Deep in the Angolan Highlands lurks a rumored new species of elephant. Conservationist and ornithologist Steve Boyes has been searching for this elusive herd for years and the story of his journey is the focus of Ghost Elephants, a haunting, evocative documentary directed by Werner Herzog. The film debuted at the Venice International Film Festival last summer and is now coming to National Geographic and Disney+.

It might seem unusual for an ornithologist to embark on a quest to find remote pachyderms, but for Boyes the connection is perfectly natural.  He grew up in South Africa and wanted nothing more than to be an explorer, just like the people he read about every month in National Geographic magazine. "I grew up waiting for the magazine to arrive; I wanted the maps," Boyes told Ars. "Those would become my garden, or the field beyond, or the river—wild places imagined and real."

Boyes' parents frequently took him and his brother out into the wild, including visits to Botswana and Tanzania. "We used to embed ourselves in baboon troops and walk with impalas," said Boyes, and while his brother feared elephants, Boyes was walking with them from a young age. Ghost Elephants contains some gorgeous underwater footage of elephant feet plodding through the water, and elephants swimming on their sides, behavior that matches Boyes' own experiences with the animals. Under the right circumstances, if they don't feel threatened, elephants "will come and swim around you and with you and interact with you," he said. "So elephants have always fascinated me."

Read full article

Comments

But now, deep in the Sahara Desert, a team of researchers led by Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago, discovered new Spinosaurus fossils suggesting both scientists and filmmakers might have got it all wrong again. The Spinosaurus most likely wasn’t an aquatic diver because, apparently, it couldn’t dive.

Bones in the sand

While the T. rex-beating version of the Spinosaurus was considered unlikely due to its relatively fragile skull, the newer depiction as an aquatic diver made more sense in light of paleontological evidence. Until now, all remains of these predators were pulled from coastal deposits near ancient seas and oceans. That geographic distribution was consistent with the aquatic lifestyle interpretation. If a creature lived on the coast, maybe it swam out to sea like a prehistoric seal, only crawling out to the beaches to rest just as it was depicted in Jurassic World Rebirth.

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday, Tel Aviv–based security firm Check Point released new research describing hundreds of hacking attempts that targeted consumer-grade security cameras around the Middle East—with many apparently timed to Iran's recent missile and drone strikes on targets that included Israel, Qatar, and Cyprus. Those camera-hijacking efforts, some of which Check Point has attributed to a hacker group that's been previously linked to Iranian intelligence, suggest that Iran's military has tried to use civilian surveillance cameras as a means to spot targets, plan strikes, or assess damage from its attacks as it retaliates for the US and Israeli bombings that have sparked a widening war in the region.

Iran wouldn't be the first to adopt that camera-hacking surveillance tactic. Earlier this week, the Financial Times reported that the Israeli military had accessed “nearly all” the traffic cameras in Iran's capital of Tehran and, in partnership with the CIA, used them to target the air strike that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. In Ukraine, the country's officials have warned for years that Russia has hacked consumer surveillance cameras to target strikes and spy on troop movements—while Ukrainian hackers have hijacked Russian cameras to surveil Russian troops and perhaps even to monitor its own attacks.

Read full article

Comments

The death of NASA's Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out.

The rocket's death came via a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: "NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA)."

Read full article

Comments

The company, which brands itself as Planet, operates a fleet of several hundred Earth-imaging satellites designed to record views of every landmass on Earth at least once per day. Its customers include think tanks, NGOs, academic institutions, news media, and commercial users in the agriculture, forestry, and energy industries, among others.

Planet also holds lucrative contracts selling overhead imagery to the US military and US government intelligence agencies.

Read full article

Comments

In an article published this week in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, health officials from New Jersey and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that there were at least three incidents of commercial fishing crews dredging up dangerous chemical warfare munitions (CWMs) off the coast of New Jersey between 2016 and 2023.

The three incidents exposed at least six crew members to mustard agent, which causes blistering chemical burns on skin and mucous membranes. (An example of these types of burns can be seen here, but be warned, the image is graphic.) One crew member required overnight treatment in an emergency department for respiratory distress and second-degree blistering burns. Another was burned so badly that they were hospitalized in a burn center and required skin grafting and physical therapy.

Read full article

Comments

There are some important caveats with the Workspace tool. While this new GitHub project is from Google, it's "not an officially supported Google product." So you're on your own if you choose to use it. The company notes that functionality may change dramatically as Google Workspace CLI continues to evolve, and that could break workflows you've created in the meantime.

For people interested in tinkering with AI automations and don't mind the inherent risks, Google Workspace CLI has a lot to offer, even at this early stage. It includes the APIs for every Workspace product, including Gmail, Drive, and Calendar. It's designed for use by humans and AI agents, but like everything else Google does now, there's a clear emphasis on AI.

Read full article

Comments

The hacking campaigns came to light on Thursday in a report published by Google. All three campaigns used Coruna, the name of an advanced hacking kit that amassed 23 separate iOS exploits into five potent exploit chains. While some of the vulnerabilities had been exploited as zero-days in earlier, unrelated campaigns, all had been patched by the time Google observed them being exploited by Coruna. When used against older iOS versions, the kit nonetheless posed a formidable threat given the high caliber of the exploit code and the wide range of capabilities.

The case of the promiscuous 2nd-hand zero-days

“The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits,” Google researchers wrote. “The exploits feature extensive documentation, including docstrings and comments authored in native English. The most advanced ones are using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses.”

Read full article

Comments

Of course, altering a moonlet’s local orbit doesn’t seem like enough to safeguard Earth from civilization-ending impacts. But now, as long-term observational data has come in, it seems we accomplished more than that. DART actually changed the trajectory of the entire Didymos binary system, altering its orbit around the Sun.

Tracking space rocks

Measuring the orbital shift of a 780-meter-wide primary asteroid and its moonlet from millions of miles away isn’t trivial. When DART slammed into Dimorphos, it didn't knock the binary system wildly off its trajectory around the Sun. The change in the system's heliocentric trajectory was expected to be small, a minuscule nudge that would become apparent only after months or years of continuous observation. By analyzing enough painstakingly gathered data, a global team of researchers led by Rahil Makadia at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has now determined the consequences of the DART impact.

Read full article

Comments

"The focus was an attempt to elevate the profile of these small, often overlooked plants," co-author Matt von Konrat, who heads the botany collections at Chicago's Field Museum, told Ars. "Mosses are ubiquitous, resilient, and capable of preserving timeline and habitat information in ways that complement other forensic tools. Our recent publications help consolidate these cases into the scientific record and, we hope, encourage investigators to recognize and preserve botanical evidence more routinely. [We also wanted to] highlight the use of natural history collections and their stories and how they can be applied to questions and applied in ways we have yet to imagine."

Burr Oak Cemetery dates back to 1927, when it was founded to serve as the final resting place for Chicago's African American population, which had grown significantly since the turn of the century due to migration from the South. Among the luminaries buried there are Emmett Till, heavyweight boxing champion Ezzard Charles, and blues singers Willie Dixon and Dinah Washington.

Read full article

Comments

xAI had tried to argue that California's Assembly Bill 2013 (AB 2013) forced AI firms to disclose carefully guarded trade secrets.

The law requires AI developers whose models are accessible in the state to clearly explain which dataset sources were used to train models, when the data was collected, if the collection is ongoing, and whether the datasets include any data protected by copyrights, trademarks, or patents. Disclosures would also clarify whether companies licensed or purchased training data and whether the training data included any personal information. It would also help consumers assess how much synthetic data was used to train the model, which could serve as a measure of quality.

Read full article

Comments

But a year into the job as the country's top health official, Kennedy—who has no background in medicine, science, or public health—still holds less sway with Americans than the esteemed physician-scientist.

In a nationally representative survey conducted in February by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, 54 percent of respondents said they had confidence in Fauci, while only 38 percent had confidence in Kennedy. Breaking those supporters down further, 25 percent of respondents said they were "very confident" in Fauci, while only 9 percent said the same for Kennedy.

Read full article

Comments

Early EVs did indeed suffer from lithium-ion battery degradation over time, similar to the energy storage loss common in lithium-ion-powered consumer electronics. But modern EV batteries aren't the same as the ones in your toothbrush or that old tablet that lasts just a few hours. With modern EV battery management systems and active thermal control—liquid cooling, in other words—range loss shouldn't be more than about 2 percent per year.

A new study from researchers at the University of Michigan provides a clear illustration of this progress. We all know the planet is undergoing human-caused warming, and a warm world is worse for EVs in a couple of ways.

Read full article

Comments

ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.

Read full article

Comments

But even a company with Apple's scale and buying power can't totally defy gravity. At some point between March 4 and now, Apple quietly removed the 512GB RAM option from its top-tier M3 Ultra Mac Studio desktop. Pricing for the 256GB configuration has also increased, from $1,600 to $2,000. The Tech Specs page on Apple's support site still acknowledges the existence of the 512GB configuration, but both the Apple Store page and the list of available configurations have removed any mention of it.

We've asked Apple to comment on the disappearance of the 512GB Mac Studio and will update this article if we receive a response.

Read full article

Comments

This is all well and good, but it neglects a critical element of the Artemis program: a lander capable of taking astronauts down to the lunar surface from an orbit around the Moon and back up to rendezvous with Orion. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.

As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.

Read full article

Comments

That's the idea behind a new theoretical synthesis published in Current Biology. According to the data considered by its authors—a team from the University of Sussex (UK) and Lund University (Sweden)—vertebrate eyes, ours included, may not descend directly from the paired eyes of early bilaterian animals. Instead, they may have been “reinvented” from what was once a single light-sensitive organ that survived an evolutionary detour.

Strange eyes

“Vertebrate eyes are so fundamentally different from the lateral eyes of other animal groups,” explains Dan-Eric Nilsson, senior author of the study from Lund University and a leading expert in eye evolution. “The key difference is the identity of the main photoreceptor, which is of ciliary nature in the vertebrate eye but rhabdomeric in other animal groups, such as arthropods and cephalopods,” he adds.

Read full article

Comments

Economists have estimated that more than $175 billion was unlawfully collected, and the US could end up owing substantially more than that the longer the refund process is dragged out, since the US must pay back daily interest on the funds. According to the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, a conservative estimate showed that "$700 million in interest is added to the final bill every month that the government delays tariff refunds, or around $23 million per day."

The US is aware that interest is compounding daily on tariffs, as the Trump administration argued against an injunction that would have temporarily blocked the tariffs much sooner by noting that no one would be harmed, since tariffs would be repaid with interest if deemed unlawful. However, now that the court has ruled against tariffs, the Trump administration seems to be dragging its feet in finding a way to return all the ill-gotten funds.

Read full article

Comments

In a lawsuit filed late last month in San Francisco Superior Court but only made public this week, Hayden AI claims that former CEO Chris Carson undertook what it called “numerous fraudulent actions,” which include “forged board signatures, unauthorized stock sales, and improper allocation of personal expenses.” (Ars covered Hayden AI’s recent product expansion in Santa Monica, Calif.)

Carson, who has since founded a rival company called EchoTwin AI, did not respond to Ars’ request on Wednesday for comment sent via LinkedIn, email, and text message.

Read full article

Comments

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

Sentinel missile nears first flight. The US Air Force’s new Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile is on track for its first test flight next year, military officials reaffirmed last week. The LGM-35A Sentinel will replace the Air Force’s Minuteman III fleet, in service since 1970, with the first of the new missiles due to become operational in the early 2030s. But it will take longer than that to build and activate the full complement of Sentinel missiles and the 450 hardened underground silos to house them, Ars reports.

Read full article

Comments