The second-largest corporate employer has bet big on robot workers to scale. No organization in the world operates more robots than Amazon. The company already has more than 1 million robots working in warehouses around the clock to make tens of millions of same-day and one-day package deliveries happen on a daily basis—and Amazon is poised to significantly grow that robotic fleet in the coming ye

Alex Gibney's provocative film is compelling but overlong, and there's not much new here for Ars readers. Elon Musk is a very familiar figure to Ars readers, given his massive influence (for better and worse) on the technology sector over the last 20 years. Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney's latest biographical documentary—simply titled Musk —covers a lot of well-known ground and challenges the

We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con. Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer ( Euphoria ) joined showrunner Silka Luisa ( Shining Girls ) onstage for the big reveal. As Luisa described the show during the

Participants meditated inside an MRI tube, with and without psilocybin. For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once. EEG traces get noisier and more complex. “Think of the netwo

Dissolved rock precipitated around the tools, which then decayed. The Stone Age owes its name to tools that survived to our time. The material early humans worked with most, though, was probably wood because it is so much easier to process. Unfortunately, we know very little about Paleolithic woodwork because wood rots relatively quickly. But at Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades, west of

One damaged data center has supercomputers used for training Yandex’s AI model. Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services. The Ukrainian drones struck

Stylish upcycling, with a retro flair, at Spain's Museo de Historia de la Computación. The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge tech to run the system, the creative team powered the project with 30 2012-era Mac Minis. Developed over 18 months, the project serves

"We’ve made it clear that NASA will never give up its presence in low Earth orbit." NASA on Friday released a much-anticipated "request" to the US commercial space industry to develop private space stations that, as early as 2030, will succeed the International Space Station as a place for astronauts to live in low-Earth orbit. In a cover letter accompanying the 360-page "request for proposals," N

Before the lava fountains started, the ground was expanding by half a meter a day. In most cases, hotspot-driven volcanism is relatively sedate, with lava flowing down mountainsides slowly enough that people can walk out of its way. But in a number of locations—Mount Etna, Hawaii, Iceland—lava gets expelled in dramatic fountains that can reach several hundred meters in height. Right now, we're not

Study finds coding efficiency gains get "absorbed" by human review "bottleneck." Anyone who has even tangentially associated with computer programming knows that modern AI coding assistants and agents can be incredibly efficient at generating huge amounts of functional code . But coders making use of those tools also know better than to trust the accuracy of that code , meaning substantial effort

CDC allocated $1.6M for study on alleged harms of hepatitis B vaccine. Outrage has erupted among health experts over news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still eager to fund a widely condemned vaccine trial that would expose newborns in Guinea-Bissau to hepatitis B, putting them at high risk of a lifelong infection, which can lead to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and premat

"The current decline may be just the beginning of a new downward cycle." PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week. The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023," Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said. Deskt

New winner is Nguyen Nam Nhat of Vietnam for video of a roundworm and single-celled Dileptus. Credit: Nguyen Nam Nhat. Last month we covered the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. But allegations surfaced about Xu's use of AI while making the vide

Debian Linux has put a call out for artist submissions for its next release: Forky. The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you've got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November

Nationwide 800 MHz spectrum to help Starlink provide mobile coverage indoors. SpaceX has a deal to purchase nationwide low-band spectrum licenses for a planned terrestrial mobile network that would complement the space-based Starlink cellular service. SpaceX will buy up to 14 megahertz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band from investment firm Grain Management , which bought the spectrum rights from T-M

The US says Microsoft abused immigration rules; the company disputes the claim. Donald Trump’s administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe, and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they abused immigration programs at the expense of American citizens. Vice-president JD Vance said on Thursday that the H-1B visa programme for highly skil

"I can say we’re weeks away from launching on Vulcan." Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo missio

The new EV’s digital cockpit can mimic instrument displays from VWs of old. Volkswagen’s ID.4 is no more. The midsize crossover debuted in 2021 , one of VW's first new electric vehicles designed in the wake of dieselgate . A year later, the company began local production in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a couple of years ago facelifted the model, adding a much-improved rear drive unit in the process

"These led to conjunctions of tens of meters to hundreds of meters. Way too close to comfort." Space has plenty of room for more megaconstellations, but only if all operators are willing to share information about where their satellites are and where they're going, a top executive at SpaceX and its AI subsidiary said this week. Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of

Judge questioned if Trump delaying access to Truth Social posts by a second harms the press. Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts. At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no