Ars Technica

John Ternus will replace Tim Cook as Apple CEO

Samuel Axon — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 21:05:35 +0000

Apple CEO Tim Cook will step down from the job effective September 1, 2026. As has long been rumored, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering John Ternus will become Apple's new CEO.

While Cook will no longer serve as CEO, he will remain with the company in a different capacity as executive chairman.

"As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world," Apple says.

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Absurd study suggests eating fruits and vegetables leads to cancer

Beth Mole — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 20:53:04 +0000

Dubious nutrition research and downright terrible diet and health advice are nothing new, but the situation has devolved as of late. With the rise of anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, federal food guidelines have centered on slabs of meat, excessive amounts of protein, and sticks of butter. The animal-based food craze has people slathering beef tallow on their faces. And, if your cardiovascular system isn't already hardening just reading this, health influencers are now peddling nicotine—an addictive drug considered to be a cardiovascular toxin.

It is in this bananas context that headlines arrived in the past few days suggesting that eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can be bad for you. Specifically, it can supposedly increase the risk of lung cancer—a claim that flies in the face of decades of evidence-based nutrition guidance, like a full-fat cream pie.

The full study behind the headlines hasn't been published yet, but experts have seen enough to call it baloney. The study is being presented at the American Association for Cancer Research conference this week and hasn’t been peer reviewed. Based on the abstract available online, the study was small, had no appropriate control group, led to a finding not previously hypothesized, used groupings that were "arbitrary," is likely picking up on a known correlation, and jumps to speculation based on no data from the study.

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US opens refund portal to start paying back Trump's illegal tariffs

Jon Brodkin — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:53:21 +0000

The US government today opened an online portal for submitting tariff refund requests, two months after the Supreme Court ruled that President Trump illegally imposed the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) tariffs. The refunds will be paid to importers and customs brokers, while consumers who paid higher prices because of the tariffs won't necessarily get anything back.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) opened the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries (CAPE) portal for IEEPA refunds. "Importers and authorized customs brokers can now file their CAPE Declarations," said a CBP bulletin issued today.

Over 330,000 importers paid a total of $166 billion in IEEPA duties as of March 4, a March 6 court filing by a CBP trade office official said. Despite moving ahead with the portal to comply with the Supreme Court ruling, it appears the Trump administration is looking into how it can avoid paying back the entire $166 billion.

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Here's how F1 is tweaking its hybrid systems to try to save the show

Jonathan M. Gitlin — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:15:50 +0000

After spending the last couple of weeks discussing the problem, Formula 1's stakeholders have arrived at a number of solutions to the sport's hybrid energy problem. F1 started this year with all-new powertrains with much more powerful electric motors than ever before, but with batteries that can only send full power to those motors for a few seconds a lap. Once exhausted, the power halves until there's more charge in the battery. In qualifying this ruins the show, as the fastest lap is no longer a flat-out one; in the race it can create dangerous speed differentials with other cars that still have charge in their battery.

The new rules, which go into effect from the Miami Grand Prix (May 1–3), reduce the maximum energy you can recharge per lap. The battery holds 4 MJ, and in the past few races, each driver has been allowed to recharge and then use up to 8 MJ per lap to power the electric motor that supplements the turbocharged V6 engine.

Recharging is done through a mixture of regenerative braking and what the sport calls "super clipping," using the engine to power the electric motor as a generator to charge the battery. The problem is that every kW that gets super-clipped from the engine is a kW that isn't going to the rear wheels, creating speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). And without an electric motor at the front axle, the cars can only harvest a few MJ via regenerative braking each lap.

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Robot runner handily beats humans in half-marathon, setting new record

Jeremy Hsu — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:56:27 +0000

Humanoid robots outran the fastest human competitors while surpassing the human world record during a half-marathon event held in Beijing on April 19. The demonstration of fast-improving robotic speed and autonomy comes as China’s tech industry is rapidly scaling up mass production of humanoid robots to explore possible uses in the real world.

The fastest robot from Chinese smartphone-maker Honor notched a winning time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds while autonomously navigating the 13-mile (21-kilometer) route, according to the Global Times. That beat the human world record of 57 minutes and 20 seconds recently set by Ugandan long-distance runner Jacob Kiplimo during the Lisbon Half Marathon.

The winning robot design took inspiration from top human athletes by incorporating long legs measuring approximately 37 inches (95 centimeters) in length, said Du Xiaodi, a test development engineer for Honor, who spoke as a member of the winning team to The Associated Press and other publications. Xiaodi also described the robot as incorporating a custom liquid-cooling system—derived from similar cooling technology for consumer electronics—that could potentially be adapted for industrial applications.

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Deezer says 44% of new music uploads are AI-generated, most streams are fraudulent

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:15:51 +0000

Music streaming services like Spotify and YouTube Music have become the primary way people listen to music, which can be a lot more convenient than buying individual albums. However, this also makes it easier for AI-created tracks to worm their way into your playlists. Most streamers don't go out of their way to label AI music, but Deezer has worked to develop technology to identify that content. In a recent update, the company says AI music is approaching half of all new uploads, and most of the supposed listeners of those streams are AI themselves.

AI-generated music has taken off in the last few years, but it doesn't get as much attention as other parts of the AI ecosystem. That's due, in part, to the fact that AI music can fly under the radar. With the right context and prompting, an AI track can sound like generic, over-produced music created by humans. According to Deezer, its users have a hard time differentiating AI tunes from the real deal. Listeners taking a Deezer survey listened to three songs, two of which were AI. A whopping 97 percent were unable to tell the difference between the AI songs and the one made by a human, the company reports.

Deezer says it has developed technology to detect AI uploads, and it's one of the few streamers to explicitly label such content. As generative audio models have proliferated, the rate of AI uploads to Deezer has reached a staggering 44 percent—that's 75,000 new AI tracks on Deezer every single day. Deezer licenses this technology to third parties, which it claims has a false positive rate of less than 0.01 percent.

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Rogue Trooper brings the Genetic Infantry to the silver screen

Jonathan M. Gitlin — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:58:28 +0000

For more than 49 years, a comic called 2000 AD has been responsible for giving science-fiction junkies a weekly infusion of "thrill power." Published in the UK, far from the action in Hollywood, its characters have crossed over from the page to the screen far less frequently than the superheroes belonging to Marvel and DC. Judge Dredd has two movies of varying quality, but attempts to follow the 2012 version with a TV show appear to have sputtered out.

But Dredd is not the be-all and end-all of 2000 AD (real ones know he wasn't even in the first issue), and later this year, director Duncan Jones (Moon) will translate another beloved character from the printed page: Rogue Trooper, the teaser for which was released earlier today.

The Rogue Trooper teaser trailer.

Created by Gerry Finley-Day and Dave Gibbons, Rogue Trooper is a future war story set on the toxic hellscape that is Nu Earth. The planet is fought over by the Southers and the Norts, who have both used so many chemical weapons that the only way to survive on the surface is in an environmental suit. Except for the Genetic Infantry, blue super soldiers engineered by the Southers to survive the poisonous atmosphere.

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Meet Bruce, the "beak-jousting" parrot

Jennifer Ouellette — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:00:22 +0000

Bruce the kea—a species of alpine parrot native to New Zealand—lost his upper beak in an accident as a young bird. But that hasn't stopped him from becoming the dominant male in his kea community (known as a "circus") at the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, Bruce achieved his alpha status via a unique fighting method, essentially "jousting" with what remains of his beak.

Researchers already knew Bruce was special. In 2021, scientists at the Kea Animal Minds Lab at the University of Auckland studied Bruce and other non-disabled kea and found that Bruce exhibited unusual preening behavior to compensate for his missing upper beak. He figured out how to use small pebbles for that purpose, wedging them between his lower jaw and tongue and then rubbing them along his feathers. Other non-disabled keas occasionally played with pebbles, too, but they chose larger ones and never used them for preening.

So Bruce didn't learn this behavior by watching other birds; he figured it out on his own. The authors concluded this was evidence of keas' high problem-solving abilities and possibly an example of deliberate tool use. It's also why Bruce's caretakers at the reserve have never fitted him with prosthetics, believing it would only cause him stress and force him to re-adapt his behavior all over again.

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Anthropic's Mythos AI model sparks fears of turbocharged hacking

Cristina Criddle, Financial Times — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 14:21:40 +0000

Anthropic’s new Mythos AI model is raising concern among governments and companies that it could outpace current cyber security defenses, turbocharge hacking, and expose weaknesses faster than they can be fixed.

The San Francisco-based startup released a cyber-focused model this month, which has shown the ability to detect software flaws faster than humans but also demonstrated it can generate exploits needed to take advantage of them.

In one alarming case, the Mythos model showed it could break out of a secure digital environment to contact an Anthropic worker and publicly reveal software glitches, overriding the intention of its human makers.

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Clarifying HEVC licensing fees, royalties, and why vendors kill HEVC support

Scharon Harding — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 11:00:07 +0000

You don’t notice good video compression—until it's not there.

For years, people have streamed high-resolution video without thinking about the tech behind it. But when companies clash over which hardware, software, and services can use modern codecs like HEVC/H.265, the idea that it all "just works" quickly falls apart.

For some Dell and HP customers, that illusion has already been shattered. When the companies disabled HEVC support built into the CPUs of select PCs, it raised uncomfortable questions: Why remove a capability that's already a part of third-party hardware? What do OEMs and chipmakers pay to support HEVC—and are HEVC patent holders effectively double-dipping on licensing fees and royalties?

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Blue Origin's rocket reuse achievement marred by upper stage failure

Stephen Clark — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:19:19 +0000

The third flight of Blue Origin's heavy-lift New Glenn launcher began Sunday with the company's first successful reflight of an orbital-class booster, but ended with a setback for Jeff Bezos' flagship rocket, a key element in NASA's Artemis lunar program.

The 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn launch vehicle ignited its seven methane-fueled BE-4 engines at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) Sunday, beginning a slow climb from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The main engines, each producing more than a half-million pounds of thrust, accelerated the rocket past the speed of sound in about a minute-and-a-half. Three minutes into the flight, the booster switched off its engines and fell away from New Glenn's upper stage, powered by two BE-3U engines burning liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen.

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I’ve fired one of America’s most powerful lasers—here’s what a shot day looks like

Ahmed Helal, The Conversation — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:17:28 +0000

If you walk across the open yard in front of the Physics, Math, and Astronomy building at the University of Texas at Austin, you’ll see a 17-story tower and a huge L-shaped building. What you won’t see is what’s underneath you. Two floors below ground, behind heavy double doors stamped with a logo that most students have never noticed, sits one of the most powerful lasers in the United States.

I was the lead laser scientist on the Texas Petawatt, or TPW as we called it, from 2020 to 2024. Texas Petawatt, which is currently closed due to funding cuts, was a government-funded research center where scientists from across the country applied for time to use specialized equipment. It was part of LaserNetUS, a Department of Energy network of high-power laser labs.

This type of laser takes a tiny pulse of light, stretches it out so it doesn’t blast optics to pieces, and amplifies it until, for a brief instant, it carries more power than the entire US electrical grid. Then it compresses the pulse back to a trillionth of a second to create a star in a vacuum chamber.

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Great white sharks are overheating

Johnny Sturgeon, Inside Climate News — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 11:07:59 +0000

The evolutionary edge that fueled great white shark dominance for millions of years could soon become its greatest downfall.

The ocean’s most iconic predators maintain warmer body temperatures than the surrounding seawater and are paying an increasingly steep price for it. As the oceans warm due to climate change, they now face the risk of potentially fatal overheating, according to a new report in Science.

Several large tuna species and sharks, known as “mesothermic” species for the way their bodies run hot, require more fuel to maintain their temperature and are thus confronting a “double jeopardy” of warming oceans and declining food, mainly from overfishing. As water temperatures climb, these species will be forced to relocate to cooler waters.

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US-sanctioned currency exchange says $15 million heist done by "unfriendly states"

Dan Goodin — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:28:35 +0000

Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers.

Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses, about 16 more than Grinex reported. Neither TRM nor fellow blockchain research firm Elliptic has said how the attackers slipped past Grinex’s defenses. Grinex said it has been under almost constant attack attempts since incorporating 16 months ago. The latest attacks, it said, targeted Russian users of the exchange.

Damaging "Russia's financial sovereignty"

“The digital footprints and nature of the attack indicate an unprecedented level of resources and technology available exclusively to the structures of unfriendly states,” Grinex said. “According to preliminary data, the attack was coordinated with the aim of causing direct damage to Russia's financial sovereignty.”

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Man with @ihackedthegovernment Instagram account tells judge, “I made a mistake"

Jon Brodkin — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:31:48 +0000

A 25-year-old Tennessee man avoided prison time after pleading guilty to accessing government systems with stolen login credentials and boasting of the deed on an Instagram account with the handle, @ihackedthegovernment.

Defendant Nicholas Moore accessed user accounts on the US Supreme Court's electronic filing system, AmeriCorps, and the Veterans Administration Health System. He then publicly posted screenshots of the users' personal information to his @ihackedthegovernment account on Instagram. It's unclear how he obtained the stolen login information.

Moore was sentenced to a year of probation today in US District Court for the District of Columbia. The US government had requested 36 months of probation for the unauthorized access that took place in 2023 from August to October. The government sentencing recommendation did not request any jail time or a fine.

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Trump picks qualified, normal health leader to head CDC; experts still cautious

Beth Mole — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 19:19:47 +0000

President Trump on Thursday announced his third nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Dr. Erica Schwartz, a well-qualified former public health official and board-certified physician in preventive medicine, who has publicly supported vaccination and followed evidence-based medicine.

The uncontroversial pick comes amid concern within the administration that the aggressive anti-vaccine agenda from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who has no medical, science, or public health background—has become a liability for the party in the lead up to the midterms.

Schwartz was deputy surgeon general in Trump's first administration. She spent much of her career as a Navy officer, held the role of Chief Medical Officer with the US Coast Guard, and is a retired rear admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. She has a medical degree from Brown University, a master's degree in public health, and a law degree from the University of Maryland. During the pandemic, she was involved in the federal rollout of COVID-19 vaccines.

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$25,000 buys plenty of used EVs: Here are some options

Jonathan M. Gitlin — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:31:48 +0000

Whether you're considering an electric vehicle because of gas prices or climate change, there has probably never been a better time to buy a used EV, despite that the Trump administration abolished the used clean vehicle tax credit last year. When we started this ongoing series looking at used EV options, the initial idea was to see what was available at bargain-basement prices. But today we're looking at the $20,000–$25,000 bracket, and we're firmly out of the basement, with thousands of EVs across the country to choose from.

If you're only spending $5,000 on an EV, you're looking at much older models with smaller batteries that never had that much range even when new. But at four or five times that sum, the net casts much, much wider. Buyers can start being a little choosy here, particularly as ex-lease cars begin filling dealership lots this year.

For those in the market, it helps that EVs face lower residuals than equivalent hydrocarbon-powered cars. All those incentives given to the original purchaser are passed along to future owners, but according to a Deloitte report, EV residuals are underperforming even more than expected. While I might expect most Ars Technica readers to see the potential, "many US consumers remain cautious about range, charge time, price, battery replacement cost, and public charging access," says Deloitte. Changing that will require automakers and car salespeople to do a much better job explaining battery longevity and range, according to the consulting company.

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Satellite and drone images reveal big delays in US data center construction

Jeremy Hsu — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:08:25 +0000

Silicon Valley has been pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building ever-larger AI data centers that require as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of US homes—but that massive buildout faces significant construction and power challenges along with growing local resistance. Now satellite imagery is showing that nearly 40 percent of US data center projects may fail to be completed this year as scheduled.

The Financial Times drew upon satellite imagery from the geospatial data analytics company SynMax showing how much progress has been made in clearing land and laying building foundations for each data center project. It also cross-checked project progress against public statements and permit documents compiled by the industry research group IIR Energy. The resulting analysis revealed how major projects from tech companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenAI are “likely to miss completion dates by more than three months.”

Interviews with more than a dozen industry executives highlighted data center delays caused by “chronic shortages of labor, power and equipment” along with the process of securing the necessary permits, according to the Financial Times. Construction executives involved with OpenAI projects specifically mentioned not having enough tradespeople, such as electricians and pipe fitters, to work on multiple data center projects.

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Amazon won’t release Fire Sticks that support sideloading anymore

Scharon Harding — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:42:42 +0000

The writing was on the wall, and now it's on Amazon’s website. Newly released Fire Sticks will not support the sideloading of Android apps or any other software from outside Amazon’s official app store.

The proof comes from an update to Amazon’s website for developers, which currently reads:

Starting with Fire TV Stick 4K Select [which came out in October], all future Fire TV Sticks will run on Vega.

According to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the website has included that statement since at least January. But Amazon hasn’t made this declaration so outrightly to consumers, many of whom are just now learning about Amazon’s commitment to its new, proprietary operating system (OS), Vega OS. Amazon declined to comment to Lowpass this week after “multiple sources with knowledge of” Amazon’s plans reportedly told the publication that all future Fire TV sticks would launch with Vega.

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Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic The Dog Stars drops first trailer

Jennifer Ouellette — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:32:55 +0000

Post-apocalyptic scenarios are a longtime staple of science fiction, and director Ridley Scott's latest film, The Dog Stars, falls firmly into that subgenre. Based on Peter Heller's critically acclaimed 2012 novel, the story depicts the aftermath of a deadly flu virus that wiped out most of humanity. The studio released the first trailer at CinemaCon, introduced by a video message from Scott, who said that his adaptation "is particularly tailored for the big screen. Every frame, I hope, will really blow you away."

Per the official logline, the film is "a riveting, epic thriller set in a world where survival is instinct, but humanity is a choice. Scott tells the story of Hig, a young pilot who, together with a military survivalist, Bangley, has carved out an efficient but isolated homestead in a brutal post-apocalyptic world until a mysterious radio transmission spurs Hig to venture into the unknown in search of the hope and humanity he still believes exists."

Jacob Elordi stars as Hig, alongside Josh Brolin as Bangley; Margaret Qualley plays a young medic named Cima; and Guy Pearce is a former Navy SEAL Pops who also happens to be Cima's father. Allison Janney and Benedict Wong will also appear in as-yet-undisclosed roles. (Janney, clad in what looks like a vintage stewardess uniform, briefly appears in the trailer.)

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