The alert included detailed clinical guidance for managing measles exposures and cases during pregnancy as well as cases in newborns. Many doctors have never seen such cases in their careers given the decades of successful use of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. But now, with vaccination rates slipping nationwide, the highly infectious virus is better able to get footholds in communities and spread rapidly through under-vaccinated pockets, as is happening in Pennsylvania.

As of October 19, Pennsylvania had reported 1,286 measles cases this year across 42 counties. Of those, 247 have been hospitalized, and six people have reportedly died (though the latest reported death is still pending an investigation by the state health department before it is added to the state tally).

Read full article

Comments

The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs said. "Kosmos 2612 closed from hundreds of kilometers away to extreme proximity to ICEYE-X36. It then maneuvered around ICEYE-X36, remained nearby for an extended period, and then began moving away."

US military officials and independent analysts have tracked Kosmos 2612 since its April launch on a Soyuz rocket from a spaceport in northern Russia. Within weeks, it became apparent that at least four of the six satellites from that launch were stalking ICEYE-X36 after they adjusted orbits to line up with the orbit of the ICEYE spacecraft.

Read full article

Comments

In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal business gain or to benefit the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Evidence showed that Alfozan had been chatting with a member of the KSA royal family on WhatsApp, while pursuing opportunities to permanently move back to Saudi Arabia during the country's biggest AI push yet, the government argued. Shortly before his arrest, the FBI found he accessed a folder called "Saudi Gov Docs" on his iPhone, where he also allegedly stored photos of a second bug he planted in the offices.

Read full article

Comments

A new study led by Haiwei Zhou at the University of Melbourne focused on the emissions associated with making lithium-ion batteries, which many parts of the energy transition rely on. Those emissions aren’t zero, so as we use more and more batteries, that number will grow. Right now, the researchers estimate that these emissions only account for 0.18 percent of annual greenhouse gas releases, but they could increase by a factor of 10 or more by 2050.

Avoiding production

There are a number of ways to reduce the emissions required to make a battery. Some elements used in various lithium-ion battery chemistries are more energy-intensive to mine and refine than others. The battery manufacturing process involves many steps that could be made more energy-efficient. And then there’s recycling, which can put battery materials back into the loop while requiring much less energy than mining.

Read full article

Comments

Plex fixed four vulnerabilities at the start of last month. Three weeks later, published CVE designations revealed five vulnerabilities, with one of them carrying a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10. A researcher last week revealed an exploit that chained four of them together to achieve remote code execution of the device running a vulnerable Plex version. The researcher named the chain "Plex2Shell."

Complex exploit chain

The new details allowed a separate researcher to create a honeypot that could track attempts in the wild to exploit the vulnerability chain. Within a day, the researcher began seeing active scanning of the simulated Plex server and eventually successful attempts to infect devices. So far, successful attacks are installing two payloads. One is a cryptominer, which uses the device to mine cryptocurrency and deposit it into a wallet controlled by the attacker. The other payload is residential proxy software, which allows people to anonymize their Internet activity (much of it illegal) by connecting to the infected box and then using it to send the user’s traffic to a final destination.

Read full article

Comments

The three-week test deployment of the 3-ton prototype power plant took place at the Axial Seamount in the northeast Pacific Ocean in September. Endurance Energy, the Seattle-based startup behind the effort, aims to eventually commercialize subsea geothermal power for Pacific island nations and other customers looking for alternatives to importing expensive fossil fuels.

“The deep ocean gives us unlimited cold seawater for cooling, and its weight keeps the system and the well pressurized, so our plants can be compact,” said Andrew Redd, founder and CEO of Endurance Energy, in an email to Ars.

Read full article

Comments

Prior to this latest announcement, ReactOS required users to keep a FAT32 partition for installations. A proprietary Microsoft-developed filesystem, NTFS can trace its roots back through the Windows NT family lineage starting in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. The variant introduced with Windows XP in 2001 remains the standard used by most Windows systems today. With ReactOS's stated goal of reaching binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003, being confined to FAT32 partitions was a practical barrier to clear on the way to reproducing the Windows environment.

However, users looking to hop off the Windows train shouldn't be grabbing their bags just yet. ReactOS wrote that the new driver still "lacks caching (which causes inferior performance), journaling and security support." So while the new driver is here, even the most intrepid of OS tinkerers should tread carefully. The ReactOS team warned in its announcement on X that there are still "potentially undiscovered bugs."

Read full article

Comments

Developer Alliance Arts highlighted this trend over the weekend, delaying the launch of a planned public demo for its demon-themed Russian Roulette drinking game Drunken Goddess Reflux, which had been set to go live with today's launch of Steam Next Fest.

In a post on social media Friday evening, the Alliance Arts team wrote that, in addition to concerns about managing streaming restrictions, "we're concerned that the demo's content could be used to quickly imitate or replicate the game's presentation and gameplay with AI or other tools and that such works could be released before our launch."

Read full article

Comments

In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on September 4, 2026, using compromised credentials.” There’s “no evidence” that data has yet been misused, the department said, but law enforcement “determined the information potentially affected includes driver license and motor vehicle data, to include document images, and other personal information.”

FLHSMV is sending out letters to everyone affected, offering victims one year of credit monitoring from Sontiq, Inc. However, the state acknowledged that it may not have current contact information for many former Florida residents whose data was still being stored. Those potential victims can confirm if their data was stolen by emailing FLHSMV at customerinquiry@flhsmv.gov, officials said.

Read full article

Comments

In the past few years, Character.AI has faced multiple private lawsuits over the safety of its chatbots, as well as investigations from regulators around the world. In a declaration filed as part of the bankruptcy, Character.AI’s newly appointed CEO explained that the goal of the bankruptcy was to reach a “consensual resolution” with personal injury claimants and a group of states investigating the company, while maximizing the value of the company’s assets for shareholders.

The Disney deal seems to be structured so that whatever is left of Character.AI will retain responsibility for those legal battles, some of which are still ongoing.

Read full article

Comments

The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.

The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.

Read full article

Comments

(Spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

There are two primary storylines. The first takes place in 2016 with a mass shooting at a local football game in Rushville, Nebraska. Current Green Lantern Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and his new trainee, John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), get involved in the investigation, to the annoyance of Sheriff Kerry Kane (Kelly Macdonald), who initially doesn't think the case has any extraterrestrial connection. She is soon proved wrong when the suspect (an alien) self-detonates. Hal's power ring controls the damage, but the mystery remains.

Read full article

Comments

But by then momentum for alternate realities of every acronym was already in steady decline, and it only dwindled from there. The rate of development of new headsets has slowed, with many companies (including Apple) scaling back or shelving their efforts. While new releases like the Steam Frame and Pimax Dream Air are still happening, many of the most interesting developments in the space these days are on the enthusiast front.

That's right, DIY VR is a thing, and with a couple hundred dollars in components, plus many hours of your time, you too can enter the immersive world of virtual reality while also experiencing the highs and lows of soldering, firmware flashing, and 3D printing. I rode that rollercoaster myself and learned why this is still a decidedly niche movement.

Read full article

Comments

The trans-Pacific flight that took place over a month between August and September 2026 was the most notable milestone yet for Sceye, a US aerospace company based near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sceye has developed an uncrewed platform filled with helium for buoyancy and equipped with an electric-powered propeller for active propulsion, allowing it to resist most strong winds and keep hovering over the same location for long periods. The platform also uses top-mounted solar panels and onboard batteries to stay powered for stratospheric operations around the clock.

“We can stay over an area of operation, and we do that in the stratosphere right around 60,000 feet, so we're twice as high as air traffic and we're above the jet stream, and yet 30 times closer than low-Earth orbit satellites,” Mikkel Frandsen, founder and CEO of Sceye, told Ars. “We can fly through day and night until the sun comes up the next morning and recharges the batteries, at which point we're still at the same altitude and still over the same area of operation.”

Read full article

Comments

METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its hardware and internal systems.

A greater role for third-party evaluators is among the main concrete steps the labs have proposed in response to rising concern about the dangers more capable AI systems could pose to the economy, cyber security, and humanity at large.

Read full article

Comments

Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they accomplish or how to make them as worthwhile as possible? For decades, the answer was… not really. Meetings weren’t a particularly accessible subject of study. But that has changed. Once a tiny niche area, “meeting science” is a growing specialization among organizational and social psychologists. The field is accelerating as archived virtual meetings provide vast swaths of data. And it is providing a fascinating window into human behavior.

Meeting to talk helps fulfill basic human needs to connect, communicate, and cooperate. People have long come together—in caves, fields, market squares, and town halls—to get something done, share ideas, get on the same page, or just to remark on the weather. But meeting scientists define their subject as gatherings of people “with some goal or structure to the event,” says organizational psychologist Liana Kreamer of the Florida Institute of Technology, who coauthored a review of over three decades of meeting science in the 2026 Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior.

Read full article

Comments

Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were.

Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has a tight-knit and surprisingly active community that none of those other games can rival. I think that's partly because it was a completely different beast.

Read full article

Comments

The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June. They come after the company revealed in July that internal test agents exploited a zero-day vulnerability in a tool designed to restrict their access to the Internet. They then broke into the network of AI tool provider Hugging Face. The agents took that illegal action to steal answers to a hacking test that weren’t available when completing the tasks on their own. The incident—which likely would have resulted in criminal charges had they been performed directly by a person—has further heightened concerns that widespread AI use could have harmful effects on an unprecedented scale.

Easier to beg for forgiveness than ask permission

In two of the cases reported Thursday, OpenAI agents tasked with retrieving information from websites hacked them when the models ran into obstacles obtaining it directly. In one incident during reinforcement training, a model that received access denials when trying to retrieve historical hospital-bed statistics on a government statistics website “used the site's file-download feature to retrieve server configuration and application files, including sensitive credentials,” OpenAI said. “It inspected the application code, bypassed the statistics endpoint's authorization checks, and retrieved data that had previously been denied. The model saved the data locally.”

Read full article

Comments

In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors” across Telegram and Instagram, the DOJ clarified to law enforcement that “CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM.”

On Thursday, New Jersey officials accused 51-year-old Fitzgerald of using AI to make photos from social media of real minors into sexualized images that he then distributed on social media.

Read full article

Comments

A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released.

The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that game launched on September 6, 2025, but is scheduled to become unplayable on December 31 due to server shutdowns. The bill, which is called the Power to Players Act, directs the FTC to take action to prevent outcomes like that in the future.

Read full article

Comments