Author name: DJ Henderson

looking-for-friends,-lobsters-may-stumble-into-an-ecological-trap

Looking for friends, lobsters may stumble into an ecological trap

Biology, evolution, groupers, lobsters, ocean science, Science / /

The authors, Mark Butler, Donald Behringer, and Jason Schratwieser, hypothesized that these solution holes represent an ecological trap. The older lobsters that find shelter in a solution hole would emit the chemicals that draw younger ones to congregate with them. But the youngsters would then fall prey to any groupers that inhabit the same solution hole. In other words, what is normally a cue for safety—the signal that there are lots of lobsters present—could lure smaller lobsters into what the authors call a “predatory death trap.”

Testing the hypothesis involved a lot of underwater surveys. First, the authors identified solution holes with a resident red grouper. They then found a series of sites that had equivalent amounts of shelter, but lacked the solution hole and attendant grouper. (The study lacked a control with a solution hole but no grouper, for what it’s worth.) At each site, the researchers started daily surveys of the lobsters present, registering how large they were and tagging any that hadn’t been found in any earlier surveys. This let them track the lobster population over time, as some lobsters may migrate in and out of sites.

To check predation, they linked lobsters (both large and small) via tethers that let them occupy sheltered places on the sea floor, but not leave a given site. And, after the lobster population dynamics were sorted, the researchers caught some of the groupers and checked their stomach contents. In a few cases, this revealed the presence of lobsters that had been previously tagged, allowing them to directly associate predation with the size of the lobster.

Lobster traps

So, what did they find? In sites where groupers were present, the average lobster was 32 percent larger than the control sites. That’s likely to be because over two-thirds of the small lobsters that were tethered to sites with a grouper were dead within 48 hours. At control sites, the mortality rate was about 40 percent. That’s similar to the mortality rates for larger lobsters at the same sites (44 percent) or at sites with groupers (48 percent).

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A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science

books, culture, Folklore, geomythology, history, Mythopedia, natural history, Science / /

Folklorist/historian Adrienne Mayor on her new book Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore

Credit: Princeton University Press

Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian “endless winters.”

Mayor’s work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano’s 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.

Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of “folk science” in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.

When her editor at Princeton University Press approached her about writing a book on geomythology, she opted for an encyclopedia format, which fit perfectly into an existing Princeton series of little encyclopedias about nature. “In this case, I wasn’t going to be working with just Greek and Roman antiquity,” Mayor told Ars. “I had collected very rich files on geomyths around the world. There are even a few modern geomyths in there. You can dip into whatever you’re interested in and skip the rest. Or maybe later you’ll read the ones that didn’t seem like they would be of interest to you but they’re absolutely fascinating.”

Mythopedia is also a true family affair, in that illustrator Michelle Angel is Mayor’s sister. “She does figures and maps for a lot of scholarly books, including mine,” said Mayor. “She’s very talented at making whimsical illustrations that are also very scientifically accurate. She really added information not only to the essays but to the illustrations for Mythopedia.

As she said, Mayor even includes a few modern geomyths in her compendium, as well as imagining in her preface what kind of geomyths might be told thousands of years from today about the origins of climate change for example, or the connection between earthquakes and fracking. “How will people try to explain the perplexing evidence that they’ll find on the planet Earth and maybe on other planets?” she said. “How will those stories be told?”

Ars caught up with Mayor to learn more.

book opened to a particular page, lying on a moss covered rock

Credit: Princeton University Press

Ars Technica:  Tell us a little about the field of geomythology.

Adrienne Mayor: It’s a relatively new field of study but it took off around 2000. Really, it’s a storytelling that has existed since the first humans started talking to one another and investigating their landscape. I think geomyths are attempts to explain perplexing evidence in nature—on the Earth or in the sky. So geomyth is a bit of a misnomer since it can also cover celestial happenings. But people have been trying to explain bizarre things, or unnatural looking things, or inexplicable things in their landscape and their surroundings since they could first speak.

These kind of stories were probably first told around the first fires that human beings made as soon as they had language. So geomyths are attempts to explain, as I say, but they also contain memories that are preserved in oral traditions. These are cultures that are trying to understand earthshaking events like volcanoes or massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches—things that really change the landscape and have an impact on their culture. Geomyths are often expressed in metaphors and poetic, even supernatural language, and that’s why they’ve been ignored for a long time because people thought they were just storytelling or fiction.

But the ones that are about nature,  about natural disasters, are based on very keen observations and repeated observations of the landscape. They also can contain details that are recognizable to scientists who study earthquakes or volcanoes. The scientists then realized that there had to be, in some cases, eyewitness accounts of these geomyths. Geomythology is actually enhancing our scientific understanding of the history of Earth over time. It can help people who study climate change figure out how far back certain climate changes have been happening. They can shed light on how and when great geological upheavals actually occurred and how humans responded to them.

Ars Technica: How long can an oral tradition about a natural disaster really persist? 

Adrienne Mayor: That was one of the provocative questions. Can it really persist over centuries, thousands of years, millennia? For a long time people thought that oral traditions could not persist for that long. But it turns out that with detailed studies of geomyths that can be related to datable events like volcanoes or earthquakes or tsunamis from geophysical evidence, we now know that the myths can last thousands of years.

For instance, the one that is told by the Klamath Indians about the creation of Crater Lake in Oregon that happened about 7,000 years ago—the details in their myth show that there were eyewitness accounts. Archaeologists have found a particular kind of woven sandal that was used by indigenous peoples 9,000 to 5,000 years ago. They found those sandals both above and below the ash from the volcano that exploded. So we have two ways of dating that. In Australia, people who study the geomyths of the Aborigines can relate their stories to events that happened 20,000 years ago.

Ars Technica: You mentioned that your interest in geomythology grew out of Greek and Roman interpretations of certain fossils that they found.

Adrienne Mayor: That really did trigger it, because it occurred to me that oral traditions and legends—rather than myths about gods and heroes—the ones that are about nature seem to have kernels of truth because it could be reaffirmed and confirmed and supported by evidence that people see over generations. I was in Greece and saw some fossils that had been plowed up by farmers on the island of Samos, thigh-bones from a mastodon or a mammoth or a giant rhinoceros. The museum curator said, “Yes, farmers bring us these all the time.” And I thought, why hasn’t it occurred to anyone that they were doing this in antiquity as well?

I read through about 30 different Greek and Roman authors from the time of Homer up through Augustine, and found more than a hundred incidents of finding remarkable bones of strange shape, gigantic bones that were inexplicable. How did they try to explain them? That’s really what got me going. These stories had all been dismissed as travelers’ tales or superstition. But I talked with paleontologists and found that if I superimposed a map of all the Greek and Roman finds of remarkable remains of giants or monsters, it actually matched the paleontological map of deposits of megafauna—not dinosaurs, but megafauna like mastodons and mammoths.

Also, I grew up in South Dakota where there were a lot of fossils, so I had always wondered what Native Americans had thought about dinosaur fossils. It turns out no one had asked them either. So my second book was Fossil Legends of the First Americans. In that case, I knew the geography of all the deposits of dinosaur fossils. I just had to drive about 6,000 miles around to reservations, talking to storytellers and elders and ordinary people to try and excavate the folklore. So I sometimes would read a scientific report in the media and think, “here’s got to be oral traditions about this,” and then I find them. And sometimes I find the myth and seek the historical or scientific kernels embedded in it.

Ars Technica:  What were your criteria for narrowing your list down to just 53 myths?

Adrienne Mayor:  I had to do something for every letter; that was a challenge. A few other authors in the series actually skipped the hard letters. I started out with the hard letters like Q, W, X, Z, Y. My husband says I almost got mugged by the letter Q because I got so obsessed with quicksand. I started talking about writing a book about quicksand because I was so obsessed with sand. There are singing sand dunes.

Ars Technica: There’s been a lot of research on the physics of singing sand dunes.

Adrienne Mayor:  Yes. Isn’t that amazing? There are even some humorous stories. One of my favorites is that Muslim pilgrims in the medieval period would travel to special singing sand dunes between Afghanistan and Iran. When pilgrims would feel the need to relieve themselves, they would try to find some privacy, yet urinating and defecating on the sand dune caused a very loud drum roll sound.

Ars Technica: Your work necessarily spans multiple disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities. Has that been a challenge? 

Adrienne Mayor: I’ve built my career since my first book in 2000 on trying to write not only to other disciplines, but to ordinary educated readers. Some people think it feels like walking a tight rope, but not to me because I don’t have a canonical academic career. I’m an autodidact, I’m not really an academic. So I have absolutely no problem trespassing in all kinds of disciplines. And I depend on the generosity of all these experts.

Some are from the classics and humanities, but an awful lot of them are from scientific disciplines. I think there’s a big tendency to want to collaborate. It’s just that in academia it’s been difficult because people are siloed. So I feel like I have worked as a bridge between the two. Scientists seem very excited to find out that there are epic poems discussing exactly what they’re studying. Paleontologists were thrilled to discover that people were noticing fossils more than 2000 years ago. So the impulse and the desire to collaborate is there.

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025

assassin's creed, avowed, Awards, baby steps, ball x pit, blue prince, Civilization VII, cloverpit, consume me, death stranding 2, donkey kong bananza, Doom: The Dark Ages, dragonsweeper, elden ring nightreign, Features, Game of the Year, gaming, Ghost of Yotei, hades 2, hollow knight silksong, kingdom come 2, mario kart world, sektori, the king is watching / /

Blue Prince and 19 others

A mix of expected sequels and out-of-nowhere indie gems made 2025 a joy.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

When we put together our top 20 games of last year, we specifically called out Civilization 7, Avowed, Doom: The Dark Ages, and Grand Theft Auto 6 as big franchise games we were already looking forward to for 2025. While one of those games has been delayed into 2026, the three others made this year’s list of Ars’ favorite games as expected. They join a handful of other highly anticipated sequels, ranging from big-budget blockbusters to long-gestating indies, on the “expected” side of this year’s list.

But the games that really stood out for me in 2025 were the ones that seemed to come out of nowhere. Those range from hard-to-categorize roguelike puzzle games to a gonzo, punishing mountainous walking simulation, the best Geometry Wars clone in years, and a touching look at the difficulties of adolescence through the surprisingly effective lens of mini-games.

As we look toward 2026, there are plenty of other big-budget projects that the industry is busy preparing for (the delayed Grand Theft Auto VI chief among them). If next year is anything like this year, though, we can look forward to plenty more games that no one saw coming suddenly vaulting into view as new classics.

Assassin’s Creed Shadows

Ubisoft Quebec; Windows, MaxOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch 2, iPad

When I was younger, I wanted—and expected—virtually every game I played to blow me away with something I’d not seen before. It was easier to hit that bar in the ’90s, when both the design and technology of games were moving at an incredible pace.

Now, as someone who still games in his 40s, I’m excited to see that when it happens, but I don’t expect it, Now, I increasingly appreciate games that act as a sort of comfort food, and I value some games as much for their familiarity as I do their originality.

That’s what Assassin’s Creed Shadows is all about (as I wrote when it first came out). It follows a well-trodden formula, but it’s a beautifully polished version of that formula. Its world is grand and escapist, its audio and graphics presentation is immersive, and it makes room for many different playstyles and skill levels.

If your idea of a good time is “be a badass, but don’t think too hard about it,” Shadows is one of the best Assassin’s Creed titles in the franchise’s long history. It doesn’t reinvent any wheels, but after nearly two decades of Assassin’s Creed, it doesn’t really need to; the new setting and story are enough to separate it, while the gameplay remains familiar.

-Samuel Axon

Avowed

Obsidian Entertainment; Windows, Xbox Series X|S

No game this year has made me feel as hated as Avowed. As an envoy for the far-off Aedryan empire, your role in Avowed is basically to be hated, either overtly or subtly, by almost everyone you encounter in the wild, semi-colonized world of the Living Lands. The low-level hum of hatred and mistrust from the citizens permeates everything you do in the game, which is an unsettling feeling in a genre usually characterized by the moral certitude of heroes fighting world-ending evil.

Role-playing aside, Avowed is helpfully carried by its strong action-packed combat system, characterized as it is by thrilling moment-to-moment positional jockeying and the juggling of magic spells, ranged weapons, and powerful close-range melee attacks. The game’s quest system also does a good job of letting players balance this combat difficulty for themselves—if a goal is listed with three skull symbols on your menu, you’d best put it off until you’ve leveled up a little bit more.

I can take or leave the mystical mumbo-jumbo-filled subplot surrounding your status as a “godlike” being that can converse with spirits. Aside from that, though, I’ve never had so much fun being hated.

-Kyle Orland

Baby Steps

Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, Bennett Foddy; Windows, PS5

The term “walking simulator” often gets thrown around in some game criticism circles as a derisive term for a title that’s about nothing more than walking around and looking at stuff. While Baby Steps might technically fit into that “walking simulator” model, stereotyping it in that way does this incredibly inventive game a disservice.

It starts with the walking itself, which requires meticulous, rhythmic manipulation of both shoulder buttons and both analog sticks just to stay upright. Super Mario 64, this ain’t. But what starts as a struggle to take just a few short steps quickly becomes almost habitual, much like learning to walk in real life.

The game then starts throwing new challenges at your feet. Slippery surfaces. Narrow stairways with tiny footholds. Overhangs that block your ridiculously useless, floppy upper body. The game’s relentless mountain is designed such that a single missed step can ruin huge chunks of progress, in the proud tradition of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy.

This all might sound needlessly cruel and frustrating, but trust me, it’s worth sticking with to the end. That’s in part for the feeling of accomplishment when you do finally make it past that latest seemingly impossible wall, and partly to experience an absolutely gonzo story that deals directly and effectively with ideas of masculinity, perseverance, and society itself. You’ll never be so glad to take that final step.

-Kyle Orland

Ball x Pit

Kenny Sun; Windows, MacOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2

The idea of bouncing a ball against a block is one of the most tried-and-true in all of gaming, from the basic version in the ancient Breakout to the number-filled angles of Holedown. But perhaps no game has made this basic concept as compulsively addictive as Ball x Pit.

Here, the brick-breaking genre is crossed with the almost as storied shoot-em-up, with the balls serving as your weapons and the blocks as enemies that march slowly but relentlessly from the top of the screen to the bottom. The key to destroying those blocks all in time is bouncing your growing arsenal of new balls at just the right angles to maximize their damage-dealing impact and catching them again so you can throw them once more that much faster.

Like so many roguelikes before it, Ball x Pit uses randomization as the core of its compulsive loop, letting you choose from a wide selection of new abilities and ball-based attacks as you slowly level up. But Ball x Pit goes further than most in letting you fuse and combine those balls into unique combinations that take dozens of runs to fully uncover and combine effectively.

Add in a deep system of semi-permanent upgrades (with its own intriguing “bounce balls around a city builder” mini game) and a deep range of more difficult settings and enemies to slowly unlock, and you have a game whose addictive pull will last much longer than you might expect from the simple premise.

-Kyle Orland

Blue Prince

Dogubomb; Windows, MacOS, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

Usually, when formulating a list like this, you can compare a title to an existing game or genre as a shorthand to explain what’s going on to newcomers. That’s nearly impossible with Blue Prince, a game that combines a lot of concepts to defy easy comparison to games that have come before it.

At its core, Blue Prince is about solving the mysteries of a house that you build while exploring it, drafting the next room from a selection of three options every time you open a new door. Your initial goal, if you can call it that, is to discover and access the mysterious “Room 46” that apparently exists somewhere on the 45-room grid. And while the houseplan you’re building resets with every in-game day, the knowledge you gain from exploring those rooms stays with you, letting you make incremental progress on a wide variety of puzzles and mysteries as you rebuild the mansion from scratch again and again.

What starts as a few simple and relatively straightforward puzzles quickly unfolds fractally into a complex constellation of conundrums, revealed slowly through scraps of paper, in-game books, inventory items, interactive machinery, and incidental background elements. Figuring out the more intricate mysteries of the mansion requires careful observation and, often, filling a real-life mad scientist’s notepad with detailed notes that look incomprehensible to an outsider. All the while, you have to manage each day’s limited resources and luck-of-the-draw room drafting to simply find the right rooms to make the requisite progress.

Getting to that storied Room 46 is enough to roll the credits on Blue Prince, and it serves as an engaging enough puzzle adventure in its own right. But that whole process could be considered a mere tutorial for a simply massive endgame, which is full of riddles that will perplex even the most experienced puzzlers while slowly building a surprisingly deep story of political intrigue and spycraft through some masterful environmental storytelling.

Some of those extreme late-game puzzles might be too arcane for their own good, honestly, and will send many players scrambling for a convenient guide or wiki for some hints. But even after playing for over 100 hours over two playthroughs, I’m pretty sure I’m still not done exploring all that Blue Prince has to offer.

-Kyle Orland

Civilization VII

Firaxis; Windows, MacOS, Linux, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Switch 2

This one will be controversial: I love Civilization VII.

Civilization VII launched as a bit of a mess. There were bugs and UI shortcomings aplenty. Most (but not all) of those have been addressed in the months since, but they’re not the main reason this is a tricky pick.

The studio behind the Civilization franchise, Firaxis, has long said it has a “33/33/33″ approach to sequels in the series, wherein 33 percent of the game should be familiar systems, 33 percent should be remixes or improvements of familiar systems, and 33 percent should be entirely new systems.

Critics of Civilization VII say Firaxis broke that 33/33/33 rule by overweighting the last 33 percent, mainly to chase innovations in the 4X genre by other games (like Humankind). I don’t disagree, but I also welcome it.

Credit is due to the team at Firaxis for ingeniously solving some longstanding design problems in the franchise, like using the new age transitions to curb snowballing and to expunge systems that become a lot less fun in the late game than they are in the beginning. Judged on its own terms, Civilization VII is a deep, addictive, and fun strategy game that I’ve spent more than 100 hours playing this year.

My favorite Civ game remains Civilization IV, but that game still runs fine on modern systems, is infinitely replayable out of the box, and enjoys robust modding support. I simply didn’t need more of the same from this particular franchise; to me, VII coexists with IV and others on my hard drive—very different flavors of the same idea.

-Samuel Axon

CloverPit

Panik Arcade; Windows, Xbox Series X|S

I’m not sure I like what my minor CloverPit obsession says about me. When I fell into a deep Balatro hole last year, I could at least delude myself into thinking there was some level of skill in deciding which jokers to buy and sell, which cards to add or prune from my deck, and which cards to hold and discard. In the end, though, I was as beholden to the gods of random number generation as any other Balatro player.

Cloverpit makes the surrender to the vagaries of luck all the more apparent, replacing the video-poker-like systems of Balatro with a “dumb” slot machine whose handle you’re forced to pull over and over again. Sure, there are still decisions to make, mostly regarding which lucky charms you purchase from a vending machine on the other side of the room. And there is some skill involved in learning and exploiting lucky charm synergies to extract the highest expected value from those slot machine pulls.

Once you’ve figured out those basic strategies, though, CloverPit mostly devolves into a series of rerolls waiting for the right items to show up in the shop in the right order. Thankfully, the game hides plenty of arcane secrets beneath its charming PS1-style spooky-horror presentation, slowly revealing new items and abilities that hint that something deeper than just accumulating money might be the game’s true end goal.

It’s this creepy vibe and these slowly unfolding secrets that have compelled me to pour dozens of hours into what is, in the end, just a fancy slot machine simulator. God help me.

-Kyle Orland

Consume Me

Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson; Windows, MacOS

Jenny is your average suburban Asian-American teenager, struggling to balance academic achievement, chores, an overbearing mother, romantic entanglements, and a healthy body image. What sounds like the premise for a cliché young adult novel actually serves to set up a compelling interactive narrative disguised as a mere mini-game collection.

Consume Me brilliantly integrates the conflicting demands placed on Jenny’s time and attention into the gameplay itself. Creating a balanced meal, for instance, becomes a literal test of balancing vaguely Tetris-shaped pieces of food on a tray, satisfying your hunger and caloric limits at the same time. Chores take up time but give you money you can spend on energy drinks that let you squeeze in more activities by staying up late (but can lead to debilitating headaches). A closet full of outfits becomes an array of power-ups to your time, energy, or focus.

It takes almost preternatural resource management skills and mini-game execution to satisfy all the expectations being placed on you, which is kind of the meta-narrative point. No matter how well you do, Jenny’s story develops in a way that serves as a touching semi-autobiographical look at the life of co-creator Jenny Jiao Hsia. That biography is made all the more sympathetic here for an interactive presentation that’s more engaging than any young adult novel could be.

-Kyle Orland

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

Kojima Productions; PS5

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach should not be fun. Much like its predecessor, the latest release from famed game designer Hideo Kojima is about delivering packages—at least on the surface. Yet the process of planning your routes, managing inventory, and exploring an unfathomably strange post-apocalyptic world remains a winning formula.

The game again follows Sam Porter Bridges (played by Norman Reedus) on his quest to reconnect the world as humanity faces possible extinction. And yes, that means acting like a post-apocalyptic Amazon Prime. Standing in the way of an on-time delivery are violent raiders, dangerous terrain, and angry, disembodied spirits known as Beached Things.

It’s common to hear Death Stranding described as a walking simulator, and there is indeed a lot of walking, but the sequel introduces numerous quality-of-life improvements that make it more approachable. Death Stranding 2 has a robust fast-travel mechanic and better vehicles to save you from unnecessary marches, and the inventory management system is less clunky. That’s important in a game that asks you to traverse an entire continent to deliver cargo.

Beyond the core gameplay loop of stacking heavy boxes on your back, Death Stranding 2 has all the Kojima vibes you could want. There are plenty of quirky gameplay mechanics and long cutscenes that add depth to the characters and keep the story moving. The world of Death Stranding has been designed from the ground up around the designer’s flights of fancy, and it works—even the really weird stuff almost makes sense!

Along the way, Death Stranding 2 has a lot to say about grief, healing, and the value of human connection. The game’s most poignant cutscenes are made all the more memorable by an incredible soundtrack, and we cannot oversell the strength of the mocap performances.

It may take 100 hours or more to experience everything the game has to offer, but it’s well worth your time.

-Ryan Whitwam

Donkey Kong Bananza

Nintendo EPD; Switch 2

Credit: Nintendo

Since the days of Donkey Kong Country, I’ve always felt that Mario’s original ape antagonist wasn’t really up for anchoring a Mario-level platform franchise. Donkey Kong Bananza is the first game to really make me doubt that take.

Bonanza is a great showcase for the new, more powerful hardware on the Switch 2, with endlessly destructible environments that send some impressive-looking shiny shrapnel flying when they’re torn apart. It can’t be understated how cathartic it is to pound tunnels up, down, and through pretty much every floor, ceiling, and wall you see, mashing the world itself to suit your needs.

Bonanza also does a good job aping Super Mario Odyssey’s tendency to fill practically every square inch of space with collectible doodads and a wide variety of challenges. This is not a game where you need to spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering for the next thing to do—there’s pretty much always something interesting around the next corner until the extreme end game.

Sure, the camera angles and frame rate might suffer a bit during the more chaotic bits. But it’s hard to care when you’re having this much fun just punching your way through Bananza’s imaginative, colorful, and malleable world.

-Kyle Orland

Doom: The Dark Ages

Id Software; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

Credit: Bethesda Game Studios

For a series that has always been about dodging, Doom: The Dark Ages is much more about standing your ground. The game’s key verbs involve raising your shield to block incoming attacks or, ideally, parrying them back in the direction they came.

It’s a real “zig instead of zag” moment for the storied Doom series, and it does take some getting used to. Overall, though, I had a great time mixing in turtle-style blocking with the habitual pattern of circling-strafing around huge groups of enemies in massive arenas and quickly switching between multiple weapons to deal with them as efficiently as possible. While I missed the focus on extreme verticality of the last two Doom games, I appreciate the new game’s more open-world design, which gives completionist players a good excuse to explore every square inch of these massive environments for extra challenges and hidden collectibles.

The only real problem with Doom: The Dark Ages comes when the game occasionally transitions to a slow-paced mech-style demon battle or awkward flying dragon section, sometimes for entire levels at a time. Those variations aside, I came away very satisfied with the minor change in focus for a storied shooter series.

-Kyle Orland

Dragonsweeper

Daniel Benmergui; Javascript

Anyone who has read my book-length treatise on Minesweeper knows I’m a sucker for games that involve hidden threats within a grid of revealed numbers. But not all variations on this theme are created equal. Dragonsweeper stands out from the crowd by incorporating a simple but arcane world of RPG-style enemies and items into its logical puzzles.

Instead of simply counting the number of nearby mines, each number revealed on the Dragonsweeper grid reflects the total health of the surrounding enemies, both seen and unseen. Attacking those enemies means enduring predictable counterattacks that deplete your limited health bar, which you can grow through gradual leveling until you’re strong enough to kill the game’s titular dragon, taunting you from the center of the field.

Altogether, it adds an intriguing new layer to the logical deduction, forcing you to carefully manage your moves to maximize the impact of your attacks and the limited health-restoring items scattered throughout the field. And while finishing one run isn’t too much of a challenge, completing the game’s optional achievements and putting together a “perfect” game score is enough to keep puzzle lovers coming back for hours and hours of compelling logical deduction.

-Kyle Orland

Elden Ring: Nightreign

FromSoftware; Windows, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S

Credit: Bandai Namco

At first blush, Nightreign feels like a twisted perversion of everything that has made FromSoft’s Souls series so compelling for so many years. What was a slow-paced, deliberate open-world RPG has become a game about quickly sprinting across a quickly contracting map, leveling up as quickly as possible before taking on punishing bosses. A moody solitary experience has become one that practically requires a group of three players working together. It’s like an Elden Ring-themed amusement park that seems to miss the point of the original.

Whatever. It still works!

Let the purists belly ache about how it’s not really Elden Ring. They’re right, but they’re missing the point. Nightreign condenses the general vibe of the Elden Ring world into something very different but no less enjoyable. What’s more, it packs that vibe into a tight experience that can be easily squeezed into a 45-minute sprint rather than requiring dozens of hours of deep exploration.

That makes it the perfect excuse to get together with a few like-minded Elden Ring-loving friends, throw on a headset, and just tear through the Lands Between together for the better part of an evening. As Elden Ring theme parks go, you could do a lot worse.

-Kyle Orland

Ghost of Yotei

Sucker Punch Productions; PS5

Ghost of Yotei from Sucker Punch Productions starts as a revenge tale, featuring hard-as-nails Atsu on the hunt for the outlaws who murdered her family. While there is plenty of revenge to be had in the lands surrounding Mount Yotei, the people Atsu meets and the stories they have to tell make this more than a two-dimensional quest for blood.

The game takes place on the northern Japanese island of Ezo (modern-day Hokkaido) several centuries after the developer’s last samurai game, Ghost of Tsushima. It has a lot in common with that title, but Ghost of Yotei was built for the PS5 and features a massive explorable world and stunning visuals. It’s easy to get sidetracked from your quest just exploring Ezo and tinkering with the game’s photo mode.

The land of Ezo avoids some of the missteps seen in other open-world games. While it’s expansive and rich with points of interest, exploring it is not tedious. There are no vacuous fetch quests or mindless collecting (or loading screens, for that matter). Even when you think you know what you’re going to find at a location, you may be surprised. The interesting side quests and random encounters compel you to keep exploring Ezo.

Ghost of Yotei’s combat is just as razor-sharp as its exploration. It features multiple weapon types, each with unlockable abilities and affinities that make them ideal for taking on certain foes. Brute force will only get you so far, though. You need quick reactions to parry enemy attacks and strike back—it’s challenging and rewarding but not frustrating.

It’s impossible to play Ghost of Yotei without becoming invested in the journey, and a big part of that is thanks to the phenomenal voice work of Erika Ishii as Atsu. Some of the game’s pivotal moments will haunt you, but luckily, the developer has just added a New Game+ mode so you can relive them all again.

-Ryan Whitwam

Hades 2

Supergiant Games; Windows, MacOS, Switch, Switch 2

There’s a moment in the second section of Hades 2 where you start to hear a haunting melody floating through the background. That music gets louder and louder until you reach the game’s second major boss, a trio of sirens that go through a full rock-opera showtune number as you dodge their bullet-hell attacks and look for openings to go in for the kill. That three-part musical presentation slowly dwindles to a solo as you finally dispatch the sirens one by one, restoring a surprisingly melancholy silence once more.

It’s this and other musical moments casually and effortlessly woven through Hades 2 that will stick with me the most. But the game stands on its own beyond the musicality, expanding the original game’s roguelike action with a compelling new spell system that lets you briefly capture or slow enemies in a binding circle. This small addition adds a new sense of depth to the moment-to-moment positional dance that was already so compelling in the original Hades.

Hades 2 also benefits greatly from the introduction of Melinoe, a compelling new protagonist who gets fleshed out through her relationship with the usual rogue’s gallery of gods and demigods. Come for her quest of self-discovery, stay for the moments of musical surprise.

-Kyle Orland

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Team Cherry; Windows, MacOS, Linux, PS4/5, Xbox One/Series X|S, Switch, Switch 2

Piece of cake.

Credit: Team Cherry

Piece of cake. Credit: Team Cherry

A quickie sequel in the year or two after Hollow Knight’s out-of-nowhere success in 2017 might have been able to get away with just being a more-of-the-same glorified expansion pack. But after over eight years of overwhelming anticipation from fans, Silksong had to really be something special to live up to its promise.

Luckily, it is. Silksong is a beautiful expansion of the bug-scale underground universe created in the first game. Every new room is a work of painterly beauty, with multiple layers of detailed 2D art drawing you further into its intricate and convincing fallen world.

The sprawling map seems to extend forever in every direction, circling back around and in on itself with plenty of optional alleyways in which to get lost searching for rare power-ups. And while the game is a punishingly hard take on action platforming, there’s usually a way around the most difficult reflex tests for players willing to explore and think a bit outside the box.

Even players who hit a wall and never make it through the sprawling tunnels of Silksong’s labyrinthine underground will still find plenty of memorable moments in whatever portion of the game they do experience.

-Kyle Orland

The King Is Watching

Hypnohead; Windows

A lot of good resource tiles there, but the king can only look at six at a time.

Credit: Hypnohead / Steam

A lot of good resource tiles there, but the king can only look at six at a time. Credit: Hypnohead / Steam

In a real-time-strategy genre that can often feel too bloated and complex for its own good, The King Is Watching is a streamlined breath of fresh air. Since the entire game takes place on a single screen, there’s no need to constantly pan and zoom your camera around a sprawling map. Instead, you can stay laser-focused on your 5×5 grid of production space and on which portion of it is actively productive under the king’s limited gaze at any particular moment.

Arranging tiles to maximize that production of basic resources and military units quickly becomes an all-consuming juggling act, requiring constant moment-to-moment decisions that can quickly cascade through a run. I’m also a big fan of the game’s self-selecting difficulty system, which asks you to choose how many enemies you think you can take in coming waves, doling out better rewards for players who are willing to push themselves to the limit of their current capabilities.

The bite-size serving of a single King Is Watching run ensures that even failure doesn’t feel too crushing. And success brings with it just enough in the way of semi-permanent ability expansions to encourage another run where you can reach even greater heights of production and protection.

-Kyle Orland

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II

Warhorse Studios; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

Kingdom Come: Deliverance was a slog that I had to will myself to complete. It was sometimes a broken and janky game, but despite its warts, I saw the potential for something special. And that’s what its sequel, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, has delivered.

While it’s still a slow burn, the overall experience has been greatly refined, the initial challenge has been smoothed out, and I’ve rarely been more immersed in an RPG’s storytelling. There’s no filler, as every story beat and side quest offers a memorable tale that further paints the setting and characters of medieval Bohemia.

Unlike most RPGs, there’s no magic to be had, which is a big part of the game’s charm. As Henry of Skalitz, you are of meager social standing, and many characters you speak to will be quick to remind you of it. While Henry is a bit better off than his humble beginnings in the first game, you’re no demigod that can win a large battle single-handedly. In fact, you’ll probably lose fairly often in the early goings if more than one person is attacking you.

Almost every fight is a slow dance once you’re in a full suit of armor, and your patience and timing will be the key to winning over the stats of your equipment. But therein lies the beauty of KC:D II: Every battle you pick, whether physical or verbal, carries some weight to your experience and shapes Bohemia for better or worse.

-Jacob May

Mario Kart World

Nintendo; Switch 2

Credit: Nintendo

After the incredible success of Mario Kart 8 and its various downloadable content packs on the Switch, Nintendo could have easily done a prettier “more of the same” sequel as the launch-window showcase for the Switch 2. Instead, the company took a huge gamble in trying to transform Mario Kart’s usual distinct tracks into a vast, interconnected open world.

This conceit works best in “Free Roam” mode, where you can explore the outskirts of the standard tracks and the wide open spaces in between for hundreds of mini-challenges that test your driving speed and precision. Add in dozens of collectible medallions and outfits hidden in hard-to-reach corners, and the mode serves as a great excuse to explore every nook and cranny of a surprisingly detailed and fleshed-out world map.

I was also a big fan of Knockout Mode, which slowly whittles a frankly overwhelming field of 24 initial racers to a single winner through a series of endurance rally race checkpoints. These help make up for a series of perplexing changes that hamper the tried-and-true Battle Mode formula and long straightaway sections that feel more than a little bit stifling in the standard Grand Prix mode. Still, Free Roam mode had me happily whiling away dozens of hours with my new Switch 2 this year.

-Kyle Orland

Sektori

Kimmo Lahtinen; Windows, PS5, Xbox Series X|S

For decades now, I’ve been looking for a twin-stick shooter that fully captures the compulsive thrill of the Geometry Wars franchise. Sektori, a late-breaking addition to this year’s top games list, is the first game I can say does so without qualification.

Like Geometry Wars, Sektori has you weaving through a field filled with simple shapes that quickly fill your personal space with ruthless efficiency. But Sektori advances that basic premise with an elegant “strike” system that lets you dash through encroaching enemies and away from danger with the tap of a shoulder button. Advanced players can get a free, instant strike refill by dashing into an upgrade token, and stringing those strikes together creates an excellent risk-vs-reward system of survival versus scoring.

Sektori also features an excellent Gradius-style upgrade system that forces you to decide on the fly whether to take basic power-ups or save up tokens for more powerful weaponry and/or protection further down the line. And just when the basic gameplay threatens to start feeling stale, the game throws in a wide variety of bosses and new modes that mix things up just enough to keep you twitching away.

Throw in an amazing soundtrack and polished presentation that makes even the most crowded screens instantly comprehensible, and you have a game I can see myself coming back to for years—until my reflexes are just too shot to keep up with the frenetic pace anymore.

-Kyle Orland

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Ars Technica’s Top 20 video games of 2025 Read More »

“yo-what?”-limewire-re-emerges-in-online-rush-to-share-pulled-“60-minutes”-segment

“Yo what?” LimeWire re-emerges in online rush to share pulled “60 Minutes” segment

CBS News, censorship, Donald Trump, government censorship, LimeWire, peer-to-peer networks, Policy, torrents / /

Early 2000s tool LimeWire used to pirate episode

As Americans scrambled to share the “Inside CECOT” story, assuming that CBS would be working in the background to pull down uploads, a once-blacklisted tool from the early 2000s became a reliable way to keep the broadcast online.

On Reddit, users shared links to a LimeWire torrent, prompting chuckles from people surprised to see the peer-to-peer service best known for infecting parents’ computers with viruses in the 2000s suddenly revived in 2025 to skirt feared US government censorship.

“Yo what,” one user joked, highlighting only the word “LimeWire.” Another user, ironically using the LimeWire logo as a profile picture, responded, “man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF.”

LimeWire was created in 2000 and quickly became one of the Internet’s favorite services for pirating music until record labels won a 2010 injunction that blocked all file-sharing functionality. As the Reddit thread noted, some LimeWire users were personally targeted in lawsuits.

For a while after the injunction, a fraction of users kept the service alive by running older versions of the software that weren’t immediately disabled. New owners took over LimeWire in 2022, officially relaunching the service. The service’s about page currently notes that “millions of individuals and businesses” use the global file-sharing service today, but for some early Internet users, the name remains a blast from the past.

“Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit,” a Bluesky user wrote.

“We need a champion against the darkness,” a Reddit commenter echoed. “I side with LimeWire.”

“Yo what?” LimeWire re-emerges in online rush to share pulled “60 Minutes” segment Read More »

apple-hit-with-$115m-fine-for-“extremely-burdensome”-app-store-privacy-policy

Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy

App Store, App Tracking, Apple, competition law, italy, personalized advertising, Policy, privacy policy / /

Apple was hit with a $115 million fine Monday after Italy’s competition authority alleged the tech giant was abusing its dominant position to harm third-party developers in its App Store.

In a press release, the Italian Competition Authority said that an “App Tracking Transparency” (ATT) privacy policy that Apple introduced in 2021 forced third-party developers to seek consent twice for the same data collection.

Requiring such “double consent” was “extremely burdensome” and “harmful” to some developers—especially the smallest developers, the regulator said. Many developers struggled to earn ad revenue after the policy was introduced, as users increasingly declined to opt into personalized ads.

Meanwhile, Apple may have benefited from the ATT restricting developers’ ad revenues, either “in the form of higher commissions collected from developers through the App Store and, indirectly, in terms of the growth of its own advertising service.” Since ATT was adopted, “revenues from App Store services increased,” the regulator said, as developers paid higher commissions and “likewise, Apple’s advertising division, which is not subject to the same stringent rules, ultimately benefited from increased revenues and higher volumes of intermediated ads.”

Without intervention, Apple would continue requiring third-party developers to provide an additional consent screen, which was “found to be disproportionate to the achievement of the company’s stated data protection objectives,” the press release said.

“Apple should have ensured the same level of privacy protection for users by allowing developers to obtain consent to profiling in a single step,” the regulator concluded.

Apple hit with $115M fine for “extremely burdensome” App Store privacy policy Read More »

bytedance-confirms-tiktok-will-be-controlled-by-us-owners

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, national security, Policy, tiktok, tiktok us / /

According to Trump, the deal ensures that TikTok complies with the divest-or-ban law, but the White House is still not providing more details. Instead, the Trump administration “referred questions about the deal to TikTok,” Reuters reported.

If the deal closes as expected on January 22, the new US company will have an estimated value of $14 billion, Vice President JD Vance noted in September.

At that point, the deal will likely face mounting scrutiny from lawmakers, including Republicans, who aren’t yet sure if the US operation resolves all national security concerns. Chinese control of the algorithm was a particular sticking point for critics, who claimed that Trump was giving China exactly what it wanted: international recognition for exporting leading technology to the US.

In September, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) vowed to take a “hard line” and oppose the deal’s framework if it violates the divest-or-ban law. Already, Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, is planning to hold a hearing next year with US TikTok leadership.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has accused Trump of handing over “even more control of what you watch to his billionaire buddies,” through the TikTok deal, which she likened to enabling a “billionaire takeover of TikTok.” Many TikTokers likely share her concerns, after Trump suggested he’d like to see his hand-picked investors tweak the algorithm to be “100 percent MAGA.”

Questions remain until the exact terms of the deal become public, Warren said.

ByteDance did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

With the terms obscured, it’s unclear how quickly TikTok may change in 2026 under US ownership. In July, the Information reported that when approximately 170 million US users get ported over to the new US-owned app, it could be buggy.

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners Read More »

google-lobs-lawsuit-at-search-result-scraping-firm-serpapi

Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi

AI, Artificial Intelligence, Google, search / /

Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google’s 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google’s terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google’s decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

SerpApi and similar firms do fulfill a need, but they sit in a legal gray area. Google does not provide an API for its search results, which are based on the world’s largest and most comprehensive web index. That makes Google’s SERPs especially valuable in the age of AI. A chatbot can’t summarize web links if it can’t find them, which has led companies like Perplexity to pay for SerpApi’s second-hand Google data. That prompted Reddit to file a lawsuit against SerpApi and Perplexity for grabbing its data from Google results.

Google is echoing many of the things Reddit said when it publicized its lawsuit earlier this year. The search giant claims it’s not just doing this to protect itself—it’s also about protecting the websites it indexes. In Google’s blog post on the legal action, it says SerpApi “violates the choices of websites and rightsholders about who should have access to their content.”

It’s worth noting that Google has a partnership with Reddit that pipes data directly into Gemini. As a result, you’ll often see Reddit pages cited in the chatbot’s outputs. As Google points out, it abides by “industry-standard crawling protocols” to collect the data that appears on its SERPs, but those sites didn’t agree to let SerpApi scrape their data from Google. So while you could reasonably argue that Google’s lawsuit helps protect the rights of web publishers, it also explicitly protects Google’s business interests.

Google lobs lawsuit at search result scraping firm SerpApi Read More »

instacart-agrees-to-refund-subscribers-$60-million-in-ftc-settlement

Instacart agrees to refund subscribers $60 million in FTC settlement

Consumer protection, federal trade commission, ftc, grocery delivery, instacart, Policy / /

In a blog post, Instacart emphasized that it has admitted no wrongdoing and elected to settle to “move forward.”

The app defended its “$0 delivery fees” claim by reminding customers that “we clearly and consistently distinguish delivery fees from service fees, which are always shown as a separate, itemized line.” Instacart also noted that subscribers receiving refunds were sent email reminders before renewals were charged. Further, any subscriber shocked by the charges had five days to request an automatic full refund if services were never used, the company said.

Boasting that Instacart has helped users save more than $3 billion “through deals, discounts, and loyalty programs,” the company estimated that users weren’t harmed by its practices and, on average, save $5 for each order.

“We flatly deny any allegations of wrongdoing by the agency, and we believe the foundation of the FTC’s inquiry was fundamentally flawed,” the company said.

The FTC, however, alleged that “hundreds of thousands of consumers have been charged membership fees without receiving benefits from the membership or getting refunds.”

Defending Instacart users from an alleged “variety of deceptive tactics,” the FTC will now work with Instacart to retrieve customer information and issue refunds, a jointly filed order detailing the settlement said.

In its blog, Instacart repeatedly claimed to be transparent and clear with customers about charges. But in a sign that the settlement is already forcing changes, a claim that the company provides “one of the most transparent, customer-friendly subscription programs available, unlocking $0 delivery fees on grocery orders of $10 or more” was starred. At the bottom of the blog, the company clarified that “service and other fees apply.”

Instacart agrees to refund subscribers $60 million in FTC settlement Read More »

school-security-ai-flagged-clarinet-as-a-gun-exec-says-it-wasn’t-an-error.

School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn’t an error.

AI, ai gun detection, AI security, Artificial Intelligence, Policy, school shooting, zeroeyes / /

Human review didn’t stop AI from triggering lockdown at panicked middle school.

A Florida middle school was locked down last week after an AI security system called ZeroEyes mistook a clarinet for a gun, reviving criticism that AI may not be worth the high price schools pay for peace of mind.

Human review of the AI-generated false flag did not stop police from rushing to Lawton Chiles Middle School. Cops expected to find “a man in the building, dressed in camouflage with a ‘suspected weapon pointed down the hallway, being held in the position of a shouldered rifle,’” a Washington Post review of the police report said.

Instead, after finding no evidence of a shooter, cops double-checked with dispatchers who confirmed that a closer look at the images indicated that “the suspected rifle might have been a band instrument.” Among panicked students hiding in the band room, police eventually found the suspect, a student “dressed as a military character from the Christmas movie Red One for the school’s Christmas-themed dress-up day,” the Post reported.

ZeroEyes cofounder Sam Alaimo told the Post that the AI performed exactly as it should have in this case, adopting a “better safe than sorry” outlook. A ZeroEyes spokesperson told Ars that “school resource officers, security directors and superintendents consistently ask us to be proactive and forward them an alert if there is any fraction of a doubt that the threat might be real.”

“We don’t think we made an error, nor does the school,” Alaimo said. “That was better to dispatch [police] than not dispatch.”

Cops left after the confused student confirmed he was “unaware” that the way he was holding his clarinet could have triggered that alert, the Post reported. But ZeroEyes’ spokesperson claimed he was “intentionally holding the instrument in the position of a shouldered rifle.” And seemingly rather than probe why the images weren’t more carefully reviewed to prevent a false alarm on campus, the school appeared to agree with ZeroEyes and blame the student.

“We did not make an error, and the school was pleased with the detection and their response,” ZeroEyes’ spokesperson said.

School warns students not to trigger AI

In a letter to parents, the principal, Melissa Laudani, reportedly told parents that “while there was no threat to campus, I’d like to ask you to speak with your student about the dangers of pretending to have a weapon on a school campus.” Along similar lines, Seminole County Public Schools (SCPS) communications officer, Katherine Crnkovich, emphasized in an email to Ars to “please make sure it is noted that this student wasn’t simply carrying a clarinet. This individual was holding it as if it were a weapon.”

However, warning students against brandishing ordinary objects like weapons isn’t a perfect solution. Video footage from a Texas high school in 2023 showed that ZeroEyes can sometimes confuse shadows for guns, accidentally flagging a student simply walking into school as a potential threat. The advice also ignores that ZeroEyes last year reportedly triggered a lockdown and police response after detecting two theater kids using prop guns to rehearse a play. And a similar AI tool called Omnilert made national headlines confusing an empty Doritos bag with a gun, which led to a 14-year-old Baltimore sophomore’s arrest. In that case, the student told the American Civil Liberties Union that he was just holding the chips when AI sent “like eight cop cars” to detain him.

For years, school safety experts have warned that AI tools like ZeroEyes take up substantial resources even though they are “unproven,” the Post reported. ZeroEyes’ spokesperson told Ars that “in most cases, ZeroEyes customers will never receive a ‘false positive,’” but the company is not transparent about how many false positives it receives or how many guns have been detected. An FAQ only notes that “we are always looking to minimize false positives and are constantly improving our learning models based on data collected.” In March, as some students began questioning ZeroEyes after it flagged a Nerf gun at a Pennsylvania university, a nearby K-12 private school, Germantown Academy, confirmed that its “system often makes ‘non-lethal’ detections.”

One critic, school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, suggested in October that these tools are “security theater,” with firms like ZeroEyes lobbying for taxpayer dollars by relying on what the ACLU called “misleading” marketing to convince schools that tools are proactive solutions to school shootings. Seemingly in response to this backlash, StateScoop reported that days after it began probing ZeroEyes in 2024, the company scrubbed a claim from its FAQ that said ZeroEyes “can prevent active shooter and mass shooting incidents.”

At Lawton Chiles Middle School, “the children were never in any danger,” police confirmed, but experts question if false positives cause students undue stress and suspicion, perhaps doing more harm than good in absence of efficacy studies. Schools may be better off dedicating resources to mental health services proven to benefit kids, some critics have suggested.

Laudani’s letter encouraged parents to submit any questions they have about the incident, but it’s hard to gauge if anyone’s upset. Asked if parents were concerned or if ZeroEyes has ever triggered lockdown at other SCPS schools, Crnkovich told Ars that SCPS does not “provide details regarding the specific school safety systems we utilize.”

It’s clear, however, that SCPS hopes to expand its use of ZeroEyes. In November, Florida state Senator Keith Truenow submitted a request to install “significantly more cameras”—about 850—equipped with ZeroEyes across the school district. Truenow backed up his request for $500,000 in funding over the next year by claiming that “the more [ZeroEyes] coverage there is, the more protected students will be from potential gun violence.”

AI false alarms pose dangers to students

ZeroEyes is among the most popular tools attracting heavy investments from schools in 48 states, which hope that AI gun detection will help prevent school shootings. The AI technology is embedded in security cameras, trained on images of people holding guns, and can supposedly “detect as little as an eighth of an inch of a gun,” an ABC affiliate in New York reported.

Monitoring these systems continually, humans review AI flags, then text any concerning images detected to school superintendents. Police are alerted when human review determines images may constitute actual threats. ZeroEyes’ spokesperson told Ars that “it has detected more than 1,000 weapons in the last three years.” Perhaps most notably, ZeroEyes “detected a minor armed with an AK-47 rifle on an elementary school campus in Texas,” where no shots were fired, StateScoop reported last year.

Schools invest tens or, as the SCPS case shows, even hundreds of thousands annually, the exact amount depending on the number of cameras they want to employ and other variables impacting pricing. ZeroEyes estimates that most schools pay $60 per camera monthly. Bigger contracts can discount costs. In Kansas, a statewide initiative equipping 25 cameras at 1,300 schools with ZeroEyes was reportedly estimated to cost $8.5 million annually. Doubling the number of cameras didn’t provide much savings, though, with ZeroEyes looking to charge $15.2 million annually to expand coverage.

To critics, it appears that ZeroEyes is attempting to corner the market on AI school security, standing to profit off schools’ fears of shootings, while showing little proof of the true value of its systems. Last year, ZeroEyes reported its revenue grew 300 percent year over year from 2023 to 2024, after assisting in “more than ten arrests through its thousands of detections, verifications, and notifications to end users and law enforcement.”

Curt Lavarello, the executive director of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told the ABC News affiliate that “all of this technology is very, very expensive,” considering that “a lot of products … may not necessarily do what they’re being sold to do.”

Another problem, according to experts who have responded to some of the country’s deadliest school shootings, is that while ZeroEyes’ human reviewers can alert police in “seconds,” police response can often take “several minutes.” That delay could diminish ZeroEyes’ impact, one expert suggested, noting that at an Oregon school he responded to, there was a shooter who “shot 25 people in 60 seconds,” StateScoop reported.

In Seminole County, where the clarinet incident happened, ZeroEyes has been used since 2021, but SCPS would not confirm if any guns have ever been detected to justify next year’s desired expansion. It’s possible that SCPS has this information, as Sen. Truenow noted in his funding request that ZeroEyes can share reports with schools “to measure the effectiveness of the ZeroEyes deployment” by reporting on “how many guns were detected and alerted on campus.”

ZeroEyes’ spokesperson told Ars that “trained former law enforcement and military make split-second, life-or-death decisions about whether the threat is real,” which is supposed to help reduce false positives that could become more common as SCPS adds ZeroEyes to many more cameras.

Amanda Klinger, the director of operations at the Educator’s School Safety Network, told the Post that too many false alarms could carry two risks. First, more students could be put in dangerous situations when police descend on schools where they anticipate confronting an active shooter. And second, cops may become fatigued by false alarms, perhaps failing to respond with urgency over time. For students, when AI labels them as suspects, it can also be invasive and humiliating, reports noted.

“We have to be really clear-eyed about what are the limitations of these technologies,” Klinger said.

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

School security AI flagged clarinet as a gun. Exec says it wasn’t an error. Read More »

nasa-will-soon-find-out-if-the-perseverance-rover-can-really-persevere-on-mars

NASA will soon find out if the Perseverance rover can really persevere on Mars

Mars, Mars 2020, Mars Perseverance, Mars Sample Return, NASA, planetary science, Science, solar system, Space / /

Engineers at JPL are certifying the Perseverance rover to drive up to 100 kilometers.

The Perseverance rover looks back on its tracks on the floor of Jezero Crater in 2022. Credit: NASA/JPL

When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now.

At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseverance rover, then billed as the first leg of a multilaunch, multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return campaign.

Here we are on the verge of 2026, and there’s no sample retrieval mission nearing the launch pad. In fact, no one is building such a lander at all. NASA’s strategy for a Mars Sample Return, or MSR, mission remains undecided after the projected cost of the original plan ballooned to $11 billion. If MSR happens at all, it’s now unlikely to launch until the 2030s.

That means the Perseverance rover, which might have to hand off the samples to a future retrieval lander in some circumstances, must continue weathering the harsh, cold, dusty environment of Mars. The good news is that the robot, about the size of a small SUV, is in excellent health, according to Steve Lee, Perseverance’s deputy project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

“Perseverance is approaching five years of exploration on Mars,” Lee said in a press briefing Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall meeting. “Perseverance is really in excellent shape. All the systems onboard are operational and performing very, very well. All the redundant systems onboard are available still, and the rover is capable of supporting this mission for many, many years to come.”

The rover’s operators at JPL are counting on sustaining Perseverance’s good health. The rover’s six wheels have carried it a distance of about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, since landing inside the 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) Jezero Crater in February 2021. That is double the original certification for the rover’s mobility system and farther than any vehicle has traveled on the surface of another world.

This enhanced-color mosaic is made from three separate images taken on September 8, 2025, each of which was acquired using the Perseverance rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument. The images were processed to improve visual contrast and enhance color differences. The view shows a location known as “Mont Musard” and another region named “Lac de Charmes,” where the rover’s team will be looking for more rock core samples to collect in the year ahead. The mountains in the distance are approximately 52 miles (84 kilometers) away.

Going for 100

Now, engineers are asking Perseverance to perform well beyond expectations. An evaluation of the rover’s health concluded it can operate until at least 2031. The rover uses a radioactive plutonium power source, so it’s not in danger of running out of electricity or fuel any time soon. The Curiosity rover, which uses a similar design, has surpassed 13 years of operations on Mars.

There are two systems that are most likely to limit the rover’s useful lifetime. One is the robotic arm, which is necessary to collect samples, and the other is the rover’s six wheels and the drive train that powers them.

“To make sure we can continue operations and continue driving for a long, long way, up to 100 kilometers (62 miles), we are doing some additional testing,” Lee said. “We’ve successfully completed a rotary actuator life test that has now certified the rotary system to 100 kilometers for driving, and we have similar testing going on for the brakes. That is going well, and we should finish those early part of next year.”

Ars asked Lee why JPL decided on 100 kilometers, which is roughly the same distance as the average width of Lake Michigan. Since its arrival in 2021, Perseverance has climbed out of Jezero Crater and is currently exploring the crater’s rugged rim. If NASA sends a lander to pick up samples from Perseverance, the rover will have to drive back to a safe landing zone for a handoff.

“We actually had laid out a traverse path exploring the crater rim, much more of the crater rim than we have so far, and then be able to return to a rendezvous site,” Lee said. “So we did an estimate of the total mission drive duration to complete that mission, added margin for science exploration, added margin in case we need the rendezvous at a different site… and it just turned out to add up to a nice, even 100 kilometers.”

The time-lapse video embedded below shows the Perseverance rover’s record-breaking 1,351-foot (412-meter) drive on June 19, 2025.

Despite the disquiet on the future of MSR, the Perseverance rover has dutifully collected specimens and placed them in 33 titanium sample tubes since arriving on Mars. Perseverance deposited some of the sealed tubes on the surface of Mars in late 2022 and early 2023 and has held onto the remaining containers while continuing to drive toward the rim of Jezero.

The dual-depot approach preserves the option for future MSR mission planners to go after either batch of samples.

Scientists selected Jezero as the target for the Perseverance mission because they suspected it was the site of an ancient dried-up river delta with a surplus of clay-rich minerals. The rover’s instruments confirmed this hypothesis, finding sediments in the crater floor that were deposited at the bottom of a lake of liquid water billions of years ago, including sandstones and mudstones known to preserve fossilized life in comparable environments on Earth.

A research team published findings in the journal Nature in September describing the discovery of chemical signatures and structures in a rock that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. Perseverance lacks the bulky, sprawling instrumentation to know for sure, so ground teams ordered the rover to collect a pulverized specimen from the rock in question and seal it for eventual return to Earth.

Fill but don’t seal

Lee said Perseverance will continue filling sample tubes in the expectation that they will eventually come back to Earth.

“We do expect to continue some sampling,” Lee said. “We have six open sample tubes, unused sample tubes, onboard. We actually have two that we took samples and didn’t seal yet. So we have options of maybe replacing them if we’re finding that there’s even better areas that we want to collect from.”

The rover’s management team at JPL is finalizing the plan for Perseverance through 2028. Lee expects the rover will remain at Jezero’s rim for a while. “There are quite a number of very prime, juicy targets we would love to go explore,” he said.

In the meantime, if Perseverance runs across an alluring rock, scientists will break out the rover’s coring drill and fill more tubes.

“We certainly have more than enough to keep us busy, and we are not expecting a major perturbation to our science explorations in the next two and a half years as a result of sample return uncertainty,” Lee said.

Perseverance has its own suite of sophisticated instruments. The instruments can’t do what labs on Earth can, but the rover can scan rocks to determine what they’re made of, search for life-supporting organic molecules, map underground geology, and capture startling vistas that inspire and inform.

This photo montage shows sample tubes shortly after they were deposited onto the surface by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover in late 2022 and early 2023. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The rover’s sojourn along the Jezero Crater rim is taking it through different geological eras, from the time Jezero harbored a lake to its formation at an even earlier point in Martian history. Fundamentally, researchers are asking the question “What was it like if you were a microbe living on the surface of Mars?” said Briony Horgan, a mission scientist at Purdue University.

Along the way, the rover will stop and do a sample collection if something piques the science team’s interest.

“We are adopting a strategy, in many cases, to fill a tube, and we have the option to not seal it,” Lee said. “Most of our tubes are sealed, but we have the option to not seal it, and that gives us a flexibility downstream to replace the sample if there’s one that we find would make an even stronger representative of the diversity we are discovering.”

An indefinite wait

Planetary scientists have carefully curated the specimens cached by the Perseverance rover. The samples are sorted for their discovery potential, with an emphasis on the search for ancient microbial life. That’s why Perseverance was sent to Jezero in the first place.

China is preparing its own sample-return mission, Tianwen-3, for launch as early as 2028, aiming to deliver Mars rocks back to Earth by 2031. If the Tianwen-3 mission keeps to this schedule—and is successful—China will almost certainly be first to pull off the achievement. Officials have not announced the landing site for Tianwen-3, so the jury is still out on the scientific value of the rocks China aims to bring back.

NASA’s original costly architecture for Mars Sample Return would have used a lander built by JPL and a small solid-fueled rocket to launch the rock samples back into space after collecting them from the Perseverance rover. The capsule containing the Mars rocks would then transfer them to another spacecraft in orbit around Mars. Once Earth and Mars reached the proper orbital alignment, the return spacecraft would begin the journey home. All told, the sample return campaign would last several years.

NASA asked commercial companies to develop their own ideas for Mars Sample Return in 2024. SpaceX, Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and Rocket Lab submitted their lower-cost commercial concepts to NASA, but progress stalled there. NASA’s former administrator, Bill Nelson, punted on a decision on what to do next with Mars Sample Return in the final weeks of the Biden administration.

A few months later, the new Trump administration proposed outright canceling the Mars Sample Return mission. Mars Sample Return, known as MSR, was ranked as the top priority for planetary science in a National Academies decadal survey. Researchers say they could learn much more about Mars and the possibilities of past life there by bringing samples back to Earth for analysis.

Budget writers in the House of Representatives voted to restore funding for Mars Sample Return over the summer, but the Senate didn’t explicitly weigh in on the mission. NASA is now operating under a stopgap budget passed by Congress last month, and MSR remains in limbo.

There are good arguments for going with a commercial sample-return mission, using a similar approach to the one NASA used to buy commercial cargo and crew transportation services for the International Space Station. NASA might also offer prizes or decide to wait for a human expedition to Mars for astronauts to scoop up samples by hand.

Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars, discussed these options a few months ago. After nearly a year of revolving-door leadership, NASA finally got a Senate-confirmed administrator this week. It will now be up to the new NASA chief, Jared Isaacman, to chart a new course for Mars Sample Return.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Physicists 3D-printed a Christmas tree of ice

3D printing, evaporative cooling, Physics, Science / /

Physicists at the University of Amsterdam came up with a really cool bit of Christmas decor: a miniature 3D-printed Christmas tree, a mere 8 centimeters tall, made of ice, without any refrigeration equipment or other freezing technology, and at minimal cost. The secret is evaporative cooling, according to a preprint posted to the physics arXiv.

Evaporative cooling is a well-known phenomenon; mammals use it to regulate body temperature. You can see it in your morning cup of hot coffee: the hotter atoms rise to the top of the magnetic trap and “jump out” as steam. It also plays a role (along with shock wave dynamics and various other factors) in the formation of “wine tears.” It’s a key step in creating Bose-Einstein condensates.

And evaporative cooling is also the main culprit behind the infamous “stall” that so frequently plagues aspiring BBQ pit masters eager to make a successful pork butt. The meat sweats as it cooks, releasing the moisture within, and that moisture evaporates and cools the meat, effectively canceling out the heat from the BBQ. That’s why a growing number of competitive pit masters wrap their meat in tinfoil after the first few hours (usually when the internal temperature hits 170° F).

Ice-printing methods usually rely on cryogenics or on cooled substrates. Per the authors, this is the first time evaporative cooling principles have been applied to 3D printing. The trick was to house the 3D printing inside a vacuum chamber using a jet nozzle as the printing head—something they discovered serendipitously when they were trying to get rid of air drag by spraying water in a vacuum chamber.  “The printer’s motion control guides the water jet layer-by-layer, building geometry on demand,” the authors wrote in a blog post for Nature, adding:

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OpenAI’s new ChatGPT image generator makes faking photos easy

AI, AI image generator, AI image generators, API, Biz & IT, chatgpt, Deepfakes, generative ai, Google, image synthesis, machine learning, multimodal AI, openai / /

For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence.

It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational image-editing model in the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in March with a public prototype, then refined it to a popular model called Nano Banana image model (and Nano Banana Pro). The enthusiastic response to Google’s image-editing model in the AI community got OpenAI’s attention.

OpenAI’s new GPT Image 1.5 is an AI image synthesis model that reportedly generates images up to four times faster than its predecessor and costs about 20 percent less through the API. The model rolled out to all ChatGPT users on Tuesday and represents another step toward making photorealistic image manipulation a casual process that requires no particular visual skills.

The

The “Galactic Queen of the Universe” added to a photo of a room with a sofa using GPT Image 1.5 in ChatGPT.

GPT Image 1.5 is notable because it’s a “native multimodal” image model, meaning image generation happens inside the same neural network that processes language prompts. (In contrast, DALL-E 3, an earlier OpenAI image generator previously built into ChatGPT, used a different technique called diffusion to generate images.)

This newer type of model, which we covered in more detail in March, treats images and text as the same kind of thing: chunks of data called “tokens” to be predicted, patterns to be completed. If you upload a photo of your dad and type “put him in a tuxedo at a wedding,” the model processes your words and the image pixels in a unified space, then outputs new pixels the same way it would output the next word in a sentence.

Using this technique, GPT Image 1.5 can more easily alter visual reality than earlier AI image models, changing someone’s pose or position, or rendering a scene from a slightly different angle, with varying degrees of success. It can also remove objects, change visual styles, adjust clothing, and refine specific areas while preserving facial likeness across successive edits. You can converse with the AI model about a photograph, refining and revising, the same way you might workshop a draft of an email in ChatGPT.

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