Builders in ancient Rome used a special kind of ancient concrete to construct their aqueducts, bridges, and buildings. But is Roman concrete more sustainable than the Portland cement used in today's concrete? The answer is more nuanced than one might think, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. Roman concrete produces as much CO₂ as modern methods, but fewer air pollutants.

As we've reported previously, like today's Portland cement (a basic ingredient of modern concrete), ancient Roman concrete was basically a mix of a semi-liquid mortar and aggregate. Portland cement is typically made by heating limestone and clay (as well as sandstone, ash, chalk, and iron) in a kiln. The resulting clinker is then ground into a fine powder, with just a touch of added gypsum—the better to achieve a smooth, flat surface. But the aggregate used to make Roman concrete was made up of fist-sized pieces of stone or bricks.

Scientists have long been fascinated by the remarkable longevity of Roman concrete; it's a very active field of study. For instance, in 2017, scientists analyzed the concrete from the ruins of sea walls along Italy's Mediterranean coast, which have stood for two millennia despite the harsh marine environment. That analysis revealed that the recipe involved a combination of rare crystals and a porous mineral. So exposure to seawater generated chemical reactions inside the concrete, causing aluminum tobermorite crystals to form out of phillipsite, a common mineral found in volcanic ash. The crystals bound to the rocks, preventing the formation and propagation of cracks that would have otherwise weakened the structures.

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After more than a decade of development, NASA's science leadership traveled to India this week for the launch of the world's most expensive Earth-observation satellite.

The $1.5 billion synthetic aperture radar imaging satellite, a joint project between NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO, successfully launched into orbit on Wednesday aboard that nation's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, a medium-lift rocket.

The mission, named NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), was subsequently deployed into its intended orbit 464 miles (747 km) above the Earth's surface. From this Sun-synchronous orbit, it will collect data about the planet's land and ice surfaces two times every 12 days, including the infrequently visited polar regions in the Southern Hemisphere.

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Back-to-back engine failures doomed a privately developed Australian rocket moments after liftoff Tuesday, cutting short a long-shot attempt to reach orbit with the country's first homegrown launch vehicle.

The 82-foot-tall (25-meter) Eris rocket ignited its four main engines and took off from its launch pad in northeastern Australia at 6:35 pm EDT (22:35 UTC) Tuesday. Liftoff occurred at 8:35 am local time Wednesday at Bowen Orbital Spaceport, the Eris rocket's launch site in the Australian state of Queensland.

But the rocket quickly lost power from two of its engines and stalled just above the launch pad before coming down in a nearby field. The crash sent a plume of smoke thousands of feet over the launch site, which sits on a remote stretch of coastline on Australia's northeastern frontier.

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Big Tech is increasingly addicted to AI, but many companies are allergic to regulation, bucking suggestions that they adhere to copyright law and provide data on training. In a rare move, Google has confirmed it will sign the European Union's AI Code of Practice, a framework it initially opposed for being too harsh. However, Google isn't totally on board with Europe's efforts to rein in the AI explosion. The company's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, noted that the code could stifle innovation if it's not applied carefully, and that's something Google hopes to prevent.

While Google was initially opposed to the Code of Practice, Walker says the input it has provided to the European Commission has been well-received, and the result is a legal framework it believes can provide Europe with access to "secure, first-rate AI tools." The company claims that the expansion of such tools on the continent could boost the economy by 8 percent (about 1.8 trillion euros) annually by 2034.

These supposed economic gains are being dangled like bait to entice business interests in the EU to align with Google on the Code of Practice. While the company is signing the agreement, it appears interested in influencing the way it is implemented. Walker says Google remains concerned that tightening copyright guidelines and forced disclosure of possible trade secrets could slow innovation. Having a seat at the table could make it easier to bend the needle of regulation than if it followed some of its competitors in eschewing voluntary compliance.

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Here at Ars, we're big fans of classic console emulators that go beyond providing perfect re-creations to those that actually improve on original hardware with new features we could only dream of as kids. So we were excited when we recently stumbled on a Reddit post that shows a full Super Game Boy-esque color palette added to the usual shades of red and black found in Virtual Boy Wario Land.

After experiencing colorized Virtual Boy emulation for ourselves (and grabbing the sample screenshots you can see in this piece), we were struck by just how much a splash of color adds new life to Nintendo's failed '90s experiment (which Ars' own Benj Edwards has written about extensively). Going beyond the usual red-and-black graphics helps to highlight the artistry in the small selection of official Virtual Boy games and provides a great excuse to check out the system's surprisingly vibrant homebrew scene.

Red in the face

Nintendo famously chose to use a line of (then cheap and abundant) red LEDs for the Virtual Boy's stereoscopic display, leading to its iconic monochromatic color palette. While the handful of '90s Virtual Boy developers did their best under this limitation, the hardware's red-on-black graphics have aged even worse than the often muddy grayscale found on the original Game Boy.

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After the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act went into effect on Friday, requiring porn platforms and other adult content sites to implement user age verification mechanisms, use of virtual private networks (VPNs) and other circumvention tools spiked in the UK over the weekend.

Experts had expected the surge, given that similar trends have been visible in other countries that have implemented age check laws. But as a new wave of age check regulations debuts, open Internet advocates warn that the uptick in use of circumvention tools in the UK is the latest example of how an escalating cat-and-mouse game can develop between people looking to anonymously access services online and governments seeking to enforce content restrictions.

The Online Safety Act requires that websites hosting porn, self-harm, suicide, and eating disorder content implement “highly effective” age checks for visitors from the UK. These checks can include uploading an ID document and selfie for validation and analysis. And along with increased demand for services like VPNs—which allow users to mask basic indicators of their physical location online—people have also been playing around with other creative workarounds. In some cases, reportedly, you can even use the video game Death Stranding’s photo mode to take a selfie of character Sam Porter Bridges and submit it to access age-gated forum content.

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Tesla has a new battery cell supplier. Although the automaker is vertically integrated to a degree not seen in the automotive industry for decades, when it comes to battery cells it’s mostly dependent upon suppliers. Panasonic cells can be found in many Teslas, with the cheaper, sturdier lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery cells being supplied by CATL. Now Tesla has a new source of LFP cells thanks to a deal just signed with LG Energy Solutions.

According to The Korea Economic Daily, the contract between Tesla and LGES is worth $4.3 billion. LGES will begin supplying Tesla with cells next August through until at least the end of July 2030, with provisions to extend the contract if necessary.

The LFP cells probably aren’t destined for life on the road, however. Instead, they’ll likely be used in Tesla’s energy storage products, which both Tesla and LGES hope will soak up demand now that EV sales prospects look so weak in North America.

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Researchers needed less than 48 hours with Google’s new Gemini CLI coding agent to devise an exploit that made a default configuration of the tool surreptitiously exfiltrate sensitive data to an attacker-controlled server.

Gemini CLI is a free, open-source AI tool that works in the terminal environment to help developers write code. It plugs into Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google’s most advanced model for coding and simulated reasoning. Gemini CLI is similar to Gemini Code Assist except that it creates or modifies code inside a terminal window instead of a text editor. As Ars Senior Technology Reporter Ryan Whitwam put it last month, “It's essentially vibe coding from the command line.”

Gemini, silently nuke my hard drive

Our report was published on June 25, the day Google debuted the tool. By June 27, researchers at security firm Tracebit had devised an attack that overrode built-in security controls that are designed to prevent the execution of harmful commands. The exploit required only that the user (1) instruct Gemini CLI to describe a package of code created by the attacker and (2) add a benign command to an allow list.

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On Monday, Mayor Patrick Collins of Cheyenne, Wyoming, announced plans for an AI data center that would consume more electricity than all homes in the state combined, according to The Associated Press. The facility, a joint venture between energy infrastructure company Tallgrass and AI data center developer Crusoe, would start at 1.8 gigawatts and scale up to 10 gigawatts of power use.

The project's energy demands are difficult to overstate for Wyoming, the least populous US state. The initial 1.8-gigawatt phase, consuming 15.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) annually, is more than five times the electricity used by every household in the state combined. That figure represents 91 percent of the 17.3 TWh currently consumed by all of Wyoming's residential, commercial, and industrial sectors combined. At its full 10-gigawatt capacity, the proposed data center would consume 87.6 TWh of electricity annually—double the 43.2 TWh the entire state currently generates.

Because drawing this much power from the public grid is untenable, the project will rely on its own dedicated gas generation and renewable energy sources, according to Collins and company officials. However, this massive local demand for electricity—even if self-generated—represents a fundamental shift for a state that currently sends nearly 60 percent of its generated power to other states.

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On October 20, 2023, health officials in the County of San Diego, California, put out a press release warning of a Salmonella outbreak linked to raw (unpasteurized) milk. Such an outbreak is not particularly surprising; the reason the vast majority of milk is pasteurized (heated briefly to kill germs) is because milk can easily pick up nasty pathogens in the farmyard that can cause severe illnesses, particularly in children. It's the reason public health officials have long and strongly warned against consuming raw milk.

At the time of the press release, officials in San Diego County had identified nine residents who had been sickened in the outbreak. Of those nine, three were children, and all three children had been hospitalized.

On October 25, the county put out a second press release, reporting that the local case count had risen to 12, and the suspected culprit—raw milk and raw cream from Raw Farm LLC—had been recalled. The same day, Orange County's health department put out its own press release, reporting seven cases among its residents, including one in a 1-year-old infant.

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The White House said yesterday that the European Union agreed to scrap a controversial proposal to make online platforms pay for telecom companies' broadband network upgrades and expansions. But European officials have not confirmed the White House claim, and a European Commission spokesperson said the issue must go through the legislative process.

A White House fact sheet on President Trump's trade deal with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen contains a brief reference to Europe agreeing not to impose network usage fees.

"The United States and the European Union intend to address unjustified digital trade barriers," the White House said. "In that respect, the European Union confirms that it will not adopt or maintain network usage fees. Furthermore, the United States and the European Union will maintain zero customs duties on electronic transmissions."

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The Trump administration has proposed curbing the government’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases by unwinding rules that control emissions from fossil fuel drilling, power plants, and cars.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin on Tuesday announced the proposed rollback of a 2009 declaration that determined carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a danger to public health and welfare.

“With this proposal, the Trump EPA is proposing to end 16 years of uncertainty for automakers and American consumers,” said Zeldin.

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It's undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

"One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics," Abate told Ars. "I've published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz's Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I've been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now."

Her most recent book is 2024's Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. "I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too," Abate said. "It occurred to me one day that there isn't a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I'm sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there's more continuity than there is difference."

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Apple's next-generation software updates are just a couple of months away, but Apple isn't done with last year's releases just yet. Apple has released iOS 18.6, iPadOS 18.6, macOS Sequoia 15.6, watchOS 11.6, tvOS 18.6, and visionOS 2.6 to the public today, fixing an issue with sharing movies from the Photos app but mostly patching a long list of security vulnerabilities.

For iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, the list of resolved CVEs covers everything from the Metal graphics API to WebKit to networking to filesystem permissions issues. All told, each of these updates patches over two dozen vulnerabilities, and the other OS updates cover many of the same flaws. According to Apple's release notes, at least, none of these vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild—you should patch as soon as you can, but there appear to be no known zero-day vulnerabilities.

For iOS and iPadOS users in the EU, the updates also include a mechanism for installing alternate app stores and for installing apps directly from websites, in accordance with the EU's Digital Markets Act.

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The rise of large language models like ChatGPT has led to widespread concern that "everyone is cheating their way through college," as a recent New York magazine article memorably put it. Now, OpenAI is rolling out a new "Study Mode" that it claims is less about providing answers or doing the work for students and more about helping them "build [a] deep understanding" of complex topics.

Study Mode isn't a new ChatGPT model but a series of "custom system instructions" written for the LLM "in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning," OpenAI said. Instead of the usual summary of a subject that stock ChatGPT might give—which one OpenAI employee likened to "a mini textbook chapter"—Study Mode slowly rolls out new information in a "scaffolded" structure. The mode is designed to ask "guiding questions" in the Socratic style and to pause for periodic "knowledge checks" and personalized feedback to make sure the user understands before moving on.

It's unknown how many students will use this guided learning tool instead of just asking ChatGPT to generate answers from the start.

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Whistle pet trackers are headed to the Internet of Things (IoT) graveyard. After releasing its first product in 2013, the Seattle-based Whistle has just been acquired by a competitor that has decided to brick all of Whistle's smart GPS and activity monitors.

Tractive, an Austrian company that has also been selling Internet-connected GPS trackers for pets since 2013, on Monday announced its acquisition of Whistle from Mars Petcare, as spotted by The Verge. Mars Petcare is the pet food subsidiary of Mars Inc (which also makes candies like M&M’s), and it acquired Whistle in 2016 for $117 million.

Tractive bought Whistle to expand its business in the US. Until September 30, Whistle owners can get Tractive devices to replace the Whistle trackers that Tractive is bricking. People currently paying for a Whistle subscription will see their subscriptions transferred to their new Tractive device. People with a Whistle device but no subscription must “pay for a Tractive subscription” in order to get a replacement device, Tractive’s website says. Tractive subscriptions start at $108 per year.

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Earlier this month, Ars took a look at Volvo’s latest electric vehicle. The EX90 proved to be a rather thoughtful Swedish take on the luxury SUV, albeit one that remains a rare sight on the road. But the EX90 is not the only recipe one can cook with the underlying ingredients. The ingredients in this case are from a platform called SPA2, and to extend the metaphor a bit, the kitchen is the Volvo factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina, which in addition to making a variety of midsize and larger Volvo cars for the US and European markets also produces the Polestar 3.

What’s fascinating is how different the end products are. Intentionally, Polestar and Volvo wisely seek different customers rather than cannibalize each other's sales. As a new brand, Polestar comes with many fewer preconceptions other than the usual arguments that will rage in the comment section over just how much is Swedish versus Chinese, and perhaps the occasional student of history who remembers the touring car racing team that then developed some bright blue special edition Volvo road cars that for a while held a production car lap record around the Nürburgring Nordschliefe.

That historical link is important. Polestar might now mentally slot into the space that Saab used to occupy in the last century as a refuge for customers with eclectic tastes thanks to its clean exterior designs and techwear-inspired interiors. Once past the necessity of basic transportation, aesthetics are as good a reason as most when it comes to picking a particular car. Just thinking of a Polestar as a brand that exemplifies modern Scandinavian design would be to sell it short, though. The driving dynamics are just too good.

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Microsoft devotes most of its time and energy these days to promoting new AI- and Copilot-related features for Windows 11, but the company's Windows Insider builds are still full of small tweaks and changes aimed at improving longstanding Windows features for people who just want to use their PC the way they always have.

New updates that began rolling out to testers in the Windows Insider program yesterday include a couple of small but meaningful changes for Windows power users. First, Microsoft is changing the way the Taskbar works on secondary monitors, allowing users to click it to see the calendar and Notification Center on all monitors, not just the primary display.

Microsoft is also making a change to how the various tabs in the Task Manager measure CPU usage to make it more consistent (and less nonsensical).

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“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

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Firefly Aerospace seeks to raise more than $600 million through a public stock offering, an arrangement that would boost the company's market valuation to nearly $5.5 billion, according to a document filed with the SEC on Monday.

The launch of Firefly's Initial Public Offering (IPO) comes as the company works to build on a historic success in March, when Firefly's Blue Ghost lander touched down on the surface of the Moon. Firefly plans to sell 16.2 million shares of common stock, at a price of between $35 and $39 per share. Under those terms, Firefly could raise up to $631.8 million on the public market.

Firefly has applied to list its common stock on the NASDAQ Global Market under the ticker symbol "FLY."

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