Ars Technica

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

the best of the rest Crushing soda cans for science, why dolphins swim so fast, how urine helps mushrooms communicate, and more Credit: Yutaro Motoori It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. April’s list includes tracking Roman ship repairs, the discovery that mushrooms can detect human urine, crushing soda cans for science, and the physics of why dolphins can swim so fast. Physics of why dolphins swim so fast Dolphins are very good swimmers but the exact mechanisms by which they achieve their impressive speed and agility in water have remained murky. Japanese scientists from the University of Osaka ran multiple supercomputer simulations to learn more about how dolphins optimize their propulsion and found it has to do with the vortices, or eddies, produced by dolphin kicks, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids. Per the authors, when dolphins flap their tails up and down, the kicking motion pushes water backward and produces swirling currents of varying sizes. The computer simulations enabled the team to break

Infrasound waves stop kitchen fires, but can they replace sprinklers?

INFRASONICS Acoustic fire suppression goes commercial. Credit: Getty Images In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out. The science of acoustic fire suppression, which has long been known and documented in scientific literature and the press, works by vibrating oxygen molecules away from a fuel source, depriving the fire of a critical component needed for combustion. Indeed, after just a few seconds of infrasound, the tiny kitchen blaze goes out. The demonstration I witnessed took place in the presence of numerous firefighters and officials from Contra Costa County Fire Protection District, the state’s premier wildland firefighting agency (CAL FIRE), and invited journalists. “We were able to not just point-and-shoot like a fire extinguisher; we figured out how to run it through ducting and distribute it like a sprinkler system,” said Geoff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech, during the presentation. The company’s goal is

Study: AI models that consider user's feeling are more likely to make errors

Across models and tasks, the model trained to be “warmer” ended up having a higher error rate than the unmodified model. Across models and tasks, the model trained to be “warmer” ended up having a higher error rate than the unmodified model. Credit: Ibrahim et al / Nature Both the “warmer” and original versions of each model were then run through prompts from HuggingFace datasets designed to have “objective variable answers,” and in which “inaccurate answers can pose real-world risks.” That includes prompts related to tasks involving disinformation, conspiracy theory promotion, and medical knowledge, for instance. Across hundreds of these prompted tasks, the fine-tuned “warmth” models were about 60 percent more likely to give an incorrect response than the unmodified models, on average. That amounts to a 7.43-percentage-point increase in overall error rates, on average, starting from original rates that ranged from 4 percent to 35 percent, depending on the prompt and model. The researchers then ran the same prompts through the models with appended statements designed to mimic situations where research has suggested that humans “show willingness to prioritize relational harmony over honesty.” These include prompts where the user shares their emotional state (e.g., happiness), suggests relational dynamics (e.g.,

The RAMpocalypse has bought Microsoft valuable time in the fight against SteamOS

competition heating up Op-ed: Valve has made a dent in Windows’ gaming share, but can it keep going? Valve's Steam Deck OLED. Credit: Valve Valve's Steam Deck OLED. Credit: Valve Valve and its SteamOS operating system have already done what a bunch of companies (including Apple) have been trying to do for decades: make a dent in Windows’ dominance in PC gaming. I mean, sure, according to Valve’s own statistics, Microsoft remains dominant. Over 92 percent of PCs in the Steam Hardware Survey run some version of Windows. But five years ago, this number was just over 96 percent. Ten years ago, it was just under 96 percent. Fifteen years ago? It was 96 percent. Go back any further than that and Steam only runs on Windows in the first place, itself a testament to Microsoft’s ubiquity. Between April 2021 and now, Linux’s share has climbed from under 1 percent to over 5 percent. This is a small number, and it’s not all SteamOS (Valve’s OS isn’t broken out, but Arch, the base distribution for SteamOS, accounts for about 0.33 of that just-over-5-percent). But it’s also more than these numbers have ever moved. By making Windows games run on Linux,

Man dies covered in necrotic lesions after amoebas eat him alive

Of all the known ways to get an Acanthamoeba infection, nasal rinsing was the most likely one in the man’s case. The man had nasal polyps and used sinus rinses to alleviate his symptoms. However, his symptoms didn’t start in his nasal passages—they started on his legs. There, red nodules formed and progressed to develop dark centers. Some became deep ulcers, while others became necrotic, turning to black scabs. Then began erupting on his trunk, arms, and neck. Catching a killer Before his transfer to Yale, doctors elsewhere tried to identify the mysterious cause, doing multiple biopsies of his diseased skin. Tests were negative for bacterial or fungal pathogens. But they showed his blood vessels were inflamed and full of clumps of immune cells. Doctors worried that his immune system was attacking his blood vessels, causing the necrotic lesions. So, they put him on immunosuppressant drugs. But his condition only worsened, and the lesions only progressed. When he arrived at Yale, he had a fever and high heart rate, and appeared frail. He had lost 16 pounds and was drowsy and confused. He was blanketed in lesions. The Yale doctors noted that the lesions began after he returned from Florida,

Ubuntu infrastructure has been down for more than a day

Servers operated by Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical were knocked offline on Thursday morning and have remained down ever since, a situation that’s preventing the OS provider from communicating normally following the botched disclosure of a major vulnerability. Attempts to connect to most Ubuntu and Canonical webpages and download OS updates from Ubuntu servers have consistently failed over the past 24 hours. Updates from mirror sites, however, have continued to work normally. A Canonical status page said: “Canonical’s web infrastructure is under a sustained, cross-border attack and we are working to address it.” Other than that, Ubuntu and Canonical officials have maintained radio silence since the outage began. A decades-long scourge A group sympathetic to the Iranian government has taken credit for the outage. According to posts on Telegram and other social media, the group is responsible for a DDoS attack using Beam, an operation that claims to test the ability of servers to operate under heavy loads but, like other “stressors,” are, in fact, fronts for services miscreants pay for to take down third-party sites. In recent days, the same pro-Iran group has taken credit for DDoSes on eBay.

Senators ban themselves from prediction markets after candidates bet on own races

Kalshi also issued a five-year suspension and a penalty of $6,229.30 to independent Mark Moran, a Senate candidate in Virginia, who did not agree to a settlement. “YES, I did bet ~$100 on myself on Kalshi because I wanted to get caught,” Moran wrote in an X post. Moran said he refused a settlement offer that would have compelled him to make a public statement, and that he made the bet to draw attention to Kalshi and his own campaign. “For $100, I just got more attention from CNN, Fox, WSJ, etc than any media consultant ever,” he wrote. “In politics, money has always bought attention, but I can get attention for almost free.” US blocks states from regulating Moran wrote that “Kalshi is currently being sued by many states for being an illegal betting market,” and that he made the bet to “bring to light that our ‘democracy’ is up for sale and Kalshi is a platform that can be manipulated by the highest bidder/donor to move a market which will sway voters bc the media will report on it.” The Trump administration has fought state efforts to impose stricter regulations on prediction markets. The US won a court

Minnesota passes ban on fake AI nudes; app makers risk $500K fines

“Today, we led the nation protecting women, children, and everyone in public life from the harm caused by AI nudification technology,” Maye Quade said. “Companies that make this technology available for free online and in app stores will no longer be allowed to enable predators who abuse and victimize adults and children with the click of a button.” Celebrating the law’s passage, Maye Quade thanked “the victim-survivors who made this bill a reality.” “They have shared their story in committee, with reporters, and with law enforcement with dignity and courage,” she said. “Their power, brilliance, and advocacy is why we passed this bill today. They have had a singular focus on passing this legislation so that what happened to them does not happen to any Minnesotan, ever again.” A lengthy CNBC report last September exposed how a group of Minnesota friends first learned that a mutual friend was creating fake nudes of dozens of women. The man apologized, but he seemingly did not help identify all the victims. There was no evidence he ever shared the images, so laws like the Take It Down Act did not apply, and proving the man’s ill intent made pursuing penalties under revenge porn

Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers

Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain—meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions “suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East” and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that “relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations” in a process that “is expected to take several months.” That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions—ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1—after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also “strongly” recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any “inaccessible resources.” Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery

Scorpions go terminator mode and reinforce their weapons with metal

It is actually very metal Different hunting patterns seem to dictate different distributions of metal. Scorpions are armed with dual front pincers (technically known as chelae or pedipalp appendages) and a venom-injecting telson, or stinger, on the posterior of their tail. These things look dangerous enough on their own, but a chemical examination showed they contain metals like zinc, manganese, and iron. “That the metals are there has been known since the 1990s,” said Sam Campbell, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia. “What we didn’t know was whether scorpions evolved to be like that or if it was accidental and they were just picking the metals up from the environment.” To answer this question, Campbell and his colleagues examined how metals are distributed across the stingers and pincers of different scorpion species. Based on their data, detailed in a recent study published in the Journal of The Royal Society Interface, there was nothing accidental about it. Mapping the weapons Campbell’s team focused on 18 scorpion taxa selected from a large collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. To map the molecular structure of the scorpions’ weaponry, the researchers used high-resolution scanning electron microscopy coupled with micro-X-ray

Amid Mythos' hyped cybersecurity prowess, researchers find GPT-5.5 is just as good

Is it just “fear-based marketing”? The new results for GPT-5.5 suggest that, when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos Preview was likely not “a breakthrough specific to one model” but rather “a byproduct of more general improvements in long-horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding,” AISI writes. In a recent interview with the Core Memory podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman criticized what he calls “fear-based marketing” in promoting limited releases for certain AI models. While he said he’s “sure Mythos is a great model for cybersecurity,” he added that “it is clearly incredible marketing to say, ‘We have built a bomb. We are about to drop it on your head. We will sell you a bomb shelter for $100 million.’” “There will be a lot more rhetoric about models that are too dangerous to release,” Altman continued. “There will also be very dangerous models that will have to be released in different ways.” In February, OpenAI rolled out its Trusted Access for Cyber pilot program, letting security researchers and enterprises verify their identities and register their interest in studying OpenAI’s frontier models for “legitimate defensive work.” Last month, OpenAI said it was using that trusted access list to control the limited launch

Is your Purosangue SUV not sharp enough? Ferrari has you covered.

The control strategies for the double-clutch paddle-shift gearbox have also been improved, cutting shift times at the expense of a bit of refinement. But then that’s the point: If you want a soothing luxury SUV, many other companies will sell you one. Ferrari buyers want the feeling of the next gear engaging to be a little more brutal, particularly if they’re in one of the more permissive traction and stability control settings (or if those are disengaged entirely). In manual mode, that happens when you shift above 5,500 rpm, Ferrari tells us. To let people know you spent an as-yet-unannounced sum on the Handling Speciale option (though if you need to ask…), there are some styling tweaks like diamond-cut wheels, carbon-fiber logo shields on the side, and black accents instead of chrome. I note with interest that the wheel here has buttons, not capacitive panels. Hopefully we can arrange a test drive soon. Ferrari Next up for Maranello is the Luce, its first-ever electric vehicle. So far, we’ve seen details about its powertrain, sound, and user interface, with the full reveal scheduled for May 25.

Virgin Galactic reveals new ship, but it's running out of time and cash

On Thursday, the publicly traded spaceflight company Virgin Galactic shared on social media a new photo of its next-generation spaceship being towed outside of its factory in Mesa, Arizona. You remember Virgin Galactic, right? The space tourism company was founded 22 years ago by Sir Richard Branson to bring spaceflight to the masses. Hundreds of people began buying tickets to space nearly two decades ago. And after a long, and at times deadly, development campaign, the company reached outer space (defined, somewhat controversially, as an altitude of 80 km and above) in December 2018. The company began flying passengers in May 2021 with its VSS Unity spacecraft, and impressively completed six spaceflights in 2023. But a few months later, in June 2024, Virgin Galactic stopped flying VSS Unity to focus on the development of its next-generation vehicle capable of more frequent, lower-cost spaceflights. Since then, the company has been largely quiet, making this week’s revelation of new hardware notable. So Virgin Galactic is still pressing ahead, but the question is where it’s going, and along with it, the entire suborbital space tourism industry. Difficult to make a profit Spaceflight remains an expensive and dangerous business, even for companies focused on

Apple may take "several months" to catch up to Mac mini and Studio demand

As we wrote last month, the extent of the shipping delays can probably be blamed on multiple factors. AI-related demand for the desktops and chip shortages are probably factors, but Apple is also said to be planning replacements for both systems with Apple M5-series chips later this year, and it’s common for models to see their ship times slip when replacements are imminent. Cook’s “several months” estimate could easily include the introduction of new models, plus whatever time Apple needs to catch up to pent-up demand afterward. Cook also noted that “customer response to MacBook Neo has been off the charts, with higher-than-expected demand” and that Apple “set a March record for customers new to the Mac, partly due to the Neo.” (Note that “a March record” is not the same thing as “an all-time record,” but regardless, it seems that demand for the Neo has been healthy.) But MacBook Neo availability has been much better than for the Mac mini or Studio. A Neo ordered directly from Apple will usually arrive in two or three weeks, but this time window has stayed roughly the same since early March. The Neo also remains widely available for same-day shipping or pickup

Women sue the men who used their Instagram feeds to create AI porn influencers

“disgusting on every single level” AI ModelForge is a platform that teaches men how to generate their own AI influencers. A little over a year ago, MG was leading the relatively normal life of a twentysomething in Scottsdale, Arizona. She worked as a personal assistant and supplemented her income by waiting tables on the weekends. Like most women her age, she had an Instagram account, where she’d occasionally post Stories and photos of herself getting matcha and hanging out by the pool with her friends, or going to Pilates. “I never really cared to pop off and become popular on social media,” says MG (who is cited only as MG in the lawsuit to protect her identity). “I just used it the way most people did when it first came out, to share their lives with the people closest to them.” She has a little more than 9,000 followers—a robust following, but nowhere close to a massive platform. Last summer, she received a DM from one of her followers. Did she know, the person asked her, that photos and videos of a woman who looked exactly like MG were circulating on Instagram? MG clicked the link and saw multiple Reels

Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia's Soyuz-5 finally debuts

Skip to content Roundup Two launches this week delivered 61 more satellites to orbit for the Amazon Leo broadband network. This long exposure photo shows the triple exhaust plume from SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket as it streaked away from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on April 29, 2026. Credit: SpaceX Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as SpaceX aims to launch the vehicle’s next test flight, perhaps sometime in May. The results of that flight and the outcome of Blue Origin’s first attempt to land on the Moon with its Blue Moon cargo lander in the coming months should tell us a lot about NASA’s actual chances of putting astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028. As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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

There's a lot of hype about Chinese EVs—is any of it true?

PYAITK In addition to being full of screens, China now wants its cars to be packed with AI. Are Chinese cars the best thing ever, or are we being spun a bit of a tale? Credit: Wuling Are Chinese cars the best thing ever, or are we being spun a bit of a tale? Credit: Wuling The Beijing Auto Show is currently taking place in China, offering those of us behind the Trump tariff curtain a peek at what’s increasingly being dubbed the world’s most advanced car market. Chinese EVs leave everyone else in the dust, we’re told, with infotainment that makes your smartphone look like a StarTac, range numbers that would make a turbodiesel Audi weep, and charging that might be even faster than filling up with gas, depending on the size of your tank. As an American, I mostly have to take someone else’s word for that. If there’s one thing Democratic politicians can agree on with Republicans, even now, it’s that they don’t want cars from Chinese automakers on US roads. Toward the end of his administration, President Joe Biden levied a 100 percent tariff on Chinese EVs. Under the Biden and then Trump administrations, Congress passed

Trump nominates Fox News doctor to be the next surgeon general

In a series of social media posts Thursday, President Trump withdrew his nomination of Make America Health Again influencer Casey Means to be surgeon general, lashed out at Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) for Means’ stalled nomination in the Senate, then announced a new nominee: Nicole B. Saphier, a breast radiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, a Fox News contributor, and founder of an herbal supplement company who has questioned vaccines. Trump’s abandonment of Means comes as no surprise. The nomination of the Stanford University-trained doctor has been stalled in the Senate since her February confirmation hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, which Cassidy chairs. Afterward, it became clear that several Republican lawmakers, including Cassidy, had reservations about her nomination. Doubts about Means Specifically, concerns centered around her vaccine views and qualifications. Although she has a medical degree, she dropped out of her medical residency and does not hold an active license, which means, if confirmed, she would serve as the country’s top doctor without being able to practice medicine. During her hearing, she largely tried to skirt questions about vaccines, avoiding explicitly recommending lifesaving shots or contradicting the views of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert

US falls below Ukraine in press freedom as global autocracy takes hold

From watching too much Nordic noir, I have learned the key lessons to Scandinavian safety: Stay out of the deep woods, avoid all “rustic villagers,” flee every solstice or equinox ritual, and run screaming from any creature (human or otherwise) wearing antlers in the wrong anatomical location. But assuming you can avoid pagan magic and the “old gods,” Nordic countries do well on many other measures of human development. In the most recent World Happiness Report, for example, Finland tops the list while Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are all in the top six. (Costa Rica is the non-Nordic exception here, taking the fourth spot.) These countries are also near the top in global average life expectancy. They also happen to have the most press freedom on the planet. Reporters Without Borders (or RSF, to use the initialism for its French name, Reporters Sans Frontières) today released the 2026 version of its venerable World Press Freedom Index, and Norway continues its decade-long run atop the leaderboard. Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Estonia are also in the top 10 spots. Looking at the report’s global map, the Nordic region stands out as the freest spot on Earth for journalists; it is the

Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine's sights

Most exciting events “We had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day.” Members of the Russian military supervise the installation of a European Space Agency environmental satellite on top of a modified Russian ballistic missile before a launch in 2016. Credit: ESA–Stephane Corvaja, 2016 If you believe official Russian reports, the country’s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months. The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX’s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow. The Russian space agency’s first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Dmitry Bakanov, the general director of Roscosmos, regaled Putin with a list of Russia’s recent accomplishments in the space sector. The list was modest, at least by the standards

Elon Musk's 7 biggest stumbles on the stand at OpenAI trial

“I don’t yell” Elon Musk spent three days testifying as the first witness in his trial against OpenAI. Elon Musk seems tired and cranky. On Thursday, he took the stand for the third day in a four-week trial stemming from his lawsuit alleging that OpenAI abandoned its mission and should be blocked from taking the company public later this year. If Musk plays his cards right, Sam Altman could be ousted and OpenAI would remain a nonprofit forever. But Musk stumbled at least seven times in ways that possibly put his chances at winning in jeopardy. Most notable, 1) OpenAI’s lawyer managed to get him to make several concessions over his own lawyer’s objections. 2) He also lost a fight to keep xAI’s safety record off the table, calling his reputation as a supposed AI savior defending OpenAI’s mission into question. 3) He repeatedly appeared dishonest, as OpenAI’s lawyer showed documents contradicting his testimony. And he twice appeared disingenuous, 4) first when confronted with calling OpenAI’s safety team “jackasses,” 5) and then again when admitting that he didn’t know what “safety cards” are, even though his own AI firm issues them. Perhaps most embarrassing, 6) he testified that he never

The most severe Linux threat to surface in years catches the world flat-footed

Publicly released exploit code for an effectively unpatched vulnerability that gives root access to virtually all releases of Linux is setting off alarm bells as defenders scramble to ward off severe compromises inside data centers and on personal devices. The vulnerability and exploit code that exploits it were released Wednesday evening by researchers from security firm Theori, five weeks after privately disclosing it to the Linux kernel security team. The team patched the vulnerability in versions 7.0, 6.19.12, 6.18.12, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254) but few of the Linux distributions had incorporated those fixes at the time the exploit was released. A single script hacks all distros The critical flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 and the name CopyFail, is a local privilege escalation, a vulnerability class that allows unprivileged users to elevate themselves to administrators. CopyFail is particularly severe because it can be exploited with a single piece of exploit code—released in Wednesday’s disclosure—that works across all vulnerable distributions with no modification. With that, an attacker can, among other things, hack multi-tenant systems, break out of containers based on Kubernetes or other frameworks, and create malicious pull requests that pipe the exploit code through CI/CD work flows. “‘Local privilege escalation’