Many things can cause wildfires, but humans are the only factor that can also make preventative efforts. Measuring people's impact on fire is difficult because of the mix of human and natural influences.

A team led by Jianghao Wang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently published a study in Cell Reports Sustainability comparing the COVID-19 era with other years. Data from the 2020 lockdowns suggest that lower human activity at this time had the net effect of lowering average fire activity.

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Slowly, gently, haltingly, the Starship upper stage eased its way toward the waiting tower where two arms extended outward, awaiting expectantly. The margins are so incredibly narrow. Two nubs on either side of the rocket, each protruding only about one foot, were the only purchase the rocket would have on the arms.

Then, less than a minute after it came into view, the Starship upper stage was snagged by the launch tower, as snug as you like. And so it was all over. SpaceX, nearly a quarter of a century after its founding, had just taken a hugely significant step toward developing and optimizing a massive, rapidly reusable rocket.

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The water ice is glassy rather than crystalline, and it is mixed with carbon dioxide in roughly the same proportions we see in comets of our own Solar System. This suggests ingredients necessary to form water-rich worlds might be common around young stars.

The missing ice

Beta Pictoris is one of the best studied stars in the sky. Its disk was among the first ever imaged, back in 1984, and we see it almost exactly edge-on, which makes it a natural laboratory for studying how planetary systems grow. It's what astronomers call a debris disk, where the dust is constantly replenished by collisions among comets and planetesimals, small bodies that are the building blocks of planets.

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Temperatures in the region have risen 1.5 to 2 times faster than the global average over the past five decades. And extreme storms have become more intense as climate variability increases. The late 2010s brought a significant challenge for winemakers, as three years of severe drought placed vineyards under intense stress and reduced grape production.

As climate variability places increasing pressure on grape production, many wine producers are building on sustainability measures that have long been part of vineyard management.

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The largely successful launch took place in the early evening; as the massive rocket rose into the atmosphere, the Sun sank toward the western horizon. Conditions were ideal for the launch, with the atmospheric winds so calm the rocket’s white plume did not dissipate for many minutes. The weather in South Texas is not always comfortable; summers are long and hot. Friday evening was perfect at Starbase.

The first stage ascended toward space flawlessly, releasing the upper stage above the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the Starship upper stage ignited its Raptor engines and powered its way into a nominal orbit. This was the second time SpaceX has flown Starship into low-Earth orbit.

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"Today's nationwide ground stop happened because our air traffic control system is operating on DECADES-OLD analog equipment that simply cannot compete with the demands of the 21st century," Duffy posted on X.

Over a million travelers have been affected by the delays, with some airlines cancelling flights for the remainder of Friday. "Due to the ongoing ground stop, Air Canada has cancelled all flights to and from the United States for the remainder of the evening," the airline said.

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In a study published this week, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke down survey data of GLP-1 use collected between July and August of 2025. Based on responses from over 8,000 US adults, the researchers estimate that about one in 10 US adults (9.8 percent) used a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist, aka GLP-1 medication, in 2025. That's around 27 million adults. The study was published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Among GLP-1 users, nearly half (44 percent) reported using their GLP-1 in a way that was different from how it was prescribed. Users skipped doses, delayed getting refills, and used smaller doses than prescribed, among other changes. More than half of the people modifying how they used the drug said the changes were because of cost or availability reasons. Cost and access barriers were most pronounced among younger GLP-1 users. Fifty-eight percent of adults 14­–39 years old who modified their use cited cost as a barrier, compared with just 20 percent of adults 65 or older who said the same.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) says the $875 million SMART system has helped reroute 180 flights since being implemented in airspace over Washington, DC, on September 21. The agency claims that this saved an average of 10 minutes per flight and almost 80 gallons of fuel per flight—and it is apparently hoping such results can be replicated nationwide through the expanded deployment.

“After a successful initial rollout to the National Capital Region in September, the FAA will now use SMART in the airspace of all 22 centers across the country to reduce delays, reduce fuel consumption and improve the travel experience for the flying public,” according to the agency statement posted on November 10.

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Anastasia Madsen, a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, San Diego, and her colleagues analyzed 12 years of observations of wild Asian elephants in Sri Lanka. They found that, once losses began to outpace newcomers, the elephants’ society didn’t just get smaller. It fractured.

Accidental savanna

Udawalawe National Park in southern Sri Lanka was created in the 1970s around a reservoir on one of the country's four major rivers. “Before that, it was basically a tropical deciduous forest,” said Shermin de Silva, an ecologist at UC San Diego and senior author of the study (de Silva started the Udawalawe Elephant Research Project in 2006).

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“We have mutually agreed to end Don's advisory role after his firm's significant investment in a competitor this past summer. We are grateful for his contributions in helping us market Kalshi to more customers," Kalshi said in a statement provided to Ars and other news outlets this week.

Trump Jr. may still have a financial interest in Kalshi, which has benefited from the Trump administration's legal and regulatory support for prediction markets. Trump Jr. "was handed about $300,000 worth of equity in Kalshi after joining the prediction market platform as a strategic adviser in early 2025," the Financial Times reported in June.

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If you go by the current statistics for deaths in the US, it's reasonable to expect that cancer or heart disease will eventually get you. But OpenAI Foundation board member and Alignment Research Center Executive Director Paul Cristiano thinks we should all be worried about another major mortality risk. Speaking at a lecture series this week, Cristiano bluntly told the audience in a Toronto Convention Center, "I think for most people in this room, the most likely reason they will die is because of an AI accident."

In the opening lecture of a three-part series, Cristiano outlined his worries about the risk of an impending "AI takeover." He defined that as a situation where goal-pursuing AI systems "call the shots in the same sense that humans today call the shots and what happens on Earth" and where any human trying to stop them "would be as ineffective as if you or me was trying to stop the US military." Such a situation would likely lead to mass death and perhaps uninhabitable environments for humans, Cristiano said.

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On Tuesday, Nightmare Eclipse disclosed SignDrop, a vulnerability that gives local users full System rights on some versions of Windows. The vulnerability resides in the Common Log File System, which Microsoft describes as a “general-purpose logging service used by software clients running in user-mode or kernel-mode.” By forcing a privileged process such as Windows Defender to open a crafted CLFS container, an attacker with ordinary user rights can abuse the privileged file creation to elevate privileges to System.

Turning a Windows defense against itself

The attack exploits the interaction of CLFS, Windows Defender, and Windows file permissions. The exploit uses Windows Defender to open a log file created by a standard user by calling ServerMpUpdateEngineSignature, a legitimate Defender function for processing antivirus signature updates.

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The outage started midday Thursday, impacting users of Microsoft email, cloud, and AI services. Microsoft has documented the full list of services impacted by the error, while moving early Friday morning to protect customers around the world from losing emails during the extended disruptions.

“Recovery actions are ongoing,” the Microsoft 365 Status account confirmed on X. “To help preserve delayed mail during this event, we’ve extended email timeout to 48 hours.”

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It's not a new fear. English economist Thomas Malthus—one of the early pioneers in modeling population dynamics—made a similar prediction in 1798, claiming that a rapidly growing population would eventually exhaust the available food supply, and humanity would starve to death. His model rested on the assumption of exponential growth, but the equation is only applicable under specific conditions, such as scientists growing bacteria in a lab in a perfectly controlled environment. Even then, while growth occurs exponentially for a time, it does not continue forever.

Population dynamics are notoriously tricky to calculate because there are so many variables to consider and so much unpredictability in the system. In his 1960 analysis, Von Foerster accurately measured past trends in population growth, but like Malthus, he assumed those trends would carry into the future largely unchanged. So he projected that human population growth would march inexorably toward infinity. We wouldn't starve to death; von Foerster thought we would be ingenious enough to solve the food supply problem. Instead, "they will be squeezed to death," he wrote.

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Among the things Slate does without is an embedded infotainment system. The small digital display on the dashboard that shows your speed and range is also where the backup camera appears if you engage reverse, and there are two USB-C ports that provide power but not connectivity, and that’s that. But there is a solution to getting lost, and it's called “Screenless GPS.” Even though we don’t have a Slate truck to test it with, the OEM sent us a unit to review.

That’s right, it’s a good old spiral-bound road atlas! “We believe you should use the devices you know and love,” Slate says, and it reckons that maps worked just fine for past generations, so they should still work now.

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Climate Action Tracker, a nonprofit group that analyzes climate policies, found that the planet is still on track to warm nearly 5° Fahrenheit by 2100, a rise that would devastate coral reefs, disrupt agriculture and forests and melt most of the world’s ice. In a separate bulletin, the European Union’s Copernicus climate change service reported that global warming has accelerated significantly since the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

When the Paris agreement was adopted, the average global temperature was projected to surpass the pact’s long-term threshold of 2.7° Fahrenheit above the preindustrial average around 2045. After another decade of global climate summits, warming is now projected to cross that benchmark as soon as 2029, according to Copernicus.

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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.

Electron set for milestone launch. The next launch of Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle is due to lift off from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand on November 14 at 5:30 UTC. This mission will serve as Electron’s 100th overall mission—a notable milestone for the small rocket that first flew in 2017, NASASpaceflight.com reports.

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The Tarmac SL9 is Specialized’s aero road bike, with the S-Level sitting just below the S-Works in Specialized’s top tier of carbon, aero road bikes, where it replaced the Tarmac SL8 Pro. After it got an update this year, I spent several weeks riding it, putting nearly 1,000 miles on it

Specialized offers the Tarmac SL9 in four models, all available with SRAM and Shimano drivetrains (Ars tested the SRAM version). Notably, you don't need to buy the top-of-the-line bike to get the top-of-the-line groupset. Here's the breakdown of the Tarmac SL9 lineup (note that the Shimano versions of the Expert is 20 g lighter and Comp is 70 grams heavier than the SRAM versions):

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Men at average risk should get a PSA test every two years from age 50 to 69, according to the new guidelines released Thursday.

Men considered at high risk due to race and family history should start testing earlier, at 45, and most are recommended to get tested every year. Specifically, yearly testing starting at age 45 is recommended for all Black men, who have higher rates of prostate cancer. Non-Black men should also get yearly testing starting at 45 if a close relative was diagnosed with prostate cancer before age 65, or if more than one of their relatives has had prostate cancer. On the other hand, if only one close relative was diagnosed with prostate cancer and it was diagnosed at age 65 or older, non-Black men in this case should start PSA screening at 45, but are recommended to get testing only every two years.

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To explore what this all means for modern society’s reliance on cloud resilience, I will be hosting a live conversation titled "Drone attacks and data centers: New Risks for Big Tech" on Tuesday, November 17 at 1 pm ET with Joseph Jarnecki, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defense and security think tank. He leads RUSI’s work on how cloud services factor into national security and defense, along with tech sovereignty efforts.

Jarnecki has done extensive research on how Ukraine strengthened its cloud resilience with Western partners despite facing both cyberattacks and kinetic attacks at the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, and explored what that means for NATO and European governments’ cloud adoption plans.

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