Ars Technica

Board game designer and entrepreneur Jamey Stegmaier has published hit games like Scythe and Wingspan—the latter a personal favorite of mine, with a delightfully gentle theme about birds—but this week found him in a gloomy mood.

"Last night I tried to work on a new game I'm brainstorming," he wrote in a blog post yesterday, "but it’s really hard to create something for the future when that future looks so grim. I mostly just found myself staring blankly at the enormity of the newly announced 54 percent tariff on goods manufactured in China and imported to the US."

Most US board games are made in China, though Germany (the home of modern hobby board gaming) also has manufacturing facilities. While printed content, such as card games, can be manufactured in the US, it's far harder to find anyone who can make intricate board pieces like bespoke wooden bits and custom dice. And if you can, the price is often astronomical. "I recall getting quoted a cost of $10 for just a standard empty box from a company in the US that specializes in making boxes," Stegmaier noted—though a complete game can be produced and boxed in China for that same amount.

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Plant cells are surrounded by an intricately structured protective coat called the cell wall. It’s built of cellulose microfibrils intertwined with polysaccharides like hemicellulose or pectin. We have known what plant cells look like without their walls, and we know what they look like when the walls are fully assembled, but we’ve never seen the wall-building process in action. “We knew the starting point and the finishing point, but had no idea what happens in between,” says Eric Lam, a plant biologist at Rutgers University. He’s a co-author of the study that caught wall-building plant cells in action for the first time. And once we saw how the cell wall building worked, it looked nothing like how we drew that in biology handbooks.

Plant cells without walls, known as protoplasts, are very fragile, and it has been difficult to keep them alive under a microscope for the several hours needed for them to build walls. Plant cells are also very light-sensitive, and most microscopy techniques require pointing a strong light source at them to get good imagery.

Then there was the issue of tracking their progress. “Cellulose is not fluorescent, so you can’t see it with traditional microscopy,” says Shishir Chundawat, a biologist at Rutgers. “That was one of the biggest issues in the past.” The only way you can see it is if you attach a fluorescent marker to it. Unfortunately, the markers typically used to label cellulose were either bound to other compounds or were toxic to the plant cells. Given their fragility and light sensitivity, the cells simply couldn’t survive very long with toxic markers as well.

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The white-necked jacobin (Florisuga mellivora) is a jewel-toned hummingbird found in the neotropical lowlands of South America and the Caribbean. It shimmers blue and green in the sunlight as it flits from flower to flower, a tiny spectacle of the rainforest.

Jay Falk, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama, expected to find something like that when he sought this species out in Panama. What he didn’t expect was a caterpillar in the nest of one of these birds. At least it looked like a caterpillar—it was actually a hatchling with some highly unusual camouflage.

The chick was covered in long, fine feathers similar to the urticating hairs that some caterpillars are covered in. These often toxic barbed hairs deter predators, who can suffer anything from inflammation to nausea and even death if they attack. Falk realized he was witnessing mimicry only seen in one other bird species and never before in hummingbirds. It seemed that the nestlings of this species had evolved a defense: convincing predators they were poisonous.

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Will this Chevrolet Silverado EV be the biggest electric vehicle we test this year? Almost certainly. Fractionally narrower and less tall than a Hummer EV pickup at more than 18 feet (just under 6 m) long and with a curb weight of 8,532 lbs (3,870 kg), the Silverado EV is what happens when Chevy's electric vehicle engineers get tasked with making their rivals over at Ford feel like they didn't try hard enough with the electric F-150.

Now that production has been ongoing for a while, Chevy is filling out the lower trim levels. For commercial customers, there's a Work Truck, but for normies, the entry point is now the LT trim, at a tax credit-friendly—if still wallet-munching—$75,195 (for as long as the tax credit still lasts and until the effect of pointless and damaging trade tariffs make themselves known, of course).

The 645 hp (481 kW), 756 lb-ft (1,037 Nm) Silverado EV LT comes with the smaller of the two battery packs offered to non-commercial customers. That adjective is doing a lot of work there; a useable 170 kWh is indeed smaller than the 200 kWh you can find in the more expensive RST Max Range, but it's also more than double the capacity of something like a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The range estimate is a commensurate 408 miles (657 km), or "just" 390 miles (628 km) if, as in our test pickup, the premium package has been fitted.

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Nintendo Switch 2 preorders, which were due to begin on April 9, are being delayed indefinitely amid the financial uncertainty surrounding Donald Trump's recent announcement of massive tariffs on most US trading partners.

"Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions,” Nintendo said in a statement cited by Polygon. "Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged."

Nintendo announced launch details for the Switch 2 on Wednesday morning, just hours before Trump's afternoon "Liberation Day" press conference announcing the biggest increase in import duties in modern US history. Those taxes on practically all goods imported into the United States are set to officially go into effect on April 9, the same day Nintendo had planned to roll out Switch 2 preorders for qualified customers.

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Outside of several mentions in the Rocket Report newsletter dating back to 2018, Ars Technica has not devoted too much attention to covering a novel California space company named SpinLaunch.

That's because the premise is so outlandish as to almost not feel real. The company aims to build a kinetic launch system that spins a rocket around at speeds up to 4,700 mph (7,500 km/h) before sending it upward toward space. Then, at an altitude of 40 miles (60 km) or so, the rocket would ignite its engines to achieve orbital velocity. Essentially, SpinLaunch wants to yeet things into space.

But the company was no joke. After being founded in 2014, it raised more than $150 million over the next decade. It built a prototype accelerator in New Mexico and performed a series of flight tests. The flights reached altitudes of "tens of thousands" of feet, according to the company, and were often accompanied by slickly produced videos.

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For two decades, farmer John Burk has been working to improve the soil on his farm in Michigan, taking a few extra steps to make it more resilient and productive. His efforts have paid off.

“When we have the dry, hot summers or lack of rainfall, our crops can sustain the dry spells better. We don’t have huge yield decreases,” Burk said. “And when it rains and we have the freak storms, like it seems to do so much now, we don’t have the ponding and all the runoff.”

An added bonus: He needs less fertilizer, a major operating expense.

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season 3—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory.

These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We'll do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.

New episodes of The Wheel of Time season 3 will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Thursday. This write-up covers episode six, "The Shadow in the Night," which was released on April 3.

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Welcome to Edition 7.38 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX test fired a Super Heavy booster that launched in January on Thursday, in South Texas. This sets up the possibility of a reused Super Heavy rocket launching within the next several weeks, and would be an important step forward in the Starship launch program. It's also a bold step given that there is a lot riding on this Starship launch, given that the last two have failed due to propulsion issues with the rocket's upper stage.

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.

European commercial launch industry joins the space race. The first flight of Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket didn't last long on Sunday, Ars reports. The booster's nine engines switched off as the rocket cartwheeled upside-down and fell a short distance from its Arctic launch pad in Norway, ending the abbreviated test flight with a spectacular, fiery crash into the sea. However, it marked the beginning of something new in Europe as commercial startups begin launching rockets.

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It's well-established that, on the whole, Americans die younger than people in most other high-income countries. For instance, an analysis from 2022 found that the average life expectancy of someone born in Switzerland or Spain in 2019 was 84 years. Meanwhile, the average US life expectancy was 78.8, lower than nearly all other high-income countries, including Canada's, which was 82.3 years. And this was before the pandemic, which only made things worse for the US.

Perhaps some Americans may think that this lower overall life-expectancy doesn't really apply to them if they're middle- or upper-class. After all, wealth inequality and health disparities are huge problems in the US. Those with more money simply have better access to health care and better health outcomes. Well-off Americans live longer, with lifespans on par with their peers in high-income countries, some may think.

It is true that money buys you a longer life in the US. In fact, the link between wealth and mortality may be stronger in the US than in any other high-income country. But, if you think American wealth will put life expectancy in league with Switzerland, you're dead wrong, according to a study in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

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As AI hype permeates the Internet, tech and business leaders are already looking toward the next step. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, refers to a machine with human-like intelligence and capabilities. If today's AI systems are on a path to AGI, we will need new approaches to ensure such a machine doesn't work against human interests.

Unfortunately, we don't have anything as elegant as Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. Researchers at Google DeepMind have been working on this problem and have released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience.

It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm."

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When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it.

When Google uses the term E2EE in this context, it means that an email is encrypted inside Chrome, Firefox, or just about any other browser the sender chooses. As the message makes its way to its destination, it remains encrypted and can’t be decrypted until it arrives at its final destination, when it’s decrypted in the recipient's browser.

The chief selling point of this new service is that it allows government agencies and the businesses that work with them to comply with a raft of security and privacy regulations and at the same time eliminates the massive headaches that have traditionally plagued anyone deploying such regulation-compliant email systems. Up to now, the most common means has been S/MIME, a standard so complex and painful that only the bravest and most well-resourced organizations tend to implement it.

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Bonobos, great apes related to us and chimpanzees that live in the Republic of Congo, communicate with vocal calls including peeps, hoots, yelps, grunts, and whistles. Now, a team of Swiss scientists led by Melissa Berthet, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Zurich, discovered bonobos can combine these basic sounds into larger semantic structures. In these communications, meaning is something more than just a sum of individual calls—a trait known as non-trivial compositionality, which we once thought was uniquely human.

To do this, Berthet and her colleagues built a database of 700 bonobo calls and deciphered them using methods drawn from distributional semantics, the methodology we’ve relied on in reconstructing long-lost languages like Etruscan or Rongorongo. For the first time, we have a glimpse into what bonobos mean when they call to each other in the wild.

The key idea behind distributional semantics is that when words appear in similar contexts, they tend to have similar meanings. To decipher an unknown language, you need to collect a large corpus of words and turn those words into vectors—mathematical representations that let you place them in a multidimensional semantic space. The second thing you need is context data, which tells you the circumstances in which these words were used (that gets vectorized, too). When you map your word vectors onto context vectors in this multidimensional space, what usually happens is that words with similar meaning end up close to each other. Berthet and her colleagues wanted to apply the same trick to bonobos’ calls. That seemed straightforward at first glance, but proved painfully hard to execute.

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In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we're looking at.

But interviews with Nintendo executives and a blog post from Nvidia did at least confirm several of the new chip's capabilities. The "custom Nvidia processor" has a GPU "with dedicated [Ray-Tracing] Cores and Tensor Cores for stunning visuals and AI-driven enhancements," writes Nvidia Software Engineering VP Muni Anda.

This means that, as rumored, the Switch 2 will support Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscaling technology, which helps to upscale a lower-resolution image into a higher-resolution image with less of a performance impact than native rendering and less loss of quality than traditional upscaling methods. For the Switch games that can render at 4K or at 120 FPS 1080p, DLSS will likely be responsible for making it possible.

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Humans have practiced some form of yodeling since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo encountered Tibetan monks on his travels who used the vocal technique for long-distance communication. It's since morphed into a distinctive singing style. But can animals also yodel? According to a new paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, several species of monkey dwelling in the rainforests of Latin America employ "voice breaks" in their calls that acoustically resemble human yodeling—i.e., "ultra-yodels" that boast a much wider frequency range.

Many years ago, I wrote about the bioacoustics of human yodeling for New Scientist. In many respects, yodeling is quite simple. It merely involves singing a long note subjected to repeated rapid sharp shifts in pitch. It's the unique anatomy of the human vocal tract that makes it possible, notably the larynx (voice box) located just behind the Adam's apple. The larynx is comprised of cartilage and the hyoid bone that together support the vocal cords, which are attached to muscles on either side of the larynx.

When air flows through the trachea, the vocal cords vibrate at frequencies ranging from 110 to 200 Hz. We have the capability of contracting the muscles to change the shape, position, and tension of our vocal cords, thereby altering the pitch of the sound produced. Stiffer vocal cords result in faster vibrations, which produce higher pitches.

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Critics are questioning if Donald Trump's administration possibly used chatbots to calculate reciprocal tariffs announced yesterday that Trump claimed were "individualized" tariffs placed on countries that have " the largest trade deficits" with the US.

Those tariffs are due to take effect on April 9 for 60 countries, with peak rates around 50 percent. That's in addition to a baseline 10 percent tariff that all countries will be subject to starting on April 5. But while Trump expressed intent to push back on anyone supposedly taking advantage of the US, some of the countries on the reciprocal tariffs list puzzled experts and officials, who pointed out to The Guardian that Trump was, for some reason, targeting uninhabited islands, some of them exporting nothing and populated with penguins.

Some overseas officials challenged Trump's math, such as George Plant, the administrator of Norfolk Island, who told the Guardian that "there are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States and no tariffs or known non-tariff trade barriers on goods coming to Norfolk Island."

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SpaceX is having trouble with Starship's upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket's enormous booster.

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship's first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9:40 am local time (10:40 am EDT; 14:40 UTC) Thursday at the company's Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a "flight-proven" Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday's static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX's factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

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Most of Google's AI efforts thus far have involved adding generative features to existing products, but NotebookLM is different. Created by the Google Labs team, NotebookLM uses AI to analyze user-provided documents. Starting today, it will be even easier to use NotebookLM to explore topics, as Google has added a "Discover Sources" feature to let the app look up its own sources.

Previously, to create a new notebook, you had to feed the AI documents, web links, YouTube videos, or raw text. You can still do that, but you don't have to with the addition of Discover functionality. Simply click the new button and tell NotebookLM what you're interested in learning. Google says the app will consider "hundreds of potential web sources" in the blink of an eye, giving you the top 10 from which to choose. There will be links available so you can peruse the suggestions before adding them to the model.

The sources you select will be ingested as if they were documents you uploaded, creating a conversant AI for your chosen topic. The content of those sources will also be loaded into NotebookLM so you can refer to them directly. That's not why you use NotebookLM, though. You use NotebookLM for all the nifty AI-assisted features.

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New 25 percent tariffs on all foreign car imports into the United States went into effect this week as President Trump ignited his new trade war. It has caused something of a rush at dealerships around the country as customers descend on existing stock in an attempt to beat looming price increases of thousands of dollars. Now we're starting to see how the automakers are reacting.

Ford is in the rather enviable position of having the least exposure to the new vehicle tariff than all but Tesla; less than 20 percent of the cars, trucks, and SUVs that Ford sells in the US are imported from abroad. And it will lean into that with a new ad campaign with the slogan "From America, For America," which launches today. (Note that this does not take into account the separate parts tariff that goes into effect before May 2.)

Never mind the slogan, though. The campaign extends Ford's "A plan" pricing, which in plain English is its employee discount, to all its customers. The blue oval is offering A plan pricing on most 2024 and 2025 vehicles, including the all-electric F-150 Lightning and the Mustang Mach-E, as well as its various hybrids.

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US experts who work in artificial intelligence fields seem to have a much rosier outlook on AI than the rest of us.

In a survey comparing views of a nationally representative sample (5,410) of the general public to a sample of 1,013 AI experts, the Pew Research Center found that "experts are far more positive and enthusiastic about AI than the public" and "far more likely than Americans overall to believe AI will have a very or somewhat positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years" (56 percent vs. 17 percent). And perhaps most glaringly, 76 percent of experts believe these technologies will benefit them personally rather than harm them (15 percent).

The public does not share this confidence. Only about 11 percent of the public says that "they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life." They're much more likely (51 percent) to say they're more concerned than excited, whereas only 15 percent of experts shared that pessimism. Unlike the majority of experts, just 24 percent of the public thinks AI will be good for them, whereas nearly half the public anticipates they will be personally harmed by AI.

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