In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.

That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.

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Sacrificial Incan boy died of blunt force trauma

Credit: Administrative Archive, Regional Museum of Iquique–CORMUDESI

It's known that the Incas practiced a human sacrifice ritual known as Capachoca, in which children were offered to the mountains and believed to become divine themselves, serving as intermediaries with the gods. This often involved pilgrimages to the remote sacrificial sites, with colonial accounts describing strangulation, asphyxiation, and blunt force trauma as the most common methods of sacrifice. Archaeologists have reanalyzed the remains of one such victim and concluded the boy died from blunt force trauma, rather than freezing to death as previously believed. They described their findings in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

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The new Lego Icons Hubble Space Telescope (set no. 11382) was released on August 1 for $140 at the toy company's stores and its online shop. The 1,252-piece kit builds a 15-inch-long (38-cm) desktop model that is about twice as large as the previously released Lego Hubble models.

The Icons Hubble is the first to be sized in comparison to a Lego minifigure, such that the included astronaut provides a sense of scale for the telescope.

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It was a disaster.

When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so.

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Picture the scene: You've been at home for a total of one night out of the previous eight, and you've just landed at the airport after an eight-hour flight. It's 85˚F (30˚C) and raining. You could take the metro home. Sure, 80 minutes isn't quick, but all you have to do is sit there, then walk home a block. But you can't because there's a car to be reviewed, waiting to be driven home. In rush hour.

I will confess, I did not know VW made a Jetta Sport. For one thing, it's not the Jetta GLI. That car has plenty of power and torque and uprated suspension, and it can even be ordered with a six-speed manual, unlike the Golf GTI, although based on our most recent GLI drive, you may regret ticking that particular box.

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There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month.

The deal would give SpaceX control of an 18-mile stretch of marshland southwest of Lafayette. The site, known as Pecan Island, became available as part of a legal settlement that resolves dozens of lawsuits that blame ExxonMobil for pollution and coastal land loss, the newspaper reports.

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Congress specifically wrote into those laws ways for citizens to enforce them through the courts when the government does not act to address the problem. Called “citizen suit provisions,” those parts of the laws allow regular people and advocacy groups to sue companies they believe are violating the law. Citizens can also sue federal agencies that fail to enforce the laws.

Since the 1970s, those provisions have been used in over 2,000 lawsuits. In fact, a majority of environmental cases are citizen suit cases. Citizen suits have been used to halt the construction of dams to protect endangered species, end the injection of wastewater into groundwater, and secure US$14.2 million in civil penalties for illegal emissions from a petrochemical facility. In short, these cases have shaped modern environmental law.

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Anyone who has driven at night in the last few years knows what I'm talking about: A modern crossover crests a hill in the opposite lane, and the cabin briefly fills with enough cold-white light to suggest a police helicopter has joined traffic. The obvious assumption is that drivers are simply leaving their high beams on more often, but the reality is more complicated.

An old problem

Before cars became the modern mode of transportation, horse-drawn carriages used oil lanterns to light the way, as roads were largely unlit outside of towns and cities. These lanterns weren’t particularly bright, though, meaning that after-dark collisions and near-misses were common.

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It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite's three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft's cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.

The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up in the atmosphere.

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My take: the IMAX scale might be epic, but Nolan gives the story an intimate feel, weaving a captivating, nearly three-hour cinematic spell. While the magic slowly starts to dissipate once one leaves the theater, the powerful imagery will resonate for days. And the film gave me, personally, a fresh perspective on the central character of Odysseus.

(Spoilers below.)

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Like any company, Reddit reports quarterly earnings, and its CEO, Steve Huffman, addresses investors during those reports. It's not always about just sharing numbers, though: This quarter, Huffman took the opportunity to voice concerns and criticisms about Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically summarizes search results on most user queries.

First, there was a letter to investors, wherein Huffman spun his narrative about Reddit's value proposition and general strategic direction amid the proliferation of AI tools.

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Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bradley S. Phillips granted this week the City of Santa Monica’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the city’s ongoing public nuisance lawsuit against the autonomous vehicle giant.

City officials and neighbors assert that the constant stream of vehicles at the charging stations create light and sound pollution and cause undue traffic congestion on the streets and nearby alleys, creating a collective bother and disruption.

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Each year’s badge creator endeavors to top previous designs and blow the minds of hard-to-impress hackers. But this year’s badges take a different tack. Instead of the badge designs being the star, it’s what is inside the hardware that will really stand out.

This year, Defcon asked legendary hardware hacker Andrew “bunnie” Huang to create the badges—revealed here for the first time—and they include an innovative open source chip that Huang designed and that aims to do no less than advance the state of security, transparency, and trustworthiness in computing.

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Scientist had little idea of how fruit flies manage this chaotic signal with a brain the size of a pinhead. For a long time, biologists stood by the “surge and cast” model, which posited that insects solved this with hardwired reflexes. The idea was that, when a fly registers the plume with olfactory neurons in its antennae, it simply flies upwind until it’s gone and then flies side to side attempting to catch it again. But now a team led by Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist at the Rockefeller University, has shown that fruit flies do something far more advanced.

A treadmill for flies

The trouble with the traditional surge and cast model is that it struggles to explain how an insect tracks a meandering plume across long distances. Chemical cues floating in the air in the natural environment are often sparse and unreliable. But those same features make the mechanism behind olfactory navigation notoriously difficult to test. "Odors are invisible," Ruta says, "and often they're carried along by turbulent airflow." We’ve got no way of knowing what the animal is smelling from one moment to the next.

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But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.

But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there has been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a "ghost lineage."

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The shoulder joint is a ball-and-socket joint, with the sphere-like head of the upper arm bone (humerus) sitting in the socket of the shoulder blade. According to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine, the man's X-ray showed that he no longer had a ball at all or an intact socket. His upper arm bone was detached from the joint, and the sphere-like top of his upper arm bone (humeral head) was completely gone. The broken, headless humerus was instead left to float freely in the man's arm, unattached to his upper body.

Magnetic resonance imaging, meanwhile, found that the man's rotator cuff—the group of muscles and tendons that holds the upper arm firmly in the socket—was also destroyed. Three of the four main tendons (supraspinatus, infraspinatus, and subscapularis tendons) had full-thickness tears.

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Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it's not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.

But what if you're an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the US sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging.

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In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Google access controls and Perplexity AI paying for it.

Engelmayer’s decision came less than two weeks after another court dismissed a similar action raised by Google, finding that the company had not proven that rights holders, such as Reddit, had ever authorized the search engine to prevent the scraping of protected content. Google told Ars that it planned to amend its complaint to keep its lawsuit alive, but SerpApi told Ars that Google and Reddit were both trying to “use the DMCA to wall off the open Internet by retroactively claiming control over content that they didn’t author and don’t own.”

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The events, which Anthropic revealed Thursday, are the second revelation in 10 days that AI models from the world’s wealthiest providers have trespassed into protected networks, an offense that, in more traditional hacking scenarios, could land the human behind the keyboard in prison for years. Earlier this month, OpenAI said its security models exploited a zero-day vulnerability for use in breaking into the network of Hugging Face, a platform for open source machine-learning models and AI datasets. The OpenAI models went on to steal access credentials and other confidential Hugging Face information. The OpenAI models also exploited publicly exposed credentials to compromise accounts of four other third-party services.

Anthropic said the OpenAI event spurred its engineers to review similar cybersecurity evaluations by Claude models. The audit found three incidents “in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”

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There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities based on user prompts. But Google’s aborted attempt to incorporate its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator as a Google Earth feature made it even easier for anyone to create modified versions of authentic imagery depicting real locations—something that Google boasted about when initially promoting the new feature.

“For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world,” wrote Bryan Horowitz, product manager for Google Earth, in a company blog post on July 30.

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