“If you compare the arrangement of these connections on day one with the same on day four or five, it's very, very different," says Kazumasa Tanaka, a neuroscientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University in Japan. To learn how a memory that can last for years can sit on hardware that shifts every few days, Tanaka’s team made the shift a bit more dramatic. In a recent Science study, they induced a hibernation-like state in mice, which basically erased the state of more than half of their synapses. And yet the mice apparently have kept their memories.

Hibernation on demand

Hibernation is a specialty of squirrels, hamsters, and bears, but the neural circuit that triggers it is conserved across mammals, and is present in species that never hibernate in the wild—like mice. In June 2020, a team of researchers led by Takeshi Sakurai, a neuroscientist at the University of Tsukuba and a collaborator on Tanaka’s study, developed a technique to artificially activate this hibernation circuit. This can be done by activating a population called Q neurons in a region of the hypothalamus.

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More than 4.2 million miles of public roads crisscross the lower 48 states—enough to reach the Moon and back almost nine times. This vast network of roads spiderwebs its way across the contiguous US, leaving only about 5 percent as an inventoried roadless area or wilderness.

Now, some of those last remaining lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s proposed rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule. That includes southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, where eagles, bears, salmon, and many other species thrive in old-growth coastal forest along the Inside Passage.

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The presidential memorandum replaces a 2013 policy signed by former President Barack Obama. Both policies share an emphasis on supporting the commercial space industry and underscore the importance of assured access to space. But the launch sector has changed immensely since then. There were 176 orbital launch attempts from US soil last year, nearly 10 times the number in 2013. SpaceX led the pack last year with 165 orbital launches of its Falcon 9 rocket, plus five suborbital test flights of the much larger Starship.

"By 2030, our space transportation ranges must grow to support more than 1,000 launches and reentries every year," the policy says. "The policies set forth in this memorandum will secure America's continued superiority in space."

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In many cases, we can get this data from naturally occurring events like earthquakes. In others, we intentionally create waves using things like explosives, providing the opportunity to do imaging in specific areas without needing to wait for an earthquake. Now, a team of scientists at Penn State suggests there's a potential option that sits between waiting for an earthquake and triggering your own seismic event: thunderstorms.

Some of the energy carried by thunder enters the Earth's upper crust, triggering what are termed "thunderquakes." But, for various physical reasons, the seismic signals are extremely complex, making it difficult to extract clear signals from them. The Penn State team says it has finally constructed a model that can help make sense of this complexity and used it to reconstruct the terrain under the local campus.

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According to plaintiffs, Peter Castaneda and Haley Gelfand, Compass has bought so many brokerage firms over the past decade-plus that it maintains a monopoly, controlling “over 80 percent of the rental unit listings available for renters in Manhattan based on 2025 data.”

With that monopoly, Compass can “literally dictate pricing for as much as 80 percent of Manhattan’s rental units,” renters argued. And now, Compass is allegedly trying to manipulate prices on other platforms, as well.

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The upcoming Moto devices won't ship with GrapheneOS, but they will be fully supported by the project with help from Moto itself. So far, only Pixel phones have met GrapheneOS's strict hardware requirements to ensure the highest level of security and privacy. The software, which is based on Android, includes features like enhanced memory protection, granular network permissions, customizable app sandboxing, and a duress code that can be used to wipe your phone. (That last one got an activist charged with a felony earlier this year after he used it to delete his data during a customs interrogation.)

According to the GrapheneOS team, the upcoming Moto phones will be premium flagship devices. The team expects pricing to be even higher than Pixel phones, which is saying something. The current Pixel lineup starts at $900 for the base model Pixel 11, a $100 increase from last year. The Pixel 11 Pro XL price has gone up to a whopping $1,300 this year.

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In April 2025, Logitech raised the prices on 51 percent of its portfolio, with some prices increasing by as much as 25 percent.

The complaint seeks to “recover monies that Logitech extracted from American consumers as offset for import tariffs that the United States Supreme Court has since declared unlawful, tariffs for which Logitech now stands to be reimbursed by the federal government. This is all while Logitech retained every dollar of the corresponding price increases it charged its customers due to the illegal tariffs.”

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As we learned earlier this year, Chinese regulators are getting more serious about the recent trend of electronically controlled car doors; a growing number of crashes have had fatal consequences when the occupants have been trapped in burning cars. Starting next year, new rules give specific dimensions for handles that must be followed by all newly approved vehicles. But cars that have already been on sale for some time, like the Models 3 and Y, are grandfathered in, at least until the end of 2028.

But China wants Tesla to do something about the nearly 3 million cars already on its roads. It is requiring the automaker to add warning labels to the car interiors—something that will require physical access to the car. Additionally, Tesla will push out a software update that automatically lowers all the cars' windows in the event of a collision.

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On August 20, the Romanian Coast Guard first spotted the maritime drone a few hundred meters away from the Neptun Deep project’s main drilling platform, where several hundred workers were busy with the platform’s ongoing installation, Defense Minister Radu Miruță said in a Facebook post. The offshore gas project would make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union once it starts full production in 2027.

To protect the lives of the workers and the offshore gas infrastructure, the Romanian military scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to stop the drone with cannon fire, Miruță said. Army specialists later carried out a controlled detonation, as seen in a Facebook video shared by the defense minister.

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The FTC has no power to ban personalized pricing, in which a business uses a customer’s personal data to determine the highest price that person might be willing to pay for a product or service. But the agency believes it could set limits on the practice, including potential penalties for businesses that fail to disclose when customers may be paying more because data suggests they won't balk at the price.

In a request for public comment on a proposed policy statement, the FTC acknowledged that personalized pricing is common in some industries. But FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said new industries are increasingly tracking customers to set individualized prices, blindsiding consumers who expect a listed price in markets like retail “to be the same price that everyone else sees,” Ferguson said.

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The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.

The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.

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As millions of people buy into the smart glasses fad each year, the odds are increasing that you could be secretly recorded while simply going about your day.

Meta is not the only smart glasses maker, but its AI glasses are by far the most popular. And as the devices become more common, some public places, including schools, courts, restaurants, and entertainment venues, have begun to ban them. Even tech lovers have rejected Meta glasses in certain settings. The hackers behind DEF CON 2026 reportedly banned smart glasses with no exceptions, reminding attendees with prescription pairs to “be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them.”

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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.

Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's Central News Agency reports. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from the rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.

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The company, RoboStore, had previously become the main North American distributor for humanoid robots and quadruped robots from Unitree Robotics, a Chinese robotics company that produces some of the most affordable and popular humanoid robot models. Universities like Harvard and MIT, along with tech companies like Amazon and Nvidia, purchased such robots made in China through RoboStore for their own research and development purposes.

“We’ve sold over 1,500 robots and deployed them and worked with customers like Cisco, OpenAI, Nvidia, and over 150 universities,” Teddy Haggerty, founder and CEO of RoboStore, told Ars.

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The large, expendable rocket has a capacity of more than 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. And to the credit of European rocket scientists and planners, the Ariane 6 has had a substantially smoother rollout than comparable vehicles in the United States—Blue Origin's New Glenn and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rockets—both of which have had significant growing pains.

However, even though the Ariane 6 rocket has had a successful debut, its future is clouded by high costs.

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September 11, 2001, will be remembered as one of the darkest days in American history. As the 25th anniversary approaches, National Geographic, in collaboration with the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, is marking the occasion with a new documentary miniseries: 9/11: Reunited. The three-episode series revisits the personal stories of several survivors of the terrorist attacks, with a twist: It reunites people whose paths crossed at that time to celebrate the bonds they formed 25 years ago.

Director Julian Jones was a producer on NatGeo's Emmy-winning 2021 documentary miniseries 9/11: One Day in America. The experience inspired him to return to direct 9/11: Reunited. "What emerged for me [while making the 2021 documentary] was a sense of people showing up for each other, a selflessness and everyday heroism," Jones told Ars. As the 25th anniversary of the attacks approached, he and National Geographic decided to commemorate the milestone with a documentary series focused on that aspect.

"We wanted to bring people together to offer gratitude to each other, to answer unanswered questions, to talk about things that maybe they weren't ready to talk about until now, and also to remember their fallen comrades or friends," said Jones. "After 25 years, who do they want to meet? What questions have they got? I think we also wanted to tell the story of what many in the 9/11 community call 9/12, that's the rest of your lives—the journey, and in many cases, the psychological and physical struggles."

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Suspecting that Roblox may not be doing enough to stop child exploitation, eSafety conducted testing earlier this year that flagged alarming gaps in Roblox safeguards. The agency found that adult strangers could still send connection requests to kids, whose “profiles and biographies, including account names, number and names of connections, avatar images, and non-sensitive biographical information such as their interests were visible to anyone on the Roblox platform, with no option to restrict the visibility of this information.”

Such requests did not trigger parental alerts, eSafety found, and bad actors could also search kids’ visible-to-anyone contact lists for more targets.

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The GV90 uses the same 800 V E-GMP platform as other Korean electric three-row SUVs, the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and Kia EV9. A three-row, seven-seat GV90 will be part of the range, and I would assume the most common variant we'll encounter on the roads. But for the launch, Genesis is just focusing on the four-seat GV90 and the high-end GV90 Neolum; the latter faithfully translates most of the concept, including the pillarless coach doors (which Genesis is calling the Neolum Arch Gate).

Pillarless coach doors certainly add drama to a vehicle, and Genesis has previously told Ars it learned enough to engineer them with all the safety requirements volume production would require. Speaking of safety, all GV90s include the world's first roof airbag (which deploys in the case of a rollover), one of 12 airbags throughout the interior.

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The commercial space sector likes talking about the allure of mining asteroids for precious metals to bring back to Earth. Under what circumstances are we going to be willing to do that in reverse? Starlink alone has doubled the mass of objects in low-Earth orbit, and this orbital data center constellation would dwarf that—and dispose of at least some satellites by pushing them away from Earth.

Given the roughly five-year expected lifetime for data center GPUs, about 200,000 of the 1 million proposed SpaceX AI1 satellites would be decommissioned each year. Based on their May 29 FCC filing, about 40,000 would definitely deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere. (Those materials would largely be dispersed throughout the atmosphere, turning a resource into a diffuse contaminant that slowly settles over the globe. One related issue: the aluminum would cause an unknown amount of ozone depletion over a period of decades.) Some or all of the remaining 160,000 satellites would be moved outward into a distant “disposal” orbit, instead. Either way, they're lost from a "material life cycle" point of view.

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Overall, according to findings from independent security researcher Jeremiah Fowler, the exposed ClarityCheck database contained roughly 450 GB of images, including what appeared to be profile images, screenshots, and other photographs of adults, teenagers, and children. All of the images were stored in an unsecured Amazon S3 bucket, with files in folders named “faces” and “profiles,” which could be accessed by anyone online through a URL included in the company’s publicly available website code.

ClarityCheck is one of a number of so-called people-finder tools that have appeared online in recent years. These websites broadly claim to be able to search the web, public records, and other databases to identify individuals. ClarityCheck’s website says it can run searches on phone numbers, email addresses, vehicle identification numbers, and names. Its photo-search page says it can help “identify anyone in a photo” and find social media profiles “in seconds.”

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