The message sent to Xbox employees and shared publicly via Xbox Wire last night paints a grim picture for practically every facet of the Xbox division. That portion of Microsoft is currently only seeing a "3% accountability margin" (read: profit margin), down year over year and well below both the game industry average and the lofty 30% margins that Microsoft is reportedly seeking across the board.

It's an underperformance, they write, born out of being "over extended" by moves like the $69 billion acquisition of Activision. That mega-merger came on top of $20 billion in spending on other acquisitions, platform investments, and hardware subsidies over the last five years, the executives write. But despite the spending spree, Microsoft's overall gaming revenues are down nearly $500 million compared to five years ago.

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The National Science Foundation announced plans in May to decommission the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a nearly $368 million network of scientific instruments that tracks ocean chemistry, wave action, water temperature, salinity, and a host of other metrics.

The real-time information from these ocean observatories helps scientists, fishery managers, coastal hazard planners, and even the military plan and prepare for the future. Whether that’s calculating how much fish can be harvested or when a marine heatwave or giant wave action may be occurring, the data is used by a plethora of sources.

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Scientists gradually settled on a simple explanation for this: the first complex cells were the product of a fusion between archaeal cells and bacteria, with the bacteria ultimately evolving into the mitochondria, a chemical-power-generating structure that still retains a bit of its own genome. Over time, many of the other bacterial genes were transferred to the nucleus of what was becoming what we now call a eukaryote, intermingling with the archaeal genes there.

But a new study has taken a careful look at some of the genes shared by all eukaryotes and comes to the conclusion that the reality is a little more complicated and that there were several waves of gene transfers from bacteria. The big picture of a merger between bacteria and archaea is still right, but it was only part of a picture where gene transfers among species were commonplace.

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But Apple Intelligence is just one of the three big focus areas Apple outlined during its keynote this week. The second is new parental controls—overdue, but promising-looking, as the parent of a 6-year-old with an iPad that I only begrudgingly connect to the Internet. And the third is "platform improvements," a catch-all for a wide range of fit-and-finish changes aimed at boosting responsiveness and addressing common user complaints.

I have the first beta of macOS 27 Golden Gate running on an M1 MacBook Air—the oldest, slowest hardware Apple supports now that Intel compatibility is out the window. With some help from Apple's densely packed wall-of-features slide, here are a few things from the "platform improvements" column I like the most, plus one item I'd still like to see.

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The scientists were ejected for handing out copies of an April editorial—published in the ADA's own journal Diabetes Care—that sharply criticizes the Trump administration for the damage and destruction it's wreaking on biomedical research. The five scientists included Steven Kahn, professor of medicine at the University of Washington, who is the editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care and a co-author of the editorial. It also included former ADA President Desmond Schatz of the University of Florida.

The scientists were distributing the editorial outside the conference's opening speech, which was originally scheduled to be given by Jay Bhattacharya, head of the National Institutes of Health under Trump. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute, and senior NIH official Rick Woychik took his place.

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"This case is about what happens when police let an error-prone artificial intelligence system stand in for an investigation," said the lawsuit filed today. "A facial recognition algorithm flagged Robert Dillon as the man who tried to lure or entice a child under twelve years old at a Jacksonville Beach McDonald’s. It was wrong. Mr. Dillon, a fifty-two-year-old resident of Fort Myers, had never set foot in Jacksonville Beach. But rather than test the machine’s answer against the evidence that would have cleared him, the officers built a case to confirm it. Mr. Dillon was arrested and prosecuted for one of the most stigmatizing crimes a person can face."

Dillon lives more than 300 miles from Jacksonville Beach, and a police search of a license plate reader database found no evidence he was in the area when the alleged crime was committed, the lawsuit said. Dillon was flagged as the suspect based on a low-quality image, specifically a photo taken of a McDonald's computer screen that was displaying video surveillance footage, the lawsuit said.

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When you’re on the go, carrying a mouse can seem burdensome or unnecessary. But I’d argue that it’s worth the boost in efficiency and comfort when navigating your computer, tablet, or phone. For the people who refuse to carry a bulky mouse with them, even when they plan to use their computer away from their desk, I’m glad Logitech launched the Mobi Fold, a foldable, wireless mouse. But I’d still push reluctant mobile mouse users toward something even more comfortable.

Logitech’s Mobi Fold

The Logitech Mobi Fold released today for $80 folds in half so that it’s easy to carry around. Logitech’s announcement claimed that it found that “while 72 percent of professionals own a mouse, only 26 percent actually use one when working in public places.” The announcement didn’t explain Logitech’s methodology, but it seems that someone at the Swiss company has also grimaced at the awkwardly bent wrist of people using laptop trackpads in public.

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Most AI models are designed to be autoregressive—they generate text left to right one token at a time. DiffusionGemma has more in common with image generation models, which start with static and then denoise it to create the desired content. This model takes a field of placeholder tokens running over the canvas multiple times to generate likely tokens and using those to improve estimation of others. At the end of the process, the model finalizes its token outputs in one large block—the "denoised" text canvas.

DiffusionGemma is fairly large in the realm of Google's open models. It's a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with a total of 26 billion parameters, but only 3.8 billion are activated during inference. That means it should fit in the 18GB RAM allotment of a high-end GPU. In testing with an RTX 5090, DiffusionGemma spits out around 700 tokens per second. With a single Nvidia H100 AI accelerator, DiffusionGemma can produce 1,000+ tokens per second. That's about four times the output of the similarly sized autoregressive Gemma models.

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The presentation, although informative, still left open key questions about the landers' readiness and what exactly they'll look like. After the crew announcement, Ars sat down with Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, to answer some of these questions.

This interview, conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center, has been lightly edited for clarity.

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The preliminary ruling came in a case flagged by The Decoder, where two publishers found that Google's AI Overviews incorrectly linked them to scams and other sketchy business practices. After smearing publishers by making affirmative statements like "Yes, [it] is known for dubious business practices and is often perceived as a scam," Google failed to correct the misleading output, even after the publishers sent a cease-and-desist letter earlier this year.

Google tried the usual arguments to shield itself from liability for false statements in AI Overviews, such as arguing that most users understand that AI outputs aren't always accurate and must be verified.

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Axios correspondent Barak Ravid first reported an unnamed US government official’s comments that an Iranian drone had hit the US Army AH-64 Apache helicopter before the latter went down on June 8. The New York Times later confirmed that reporting through more anonymous US officials, including one official who said US military investigators were still evaluating whether the Iranian drone strike on the helicopter was intentional or accidental.

Iran has fired thousands of such Shahed drones against a wide range of military and civilian targets in the Gulf region since February 28, 2026, when the United States and Israel began the war by jointly attacking Iran with a barrage of bombs and missiles. But Shahed drones have mainly struck stationary targets such as Amazon data centers and energy facilities, sometimes hitting slow-moving commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

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ACOG President Camille Clare blamed "changing national recommendations coupled with rampant vaccine misinformation" for the confusion among patients and health care professionals about vaccines during pregnancy.

"It is incredibly important for the public to have access to reliable, evidence-based information on maternal immunizations from a trusted source. ACOG is proud to be that source," Clare said in a statement.

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PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page. Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment.

Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: "Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone."

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A Mazda MX-5 or Subaru BRZ weighs hundreds of pounds less, and the Subaru packs more power than the Prelude's 200 hp (149 kW). A Volkswagen Golf GTI weighs about the same as the Prelude at 3,261 lbs (1,479 kg), but it delivers 20 percent more power and offers rear seats that actually accommodate adults. But after a week with the bright blue Prelude, it's hard to care about the specs. This might be one of the best cars we'll drive all year.

Then again, looking back across the previous five generations, the Prelude was never really a sports car. It has always been a technology showcase for Honda, introducing features like fuel injection, four-wheel steering, variable valve timing, and active torque transfer. For the sixth-generation Prelude, the headline feature is Honda's S+ shift, which adds some sporty character to the OEM's four-cylinder hybrid.

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Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.

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Still, at a GM event Ars attended in San Francisco this week, the company continues to stick to its guns with an EV lineup spanning its brands. The automaker shared that it has also been working toward the adoption of bidirectional charging to help balance the grid.

With the rise of AI, data centers are placing more and more pressure on the nation's electric infrastructure. GM wants to relieve some of that pressure with news that its GM Energy products now support vehicle-to-grid (V2G) in addition to vehicle-to-home. The grid integration requires working with utilities and includes launch partners PG&E in California and DTE Energy in Michigan. For standalone energy storage solutions, the company also announced partnering with Peak Energy on the development of sodium-ion batteries built specifically for grid energy storage.

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Starlink residential ordering pages now show an upfront hardware cost of $0 and a monthly kit fee of $10, similar to the hardware rental fees long charged by cable and telecom companies. Starlink hardware includes a terminal to receive satellite signals and a router to place in a user's home.

The monthly kit fee is in addition to Internet service prices, which Starlink recently raised by $5 to $10 per month. Starlink is charging $55 a month for 100Mbps, $85 for 200Mbps, and $130 for the "Max" tier that can go up to 400Mbps. Starlink also provides a professional-installation service for a one-time fee of $199, or for no additional charge if you subscribe to the Max plan.

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Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym the researcher goes by, released a handful of high-severity vulnerabilities in recent months, making them zero-days that had the potential to be exploited in the wild. The researcher has said the disclosures, which included proof-of-concept code, came after Microsoft reneged on an arrangement the two made regarding vulnerabilities they had discussed.

Disclosure drama

“But someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing,” Nightmare Eclipse wrote in March. “They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.”

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The precise definition of urbanization has shifted over the centuries. Zhe Zhu of the University of Connecticut and his fellow authors adopted a broad version for their study. It features fundamental "processes of concurrent change in at least six dimensions, including demography, economy, infrastructure, environment, governance and culture," they wrote. "Together they give rise to outcomes, measurable results of the process, such as population growth, urban land expansion, GDP growth, and innovation." Their chosen metrics reflect this dynamic view: Cities are not static grids but "living, adaptive ecosystems."

“For decades, we had just been capturing the outcome of urbanization—a house that’s been built, or a road expansion,” said Zhu. “But you don’t really see the dynamics within an urban area. This is going to be a very impactful tool influencing not only top-down policy decisions from governments but also bottom-up decisions from everyday people navigating their cities.” One day we may be able to check a neighborhood's "urban pulse" while house-hunting, for instance, or while scouting potential locations for a new business.

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Commonwealth Fusion is a startup that's basically asking "what if we did that, but now?" Its ITER equivalent, a tokamak called SPARC, is over 70 percent complete and is planned to be operating as soon as next year. The company already has a site and customers for the power-generating follow-on, called ARC. Both of those projects are predicated on using high-temperature superconductors to generate an extremely powerful magnetic field that will allow the company to build a smaller reactor, and thus get things done faster.

Years of running plasmas through tokamaks has given us confidence that the basics of these plans are sound. But there are lots of potential devils in the details (otherwise there'd be little need for experimental reactors). So Commonwealth's scientists, in collaboration with the academic community, have recently released five peer-reviewed papers that detail its plans for ARC: what our best models tell us now, and what we'll still need to learn from SPARC to finalize the design of a production fusion plant.

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