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Modern medicine's loss is social media's gain. Since the pandemic hit, public trust in science and evidence-based medicine, like lifesaving vaccines, has declined. Yet, trust in the anecdotal and often bonkers health advice that endlessly swirls on social media only seems to have risen—and that trust seems unshakeable.

A perfect example of this is ivermectin. In the early stages of the pandemic, some laboratory data suggested that ivermectin—a decades-old deworming drug—might be able to prevent or treat COVID-19. The antiparasitic drug was initially used in the 1970s to treat worm infections in animals, but years later, it gained FDA approval as a prescription drug for treating parasitic infections in humans, including river blindness.

Before scientists could conduct clinical trials to know if ivermectin could also treat the new viral infection, COVID-19, the idea took off, mainly among conservatives. Anecdotes and misinformation ballooned.

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Ana de Armas shone in the original Knives Out (2019) and as one of the best Bond girls in recent memory in No Time to Die (2021). She proves herself a fierce and lethal adversary against a cultish syndicate in the new film Ballerina—excuse me, From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. (Why, Lionsgate? Just... why?) I love them all, but this is probably my favorite John Wick film since the original in 2014 (which may never be surpassed).

(Mostly mild spoilers, and a couple of significant reveals below the gallery. We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he made his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston), where he was trained as an assassin. The Director also trains girls to be ballerina-assassins, one of whom is Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas). We see snippets of these events from Eve's perspective in Ballerina, just to establish the continuity.

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It would have been exceptionally easy for Nintendo to stick with an established formula for Mario Kart World. While the series has added a few crucial new features here and there since its Super NES debut, it has settled into an extremely comfortable groove since the 2014 release of Mario Kart 8 on the ill-fated Wii U. Since then, we've seen the franchise lean on nostalgia-rich DLC as it introduced a barely differentiated Switch port and a series of course-packed expansions rather than another distinct sequel. Save for the expert-level, ultra-fast 200cc racing mode, the broad strokes of a Mario Kart game have gone from staid to practically frozen in amber in recent years.

Mario Kart World doesn't completely abandon the basic structure of those previous Mario Kart games; there are still twisty, turny, shortcut-filled courses loaded with items and opportunities to power slide. But it builds on that skeleton more than any Mario Kart game ever has, adding new modes, new driving techniques, and a new focus on the vast swathes of land between the intricately designed race courses. The result can feel a little inconsistent but also like a necessary shot of new ideas into a series that has been growing stale.

Too many karts

The first thing you're liable to notice loading up a race in Mario Kart World is just how crowded things have gotten. The expansion to 24 racers on each track (from 12 in Mario Kart 8 and eight in previous franchise titles) serves as a good way to show off the added processing power of the Switch 2. It also provides a good excuse to greatly expand the number of selectable characters and outfits available in the game, which dredge up options from some of the deeper depths of the Mario catalog (your day has finally arrived, Sidestepper fans).

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The Federal Communications Commission is facing widespread criticism after threatening to revoke EchoStar licenses for spectrum bands that rival firms, including SpaceX, want to take over. Opposition to license revocations came from conservatives, telecom consumer advocates, and some industry groups.

The Free State Foundation, a free-market group that has generally supported Republican priorities at the FCC, filed comments saying that "arbitrary" decisions would create instability in the market for wireless broadband deployment. EchoStar is now facing regulatory uncertainty less than a year after obtaining deadline extensions for its wireless network buildout, the Free State Foundation said:

There is widespread agreement that constructing and operating wireless broadband networks depends on significant private market investment. Legal stability is a necessary ingredient for the operation of any marketplace conducive to competition and growth, including today's dynamic wireless market. Before risking their money in commercial ventures, private investors reasonably seek assurance that their interests and rights will be protected from changes in the rules or agency actions that are arbitrary or unforeseen... Rescission of deadline extension orders granted months earlier undoubtedly creates a type of regulatory uncertainty.

As previously reported, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr directed agency staff to investigate EchoStar's compliance with obligations to provide nationwide 5G service under the terms of its spectrum licenses. EchoStar bought Dish Network in December 2023 and offers wireless service under the Boost Mobile brand.

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Researchers have unearthed two publicly available exploits that completely evade protections offered by Secure Boot, the industry-wide mechanism for ensuring devices load only secure operating system images during the boot-up process. Microsoft is taking action to block one exploit and allowing the other one to remain a viable threat.

As part of Tuesday's monthly security update routine, Microsoft patched CVE-2025-3052, a Secure Boot bypass vulnerability affecting more than 50 device makers. More than a dozen modules that allow devices from these manufacturers to run on Linux allow an attacker with physical access to turn off Secure Boot and, from there, go on to install malware that runs before the operating system loads. Such “evil maid” attacks are precisely the threat Secure Boot is designed to prevent. The vulnerability can also be exploited remotely to make infections stealthier and more powerful if an attacker has already gained administrative control of a machine.

A single point of failure

The underlying cause of the vulnerability is a critical vulnerability in a tool used to flash firmware images on the motherboards of devices sold by DT Research, a manufacturer of rugged mobile devices. It has been available on VirusTotal since last year and was digitally signed in 2022, an indication it has been available through other channels since at least that earlier date.

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After months of speculation and beta testing, Google is rolling out Android 16 starting today. The new software will arrive first on Pixel phones, but you can expect to see updates on other phones in the coming weeks—or more likely months.

For those with Pixel devices, the OTA should begin appearing soon. If you just can't wait, Google will have system images and update files on its developer pages. You probably don't need to get up in arms about potential delays, though. Like other recent Android updates, there aren't many changes bundled into this version. Many of the most interesting changes are coming later this year.

Android 16 has landed

Despite the light feature set at launch, there are a few things of note. Right at the top of the list is a cleaner notification shade. Google launched bundled notifications in Android 7.0 Nougat, which has helped to clean up phones ever since. With Android 16, Google is stepping up notification bundling by forcing it on apps. Now, multiple notifications from a single app will be merged together into a single expandable item. Neat.

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OpenAI has struck a deal to use Google's cloud computing infrastructure for AI despite the two companies' fierce competition in the space, reports Reuters. The agreement, finalized in May after months of negotiations, marks a shift in OpenAI's strategy to diversify its computing resources beyond Microsoft Azure, which had been its exclusive cloud provider until January.

Microsoft's long-standing partnership with OpenAI dates back to 2019, with significant expansions of investment from the computer giant in 2021 and 2023. In October, The Information reported that the ChatGPT maker had begun to seek data center deals elsewhere, citing the need for more AI data center servers faster than Microsoft could supply them.

Under the new deal, Google Cloud will provide additional computing capacity to help OpenAI train and run its AI models. For OpenAI, the partnership addresses growing demands for computing power as the company's annual revenue reached $10 billion as of June, according to sources familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters.

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A critical measure of the ocean’s health suggests that the world’s marine systems are in greater peril than scientists had previously realized and that parts of the ocean have already reached dangerous tipping points.

A study, published Monday in the journal Global Change Biology*,* found that ocean acidification—the process in which the world’s oceans absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, becoming more acidic—crossed a “planetary boundary” five years ago.

“A lot of people think it’s not so bad,” said Nina Bednaršek, one of the study’s authors and a senior researcher at Oregon State University. “But what we’re showing is that all of the changes that were projected, and even more so, are already happening—in all corners of the world, from the most pristine to the little corner you care about. We have not changed just one bay, we have changed the whole ocean on a global level.”

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Meta has developed plans to create a new artificial intelligence research lab dedicated to pursuing "superintelligence," according to reporting from The New York Times. The social media giant chose 28-year-old Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, to join the new lab as part of a broader reorganization of Meta's AI efforts under CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Superintelligence refers to a hypothetical AI system that would exceed human cognitive abilities—a step beyond artificial general intelligence (AGI), which aims to match an intelligent human's capability for learning new tasks without intensive specialized training.

However, much like AGI, superintelligence remains a nebulous term in the field. Since scientists still poorly understand the mechanics of human intelligence, and because human intelligence resists simple quantification with no single definition, identifying superintelligence when it arrives will present significant challenges.

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Our discussion with Reuters' Joey Roulette and WaPo's Christian Davenport. Click here for transcript.

Recently, during the first Ars Live event of this year, two noted space journalists joined Ars space editor Eric Berger for a discussion of NASA's future in the age of the second Trump administration.

During the hour-long discussion, Christian Davenport of The Washington Post and Joey Roulette of Reuters covered a range of issues, from uncertainty at the space agency to the likelihood of NASA sponsoring a humans-to-Mars mission any time soon.

This is an especially frenetic time in space policy. In the days since this video was recorded, President Trump canceled the longstanding nomination of private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become NASA administrator—at the time we recorded the video, Senate approval was assured, and a vote was imminent. Then Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk had a serious falling out, with the two trading nasty words on social media and culminating in Musk threatening to end Dragon spacecraft missions before pulling back.

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In 1965, Ted Nelson submitted a paper to the Association for Computing Machinery. He wrote: “Let me introduce the word ‘hypertext’ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper.” The paper was part of a grand vision he called Xanadu, after the poem by Samuel Coleridge.

A decade later, in his book “Dream Machines/Computer Lib,” he described Xanadu thusly: “To give you a screen in your home from which you can see into the world’s hypertext libraries.” He admitted that the world didn’t have any hypertext libraries yet, but that wasn’t the point. One day, maybe soon, it would. And he was going to dedicate his life to making it happen.

As the Internet grew, it became more and more difficult to find things on it. There were lots of cool documents like the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Internet, but to read them, you first had to know where they were.

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On Tuesday, IBM released its plans for building a system that should push quantum computing into entirely new territory: a system that can both perform useful calculations while catching and fixing errors and be utterly impossible to model using classical computing methods. The hardware, which will be called Starling, is expected to be able to perform 100 million operations without error on a collection of 200 logical qubits. And the company expects to have it available for use in 2029.

Perhaps just as significant, IBM is also committing to a detailed description of the intermediate steps to Starling. These include a number of processors that will be configured to host a collection of error-corrected qubits, essentially forming a functional compute unit. This marks a major transition for the company, as it involves moving away from talking about collections of individual hardware qubits and focusing instead on units of functional computational hardware. If all goes well, it should be possible to build Starling by chaining a sufficient number of these compute units together.

"We're updating [our roadmap] now with a series of deliverables that are very precise," IBM VP Jay Gambetta told Ars, "because we feel that we've now answered basically all the science questions associated with error correction and it's becoming more of a path towards an engineering problem."

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Anti-vaccine advocate and current US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken the extraordinary action of firing all 17 vaccine experts on a federal committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on immunization practices.

In an opinion piece published Monday in the Wall Street Journal, Kennedy announced that he had cleared out the committee, accusing them of being "plagued with persistent conflicts of interest" and a group that has "become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine."

"Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028," Kennedy added.

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The robotaxi company Waymo has suspended service in some parts of Los Angeles after some of its vehicles were summoned and then vandalized by protesters angry with ongoing raids by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Five of Waymo's autonomous Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles were summoned downtown to the site of anti-ICE protests, at which point they were vandalized with slashed tires and spray-painted messages. Three were set on fire.

The Los Angeles Police Department warned people to avoid the area due to risks from toxic gases given off by burning EVs. And Waymo told Ars that it is "in touch with law enforcement" regarding the matter.

The protesters in Los Angeles were outraged after ICE, using brutal tactics, began detaining people in raids across the city. Thousands of Angelenos took to the streets over the weekend to confront the masked federal enforcers and, in some cases, forced them away.

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The Supreme Court allowed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access Social Security Administration (SSA) records on Friday, overturning lower-court decisions that imposed some limits on DOGE's data access.

"We conclude that, under the present circumstances, SSA may proceed to afford members of the SSA DOGE Team access to the agency records in question in order for those members to do their work," the Supreme Court order said. The court also sided with the Trump administration in a different DOGE case, finding that a lower court's discovery order requiring DOGE to provide information about its government cost-cutting operations was too broad (more on that ruling later in this article).

The data-access ruling was in a case filed by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Alliance for Retired Americans; and American Federation of Teachers. US District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander previously issued a preliminary injunction, writing that DOGE "is essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion." The District of Maryland judge found that plaintiffs are likely to win their case alleging that the government violated the Privacy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.

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On Wednesday, acting FAA Administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee that the Federal Aviation Administration plans to replace its aging air traffic control systems, which still rely on floppy disks and Windows 95 computers, Tom's Hardware reports. The agency has issued a Request For Information to gather proposals from companies willing to tackle the massive infrastructure overhaul.

"The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips," Rocheleau said during the committee hearing. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called the project "the most important infrastructure project that we've had in this country for decades," describing it as a bipartisan priority.

Most air traffic control towers and facilities across the US currently operate with technology that seems frozen in the 20th century, although that isn't necessarily a bad thing—when it works. Some controllers currently use paper strips to track aircraft movements and transfer data between systems using floppy disks, while their computers run Microsoft's Windows 95 operating system, which launched in 1995.

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Ajit Pai is back on the telecom policy scene as chief lobbyist for the mobile industry, and he has quickly managed to anger a coalition that includes both cable companies and consumer advocates.

Pai was the Federal Communications Commission chairman during President Trump's first term and then spent several years at private equity firm Searchlight Capital. He changed jobs in April, becoming the president and CEO of wireless industry lobby group CTIA. Shortly after, he visited the White House to discuss wireless industry priorities and had a meeting with Brendan Carr, the current FCC chairman who was part of Pai's Republican majority at the FCC from 2017 to 2021.

Pai's new job isn't surprising. He was once a lawyer for Verizon, and it's not uncommon for FCC chairs and commissioners to be lobbyists before or after terms in government.

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Over 300 researchers from the National Institutes of Health have published a letter rebuking its director and the Trump administration for deep, politically motivated cuts to research funding, as well as disrupting global collaboration, undermining scientific review processes, and laying off critical NIH staff.

"We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources," the letter states, linking to independent news reports on the harms of NIH trials being halted and that the administration's cuts to the agency have cost, rather than saved, taxpayer money. Since January, the Trump administration has terminated 2,100 NIH research grants totaling around $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts, the letter notes. The researchers also accuse the administration of creating "a culture of fear and suppression" among federal researchers.

The letter describes the researchers' action as "dissent" from the administration's policies, quoting NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya in his congressional confirmation hearing as saying, "Dissent is the very essence of science."

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Look, no one said building a large harvester to roam around the Moon and sift through hundreds of tons of regolith to retrieve small amounts of helium-3 would be easy. And that's to say nothing of the enormous challenge of processing and then launching any of this material from the lunar surface before finally landing it safely on Earth.

If we're being completely honest, doing all of this commercially is a pretty darn difficult row to hoe. Many commercial space experts dismiss it out of hand. So that's why it's gratifying to see that a company that is proposing to do this, Interlune, is taking some modest steps toward this goal.

Moreover, recent changes in the tides of space policy may also put some wind in the sails of Interlune and its considerable ambitions.

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A few weeks ago, the chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp, convened an all-hands meeting for the more than 12,000 employees at the company. Among the most critical items he discussed was the launch rate for the New Glenn rocket and how the company would fall significantly short of its goal for this year.

Before 2025 began, Limp had set expectations alongside Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos: New Glenn would launch eight times this year.

However, since the rocket's mostly successful debut in January, five months have passed. At one point the company targeted "late spring" for the second launch of the rocket. However, on Monday, Limp acknowledged on social media that the rocket's next flight will now no longer take place until at least August 15. Although he did not say so, this may well be the only other New Glenn launch this year.

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YouTube videos may be getting a bit more pernicious soon. Google's dominant video platform has spent years removing discriminatory and conspiracy content from its platform in accordance with its usage guidelines, but the site is now reportedly adopting a lighter-touch approach to moderation. A higher bar for content removal will allow more potentially inflammatory content to remain up in the "public interest."

YouTube has previously attracted the ire of conservatives for its removal of QAnon and anti-vaccine content. According to The New York Times, YouTube's content moderators have been provided with new guidelines and training on how to handle the deluge of provocative content on the platform. The changes urge reviewers to pull back on removing certain videos, a continuation of a trend not just at YouTube, but on numerous platforms that host user-created content.

Beginning late last year, YouTube began informing moderators they should err on the side of caution when removing videos that are in the public interest. That includes user uploads that discuss issues like elections, race, gender, sexuality, abortion, immigration, and censorship. Previously, YouTube's policy told moderators to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated policies. Now, the exception cutoff has been increased to half. In addition, staff are now told to bring issues to managers if they are uncertain rather than removing the content themselves.

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One weakness of Valve's Steam Deck gaming handheld and SteamOS is that, by default, they will only run Windows games from Steam that are supported by the platform's Proton compatibility layer (plus the subset of games that run natively on Linux). It's possible to install alternative game stores, and Proton's compatibility is generally impressive, but SteamOS still isn't a true drop-in replacement for Windows.

Microsoft and Asus' co-developed ROG Xbox Ally is trying to offer PC gamers a more comprehensive compatibility solution that also preserves a SteamOS-like handheld UI by putting a new Xbox-branded user interface on top of traditional Windows. And while this interface will roll out to the ROG Xbox Ally first, Microsoft told The Verge that the interface would come to other Ally handhelds next and that something "similar" would be "rolling out to other Windows handhelds starting next year."

Bringing a Steam Deck-style handheld-optimized user interface to Windows is something Microsoft has been experimenting with internally since at least 2022, when employees at an internal hackathon identified most of Windows' handheld deficiencies in a slide deck about a proposed "Windows Handheld Mode."

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As part of a wider software rebranding effort, Apple's visionOS is jumping from version 2 to 26 with a new software update announced during the company's developer conference this week.

visionOS 26 will reach Vision Pro users later this year, and it focuses on refining the focus of the device based on how users are actually using it rather than whatever wild ideas the company had during its initial development—including addressing common complaints about how the Vision Pro doesn't support some features of popular competing mixed-reality headsets.

For example, the headset will soon support native playback of 3D video recorded by people other than Apple and downloaded from anywhere on the Internet—something you had to use a few, somewhat janky third-party apps to do until now, but which is an easier-to-access feature of some other mixed-reality headsets.

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At WWDC today, Apple unveiled iOS 26, its next iPhone operating system (OS), which is centered on Apple's new Liquid Glass design for its software platform.

Available across Apple's other upcoming OSes, like macOS 26 Tahoe, Liquid Glass aims to make the software look and operate as if it has glass edges. You can see this approach throughout iOS 26 in things like the app icon's appearance, which includes softer edges and the option to be translucent.

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The support list for macOS Tahoe still includes Intel Macs, but it's been whittled down to just four models, all released in 2019 or 2020. We speculated that this meant that the end was near for Intel Macs, and now we can confirm just how near it is: macOS Tahoe will be the last new macOS release to support any Intel Macs. All new releases starting with macOS 27 will require an Apple Silicon Mac.

Apple will provide additional security updates for Tahoe until fall 2028, two years after it is replaced with macOS 27. That's a typical schedule for older macOS versions, which all get one year of major point updates that include security fixes and new features, followed by two years of security-only updates to keep them patched but no longer receive new features.

Apple is also planning changes to Rosetta 2, the Intel-to-Arm app translation technology created to ease the transition between the Intel and Apple Silicon eras. Rosetta will continue to work as a general-purpose app translation tool in both macOS 26 and macOS 27.

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