Technology News

While almost no Chinese EVs are legally sold in the US, these are the workarounds that could allow eager enthusiasts to get them onto American roads—at a price.

Using environmental DNA analysis and traditional fishing techniques, researchers are seeking answers about the current population of axolotls in their natural habitat. The numbers are alarming.

Find great deals and promo codes for Visible at WIRED and save big, whether you're a long-time customer or a newbie.

Enjoy 15% off with Dell promo code, plus today's deals for up to $400 off laptops, workstations, and all things tech.

Honda's motorsport division must be doing some spring cleaning. Today, the Honda Racing Corporation announced that it's getting into the memorabilia business, offering up parts and even whole vehicles for fans and collectors. And to kick things off, it's going to auction some components from the RA100E V10 engines that powered the McLaren Honda MP4/5Bs of Ayrton Senna and Gerhard Berger to both F1 titles in 1990.

"We aim to make this a valuable business that allows fans who love F1, MotoGP and various other races to share in the history of Honda's challenges in racing since the 1950s," said Koi Watanabe, president of HRC, "including our fans to own a part of Honda's racing history is not intended to be a one-time endeavor, but rather a continuous business that we will nurture and grow."

The bits from Senna's and Berger's V10s will go up for auction at Monterey Car Week later this year, and the lots will include some of the parts seen in the photo above: cam covers, camshafts, pistons, and conrods, with a certificate of authenticity and a display case. And HRC is going through its collections to see what else it might part with, including "heritage machines and parts" from IndyCar, and "significant racing motorcycles."

Read full article

Comments

Leading scientists at the National Institutes of Health, the US’s leading medical research agency, were swept up Tuesday in the Trump administration’s latest firing blitz.

It’s the culmination of a weeks-long standoff between Elon Musk’s DOGE team and the United States Institute of Peace.

It’s the culmination of a weeks-long standoff between Elon Musk’s DOGE team and the United States Institute of Peace.

There are a remarkable number of commercial fusion power startups, considering that it's a technology that's built a reputation for being perpetually beyond the horizon. Many of them focus on radically new technologies for heating and compressing plasmas, or fusing unusual combinations of isotopes. These technologies are often difficult to evaluate—they can clearly generate hot plasmas, but it's tough to determine whether they can get hot enough, often enough to produce usable amounts of power.

On the other end of the spectrum are a handful of companies that are trying to commercialize designs that have been extensively studied in the academic world. And there have been some interesting signs of progress here. Recently, Commonwealth Fusion, which is building a demonstration tokamak in Massachussets, started construction of the cooling system that will keep its magnets superconducting. And two companies that are hoping to build a stellarator did some important validation of their concepts.

Doing donuts

A tokamak is a donut-shaped fusion chamber that relies on intense magnetic fields to compress and control the plasma within it. A number of tokamaks have been built over the years, but the big one that is expected to produce more energy than required to run it, ITER, has faced many delays and now isn't expected to achieve its potential until the 2040s. Back in 2015, however, some physicists calculated that high-temperature superconductors would allow ITER-style performance in a far smaller and easier-to-build package. That idea was commercialized as Commonwealth Fusion.

Read full article

Comments

Robots powered by Gemini Robotics models can learn complex actions like preparing salads and even folding an origami fox.Robots powered by Gemini Robotics models can learn complex actions like preparing salads and even folding an origami fox.

Nearly half of US states sued the federal government and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today in a bid to halt the termination of $11 billion in public health grants. The lawsuit was filed by 23 states and the District of Columbia.

"The grant terminations, which came with no warning or legally valid explanation, have quickly caused chaos for state health agencies that continue to rely on these critical funds for a wide range of urgent public health needs such as infectious disease management, fortifying emergency preparedness, providing mental health and substance abuse services, and modernizing public health infrastructure," said a press release issued by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser.

The litigation is led by Colorado, California, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington. The other plaintiffs are Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Read full article

Comments

Apple spent years ignoring RCS, allowing iPhones to offer a degraded messaging experience with Android users. This made Android folks unwelcome in many a group chat, but Apple finally started rectifying this issue last year with the addition of RCS support in iOS. It has been a slow rollout, though, with Google's mobile service only now getting support.

While Apple supports RCS messaging on iPhones now, it has not exactly been enthusiastic about it. Anyone using Google Fi on an iPhone was left in the lurch even after Apple changed course. The first RCS update rolled out in iOS 18 last fall, but it only supported postpaid plans on the big three carriers. Most other wireless subscribers had to wait, including those on Google Fi, as confirmed to Ars last year. It was a suitably amusing outcome, considering Google is largely responsible for reviving the RCS standard and runs the Jibe back-end servers through which many iPhone RCS messages flow.

Slowly but surely, Apple is making good on its promises to enable RCS as it gets the necessary data from carriers. The company released iOS 18.4 this week, and hiding amid the control center tweaks and priority notifications is support for RCS on Google Fi and other T-Mobile MVNOs. Some users spotted this feature in the recent beta releases, but the servers that handle RCS for Google's mobile service were not yet connectable. With the final release, Google has confirmed that RCS is ready at last.

Read full article

Comments

With its planned Switch 2 Direct presentation scheduled for Wednesday morning, Nintendo is set to finally fully pull back the curtain on a console we've been speculating about for years now. We'll have plenty of reporting and analysis of whatever Nintendo announces in the days to come. In the meantime, though, we thought it would be fun to put down a marker on some of the key announcements we expect Nintendo to make tomorrow.

Rather than limiting ourselves to a single prediction, though, we've broken things down into increasingly outlandish categories of "Likely," "Possible," and "Implausible." Consider this an exercise in expectation-setting for one of the most important moments in Nintendo's recent history, and be sure to let us know what you think will happen in the comments section below.

Price Yen per US dollar, charted. Credit: MacroTrends

Likely: A $399 MSRP would reflect some of the eight years of inflation that Nintendo has seen in the (seemingly unmovable) $299 price of the original Switch. That price point would also put the Switch 2 at rough parity with the market-proven price point of the (older, non-portable) Xbox Series X and PS5.

Read full article

Comments

In 1982, while most game developers were busy with space invaders and maze ghosts, Bill Williams created something far more profound: a game about swimming upstream against impossible odds. Salmon Run for the Atari 800 served as a powerful metaphor for life itself, one that resonates even more deeply when you learn about the creator's own struggles with cystic fibrosis.

As a kid growing up in the 1980s with an Atari 800 home computer, I discovered this hidden gem in our family's game collection, and it soon became a favorite. What struck me most—and what still amazes me today—was its incredible audio design, creating water sounds that seemed impossible for 8-bit hardware. But Salmon Run was about far more than impressive audio.

In the game, you play as Sam the Salmon, swimming upriver to spawn with a female salmon waiting upstream. You control your speed while dodging obstacles like rocks, waterfalls, and riverbanks, moving left to right and leaping from the water. And predators—bears, fishermen, and birds—are constantly trying to eat you.

Read full article

Comments

Big Boys, A Thousand Blows, and The Handmaid's Tale are just a few of the shows you should be watching on Hulu this month.

Satisfactory starts out as a game you play, then becomes a way you think. The only way I have been able to keep the ridiculous factory simulation from eating an even-more-unhealthy amount of my time was the game's keyboard-and-mouse dependency. But the work, it has found me—on my couch, on a trip, wherever one might game, really.

In a 1.1 release on Satisfactory's Experimental branch, there are lots of new things, but the biggest new thing is a controller scheme. Xbox and DualSense are officially supported, though anyone playing on Steam can likely tweak their way to something that works on other pads. With this, the game becomes far more playable for those playing on a couch, on a portable gaming PC like the Steam Deck, or over household or remote streaming. It also paves the way for the game's console release, which is currently slated for sometime in 2025.

Coffee Stain Studios reviews the contents of its Experimental branch 1.1 update.

Satisfactory seems like an unlikely candidate for controller support, let alone consoles. It's a game where you do a lot of three-dimensional thinking, putting machines and conveyer belts and power lines in just the right places, either because you need to or it just feels proper. How would it feel to select, rotate, place, and connect everything using a controller? Have I just forgotten that Minecraft, and first-person games as a whole, probably seemed similarly desk-bound at one time? I grabbed an Xbox Wireless controller, strapped on my biofuel-powered jetpack, and gave a reduced number of inputs a shot.

Read full article

Comments

TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favorite program, and unplugging from the realities around you.

But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages.

That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways.

Read full article

Comments

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said he's keeping an eye on 23andMe's bankruptcy proceeding and the company's planned sale because of privacy concerns related to genetic testing data. 23andMe and its future owner must uphold the company's privacy promises, Ferguson said in a letter sent yesterday to representatives of the US Trustee Program, a Justice Department division that oversees administration of bankruptcy proceedings.

"As Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, I write to express the FTC's interests and concerns relating to the potential sale or transfer of millions of American consumers' sensitive personal information," Ferguson wrote. He continued:

As you may know, 23andMe collects and holds sensitive, immutable, identifiable personal information about millions of American consumers who have used the Company's genetic testing and telehealth services. This includes genetic information, biological DNA samples, health information, ancestry and genealogy information, personal contact information, payment and billing information, and other information, such as messages that genetic relatives can send each other through the platform.

23andMe's recent bankruptcy announcement set off a wave of concern about the fate of genetic data for its 15 million customers. The company said that "any buyer of 23andMe will be required to comply with our privacy policy and with all applicable law with respect to the treatment of customer data." Many users reacted to the news by deleting their data, though tech problems apparently related to increased website traffic made that process difficult.

Read full article

Comments

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

Read full article

Comments

It has been a bumpy start for Amazon's $280 Kindle Colorsoft, the company's first E-Ink book reader with a color screen. The company delayed shipments for a few weeks to correct a problem where a faint yellow band would appear across the bottom of the screen, something that has apparently been fixed for current versions of the reader (Amazon says it has made "the appropriate adjustments" to fix the problem but hasn't been specific about what those adjustments are).

Amazon didn't send us a Colorsoft for review at the time, maybe in part because of this problem early reviewers had, but we finally got one a few weeks ago and have been using it since then.

My main takeaway is that I don't mind the Colorsoft, but it also doesn't solve any problems I was having with the monochrome Kindle Paperwhite, and it doesn't meaningfully solve the big problems with color E-Ink. It also makes the experience of reading regular text subtly worse, which accounts for the vast majority of my Kindle activity. I'm curious to see future riffs on the idea, but this initial implementation leaves me cold.

Read full article

Comments