Usually, the CDC would allow states to order the newly available seasonal COVID-19 vaccines through the federal Vaccine for Children (VFC) program, which provides vaccines at no cost to children who are uninsured, underinsured, Medicaid-eligible, or Indigenous people in the US. Approximately 52 percent of all US children are eligible for vaccines through the program.

Additionally, The Guardian reports that at least 11 states and one US territory are part of a universal vaccine purchase program, in which they buy all vaccines for children—regardless of their ability to pay or insurance status—through contracts otherwise for the VFC. The 11 states and one territory include: Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming, and American Samoan.

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On Tuesday, 404 Media reported that ShinyHunters took down the agency site, FBIJobs.gov, then posted a banner on the homepage that said “THIS SITE HAS BEEN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS.”

About two to three terabytes of data were taken, ShinyHunters told The New York Times. None of the data has been leaked yet, but it included “names of current and former agents as well as applicants and corresponding home addresses, phone numbers, names of spouses, certain medical information, and other data.” According to Bloomberg, the data could be used to potentially retaliate against agents, with one sample appearing to include “potentially sensitive professional information on the FBI employees’ work focus such as counter-intelligence work on China, Russia and Iran, as well as work against street gangs.”

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Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone, ad-free plans (which also support 4K and HDR) are each increasing 13 percent from $19 per month to $21.50/month.

Disney+ and Hulu’s respective standalone plans with ads increased from $12 to $12.50.

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A few weeks ago, Bentley gave Ars a ride in a new camouflaged electric vehicle. Named after a Spanish rock formation, the Torcal is the brand’s first battery EV, and today the production car had its formal unveiling. That camo was effective: The real car is less bulbous and more blocky than its disguise would suggest. And it’s fair to say it brings some of the ideas of the EXP 15 concept to the road—even if that didn’t include that show car’s elegant, stretched proportions. It’s smaller than the Bentayga, and it should slot beneath that model in pricing (or the PHEV version of it, at least), though Bentley has yet to reveal exactly how much US buyers can expect to pay.

Underneath the bodywork are some relatively familiar underpinnings; Bentley shares technology with Porsche as both are part of the greater Volkswagen Group empire. The power output might not be as prodigious as the electric Porsche Cayenne but should be sufficient nonetheless. The standard car will offer peak outputs of 810 hp (604 kW) and 880 lb-ft (1,194 Nm), enough for a 3.3-second 0–60 mph time (0–100 km/h takes 3.4 seconds).

The more powerful Torcal S boasts 875 hp (653 kW) and 995 lb-ft (1,350 Nm) at its most potent; this is capable of 60 mph from a standing start in a mere 2.8 seconds (2.9 to 100 km/h) and an increased top speed of 162 mph (260 km/h), up from 155 mph (250 km/h) for the standard version, either of which are academic outside certain stretches of German highway.

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It's clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”

However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China's leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.

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The competition’s First Prize track for space-based wildfire detection challenged teams to accurately detect all fires across a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. A second Autonomous Response Prize track challenged teams to autonomously detect and put out a high-risk fire located somewhere within rural Alaska while ignoring decoy fires—all within 10 minutes of the fire igniting.

“We want to be able to prepare and provide tools for firefighters to really allow them to do the best job,” Andrea Santy, program director of XPRIZE Wildfire, told Ars. “They're great at what they do, but it's unfair to continue to put them in harm's way when there's technology coming online that can help keep them safe, keep communities safe, and protect ecosystems.”

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Discord had announced a somewhat different plan for age checks in February, but scrapped it amid backlash from users concerned about privacy. The privacy concerns were heightened by a 2025 incident in which hackers stole government IDs of 70,000 Discord users from a third-party service that Discord used to verify ages in the UK and Australia.

The original plan was to require ID uploads or face scans from users seeking to access age-restricted servers and channels. The revised system, detailed yesterday by Discord CTO and co-founder Stanislav Vishnevskiy, will provide several additional options.

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The design of YouTube's homepage feed comes under fire often, but the platform is preparing to give you more options. With Custom Feeds, you'll be able to add new tabs to the YouTube interface with content of your choice. To create a feed, just type a description and let YouTube populate the page. You can refine your description and rate video suggestions to tune the Custom Feed. Google says you'll be able to save "multiple" feeds without specifying the exact number. This feature will roll out soon in the US for web, mobile, and TV users.

Interacting on YouTube will also change later this year. The platform will finally add the option to post GIFs in comments, which has apparently been a common request for some time. The comment box will let you search for popular animated thumbnails and post them on both regular videos and YouTube Shorts. The YouTube direct messaging feature is also adding support for group chat, but it's only going to be available in the US, UK, Singapore, Brazil, and some European countries to start.

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You do not have two brains. It's a silly way to look at the results of the new paper.

But there are far better ways to look at the results, ways that can help us understand how the brain gets put together and illustrate some of the general ideas behind developmental biology. So let's take a look at what the research actually shows and place it in the context of brain development.

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Brad Bird has directed some of our all-time favorite animated films: The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004), and Ratatouille (2007), with the latter two snagging well-deserved Oscar wins. He's back with a new animated feature, Ray Gunn, coming to Netflix in December, described as a neo-noir science-fiction mystery. Netflix recently released the official trailer, chock-full of retro-futuristic elements, like flying cars, jet packs, laser guns, aliens, and yes, a sultry femme fatale. Color us among those now eagerly awaiting the film's release.

Bird has been kicking around the idea for Ray Gunn for the last 30 years, working on his many other film projects while the Ray Gunn script—co-written by Matthew Robbins, who also co-wrote 1987's Batteries Not Included with Bird—"stayed in a filing cabinet at Warner Brothers," the director said earlier this year.

The film's inspiration came when Bird heard the opening of the B-52s' "Planet Claire" (a personal favorite) and initially thought it was a cover of Henry Mancini's theme music from the classic TV show Peter Gunn. Bird is a longtime fan of film noir and hard-boiled detectives, and he came up with the idea of a futuristic detective named Ray Gunn (a pun on raygun, of course). "It’s film noir and a hard-boiled detective story, but it’s got a lot more comedy and a lot more action than the average film noir,” said Bird.

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Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message "Checking SmartThings app during update.”

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"Beijing's intended strategy is to dominate the high ground of the twenty-first century," writes Nelson in Space Odyssey, a book to be published by Harper Horizon in January 2027.

A former Congressman and Senator from Florida, Nelson served as a mission specialist on a space shuttle flight in 1986 and later as NASA administrator from May 2021 to January 2025 under President Biden. The book largely focuses on his space policy work in Congress and his tenure as NASA's leader.

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Comma.ai was the brainchild of George Hotz, who rose to prominence at the start of the last decade by jailbreaking iOS and hacking Sony PlayStations. In 2015, Hotz turned his attention to partially automated driver assists, which were gaining attention following Tesla’s exploits with its Autopilot system. Hotz first modified his own Acura to give it a more advanced driver assist that let him take his hands off the wheel, with the goal of selling his system to Tesla and replacing Mobileye as the company’s supplier.

(Mobileye dropped Tesla as a customer the following year after becoming unhappy with the way the car company was using Mobileye products in unintended ways.)

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All of these devices function because of 17 metals collectively known as rare earth elements. The scientists who gave the group that name in 1794 created a misnomer. Cerium alone is about as common in the Earth’s crust as copper.

However, separating rare earth minerals from one another and from raw ore is intensely difficult. As a result, countries that control the processing of rare earth minerals have a lot of political leverage.

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Volcanoes at sea can pose hazards quite different from those on land, as their impact can vary depending on how the volcanic activity interacts with seawater. In the deep ocean, high water pressure can suppress explosive volcanic activity, making eruptions less destructive. But closer to the surface, the lower water pressure and the high temperatures of volcanic material can cause violent explosions. Yet scientists still do not fully understand the conditions under which volcanic activity can cause a tsunami.

To better understand these risks, an international team of researchers examined the 2022 Hunga eruption in Tonga, focusing on the rapid caldera collapse that may have amplified its powerful tsunami. Calderas form when the ground above a magma reservoir collapses as the magma drains away. Comparisons of seafloor topography before and after the eruption showed that a roughly 4-kilometer-wide caldera sank by about a kilometer during the eruption.

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The movie is fantastic, a true thriller, and while some liberties were taken with the depiction of outer space, the basic premise of a cascading series of collisions rendering orbits too cluttered with debris to be usable is valid. The idea was first proposed by NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais nearly half a century ago.

Still, the movie was science fiction, right?

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The woman, a rice farmer in the Philippines, headed to the emergency department. There, doctors gave her a physical exam and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then they took a look at her brain. Magnetic resonance imaging revealed a bright cluster of nodules surrounded by fluid in her left frontal lobe. The doctors had an immediate guess as to what they were: worm eggs.

In a case report published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors write that they suspected the woman had neuroschistosomiasis, an uncommon complication of an infection with a Schistosoma parasitic worm, aka a blood fluke. In the Philippines, the most common fluke is S. japonicum. It's also found in China and part of Indonesia; despite its name, it has been eliminated from Japan.

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OpenAI and Anthropic both recently released new models aimed at lowering costs. Anthropic announced Opus 5.5, the latest version of its main mass-market workhorse model, used for tasks like coding and other complex knowledge work.

And OpenAI announced GPT-6 Sol and Luna, the latest versions of its middle-of-the-road or smaller models focused on efficiency and speed.

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The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible."

The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety. Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks.

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Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for streamlining most steps required to compromise email accounts in large numbers. From there, the platform helped customers analyze inboxes, select targets that would provide the biggest potential payouts, and draft follow-up emails that provided realistic ruses for tricking company employees into transferring funds to attacker-controlled accounts.

Minutes, not days

“While EvilTokens helped cybercriminals access email accounts, at the center of the service was an AI-style chatbot that could analyze a victim’s inbox and help criminals identify trusted relationships, payment authorizations, and sensitive responsibilities, as well as other circumstances where fraud was most likely to succeed,” Microsoft said. “The platform could even recommend fraud strategies, including drafting messages that impersonated trusted contacts to help criminals trick victims into taking action.”

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