It’s House Targaryens vs House Hightower in the second season of HBO’s House of the Dragon. HBO dropped the first teaser for the much-anticipated second season of its Game of Thrones prequel spinoff series House of the Dragon during CCXP23 in Sao Paulo Brazil. The eight episodes will cover the onset of civil war within … Read more
Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson. Eric Berger Sir Richard Branson has ruled out putting more money into his lossmaking space travel company Virgin Galactic, saying his business empire “does not have the deepest pockets” any more. Virgin Galactic, which was founded by Branson in 2004, last month announced it was cutting jobs and suspending commercial … Read more
Enlarge / The protein structure of CAS, shown with nucleic acids bound. Bang Wong, Broad Institute CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats—is the microbial world’s answer to adaptive immunity. Bacteria don’t generate antibodies when they are invaded by a pathogen and then hold those antibodies in abeyance in case they encounter that same pathogen again, … Read more
Enlarge / We never get tired of seeing the different ways Porsche finds to tweak the venerable 911. It’s outdone itself with the Sport Classic, but the car comes with a price tag that means very few will experience it. Bradley Iger Sports cars have always been emotionally driven purchases, and perhaps no automaker understands … Read more
Enlarge / BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ astrida via Getty Images One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that … Read more
Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses… that will be $1,400. Ron Amadeo / Hasbro Google’s war on ad blockers is just gearing up, with YouTube doing its best to detect and block ad blockers and Chrome aiming to roll out the ad block-limiting Manifest V3 extension … Read more
Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a reused booster stage and payload fairing is seen rolling out to its launch pad in Florida before a mission last month. SpaceX Amazon announced Friday that it has purchased three Falcon 9 rocket launches from SpaceX beginning in mid-2025 to help deploy the retail giant’s network … Read more
Enlarge / Just some of the prizes you can win in this year’s charity drive sweepstakes. Kyle Orland If you’ve been too busy playing Pendulumania to take part in this year’s Ars Technica Charity Drive sweepstakes, don’t worry. You still have time to donate to a good cause and get a chance to win your share … Read more
Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel during a House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch A federal program that provides $30 monthly broadband discounts to people with low incomes is expected to run out of money in April 2023, potentially taking … Read more
Enlarge / An artist’s impression of a human and a robot talking. Getty Images | Benj Edwards In a preprint research paper titled “Does GPT-4 Pass the Turing Test?”, two researchers from UC San Diego pitted OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI language model against human participants, GPT-3.5, and ELIZA to see which could trick participants into thinking … Read more