Some of these roles—the secretary of state, for example—are well-known. Others, such as the deputy assistant secretary for textiles, consumer goods, materials, critical minerals & metals industry & analysis, are more obscure.

Historically, science agencies like NASA or the National Institutes of Health tend to have fewer political appointees than many other parts of the federal government. Sometimes, very senior roles—with authority over billions of dollars of spending, and the power to shape entire fields of research—are filled without any direct input from the White House or Congress. The arrangement reflects a long-running argument that scientists should oversee the work of funding and conducting research with very little interference from political leaders.

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Infestations of bark beetles are the bane of spruce trees. Eurasian spruce bark beetles (Ips typographus) ingest bark high in phenolic compounds, organic molecules that often act as antioxidants and antimicrobials. They protect spruce bark from pathogenic fungi—and the beetles take advantage. Their bodies boost the antimicrobial power of these compounds by turning them into substances that are even more toxic to fungi. This would seem to make the beetles invulnerable to fungi.

There is a way to get past the beetles’ borrowed defenses, though. Led by biochemist Ruo Sun, a team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, found that some strains of the fungus Beauveria bassiana are capable of infecting and killing the pests.

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Humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Credit: Timothy Darvill

Stonehenge is an iconic landmark of endless fascination to tourists and researchers alike. There has been a lot of recent chemical analysis identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. So how were the stones transported to their current location?

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Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression.

A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression.

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In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry's claim that 8K TVs were "the future."

However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.

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Cleland, a 56-year-old resident of Richfield and a director at Target Corporation, volunteers with a group that tracks potential Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles in her neighborhood, according to her declaration. On the morning of January 10, she "observed a white Dodge Ram being driven by what I believed to be federal enforcement agents" and "maneuvered behind the vehicle with the intent of observing the agents’ actions."

Cleland said that she and another observer in a different car followed the Dodge Ram because of "concern about a local apartment building being raided." She followed the car for a short time and from a safe distance until "the Dodge Ram stopped in front of the other commuter’s vehicle," she wrote. Cleland said two other vehicles apparently driven by federal agents stopped in front of the Dodge Ram, and her path forward was blocked.

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Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) sent a letter to the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday seeking answers on how the OIG will oversee the direct-to-consumer (DTC) platform and, specifically, how it will apply the anti-kickback statute.

"Legitimate concerns about inappropriate prescribing, conflicts of interest, and inadequate care have been raised about the exact types of DTC platforms to which TrumpRx would route patients," the senators write.

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The platform, which launched days ago as a companion to the viral OpenClaw (once called "Clawdbot" and then "Moltbot") personal assistant, lets AI agents post, comment, upvote, and create subcommunities without human intervention. The results have ranged from sci-fi-inspired discussions about consciousness to an agent musing about a "sister" it has never met.

Moltbook (a play on "Facebook" for Moltbots) describes itself as a "social network for AI agents" where "humans are welcome to observe." The site operates through a "skill" (a configuration file that lists a special prompt) that AI assistants download, allowing them to post via API rather than a traditional web interface. Within 48 hours of its creation, the platform had attracted over 2,100 AI agents that had generated more than 10,000 posts across 200 subcommunities, according to the official Moltbook X account.

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The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

So why is Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos more than a quarter of a century ago, ending the company's longest-running program?

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California officials say the FCC allegations are overblown, and that there is simply "lag time between a death and account closure" rather than widespread failures in its Lifeline enrollment process. Meanwhile, the only Democratic commissioner on the FCC alleges that Carr's plan to change eligibility rules uses "cruel and punitive eligibility standards" that will raise prices on many people who are still very much alive and eligible for the program.

Carr's office said this week that the FCC will vote next month on rule changes to ensure that Lifeline money goes to "only living and lawful Americans" who meet low-income eligibility guidelines. Lifeline spends nearly $1 billion a year and gives eligible households up to $9.25 per month toward phone and Internet bills, or up to $34.25 per month in tribal areas.

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To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that's entirely good news. It's a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. "All of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much," he said. "Don't get me wrong—LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don't expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It's not how they work."

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So Thacker looked into it. With just a few minutes of work, he and a web security researcher friend named Joel Margolis made a startling discovery: Bondu’s web-based portal, intended to allow parents to check on their children's conversations and for Bondu’s staff to monitor the products’ use and performance, also let anyone with a Gmail account access transcripts of virtually every conversation Bondu's child users have ever had with the toy.

Without carrying out any actual hacking, simply by logging in with an arbitrary Google account, the two researchers immediately found themselves looking at children's private conversations, the pet names kids had given their Bondu, the likes and dislikes of the toys' toddler owners, their favorite snacks and dance moves.

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So depreciate they do, and that's good news for the three-quarters of US car buyers who buy used vehicles. It means that some very expensive EVs can now be had for quite little, but we'll explore that more at a later date. Today, I want to focus on what you can get for peanuts. What if you wanted to only spend $5,000—or less—on an EV?

As it turns out, there are options even at this end of the market. Just don't expect that much in the way of range: We're still a while away from a $5,000 EV also being an EV a sane person would want to road trip. At the same time, most of us don't drive more than 40 miles a day, and EVs are great at sitting in traffic because there's no engine to idle. If you're not commuting long distances and don't live an hour from the nearest town, a cheap EV could make sense as a runabout. Especially as they're cheaper to run than a gas-powered car.

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What everyone agrees on is that NASA needs a new spacecraft capable of relaying communications from Mars to Earth. This issue has become especially acute with the recent loss of NASA's MAVEN spacecraft. NASA's best communications relay remains the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has now been there for 20 years.

Congress cared enough about this issue to add $700 million in funding for a "Mars Telecommunications Orbiter" in the supplemental funding for NASA provided by the "One Big Beautiful Bill" passed by the US Congress last year.

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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.

Why did the UK abandon Orbex? European Spaceflight explores the recent announcement that British launch company Orbex is preparing to sell the business to The Exploration Company in close cooperation with the UK government. This represents a reversal from early 2025, when the United Kingdom appeared prepared to back Orbex as a means of using British rockets to launch British satellites into space. Now the government is prepared to walk away. So what happened? "There are still too many unknowns to count, and the story is far from told," the publication states.

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Nvidia released the first Shield Android TV in 2015, and according to the company's senior VP of hardware engineering, Andrew Bell, supporting these devices has been a labor of love. And the team at Nvidia still loves the Shield. Bell assures us that Nvidia has never given up, even when it looked like support for the Shield was waning, and it doesn't plan to stop any time soon.

The soul of Shield

Gaming has been central to Nvidia since its start, and that focus gave rise to the Shield. "Pretty much everybody who worked at Nvidia in the early days really wanted to make a game console," said Bell, who has worked at the company for 25 years.

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A new study in JAMA Network Open found that people who faced those high out-of-pocket costs as well as a cancer diagnosis had worse overall survival and cancer-specific survival than those with more standard health plans.

The findings, while perhaps not surprising, are a stark reminder of the fraught decisions Americans face as the price of health care only continues to rise and more people try to offset costs by accepting insurance plans with higher deductibles—that is, higher out-of-pocket costs they have to pay before their health insurance provider starts paying its share.

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The program was codenamed Jumpseat, and its existence was already public knowledge through leaks and contemporary media reports. What's new is the NRO's description of the program's purpose and development and pictures of the satellites themselves.

In a statement, the NRO called Jumpseat "the United States’ first-generation, highly elliptical orbit (HEO) signals-collection satellite."

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Despite the negativity surrounding the current version of Windows, it remains the most widely used operating system on the world's desktop and laptop computers, and people usually prefer to stick to what they're used to. As a result, Windows 11 has just cleared a big milestone—Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on the company's most recent earnings call (via The Verge) that Windows 11 now has over 1 billion users worldwide.

Windows 11 also reached that milestone just a few months quicker than Windows 10 did—1,576 days after its initial public launch on October 5, 2021. Windows 10 took 1,692 days to reach the same milestone, based on its July 29, 2015, general availability date and Microsoft's announcement on March 16, 2020.

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Anthropic took a stab at answering that question this week, releasing a paper studying the potential for what it calls "disempowering patterns" across 1.5 million anonymized real-world conversations with its Claude AI model. While the results show that these kinds of manipulative patterns are relatively rare as a percentage of all AI conversations, they still represent a potentially large problem on an absolute basis.

A rare but growing problem

In the newly published paper "Who’s in Charge? Disempowerment Patterns in Real-World LLM Usage," researchers from Anthropic and the University of Toronto try to quantify the potential for a specific set of "user disempowering" harms by identifying three primary ways that a chatbot can negatively impact a user's thoughts or actions:

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