“School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn’t an error.”
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.com).
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A Florida middle school was locked down last week after an AI security system called ZeroEyes mistook a clarinet for a gun, reviving criticism that AI may not be worth the high price schools pay for peace of mind. Human review of the AI-generated false flag did not stop police from rushing to Lawton Chiles Middle School. Cops expected to find “a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a ‘
A couple of hours after a judge formally swore in private astronaut Jared Isaacman as the next administrator of NASA on Thursday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order outlining his space policy objectives for the next three years. The executive order, titled “ Ensuring American Space Superiority ,” states that the country must “pursue a space policy that will extend the reach of human
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For people living in the European Union, the price of their next car, home renovation, and even local produce may soon reflect a climate policy that many have never even heard of. This new regulation, which comes fully into force on New Year’s Day, does not just target heavy industry—it affects everyday goods which now face an added carbon cost when they enter Europe. The carbon border adjustment
Yesterday
Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggr
The trade-off between quality and quantity is a fundamental economic dilemma. Now, a team of British, American, and Japanese researchers describes how it applies to biology, as well. They have discovered that this dilemma most likely shaped the evolutionary trajectory of ants, one of Earth’s most successful groups of organisms. Their study reveals that, as ant societies grew in complexity and num
The Switch 2’s data-free, download-enabling Game Key Cards have proved controversial with players who worry about long-term ownership and access issues to their purchases. But they’ve remained popular with publishers that want to save production costs on a boxed Switch 2 game release, since Game Key Cards don’t include any of the expensive flash memory found on a standard Switch 2 cartridge. Now,
Online fury erupted this week after an LG TV owner claimed that a firmware update installed unremovable generative AI software on their smart TV. The controversy began on Saturday, when a Reddit user posted about the sudden appearance of a Microsoft Copilot icon on their device (something Windows users are all too familiar with). The Reddit user claimed that a “new software update installed Copil
At this point, most competitive online multiplayer games on the PC come with some kind of kernel-level anti-cheat software . As we’ve written before , this is software that runs with more elevated privileges than most other apps and games you run on your PC, allowing it to load in earlier and detect advanced methods of cheating. More recently, anti-cheat software has started to require more Windo
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There’s a lot of goodwill out there for the Chevrolet Bolt . As maybe the first properly affordable longer-range electric car on the market, the Bolt wasn’t perfect. It didn’t charge very fast, and people found the seats quite uncomfortable. But it could get more than 230 miles on a single charge—a lot in 2017—and you didn’t have to be flush to afford one. Oh, and it was also pretty good to drive
SEATTLE—The last coal-fired power plant in Washington state was set to go cold at the end of the year. It would then switch to natural gas, cutting carbon emissions in half. The shutdown had been in the works for 15 years and was mandated by state law. It required the Canadian energy company that owns the power plant, TransAlta, to retrain workers and ease the local community’s economic transitio
Instacart has agreed to pay out $60 million in subscriber refunds, the Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday. The refunds will help settle a lawsuit the FTC raised, accusing the grocery delivery app of engaging in “numerous unlawful tactics that harmed shoppers and raised the cost of grocery shopping for Americans.” Under the settlement—which expires after 10 years—Instacart agreed to st
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Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual “Year in Sport” wrap-up—a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user’s athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ($80 per year), rather than making it free to everyone, as it had been historically since the review’s de
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The idea of using AI to help with computer programming has become a contentious issue. On the one hand, coding agents can make horrific mistakes that require a lot of inefficient human oversight to fix, leading many developers to lose trust in the concept altogether . On the other hand, some coders insist that AI coding agents can be powerful tools and that frontier models are quickly getting bet
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For several years now, in discussing plans for its human spaceflight program beyond the International Space Station, Russian officials would proudly bring up the Russian Orbital Station , or ROS. The first elements of ROS were to launch in 2027 so it would be ready for human habitation in 2028. Upon completion in the mid-2030s, the station would encompass seven shiny new modules, potentially incl
Welcome to Edition 8.23 of the Rocket Report! Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight in November, culminating in the booster’s first landing on an offshore platform. Second on the list is China’s Zhuque-3, a partially reusable methane-fueled ro
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After a year of stalled negotiations, TikTok owner ByteDance has reportedly agreed to Donald Trump’s deal giving US owners majority ownership of the app. By signing the agreements, ByteDance has ended a prolonged period of uncertainty for millions of Americans who rely on TikTok for news, entertainment, social connection, and income. Under a law that Trump declined to enforce—which lawmakers conv
It may be happening quietly, but there is a revolution taking place with in-space transportation, and it opens up a world of possibilities. In January, a small spacecraft built by a California-based company called Impulse Space launched along with a stack of other satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket. Upon reaching orbit, the rocket’s upper stage sent the satellites zipping off on their various missio
Dec 18, 2025
Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design. The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at 12:03 am
It probably sucked to be a Roman soldier guarding Hadrian’s Wall circa the third century CE. W.H. Auden imagined the likely harsh conditions in his poem “ Roman Wall Blues ,” in which a soldier laments enduring wet wind and rain with “lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.” We can now add chronic nausea and bouts of diarrhea to his list of likely woes, thanks to parasitic infections, according t
Google is generally happy to see people using generative AI tools to create content, and it’s doubly happy when they publish it on its platforms. But there are limits to everything. Two YouTube channels that attracted millions of subscribers with AI-generated movie trailers have been shuttered. Screen Culture and KH Studio flooded the site with fake but often believable trailers. The channels, wh
Peacock subscribers will see ads immediately upon opening the streaming app or website next year. It’s a bold new strategy for attracting advertisers—something that’s been increasingly important to subscription-based streaming services—but it also risks alienating viewers As reported by Variety , the new type of ads will display on the profile selection page that shows when a subscriber launches
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If you’ve been too busy planning for Half-Life 3 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 of over $4,000 worth of swag (no purchase necessary to win). In the first week or so of the drive, over 300 readers have contributed nearly $18,000 to either the Electronic Frontier Found
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The first few months of 2025 were full of graphics card reviews where we generally came away impressed with performance and completely at a loss on availability and pricing. The testing in these reviews is useful regardless, but when it came to extra buying advice, the best we could do was to compare Nvidia’s imaginary pricing to AMD’s imaginary pricing and wait for availability to improve. Now,
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There have been a number of high-profile cases where scientific papers have had to be retracted because they were filled with AI-generated slop —the most recent coming just two weeks ago . These instances raise serious questions about the quality of peer review in some journals—how could anyone let a figure with terms like “runctitional,” “fexcectorn,” and “frymblal” through, especially given the
Guitarists today are spoiled for choice, and that goes doubly true for players who use computer-based amp modeling software. I’m one such player, and I don’t miss the size, weight, deafening volume, or cost of owning an amp and cabinet collection, to say nothing of all those pedals and cables. For clean to mid-gain tones alone, I already have more terrific options than I need, including NeuralDSP
When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now. At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseve
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The holidays have snuck up on us. How is it already that time? If you’re on top of things and have already bought all your Christmas gifts, I commend you. Not all of us are so conscientious. In fact, one of us is so behind on holiday prep that he is not only running late on buying gifts; he’s also behind on publishing the Ars staff gift guide he said he’d write. (Whoever could we be talking about
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If you’re human, you’ve probably hollered a curse word or two (or three) when barking your shin on a table edge or hitting your thumb with a hammer. Perhaps you’ve noticed that this seems to lessen your pain. There’s a growing body of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case. The technical term is the “ hypoalgesic effect of swearing. ” Cursing can also improve physical strength and endur
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While not quite a separate dialect, Formula 1-speak can be heavy on the jargon at times. They say “box” instead of pit, “power unit” to describe the engine and hybrid system, and that’s before we get into all the aerodynamics-related expressions like “outwash” and “dirty air.” Next year is a big technical shakeup for the sport, and it seems we’re getting some new terminology to go with it. So for
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On Dec. 21, 2015, SpaceX launched the Orbcomm-2 mission on an upgraded version of its Falcon 9 rocket. That night, just days before Christmas, the company successfully landed the first stage for the
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