Technology News

For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, when the Orion spacecraft's heat shield cracked and chipped away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022, what caused it became a burning question.

Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

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The history of the Silk Road, a vast network of ancient and medieval trade routes connecting Beijing and Hangzhou with Constantinople and Cairo, has mostly been focused on its endpoints: China and the West. Less was known about the people and cultures the traders encountered along the way. Given the length of the route, there must have been a lot of encounters. Traders passed through large cities like Tehran or Baghdad, which we know very well because they still stand today. They also crossed the Tien Shan, the largest east-west mountain range on the planet.

“People thought these mountains were just places the caravans had to cross and get through but not really a major contributor to commerce themselves,” says Michael Frachetti, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who led a team that used drone-based lidar to map two mountainous cities at the western end of Tien Shan in the modern-day Uzbekistan. Both were built over 2,000 meters above sea level like Machu Picchu or Lhasa, Tibet. One of them, the Tugunbulak, was larger than Siena, one of the most influential city-states in medieval Italy.

Into the mountains

“The Silk Road was a complicated complex representing in some cases actual pathways the caravans could traverse, but also general exchange between East Asia and Europe. If you ask me, as an archeologist, the foundations of Silk Road can be traced back to the Bronze Age. But the peak of this exchange we date to the medieval period, between the 6th century and the 11th century,” says Frachetti.

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Apple will adapt the classic educational game The Oregon Trail into a big-budget movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

The film is in early development, having just been pitched to Apple and approved. Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades of Glory, Office Christmas Party) will direct and produce. Given that pedigree (zany comedies), it's clear this film won't be a serious historical drama about the struggles of those who traveled the American West.

In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too. "The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie," according to THR's sources. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will be responsible for the original music in the film.

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On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of "dishonestly" funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public.

In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by "a handful of European cloud providers." In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them "to serve as the public face" and "obfuscate" Google's involvement, Microsoft's blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers cash or discounts to join, Alaily alleged.

The Open Cloud Coalition is just one part of a "pattern of shadowy campaigns" that Google has funded, both "directly and indirectly," to muddy the antitrust waters, Alaily alleged. The only other named example that Alaily gives while documenting this supposed pattern is the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing (CFSL), which Alaily said has attacked Microsoft's cloud computing business in the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

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For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his "personal drink bag" allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin.

This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How many of us would give up coffee for science?

Well, Donald Roy Pettit is not like most of us.

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Dozens of people in Wisconsin have been sickened and at least five needed emergency medical services after inadvertently eating pizza tainted with Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive compound in cannabis, officials of Public Health Madison & Dane County reported late Friday.

The contamination, which health officials called "unintentional," occurred at Famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stoughton between October 22 and October 24. In a news release, the local health department advised customers to throw away any pizza they had from the restaurant during that time period.

"We want to be sure anyone who has this pizza on hand throws it away so they don't get sick," Bonnie Armstrong, director of Environmental Health at Public Health Madison & Dane County, said in the release. "If you ate the pizza and are experiencing THC-related symptoms, please contact your health care provider or call 911 if your symptoms worsen."

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One of the last major holdouts against USB-C has majorly loosened its grasp. All the accessories that come with Apple's newest iMac—the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad—ship with USB-C charging and connection ports rather than the Lightning ports they have featured for nearly a decade.

"These accessories now come with USB-C ports, so users can charge all of their favorite devices with just a single cable," Apple writes in announcing its new M4-powered iMac, in the way that only Apple can, suggesting that something already known to so many is, when brought into Apple's loop, notable and new.

Apple's shift from its own Lightning connector, in use since 2012, to USB-C was sparked by European Union policies enacted in 2022. Apple gradually implemented USB-C on other devices, like its iPad Pro and MacBooks, over time, but the iPhone 15's USB-C port made the "switch" somewhat formal.

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In recent years, materials scientists experimenting with ceramics have started adding an oxidized form of graphene to the mix to produce ceramics that are tougher, more durable, and more resistant to fracture, among other desirable properties. Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a new method that uses ultrasound to more evenly distribute graphene oxide (GO) in ceramics, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Omega. And as a bonus, they collaborated with an artist who used the resulting ceramic tiles to create a unique art exhibit at the NUS Museum—a striking merger of science and art.

As reported previously, graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few.

In 2021, scientists found that this wonder material might also provide a solution to the fading of colors of many artistic masterpieces. For instance, several of Georgia O'Keeffe's oil paintings housed in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt.

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Today, Apple released iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, macOS Sequoia 15.1, tvOS 18.1, visionOS 2.1, and watchOS 11.1. The iPhone, iPad, and Mac updates are focused on bringing the first AI features the company has marketed as "Apple Intelligence" to users.

Once they update, users with supported devices in supported regions can enter a waitlist to begin using the first wave of Apple Intelligence features, including writing tools, notification summaries, and the "reduce interruptions" focus mode.

In terms of features baked into specific apps, Photos has natural language search, the ability to generate memories (those short gallery sequences set to video) from a text prompt, and a tool to remove certain objects from the background in photos. Mail and Messages get summaries and smart reply (auto-generating contextual responses).

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On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

The fabrications pose particular risks in health care settings. Despite OpenAI's warnings against using Whisper for "high-risk domains," over 30,000 medical workers now use Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits, according to the AP report. The Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children's Hospital Los Angeles count among 40 health systems using a Whisper-powered AI copilot service from medical tech company Nabla that is fine-tuned on medical terminology.

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Some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley appear to be quietly sitting out the presidential election cycle. But Trump says that in private, it's a different story.

AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show.

Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown.

A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they "owed the federal government nearly $100,000."

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At his Madison Square Garden rally, Donald Trump all but promised that conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pushed crank science for decades, would have a role in a prospective administration.

Google researchers said they uncovered a Kremlin-backed operation targeting recruits for the Ukrainian military with information-stealing malware for Windows and Android devices.

The malware, spread primarily through posts on Telegram, came from a persona on that platform known as "Civil Defense." Posts on the ​​@civildefense_com_ua telegram channel and the accompanying civildefense[.]com.ua website claimed to provide potential conscripts with free software for finding user-sourced locations of Ukrainian military recruiters. In fact, the software, available for both Windows and Android, installed infostealers. Google tracks the Kremlin-aligned threat group as UNC5812.

Dual espionage and influence campaign

"The ultimate aim of the campaign is to have victims navigate to the UNC5812-controlled 'Civil Defense' website, which advertises several different software programs for different operating systems," Google researchers wrote. "When installed, these programs result in the download of various commodity malware families."

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Apple's week of Mac announcements kicks off today with a new lineup of 24-inch iMacs, Apple's first Macs to launch with the M4 processor from this spring's iPad Pros. The new models still start at $1,299 can be preordered starting today and will begin arriving on November 8.

Processor aside, the biggest functional upgrade to the base model may be the bump from 8GB to 16GB of RAM, the first time Apple has bumped up the RAM in a base-model Mac since 2012. The base iMac's price is staying the same at $1,299, effectively saving you $200 compared to the M1 and M3 models. Base storage remains the same at 256GB, though it is at least possible to add external storage; there's no way to add RAM to a Mac after you've bought it.

The new iMacs also come with tweaked versions of the existing Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad accessories that use USB-C ports for charging rather than Lightning ports. These were some of the last remaining Lightning products in Apple's lineup; the iPhone SE and iPhone 14 are still keeping Lightning alive for now.

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Will Hatcher got internet famous when Metro Boomin sampled his AI-generated song for a diss track released during the Kendrick Lamar–Drake beef. That was just the beginning.

Refurbished Pixel phones are now available at the Google Store in the U.S.Refurbished Pixel phones are now available at the Google Store in the U.S.

The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.

The blogging platform Medium is facing an influx of AI-generated content. CEO Tony Stubblebine says it “doesn’t matter” as long as nobody reads it.

AI Overviews in Search are expanding to 100+ countries and multiple languages, bringing monthly users to over 1 billion.AI Overviews in Search are expanding to 100+ countries and multiple languages, bringing monthly users to over 1 billion.