenAI's terms of service, then resigned and joined OpenAI. Google denied the claim but reportedly stopped using the data.

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Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped out one of the dominant species of these forests, the American chestnut, killing an estimated 3 billion trees. While new saplings continue to sprout from the stumps of the former trees, the fungus persists, killing them before they can seed a new generation.

But thanks in part to trees planted in areas where the two fungi don't grow well, the American chestnut isn't extinct. And efforts to revive it in its native range have continued, despite the long generation times needed to breed resistant trees. In Thursday's issue of Science, researchers describe their efforts to apply modern genomic techniques and exhaustive testing to identify the best route to restoring chestnuts to their native range.

Multiple paths to restoration

While the American chestnut is functionally extinct—it's no longer a participant in the ecosystems it once dominated—it's most certainly not extinct. Two Asian fungi that have killed it off in its native range; one causes chestnut blight, while a less common pathogen causes a root rot disease. Both prefer warmer, humid environments and persist there because they can grow asymptomatically on distantly related trees, such as oaks. Still, chestnuts planted outside the species' original range—primarily in drier areas of western North America—have continued to thrive.

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An elephant's trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla chip. That's because the trunk is highly sensitive when it comes to sensing touch. Scientists have determined that the whiskers lining the trunk are crucial for that sensitivity thanks to their unique structure, amounting to a kind of innate "material intelligence, according to a new paper published in the journal Science.

As previously reported, there is a long history of studying whiskers (vibrissae) in mammals. Rats, cats, tree squirrels, manatees, harbor seals, sea otters, pole cats, shrews, tammar wallabies, sea lions, and naked mole-rats all share strikingly similar basic whisker anatomies, according to various prior studies. Among other potential applications, such research could one day enable scientists to build artificial whiskers as tactile sensors in robotics, as well as learn more about human touch.

Whiskers are much more complex than one might think, both in structure and function. Rats, for instance, have about 30 large whiskers and dozens of smaller ones, part of a complex “scanning sensorimotor system” that enables the rat to perform such diverse tasks as texture analysis, active touch for path finding, pattern recognition, and object location, just by scanning the terrain with its whiskers.

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Years before the Chevrolet Bolt or Tesla Model 3, the Nissan Leaf was a good-faith attempt by a major automaker to bring electric vehicles to the mass market. But even in its second-generation, the Leaf was hamstrung by poor battery management and was soon left behind. For its third take on the Leaf, Nissan fixed the earlier cars' key flaw by adding liquid-cooling for the battery pack. Better yet, the new Leaf is built on a dedicated EV platform that offers better interior space and range efficiency than the hatchback it replaces, despite taking up less road space.

Our first drive of the car took place last year in San Diego, a region where the roads tend to flatter a car. Our first impression was positive enough to place the Leaf first among the cars we drove in 2025. Sure, if money were no object, I'd take that hybrid Porsche 911 that came in second, but you could buy five fully loaded Leafs for the same price as a bare-bones Carrera GTS. And for those of us in the real world, money usually is an object. But a longer test with the Leaf was in order to see how the electric Nissan held up in the day-to-day grind.

Price and specs

In time, Nissan will offer an entry-level Leaf with a 52 kWh battery pack and a bit less power. For now, though, the company is only importing cars with a 75 kWh (usable) pack and a 214 hp (160 kW), 262 lb-ft (355 Nm) electric motor, which drives the front wheels. Nissan has managed to keep the price sensible, too; the S+ trim starts at $29,990. Riding on the smallest 18-inch wheels, the S+ has the longest range at 303 miles (488 km), but this version does without some of the features many EV drivers may consider essential, like heated front seats and a heat pump.

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It's been about a month since Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—an anti-vaccine activist and lawyer who has no background in medicine, health, or science—released dietary guidance for Americans. It's going about as well as expected for a man who drinks raw milk, peddles beef tallow, swims in sewage-tainted water, and keeps roadkill meat in his freezer. That is to say, it's going badly—so badly that even his favorite AI chatbot is openly defecting.

Of course, this hasn't slowed Kennedy. On Wednesday, he and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins held an event in Washington, DC, to celebrate what they called the "implementation" of the dietary guidance, which is represented in an upside-down food pyramid—or a funnel.

However, the event, which lasted about an hour, seemed mostly focused on honoring a commercial produced to promote the nutrition guidance and a new website showcasing it, RealFood.gov. That commercial, which aired during last weekend's Super Bowl, featured tightly framed shots of world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson, who made stigmatizing remarks about how he felt "fat and nasty" earlier in life and consequently "just wanted to kill myself." He went on to decry America's "obese, fudgy" people and lambasted "processed food," before eating an apple.

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US businesses and consumers paid nearly 90 percent of the cost of Donald Trump’s tariffs last year, according to new Federal Reserve research that undercuts the president’s claim that foreign companies would bear the burden.

The study by the New York Fed found that the majority of tariff costs were passed through to Americans in the first 11 months of 2025, although exporters shouldered an increasing amount as the year progressed.

“Our results show that the bulk of the tariff incidence continues to fall on US firms and consumers,” the study’s authors wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

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It's not every day that a classic PC game gets a new content expansion 25 years after its last major update. But that's what happened last night, as Blizzard suddenly released new "Reign of the Warlock" DLC that adds a new class, new end-game challenges, and new inventory-management options to the classic Diablo II.

To be clear, the new DLC is technically not for the original 2000 release of Diablo II (which was still getting patches as of 2016) but for the game's 2021 Resurrected remaster. Still, that remastered version has gameplay and animations that are extremely faithful to the original, making yesterday's surprise update the kind of content drop that players have been waiting for since 2001's "Lord of Destruction" expansion.

The "Reign of the Warlock" DLC lets you "command forbidden power" as a new class that "wields forbidden arts, bridles hellfire and shadow, and dominates demons," according to the in-game class selection screen description. By way of backstory, Blizzard writes that most Warlocks "have the means to lead a lavish lifestyle but find the pursuit of luxury and ease stale. Instead, they leverage their elevated status in Sanctuary to hunt down lost knowledge that would enable them to continue the legacy of Horazon."

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We are now a few years into the AI revolution, and talk has shifted from who has the best chatbot to whose AI agent can do the most things on your behalf. Unfortunately, AI agents are still rough around the edges, so tasking them with anything important is not a great idea. OpenAI launched its Atlas agent late last year, which we found to be modestly useful, and now it's Google's turn.

Unlike the OpenAI agent, Google's new Auto Browse agent has extraordinary reach because it's part of Chrome, the world's most popular browser by a wide margin. Google began rolling out Auto Browse (in preview) earlier this month to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers, allowing them to send the agent across the web to complete tasks.

I've taken Chrome's agent for a spin to see whether you can trust it to handle tedious online work for you. For each test, I lay out the problem I need to solve, how I prompted the robot, and how well (or not) it handled the job.

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Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.

Construction workers first carved the footprint for the launch pad from the Florida wetlands more than 60 years ago. NASA used the site to launch Saturn V rockets dispatching astronauts to the Moon, then converted the pad for the Space Shuttle program. The last shuttle flight lifted off from Pad 39A in 2011, and the agency leased the site to SpaceX for use as the departure point for the company's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets.

SpaceX started launching from Pad 39A in 2017, then installed a new Crew Access Arm on the pad's tower the following year, replacing the aging shuttle-era arm that connected to the hatches of NASA's orbiters. SpaceX added the new arm ahead of the first test flight of the company's human-rated Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2019. Astronauts started using the pathway, suspended more than 200 feet above the pad surface, beginning with the first crew flight on a Dragon spacecraft in 2020.

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On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the "Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal." Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot at reviving the fortunes of the US's most polluting source of electricity: an executive order that would make the military buy it.

Coal is the second most expensive source of power for the US grid, eclipsed by gas, wind, solar, hydro—everything other than nuclear power. It also produces the most pollution, including particulates that damage human lungs, chemicals that contribute to acid rain, and coal ash that contains many toxic metals. It also emits the most carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced. Prior to Trump's return to office, the US grid had been rapidly moving away from its use, including during his first term.

Despite the long-standing Republican claims to support free markets, the second Trump administration has determined that the only way to keep coal viable is direct government intervention. Its initial attempts involved declaring an energy emergency and then using that to justify forcing coal plants slated for closure to continue operations. The emergency declaration relied on what appears to be a tenuous interpretation of the Federal Power Act, and the administration was already facing a lawsuit challenging these actions.

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On Tuesday night, the Federal Aviation Administration closed airspace up to 18,000 feet above the El Paso International Airport in Texas, saying the restrictions would be in place for 10 days. Then, less than 10 hours later, the federal agency reopened the airspace, allowing planes to land and take off at the busy airport.

About an hour after lifting the restrictions, US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy, whose responsibilities include overseeing the FAA, explained the unexpected closure by saying, "The FAA and DOW acted swiftly to address a cartel drone incursion." (The Trump Administration refers to the Department of Defense as the Department of War, or DOW, although its legal name remains the former.)

Not everyone agrees with Duffy's account.

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Last May, law enforcement authorities around the world scored a key win when they hobbled the infrastructure of Lumma, an infostealer that infected nearly 395,000 Windows computers over just a two-month span leading up to the international operation. Researchers said Wednesday that Lumma is once again “back at scale” in hard-to-detect attacks that pilfer credentials and sensitive files.

Lumma, also known as Lumma Stealer, first appeared in Russian-speaking cybercrime forums in 2022. Its cloud-based malware-as-a-service model provided a sprawling infrastructure of domains for hosting lure sites offering free cracked software, games, and pirated movies, as well as command-and-control channels and everything else a threat actor needed to run their infostealing enterprise. Within a year, Lumma was selling for as much as $2,500 for premium versions. By the spring of 2024, the FBI counted more than 21,000 listings on crime forums. Last year, Microsoft said Lumma had become the “go-to tool” for multiple crime groups, including Scattered Spider, one of the most prolific groups.

Takedowns are hard

The FBI and an international coalition of its counterparts took action early last year. In May, they said they seized 2,300 domains, command-and-control infrastructure, and crime marketplaces that had enabled the infostealer to thrive. Recently, however, the malware has made a comeback, allowing it to infect a significant number of machines again.

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On February 1, Robert Tinney, the illustrator whose airbrushed cover paintings defined the look and feel of pioneering computer magazine Byte for over a decade, died at age 78 in Baker, Louisiana, according to a memorial posted on his official website.

As the primary cover artist for Byte from 1975 to the late 1980s, Tinney became one of the first illustrators to give the abstract world of personal computing a coherent visual language, translating topics like artificial intelligence, networking, and programming into vivid, surrealist-influenced paintings that a generation of computer enthusiasts grew up with.

Tinney went on to paint more than 80 covers for Byte, working almost entirely in airbrushed Designers Gouache, a medium he chose for its opaque, intense colors and smooth finish. He said the process of creating each cover typically took about a week of painting once a design was approved, following phone conversations with editors about each issue's theme. He cited René Magritte and M.C. Escher as two of his favorite artists, and fans often noticed their influence in his work.

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A little more than two months ago, a Rocket Lab employee called the Stennis Space Center Fire Department from the nearby A3 test stand. There was a grass fire where Archimedes engines undergo testing. Could they please send personnel over?

According to the fire station's November 30 dispatcher log, the employee said, "The fire started during a test when an anomaly caused an electrical box to catch fire."

Satellite imagery from before and after the anomaly appears to show that the roof had been blown off the left test cell, one of two at the test stand at the historic NASA facility in southern Mississippi. One person with knowledge of the anomaly said, "The characterization of this as an electrical fire doesn't reflect what actually occurred. This was a catastrophic engine explosion that resulted in significant infrastructure damage."

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The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru's southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long puzzled over the foundation for that prosperity, and it seems one critical factor was bird poop, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE.

“Seabird guano may seem trivial, yet our study suggests this potent resource could have significantly contributed to sociopolitical and economic change in the Peruvian Andes,” said co-author Jacob Bongers, a digital archaeologist at the University of Sydney. “Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize (corn), and this agricultural surplus crucially helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy, driving their trade, wealth, population growth and regional influence, and shaped their strategic alliance with the Inca Empire. In ancient Andean cultures, fertiliser was power.”

Last November, Bongers co-authored a paper detailing evidence supporting the hypothesis that the mysterious "Band of Holes" on Mount Sierpe in the Andes might have been an ancient marketplace. Aerial photographs from the 1930s first revealed that long row of around 5,200 precisely aligned holes, seemingly organized into blocked sections, most likely constructed by the Chincha Kingdom. Scholars had suggested various hypotheses for what the site's purpose may have been: defense, storage, or accounting, perhaps, or maybe to collect water and capture fog for local gardens. But nobody had any strong evidence for those suggestions.

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On Wednesday, former OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig published a guest essay in The New York Times announcing that she resigned from the company on Monday, the same day OpenAI began testing advertisements inside ChatGPT. Hitzig, an economist and published poet who holds a junior fellowship at the Harvard Society of Fellows, spent two years at OpenAI helping shape how its AI models were built and priced. She wrote that OpenAI's advertising strategy risks repeating the same mistakes that Facebook made a decade ago.

"I once believed I could help the people building A.I. get ahead of the problems it would create," Hitzig wrote. "This week confirmed my slow realization that OpenAI seems to have stopped asking the questions I'd joined to help answer."

Hitzig did not call advertising itself immoral. Instead, she argued that the nature of the data at stake makes ChatGPT ads especially risky. Users have shared medical fears, relationship problems, and religious beliefs with the chatbot, she wrote, often "because people believed they were talking to something that had no ulterior agenda." She called this accumulated record of personal disclosures "an archive of human candor that has no precedent."

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Since its release in the fall of 2021, Microsoft's Windows 11 has received an "annual feature update" in the second half of every year. These feature updates sometimes include new Windows features and other changes that are too large to roll out in a typical monthly Windows Update, and users need to upgrade to new ones to keep getting security patches and other features. The currently supported versions are Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, released in the fall of 2024 and 2025, respectively.

This week, Microsoft disrupted that update cadence by announcing more information on Windows 11 26H1, which is best described not as an update to Windows 11 but as another version of the operating system entirely. That's because 26H1 is a "scoped" release intended exclusively for new PCs, starting with those based on Qualcomm's recently announced Snapdragon X2 Elite chips.

Microsoft's support page explains why this release is strange: It won't be released broadly to other Windows 11 PCs, which should continue to use either 24H2 or 25H2. PCs running 24H2 or 25H2 will never be offered an update to version 26H1, though testers in the Windows Insider Program's early access Canary channel are able to install it to other PCs if they want. (Build numbers for Windows 11 26H1 start with 28000, compared to 26100 for 24H2 and 26200 for 25H2.)

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Like most cloud-enabled home security cameras, Google's Nest products don't provide long-term storage unless you pay a monthly fee. That video may not vanish into the digital aether right on time, though. Investigators involved with the high-profile abduction of Nancy Guthrie have released video from Guthrie's Nest doorbell camera—video that was believed to have been deleted because Guthrie wasn't paying for the service.

Google's cameras connect to the recently upgraded Home Premium subscription service. For $10 per month, you get 30 days of stored events, and $20 gets you 60 days of events with 10 days of the full video. If you don't pay anything, Google only saves three hours of event history. After that, the videos are deleted, at least as far as the user is concerned. Newer Nest cameras have limited local storage that can cache clips for a few hours in case connectivity drops out, but there is no option for true local storage. Guthrie's camera was reportedly destroyed by the perpetrators.

Expired videos are no longer available to the user, and Google won't restore them even if you later upgrade to a premium account. However, that doesn't mean the data is truly gone. Nancy Guthrie was abducted from her home in the early hours of February 1, and at first, investigators said there was no video of the crime because the doorbell camera was not on a paid account. Yet, video showing a masked individual fiddling with the camera was published on February 10.

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The National Labor Relations Board abandoned a Biden-era complaint against SpaceX after a finding that the agency does not have jurisdiction over Elon Musk's space company. The US labor board said SpaceX should instead be regulated under the Railway Labor Act, which governs labor relations at railroad and airline companies.

The Railway Labor Act is enforced by a separate agency, the National Mediation Board, and has different rules than the National Labor Relations Act enforced by the NLRB. For example, the Railway Labor Act has an extensive dispute-resolution process that makes it difficult for railroad and airline employees to strike. Employers regulated under the Railway Labor Act are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act.

In January 2024, an NLRB regional director alleged in a complaint that SpaceX illegally fired eight employees who, in an open letter, criticized CEO Musk as a “frequent source of embarrassment." The complaint sought reinstatement of the employees, back pay, and letters of apology to the fired employees.

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Apple has just released the latest major updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, and all the other operating systems it released back in September of 2025. The 26.3 updates for these operating systems are fairly mild, focusing mostly on bug fixes and security patches, but Apple is adding a handful of iPhone features designed to make it easier to use third-party devices in Apple's ecosystem.

The first is a "transfer to Android" feature that will facilitate switching away from Apple's phones into the Android ecosystem. Apple offers to transfer "photos, messages, notes, apps, and more," as well as the user's phone number, but won't transfer things like Bluetooth pairing information or sensitive data from the Health app.

Whether third-party apps can have their data transferred is likely tied to the AppMigrationKit developer framework that Apple added in iOS 26.1. Apps using this framework can import and export data to and from other devices and also access and download content the app has stored in the cloud. Apple notes that AppMigrationKit only functions for transfers from an Apple device to a non-Apple device; Apple already has several systems in place for preserving and transferring data and settings when upgrading from one iPhone to another.

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China's space program, striving to land astronauts on the Moon by 2030, carried out a test flight of a new reusable booster and crew capsule late Tuesday (US time), and the results were spectacular.

The demonstration "marks a significant breakthrough in the development of [China's] manned lunar exploration program," the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement. China and the United States are racing to accomplish the next human landing on the Moon in a competition for national prestige and lunar resources. The Long March 10 rocket and Mengzhou spacecraft, both tested Tuesday, are core elements of China's lunar architecture.

The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule's safety system. The test began with liftoff of the Long March 10 booster from a new launch pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 10 pm EST Tuesday (03:00 UTC or 11 am Beijing time Wednesday).

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In 2022, Apple announced it was adopting a "new Home architecture" for its smart home ecosystem to improve its performance and reliability and make it possible to support different kinds of accessories. Although it was mostly an invisible update when it worked properly, some users who attempted to switch to the new architecture when it first rolled out in iOS 16.2 ran into slow or unresponsive devices and other problems, prompting Apple to pause the rollout and re-release it as part of iOS 16.4.

If you put off transitioning to the new architecture because of those early teething problems or for some other reason, Apple is forcing the issue starting today: You'll need to update to the new Home architecture if you want to continue using the Home app, and older iOS and macOS versions that don't support the new architecture will no longer be able to control your smart home devices. The old version of the Home app and the old Home/HomeKit architecture are no longer supported.

If you're like me, you hit an "upgrade" button in your Home app years ago and then mostly forgot about it—if you open the Home app on a modern iPhone, iPad, or Mac and don't see an update prompt, it means you're already using the updated architecture and don't need to worry about it.

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Following three of the warmest years on record, as scientists reckon with climate tipping points and states and cities grapple with the escalating cost of extreme weather and more intense wildfires, the Trump administration this week is expected to formally eliminate the US government’s role in controlling greenhouse gas pollution.

By revoking its 17-year-old scientific finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency will demolish the legal underpinning of its authority to act on climate change under the Clean Air Act.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will be alongside President Donald Trump for an event Wednesday focused on boosting US use of coal, as mercury and air toxics standards are repealed. That is expected to be a prelude to Zeldin finalizing the endangerment finding repeal, an assignment the president handed him in an executive order signed on the first day of his second term in office.

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The Federal Aviation Administration abruptly halted flights into and out of El Paso International Airport on Tuesday night at 11:30 pm local time (1:30 am EST Wednesday) and said the restrictions would remain in place for 10 days.

In its notice, the FAA also restricted air space extended in a radius of 10 nautical miles from the airport. Violators were subject to being shot down, the agency said.

However, less than 10 hours later and without any additional explanation, the FAA ended the restrictions. "The temporary closure of airspace over El Paso has been lifted," the federal agency said on social media. "There is no threat to commercial aviation. All flights will resume as normal."

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A long time ago, in (I believe) an issue of Car Magazine from the mid-1990s, the designer Gordon Murray shared his thoughts about a possible four-door follow-up to the McLaren F1.

Road cars weren't really his thing. Until then, his career had been focused on Formula 1 car design, and he brought that sport's obsession with weight savings with him. Were he to design a sedan, he'd trim the interior with textile, not leather. After all, wool made fine suits and coats, Murray reasoned, and it would save weight.

A four-door McLaren never happened during his tenure, nor has one appeared since. Murray now runs his own boutique hypercar company, which also builds no sedans. But the idea that high-end cars could use something other than leather has stuck with me, especially after driving BMW's i7, which  debuted in 2022 with a premium cashmere wool interior. More recently, new EVs have experimented with interesting textile alternatives to leather. Two good examples are the BMW iX3 and the Audi A6, though neither can be ordered with these textile options in the US.

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The Food and Drug Administration has refused to review Moderna's application for an mRNA flu vaccine, the company revealed Tuesday.

While the move came as a surprise to the high-profile vaccine maker, it is just the latest hostility toward vaccines—and mRNA vaccines in particular—from an agency overseen by the fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In his first year in office, Kennedy has already dramatically slashed childhood vaccine recommendations and canceled $500 million in research funding for mRNA vaccines against potential pandemic threats.

In a news release late Tuesday, Moderna said it was blindsided by the FDA's refusal, which the FDA cited as being due to the design of the company's Phase 3 trial for its mRNA flu vaccine, dubbed mRNA-1010. Specifically, the FDA's rejection was over the comparator vaccine Moderna used.

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The upgraded Super Heavy booster slated to launch SpaceX's next Starship flight has completed cryogenic proof testing, clearing a hurdle that resulted in the destruction of the company's previous booster.

SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: "Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster's redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength."

Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey's Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster's propellant tanks on launch day.

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Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website's anonymous maintainer.

In a request for comment page, Wikipedia's volunteer editors were presented with three options. Option A is to remove or hide all Archive.today links and add the site to the spam blacklist. Option B is to deprecate Archive.today, discouraging future link additions while keeping the existing archived links. Option C is to do nothing and maintain the status quo.

Option A in particular would be a huge change, as more than 695,000 links to Archive.today are used across 400,000 or so Wikipedia pages. Archive.today, also known as Archive.is, is a website that saves snapshots of webpages and is commonly used to bypass news paywalls.

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xAI co-founder Tony Wu abruptly announced his resignation from the company late Monday night, the latest in a string of senior executives to leave the Grok-maker in recent months.

In a post on social media, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at xAI, but said it was "time for my next chapter." The current era is one where "a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine what's possible," he wrote.

The mention of what "a small team" can do could hint at a potential reason for Wu's departure. xAI reportedly had 1,200 employees as of March 2025, a number that included AI engineers and those focused more on the X social network. That number also included 900 employees that served solely as "AI tutors," though roughly 500 of those were reportedly laid off in September.

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