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"US's big bet on quantum computing may not be entirely legal."
Views expressed in this science and technology update are those of the reporters and correspondents. Accessed on 25 May 2026, 1520 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencemonitor.blogspot.com).
56
Today
Last week, the US government announced $2 billion in investments in quantum computing companies, allocating $100 million each to a range of startups in exchange for equity in the companies. Those could be make-or-break investments for many companies that are likely years away from a product that could see widespread use. But a member of the US Congress is now arguing that those deals are illegal,
by Samuel Axon / 2h
I don't like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt . I'm sorry to disappoint you. I know it's confusing, and I hope you will still respect me. I had to say that a lot back in 2015. When the game first came out, the community of critics and enthusiasts I was a part of went bananas for it, much in the same way the current crop of journalists and influencers rallied around Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in 2025—ano
Yesterday
In hours of underwater video footage from a New York aquarium, a beluga whale named Natasha stretches her neck, pirouettes, nods, and shakes her head in front of a two-way mirror. Her daughter Maris does much the same. According to a new study published in PLOS One , both animals show the behavioral hallmarks of mirror self-recognition—a cognitive ability long considered a marker of self-awarenes
May 23, 2026
SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results. The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cl
by Robert Pearlman / 2d
Tom Akers and Joe Tanner are finally in the same class. The two veteran space shuttle crew members were inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame together on May 16. They could also have been in the same NASA astronaut selection group, too, had history played out a little differently. In 1984, Tanner reported to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) to fly as an instructor pilot and then applied for t
by Johnny Sturgeon, Inside Climate News / 2d
For migrant workers trapped onboard Chinese distant water fishing fleets, cutting the fins off sharks as they writhe violently on rusted decks in the Indian Ocean isn’t accidental. It’s an intentional and lucrative act that marks the start of a bloody half-a-billion-dollar offshore supply chain, tacitly supported by Beijing yet covertly concealed from port inspectors globally. The Center for Biol
May 22, 2026
by Stephen Clark / 2d
At least four Russian military satellites changed their orbits to match that of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite in the last week, raising questions about Russia's intentions amid an ever-expanding standoff high above Earth. The maneuvers were identified through open source orbital tracking data. Greg Gillinger, a retired Air Force space intelligence officer, revealed the orbit cha
The Ebola outbreak erupting from the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo continues to escalate wildly, with cases nearing 750, deaths reported at 177, and around 1,400 contacts now being traced, the World Health Organization reported in a press briefing Friday. The latest numbers already place the outbreak as the third largest on record, though it was only first reported a week
Google’s first Chromecast was a hit. With 10 million units sold in 2014, it excelled as an easy solution for streaming TV and movies from the Internet to a TV. Released at a time when dumb TVs were more common, the first-generation Chromecast has a simplicity you don’t find in streaming devices these days. Press "Cast" in an app, select a TV with a Chromecast, and start watching. Foregoing extras
The Federal Communications Commission is escalating its attack on ABC’s The View with a proceeding that seeks public comment on whether the talk show is a "bona fide news interview program." The FCC Media Bureau today issued a public notice seeking opinions on whether The View qualifies for the bona fide news exemption to the equal-time rule, which requires equal time for opposing political candi
Pilots’ voices from the last seconds of a fatal cargo plane crash have been re-created by Internet sleuths using software and AI tools. The spread of reconstructed audio recordings has prompted a US government agency to suspend all public access to its database of civil transportation accidents—because federal law prohibits investigators from publicly releasing audio from cockpit voice recorders.
Well, that was fast. The Boys series finale only wrapped two days ago, but Prime Video clearly wants to build on that momentum by releasing the first teaser for the prequel series, Vought Rising . With spinoff series Gen V canceled after two seasons, Vought Rising and a planned The Boys: Mexico must carry the franchise banner. (Spoilers for The Boys series finale below.) The Boys ' fifth season s
European law enforcement say they hacked into a VPN (virtual private network) service used for ransomware attacks and other crimes, and identified thousands of users before shutting the VPN down and arresting its administrator. Europol announced yesterday the results of the operation against the service, First VPN. The First VPN website now displays a message saying the domain was seized by a joi
by Jennifer Ouellette / 2d
Hopes were arguably high for The Mandalorian and Grogu , director Jon Favreau's big-screen offshoot of the popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian . After all, there hasn't been a new film in the Star Wars franchise since 2019's The Rise of Skywalker wrapped up the three trilogies that make up the so-called "Skywalker Saga." The new film is ... fine. It's an average Star Wars outing, and it will g
The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger, used by more than 3 billion people, doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. Since at least 2016, Meta (then named Facebook) has said WhatsApp provides robust end-to-end encryption, meaning that messages are encrypted on a sender’s device with keys that are available only
by Robert Pearlman / 2d
Humans do not just visit space; they live there, but a major part of that is coming to an end. The platform that made the longest continuous human presence in space possible is becoming history. With NASA and its partners beginning preparations for the destructive end of the International Space Station (ISS) as soon as 2030, those who collect, curate, and study the station are now asking how to p
In November 2023, we reported on dubious claims made by marketing firm Cox Media Group (CMG) Local Solutions. The company advertised a service called Active Listening on a website that said, “It’s true. Your devices are listening to you” and claimed it could use “voice data” to help advertisers target ads to specific people. Naturally, panic ensued . 404 Media , which initially spotted the websit
Last year, the first few months of data from the US grid suggested that fears of a data-center-driven surge in demand were becoming a reality. Demand had risen by about 3 percent, triggering a surge in coal , interrupting what had been a long downward trend. But over the course of the year, both trends slowed considerably . A year later, all of that seems to be in the past, as the US has returned
President Donald Trump abruptly canceled an event on Thursday just hours before he was scheduled to sign an executive order granting the government the power to test frontier AI models before their public release. As The New York Times explained , Trump had been hoping that top executives from leading AI firms would attend the signing. He decided to pull the plug after learning that some CEOs cou
When we reviewed the new Steam Controller last month , we noted how the satisfying click of the magnetic charging puck easily connecting to the back of the controller lets users “save the hassle of fiddling with a power cord.” But one Reddit user’s experience highlights how the exposed contacts on that puck can be a fire hazard if Steam Controller owners aren’t careful. On the r/SteamController s
by Eric Berger / 2d
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent a long email to employees on Friday morning outlining several structural changes that are intended to make the sprawling agency more efficient and allow it to better accomplish major goals, such as returning to the Moon and building a base there. "I believe it is imperative to concentrate resources towards the highest priority objectives in the National Spac
Journalist and author Steven Rosenbaum has more reasons than most to distrust AI. His new book, The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality , is all about "how Truth is being bent, blurred, and synthesized" thanks to the "pressure of fast-moving, profit-driven AI." Yet a New York Times investigation this week found what Rosenbaum now acknowledges are "a handful of improperly attributed or synthe
by Beth Mole / 3d
Top medical groups are outraged and alarmed that anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has fired two leaders of an influential panel that makes recommendations and sets insurance coverage for preventive care—such as mammograms, colonoscopies, statin use, and depression screening. On Wednesday, news broke that Kennedy had fired the two vice chairs of the US Preventive Services Task F
by Eric Berger / 3d
Welcome to Edition 8.42 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX nearly launched its Starship rocket on Thursday amid much pomp and circumstance in South Texas, only to be foiled by a ground system issue. Such delays are to be expected, with almost entirely new hardware on both the rocket and the ground side of things. The company will try again as soon as Friday evening, and as we discuss in this week's rep
by Nate Anderson / 3d
Imagine the life of a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida back in 2005. On Monday, you hold a hearing on contested legislation. On Tuesday, you rule in a national security case. But on Wednesday—bah, there's just something about Wednesday—you have to spend a sunny day indoors, reading technical affidavits on satellite TV bootloaders, electronic countermeasures, and smartcard voltage
5 TTPs
by Andy Greenberg and Lily Hay Newman, WIRED.com / 3d
•A so-called software supply chain attack , in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a n
May 21, 2026
SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day. Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX's launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pus
by Scharon Harding / 3d
AcuRite must kill its customers’ favorite companion app due to “obsolete technology," VP of product development Jeff Bovee tells Ars Technica. AcuRite, which makes smart weather-monitoring devices, announced this month that the My AcuRite iOS and Android app that has been around since 2016 won’t be available after May 30. After that date, device owners must use AcuRite NOW, which AcuRite released
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has highlighted AI as the tentpole of the company’s future, projecting a multi-trillion-dollar market opportunity that rivals the total value of all US economic activity. But the company must first win over customers who generally favor AI models from competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic. SpaceX described its traditional space launch and satellite business as playing a supp
AT&T sued California yesterday over the state's refusal to let the carrier stop providing phone service to all potential customers in its wireline network territory. AT&T is also asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare that California cannot enforce its rules and to let AT&T stop providing service to about 199,000 phone customers. "California requires AT&T to spend $1 billion each
WASP-94A b is a hot, tidally locked gas giant orbiting close to one of the stars in a binary system roughly 690 light-years away from Earth. In a new Science study, scientists led by Sagnick Mukherjee, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University, used the James Webb Space Telescope to learn what the weather looks like out there. Tidal locking means that you no longer have day- and night-side te
On Wednesday, Zillow abruptly lost access to thousands of property listings in the Chicago area after filing a lawsuit accusing a private listing network owner of colluding with the nation's largest brokerage to harm consumers by hiding homes. According to the Chicago Sun-Times , hopeful Chicagoland home buyers browsing Zillow and Trulia suddenly saw significantly fewer listings. On Zillow, a nea
When the action film Top Gun hit the big screen in 1986, critical reviews were mixed, but audiences were thrilled. The film racked up $358 million globally, making it the highest-grossing film of that year. Its success spawned a few video games and a critically acclaimed blockbuster 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick , and the eye-popping flight sequences definitely boosted enlistment numbers for the
by Eric Berger / 3d
NASA confirmed Thursday that the Russian segment of the International Space Station has begun leaking atmosphere into space again. It's an old problem that NASA recently hoped was resolved. For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have been tracking the leak rate from a small Russian module attached to the space station that leads to a docking port. The source of these leaks
The US government will take equity stakes worth a total of $2 billion in a slew of quantum computing companies, including a startup backed by a firm with links to the Trump family and one taken public by a Pentagon official. The announcement by the commerce department that it had signed letters of intent with nine companies—including GlobalFoundries and IBM—sent shares in quantum specialists soar
Plug-in hybrid powertrains were developed to be the best of both worlds: a combustion engine and fuel tank that can handle those longer journeys exactly the same as a non-hybrid car, with an electric motor and a battery large enough for most or all of someone's daily driving range. But only if you plug it in. And it is often taken as a statement of fact that plug-in hybrid owners don't plug in th
by Jonathan M. Gitlin / 4d
Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Munich, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could test out its headlights, as well as some other things you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. MUNICH—Headlight technology in the US is about to get smarter. When Audi's Q9 SUV goes on sale here later this year, it will feature the automaker's latest adaptive be
May 20, 2026
After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. SpaceX, founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering o
An American infected with Ebola is being treated in Berlin, while another exposed to the deadly virus is being sent to Prague after the White House reportedly resisted allowing citizens to return to the US for care and monitoring. According to The Washington Post , five people close to the Ebola response said that, over the weekend, the Trump administration resisted allowing the return of Peter S
Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029. The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago , in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billi
No doubt buoyed by all the positive advance reviews on social media , Amazon MGM Studios has released one last trailer for Masters of the Universe , and it comes in strong with the 1980s nostalgia, chock-full of Easter eggs to delight Ars readers of a certain age. Directed by Travis Knight ( Bumblebee , Kubo and the Two Strings ), the film is a reboot of sorts of the He-Man and the Masters of the
At a star-studded event that closed downtown Los Angeles' Sixth Street Viaduct last night, Mercedes and AMG unveiled the next generation of performance electric vehicles. The new four-door GT Coupe arrives in the midst of a pivotal period, the result of an almost experimental process that seems to take two steps forward and one step back quite regularly. In many ways, the all-electric AMG leaves
It's not an ideal time to be buying a new PC or doing a major upgrade. Price crunches for RAM and storage chips are making all kinds of components more expensive, and the shift to DDR5 in modern Intel and AMD CPUs means that a lot of people would need to pay money to replace their current DDR4 kits if they wanted to step up to a significantly newer, faster CPU and motherboard. AMD may have someth
2 TTPs
by Dan Goodin / 4d
Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers. The proof-of-concept code exploits the Browser Fetch programming interface, a standard that allows long videos and other large files to be downloaded in the background. An attacker
President Donald Trump’s latest pitch for using taxpayer dollars to secure his White House ballroom featured a militarized building—including a rooftop hardened against drone strikes and a “drone port” that could potentially house military drones. The remarks came on May 19 as Trump gave reporters a personal tour of the ballroom project that has already involved the demolition of the White House
Disney currently has no plans to shutter Hulu as a standalone streaming service or app, according to a company representative. In a report from Variety today, the spokesperson said that Disney, which took total ownership of Hulu in June 2025 , will continue to sell subscriptions to Hulu in the US and that “there are no current plans to sunset the Hulu app.” Disney owned two-thirds of Hulu before
On Tuesday, biotech startup Colossal announced its newest development on the road to its announced goal: reversing the extinction of species, in this case, avian species. The development itself is essentially an artificial eggshell, one that allows almost the entire developmental process to occur without the shell. The company transferred the contents of eggs to their specially designed container
The Trump administration yesterday sued Minnesota in an attempt to block the first state law that prohibits prediction markets. While other states imposed restrictions on prediction markets, Minnesota banned them outright in a law signed by Gov. Tim Walz on Monday. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced a lawsuit against the state, saying that Minnesota's "new legislation represent
Last year marked the beginning of Google's explicit focus on AI search, and this year's I/O solidified that shift . As Google's search VP Liz Reid said during the keynote, "Google search is AI search." This change is well underway, and the very reasonable objections to this path will not dissuade the company. All the metrics that matter to Google say this is the right move. But at the end of the
Larry Bushart, a retired Tennessee cop who was jailed for 37 days for posting a Trump meme on Facebook , won an $835,000 settlement Wednesday after suing the county and sheriff that he said jailed him in order to censor him. In a press release , Bushart's legal team at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) confirmed that Bushart agreed to dismiss his lawsuit in exchange for t
by Eric Berger / 5d
It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great. This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine
by Scharon Harding / 5d
For years, owners of Vizio smart TVs have had little control over the software running on their sets—software that can track viewing habits, push ads, and generally shape the experience of using the device. The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a US nonprofit that promotes and provides legal support for free and open source software projects, isn't happy about that—so much so that it has spent
Beijing banned an Nvidia gaming chip while the company’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, was visiting China with Donald Trump last week, the latest salvo in the superpowers’ battle to dominate AI. The chip was added to a list of banned goods at China’s customs checkpoints last Friday, according to a copy of the document seen by the FT and two people with knowledge of the matter. The move highlight
The robotics startup Figure AI has been livestreaming humanoid robots placing thousands of packages onto a conveyor belt for nearly a week—a spectacle that included a robot competing against a
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