How archaeologists reconstructed the burning of Jerusalem in 586 BCE

Enlarge (credit: Assaf Peretz/Israel Antiquities Authority)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Archaeologists relied on chemical clues and techniques like FTIR spectroscopy and archaeomagnetic analysis to reconstruct the burning of Jerusalem by Babylonian forces around 586 BCE.

Archaeologists have uncovered new evidence in support of Biblical accounts of the siege and burning of the city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians around 586 BCE, according to a September paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Hebrew bible contains the only account of this momentous event, which included the destruction of Solomon's Temple. “The Babylonian chronicles from these years were not preserved,” co-author Nitsan Shalom of Tel Aviv University in Israel told New Scientist. According to the biblical account, “There was a violent and complete destruction, the whole city was burned and it stayed completely empty, like the descriptions you see in [the Book of] Lamentations about the city deserted and in complete misery.”

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Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing

Enlarge / A Huawei Technologies Co. Mate X5 smartphone arranged in Hong Kong, China, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty)

Every large smartphone maker except Apple is betting that “foldable” phones will help revive a lackluster mobile market, despite the devices still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers.

Foldables, which have a screen that opens like a book or compact mirror, barely exceed a 1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced.

But Samsung has doubled down on the product, investing heavily in marketing this year. In July, the Korean group released its 5G Galaxy Z series.

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A cat video highlighted a big year for lasers in space

Enlarge / Taters, the orange tabby cat of a Jet Propulsion Laboratory employee, stars in a video beamed from deep space by NASA's Psyche spacecraft. The graphics illustrate several features from the tech demo, such as Psyche’s orbital path, Palomar’s telescope dome, and technical information about the laser and its data bit rate. Tater’s heart rate, color, and breed are also on display. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

It's been quite a year for laser communications in space. In October and November, NASA launched two pioneering demonstrations to test high-bandwidth optical communication links, and these tech demos are now showing some initial results.

On December 11, a laser communications terminal aboard NASA's Psyche spacecraft on the way to an asteroid linked up with a receiver in Southern California. The near-infrared laser beam contained an encoded message in the form of a 15-second ultra-high-definition video showing a cat bouncing around a sofa, chasing the light of a store-bought laser toy.

Laser communications offer the benefit of transmitting data at a higher rate than achievable with conventional radio links. In fact, the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment on the Psyche spacecraft is testing technologies capable of sending data at rates 10 to 100 times greater than possible on prior missions.

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SpaceX launches two rockets—three hours apart—to close out a record year

Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket lifted off Thursday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.

The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters and the Falcon 9's first stage landed back on Earth for reuse.

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TV Technica 2023: These were our favorite shows and binges of the year

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

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. The segment for The Great contains major reveals, so skip it if you haven't watched the latest season. (We'll give you a heads-up when we get there.)

Everything was coming up mystery in 2023, judging by our picks for Ars Technica's annual list of the best TV shows of the year. There's just something about the basic framework that seems to lend itself to television. Showrunners and studios have clearly concluded that genre mashups with a mystery at the center is a reliable winning formula, whether it's combined with science fiction (Silo, Bodies, Pluto), horror (Fall of the House of Usher), or comedy (Only Murders in the Building, The Afterparty). And there's clearly still plenty of room in the market for the classic police procedural (Dark Winds, Poker Face, Justified: City Primeval). Even many shows we loved that were not overt nods to the genre still had some kind of mystery at their core (Yellowjackets, Mrs. Davis), so one could argue it's almost a universal narrative framework.

Streaming platforms continue to lead, with Netflix, Apple TV+, and FX/Hulu dominating this year's list. But there are signs that the never-ending feast of new fare we've enjoyed for several years now might be leveling off a bit, as the Hollywood strikes took their toll and the inevitable reshuffling and consolidation continues. That would be great news for budgets strained by subscribing to multiple platforms, less so for those who have savored the explosion of sheer creativity during what might be remembered as a Golden Age of narrative storytelling on TV.

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How a forensic artist reconstructed the face of 500-year-old Inca “ice maiden”

Enlarge / The final approximation of the Incan girl dubbed "Juanita" wearing clothing similar to what she was wearing when she died. (credit: Dagmara Socha)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Swedish forensic artist Oscar Nilsson combined CT scans of frozen mummified remains with skull measurements and DNA analysis to reconstruct the face of a 500-year-old Inca girl.

In 1995, archaeologists discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a young Inca girl high in the mountains of Peru, thought to have died as part of a sacrificial ritual known as Capacocha (or Ohapaq hucha). In late October, we learned how she most likely looked in life, thanks to a detailed reconstruction by Swedish forensic article Oscar Nilsson. A plaster bust of the reconstruction was unveiled at a ceremony at the Andean Sanctuaries Museum of the Catholic University of Santa Maria in Arequipa, Peru, where the girl's remains (now called Juanita) have been on near-continuous display since her discovery.

"I thought I'd never know what her face looked like when she was alive," archaeologist Johan Reinhardt told the BBC. Reinhardt had found the remains with Peruvian mountaineer Miguel Zárate at an altitude of 21,000 feet (6,400 meters) during an expedition to Ampato, one of the highest volcanos in the Andes. "Now 28 years later, this has become a reality thanks to Oscar Nilsson's reconstruction."

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Chinese smartphone company says it wants to build a Porsche challenger

Enlarge / I know it looks like someone grafted the nose from a McLaren onto a Porsche Taycan, but it's actually a Xiaomi SU7. (credit: Xiaomi)

Xiaomi, a Chinese maker of consumer electronics perhaps best known for taking plenty of inspiration from Apple, is getting into the automotive industry. Earlier today in Beijing, Xaiomi CEO Lei Jun debuted the Speed Ultra 7, a luxury electric vehicle that's squarely aimed at the spot in the market currently served by the Porsche Taycan and Tesla Model S sedans.

Xiaomi wanted to branch out from smartphones and tablets to EVs—that wasn't exactly news, as the company announced its plans about three years ago. Lei has big ambitions though; he wants Xiaomi to be a top-five automaker within the next two decades.

Making a car isn't that hard, Lei told the audience. "If you want to build a car, 300 or 400 people and a bit over a billion, and you find a benchmark car and you just need do reverse-engineering and you can do it," Lei said, then acknowledged that "to build a good car it is still very very difficult."

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Injection of “smart insulin” regulates blood glucose levels for one week

Enlarge / Smart insulin has the potential to make injections far less frequent. (credit: A. Martin UW Photography)

People with type I diabetes have to inject themselves multiple times a day with manufactured insulin to maintain healthy levels of the hormone, as their bodies do not naturally produce enough. The injections also have to be timed in response to eating and exercise, as any consumption or use of glucose has to be managed.

Research into glucose-responsive insulin, or “smart” insulin, hopes to improve the quality of life for people with type I diabetes by developing a form of insulin that needs to be injected less frequently, while providing control of blood-glucose levels over a longer period of time.

A team at Zhejiang University, China, has recently released a study documenting an improved smart insulin system in animal models—the current work doesn’t involve any human testing. Their insulin was able to regulate blood-glucose levels for a week in diabetic mice and minipigs after a single subcutaneous injection.

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Getting to the bottom of how red flour beetles absorb water through their butts

Enlarge / Who doesn't thrill to the sight of a microscopic cross-section of a beetle's rectum? You're welcome. (credit: Kenneth Veland Halberg)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: red flour beetles can use their butts to suck water from the air, helping them survive in extremely dry environments. Scientists are honing in on the molecular mechanisms behind this unique ability.

The humble red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is a common pantry pest feeding on stored grains, flour, cereals, pasta, biscuits, beans, and nuts. It's a remarkably hardy creature, capable of surviving in harsh arid environments due to its unique ability to extract fluid not just from grains and other food sources, but also from the air. It does this by opening its rectum when the humidity of the atmosphere is relatively high, absorbing moisture through that opening, and converting it into fluid that is then used to hydrate the rest of the body.

Scientists have known about this ability for more than a century, but biologists are finally starting to get to the bottom (ahem) of the underlying molecular mechanisms, according to a March paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. This will inform future research on how to interrupt this hydration process to better keep red flour beetle populations in check, since they are highly resistant to pesticides. They can also withstand even higher levels of radiation than the cockroach.

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Ars Technica’s best video games of 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

It’s been a real period of feast or famine in the video game industry of late. Last year in this space, we lamented how COVID-related development delays meant a dearth of big-budget blockbusters that would usually fill a year-end list. In 2023, many of those delays finally expired, leading to a flood of long-anticipated titles over just a few months.

But the year in games didn’t stop there. Beyond the usual big-budget suspects, there were countless delightful surprises from smaller indie studios, many of which came out of nowhere to provide some of the most memorable interactive experiences of the year.

These two trends make it difficult to narrow this year’s best games down to just 20 titles. The “shortlist” we assembled during the winnowing process easily approached 50 titles, most of which could have easily made the list in a less packed year—or been swapped with a game that did make this year’s list.

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No last-minute reprieve, US ban on some Apple Watch sales now in effect

Enlarge / The Apple Watch Ultra 2. (credit: Apple)

Apple is banned from selling the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 in the US after President Joe Biden’s administration refused to grant a reprieve from a trade tribunal’s decision that it had infringed another company’s patents.

Apple confirmed on Tuesday it had appealed against the earlier ruling from the US International Trade Commission, which stems from a patent dispute with health technology company Masimo.

Biden’s administration had 60 days from the ITC decision, which was handed down in October, to decide whether to allow it to take effect. The authority to decide whether to intervene was delegated by the White House to the US trade representative, Katherine Tai.

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Watch sand defy gravity and flow uphill thanks to “negative friction”

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: how applying magnetic forces to individual "micro-roller" particles spurs collective motion, producing some pretty counter-intuitive results.

Engineering researchers at Lehigh University have discovered that sometimes sand can actually flow uphill. (credit: Lehigh University)

We intuitively understand that the sand pouring through an hourglass, for example, forms a neat roughly pyramid-shaped pile at the bottom, in which the grains near the surface flow over an underlying base of stationary particles. Avalanches and sand dunes exhibit similar dynamics. But scientists at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania have discovered that applying a magnetic torque can actually cause sand-like particles to collectively flow uphill in seeming defiance of gravity, according to a September paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Sand is pretty fascinating stuff from a physics standpoint. It's an example of a granular material, since it acts both like a liquid and a solid. Dry sand collected in a bucket pours like a fluid, yet it can support the weight of a rock placed on top of it, like a solid, even though the rock is technically denser than the sand. So sand defies all those tidy equations describing various phases of matter, and the transition from flowing "liquid" to a rigid "solid" happens quite rapidly. It's as if the grains act as individuals in the fluid form, but are capable of suddenly banding together when solidarity is needed, achieving a weird kind of "strength in numbers" effect.

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Elon Musk will see you in court: The top Twitter and X Corp. lawsuits of 2023

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks at the Atreju political convention organized by Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) on December 15, 2023 in Rome, Italy. (credit: Getty Images | Antonio Masiello )

Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter, now called X, began with a lawsuit. When Musk tried to break a $44 billion merger agreement, Twitter filed a lawsuit that gave Musk no choice but to complete the deal.

In the year-plus since Musk bought the company, he's been the defendant and plaintiff in many more lawsuits involving Twitter and X Corp. As 2023 comes to a close, this article rounds up a selection of notable lawsuits involving the Musk-led social network and provides updates on the status of the cases.

Musk sues Twitter law firm

Musk seemingly held a grudge against the law firm that helped Twitter force Musk to complete the merger. In July, X Corp. sued Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in an attempt to claw back the $90 million that Twitter paid the firm before Musk completed the acquisition.

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Science lives here: take a virtual tour of the Royal Institution in London

Enlarge / The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 and is still located in the same historic building at 21 Albermarle Street in London. (credit: Griffindor/CC BY-SA 3.0)

If you're a fan of science, and especially science history, no trip to London is complete without visiting the Royal Institution, browsing the extensive collection of artifacts housed in the Faraday Museum and perhaps taking in an evening lecture by one of the many esteemed scientists routinely featured—including the hugely popular annual Christmas lectures. (The lecture theater may have been overhauled to meet the needs of the 21st century but walking inside still feels a bit like stepping back through time.) So what better time than the Christmas season to offer a virtual tour of some of the highlights contained within the historic walls of 21 Albemarle Street?

The Royal Institution was founded in 1799 by a group of leading British scientists. This is where Thomas Young explored the wave theory of light (at a time when the question of whether light was a particle or wave was hotly debated); John Tyndall conducted experiments in radiant heat; Lord Rayleigh discovered argon; James Dewar liquified hydrogen and invented the forerunner of the thermos; and father-and-son duo William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg invented x-ray crystallography.

No less than 14 Nobel laureates have conducted ground-breaking research at the Institution over the ensuing centuries, but the 19th century physicist Michael Faraday is a major focus. In fact, there is a full-sized replica of Faraday's magnetic laboratory—where he made so many of his seminal discoveries—in the original basement room where he worked, complete with an old dumbwaiter from when the room was used as a servant's hall. Its arrangement is based on an 1850s painting by one of Faraday's friends and the room is filled with objects used by Faraday over the course of his scientific career.

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People can see what you want to know by shaking wrapped Christmas gifts

Enlarge / Shake, shake, shake: this adorable young child would love to guess what he's getting for Christmas this year. (credit: Johns Hopkins University)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2023, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: New research shows it’s incredibly easy for people watching others shake boxes to tell what they’re up to.

Christmas Day is a time for opening presents and finally ending the suspense of what one is receiving this year, but chances are some of us may have already guessed what's under the wrapping—perhaps by strategically shaking the boxes for clues about its contents. According to a November paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, if someone happened to see you shaking a wrapped gift, they would be able to tell from those motions what you were trying to learn by doing so.

“There are few things more delightful than seeing a child’s eyes light up as they pick up a present and wonder what might be inside,” said co-author Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University, who studies how vision and thought interact. “What our work shows is that your mind is able to track the information they are seeking. Just as they might be able to tell what’s inside the box by shaking it around, you can tell what they are trying to figure out when they shake it.” Christmas presents are "the perfect real-life example of our experiment.”

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The 20 most-read stories of 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Every so often, you live through a year that you know you're going to remember. Sometimes it's because of a personal milestone. Other times it's because of noteworthy events that affected all of us in one way or another. And in some years, it's because we were all surprised by unanticipated and rapid technological advances.

2023 definitely will be a year that will be remembered. On the tech side, the biggest story was AI, due in no small part to rapid advances in large language models. We had news about space flight, hackers, operating systems, and even music players.

Read on to find out which stories resonated the most with our readers throughout the year.

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Film Technica: Our favorite movies of 2023

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything too major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed films that some might consider spoiler-y.

It's been an odd couple of years for film as the industry struggles to regain its footing in the wake of a devastating global pandemic, but there are reasons to be optimistic about its future, both from a box office and variety standpoint. This was the year that the blockbuster superhero franchises that have dominated for more than a decade finally showed signs of faltering; the Marvel and DC Universe releases this year were mostly fine, but only one (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) made our 2023 year-end list. There were just so many of them, one after the other, adding up to serious superhero fatigue.

We still love our blockbusters, of course. This was also the summer of "Barbenheimer," as audiences flocked to theaters for the unlikely pairing of Barbie and Oppenheimer, breaking a few box office records in the process. It was also a good year for smaller niche fare by younger directors—including two re-imaginings of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—as well as a new film from the legendary Martin Scorsese (Killers of the Flower Moon).

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Corvids seem to handle temporary memories the way we do

Enlarge / A jackdaw tries to remember what color it was thinking of. (credit: Frans Buiter / 500px)

Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.

This is far from the first time that bird species such as corvids and parrots have shown that they can think like us in certain ways. Jackdaws are clever corvids that belong to the same family as crows and ravens. After putting a pair of them to the test, an international team of researchers saw that the birds’ working memory operates the same way as that of humans and higher primates. All of these species use what’s termed “attractor dynamics,” where they organize information into specific categories.

Unfortunately for them, that means they also make the same mistakes we do. "Jackdaws (Corvus monedula) have similar behavioral biases as humans; memories are less precise and more biased as memory demands increase,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Communications Biology.

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PAX Unplugged 2023: How indie devs build and sell new board games

Enlarge / Given only this sign, and a glimpse of some pieces, a constant stream of playtesters stopped by to check out what was then called Corporate Vampire. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

“You don’t want Frenzy. Frenzy is a bad thing. It might seem like it’s good, but trust me, you want to have a blood supply. Frenzy leads to Consequences.”

It’s mid-afternoon in early December in downtown Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Convention Center, and I’m in the Unpub room at PAX Unplugged. Michael Schofield and Tim Broadwater of Design Thinking Games have booked one of the dozens of long card tables to show their game Corporate Vampire to anybody who wants to try it. Broadwater is running the game and explaining the big concepts while Schofield takes notes. Their hope is that after six revisions and 12 smaller iterations, their game is past the point where someone can break it. But they have to test that disheartening possibility in public.

I didn’t expect to spend so much of my first PAX Unplugged hanging around indie game makers. But with the tabletop industry expanding after some massive boom years, some Stranger Things and Critical Role infusions, and, of course, new COVID-borne habits, it felt like a field that was both more open to outsiders than before and also very crowded. I wanted to see what this thing, so big it barely fit inside a massive conference center, felt like at the smaller tables, to those still navigating their way into the industry.

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US agency tasked with curbing risks of AI lacks funding to do the job

Enlarge / They know... (credit: Aurich / Getty)

US president Joe Biden’s plan for containing the dangers of artificial intelligencealready risks being derailed by congressional bean counters.

A White House executive order on AI announced in October calls on the US to develop new standards for stress-testing AI systems to uncover their biases, hidden threats, and rogue tendencies. But the agency tasked with setting these standards, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), lacks the budget needed to complete that work independently by the July 26, 2024, deadline, according to several people with knowledge of the work.

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Banks use your deposits to loan money to fossil-fuel, emissions-heavy firms

Enlarge (credit: d3sign)

When you drop money in the bank, it looks like it’s just sitting there, ready for you to withdraw. In reality, your institution makes money on your money by lending it elsewhere, including to the fossil fuel companies driving climate change, as well as emissions-heavy industries like manufacturing.

So just by leaving money in a bank account, you’re unwittingly contributing to worsening catastrophes around the world. According to a new analysis, for every $1,000 dollars the average American keeps in savings, each year they indirectly create emissions equivalent to flying from New York to Seattle. “We don’t really take a look at how the banks are using the money we keep in our checking account on a daily basis, where that money is really circulating,” says Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, which published the analysis. “But when we look under the hood, we see that there's a lot of fossil fuels.”

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Laptops’ 2023 quantum leap: 5 computers we’ll still be talking about in 2024

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

You'll never uncover The Next Great Thing if you don't deviate from the norm. When looking back at 2023's laptops, we can see that many were merely refreshed designs—approaches that already work. But what happens when a company explores a design that, though not the most appealing today, might lead us to a new trend tomorrow?

You might end up with some computers that many, or even most, people aren't currently interested in buying. But you could also end up glimpsing the designs that influence future laptops.

The laptops we're about to look at all defied trends in some way, and we're curious to see if they impact the laptop industry beyond 2023. We'll also look at the challenges these ideas might face in the future—and some ways they could improve.

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Study: “Smarter” dogs think more like humans to overcome their biases

Enlarge / Look at this very good boy taking a test to determine the origin of his spatial bias for a study on how dogs think. (credit: Eniko Kubinyi)

Research has shown that if you point at an object, a dog will interpret the gesture as a directional cue, unlike a human toddler, who will more likely focus on the object itself. It's called spatial bias, and a recent paper published in the journal Ethology offers potential explanations for why dogs interpret the gesture the way that they do. According to researchers at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, the phenomenon arises from a combination of how dogs see (visual acuity) and how they think, with "smarter" dog breeds prioritizing an object's appearance as much as its location. This suggests the smarter dogs' information processing is more similar to humans.

The authors wanted to investigate whether spatial bias in dogs is sensory or cognitive, or a combination of the two. "Very early on, children interpret the gesture as pointing to the object, while dogs take the pointing as a directional cue," said co-author Ivaylo Iotchev. "In other words, regardless of the intention of the person giving the cue, the meaning for children and dogs is different. This phenomenon has previously been observed in dogs using a variety of behavioral tests, ranging from simple associative learning to imitation, but it had never been studied per se."

Their experimental sample consisted of dogs used in a previous 2018 study plus dogs participating specifically in the new study, for a total of 82 dogs. The dominant breeds were border collies (19), vizslas (17), and whippets (6). Each animal was brought into a small empty room with their owner and one of the experimenters present. The experimenter stood 3 meters away from the dog and owner. There was a training period using different plastic plates to teach the dogs to associate either the presence or absence of an object, or its spatial location, with the presence or absence of food. Then they tested the dogs on a series of tasks.

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Daily Telescope: A simple shot of the Milky Way high above France and Spain

Enlarge / The Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees, right on the French and Spanish border. (credit: bulbs_01_frizzle)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 21, and today's image showcases our very own Milky Way Galaxy above the Pyrenees mountain range, which separates Spain from the rest of Europe.

It was sent in by a reader who captured it while hiking through the mountains and in their words bivvying—a new word for "minimalist camping" that I learned about five minutes ago. I'm jealous. Hiking through the Pyrenees and gazing at the stars at night sounds like a wonderful dream. The photographer told me they are no great astrophotographer, but that the skies were so dark and brilliant that even this single exposure photo taken with a Fuji X100 APS camera looks stunning.

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Great British Bake Off’s festive Christmas desserts aren’t so naughty after all

Enlarge / Great British Bake Off judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith (top) and presenters Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding. (credit: Mark Bourdillon/Love Productions/Channel 4)

The Great British Bake Off (TGBBO)—aka The Great British Baking Show in the US and Canada—features amateur bakers competing each week in a series of baking challenges, culminating in a single winner. The recipes include all manner of deliciously decadent concoctions, including the occasional Christmas dessert. But many of the show's Christmas recipes might not be as bad for your health as one might think, according to a new paper published in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal, traditionally devoted to more light-hearted scientific papers.

TGBBO made its broadcast debut in 2010 on the BBC, and its popularity grew quickly and spread across the Atlantic. The show was inspired by the traditional baking competitions at English village fetes (see any British cozy murder mystery for reference). Now entering its 15th season, the current judges are Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, with Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond serving as hosts/presenters, providing (occasionally off-color) commentary. Each week features a theme and three challenges: a signature bake, a technical challenge, and a show-stopper bake.

The four co-authors of the new BMJ study—Joshua Wallach of Emory University and Yale University's Anant Gautam, Reshma Ramachandran, and Joseph Ross—are avid fans of TGBBO, which they declare to be "the greatest television baking competition of all time." They are also fans of desserts in general, noting that in medieval England, the Catholic Church once issued a decree requiring Christmas pudding four weeks before Christmas. Those puddings were more stew-like, containing things like prunes, raisins, carrots, nuts, spices, grains, eggs, beef, and mutton. Hence, those puddings were arguably more "healthy" than the modern take on desserts, which contain a lot more butter and sugar in particular.

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For the first time, ULA’s Vulcan rocket is fully stacked at Cape Canaveral

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket stands 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall with the addition of its payload fairing. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket has been fully assembled at Cape Canaveral, Florida, in preparation for its inaugural flight next month.

Technicians hoisted the Vulcan rocket's payload fairing, containing a commercial lunar lander from Astrobotic, on top of the launch vehicle Wednesday morning at ULA's Vertical Integration Facility. This milestone followed the early morning transfer of the payload fairing from a nearby facility where Astrobotic's lunar lander was fueled for its flight to the Moon.

ULA's new rocket has rolled between its vertical hangar and the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station several times for countdown rehearsals and fueling tests. But ULA only needed the Vulcan rocket's first stage and upper stage to complete those tests. The addition of the payload shroud Wednesday marked the first time ULA has fully stacked a Vulcan rocket, standing some 202 feet (61.6 meters) tall, still surrounded by scaffolding and work platforms inside its assembly building.

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What would you do with a used Rolls-Royce Olympus engine from Concorde?

Enlarge / British Airways Aerospatiale BAC Concorde taking off with afterburners blazing. (credit: aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

If you're a bit of a plane nerd—and if you're reading this site, the odds are good that you are—a rather interesting eBay auction ended over the weekend. The auction site knows it as item number 116001533010; a less anodyne description would be a Rolls-Royce Olympus 593 turbojet engine, one of four that powered a Concorde—complete with afterburner attached.

The world's first and most successful supersonic airliner, Concorde was an ambitious and extremely expensive joint project developed by the UK and France. The initial plans started in 1956, with the first in a series of studies commissioned by the British Ministry of Supply, which set about exploring the idea of a supersonic transport plane—then, as now, the sole preserve of military jets.

A parallel effort was also underway across the Channel in France, with both countries coming up with fairly similar designs. At some point, bean counters on both sides of la manche realized that the cost of developing such an extreme aircraft was perhaps better shared than borne alone, and in 1962 the two projects—one headed by the British Aircraft Corporation, the other by Sud-Aviation combined—were merged.

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EU will hold 3 major porn sites to same regulations as Meta, X

Enlarge (credit: ToolX via Getty Images)

Three of the world’s biggest pornography sites will be hit with new regulatory curbs including stricter requirements on age verification, after EU regulators determined the adult platforms fell within the scope of a landmark law designed to police content online.

Xvideos, Pornhub, and Stripchat will be from April subject to the obligations of “very large online platforms” under the Digital Services Act (DSA), according to three people familiar with the move.

That designation applies to platforms with more than 45 million users and has so far been applied to tech groups such as Facebook, Wikipedia, and TikTok.

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Daily Telescope: A colorful Christmas tree in the night sky

Enlarge / A new image of NGC 2264, also known as the "Christmas Tree Cluster." (credit: NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 20, and today's image showcases two astronomical objects—the Cone Nebula and the Christmas Tree Cluster—that combined are known as NGC 2264. (NGC, by the way, stands for New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars).

These astronomical objects are found about 2,300 light-years from Earth, and because they are relatively close, they are popular astronomical objects to observe in the night sky. This is a composite image from NASA and other organizations that combines observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory along with those from ground-based telescopes. The image has been rotated clockwise 160 degrees so that the "Christmas tree" appears standing.

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Dark matter might be keeping an even darker secret

Enlarge / A compact dwarf galaxy, which may have features that are difficult to explain with standard models of dark matter. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA)

It is impossible for a telescope to image and far from being completely understood, yet dark matter is everywhere.

The deepest mysteries about dark matter relate to its nature and behavior. The prevailing idea regarding dark matter is the cold dark matter theory (CDM), which posits that dark matter is made up of low-velocity particles that do not interact with each other. This thinking has been debated—and it is up for debate again. Led by astrophysicist Hai-Bo Yu, a team of researchers from the University of California Riverside have come up with an alternative idea that explains two extremes where cold dark matter doesn't work well.

Galaxies and galaxy clusters are thought to be surrounded by halos of dark matter. At one end of the controversy are galactic dark matter halos that are too dense to be consistent with CDM, and at the other are galactic dark matter halos too diffuse for CDM to make sense of. Yu and his colleagues instead suggest that some dark force (sorry Star Wars fans—not the Force) causes dark matter particles to smash into each other. This is Self-Interacting Dark Matter, or SIDM.

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Google’s loss to Epic Games leads to $700M settlement with users, states

Enlarge (credit: SOPA Images / Contributor | LightRocket)

After Epic Games proved that Google’s Android app store monopoly violates antitrust law, Google has agreed to pay a $700 million settlement with US states and consumers, Reuters reported.

Once a judge approves the settlement, the largest chunk—$630 million—will go to consumers who allegedly were hit with unnecessary fees for in-app transactions. Google has not admitted to any wrongdoing, but each eligible consumer will receive at least $2, and some will receive more. Individual payouts will vary, depending on how much consumers spent in the Google Play Store between August 16, 2016 and September 30, 2023.

The remaining $70 million will go to states that joined the settlement, which includes all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.

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Hurricane Larry dumped 100,000 microplastics per sq. meter on Newfoundland each day

Enlarge (credit: J Marshall/NASA/ESA/T. Pesquet/Alamy)

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as opposed to, say, a highly populated city, where you’d expect to find lots of microplastics.

As Larry passed over Newfoundland, the instrument gobbled up what fell from the sky. That included rain, of course, but also gobs of microplastics, defined as bits smaller than 5 millimeters, or about the width of a pencil eraser. At its peak, Larry was depositing over 100,000 microplastics per square meter of land per day, the researchers found in a recent paper published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. Add hurricanes, then, to the growing list of ways that tiny plastic particles are not only infiltrating every corner of the environment, but readily moving between land, sea, and air.

As humanity churns out exponentially more plastic in general, so does the environment get contaminated with exponentially more microplastics. The predominant thinking used to be that microplastics would flush into the ocean and stay there: Washing synthetic clothing like polyester, for instance, releases millions of microfibers per load of laundry, which then flow out to sea in wastewater. But recent research has found that the seas are in fact burping the particles into the atmosphere to blow back onto land, both when waves break and when bubbles rise to the surface, flinging microplastics into sea breezes.

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Daily Telescope: James Webb zooms in on Uranus

Enlarge / James Webb Space Telescope captures a wide view of Uranus. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI)

Good morning. It's December 19, and as we get closer to the year-end holidays your humble space correspondent is starting to get a little stir-crazy. Hence the reason for today's abdominal, I mean abominable, headline.

This amazingly cool image of Uranus comes from the Near-Infrared Camera on the James Webb Space Telescope. This wide-field image shows Uranus with an assortment of background galaxies and 14 of its 27 moons, including Oberon and Titania. We can also see the north polar cap gleaming a bright white, as well as the planet's rather faint (in visible light) inner and outer rings.

I've also included the close-up image of Uranus, which is really quite stunning with all of its various rings.

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An Interview with Cities: Skylines 2 developer’s CEO, Mariina Hallikainen

Enlarge / Colossal Order CEO Mariina Hallikainen, from the company's "Winter Recap" video. (credit: Colossal Order/Paradox Interactive/YouTube)

It's not often you see the CEO of a developer suggest their game is "cursed" in an official, professionally produced video, let alone a video released to celebrate that game. But Colossal Order, and its CEO, are not a typical developer. And Cities: Skylines 2 has not had anything close to a typical release.

In a "Winter Recap" video up today for Cities: Skylines 2 (C:S2), CEO Mariina Hallikainen says that her company's goal was to prevent the main issue they had with the original Cities: Skylines: continuing work on a game that was "not a technical masterpiece" for 10 years or more. The goal with C:S2 was to use the very latest technology and build everything new.

"We are trying to make a city-building game that will last for a decade," Hallikainen says in the video. "People didn't understand; we aren't using anything from Cities: Skylines. We're actually building everything new." Henri Haimakainen, game designer, says Colossal Order is "like fighting against ourselves, in a way. We are our own worst competition," in trying to deliver not only the original game, but more.

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Daily Telescope: Tracking the Sun’s path every day across the sky

Enlarge / The path of the Sun over Germany. (credit: Frank Niessen/IAU OAE)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 18, and today's photo is an homage to the forthcoming winter solstice—which will visit the Northern Hemisphere on Thursday evening.

This image was a second-place finisher in a recent competition by the International Astronomical Union's Office of Education. This year's contest welcomed astrophotography enthusiasts at all skill levels, including images taken with smartphones.

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Love at first ride: The Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp gravel e-bike

Enlarge / The Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp taking a break from central Illinois gravel. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

If the question is "what is the ideal number of bikes to own," the answer is usually "n+1." Whether you are into gravel trails, BMX, mountain biking, road biking, or cyclecross, there's a bike for that.  But after spending a couple of months riding the Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp, the answer could actually be n.

The $6,500 Turbo Creo 2 Comp is a gravel e-bike that Specialized calls "category defying." It looks the result of an illicit tryst between a gravel bike and a mountain bike. With the motor, the is a double-duty road-plus-gravel machine—at least that's what Specialized claims. And it turns out Specialized is on to something.

The proportions on the Creo are spot-on. You can see the charging port for the integrated battery near the bottom of the seat tube (credit: Eric Bangeman)

The Turbo Creo 2 Comp is certainly eye-catching. Not only is the "Harvest Gold" colorway easy on the eyes, but the thickness of the downtube and tires also grab the viewer's attention. The massive downtube is necessary because that's where the 320 Wh integrated battery lives. The chunky, mountain-bike-appropriate 700 x 47 tires, however, are a statement of intent by the Creo 2 Comp, screaming, "Ride me anywhere you want—I'm up for it."

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How Microsoft’s cybercrime unit has evolved to combat increased threats

Microsoft's Cybercrime Center. (credit: Microsoft)

Governments and the tech industry around the world have been scrambling in recent years to curb the rise of online scamming and cybercrime. Yet even with progress on digital defenses, enforcement, and deterrence, the ransomware attacks, business email compromises, and malware infections keep on coming. Over the past decade, Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has forged its own strategies, both technical and legal, to investigate scams, take down criminal infrastructure, and block malicious traffic.

The DCU is fueled, of course, by Microsoft's massive scale and the visibility across the Internet that comes from the reach of Windows. But DCU team members repeatedly told WIRED that their work is motivated by very personal goals of protecting victims rather than a broad policy agenda or corporate mandate.

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A top-secret Chinese spy satellite just launched on a supersized rocket

Enlarge / A Long March 5 rocket, the largest launcher in China's inventory, deployed a classified Chinese military satellite into orbit Friday. (credit: CASC)

China's largest rocket apparently wasn't big enough to launch the country's newest spy satellite, so engineers gave the rocket an upgrade.

The Long March 5 launcher flew with a payload fairing some 20 feet (6.2 meters) taller than its usual nose cone when it took off on Friday with a Chinese military spy satellite. This made the Long March 5, with a height of some 200 feet, the tallest rocket China has ever flown.

Adding to the intrigue, the Chinese government claimed the spacecraft aboard the Long March 5 rocket, named Yaogan-41, is a high-altitude optical remote sensing satellite. These types of surveillance satellites usually fly much closer to Earth to obtain the sharpest images possible of an adversary's military forces and strategically important sites.

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Marketer sparks panic with claims it uses smart devices to eavesdrop on people

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

We've all experienced it or heard about it happening: Someone has a conversation about wanting a red jacket, and then suddenly, it seems like they're seeing ads for red jackets all over the place.

Makers of microphone-equipped electronics sometimes admit to selling voice data to third parties (advertisers). But that's usually voice data accumulated after a user has prompted their device to start listening to them and after they've opted into (preferably not by default) this sort of data collection.

But a marketing company called CMG Local Solutions sparked panic recently by alluding that it has access to people's private conversations by tapping into data gathered by the microphones on their phones, TVs, and other personal electronics, as first reported by 404 Media on Thursday. The marketing firm had said it uses these personal conversations for ad targeting.

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If AI is making the Turing test obsolete, what might be better?

Enlarge (credit: mevans)

If a machine or an AI program matches or surpasses human intelligence, does that mean it can simulate humans perfectly? If yes, then what about reasoning—our ability to apply logic and think rationally before making decisions? How could we even identify whether an AI program can reason? To try to answer this question, a team of researchers has proposed a novel framework that works like a psychological study for software.

"This test treats an 'intelligent' program as though it were a participant in a psychological study and has three steps: (a) test the program in a set of experiments examining its inferences, (b) test its understanding of its own way of reasoning, and (c) examine, if possible, the cognitive adequacy of the source code for the program," the researchers note.

They suggest the standard methods of evaluating a machine’s intelligence, such as the Turing Test, can only tell you if the machine is good at processing information and mimicking human responses. The current generations of AI programs, such as Google’s LaMDA and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, have come close to passing the Turing Test, yet the test results don’t imply these programs can think and reason like humans.

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I’ve used a foldable laptop for a month, and I’m ready to return to a clamshell

Enlarge / Reflective screens and creases aren't the only concerns with foldable PCs. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Specs at a glance: HP Spectre Foldable 17-cs0097nr
Screen	17-inch 1920×2560 OLED touchscreen
OS	Windows 11 Home
CPU	Intel Core i7-1250U
RAM	16GB LPDDR5-5200
Storage	1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Networking	Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3
Ports	2x Thunderbolt 4
Size (folded)	10.91×7.53×0.84 inches
Weight (with keyboard)	3.58 lbs
Battery	94.3 Wh
Warranty	1 year
Price (MSRP)	$5,000
Other	HP Rechargeable MPP2.0 Tilt Pen, Bluetooth keyboard, and HP Envy USB-C Hub included

Although foldable smartphones have been available for five years, the devices are still trying to justify themselves. And after using a foldable-screen laptop as my primary PC for about four weeks, I'm not sure they're ready for prime time.

I'm leaving my time with HP's first foldable laptop with a sense of anticipation for the future of laptops, which I think would benefit from a resurgence of creative ideas that cater to the unique ways people use their computers. But I seriously question if the benefits of having a 17-inch screen in a 12-inch laptop body are worth the trade-offs inherent in today's foldable PCs.

Early participants in the foldable laptop world have an opportunity to define the space, while consumers can decide if this is something they even want. HP's foldable is the most beefed-up option ever, and weeks of use have shown me a lot about what I want and don't want to see when the dust settles.

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How worried should we be about the “AutoSpill” credential leak in Android password managers?

Enlarge / Close up of hand holding smartphone and screen applications with unlocking mobile phones. Concept of technological safety. (credit: Getty Images)

By now, you’ve probably heard about a vulnerability named AutoSpill, which can leak credentials from any of the seven leading password managers for Android. The threat it poses is real, but it’s also more limited and easier to contain than much of the coverage to date has recognized.

This FAQ dives into the many nuances that make AutoSpill hard for most people (yours truly included) to understand. This post wouldn't have been possible without invaluable assistance from Alesandro Ortiz, a researcher who discovered a similar vulnerability in Chrome in 2020.

Q: What is AutoSpill?

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The 2024 Chevrolet Blazer first drive: GM’s EV platform goes mainstream

Enlarge / The new Chevrolet Blazer EV is the latest electric vehicle to use General Motors' Ultium battery platform. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Chevrolet provided flights from Washington to San Diego and accommodation so we could drive the new Blazer EV. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

DEL MAR, Calif.—Americans love midsize SUVs—American automotive product planners, at any rate. These SUVs have supplanted sedans and station wagons as the family-mobile of choice, offering all the advantages of a hatchback with a lofty driving position. Now there's a new one in town, an all-electric version of the Chevrolet Blazer. It's not an EV conversion of the existing Blazer but a new model built on the same dedicated platform as the Cadillac Lyriq. After a few hours driving the new Blazer EV around the outskirts of San Diego, here's what we've learned.

In time, the Blazer EV will be available in three trims (LT, RS, and SS) and in front-, rear-, and all-wheel drive configurations. But for now, Chevy is starting with the Blazer EV RS, available with either a single motor driving the rear wheels and a larger-capacity battery or an all-wheel drive variant with a smaller-capacity battery pack.

Chevy arranged for us to drive the $57,200 Blazer EV RS RWD first, so let's start there. It uses a 102 kWh battery pack to achieve an EPA range of 324 miles (521 km), sending that energy to a 340 hp (254 kW), 325 lb-ft (440 Nm) permanent magnet electric motor.

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Daily Telescope: A space-based camera spys a secretive Project Kuiper satellite

Enlarge / An image of a Kuiper satellite in space. (credit: HEO Space)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's December 13, and today's image comes from a company that images other objects in space—HEO Space. It reveals one of the two Project Kuiper satellites currently undergoing testing in low-Earth orbit.

Project Kuiper is Amazon's answer to SpaceX's Starlink satellite Internet constellation. However, in the run-up to the October launch of the first two demonstration satellites on an Atlas V rocket, Amazon was super secretive about the satellites. It released almost no technical details or any photos. So this in-space image is the best we've got for now.

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Blue Origin sure seems confident it will launch New Glenn in 2024

Enlarge / This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket inside the company's manufacturing facility in Florida. (credit: Blue Origin)

For the first time, it's starting to feel like Jeff Bezos's space company, Blue Origin, might have a shot at launching its long-delayed New Glenn rocket within the next 12 months.

Of course, there's a lot for Blue Origin to test and validate before New Glenn is ready to fly. First, the company's engineers need to fully assemble a New Glenn rocket and raise it on the company's sprawling seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There's a good chance of this happening in the coming months as Blue Origin readies for a series of tanking tests and simulated countdowns at the launch site.

It's tempting to invoke Berger's Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin's history of New Glenn delays, that's probably the safer bet. New Glenn's inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for 2024.

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Here’s how Ducati made its motorbikes reliable under VW Group

Enlarge / In the past you needed to be brave to own an Italian motorcycle. Now you just need to be brave to ride one. (credit: Ducati)

Michael visited the Ducati factory while on a trip to Italy with Lamborghini. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

BOLOGNA, ITALY—For decades, owning an Italian motorcycle required a tradeoff. On one hand, Italian bikemakers led the pack with gorgeous designs and the most exotic, highest-performing engines in the world. No other country could come close to matching the sounds and smells of a Ducati, Moto Guzzi, or Aprilia revving by. But build quality and reliability always presented a challenge for owners, not to mention parts availability and exorbitant maintenance costs.

Ducati arguably led the charge in every regard, setting a standard as the Ferrari of the motorcycle world with eye-catching Rosso Corsa red paint jobs to go along with real racing success in MotoGP and World Superbike thanks to famous—some might say infamous—desmodromic engines. However, In recent years under Volkswagen Group's ownership, Ducati has made great strides in reliability and build quality, which explains to a large extent why 2022 was the firm's most profitable year ever, with 62,000 bikes sold worldwide.

During a recent trip to Italy, I visited the Ducati factory in Bologna to learn how modernizing the production facility at Borgo Panigale helped improve the bikes built there over the decade since joining the Volkswagen group.

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