“DOGE did not find $2T in fraud, but that doesn’t matter, Musk allies say.”
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Accessed on 30 December 2025, 2055 UTC.
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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencjournal.com).
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Today
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Determining how “successful” Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) truly was depends on who you ask, but it’s increasingly hard to claim that DOGE made any sizable dent in federal spending, which was its primary goal. Just two weeks ago, Musk himself notably downplayed DOGE as only being “a little bit successful” on a podcast , marking one of the first times that Musk admitted DO
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MANVILLE, N.J.—Richard Onderko said he will never forget the terrifying Saturday morning back in 1971 when the water rose so swiftly at his childhood home here that he and his brother had to be rescued by boat as the torrential rain from the remnants of Hurricane Doria swept through the neighborhood. It wasn’t the first time—or the last—that the town endured horrific downpours. In fact, the worki
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Stranger Things fans are hyped for the premiere of the hotly anticipated series finale on New Year’s Eve: they’ll either be glued to their TVs or heading out to watch it in a bona fide theater. Netflix has dropped one last trailer for the finale—not that it really needs to do anything more to boost anticipation. (Some spoilers for Vols. 1 and 2 below but no major Vol. 2 reveals.) As previously re
Earlier this month, a hacker named Lovely claimed to have breached a Condé Nast user database and released a list of more than 2.3 million user records from our sister publication WIRED . The released materials contain demographic information (name, email, address, phone, etc.), but no passwords. The hacker also says that they will release an additional 40 million records for other Condé Nast pro
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Lobsters are generally notable for their large claws, which can serve as a deterrent to any predators. But there’s a whole family of spiny lobsters that lack these claws. They tend to ward off predators by forming large groups that collectively can present a lot of pointy bits towards anything attempting to eat them. In fact, studies found that the lobsters can sense the presence of other species
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There were a lot of horrifying things in the news this year—a lot. But some of it was horrifying in a good way . Extraordinary medical cases—even the grisly and disturbing ones—offer a reprieve from the onslaught of current events and the stresses of our daily lives. With those remarkable reports, we can marvel at the workings, foibles, and resilience of the human body. They can remind us of the
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2025 has been a tumultuous year for the car world. After years of EV optimism, revanchists are pushing back against things like clean energy and fuel economy. Automakers have responded, postponing or canceling new electric vehicles in favor of gasoline-burning ones. It hasn’t been all bad, though. Despite the changing winds, EV infrastructure continues to be built out and, anecdotally at least, f
Yesterday
Imran Ahmed’s biggest thorn in his side used to be Elon Musk, who made the hate speech researcher one of his earliest legal foes during his Twitter takeover. Now, it’s the Trump administration, which planned to deport Ahmed, a legal permanent resident, just before Christmas. It would then ban him from returning to the United States, where he lives with his wife and young child, both US citizens.
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Yakisugi is a Japanese architectural technique for charring the surface of wood. It has become quite popular in bioarchitecture because the carbonized layer protects the wood from water, fire, insects, and fungi, thereby prolonging the lifespan of the wood. Yakisugi techniques were first codified in written form in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it seems Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da
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The nervous system does an astonishing job of tracking sensory information, and does so using signals that would drive many computer scientists insane: a noisy stream of activity spikes that may be transmitted to hundreds of additional neurons, where they are integrated with similar spike trains coming from still other neurons. Now, researchers have used spiking circuitry to build an artificial r
China drafted landmark rules to stop AI chatbots from emotionally manipulating users, including what could become the strictest policy worldwide intended to prevent AI-supported suicides, self-harm, and violence. China’s Cyberspace Administration proposed the rules on Saturday. If finalized, they would apply to any AI products or services publicly available in China that use text, images, audio,
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Ma
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In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was visibility. In such gray situations, pilots use GPS technology to help them land on a runway and not the side of a mountain. But on this day, GPS systems weren’t working correctly, the airwaves jamme
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If you’ve been following our coverage for the last few years, you’ll already know that 2025 is the year that Windows 10 died . Technically . “Died,” because Microsoft’s formal end-of-support date came and went on October 14, as the company had been saying for years . “Technically,” because it’s trivial for home users to get another free year of security updates with a few minutes of effort, and s
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SIM cards, the small slips of plastic that have held your mobile subscriber information since time immemorial, are on the verge of extinction. In an effort to save space for other components, device makers are finally dropping the SIM slot, and Google is the latest to move to embedded SIMs with the Pixel 10 series . After long avoiding eSIM, I had no choice but to take the plunge when the time ca
As the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026. Tech companies may have already grown numb to Trump’s unpredictable moves. Back in February, Trump warned Americans to expect “a little pain” after he issued executive orders imposing 10–25 percent tariffs on
Dec 26, 2025
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Black holes have long captured the imagination of both scientists and the general public. These exotic objects—once thought to be merely hypothetical—have also conceptually inspired countless artists all over the world. A generous sampling of such work is featured in Conjuring the Void: The Art of Black Holes . Author Lynn Gamwell spent ten years as director of the New York Academy of Science’s G
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Ever since 1993, I think I’ve unconsciously judged almost every game by how well it can capture how Wing Commander: Privateer made me feel. Steam and PlayStation (the two platforms I use the most) have been doing a year-in-review summary akin to the wildly popular Spotify Wrapped for the past few years. Based on these, I can report that my most-played games in 2025 were, from most hours down: No
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When we put together our top 20 games of last year, we specifically called out Civilization 7 , Avowed , Doom: The Dark Ages , and Grand Theft Auto 6 as big franchise games we were already looking forward to for 2025. While one of those games has been delayed into 2026, the three others made this year’s list of Ars’ favorite games as expected. They join a handful of other highly anticipated seque
Dec 24, 2025
Tis the season when professional Santas are in peak demand, but many who choose this line of work often view it as a higher calling and maintain some aspects of the identity all year round—even those who don’t fit the stereotypical popular image of Santa, according to a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal. Co-author Christina Hymer of the University of Tennessee got the idea for
The House of Representatives cleared the way for a massive overhaul of the federal environmental review process last Thursday, despite last-minute changes that led clean energy groups and moderate Democrats to pull their support. The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, or SPEED Act , overcame opposition from environmentalists and many Democrats who oppose the bill’s
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Editor’s note : Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y. This was a pretty good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Streaming platforms reigned supreme, with Netflix and
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AI coding agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing complete apps, running tests, and fixing bugs with human supervision. But these tools are not magic and can complicate rather than simplify a software project. Understanding how they work under the hood can help developers know when (and if) to use them, while avoiding common pitfall
Dec 23, 2025
For the second time this month, a Chinese rocket designed for reuse successfully soared into low-Earth orbit on its first flight Monday, defying the questionable odds that burden the debuts of new launch vehicles. The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UT
You’ve no doubt heard some version of the Robert Burns adage about the best-laid plans. Marvel Studios had an elaborate marketing plan in place to introduce four teaser trailers for Avengers: Doomsday as previews prior to screenings of Avatar: Fire and Ash , with one teaser rolling out each successive week. But the first one leaked online a few days early, revealing that (as rumored) Steve Rogers
Americans will be unable to buy the latest and greatest drones because the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has banned foreign-made drones as of today. On Monday, the FCC added drones to its Covered List , which it says are communications equipment and services “that are deemed to pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United S
OpenAI sent 80 times as many child exploitation incident reports to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children during the first half of 2025 as it did during a similar time period in 2024, according to a recent update from the company. The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a Congressionally authorized clearinghouse for reporting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other forms of child exploita
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CBS cannot contain the online spread of a “60 Minutes” segment that its editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, tried to block from airing. The episode, “Inside CECOT,” featured testimonies from US deportees who were tortured or suffered physical or sexual abuse at a notorious Salvadoran prison, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism. “Welcome to hell,” one former inmate was told upon arriving, the seg
There’s still another couple of months before the 2026 crop of F1 cars takes to the track for the first preseason test. It’s a year of big change for the sport, which is adopting new power unit rules that place much more emphasis on the electric motor’s contribution. The switch to the new power units was meant to attract new manufacturers to the sport, and in that regard, it has succeeded. But co
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Since I’m fascinated by new display technologies and by improving image quality, I’ve never been a fan of home projectors. Projectors lack the image quality compared to good TVs and monitors, and they’re pretty needy. Without getting into the specific requirements of different models, you generally want a darker room with a large, blank wall for a projector to look its best. That can be a lot to
Dec 22, 2025
Tory Bruno, a veteran engineer and aerospace industry executive, has resigned from the top job at United Launch Alliance after more than a decade competing against the growing dominance of SpaceX, the company announced Monday. The news of Bruno’s sudden resignation was unexpected. His tenure was marked by a decline in ULA’s market share as rival SpaceX competed for and won ever-larger US governme
Vince Zampella, a video game developer who has co-created or helmed some of the most popular franchises in the world, died in a car crash on a Los Angeles highway at 12:45 pm Pacific time on Sunday, December 21. He was 55 years old. According to the California Highway Patrol, Zampella was in a car on Angeles Crest Highway when the vehicle veered off the road and crashed into a concrete barrier. N
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For the better part of two months last year, most of us had no idea how serious the problems were with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft docked at the International Space Station. A safety advisory panel found this uncertainty also filtered through NASA’s workforce. On its first Crew Test Flight, Boeing’s Starliner delivered NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station in June
The world’s largest shadow library—which is increasingly funded by AI developers—shocked the Internet this weekend by announcing it had “backed up Spotify” and started distributing 300 terabytes of metadata and music files in bulk torrents. According to Anna’s Archive, the data grab represents more than 99 percent of listens on Spotify, making it “the largest publicly available music metadata dat
On Monday, the US Department of the Interior announced that it was pausing the leases on all five offshore wind sites currently under construction in the US. The move comes despite the fact that these projects already have installed significant hardware in the water and on land; one of them is nearly complete. In what appears to be an attempt to avoid legal scrutiny, the Interior is blaming the d
Director Christopher Nolan won two well-deserved Oscars for 2023’s Oppenheimer , and Hollywood was soon buzzing about what his next project might be. A vampire period piece, perhaps? Or maybe a reboot of 1983’s Blue Thunder or British 1960s spy series The Prisoner ? Instead, Nolan chose to adapt one of the greatest epic sagas in history: Homer’s Odyssey . At long last, Universal has released the
Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store. In a press release , the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same
Artemis II, meet Astrovan II. NASA’s first astronauts who will fly by the moon in more than 50 years participated in a practice launch countdown on Saturday, December 20, including taking their first trip on a transport vehicle steeped in almost the entire span of US space history—from Apollo through to the ongoing commercial crew program. Artemis II astronauts (from right to left) Reid Wiseman,
San Francisco was affected by a massive power outage over the weekend. It started with a fire at a substation in the city on Saturday afternoon, causing a blackout that at times affected as much as a third of the city, leaving more than 130,000 homes without power. Among the city’s affected critical systems were the traffic lights, which paralyzed Waymo’s fleet of robotaxis, stopping them in thei
Before he became chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr seemed to be a big believer in the agency’s role as an independent branch of the federal government. According to the pre-2025 version of Brendan Carr, the White House interfered with the agency’s independence when a Democratic president publicly urged the FCC to adopt net neutrality rules. When the Biden-era FCC rei
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Caroline Muller looks at clouds differently than most people. Where others may see puffy marshmallows, wispy cotton candy or thunderous gray objects storming overhead, Muller sees fluids flowing through the sky. She visualizes how air rises and falls, warms and cools, and spirals and swirls to form clouds and create storms. But the urgency with which Muller, a climate scientist at the Institute o
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‘Tis the season for all kinds of festive titles to start appearing in our to-watch queues. For folks who celebrate Christmas in any form, there are a million different movies and TV specials vying for your
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