The goal is to make drones a “universal combat tool” for all troops by training them to use drones like a “second personal weapon,” said Ahn Gyu-back, South Korea’s Minister of National Defense, in a June 26 briefing reported by Reuters and other media outlets. The announcement coincides with broader plans to equip individual military units with more cheap and expendable drones for surveillance and strike missions, along with deploying more counter-drone lasers and microwave weapons.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s former drone operations command headquarters that used to have direct command authority over combat units will be reorganized to focus on collaborating with South Korean industry on developing and procuring commercial drone technology, according to The Korea Times. The South Korean defense minister specifically cited the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East as inspiring such military reforms with a focus on drone technologies.

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In a neurological exam, doctors found he had a mild delay in his movements, but no other deficits. His blood work was generally normal except for elevated IgE, a signal of immune responses linked to allergies, autoimmune disease, and parasitic infections. The doctors did a computed tomography (CT) scan of his head and saw much more obvious evidence of a problem: There were multiple lesions distributed throughout his brain accompanied by swelling.

In a case report in Emerging Infectious Diseases, the doctors reported working through the possible conditions that could explain all the findings. They noted that the man was not immunocompromised and had never traveled internationally. Their top suspicion was metastatic cancer.

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As The Hollywood Reporter highlighted this week, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill (SB 576) in October 2025 that prohibits any video streaming service from transmitting the “audio of commercial advertisements louder than the video content the advertisements accompany” in the state.

The law brings some parity between streaming services and broadcast, cable, and satellite TV providers, which, under The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, can only play commercials at “the same average volume as the programs they accompany,” the FCC says.

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In 2025, Russia asked that Apple remove 1,213 apps—many of these VPN apps designed to thwart the country's draconian Internet censorship. (Vietnam was number two, requesting that 335 apps be blocked.)

Russia is essentially trying to build a closed, spy-friendly, domestic version of the Internet. While the Russian government loves demanding app bans from Apple, it only wants bad, degenerate apps banned. It does not want good, strong Russian apps banned, such as VKontakte (a Russian version of Facebook) or the Max messaging app (state-mandated communications software so creepy that one exile publication described it with the insanely long headline, "You already know Russia’s Max messenger spies on users. You probably don’t know just how many surveillance tools it hides, including even a neural network for eavesdropping.")

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NYT's motion comes after the Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried and failed to claim that Cox was contributing to music piracy as an Internet service provider, which set a new standard for contributory infringement. Moving forward, plaintiffs will have to prove that parties intentionally acted to induce illegal conduct. Recognizing that the legal precedent has changed, the NYT now wants to amend its complaint to align its contributory infringement claim against Microsoft with that new standard.

“Today, we asked the court for permission to file an amended complaint that further strengthens our case, clarifying our claim of contributory infringement against Microsoft based on new law and new evidence uncovered during discovery,” Graham James, an NYT spokesperson, said in a statement provided to Ars.

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"The evidence clearly demonstrates that the FCC has acted in bad faith by withholding documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] request," journalist Nina Burleigh and advocacy group Frequency Forward said in a filing yesterday in US District Court for the District of Columbia. "The FCC acted in bad faith when it redefined the search criteria without notice to Plaintiffs or this Court. Further, the FCC acted in bad faith by concealing the fact that the Chairman Carr has a Signal account on a phone he uses to conduct government business."

Burleigh and Frequency Forward sued the FCC last year, alleging that it violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding agency records. In August 2025, a federal judge ordered the FCC to produce documents and criticized it for a “vague and uninformative” response to the lawsuit.

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There were just a few minutes until Netflix would start streaming a live MMA event, and he couldn’t get into my account. For a while, he had accessed Netflix as an add-on member with his own profile through my household’s account. That day, however, he was logged out and couldn’t use my login credentials to watch Netflix. Instead, he saw a prompt asking him to “add an email address to your profile” to continue.

After some frantic phone troubleshooting and a couple of password resets, we realized that my father had to create his own login to continue using the extra profile I paid for. Although I was able to get him set up in time (for some disappointing bouts), the situation was confusing and inconvenient.

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For decades, humans mined antibiotic molecules from microbes and tweaked them to develop new drugs, staying ahead of evolution's cunning countermeasures. But in recent times, new natural products have been harder to find, and the pipeline of new antibiotics has slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, existing antibiotics have been overused, and resistance has mounted to critical levels. Most antibiotics are single bioactive molecules, and some can be thwarted with single mutations. While the current situation is dire, a study in Nature this week reports a compelling discovery that not only points to a potentially new antibiotic regimen, but also an entirely new strategy to once again get ahead in the microbial arms race.

Exciting find

The study, led by biomedical researcher Eric Brown at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, reports the discovery of a large block of genes—dubbed a "megacluster"—that codes for four molecules that appear to work in concert to derail a single essential metabolic pathway.

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The rocket's explosion took out its only launch pad, LC-36A. So even if Blue Origin can quickly diagnose the cause of the failure, it has nowhere to launch the New Glenn rocket from. Company officials, including founder Jeff Bezos, have said the vehicle will return to flight at LC-36A before the end of this year, though there is widespread skepticism about that timeline.

Meanwhile, we have more questions than answers about a rocket that had become increasingly central to the needs of NASA and commercial customers. What does this failure mean for the Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon? What do we know about the timing of Artemis III and the lunar landing mission, Artemis IV? What about the Moon base?

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2025 was a bad year for Europe's largest automaker. Its sales were essentially flat, but profits were anything but, dropping 44 percent to just 6.9 billion euros ($7.9 billion) as operating margins more than halved. The red ink looks set to continue bleeding through 2026, and in March, the company announced it would cut 50,000 jobs in Germany by 2030 as part of a plan to adapt. Now, according to a report in Manager Magazin, those job losses may double.

The automaker did well selling EVs in Europe last year, but sales in North America and China fell and continue to fall, and tariffs have had a significant effect.

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A new study in the journal Nature Communications uses the geological past to test how these competing effects added up. Doctor Madeleine Stow of the University of Oxford, with colleagues from across the UK and France, examined a volcanically triggered episode of global warming that happened in the early part of the Jurassic period, 183 million years ago, known as the “Toarcian Ocean Anoxic Event.”

They found that eroding organic carbon amplified climate warming at the time, suggesting that the same process may apply to modern climate change. But the extent to which the past is prologue is uncertain.

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The company’s president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, told investors during a recent IPO roadshow that the group was considering launching a Starlink retail product and could build its own terrestrial US mobile network, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The move would require Starlink to build a new retail offering by selling mobile contracts to individual customers, competing directly with the three big US network operators Verizon Wireless, AT&T. and T-Mobile.

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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.

Rocket Lab executes rapid response mission. Last Friday Rocket Lab launched the Victus Haze mission just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving the US Space Force’s Notice to Launch, beating the previous record by more than 10 hours, the company said. The launch was scarcely announced in advance, Ars reports. The only public indication of an impending launch was the release of a warning for pilots and sailors to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path. Rocket Lab did not provide a livestream of the launch, as it does for most of its missions.

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The last regular updates rolled out to Windows 10 in October of last year, but the Internet can be a dangerous place for unpatched Windows machines. That was a problem for Microsoft, as Windows 11 usage had only barely surpassed Windows 10 when support ended. Microsoft's solution was to give everyone on the old OS a free year of extended updates.

That program was set to end on October 12, 2026, but Microsoft has updated its policy with hardly a whisper, pushing back the end of extended updates to October 12, 2027. The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft's blog post on the program has a new editor's note confirming the change.

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FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said E-Rate should be changed because students are getting too much screen time. He led a 2-1 vote to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that proposes changes and asks the public to comment on them.

"Over the last decade, school districts across the country experimented with a massive increase in screen time for students," Carr said at today's meeting.

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In an X post (first spotted by 9to5Mac) today, Notion said that it will shutter the Notion Mail “inbox across web, desktop, and iOS on September 22.”

The post claimed that most Notion users don’t use email clients anyway and instead rely on AI agents to handle their electronic correspondence. It reads:

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The app is available globally in the Play Store, but that's not the only update to Google's financial tracker. The AI-powered makeover for the Finance website is also leaving beta, making Google's chatbot a core part of the experience. Naturally, the mobile app includes a heaping helping of generative AI that aims to make sense of irrational financial markets.

If you've checked out the new Finance web experience, you'll see a lot of familiar features in the app. You can create watchlists, monitor real-time market data, and keep up with financial news in one place. While perusing graphs of stock performance, Finance will use AI to generate "key moments" that can explain why the numbers changed. This feature initially launched in the Finance web interface in May.

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Ars obtained a June 10 letter sent to Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) one day ahead of a Senate committee hearing on “AI and the American Dream.” In the letter, Anthropic shared “new, confidential evidence of the largest campaign to illicitly extract Claude’s capabilities we have ever measured.”

The attacks occurred between April 22 and June 5, when “operators affiliated with Alibaba and Alibaba Qwen, Alibaba’s AI lab” allegedly generated “more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts,” Anthropic said. Violating Claude's terms of service and access restrictions, this campaign “targeted some of Claude’s most valuable capabilities, such as agentic reasoning, software engineering, and long-horizon tasks.”

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Now, we can apparently add an additional oddity: overlapping magnetic fields. Researchers have found a star/planet combo that experiences periodic brightening, which they ascribe to the interactions between the magnetic fields of both bodies.

Looking for repetition

This is one of those cases where theory came before discovery. People had already proposed that a planet orbiting close to its host star could interact with it if its magnetic field were sufficiently strong. And, in a number of cases, researchers have found evidence that this is happening, with one case of an extremely young star emitting flares seemingly in response to the orbit of its innermost planet.

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Polestar says it will continue to sell its existing stock of Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 SUVs and "will continue to support customers, including providing access to its service network." But we can forget about the Polestar 5 sedan, the Polestar 6 roadster, or any future models making it to these shores.

The automaker was spun out of Volvo Cars several years ago as a pure EV brand by its corporate parent, Zhejiang Geely Holding, a Chinese company that also owns OEMs like Lynk and Co and Zeekr. And just weeks ago, Commerce authorized Volvo to import MY27 vehicles. At the time, Polestar told Ars that it was continuing to work with US authorities to meet the regulations; that work was evidently in vain.

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