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Scientists have what they say is one of the oldest Mars meteoritesKing to address slavery during Commonwealth speech in Antigua on final leg of Caribbean tourOPEC+ keeps December oil output targets steady ahead of tougher call for 2027Gen Z protests turn violent in GermanyCollege football Week 9 winners and losers, from confident kickers to Halloween horrorsScientists have what they say is one of the oldest Mars meteoritesKing to address slavery during Commonwealth speech in Antigua on final leg of Caribbean tourOPEC+ keeps December oil output targets steady ahead of tougher call for 2027Gen Z protests turn violent in GermanyCollege football Week 9 winners and losers, from confident kickers to Halloween horrors
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Some iPhone Duo screens are already failing

The iPhone Duo launched last week, offering anyone willing to spend $2,000 a chance to experience Apple's first foldable phone. For some early buyers, the morning after isn't going great. Despite the company's big talk about its "precision-engineered" hinge, some devices appear to have a hardware flaw that destroys the device's impressive internal display within hours (or minutes) of use. The Internet is currently overflowing with images of busted iPhone Duos, all sporting almost identical damage. The OLED is marred by several bright lines originating just below the midpoint of the display. These bands of damaged pixels extend all the way to the bottom and right edges. Some units also show lines of dead pixels following the crease from the top to the area where the bright lines begin. Anyone who has seen a damaged OLED panel will be familiar with this type of defect. When the layers of the display are damaged, the pixels no longer receive the correct voltage to illuminate them. Instead, they get the full driving voltage and are permanently on at maximum brightness. Some pixels can get no voltage, leaving them totally black. The only fix is to replace the OLED, but swapping the iPhone Duo's screen reportedly costs half as much as the device itself.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica
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F1 in Texas: The American race that fans love to attend

Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Austin, Texas, and accommodation so Ars could attend the US Grand Prix. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. AUSTIN, Texas—Formula 1 returned to US shores this weekend with its annual visit to the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Once in danger of falling off the calendar due to lack of interest, it’s now one of the most popular tracks on the calendar and, of the US’s three races, it's the one the real fans mostly attend. Unlike Miami or Las Vegas, which race on temporary street circuits, COTA is a permanent race track with plenty of run-off areas instead of concrete walls. Designed by motorcycle racer Kevin Schwanz—Herman Tilke’s company did only the buildings and infrastructure, contrary to popular belief—the track combines a mix of corner speeds with challenging turn sequences, a few heavy braking zones, and plenty of elevation changes. It’s a place Ars knows rather intimately by now. We’ve driven it in everything from an Audi TT-S to a Corvette ZR1 to a bicycle, and that’s just in the real world. Over the years, we’ve been there for F1 to learn about how the sport puts together its broadcasts, how Pirelli designs its tires, and how various tech partners help teams manage their data and strategies. We even saw the race through a neophyte’s eyes. And that’s just F1—we’ve logged many hours there with the World Endurance Championship and IMSA for the Lone Star Le Mans races in sweaty September.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica
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Anthropic officially files for its public debut

Anthropic has officially filed for an IPO, revealing soaring revenue, mounting losses, major enterprise adoption, and an unusual governance structure designed to preserve founder control and its AI safety mission.

via TechCrunch
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Tesla gave up the EV crown. Now it wants to win the autonomy race.

Elon Musk’s “flying” Roadster jumped and flipped through the air this month in a stunt that went viral around the world. But his bigger bet is on changing the way Tesla makes money—and the wider car industry is scrambling to catch up. Five days after the spectacle, made possible by compressed-gas thrusters developed by Musk’s SpaceX, he revealed the companies were exploring a merger that could accelerate his push into autonomous driving. At stake is more than a technological race. Car groups, already grappling with growing Chinese competition, are seeking to move beyond a business model centered on vehicle sales towards one that also generates recurring revenues from software and AI-powered services.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica
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From impulse purchase to pocket studio: The M-Vave FM-1

The M-Vave FM-1 is exactly the kind of device I have a weakness for. I may not have an intended use for the frequency-modulation synthesizer, but when a low price meets a high coolness factor, I'm powerless to keep it out of my cart. Initially billed as a pocket cousin of the famous Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, the FM-1 is a bargain at only $59.72 after fees. At release, it was a cool device that did what it said on the box, but not much else. But in July, some intrepid tinkerers on Reddit’s r/synthdiy board began reverse-engineering the FM-1's stock firmware to expand the device's abilities. By September, custom firmware began appearing. We're not even through October, and there are already more community firmware projects available to install on the FM-1 than I could ever hope to cover.Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica
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A 1,000-mile cloud on Mars may reveal physics never seen in nature

Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months. Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled the cloud’s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet's atmosphere. "We found that we needed to include some exotic physics… physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before," Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and lead author of the study, said in a press release. "Once we included this physics in our simulations, the AMEC emerged just as we hoped.”Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica
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Ice sheet expansion may have started 2,000 years ago, but we canceled that

Barnes Ice Cap sits on the central plateau of Baffin Island, in the Canadian Arctic. It is the last surviving fragment of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the largest of the Pleistocene ice sheets, which at its peak buried most of Canada under two miles of ice and locked away around 80 meters of sea level. That remnant has now yielded direct physical evidence that ice sheets might have reversed their retreat and started to grow again thousands of years ago. In a recent Science study, researchers show that the Laurentide reached its smallest size about 3,600 years ago, then started re-expanding roughly 2,000 years ago, which the team interprets as the opening move of the next glaciation. Apparently, this brand-new ice age was on its way until about 1960, when human-caused climate warming reversed it. Frozen to the bed “Barnes is the last remaining piece of one of the domes of the Laurentide Ice Sheet,” says Nicolás Young, a geologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the study. As that enormous dome thinned through the Holocene, its margin withdrew up onto Baffin Island, and what's left today is the deflated core of something that was once two miles thick. The reason Barnes can testify about its own history, Young explains, comes down to the temperature at its base.Read full article Comments

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NASA updates lander plans for Moon landings, finally solves long-festering Orion issue

During a lengthy news conference on Friday, NASA provided a detailed overview of how it plans to return astronauts to the lunar surface as soon as 2028 as part of its Artemis Program. Although much of the information behind these plans has been previously reported at Ars Technica and elsewhere, this marked the first time NASA has laid them out in detail and acknowledged some substantial changes in the architecture. Most notably, for SpaceX's Starship vehicle, the revised plan calls for the Orion spacecraft to dock with the Starship lunar lander in high-Earth orbit before transiting to the Moon. And for Blue Origin, the mission architecture includes four launches of the New Glenn rocket, but no spacecraft-to-spacecraft refuelings. Additionally, the Blue Origin plans allows for the possibility of its Blue Moon lander rendezvousing with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.Read full article Comments

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Hegseth warns prediction market bets warp military judgment, endanger troops

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo warning military personnel against using nonpublic information to make bets on prediction markets, saying the wagers could give important clues to enemy countries. "Do Not Compromise Military Operations for Personal Financial Gain," said the subject line of an October 20 memo published yesterday by CBS News. Hegseth's memo was sent to senior Pentagon leadership, Combatant Command leaders, and Defense Department field activity directors. Hegseth wrote:Read full article Comments

via Ars Technica