It's long been the stuff of science fiction: humans achieving immortality by uploading their consciousness into a silicon virtual paradise, ruled over by a benevolent super-intelligent AI. Or maybe one dreams of leaving a dying Earth to colonize Mars or other distant planets. It's a tantalizing visionary future that has been embraced by tech billionaires in particular. But is that future truly the utopian ideal, or something potentially darker? And are those goals even scientifically feasible?

These are the kinds of questions astrophysicist and science journalist Adam Becker poses in his new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. Becker's widely praised first book, What Is Real?, focused on competing interpretations of quantum mechanics and questioned the long dominance of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation championed by Niels Bohr, among other luminaries. This time around, he's tackling Silicon Valley's far-reaching ideas about the future, which have moved out of online subcultures and into mainstream culture, including our political discourse.

"It seemed like it was only going to become more relevant and someone needed to speak out about it, and I didn't see enough people connecting the dots in a way that looked right to me," Becker told Ars. "One current critique of Silicon Valley is that they moved fast and broke democracy and institutional norms. That's true. Another is that they're contemptuous of government, and I think that's true, too. But there wasn't much critique of their visions of the future, maybe because not enough people realized they meant it. Even among Silicon Valley critics, there was this idea that at the very least, you could trust that the statements they made about science and technology were true because they were experts in science and technology. That's not the case."

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It's been a long, long wait, but we're finally getting a second season of the Netflix supernatural horror comedy, Wednesday. The streaming giant dropped the first teaser and several first-look images to whet our appetites for what promises to be an excellent follow-up to the delightful first season.

(Spoilers for S1 below.)

As previously reported, director Tim Burton famously turned down the opportunity to direct the 1991 feature film The Addams Family, inspired by characters created by American cartoonist Charles Addams for The New Yorker in 1938. Wednesday showrunners Alfred Gough and Miles Millar—best known for Smallville—expected Burton to turn them down as well when they made their pitch. He signed up for the project instead.

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Several years ago, Harvard University roboticist Robert Wood made headlines when his lab constructed RoboBee, a tiny robot capable of partially untethered flight. Over the years, RoboBee has learned to fly, dive, and hover. The latest improvement: RoboBee has learned how to stick the landing, thanks to biomechanical improvements to its landing gear modeled on the crane fly, which has a similar wingspan and body size to the RoboBee platform. The details of this achievement appear in a new paper published in the journal Science Robotics.

As previously reported, the ultimate goal of the RoboBee initiative is to build a swarm of tiny interconnected robots capable of sustained, untethered flight—a significant technological challenge, given the insect-sized scale, which changes the various forces at play. In 2019, Wood's group announced its achievement of the lightest insect-scale robot so far to have achieved sustained, untethered flight—an improved version called the RoboBee X-Wing. In 2021, Wood's group turned its attention to the biomechanics of the mantis shrimp's knock-out punch and built a tiny robot to mimic that movement.

But RoboBee was not forgotten, with the team focusing this time around on achieving more robust landings. “Previously, if we were to go in for a landing, we’d turn off the vehicle a little bit above the ground and just drop it, and pray that it will land upright and safely,” said co-author Christian Chan, one of Wood's graduate students. The trick is to minimize velocity when approaching a surface and then quickly dissipating impact energy. Even something as small and light as RoboBee can generate significant impact energy. The crane fly has long, jointed appendages that enable them to dampen their landings, so the insect served as a useful model for RoboBee's new landing gear.

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More than 45 million people in the US are fans of bowling, with national competitions awarding millions of dollars. Bowlers usually rely on instinct and experience, earned through lots and lots of practice, to boost their strike percentage. A team of physicists has come up with a mathematical model to better predict ball trajectories, outlined in a new paper published in the journal AIP Advances. The resulting equations take into account such factors as the composition and resulting pattern of the oil used on bowling lanes, as well as the inevitable asymmetries of bowling balls and player variability.

The authors already had a strong interest in bowling. Three are regular bowlers and quite skilled at the sport; a fourth, Curtis Hooper of Longborough University in the UK, is a coach for Team England at the European Youth Championships. Hooper has been studying the physics of bowling for several years, including an analysis of the 2017 Weber Cup, as well as papers devising mathematical models for the application of lane conditioners and oil patterns in bowling.

The calculations involved in such research are very complicated because there are so many variables that can affect a ball's trajectory after being thrown. Case in point: the thin layer of oil that is applied to bowling lanes, which Hooper found can vary widely in volume and shape among different venues, plus the lack of uniformity in applying the layer, which creates an uneven friction surface.

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Kevin Peterson is a "nose" for his own perfume company, Sfumato Fragrances, by day. By night, Sfumato's retail store in Detroit transforms into Peterson's craft cocktail bar, Castalia, where he is chief mixologist and designs drinks that pair with carefully selected aromas. He's also the author of Cocktail Theory: A Sensory Approach to Transcendent Drinks, which grew out of his many (many!) mixology experiments and popular YouTube series, Objective Proof: The Science of Cocktails.

It's fair to say that Peterson has had an unusual career trajectory. He worked as a line cook and an auto mechanic, and he worked on the production line of a butter factory, among other gigs, before attending culinary school in hopes of becoming a chef. However, he soon realized it wasn't really what he wanted out of life and went to college, earning an undergraduate degree in physics from Carleton College and a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Michigan.

After 10 years as an engineer, he switched focus again and became more serious about his side hobby, perfumery. "Not being in kitchens anymore, I thought—this is a way to keep that little flavor part of my brain engaged," Peterson told Ars. "I was doing problem sets all day. It was my escape to the sensory realm. 'OK, my brain is melting—I need a completely different thing to do. Let me go smell smells, escape to my little scent desk.'" He and his wife, Jane Larson, founded Sfumato, which led to opening Castalia, and Peterson finally found his true calling.

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A rogue cyborg security (SEC) unit gains autonomy and must learn to interact with humans while hiding its new capability in the trailer for Murderbot, Apple TV+'s new 10-episode sci-fi comedic thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård. It's based on the bestselling book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. And judging from the trailer, Murderbot looks like it will strike just the right balance between humor and action.

There are seven books in Wells' series thus far. All are narrated by Murderbot, who is technically owned by a megacorporation but manages to hack and override its governor module. Rather than rising up and killing its former masters, Murderbot just goes about performing its security work, relieving the boredom by watching a lot of entertainment media.

In the first book, All Systems Red, Murderbot saves a scientific expedition on an alien planet when they are attacked by a giant alien creature. During the ensuing investigation, the cyborg uncovers a plot against the expedition, as well as a second team, by yet another team intent on killing their rivals for some reason. Murderbot joins the humans in foiling those murderous plans but escapes onto a cargo ship at the end rather than give up its hard-earned autonomy.

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Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, counting many scientists among its fans. Naturally those scientists are sometimes drawn to study their beloved beverage from various angles with an eye toward achieving the perfect cup.

While espresso has received the lion's share of such attention, physicists at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated the physics behind brewing so-called "pour-over" coffee, in which hot water is poured over coffee grounds in a filter within a funnel-shaped cone and allowed to percolate and drip into a cup below. The trick is to pour the water from as high as possible without letting the jet of water break up upon impact with the grounds, according to their new paper published in the journal Physics of Fluids.

In 2020, we reported on a mathematical model for brewing the perfect cup of espresso with minimal waste. Many variables can affect the quality of a steaming cup of espresso, including so-called "channeling" during the brewing process, in which the water doesn't seep uniformly through the grounds but branches off in various preferential paths instead. This significantly reduces the extraction yield (EY)—the fraction of coffee that dissolves into the final beverage—and thus the quality of the final brew. That, in turn, depends on controlling water flow and pressure as the liquid percolates through the coffee grounds.

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Enthusiasm was understandably high for Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel's revival of the hugely popular series in the Netflix Defenders universe. Not only was Charlie Cox returning to the title role as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, but Vincent D'Onofrio was also coming back as his nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin. Their dynamic has always been electric, and that on-screen magic is as powerful as ever in Born Again, which quickly earned critical raves and a second season that is currently filming.

(Some spoilers for the series below, but no major reveals beyond the opening events of the first episode.)

Born Again was initially envisioned as more of an episodic reset rather than a straight continuation of the serialized Netflix series. But during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, with production halted, the studio gave the show a creative overhaul more in line with the Netflix tone, even though six episodes had been largely completed by then. The pilot was reshot completely, and new footage was added to subsequent episodes to ensure narrative continuity with the original Daredevil—with a few well-placed nods to other characters in the MCU for good measure.

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It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON, had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares, directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil), that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy. Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON.

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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Humans have practiced some form of yodeling since at least the 13th century, when Marco Polo encountered Tibetan monks on his travels who used the vocal technique for long-distance communication. It's since morphed into a distinctive singing style. But can animals also yodel? According to a new paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, several species of monkey dwelling in the rainforests of Latin America employ "voice breaks" in their calls that acoustically resemble human yodeling—i.e., "ultra-yodels" that boast a much wider frequency range.

Many years ago, I wrote about the bioacoustics of human yodeling for New Scientist. In many respects, yodeling is quite simple. It merely involves singing a long note subjected to repeated rapid sharp shifts in pitch. It's the unique anatomy of the human vocal tract that makes it possible, notably the larynx (voice box) located just behind the Adam's apple. The larynx is comprised of cartilage and the hyoid bone that together support the vocal cords, which are attached to muscles on either side of the larynx.

When air flows through the trachea, the vocal cords vibrate at frequencies ranging from 110 to 200 Hz. We have the capability of contracting the muscles to change the shape, position, and tension of our vocal cords, thereby altering the pitch of the sound produced. Stiffer vocal cords result in faster vibrations, which produce higher pitches.

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Paramount+ has dropped a tantalizing one-minute teaser for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds., and it looks like the latest adventures of the starship Enterprise will bring romance, comedy, mystery, and even a bit of analog tech, not to mention a brand new villain.

(Some spoilers for S2 below)

We haven't seen much from the third season to date. There was an exclusive clip during San Diego Comic Con last summer—a callback to the S2 episode "Charades," in which a higher-dimensional race, the Kerkohvians, accidentally reconfigured Spock's half-human, half-Vulcan physiology to that of a full-blooded human, just before Spock was supposed to meet his Vulcan fiancee's parents. The S3 clip had the situation reversed: The human crew had to make themselves Vulcan to succeed on a new mission but weren't able to change back.

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Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are tremendously fond of fermented foodstuffs. Technically, it's the yeast they crave, produced by yummy rotting fruit, but they can consume quite a lot of ethanol as a result of that fruity diet. Yes, fruit flies have ultra-fast metabolisms, the better to burn off the booze, but they can still get falling-down drunk—so much so, that randy inebriated male fruit flies have been known to court other males by mistake and fail to mate successfully.

Then again, apparently adding alcohol to their food increases the production of sex pheromones in male fruit flies, according to a new paper published in the journal Science Advances. That, in turn, makes them more attractive to the females of the species.

"We show a direct and positive effect of alcohol consumption on the mating success of male flies," said co-author Ian Keesey of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. "The effect is caused by the fact that alcohol, especially methanol, increases the production of sex pheromones. This in turn makes alcoholic males more attractive to females and ensures a higher mating success rate, whereas the success of drunken male humans with females is likely to be questionable."

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