Enlarge / An Apple Store in Shanghai, China, on April 11, 2024. (credit: CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

Apple said it complied with orders from the Chinese government to remove the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China. Apple also removed Telegram and Signal from China.

"We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree," Apple said in a statement quoted by several news outlets. "The Cyberspace Administration of China ordered the removal of these apps from the China storefront based on their national security concerns. These apps remain available for download on all other storefronts where they appear."

The Wall Street Journal paraphrased a person familiar with the matter as saying that the Chinese cyberspace agency "asked Apple to remove WhatsApp and Threads from the App Store because both contain political content that includes problematic mentions of the Chinese president [Xi Jinping]."

Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." (credit: Microsoft)

On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the future, it could power virtual avatars that render locally and don't require video feeds—or allow anyone with similar tools to take a photo of a person found online and make them appear to say whatever they want.

"It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors," reads the abstract of the accompanying research paper titled, "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." It's the work of Sicheng Xu, Guojun Chen, Yu-Xiao Guo, Jiaolong Yang, Chong Li, Zhenyu Zang, Yizhong Zhang, Xin Tong, and Baining Guo.

The VASA framework (short for "Visual Affective Skills Animator") uses machine learning to analyze a static image along with a speech audio clip. It is then able to generate a realistic video with precise facial expressions, head movements, and lip-syncing to the audio. It does not clone or simulate voices (like other Microsoft research) but relies on an existing audio input that could be specially recorded or spoken for a particular purpose.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Benj Edwards)

On Thursday, Meta unveiled early versions of its Llama 3 open-weights AI model that can be used to power text composition, code generation, or chatbots. It also announced that its Meta AI Assistant is now available on a website and is going to be integrated into its major social media apps, intensifying the company's efforts to position its products against other AI assistants like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, and Google's Gemini.

Like its predecessor, Llama 2, Llama 3 is notable for being a freely available, open-weights large language model (LLM) provided by a major AI company. Llama 3 technically does not quality as "open source" because that term has a specific meaning in software (as we have mentioned in other coverage), and the industry has not yet settled on terminology for AI model releases that ship either code or weights with restrictions (you can read Llama 3's license here) or that ship without providing training data. We typically call these releases "open weights" instead.

At the moment, Llama 3 is available in two parameter sizes: 8 billion (8B) and 70 billion (70B), both of which are available as free downloads through Meta's website with a sign-up. Llama 3 comes in two versions: pre-trained (basically the raw, next-token-prediction model) and instruction-tuned (fine-tuned to follow user instructions). Each has a 8,192 token context limit.

Enlarge (credit: PM Images | DigitalVision)

On Wednesday, Colorado expanded the scope of its privacy law initially designed to protect biometric data like fingerprints or face images to become first in the nation to also shield sensitive neural data.

That could stop companies from hoarding brain activity data without residents realizing the risks. The New York Times reported that neural data is increasingly being collected and sold nationwide. And after a market analysis showed that investments in neurotechnology leapt by 60 percent globally from 2019 to 2020—and were valued at $30 billion in 2021—Big Tech companies have significantly intensified plans to develop their own products to rake in potentially billions.

For instance, in 2023, Meta demoed a wristband with a neural interface used to control its smart glasses and unveiled an AI system that could be used to decode the mind. In January, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first brain chip in a human that can be used to control a device with their thoughts. And just last month, Apple Insider reported that "Apple is working on technology that could turn the Apple Vision Pro into a brainwave reader to improve mental health, assist with training and workouts, and help with mindfulness."

Enlarge / That is in no way what the Z button looks like or where it goes...

Apple's decision earlier this month to open the iOS App Store to generic retro game emulators is already bearing fruit. Delta launched Wednesday as one of the first officially approved iOS apps to emulate Nintendo consoles from the NES through the N64 and the Game Boy through the Nintendo DS (though unofficial options have snuck through in the past).

Delta is an outgrowth of developer Riley Testut's earlier sideloadable GBA4iOS project, which recently had its own unauthorized clone removed from the App Store. Before Wednesday, iOS users could load Delta onto their devices only through AltStore, an iOS marketplace that used a Developer Mode workaround to sideload apps from a self-hosted server. European users can now get that AltStore directly on their iOS devices (for a small 1.50 euro/year fee), while North American users can simply download Delta for free from the iOS App Store, with no ads or user tracking to boot.

All that history means Delta is far from a slapdash app quickly thrown together to take advantage of Apple's new openness to emulation. The app is obviously built with iOS in mind and already integrates some useful features designed for the mobile ecosystem. While there are some updates we'd like to see in the future, this represents a good starting point for where Apple-approved game emulation can go on iOS.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai promised more layoffs at Google this year, and the company is delivering. Business Insider was the first to report the latest cuts are to "several teams" in Google's real estate and finance departments. The report adds: "One current employee said the changes were 'pretty large-scale' and that some roles are being moved abroad."

CNBC has a copy of the memo that Google and Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat sent out to employees about the layoffs. Porat blames AI for the layoffs, saying, “The tech sector is in the midst of a tremendous platform shift with Al. As a company, this means we have the opportunity to make more helpful products for billions of users and provide faster solutions to our customers, but it also means we collectively have to make tough decisions, including how and where we work to align with our highest priority areas.” It's not clear how or if AI is actually taking over roles in real estate and finance.

Google has been making cuts across a ton of departments since 2022, when Pichai declared Google was not productive enough. There was a big set of 12,000 layoffs in January 2023, and an almost uncountable number of smaller cuts since then. Google's cuts are aligned with a massive wave of layoffs across the tech industry.

Enlarge (credit: Sergey Krasovskiy)

Blue whales have been considered the largest creatures to ever live on Earth. With a maximum length of nearly 30 meters and weighing nearly 200 tons, they are the all-time undisputed heavyweight champions of the animal kingdom.

Now, digging on a beach in Somerset, UK, a team of British paleontologists found the remains of an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that could give the whales some competition. “It is quite remarkable to think that gigantic, blue-whale-sized ichthyosaurs were swimming in the oceans around what was the UK during the Triassic Period,” said Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester who led the study.

Giant jawbones

Ichthyosaurs were found in the seas through much of the Mesozoic era, appearing as early as 250 million years ago. They had four limbs that looked like paddles, vertical tail fins that extended downward in most species, and generally looked like large, reptilian dolphins with elongated narrow jaws lined with teeth. And some of them were really huge. The largest ichthyosaur skeleton so far was found in British Columbia, Canada, measured 21 meters, and belonged to a particularly massive ichthyosaur called Shonisaurus sikanniensis. But it seems they could get even larger than that.

Enlarge / Here it is: two virtual Mac displays in Vision Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's Vision Pro headset holds the promise to be a powerful extension of your Mac workflow, but the Mac integration it shipped with is just neat, not a big step forward. Now, an app by established independent developers Jordi Bruin, Mathijs Kadijk, and Tom Lokhorst aims to fix that.

Called Splitscreen, it enables you to use two virtual displays at once while working with your Mac and wearing Vision Pro. By contrast, Apple's default implementation only supports mirroring a single Mac display to a resizable virtual one.

Further, the developers are working on achieving what I said I'd like to see from Apple when I wrote up my first impressions of the headset: the ability to move individual Mac windows around your space freely like visionOS apps when your Mac and Vision Pro are connected to one another.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt "A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style." (credit: AI Pictures That Go Hard / X)

When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a lot of people off guard. The launch began an innovative and tumultuous period in AI history, marked by a sense of wonder and a polarizing ethical debate that reverberates in the AI space to this day.

Last week, OpenAI turned off the ability for new customers to purchase generation credits for the web version of DALL-E 2, effectively killing it. From a technological point of view, it's not too surprising that OpenAI recently began winding down support for the service. The 2-year-old image generation model was groundbreaking for its time, but it has since been surpassed by DALL-E 3's higher level of detail, and OpenAI has recently begun rolling out DALL-E 3 editing capabilities.

But for a tight-knit group of artists and tech enthusiasts who were there at the start of DALL-E 2, the service's sunset marks the bittersweet end of a period where AI technology briefly felt like a magical portal to boundless creativity. "The arrival of DALL-E 2 was truly mind-blowing," illustrator Douglas Bonneville told Ars in an interview. "There was an exhilarating sense of unlimited freedom in those first days that we all suspected AI was going to unleash. It felt like a liberation from something into something else, but it was never clear exactly what."

Enlarge (credit: da-kuk/Getty)

Kremlin-backed actors have stepped up efforts to interfere with the US presidential election by planting disinformation and false narratives on social media and fake news sites, analysts with Microsoft reported Wednesday.

The analysts have identified several unique influence-peddling groups affiliated with the Russian government seeking to influence the election outcome, with the objective in large part to reduce US support of Ukraine and sow domestic infighting. These groups have so far been less active during the current election cycle than they were during previous ones, likely because of a less contested primary season.

Stoking divisions

Over the past 45 days, the groups have seeded a growing number of social media posts and fake news articles that attempt to foment opposition to US support of Ukraine and stoke divisions over hot-button issues such as election fraud. The influence campaigns also promote questions about President Biden’s mental health and corrupt judges. In all, Microsoft has tracked scores of such operations in recent weeks.

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Electricity supply is becoming the latest chokepoint to threaten the growth of artificial intelligence, according to leading tech industry chiefs, as power-hungry data centers add to the strain on grids around the world.

Billionaire Elon Musk said this month that while the development of AI had been “chip constrained” last year, the latest bottleneck to the cutting-edge technology was “electricity supply.” Those comments followed a warning by Amazon chief Andy Jassy this year that there was “not enough energy right now” to run new generative AI services.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent Alphabet are investing billions of dollars in computing infrastructure as they seek to build out their AI capabilities, including in data centers that typically take several years to plan and construct.

Enlarge / EV charger status is coming to Google Maps. (credit: Google)

Google Maps is making itself friendlier for electric vehicles. A couple of years ago it added the option to select different powertrain types when calculating a route—gas, hybrid, electric, and so on. Lower-energy routes with fewer hills are helpful for electric vehicles, but mostly what EV drivers on unfamiliar terrain really want to know about are the chargers: Where are they, how fast are they, and do they work? Soon, that critical information will be available to Google Maps users via a new update.

Live charger status is usually available from the onboard navigation system built into an EV. Better yet, those native nav systems invariably talk to the powertrain, so they know how much state of charge is currently in the battery and how much to expect upon arrival. Add in real-time status on chargers—how many are working, how many are available—and it's not hard to see why plenty of EV drivers stick with the built-in system.

But for some EVs, that built-in system is Google Maps, including EVs from Ford, Honda, General Motors, Volvo, Polestar, and soon even Porsche. These will be the first devices to receive the update, Google says, which will roll out globally in the coming months. After the connected cars, smartphones will be next.

Enlarge / Cans of Tab diet soda on display in 2011. Tab was discontinued in 2020. There has never been a soda named "Spaces" that had a cult following. (credit: Getty Images)

Anybody can contribute to the Linux kernel, but any person's commit suggestion can become the focus of the kernel's master and namesake, Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is famously not overly committed to niceness, though he has been working on it since 2018. You can see glimpses of this newer, less curse-laden approach in how Torvalds recently addressed a commit with which he vehemently disagreed. It involves tabs.

The commit last week changed exactly one thing on one line, replacing a tab character with a space: "It helps Kconfig parsers to read file without error." Torvalds responded with a commit of his own, as spotted by The Register, which would "add some hidden tabs on purpose." Trying to smooth over a tabs-versus-spaces matter seemed to awaken Torvalds to the need to have tab-detecting failures be "more obvious." Torvalds would have added more, he wrote, but didn't "want to make things uglier than necessary. But it *might* be necessary if it turns out we see more of this kind of silly tooling."

If you've read this far and don't understand what's happening, please allow me, a failed CS minor, to offer a quick explanation: Tabs Versus Spaces will never be truly resolved, codified, or set right by standards, and the energy spent on the issue over time could, if harnessed, likely power one or more small nations. Still, the Linux kernel has its own coding style, and it directly cites "K&R," or Kernighan & Ritchie, the authors of the coding bible The C Programming Language, which is a tabs book. If you are submitting kernel code, it had better use tabs (eight-character tabs, ideally, though that is tied in part to teletype and line-printer history).

Enlarge / SEM Micrograph of a tardigrade, more commonly known as a "water bear" or "moss piglet." (credit: Cultura RM Exclusive/Gregory S. Paulson/Getty Images)

Since the 1960s, scientists have known that the tiny tardigrade can withstand very intense radiation blasts 1,000 times stronger than what most other animals could endure. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, it's not that such ionizing radiation doesn't damage tardigrades' DNA; rather, the tardigrades are able to rapidly repair any such damage. The findings complement those of a separate study published in January that also explored tardigrades' response to radiation.

“These animals are mounting an incredible response to radiation, and that seems to be a secret to their extreme survival abilities,” said co-author Courtney Clark-Hachtel, who was a postdoc in Bob Goldstein's lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has been conducting research into tardigrades for 25 years. “What we are learning about how tardigrades overcome radiation stress can lead to new ideas about how we might try to protect other animals and microorganisms from damaging radiation.”

As reported previously, tardigrades are micro-animals that can survive in the harshest conditions: extreme pressure, extreme temperature, radiation, dehydration, starvation—even exposure to the vacuum of outer space. The creatures were first described by German zoologist Johann Goeze in 1773. They were dubbed tardigrada ("slow steppers" or "slow walkers") four years later by Lazzaro Spallanzani, an Italian biologist. That's because tardigrades tend to lumber along like a bear. Since they can survive almost anywhere, they can be found in lots of places: deep-sea trenches, salt and freshwater sediments, tropical rain forests, the Antarctic, mud volcanoes, sand dunes, beaches, and lichen and moss. (Another name for them is "moss piglets.")

Enlarge / Photos of iGBA that appeared on the App Store before the app was taken down. (credit: Internet Archive)

Over the weekend, developer Mattia La Spina launched iGBA as one of the first retro game emulators legitimately available on the iOS App Store following Apple's rules change regarding such emulators earlier this month. As of Monday morning, though, iGBA has been pulled from the App Store following controversy over the unauthorized reuse of source code from a different emulator project.

Shortly after iGBA's launch, some people on social media began noticing that the project appeared to be based on the code for GBA4iOS, a nearly decade-old emulator that developer Riley Testut and a partner developed as high-schoolers (and distributed via a temporary security hole in the iOS App Store). Testut took to social media Sunday morning to call iGBA a "knock-off" of GBA4iOS. "I did not give anyone permission to do this, yet it’s now sitting at the top of the charts (despite being filled with ads + tracking)," he wrote.

GBA4iOS is an open source program released under the GNU GPLv2 license, with licensing terms that let anyone "use, modify, and distribute my original code for this project without fear of legal consequences." But those expansive licensing terms only apply "unless you plan to submit your app to Apple’s App Store, in which case written permission from me is explicitly required."

Enlarge (credit: OsakaWayne Studios)

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to get at least eight hours of sleep, there is now one more. Neurons are still active during sleep. We may not realize it, but the brain takes advantage of this recharging period to get rid of junk that was accumulating during waking hours.

Sleep is something like a soft reboot. We knew that slow brainwaves had something to do with restful sleep; researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have now found out why. When we are awake, our neurons require energy to fuel complex tasks such as problem-solving and committing things to memory. The problem is that debris gets left behind after they consume these nutrients. As we sleep, neurons use these rhythmic waves to help move cerebrospinal fluid through brain tissue, carrying out metabolic waste in the process.

In other words, neurons need to take out the trash so it doesn’t accumulate and potentially contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. “Neurons serve as master organizers for brain clearance,” the WUSTL research team said in a study recently published in Nature.

Enlarge / An image of a boy amazed by flying letters. (credit: Getty Images)

Some weeks in AI news are eerily quiet, but during others, getting a grip on the week's events feels like trying to hold back the tide. This week has seen three notable large language model (LLM) releases: Google Gemini Pro 1.5 hit general availability with a free tier, OpenAI shipped a new version of GPT-4 Turbo, and Mistral released a new openly licensed LLM, Mixtral 8x22B. All three of those launches happened within 24 hours starting on Tuesday.

With the help of software engineer and independent AI researcher Simon Willison (who also wrote about this week's hectic LLM launches on his own blog), we'll briefly cover each of the three major events in roughly chronological order, then dig into some additional AI happenings this week.

Gemini Pro 1.5 general release

(credit: Google)

On Tuesday morning Pacific time, Google announced that its Gemini 1.5 Pro model (which we first covered in February) is now available in 180-plus countries, excluding Europe, via the Gemini API in a public preview. This is Google's most powerful public LLM so far, and it's available in a free tier that permits up to 50 requests a day.

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

Epic Games has filed a proposed injunction that would stop Google from restricting third-party app distribution outside Google Play Store on Android devices after proving that Google had an illegal monopoly in markets for Android app distribution.

Epic is suggesting that competition on the Android mobile platform would be opened up if the court orders Google to allow third-party app stores to be distributed for six years in the Google Play Store and blocks Google from entering any agreements with device makers that would stop them from pre-loading third-party app stores. This would benefit both mobile developers and users, Epic argued in a wide-sweeping proposal that would greatly limit Google's control over the Android app ecosystem.

US District Court Judge James Donato will ultimately decide the terms of the injunction. Google has until May 3 to respond to Epic's filing.

Enlarge / From magnets we came, to magnets we return. (credit: Garner Products)

There is the mental image that most people have of electronics recycling, and then there is the reality, which is shredding.

Less than 20 percent of e-waste even makes it to recycling. That which does is, if not acquired through IT asset disposition (ITAD) or spotted by a worker who sees some value, heads into the shredder for raw metals extraction. If you've ever toured an electronics recycling facility, you can see for yourself how much of your stuff eventually gets chewed into little bits, whether due to design, to unprofitable reuse markets, or sheer volume concerns.

Traditional hard drives have some valuable things inside them—case, cover, circuit boards, drive assemblies, actuators, and rare-earth magnets—but only if they avoid the gnashing teeth. That's where the DiskMantler comes in. Garner Products, a data elimination firm, has a machine that it claims can process 500 hard drives (the HDD kind) per day in a way that leaves a drive separated into those useful components. And the DiskMantler does this by shaking the thing to death (video).

Enlarge / File photo of a Falcon 9 rocket rolling out of its hangar at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

For the first time, SpaceX will launch one of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters for a 20th time Friday night on a flight to deliver 23 more Starlink Internet satellites to orbit.

This milestone mission is scheduled to lift off at 9:22 pm EDT Friday (01:22 UTC Saturday) from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Forecasters from the US Space Force predict "excellent" weather for the primetime launch.

Falcon 9 will blaze a familiar trail into space, following the same profile as dozens of past Starlink missions.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Another day, another dead Google product. The Google One VPN service we complained about last week is headed to the chopping block. Google's support documents haven't been updated yet, but Android Authority reported on an email going out to Google One users informing them of the shutdown. 9to5Google also got confirmation of the shutdown from Google.

The Google One VPN launched in 2020 as a bonus feature for paying Google One subscribers. Google One is Google's cloud storage subscription plan that allows users to buy extra storage for Gmail, Drive, and Google Photos. In 2020, the plan was exclusive to the expensive 2TB tier for $10 a month, but later, it was brought down to all Google One tiers, including the entry-level $2-per-month option.

By our count, Google has three VPN products, though "products" might be too strong a word since they are all essentially the same thing—VPN market segments? There's the general Google One VPN for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac—this is the one that's dying. There's also the "Pixel VPN by Google One," which came with Pixel phones (the "Google One" branding here makes no sense since you didn't have to subscribe to Google One) and the Google Fi VPN that's exclusive to Google Fi Android and iOS customers.

Enlarge / Artist's visualization of GRB 221009A showing the narrow relativistic jets—emerging from a central black hole—that gave rise to the brightest gamma-ray burst yet detected. (credit: Aaron M. Geller/Northwestern/CIERA/ ITRC&DS)

In October 2022, several space-based detectors picked up a powerful gamma-ray burst so energetic that astronomers nicknamed it the BOAT (Brightest Of All Time). Now they've confirmed that the GRB came from a supernova, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature Astronomy. However, they did not find evidence of heavy elements like platinum and gold one would expect from a supernova explosion, which bears on the longstanding question of the origin of such elements in the universe.

As we've reported previously, gamma-ray bursts are extremely high-energy explosions in distant galaxies lasting between mere milliseconds to several hours. There are two classes of gamma-ray bursts. Most (70 percent) are long bursts lasting more than two seconds, often with a bright afterglow. These are usually linked to galaxies with rapid star formation. Astronomers think that long bursts are tied to the deaths of massive stars collapsing to form a neutron star or black hole (or, alternatively, a newly formed magnetar). The baby black hole would produce jets of highly energetic particles moving near the speed of light, powerful enough to pierce through the remains of the progenitor star, emitting X-rays and gamma rays.

Those gamma-ray bursts lasting less than two seconds (about 30 percent) are deemed short bursts, usually emitting from regions with very little star formation. Astronomers think these gamma-ray bursts are the result of mergers between two neutron stars, or a neutron star merging with a black hole, comprising a "kilonova." That hypothesis was confirmed in 2017 when the LIGO collaboration picked up the gravitational wave signal of two neutron stars merging, accompanied by the powerful gamma-ray bursts associated with a kilonova.

Enlarge / A photo of Braarudosphaera bigelowii with the nitroplast indicated by an arrowhead. (credit: Tyler Coale)

The complex cells that underlie animals and plants have a large collection of what are called organelles—compartments surrounded by membranes that perform specialized functions. Two of these were formed through a process called endosymbiosis, in which a once free-living organism is incorporated into a cell. These are the mitochondrion, where a former bacteria now handles the task of converting chemical energy into useful forms, and the chloroplast, where photosynthesis happens.

The fact that there are only a few cases of organelles that evolved through endosymbiosis suggests that it's an extremely rare event. Yet researchers may have found a new case in which an organelle devoted to fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere is in the process of evolving. The resulting organelle, termed a nitroplast, is still in the process of specialization.

Getting nitrogen

Nitrogen is one of the elements central to life. Every DNA base, every amino acid in a protein contains at least one, and often several, nitrogen atoms. But nitrogen is remarkably difficult for life to get ahold of. N₂ molecules might be extremely abundant in our atmosphere, but they're extremely difficult to break apart. The enzymes that can, called nitrogenases, are only found in bacteria, and they don't work in the presence of oxygen. Other organisms have to get nitrogen from their environment, which is one of the reasons we use so much energy to supply nitrogen fertilizers to many crops.

Enlarge (credit: Laurie Rubin via Getty)

Caroline Chaboo’s eyes light up when she talks about tortoise beetles. Like gems, they exist in myriad bright colors: shiny blue, red, orange, leaf green and transparent flecked with gold. They’re members of a group of 40,000 species of leaf beetles, the Chrysomelidae, one of the most species-rich branches of the vast beetle order, Coleoptera. “You have your weevils, longhorns, and leaf beetles,” she says. “That’s really the trio that dominates beetle diversity.”

An entomologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Chaboo has long wondered why the kingdom of life is so skewed toward beetles: The tough-bodied creatures make up about a quarter of all animal species. Many biologists have wondered the same thing, for a long time. “Darwin was a beetle collector,” Chaboo notes.

Despite their kaleidoscopic variety, most beetles share the same three-part body plan. The insects’ ability to fold their flight wings, origami-like, under protective forewings called elytra allows beetles to squeeze into rocky crevices and burrow inside trees. Beetles’ knack for thriving in a large range of microhabitats could also help explain their abundance of species, scientists say. (credit: Bugboy52.40 (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons)

Of the roughly 1 million named insect species on Earth, about 400,000 are beetles. And that’s just the beetles described so far. Scientists typically describe thousands of new species each year. So—why so many beetle species? “We don’t know the precise answer,” says Chaboo. But clues are emerging.

Enlarge / The classic Sega Genesis game Sonic the Hedgehog running on an iPhone—in this case, as a standalone app. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple posted its latest update to the App Store's app review and submission policies for developers, it included language that appears to explicitly allow a new kind of app for emulating retro console games.

Apple has long forbidden apps that run code from an external source, but today's announced changes now allow "software that is not embedded in the binary" in certain cases, with "retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games" specifically listed as one of those cases.

Here's the exact wording:

Enlarge / Legendary Pictures has confirmed that it plans to make Dune: Part Three with director Denis Villeneuve. (credit: YouTube/Warner Bros.)

Dune: Part Two is still raking in the moolah at the box office, and deservedly so. But judging by my various feeds, fans are already swooning over the prospect of director Denis Villeneuve extending his vision into a trilogy by adapting Frank Herbert's 1969 sequel, Dune Messiah, for the next installment. Will there be a Dune: Part Three? Most signs currently point to yes, with a couple of caveats. Exactly how soon we'll be seeing a return to Arrakis depends a lot on Villeneuve.

Variety confirmed that Legendary Pictures is working with the director on developing Dune: Part Three, although it remains unclear from the wording of the plethora of news items whether the project has officially been greenlit. ("Development" can mean a lot of things.) Naturally, the studio is eager, as are we: the film is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, with global earnings of $630 million (although the hotly anticipated Deadpool and Wolverine this summer might give it a run for its money).

That confirmation sent fresh frissons of excitement across the Internet, although Villeneuve had been talking about the prospect as far back as September 2021. Those plans always depended on the success of Part Two, and that hurdle has obviously been cleared. By August 2023, the director was on record saying there were "words on paper" for a third film. And we learned just last month that composer Hans Zimmer was already working on the score for Dune: Part Three.

Enlarge / Pebblebee's Android trackers. (credit: Pebblebee)

Will Google ever launch its "Find My" network? The Android ecosystem was supposed to have its own version of Apple's AirTags by now. Google has had a crowd-sourced device-tracking network sitting dormant on 3 billion Android phones since December 2022. Partners have been ready to go with Bluetooth tag hardware since May 2023! This was all supposed to launch a year ago, but Google has been in a holding pattern. The good news is we're finally seeing some progress after a year of silence.

The reason for Google's lengthy delay is actually Apple. A week before Google's partners announced their Android network Bluetooth tags, Google and Apple jointly announced a standard to detect "unknown" Bluetooth trackers and show users alerts if their phone thinks they're being stalked. Since you can constantly see an AirTag's location, they can be used for stalking by just covertly slipping one into a bag or car; nobody wants that, so everyone's favorite mobile duopoly is teaming up.

Google did its half of this partnership and rolled out AirTag detection in July 2023. At the same time, Google also announced: "We’ve made the decision to hold the rollout of the Find My Device network until Apple has implemented protections for iOS." Surely Apple would be burning the midnight oil to launch iOS Android tag detection as soon as possible so that Google could start competing with AirTags.

Enlarge / Electric F-150 sales are up 80 percent year over year. (credit: Ford)

Ford has caught a case of electric vehicle pessimism and is scaling back or delaying some of its plans for new EV models. A new electric pickup, scheduled to go into production next year, has been pushed back to 2026. And a three-row electric SUV has been given a two-year delay and will now not be available until 2027 at the earliest. The kicker? The automaker has published its sales for the first quarter of the year, and its EV sales are up a whopping 86 percent year over year.

Instead, the Blue Oval wants to focus on making more hybrids instead and says it will have hybrid options for all its internal combustion engine-powered vehicles by 2030. Ford's current range of hybrids is not extensive, but it grew 42 percent in Q1 compared to the first three months of 2023.

Many of those—19,660 to be exact—were the Maverick Hybrid, despite the fact that for model year 2024, Ford removed the hybrid powertrain as the base model and effectively gave the electrified pickup a $1,500 price hike. In total, Ford sold 38,421 hybrids in Q1 2024, which it says makes this the best-ever quarter for hybrid sales. But they represent a rather small slice of its overall pie—just 7.6 percent of the 508,083 vehicles that Ford sold for the first three months of the year.

Enlarge / A user of the Washington Lottery's "Test Drive a Win" website says it used AI to generate (the unredacted version of) this image with her face on a topless body. (credit: The Jason Rantz Show)

The Washington State Lottery has taken down a promotional AI-powered web app after a local mother reported that the site generated an image with her face on the body of a topless woman.

The lottery's "Test Drive a Win" website was designed to help visitors visualize various dream vacations they could pay for with their theoretical lottery winnings. The site included the ability to upload a headshot that would be integrated into an AI-generated tableau of what you might look like on that vacation.

But Megan (last name not given), a 50-year-old from Olympia suburb Tumwater, told conservative Seattle radio host Jason Rantz that the image of her "swim with the sharks" dream vacation on the website showed her face atop a woman sitting on a bed with her breasts exposed. The background of the AI-generated image seems to show the bed in some sort of aquarium, complete with fish floating through the air and sprawling undersea flora sitting awkwardly behind the pillows.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

Google has sued two app developers based in China over an alleged scheme targeting 100,000 users globally over four years with at least 87 fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investor apps distributed through the Play Store.

The tech giant alleged that scammers lured victims with "promises of high returns" from "seemingly legitimate" apps offering investment opportunities in cryptocurrencies and other products. Commonly known as "pig-butchering schemes," these scams displayed fake returns on investments, but when users went to withdraw the funds, they discovered they could not.

In some cases, Google alleged, developers would "double down on the scheme by requesting various fees and other payments from victims that were supposedly necessary for the victims to recover their principal investments and purported gains."

Enlarge / A Waymo Jaguar I-Pace. (credit: Waymo)

Your next food delivery driver may be a robot.

Waymo and Uber have been working together on regular Ubers for a while, but the two companies are now teaming up for food delivery. Automated Uber Eats is rolling out to Waymo's Phoenix service area. Waymo says this will start in "select merchants in Chandler, Tempe and Mesa, including local favorites like Princess Pita, Filiberto's, and Bosa Donuts."

Phoenix Uber Eats customers can fire up the app and order some food, and they might see the message “autonomous vehicles may deliver your order.” Waymo says you'll be able to opt out of robot delivery at checkout if you want.

Enlarge / NASA's generic concept for a lunar terrain vehicle. (credit: NASA)

NASA has made another bold bet on the nation's commercial space industry, this time asking private companies to provide a lunar rover that can survive for up to a decade near the South Pole of the Moon.

The space agency on Wednesday announced the selection of three teams, led by Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab, to work on designs for a rover that can be used by astronauts and function autonomously when no crew is around.

Each company will work with the space agency for the next year or so to reach what is known as a "preliminary design review" for their vehicle. The initial awards are not huge; each is a few tens of millions of dollars. But this work will set the stage for a demonstration phase, which will be worth significantly more.

Enlarge / Engineers from NASA and the National Nuclear Safety Administration lower the wall of a vacuum chamber around the KRUSTY experiment, the Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling Technology. (credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory)

In February, NASA celebrated the arrival of the first US-made lander on the Moon in more than 50 years, an achievement that helps pave the way for the return of American astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade. But the clock was ticking for Intuitive Machines' Odysseus spacecraft after touching down on February 22 near the Moon's south pole.

Each day and night on the Moon lasts two weeks. When the Sun sets, a solar-powered lunar lander like Odysseus is starved of energy. Temperatures during the lunar night plummet, bottoming out at around minus 280° Fahrenheit (minus 173° Celsius).

Over the course of two weeks, these cold temperatures can damage sensitive spacecraft equipment, killing a lander even if it could start generating power again at lunar sunrise. Surviving the night requires heat and electricity, and NASA officials say nuclear power is one of the most attractive solutions to this problem.

Enlarge / You think this cute little search robot is going to work for free? (credit: Getty Images)

Google might start charging for access to search results that use generative artificial intelligence tools. That's according to a new Financial Times report citing "three people with knowledge of [Google's] plans."

Charging for any part of the search engine at the core of its business would be a first for Google, which has funded its search product solely with ads since 2000. But it's far from the first time Google would charge for AI enhancements in general; the "AI Premium" tier of a Google One subscription costs $10 more per month than a standard "Premium" plan, for instance, while "Gemini Business" adds $20 a month to a standard Google Workspace subscription.

While those paid products offer access to Google's high-end "Gemini Advanced" AI model, Google also offers free access to its less performant, plain "Gemini" model without any kind of paid subscription.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Depending on who you ask about AI (and how you define it), the technology may or may not be useful, but one thing is for certain: AI hype is dominating corporate marketing these days—even in fast food. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, corporate fast food giant Yum Brands is embracing an "AI-first mentality" across its restaurant chains, including Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC, and Habit Burger Grill. The company's chief digital and technology officer, Joe Park, told the WSJ that AI will shape nearly every aspect of how these restaurants operate.

"Our vision of [quick-service restaurants] is that an AI-first mentality works every step of the way," Park said in an interview with the outlet. "If you think about the major journeys within a restaurant that can be AI-powered, we believe it’s endless."

As we've discussed in the past, artificial intelligence is a nebulous term. It can mean many different things depending on the context, including computer-controlled ghosts in Pac-Man, algorithms that play checkers, or large language models that give terrible advice on major city websites. But most of all in this tech climate, it means money, because even talking about AI tends to make corporate share prices go up.

Enlarge / The original YouTube thumbnail for Dudesy's Carlin special shows an AI-generated comedian sporting Carlin's signature gray ponytail look. (credit: Carlin estate vs. Dudesy lawsuit)

The George Carlin estate has settled its lawsuit with Dudesy, the podcast that purportedly used a "comedy AI" to produce an hour-long stand-up special in the style and voice of the late comedian.

Dudesy's "George Carlin: Dead and Loving It" special, which was first uploaded in early January, gained hundreds of thousands of views and plenty of media attention for its presentation as a creation of an AI that had "listened to all of George Carlin’s material... to imitate his voice, cadence and attitude as well as the subject matter I think would have interested him today." But even before the Carlin estate lawsuit was filed, there were numerous signs that the special was not actually written by an AI, as Ars laid out in detail in a feature report.

Shortly after the Carlin estate filed its lawsuit against Dudesy in late January, a representative for Dudesy host Will Sasso told The New York Times that the special had actually been "completely written by [Dudesy co-host] Chad Kultgen."

Enlarge / With these tips, you too can prompt people successfully.

In a break from our normal practice, Ars is publishing this helpful guide to knowing how to prompt the "human brain," should you encounter one during your daily routine.

While AI assistants like ChatGPT have taken the world by storm, a growing body of research shows that it's also possible to generate useful outputs from what might be called "human language models," or people. Much like large language models (LLMs) in AI, HLMs have the ability to take information you provide and transform it into meaningful responses—if you know how to craft effective instructions, called "prompts."

Human prompt engineering is an ancient art form dating at least back to Aristotle's time, and it also became widely popular through books published in the modern era before the advent of computers.

Enlarge / Billie Eilish attends the 2024 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on March 10, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California. (credit: Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) announced an open letter critical of AI signed by over 200 musical artists, including Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, and the estate of Frank Sinatra. In the letter, the artists call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to stop using AI to "infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists." A tweet from the ARA added that AI poses an "existential threat" to their art.

Visual artists began protesting the advent of generative AI after the rise of the first mainstream AI image generators in 2022, and considering that generative AI research has since been undertaken for other forms of creative media, we have seen that protest extend to professionals in other creative domains, such as writers, actors, filmmakers—and now musicians.

"When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods," the open letter states. It alleges that some of the "biggest and most powerful" companies (unnamed in the letter) are using the work of artists without permission to train AI models, with the aim of replacing human artists with AI-created content.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Thinkstock)

Google offers a VPN via its "Google One" monthly subscription plan, and while it debuted on phones, a desktop app has been available for Windows and Mac OS for over a year now. Since a lot of people pay for Google One for the cloud storage increase for their Google accounts, you might be tempted to try the VPN on a desktop, but Windows users testing out the app haven't seemed too happy lately. An open bug report on Google's GitHub for the project says the Windows app "breaks" the Windows DNS, and this has been ongoing since at least November.

A VPN would naturally route all your traffic through a secure tunnel, but you've still got to do DNS lookups somewhere. A lot of VPN services also come with a DNS service, and Google is no different. The problem is that Google's VPN app changes the Windows DNS settings of all network adapters to always use Google's DNS, whether the VPN is on or off. Even if you change them, Google's program will change them back.

Most VPN apps don't work this way, and even Google's Mac VPN program doesn't work this way. The users in the thread (and the ones emailing us) expect the app, at minimum, to use the original Windows settings when the VPN is off. Since running a VPN is often about privacy and security, users want to be able to change the DNS away from Google even when the VPN is running.

Before the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, Apple forbade the inclusion of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as a guest and steered the show away from confronting issues related to artificial intelligence, according to Jon Stewart.

This isn't the first we've heard of this rift between Apple and Stewart. When the Apple TV+ show was canceled last October, reports circulated that he told his staff that creative differences over guests and topics were a factor in the decision.

The New York Times reported that both China and AI were sticking points between Apple and Stewart. Stewart confirmed the broad strokes of that narrative in a CBS Morning Show interview after it was announced that he would return to The Daily Show.

Enlarge / If you didn't know what "New Energies" meant, this promotional image puts a windmill on it. (credit: Catan GmbH)

In Klaus Teuber's Catan (previously Settlers of Catan), the player is tasked with starting from scratch and building as much as they can: the largest army, the most cities, the best sea ports for easy trading, even the longest road. It's all beneficial, and the only real drawback is that you have to prioritize certain things over others. There wasn't direct conflict or battle, but there were scarce resources, and the savviest player could corner the market for them.

Catan was released in 1995. Now, in 2024, Teuber's son, Benjamin Teuber, is releasing Catan: New Energies, which he developed with his late father. While it is "rooted in classic Catan mechanics of trading, harvesting, and building," there are some decidedly 2024 issues at play now that the Vikings have settled in for more than a millennia.

As detailed by Benjamin Teuber in a Fast Company interview, New Energies will see players:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Tesla delivered 386,810 vehicles in the first quarter of 2024, an 8.5 percent drop compared to the first quarter of 2023. Tesla produced 433,371 vehicles in Q1 2024, a year-over-year decline of 1.7 percent.

"Decline in volumes was partially due to the early phase of the production ramp of the updated Model 3 at our Fremont factory and factory shutdowns resulting from shipping diversions caused by the Red Sea conflict and an arson attack at Gigafactory Berlin," Tesla announced today.

In Q1 2023, Tesla produced 440,808 cars and delivered 422,875. Tesla's Q4 2023 numbers were 494,989 cars produced and 484,507 delivered.

Enlarge / This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows a globular cluster called NGC 1651. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Girardi, F. Niederhofer)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's April 2, and today's photo comes from the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. It showcases a globular cluster, NGC 1651, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

This cluster of stars is about 120 light-years across. Like other such globular clusters, it is generally spherical, as the stars are bound to one another by gravity. Thus, there is a higher concentration of stars near the center of the cluster.

Enlarge (credit: Benj Edwards)

On Monday, OpenAI announced that visitors to the ChatGPT website in some regions can now use the AI assistant without signing in. Previously, the company required that users create an account to use it, even with the free version of ChatGPT that is currently powered by the GPT-3.5 AI language model. But as we have noted in the past, GPT-3.5 is widely known to provide more inaccurate information compared to GPT-4 Turbo, available in paid versions of ChatGPT.

Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has transformed over time from a tech demo to a comprehensive AI assistant, and it has always had a free version available. The cost is free because "you're the product," as the old saying goes. Using ChatGPT helps OpenAI gather data that will help the company train future AI models, although free users and ChatGPT Plus subscription members can both opt out of allowing the data they input into ChatGPT to be used for AI training. (OpenAI says it never trains on inputs from ChatGPT Team and Enterprise members at all.)

Opening ChatGPT to everyone could provide a frictionless on-ramp for people who might use it as a substitute for Google Search or potentially gain new customers by providing an easy way for people to use ChatGPT quickly, then offering an upsell to paid versions of the service.

Enlarge (credit: Anadolu / Contributor | Anadolu)

To settle a class-action dispute over Chrome's "Incognito" mode, Google has agreed to delete billions of data records reflecting users' private browsing activities.

In a statement provided to Ars, users' lawyer, David Boies, described the settlement as "a historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies." Based on Google's insights, users' lawyers valued the settlement between $4.75 billion and $7.8 billion, the Monday court filing said.

Under the settlement, Google agreed to delete class-action members' private browsing data collected in the past, as well as to "maintain a change to Incognito mode that enables Incognito users to block third-party cookies by default." This, plaintiffs' lawyers noted, "ensures additional privacy for Incognito users going forward, while limiting the amount of data Google collects from them" over the next five years. Plaintiffs' lawyers said that this means that "Google will collect less data from users’ private browsing sessions" and "Google will make less money from the data."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | VIEW press )

AT&T reset passcodes for millions of customers after acknowledging a massive leak involving the data of 73 million current and former subscribers.

"Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders," AT&T said in an update posted to its website on Saturday.

An AT&T support article said the carrier is "reaching out to all 7.6 million impacted customers and have reset their passcodes. In addition, we will be communicating with current and former account holders with compromised sensitive personal information." AT&T said the leaked information varied by customer but included full names, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, AT&T account numbers, and passcodes.

Enlarge / An Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center under construction in Stone Ridge, Virginia, in March 2024. Amazon will spend more than $150 billion on data centers in the next 15 years. (credit: Getty Images)

Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from an open source BSD license to both a Source Available License and a Server Side Public License (SSPL).

The software project and company supporting it were fairly clear in why they did this. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote on March 20 that while Redis and volunteers sponsored the bulk of the project's code development, "the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community." Clarifying a bit, "cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge."

Clarifying even further: Amazon Web Services (and lesser cloud giants), you cannot continue reselling Redis as a service as part of your $90 billion business without some kind of licensed contribution back.

Heads up, Whovians! We've got a newly regenerated Fifteenth Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa and a new season of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who on the way. Judging by the latest trailer, we're in for another wild ride of time-traveling hijinks, punctuated by an irresistibly charismatic Gatwa sporting some very colorful outfits with confident aplomb.

(Spoilers for most recent seasons and specials below.)

Look, I loved Jodie Whittaker's incarnation of the Doctor, but her tenure was hampered by the unavoidable fact that showrunner Chris Chibnall just didn't give her a lot of great material to work with. Among other issues, there was an unfortunate tendency toward didacticism and preachiness in the writing at the expense of genuine emotional resonance. While there were a number of notable episodes, and Chibnall gamely trotted out all the fan-favorite monsters and tropes, nothing ever fully captured the imagination in quite the same way as the show has always done at its best. Whittaker deserved better.

Enlarge / The SOFIA telescope. (credit: Chris Johnson)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's April 1, and today's photo showcases an airplane—but it's a special airplane with some celestial treats in the background.

The plane is a shortened version of a Boeing 747 that housed the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, known as SOFIA. This airborne observatory first took flight in May 2010 and operated through September 2022. The 2.5-meter telescope flew at about 45,000 feet and observed all manner of phenomena from a vantage point above much of the Earth's atmosphere—celestial magnetic fields, star-forming regions, comets, and more.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Image)

On Wednesday, the IEEE Computer Society announced to members that, after April 1, it would no longer accept papers that include a frequently used image of a 1972 Playboy model named Lena Forsén. The so-called "Lenna image," (Forsén added an extra "n" to her name in her Playboy appearance to aid pronunciation) has been used in image processing research since 1973 and has attracted criticism for making some women feel unwelcome in the field.

In an email from the IEEE Computer Society sent to members on Wednesday, Technical & Conference Activities Vice President Terry Benzel wrote, "IEEE's diversity statement and supporting policies such as the IEEE Code of Ethics speak to IEEE's commitment to promoting an including and equitable culture that welcomes all. In alignment with this culture and with respect to the wishes of the subject of the image, Lena Forsén, IEEE will no longer accept submitted papers which include the 'Lena image.'"

An uncropped version of the 512×512-pixel test image originally appeared as the centerfold picture for the December 1972 issue of Playboy Magazine. Usage of the Lenna image in image processing began in June or July 1973 when an assistant professor named Alexander Sawchuck and a graduate student at the University of Southern California Signal and Image Processing Institute scanned a square portion of the centerfold image with a primitive drum scanner, omitting nudity present in the original image. They scanned it for a colleague's conference paper, and after that, others began to use the image as well.