Ars Technica

China created a new entity called the "Deep Space Exploration Laboratory" three years ago to strengthen the country's approach to exploring the Solar System. Located in eastern China, not far from Shanghai, the new laboratory represented a partnership between China's national space agency and a local public college, the University of Science and Technology of China.

Not much is known outside of China about the laboratory, but it has recently revealed some very ambitious plans to explore the Solar System, including the outer planets. This week, as part of a presentation, Chinese officials shared some public dates about future missions.

Space journalist Andrew Jones, who tracks China's space program, shared some images with a few details. Among the planned missions are:

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Health Secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is slashing a total of 20,000 jobs across the Department of Health and Human Services—or about 24 percent of the workforce—in a sweeping overhaul said to improve efficiency and save money, Kennedy and the HHS announced Thursday.

Combining workforce losses from early retirement, the "Fork in the Road" deferred resignation deal, and 10,000 positions axed in the reductions and restructuring announced today, HHS will shrink from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000 under Kennedy and the Trump administration. The HHS's 28 divisions will be cut down to 15, while five of the department's 10 regional offices will close.

"This will be a painful period," Kennedy said in a video announcement posted on social media. Calling the HHS a "sprawling bureaucracy," Kennedy claimed that the cuts would be aimed at "excess administrators."

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Switch players who buy their games on physical cards are used to being able to share those games with other players simply by handing them the card. Now, Nintendo is planning a process to allow players to share their digital Switch purchases in a similar way.

The new "virtual game card" system—which Nintendo announced today ahead of a planned late April rollout—will allow players to "load" and "eject" digital games via a dedicated management screen. An ejected digital game can't be played on the original console, but it can be digitally loaded onto a new console and played there without restriction by any user logged into that system.

While an Internet connection is required when loading and ejecting digital games in this way, the Internet will not be required to play the shared digital game after that initial process is complete. And while both Switch consoles will need to be synced up via a "local connection" the first time such sharing is done, subsequent shares won't require the consoles to be in physical proximity.

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The growing energy use of AI has gotten a lot of people working on ways to make it less power hungry. One option is to develop processors that are a better match to the sort of computational needs of neural networks, which require many trips to memory and a lot of communication between artificial neurons that might not necessarily reside on the same processor. Termed "neuromorphic" processors, this alternative approach to hardware tends to have lots of small, dedicated processing units with their own memory and an extensive internal network connecting them.

Examples like Intel's Loihi chips tend to get competitive performance out of far lower clock speeds and energy use, but they require a lot of silicon to do so. Other options give up on silicon entirely and perform the relevant computation in a form of phase change memory.

A paper published in Nature on Wednesday describes a way to get plain-old silicon transistors to behave a lot like an actual neuron. And unlike the dedicated processors made so far, it only requires two transistors to do so.

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The US Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday last year, when it boasted an annual budget of $29 billion, about 3.5 percent of the Pentagon's overall funding level.

On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that set the Space Force's budget for fiscal year 2025 at $28.7 billion. This was the first cut to the Space Force's budget since Trump created the military's newest service branch in 2019.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, worries that the budget crunch will hamstring the military's ability to match China's fast-growing space architecture. The Space Force is charged with developing and operating satellites, ground systems, and weapons that the Pentagon could use to track and target enemy forces on the ground and in space.

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Yesterday afternoon, once the markets were closed and could no longer react immediately, US President Donald Trump announced that starting on April 2, all imported automobiles and many imported car parts will now be subject to an extra 25 percent tariff. Despite Trump's rhetoric during his election campaign and since taking office, tariffs are paid for by those importing the goods, not the exporters, so we can look forward to most new cars and trucks—and their maintenance costs—getting a lot more expensive.

During his first term in office, Trump started trade wars with key US trading partners like Canada, the European Union, and China. Upon his return in 2025, more trade wars have been the name of the game. A 25 percent tariff on all imports from Canada and Mexico was threatened and then implemented at the beginning of March, before being partially reversed just two days later. Additionally, a 10 percent tariff on Chinese exports was also levied.

Less than two weeks later, a new 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports also joined the club.

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Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s pledge to spend an extra $100 billion on advanced manufacturing plants in the US will do little to help the country restore its global lead in chipmaking, according to Pat Gelsinger, who was forced out as chief executive of Intel late last year.

His comments come less than a month after the White House hailed the investment from TSMC, the world’s largest chip manufacturer, as an important milestone in efforts to bring production of the most advanced semiconductors back on to US soil.

“If you don’t have R&D in the US, you will not have semiconductor leadership in the US,” Gelsinger said. “All of the R&D work of TSMC is in Taiwan, and they haven’t made any announcements to move that.”

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The arrival of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation.

But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images. It also had limitations in following complex prompts with multiple elements, sometimes missing key details or misinterpreting instructions. These shortcomings left room for improvement that OpenAI would address in subsequent iterations, such as DALL-E 3 in 2023.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new multimodal image-generation capabilities that are directly integrated into its GPT-4o AI language model, making it the default image generator within the ChatGPT interface. The integration, called "4o Image Generation" (which we'll call "4o IG" for short), allows the model to follow prompts more accurately (with better text rendering than DALL-E 3) and respond to chat context for image modification instructions.

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The first ever fatal crash involving a fully driverless vehicle occurred in San Francisco on January 19. The driverless vehicle belonged to Waymo, but the crash was not Waymo’s fault.

Here’s what happened: A Waymo with no driver or passengers stopped for a red light. Another car stopped behind the Waymo. Then, according to Waymo, a human-driven SUV rear-ended the other vehicles at high speed, causing a six-car pileup that killed one person and injured five others. Someone’s dog also died in the crash.

Another major Waymo crash occurred in October in San Francisco. Once again, a driverless Waymo was stopped for a red light. According to Waymo, a vehicle traveling in the opposite direction crossed the double yellow line and crashed into an SUV that was stopped to the Waymo’s left. The force of the impact shoved the SUV into the Waymo. One person was seriously injured.

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Three weeks ago, NASA revealed that a shipping container protecting a Cygnus spacecraft sustained "damage" while traveling to the launch site in Florida.

Built by Northrop Grumman, Cygnus is one of two Western spacecraft currently capable of delivering food, water, experiments, and other supplies to the International Space Station. This particular Cygnus mission, NG-22, had been scheduled for June. As part of its statement in early March, the space agency said it was evaluating the NG-22 Cygnus cargo supply mission along with Northrop.

On Wednesday, after a query from Ars Technica, the space agency acknowledged that the Cygnus spacecraft designated for NG-22 is too damaged to fly, at least in the nearterm.

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Amazon discontinued 2016's Kindle Oasis in early 2024, and since then, the company hasn't offered a new e-reader with physical page turn buttons or any other alternative to touchscreen input. There still isn't a Kindle with buttons, and the feature seems unlikely to return, but buyers of the latest Kindle Paperwhite or the Kindle Colorsoft are getting a possible consolation prize in the new 5.18.1 software update: a "double tap to page turn" feature that will turn the page or move to the next screen when you double-tap on the back or side of the device.

The 5.18.1 software update is available on all Kindle readers going back to 2018's "10th generation" models, but the double-tap feature only works on the newest 12th-generation Paperwhite and the Colorsoft, not on any older Kindles or either Kindle Scribe model. We verified this firsthand by installing 5.18.1 on a 10th-generation Paperwhite, but we also checked the release notes for each individual Kindle on Amazon's software update page.

All Kindles that get the 5.18.1 update also gain access to new book summaries for "thousands of bestselling English language Kindle books," aiming to make it easier to pick up a new book in an ongoing series.

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An eruption of measles is spreading quickly in Kansas, with cases doubling in a week and spreading to three new counties, some with vaccination coverage among kindergartners at pitiful levels as low as 41 percent. Coverage of 95 percent or greater is thought to protect communities from onward spread of the extremely contagious virus.

In an update Wednesday, March 26, Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE) reported 23 measles cases across six counties—up from 10 cases across three counties on March 21. The 23 people ill with the dangerous virus are mostly children, including six who are 0 to 4 years old, nine who are 5 to 10, three who are 11 to 13, three who are 14 to 17, and two adults between the ages of 25 and 44. Fortunately, none of the cases have been hospitalized so far, and there have been no deaths.

Twenty of the 23 cases were unvaccinated. One case was "not age appropriately vaccinated," one was "age appropriately vaccinated," and the remaining case's vaccination status is pending.

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The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions.

"Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security," said Brig. Gen. Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. "Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems."

The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

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Google is planning a major change to the way it develops new versions of the Android operating system. Since the beginning, large swaths of the software have been developed in public-facing channels, but that will no longer be the case. This does not mean Android is shedding its open source roots, but the process won't be as transparent.

Google has confirmed to Android Authority that all Android development work going forward will take place in Google's internal branch. This is a shift from the way Google has worked on Android in the past, which featured frequent updates to the public AOSP branch. Anyone can access AOSP, but the internal branches are only available to Google and companies with a Google Mobile Services (GMS) license, like Samsung, Motorola, and others.

According to the company, it is making this change to simplify things, building on a recent change to trunk-based development. As Google works on both public and private branches of Android, the two fall out of sync with respect to features and API support. This forces Google to tediously merge the branches for every release. By focusing on the internal branch, Google claims it can streamline releases and make life easier for everyone.

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President Trump and administration officials claimed this week that no classified information about war plans was shared with a journalist, despite The Atlantic report that specific plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen were included in a Signal chat the reporter was inexplicably invited to.

The Atlantic initially declined to publish the exact text of the most specific message sent in advance of the bombings but changed course after the Trump administration's denials. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters that "nobody was texting war plans and that’s all I have to say about that." At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that "there was no classified material that was shared in that Signal group."

CIA Director John Ratcliffe said at the same hearing that "my communications, to be clear, in the Signal message group were entirely permissible and lawful and did not include classified information." Trump himself said the information shared was not classified.

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There's a new "exciting, small EV" on the way, to be launched early next year by Also, a spinoff of the electric vehicle maker Rivian. Details are light on exactly what that product will be, but don't go expecting a $20,000 electric hatchback or the like—think more like an e-bike. Also will be into micromobility, not competing with Mini or Smart.

Also started out as an internal project to see if Rivian could use its knowledge of electric powertrains, vehicle electronics, and software to build other "small vehicle form factors." In fact, in 2023, news broke of a Rivian e-bike in the works at Rivian, although it was unclear if it would be something with pedals or more like an electric motorcycle.

Things are still rather vague. Also's announcement says its "flagship product" will launch in early 2026 and that the company will focus on the US and Europe at first. It will build "an exciting range of electric vehicles that are efficient, sustainable, and delightful to use," using in-house technology.

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Just a few months after releasing its first Gemini 2.0 AI models, Google is upgrading again. The company says the new Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is its "most intelligent" model yet, offering a massive context window, multimodality, and reasoning capabilities. Google points to a raft of benchmarks that show the new Gemini clobbering other large language models (LLMs), and our testing seems to back that up—Gemini 2.5 Pro is one of the most impressive generative AI models we've seen.

Gemini 2.5, like all Google's models going forward, has reasoning built in. The AI essentially fact-checks itself along the way to generating an output. We like to call this "simulated reasoning," as there's no evidence that this process is akin to human reasoning. However, it can go a long way to improving LLM outputs. Google specifically cites the model's "agentic" coding capabilities as a beneficiary of this process. Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental can, for example, generate a full working video game from a single prompt. We've tested this, and it works with the publicly available version of the model.

Google says a lot of things about Gemini 2.5 Pro; it's smarter, it's context-aware, it thinks—but it's hard to quantify what constitutes improvement in generative AI bots. There are some clear technical upsides, though. Gemini 2.5 Pro comes with a 1 million token context window, which is common for the big Gemini models but massive compared to competing models like OpenAI GPT or Anthropic Claude. You could feed multiple very long books to Gemini 2.5 Pro in a single prompt, and the output maxes out at 64,000 tokens. That's the same as Flash 2.0, but it's still objectively a lot of tokens compared to other LLMs.

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Being Red Bull Racing 1 teammates with Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen is a hard ask. The Dutch driver took his fourth consecutive world championship last year, dominating the sport to such an extent that he led the points table across a 63-race, 1,029-day streak that only ended with McLaren and Lando Norris' victory in Australia earlier this month. Now we believe he's going to have his second teammate of the year, after just two races, as Red Bull gets ready to drop Liam Lawson for Yuki Tsunoda.

For three of its championship years, Red Bull built the fastest car in F1, and Verstappen's teammate Sergio Perez scored race wins and plenty of points to help the team secure the constructors championships in 2021, 2022, and 2023. But Red Bulls' designers have been evolving a concept that even its former design boss Adrian Newey thinks is flawed, and in 2024, we saw Perez' form evaporate after the first handful of races that year.

Verstappen was able to fight for the title thanks to his considerable skill in the car. But the team lost out to both McLaren and Ferrari in the constructors' standings, something that will have had a very considerable impact upon the end-of-year bonuses for Red Bull's hundreds of employees.

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A discredited anti-vaccine advocate who has no medical background and who has been disciplined for practicing medicine without a license will reportedly lead a questionable federal study on vaccines and autism—despite a large volume of existing research that has found no link between the two and despite a thorough debunking of claims that vaccines cause autism.

Late Tuesday, The Washington Post reported that David Geier has been hired as a "data analyst" by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is now headed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent and fervent anti-vaccine advocate. Kennedy and Geier have both long touted the false claim that vaccines cause autism, despite the extensive evidence showing that they do not. In March, HHS directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to reexamine the nonexistent link between vaccines and autism, using funds from taxpayers that could have been directed at other research.

David Geier earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in 2002. Since then, he has largely worked with his father, Mark Geier, also an anti-vaccine advocate who falsely blames vaccines for autism. In 2011, Mark Geier was stripped of his medical license by the Maryland State Board of Physicians for misrepresenting his credentials, failing to meet state and federal regulations on safety oversight, and allegedly putting the safety and welfare of autistic children at risk.

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VMware is suing the US arm of industrial giant AG Siemens. The Broadcom company claims that Siemens outed itself by revealing to VMware that it downloaded and distributed multiple copies of VMware products without buying a license.

VMware filed the lawsuit (PDF) on March 21 in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, as spotted by The Register.

In the complaint, VMware says that it has had a Master Software License and Service Agreement with Siemens since November 28, 2012. The virtualization company claims that in September, Siemens sent VMware a purchase order for maintenance and support services. Siemens was reportedly looking to exercise a previously agreed-upon option for a one-year renewal of support services. However, the list of VMware technology that Siemens was seeking support for "included a large number of products for which [VMware] had no record of Siemens AG purchasing a license," the complaint says.

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