Enlarge / Transmission electron micrograph of poliovirus type 1. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

Health officials in New York have once again detected poliovirus in wastewater from Rockland County, where a case of paralytic polio occurred last summer.

Wastewater samples from Rockland and several nearby counties were positive for poliovirus for months after the initial case was reported in July, suggesting widespread circulation of the virus in the region.

So far this year, officials have only detected poliovirus in one sample, which was collected from Rockland in February. Two samples from the county taken during March were negative. Before the detection in February, the last positive sample from the region was found in mid-December in Orange County, just north of Rockland. The last positive detection in Rockland was in October.

Enlarge / An AI-generated photo of Pope Francis wearing a puffy white coat that went viral on social media. (credit: @skyferrori on Twitter)

Over the weekend, an AI-generated image of Pope Francis wearing a puffy white coat went viral on Twitter, and apparently many people believed it was a real image. Since then, the puffy pontiff has inspired commentary on the deceptive nature of AI-generated images, which are now nearly photorealistic.

The pope image, created using Midjourney v5 (an AI image synthesis model), first appeared in a tweet by a user named Leon (@skyferrori) on Saturday and quickly began circulating as part of other meme tweets featuring similar images as well, including one that humorously speculates about a pope "lifestyle brand."

Not long after, Twitter attached a reader-added context warning to the tweet that reads, "This is an AI-generated image of Pope Francis. It is not a genuine photo."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

President Joe Biden on Monday signed an executive order barring many uses by the federal government of commercial spyware, which has been increasingly used by other countries in recent years to surveil dissidents, journalists, and politicians.

The signing of the executive order came as administration officials told journalists that roughly 50 US government personnel in at least 10 countries had been infected or targeted by such spyware, a larger number than previously known. The officials didn’t elaborate.

Commercial spyware is sold by a host of companies, with the best known being NSO Group of Israel. The company sells a hacking tool known as Pegasus that can surreptitiously compromise both iPhones and Android devices using “clickless” exploits, meaning they require no user interaction. By sending a text or ringing the device, Pegasus can install spying software that steals contacts, messages, geo locations, and more, even when the text or call isn’t answered. Other companies selling commercial spyware include Cytrox, Candiru, and Paragon.

Enlarge / The new OLED Switch above its predecessor. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Kicking off the week, we have a couple of today-only sales, including a rare discount on Nintendo's Switch OLED and a free $50 Amazon gift card deal on Microsoft's 365 Family office software. There are also price cuts on the PS5 God of War Ragnarök bundle and Apple's four-pack of AirTags.

Nintendo Switch OLED for $310 ($350)

Nintendo's Switch OLED is the best Switch console you can buy. In our review, we praised the larger, upgraded display's completely blacked-out pixels and infinite contrast ratio whether gaming before bed or during the day. We also appreciated the bigger, sturdier hinge, Ethernet-toting dock, and 64GB standard storage, as opposed to 32GB on other Switch models.

We still think the Switch Lite is an unbeatable deal in portable gaming for $200, but for those among us who like the best of the best, the Switch OLED is the ultimate portable gaming device. With today's one-day-only $40 discount, it's a bit more affordable now, too. Samsung's 256GB microSD Evo Select is also on sale for $20, which pairs well with the Switch for game storage.

Enlarge / The 2021, 24-inch iMac with Apple's M1. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple released new updates for most of its software platforms today, including macOS Ventura 13.3, iOS 16.4, iPadOS 16.4, tvOS 16.4, and watchOS 9.4.

These are all feature updates, meaning they actually add new functionality in addition to fixing bugs or addressing security vulnerabilities.

iOS and iPadOS 16.4 add a number of minor features. The headliner is (of course) 21 new emojis, like new heart colors, additional animals, and a shaking head. Beyond that, though, Apple says you'll see improved voice isolation on phone calls, support for notifications from web apps that have been added to your phone's home screen, new ways to weed out duplicates in your Photos library, and a number of bug fixes.

Enlarge / Your last chance to buy individual games for the Wii U and 3DS—assuming you have credits in your wallet account—arrives tonight.

Only a few hours remain for anyone who wants to buy games from the eShops for Nintendo's Wii U and 3DS.

As it promised more than a year ago, Nintendo is shutting down those digital storefronts tonight at 8 pm Eastern, after previously halting the ability to add eShop funds in May 2022. After today, you can still download or re-download any titles you've previously bought from those shops, though that can obviously change in the future. Closing the eShops means that roughly 1,000 digital-only games will no longer be accessible, according to research by VGC, including 335 Virtual Console games that aren't available through the Nintendo Switch Online service.

These kinds of sweeping moves, while perhaps understandable from a business perspective, pose a serious danger to the preservation of many games in the systems' libraries. As Ars detailed earlier this month, video game preservationists are hamstrung by laws and regulations around remote access to DRM-protected work, even if it's kept by research-driven organizations. Nintendo is one of many organizations that, through the Entertainment Software Association, lobbies to prevent libraries from offering legal access to archived games.

Enlarge / A photo of an IBM PC 5155 portable computer running a ChatGPT client written by Yeo Kheng Meng. (credit: Yeo Kheng Meng)

On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.

Vintage computer development projects come naturally to Yeo, who created a Slack client for Windows 3.1 in 2019. "I thought to try something different this time and develop for an even older platform as a challenge," he writes on his blog. In this case, he turned his attention to MS-DOS, a text-only operating system first released in 1981, and ChatGPT, an AI-powered large language model (LLM) released by OpenAI in November.

As a conversational AI model, ChatGPT draws on knowledge scraped from the Internet to answer questions and generate text. Thanks to an API that launched his month, anyone with the programming chops can interface ChatGPT with their own custom application.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )

Elon Musk told Twitter employees that the company is now worth about $20 billion, less than half the amount he paid for it. The New York Times reported that Musk provided the $20 billion figure in an email sent to staff on Friday to announce a new stock compensation program.

"According to Mr. Musk's email about the new stock compensation program, Twitter employees will receive stock in X Corporation, the holding company he used to buy the company. Those awards will be granted under the $20 billion valuation. Mr. Musk also said in the email that he believed Twitter could someday be worth $250 billion," the NYT article said.

Musk "warned workers that Twitter remained in a precarious financial position and, at one point, had been four months away from running out of money," the article said. Musk's email reportedly said bankruptcy was averted because of the "radical changes" he implemented—like staff cuts that reduced the company headcount from about 7,500 to under 2,000.

Enlarge / An illustration of what the inner portion of the TRAPPIST-1 system might look like. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, J. Olmsted (STScI), T. P. Greene (NASA Ames), T. Bell (BAERI), E. Ducrot (CEA), P. Lagage (CEA))

At this point, we've discovered lots of exoplanets that fall under the general label "Earth-like." They're rocky, and many orbit at distances from their host stars to potentially have moderate temperatures. But "like" is doing a lot of work there. In many cases, we have no idea whether they even have an atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect means that the atmosphere can have a huge impact on the planet's temperature. So the Earth-like category can include dry, baking hellscapes like Venus with its massive atmosphere, as well as dry, frozen tundras with sparse atmospheres like Mars.

But we're slowly getting the chance to image the atmospheres of rocky exoplanets. And today, researchers are releasing the results of turning the Webb Space Telescope on a rocky planet orbiting a nearby star, showing that the new hardware is so sensitive that it can detect the star blocking out light originating from the planet. The results suggest that the planet has very little atmosphere and is mostly radiating away heat from being baked by its nearby star.

The ultra-cool dwarf and its seven planets

TRAPPIST-1 is a small, reddish star—in astronomical terminology, it's an "ultra-cool dwarf"—that's about 40 light-years from Earth. While the star itself is pretty nondescript, it's notable for having lots of planets, with seven in total having been identified so far. All of these are small, rocky bodies, much like the ones that occupy the inner portion of our Solar System. While the star emits very little light, the planets are all packed in closer to it than Mercury is to the Sun.

Enlarge / Fitbit's now-dead Challenges feature. (credit: Sherwin Fong)

Today's the day for Google's biggest change yet to Fitbit: It's shutting down some more features. As Google announced in February, the popular fitness gamification features, Fitbit "Challenges" and "Adventures," are being shut down today. Google is also removing the "Open Group" social networking feature.

Getting motivated to work out is tough for some people, so Fitbit's software included a few ways to gamify fitness to keep people interested. Challenges were introduced in 2014 as a way to share and compare your step counts with friends, hopefully motivating both of you to get more exercise. The feature came with badges that could be earned for specific tasks and trophies for winning a battle. Adventures were announced in 2017 as location-specific challenges that highlighted local places that were good for exercise and hiking, like national parks and landmarks. You could tackle these areas solo at your own pace or participate in multiplayer "Adventure Races" where you could track your hiking speed or progress against other Fitbit users. This seems like something that would only get better with Google Maps integration. Oh, well.

Adventures, Challenges, and all player-earned trophies and badges are going away today. The Fitbit community on Reddit has been furious over the feature removals, with the most popular post of the past year being a call to cancel your Fitbit Premium subscription over the changes. On Twitter, Fitbit tried celebrating the company's birthday yesterday, but nearly all the replies were about the feature shutdown and what other services people should switch to. Several users have confirmed today that the features are dead.

Enlarge (credit: nicolamargaret | E+)

On Friday, a US district judge ruled in favor of book publishers suing the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement. The IA’s Open Library project—which partners with libraries to scan print books in their collections and offer them as lendable e-books—had no right to reproduce 127 of the publishers’ books named in the suit, judge John Koeltl decided.

IA's so-called "controlled digital lending" practice "merely creates derivative e-books that, when lent to the public, compete with those [e-books] authorized by the publishers,” Koeltl wrote in his opinion.

Publishers suing—Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley—had alleged that the Open Library provided a way for libraries to avoid paying e-book licensing fees that generate substantial revenue for publishers. These licensing fees are paid by aggregators like OverDrive and constitute a “thriving” market that IA “supplants,” Koeltl wrote. Penguin’s e-book licensing generates $59 million annually, for example.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Future Publishing)

Portions of Twitter's source code recently appeared on GitHub, and Twitter is trying to force GitHub to identify the user or users who posted the code.

GitHub disabled the repository on Friday shortly after Twitter filed a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice but apparently hasn't provided the information Twitter is seeking. Twitter's DMCA takedown notice asked GitHub to provide the code submitter's "upload/download/access history," contact information, IP addresses, and any session information or "associated logs related to this repo or any forks."

The GitHub user who posted the Twitter source code has the username "FreeSpeechEnthusiast," possibly a reference to Twitter owner Elon Musk casting himself as a protector of free speech.

Enlarge / North America was denied the extra-special GR Yaris, but Toyota has remedied that with a GR Corolla, which starts at a rather reasonable $36,995. (credit: Bradley Iger)

After decades of being the brand known for sensible, inoffensive motoring—as spearheaded by models like the Camry and Prius—Toyota has been going through a bit of a reinvention as of late. The brand's roots in motorsport date back to the early 1970s with its rally efforts, and recently the company has been keen to recapture some of that racing spirit.

The first evidence came by way of its joint partnership with Subaru to develop the Scion FR-S (later known as the Toyota 86, and now, in its second generation, the GR86) as well as its more recent collaboration with BMW to produce the Supra and its Bavarian counterpart, the Z4. Now, after building the sensational GR Yaris the gearheads at Toyota's performance-focused Gazoo Racing division have turned their attention to the Corolla, and the result is something that's a far cry from the staid machine that we've come to associate with the name.

Lowered, widened, boosted, and packing a sophisticated all-wheel drive system to go along with a raft of other performance features, the GR Corolla is a nod to Toyota's glory days in the World Rally Championship, and it takes square aim at hot hatches like the Honda Civic Type R and Volkswagen Golf R. To celebrate its introduction, Toyota also introduced two special-edition models: The Circuit Edition—which includes performance hardware that's optional on the Core base model as well as a forged carbon roof, heat extractors on the hood, and some aesthetic upgrades—and this, the Morizo Edition.

Enlarge / The emergency escape system is seen firing on the New Shepard spacecraft Monday morning after its rocket was lost. (credit: Blue Origin)

A little more than six months after the failure of its New Shepard rocket, Blue Origin has published a summary of the findings made by its accident investigation team.

For a private company flying a private launch system, the analysis of this "NS-23" mission is reasonably detailed. Essentially, the rocket's main engine nozzle sustained temperatures that were higher than anticipated, leading to an explosion of the rocket.

The accident occurred at 1 minute and 4 seconds into a research flight that launched on September 12, 2022. The emergency escape system performed as intended, rapidly pulling the spacecraft away from the disintegrating rocket. Had a crew been on board this flight, they would have experienced a significant jolt and some high gravitational forces before landing safely in the West Texas desert.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Android apps digitally signed by China’s third-biggest e-commerce company exploited a zero-day vulnerability that allowed them to surreptitiously take control of millions of end-user devices to steal personal data and install malicious apps, researchers from security firm Lookout have confirmed.

The malicious versions of the Pinduoduo app were available in third-party markets, which users in China and elsewhere rely on because the official Google Play market is off-limits or not easy to access. No malicious versions were found in Play or Apple’s App Store. Last Monday, TechCrunch reported that Pinduoduo was pulled from Play after Google discovered a malicious version of the app available elsewhere. TechCrunch reported the malicious apps available in third-party markets exploited several zero-days, vulnerabilities that are known or exploited before a vendor has a patch available.

Sophisticated attack

A preliminary analysis by Lookout found that at least two off-Play versions of Pinduoduo for Android exploited CVE-2023-20963, the tracking number for an Android vulnerability Google patched in updates that became available to end users two weeks ago. This privilege-escalation flaw, which was exploited prior to Google’s disclosure, allowed the app to perform operations with elevated privileges. The app used these privileges to download code from a developer-designated site and run it within a privileged environment.

Enlarge (credit: Kevin Gill (CC BY 2.0))

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could. They would then go on to use that enormous amount of energy to mine bitcoin, make funny videos on social media, delve into the deepest mysteries of the Universe, and enjoy the bounties of their energy-rich civilization.

But what if the alien civilization was… us? What if we decided to build a Dyson sphere around our sun? Could we do it? How much energy would it cost us to rearrange our solar system, and how long would it take to get our investment back? Before we put too much thought into whether humanity is capable of this amazing feat, even theoretically, we should decide if it’s worth the effort. Can we actually achieve a net gain in energy by building a Dyson sphere?

Spherical Dyson cows

I’ll state from the outset that I'm a theoretical cosmologist, not an engineer. I have absolutely no idea how to go about building a bridge, let alone a structure that reshapes the very face of our Solar System. But I’m willing to bet that nobody knows how to engage in these kinds of mega-engineering challenges. We can’t say for certain what kind of advances in which technologies would be necessary to build a structure that even partially encloses the sun. To speculate on that would be science fiction—fun, but not very meaty.

Enlarge / Recycling is sorted at the Sims Municipal Recycling Facility in New York City in 2015. (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

To jumpstart a paltry market for recycled plastic, governments across the globe are pushing companies to include recycled materials in their products. Last year, the United Kingdom introduced a tax on manufacturers that produce or import plastic packaging containing less than 30 percent recycled plastic. In 2024, New Jersey will begin enforcing similar rules, albeit with lower targets. California now requires that beverage containers be made of 15 percent recycled materials, and Washington will enact a similar requirement later this year. The European Commission, Canada, and Mexico are all considering comparable moves.

Currently, most plastic products are derived from freshly extracted fossil fuels, including crude oil and natural gas. Incorporating some recycled plastic could reduce emissions, and shrink pollution in waterways and landfills, experts say. But collecting, sorting, pulverizing, and melting post-consumer plastics for reuse is expensive. The new laws will potentially help recyclers find buyers for what would otherwise become waste.

But regulators may need a better way to verify that the new laws are working. While companies can enlist a third-party to certify their use of recycled content, most certifiers take a bird’s-eye view, tracking the materials across a range of products and factories. As a result, an item with a “recycled content” label might be completely devoid of recycled content.

Enlarge (credit: Walter Zerla via Getty Images)

Say you are a maker of computer graphics cards, under pressure from investors questioning your green credentials. You know what to do. You email your various departments, asking them to tally up their carbon emissions and the energy they consume. Simple enough. You write a report pledging a more sustainable future, in which your trucks are electrified and solar panels adorn your offices.

Good start, your investors say. But what about the mines that produced the tantalum or palladium in your transistors? Or the silicon wafers that arrived via a lengthy supply chain? And what of when your product is shipped to customers, who install it in a laptop or run it 24/7 inside a data center to train an AI model like GPT-4 (or 5)? Eventually it will be discarded as trash or recycled. Chase down every ton of carbon and the emissions a company creates are many times times higher than it first seemed.

Enlarge (credit: Corey Gaskin)

If you're at all familiar with Garmin's wearables, you know that GPS-equipped running watches have always been the company's primary strength. Garmin's fitness watches have been a staple among athletes due to their features that aren't found on Fitbits and Apple Watches. The Forerunner series is still where the company introduces some of its most innovative tracking and training features.

The Forerunner 955 continues that tradition. It sits atop the Forerunner series as the most feature-packed watch in the bunch, and this year it gains some modern touches like a touchscreen and daily exercise readiness assessments (à la Fitbit's Daily Readiness feature, but free to users), while introducing new features not present on any other Garmin watch. That includes the higher-end Fenix series of watches, from which the Forerunner 955 is also starting to steal some cues, like solar-charging options and multi-band GPS.

We trained with the Forerunner 955 for a few weeks to see how its newest features improve on a platform we already love and to determine just how afraid Garmin should be about Apple or Fitbit catching up.

Enlarge / If this road is your only route to the outside world, it might not matter that your house didn't flood. (credit: Maurice Alcorn / EyeEm)

Climate change produces lots of risks that are difficult to predict. While it will make some events—heatwaves, droughts, extreme storms, etc.—more probable, all of those events depend heavily on year-to-year variation in the weather. So, while the odds may go up, it's impossible to know when one of these events will strike a given location.

By contrast, sea level rise seems far simpler. While there's still uncertainty about just how quickly ocean levels will rise, other aspects seem pretty predictable. Given a predicted rate of sea level rise, it's easy to tell when a site will start ending up underwater. And that sort of analysis has been done for various regions.

But having a property above water won't be much good if flooding nearby means you can't get to a hospital or grocery store when you need to or lose access to electricity or other services. It's entirely possible for rising seas to leave a property high, dry, but uninhabitable as rising seas cut connections to essential services. A group of researchers has analyzed the risk of isolation driven by sea level rise and shows it's a major contributor to the future risks the US faces.