We tend to lump all mammoths together as big, hairy elephant-like beasts with enormous tusks. But there were a number of mammoth species, including less furry ones that inhabited temperate regions. And the furry ones include at least three species: the Eurasian steppe mammoth, the Arctic-specializing woolly mammoth, and the late-evolving North America-only Columbian mammoth.

Because these species inhabited the Arctic, it has been remarkably easy to obtain DNA from them, providing a genetic picture of their relations. The DNA suggests that the woolly mammoth is an offshoot of the steppe mammoth lineage, and was the first to migrate into North America. But the Columbian mammoth was a bit of an enigma; some genetic data suggested it was also a steppe offshoot, while other samples indicated it might be a woolly/steppe hybrid.

But all of that data came from animals living in colder environments. In contrast, the Columbian mammoth ranged as far south as Central America. And now, a group of researchers has managed to obtain a bit of genetic information from bones found in the Basin of Mexico, which includes Mexico City. And these mammoths appear to form a distinct genetic cluster, and are all more closely related to each other than to any other woolly or Columbian mammoths.

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If a family of anthropomorphic mice were to meet around a TV, I imagine they'd gather around something like TinyCircuits’ TinyTV 2. The gadget sits on four slender, angled legs with its dials and classic, brown shell beckoning viewers toward its warm, bright stories. The TinyTV’s screen is only 1.14 inches diagonally, but the device exudes vintage energy.

In simple terms, the TinyTV is a portable, rechargeable gadget that plays stored videos and was designed to look and function like a vintage TV. The details go down to the dials, one for controlling the volume and another for scrolling through the stored video playlist. Both rotary knobs make an assuring click when twisted.

Musing on fantastical uses for the TinyTV seems appropriate because the device feels like it's built around fun. At a time when TVs are getting more powerful, software-driven, AI-stuffed, and, of course, bigger, the TinyTV is a delightful, comforting tribute to a simpler time for TVs.

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The maker of Passwordstate, an enterprise-grade password manager for storing companies’ most privileged credentials, is urging them to promptly install an update fixing a high-severity vulnerability that hackers can exploit to gain administrative access to their vaults.

The authentication bypass allows hackers to create a URL that accesses an emergency access page for Passwordstate. From there, an attacker could pivot to the administrative section of the password manager. A CVE identifier isn’t yet available.

Safeguarding enterprises’ most privileged credentials

Click Studios, the Australia-based maker of Passwordstate, says the credential manager is used by 29,000 customers and 370,000 security professionals. The product is designed to safeguard organizations' most privileged and sensitive credentials. Among other things, it integrates into Active Directory, the service Windows network admins use to create, change, and modify user accounts. It can also be used for handling password resets, event auditing, and remote session logins.

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“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

It’s the ominous slogan for “Hotel California,” an iconic fictional lodging dreamed up by the Eagles in 1976. One of the rock band’s lead singers, Don Henley, said in an interview that the song and place “can have a million interpretations.”

For US Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, what comes to mind is a key part of one of the country’s most central conservation laws.

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In the olden days, publishing a site on the Internet required that you figure out hosting and have at least some experience with HTML, CSS, and the other languages that make the Internet work. But the emergence of blogging and "Web 2.0" sites in the late '90s and early 2000s gave rise to a constellation of services that would offer to host all of your thoughts without requiring you to build the website part of your website.

Many of those services are still around in some form—someone who really wanted to could still launch a new blog on LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, or WordPress.com. But one of the field's former giants is shutting down—and taking all of those old posts with it. TypePad announced that the service would be shutting down on September 30 and that everything hosted on it would also be going away on that date. That gives current and former users just over a month to export anything they want to save.

TypePad had previously removed the ability to create new accounts at some point in 2020. It gave no specific rationale for the shutdown beyond calling it a "difficult decision." As recently as March of this year, TypePad representatives were telling users there were "no plans" to shut down the service.

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As SpaceX's Starship vehicle gathered all of the attention this week, the company's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket continued to hit some impressive milestones.

Both occurred during relatively anonymous launches of the company's Starlink satellites but are nonetheless notable because they underscore the value of first-stage reuse, which SpaceX has pioneered over the last decade.

The first milestone occurred on Wednesday morning with the launch of the Starlink 10-56 mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The first stage that launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was making its second launch and successfully landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship. Strikingly, this was the 400th time SpaceX has executed a drone ship landing.

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Ankylosaurs, with their squat, armored bodies and bizarre, weaponized tails, are an iconic group of dinosaurs. While there were plenty of species present in the Cretaceous, they're thought to have origins that trace back to the Jurassic. It has been hard to say much about those origins, however, because the fossil evidence was so sparse. One of the earliest potential ankylosaur species, Spicomellus, was known from only a single partial rib; others are known only by jaw fragments or teeth.

Now, however, we have a much better picture of what Spicomellus afer looks like thanks to a much larger collection of bones discovered in Morocco. It turns out that the heavy armor and rows of chunky spikes found on Cretaceous ankylosaurs were actually subdued compared to the massive rows of meter-long spikes and bony collars found on Spicomellus. It looks like what would happen if you combined the aesthetics of punk with the flamboyance of glam and made a dinosaur out of the results.

A spiky find

Cretaceous ankylosaurs share a number of common features. One is a short, broad body form that kept the herbivores close to the ground when on all four limbs. Another common feature: bony plates, formed from the skin, that provided the animal with the equivalent of body armor. Some of these, especially along the animal's ribs, thickened into short, blunt spikes that provided added protection. Finally, many species had tails that ended in club-like growths that attached to the vertebrae in the tail through features with the highly technical name of "handles."

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In mid-2023, just as it seemed like the North American auto industry had settled on CCS1 as the default fast-charging plug, everything upended as Ford, then General Motors, then everyone else announced they were adopting the North American Charging Standard.

Originally developed by Tesla, NACS has a different plug but uses the same electronic communication protocols as CCS, and adoption of NACS thus makes all those non-Tesla electric vehicles compatible with the extensive Tesla Supercharger network.

GM's existing EV drivers got access to those 17,000-plus Superchargers last year—something that significantly upgraded the road-tripping experience with the Chevrolet Bolt, we discovered.

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Don’t believe everything you read—especially when it’s part of a marketing pitch designed to sell security services.

The latest example of the runaway hype that can come from such pitches is research published today by SquareX, a startup selling services for securing browsers and other client-side applications. It claims, without basis, to have found a “major passkey vulnerability” that undermines the lofty security promises made by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and thousands of other companies that have enthusiastically embraced passkeys.

Ahoy, face-palm ahead

“Passkeys Pwned,” the attack described in the research, was demonstrated earlier this month in a Defcon presentation. It relies on a malicious browser extension, installed in an earlier social engineering attack, that hijacks the process for creating a passkey for use on Gmail, Microsoft 365, or any of the other thousands of sites that now use the alternative form of authentication.

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Although it feels like Porsche only just introduced the electric Macan, the sporty EV SUV is starting to become a more common sight on the road. And as the automaker transitions into model year 2026, it's giving the Macan some new digital toys.

Now, both Android and iPhone users will be able to create a digital key for the car (iPhone users can also add a key to their Apple Watch). This works via near-field communication as well as Bluetooth low energy and ultra-wideband, and you can share keys with up to seven other users from your phone's wallet. You can also use your phone to open the trunk (although operating the frunk requires the My Porsche App). The key should work even if the phone needs charging.

For Macans fitted with 360-degree parking cameras, several new features leverage the sensors. There's a transparent hood function that shows you on the infotainment screen whatever it is that's being obscured by the front of the vehicle, which should be useful should you take the Macan off-road.

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Recently, a woman slowed down a line at the post office, waving her phone at the clerk. ChatGPT told her there's a "price match promise" on the USPS website. No such promise exists. But she trusted what the AI "knows" more than the postal worker—as if she'd consulted an oracle rather than a statistical text generator accommodating her wishes.

This scene reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about AI chatbots. There is nothing inherently special, authoritative, or accurate about AI-generated outputs. Given a reasonably trained AI model, the accuracy of any large language model (LLM) response depends on how you guide the conversation. They are prediction machines that will produce whatever pattern best fits your question, regardless of whether that output corresponds to reality.

Despite these issues, millions of daily users engage with AI chatbots as if they were talking to a consistent person—confiding secrets, seeking advice, and attributing fixed beliefs to what is actually a fluid idea-connection machine with no persistent self. This personhood illusion isn't just philosophically troublesome—it can actively harm vulnerable individuals while obscuring a sense of accountability when a company's chatbot "goes off the rails."

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Just weeks after being confirmed by the Senate, Susan Monarez has been ousted from the now thoroughly battered public health agency.

The news was first reported by The Washington Post, which cited multiple officials within the Trump administration. After Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services for confirmation of the ouster, HHS responded with a link to a post on the department's X account. The post states:

Susan Monarez is no longer director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We thank her for her dedicated service to the American people. @SecKennedy has full confidence in his team at @CDCgov who will continue to be vigilant in protecting Americans against infectious diseases at home and abroad.

The department did not address the circumstances surrounding Monarez's ouster. But The Washington Post reported this evening that US Health Secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had pressed Monarez for days on her willingness to rescind approvals for COVID-19 vaccines. Monarez reportedly met with Kennedy and other officials Monday and declined to agree to changes without consulting vaccine advisors. Kennedy then urged her to resign for "not supporting President Trump’s agenda."

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In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention dramatically, but quietly, scaled back a food safety surveillance system, cutting active tracking from eight top foodborne infections down to just two, according to a report by NBC News.

The Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet)—a network of surveillance sites that spans 10 states and covers about 54 million Americans (16 percent of the US population)—previously included active monitoring for eight infections from pathogens. Those include Campylobacter, Cyclospora, Listeria, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), Shigella, Vibrio, and Yersinia.

Now the network is only monitoring for STEC and Salmonella.

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The chief of Russia's main spacecraft manufacturer issued a dire warning this week, saying that his corporation has reached a "critical" condition and cannot continue in its present state.

"The situation is critical: multi-million dollar debts, interest on loans that 'eat up' the budget, many processes that are ineffective, and a significant part of the team has lost motivation and a sense of shared responsibility," said Igor Maltsev, chief of RSC Energia, which is located near Moscow.

Maltsev's remarks were first published by Gazeta.ru, one of the largest Russian news websites. Later, they were reposted on the "Forgive us Yura," Telegram channel, the name of which references cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and primarily has content that focuses on critiques of Russia's space program. Multiple sources confirmed that the statement is legitimate.

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A judge yesterday chided the Federal Communications Commission for its "vague and uninformative" response to a DOGE-related lawsuit and ordered the commission to produce documents sought under the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA).

The FCC was sued by journalist Nina Burleigh and Frequency Forward, a group that says it is investigating how Elon Musk's influence in government "is creating unmanageable conflicts of interest within the FCC." Burleigh and Frequency Forward alleged in an April 24 complaint that the FCC violated the Freedom of Information Act by wrongfully withholding records on DOGE's activities within the agency.

The plaintiffs filed a motion for preliminary injunction this week and received a quick ruling from US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the District of Columbia. Jackson denied the preliminary injunction request but ordered the FCC to "make ongoing productions of responsive documents on September 15, 2025 and October 6, 2025," and to "file a status report proposing a schedule for the completion of its production of documents to plaintiff by October 13, 2025."

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Some investors are not happy that Intel agreed to sell the US a 10 percent stake in the company after Donald Trump attacked Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan with a demand to resign.

After Intel accepted the deal at a meeting with the president, it alarmed some investors when Trump boasted that his pressure campaign worked, claiming Tan "walked in wanting to keep his job, and he ended up giving us $10 billion for the United States."

"It sets a bad precedent if the president can just take 10 percent of a company by threatening the CEO," James McRitchie, a private investor and shareholder activist in California who owns Intel shares, told Reuters. To McRitchie, Tan's acceptance of the deal effectively sent the message that "we love Trump, we don't want 10 percent of our company taken away."

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As AI assistants become capable of controlling web browsers, a new security challenge has emerged: users must now trust that every website they visit won't try to hijack their AI agent with hidden malicious instructions. Experts voiced concerns about this emerging threat this week after testing from a leading AI chatbot vendor revealed that AI browser agents can be successfully tricked into harmful actions nearly a quarter of the time.

On Tuesday, Anthropic announced the launch of Claude for Chrome, a web browser-based AI agent that can take actions on behalf of users. Due to security concerns, the extension is only rolling out as a research preview to 1,000 subscribers on Anthropic's Max plan, which costs between $100 and $200 per month, with a waitlist available for other users.

The Claude for Chrome extension allows users to chat with the Claude AI model in a sidebar window that maintains the context of everything happening in their browser. Users can grant Claude permission to perform tasks like managing calendars, scheduling meetings, drafting email responses, handling expense reports, and testing website features.

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The single-player Star Citizen spin-off Squadron 42 is slated to finally be in players' hands in 2026, 11 full years after its initial 2015 release target. And after all that time, Cloud Imperium Games CEO Chris Roberts says he's hopeful that the title will be received similarly to another 2026 release that happens to be possibly the most anticipated video game of all time: Grand Theft Auto VI.

A recent report from French Canadian outlet La Presse (translated) suggests that Squadron 42's launch is being timed so that it "won't be overshadowed" by the planned May launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. "We're hoping it'll be almost as big an event," Roberts said in comparing the two upcoming releases in an interview with the French paper. "Other than GTA VI, it's probably the biggest-budget AAA game [of the year]."

That's a pretty bold claim, considering Squadron 42's very public and tumultuous path to a purported "feature complete" status in 2023. But it seems at least somewhat reasonable when you consider that GTA VI's development budget of nearly $1 billion lines up closely with $859 million in crowdfunding currently being reported for Star Citizen as a whole.

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STARBASE, Texas—SpaceX launched the 10th test flight of the company's Starship rocket Tuesday evening, sending the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The largely successful mission for the world's largest rocket was an important milestone for SpaceX's Starship program after months of repeated setbacks, including three disappointing test flights and a powerful explosion on the ground that destroyed the ship that engineers were originally readying for this launch.

For the first time, SpaceX engineers received data on the performance of the ship's upgraded heat shield and control flaps during reentry back into the atmosphere. The three failed Starship test flights to start the year ended before the ship reached reentry. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has described developing a durable, reliable heat shield as the most pressing challenge for making Starship a fully and rapidly reusable rocket.

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For decades, astronomers have wondered what the very first stars in the universe were like. These stars formed new chemical elements, which enriched the universe and allowed the next generations of stars to form the first planets.

The first stars were initially composed of pure hydrogen and helium, and they were massive—hundreds to thousands of times the mass of the Sun and millions of times more luminous. Their short lives ended in enormous explosions called supernovae, so they had neither the time nor the raw materials to form planets, and they should no longer exist for astronomers to observe.

At least that’s what we thought.

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