Mike M. – Page 2

A century of hair samples proves leaded gas ban worked

chemistry, geochemistry, leaded gasoline, Science / Mike M. / February 2, 2026

Science also produced a hero in this saga: Caltech geochemist Clair Patterson. Along with George Tilton, Patterson developed a lead-dating method and used it to calculate the age of the Earth (4.55 billion years), based on analysis of the Canton Diablo meteorite. And he soon became a leading advocate for banning leaded gasoline and the “leaded solder” used in canned foods. This put Patterson at odds with some powerful industry lobbies, for which he paid a professional price.

But his many experimental findings on the extent of lead contamination and its toxic effects ultimately led to the rapid phase-out of lead in all standard automotive gasolines. Prior to the EPA’s actions in the 1970s, most gasolines contained about 2 grams of lead per gallon, which quickly adds up to nearly 2 pounds of lead released via automotive exhaust into the environment, per person, every year.

The proof is in our hair

The U.S. Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. — The US Mining and Smelting Co. plant in Midvale, Utah, 1906. Credit: Utah Historical Society

Lead can linger in the air for several days, contaminating one’s lungs, accumulating in living tissue, and being absorbed by one’s hair. Cerling had previously developed techniques to determine where animals lived and their diet by analyzing hair and teeth. Those methods proved ideal for analyzing hair samples from Utah residents who had previously participated in an earlier study that sampled their blood.

The subjects supplied hair samples both from today and when they were very young; some were even able to provide hair preserved in family scrapbooks that had belonged to their ancestors. The Utah population is well-suited for such a study because the cities of Midvale and Murray were home to a vibrant smelting industry through most of the 20th century; most other smelters in the region closed down in the 1970s when the EPA cracked down on using lead in consumer products.

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Research roundup: 6 cool stories we almost missed

research roundup, Science / Mike M. / February 1, 2026

A lip-syncing robot, Leonardo’s DNA, and new evidence that humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Credit: Yuhang Hu/Creative Machines Lab

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. January’s list includes a lip-syncing robot; using brewer’s yeast as scaffolding for lab-grown meat; hunting for Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA in his art; and new evidence that humans really did transport the stones to build Stonehenge from Wales and northern Scotland, rather than being transported by glaciers.

Humans, not glaciers, moved stones to Stonehenge

Stonehenge is an iconic landmark of endless fascination to tourists and researchers alike. There has been a lot of recent chemical analysis identifying where all the stones that make up the structure came from, revealing that many originated in quarries a significant distance away. So how were the stones transported to their current location?

One theory holds that glaciers moved the bluestones at least part of the way from Wales to Salisbury Plain in southern England, while others contend that humans moved them—although precisely how that was done has yet to be conclusively determined. Researchers at Curtin University have now produced the strongest scientific evidence to date that it was humans, not glaciers, that transported the stones, according to a paper published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Curtin’s Anthony Clarke and co-authors relied on mineral fingerprinting to arrive at their conclusions. In 2024, Clarke’s team discovered the Stonehenge Altar Stone originated from the Orkney region in the very northeast corner of Scotland, rather than Wales. This time, they analyzed hundreds of zircon crystals collected from rivers close to the historic monument, looking for evidence of Pleistocene-era sediment. Per Clarke, if the stones had “sailed” to the plain from further north, there would be a distinct mineral signature in that sediment as the transported rocks eroded over time. They didn’t find that signature, making it far more likely that humans transported the stone.

DOI: Communications Earth & Environment, 2026. 10.1038/s43247-025-03105-3 (About DOIs).

When grasshoppers fly

An American grasshopper sample with three iterations of model gliders. — Credit: Princeton University/Sameer A. Khan/Fotobuddy

Everyone knows grasshoppers can hop, but they can also flap their wings, jump, and glide, moving seamlessly across both the ground and through the air. That ability inspired scientists from Princeton University to devise a novel approach to building robotic wings, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. This could one day enable multimodal locomotion for miniature robots with extended flight times.

According to the authors, grasshoppers have two sets of wings: forewings and hindwings. Forewings are mostly used for protection and camouflage, while the latter are involved in flapping and gliding, and are corrugated to allow them to fold into the insect’s body. The team took CT scans to capture the geometry of grasshopper wings and used the scans to 3D print model wings with varying designs. Next they tested each variant in a water channel to study how water flowed around the wing, isolating key features like a wing’s shape or corrugation to see how this impacted the flow.

Once they had perfected their design, they printed new wings and attached them to small frames to create grasshopper-sized gliders. The team then launched the gliders across the lab and used motion capture to evaluate how well they flew. The glider performed as well as actual grasshoppers. In addition, they found that a smooth wing resulted in more efficient gliding. So why do real grasshopper wings have corrugations? The authors suggest that these evolved because they help with executing steep angles.

DOI: Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2026. 10.1098/rsif.2025.0117 (About DOIs).

Lip-syncing robot

Credit: Yuhang Hu/Creative Machines Lab

Humanoid robots are fascinating, but nobody would mistake them for actual humans, in part because even the ones that have faces are far too limited in facial gestures, including lip motion—hence, the “Uncanny Valley.” Columbia University engineers have now created a robot capable of learning facial lip motions for speaking and singing. According to a paper published in Science Robotics, the resulting robotic face was able to speak words in several different languages and sing an AI-generated song. (Its AI-generated debut album is aptly titled hello world.).

What makes human faces so uniquely capable of expression are the dozens of muscles lying just under the skin. Robotic faces are rigid and hence only have a limited range of motion. The Columbia team built their robotic face out of flexible material augmented with 26 motors (actuators). The robot learned to how its face moved in response to different actuator activity by watching itself in a mirror as it attempted thousands of random facial expressions. Eventually it learned how to achieve specific facial gestures.

The next step was to let the robot watch recorded videos of humans talking and singing, augmented with an AI algorithm that enabled it to learn exactly how the human mouths moved when performing those tasks so it could lip sync along. The resulting lip motion wasn’t perfect; the robot struggled with “B” and “W” sounds in particular. But the authors believe the robot will improve with more practice; combining this ability with ChatGPT or Gemini could further improve its lip-syncing ability.

DOI: Science Robotics, 2026. 10.1126/scirobotics.adx3017 (About DOIs).

Is Leonardo’s DNA preserved in his art?

Artist Karina Åberg swabs a 14th century da Vinci family letter from the State Archive in Prato for biological clues, following research initiated by Rossella Lorenzi. — Credit: Paola Agazzi / Archivio di Stato di Prato / Italian Ministry of Culture

In 2020, scientists analyzed the microbes found on several of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and discovered that each had its own distinct microbiome/. A second team, working with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project in France, collected and analyzed swabs taken from centuries-old art in a private collection housed in Florence, Italy. They concluded that microbial signatures could be used to differentiate artwork according to the materials used—dubbing this emerging subfield “arteomics.”

Yet another team collaborating with the project painstakingly assembled Leonardo’s family tree in 2021, spanning 21 generations from 1331 to the present, resulting a full-length book published last year. The idea was that this will one day provide a means of conducting DNA testing to confirm whether the bones interred in Leonardo’s grave are actually the his. And now the project’s scientists are back with a preprint posted to the bioRxiv, announcing the successful sequencing of human DNA collected from a handful of artifacts associated with Leonardo—including a drawing of the Holy Child that some scholars attribute to Leonardo, as well as letters from a da Vinci family member.

The team lightly swabbed samples from the artifacts’ surfaces and were able to recover human Y-chromosome sequences from several of the samples. Several of these sequences were related and the authors speculate that some might even be Leonardo’s, although they cautioned that the samples would need to be compared to samples taken from the artist’s notebooks, burial site, and family tomb to make a definitive identification. The authors also found DNA from bacteria, fungi, flowers, and animals in some of the samples, as well as traces of viruses and parasites.

DOI: bioRxiv, 2026. 10.64898/2026.01.06.697880 (About DOIs).

From pint to plate

Flowchart showing the production process proposed in the current study. BSY is taken from the fermentation tank and used to culture K. xylinus bacteria to produce cellulose pellicles. Pellicles are then harvested, seeded with cells, then stacked and encased in gel to create a cube. — Credit: Christian Harrison et al., 2026

Lab-grown meat is often touted as a more environmentally responsible alternative to the real deal, but carnivorous consumers are often put off by the unappealing mouthfeel and texture (and, for me, a weird oily aftertaste). A new method using spent brewer’s yeast to make edible “scaffolding” for cultivating meat in the lab might one day offer a solution, according to a paper published in the journal Frontiers in Nutrition.

Typically, a nutrient broth is used as a source of bacteria for the scaffolding. But Richard Day of University College London and his co-authors decided to use brewer’s yeast, usually discarded as waste, to culture a species of bacteria known for making high-quality cellulose. Then they tested the mechanical and structural properties of that cellulose with a “chewing machine.” They concluded that the cellulose made from spent brewer’s yeast was much closer in texture to real meat than the cellulose scaffolding made from a nutrient broth. The next step is to incorporate fat and muscle cells into the cellulose, as well as testing yeast from different kinds of beer.

DOI: Frontiers in Nutrition, 2026. 10.3389/fnut.2025.1656960 (About DOIs).

Water-driven gears

New York University scientists created a gear mechanism that relies on water to generate movement. For some conditions, the rotors spin in the same direction like pulleys looped together with a belt.

Gears have been around for thousands of years; the Chinese were using them in two-wheeled chariots as far back as 3000 BCE, and they are a mainstay in windmills, clocks, and the famed Antikythera mechanism. Roboticists also use gears in their inventions, but whether they are made of wood, metal or plastic, such gears tend to be inflexible and hence more prone to breakage. That’s why New York University mathematician Leif Reistroph and colleagues decided to see if flowing air or water could be used to rotate robotic structures.

Ristroph’s lab frequently addresses all manner of colorful real-world puzzles: fine-tuning the recipe for the perfect bubble, for instance; exploring the physics of the Hula-Hoop; or the formation processes underlying so-called “stone forests” common in China and Madagascar. In 2021, his lab built a working Tesla valve, in accordance with the inventor’s design; the following year they studied the complex aerodynamics of what makes a good paper airplane—specifically what is needed for smooth gliding; and in 2024 they cracked the conundrum of the “reverse sprinkler” problem that physicists like Richard Feynman, among others, had grappled with since the 1940s.

For their latest paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, Ristroph et al. wanted to devise something that functioned like a gear only with flowing liquid driving the motion, instead of teeth grinding against each other. They conducted a series of experiments in which they immersed cylindrical rotors in a glycerol-and-water solution. One cylinder would rotate while the other was passive.

They found that the rotating cylinder, combined with fluid flow, was sufficient to induce rotation in the passive cylinder. The flows functioned much in the same way as gear teeth when the cylinders were close together. Moving the cylinders further apart caused the active cylinder to rotate faster, looping the flows around the passive cylinder—essentially mimicking a belt and pulley system.

DOI: Physical Review Letters, 2026. 10.1103/m6ft-ll2c (About DOIs).

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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The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K

8K, lg, Tech, TVs / Mike M. / January 31, 2026

Technology companies spent part of the 2010s trying to convince us that we would want an 8K display one day.

In 2012, Sharp brought the first 8K TV prototype to the CES trade show in Las Vegas. In 2015, the first 8K TVs started selling in Japan for 16 million yen (about $133,034 at the time), and in 2018, Samsung released the first 8K TVs in the US, starting at a more reasonable $3,500. By 2016, the Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) had a specification for supporting 8K (Display Port1.4), and the HDMI Forum followed suit (with HDMI 2.1). By 2017, Dell had an 8K computer monitor. In 2019, LG released the first 8K OLED TV, further pushing the industry’s claim that 8K TVs were “the future.”

A marketing image with three TVs next to the words — A marketing image for 8K TVs that’s (still) on LG’s US website. Credit: LG

However, 8K never proved its necessity or practicality.

TV companies are quitting 8K

LG Display is no longer making 8K LCD or OLED panels, FlatpanelsHD reported today. Earlier this month, an LG Display representative told FlatpanelsHD that the panel supplier is “taking a comprehensive view of current display market trends and the trends within the 8K content ecosystem.”

“As our technical readiness is already complete, LG Display is fully prepared to respond immediately whenever the market and customers determine that the timing is right,” LG Display’s representative said.

LG Electronics was the first and only company to sell 8K OLED TVs, starting with the 88-inch Z9 in 2019. In 2022, it lowered the price-of-entry for an 8K OLED TV by $7,000 by charging $13,000 for a 76.7-inch TV.

FlatpanelsHD cited anonymous sources who said that LG Electronics would no longer restock the 2024 QNED99T, which is the last LCD 8K TV that it released.

LG’s 8K abandonment follows other brands distancing themselves from 8K. TCL, which released its last 8K TV in 2021, said in 2023 that it wasn’t making more 8K TVs due to low demand. Sony discontinued its last 8K TVs in April and is unlikely to return to the market, as it plans to sell the majority ownership of its Bravia TVs to TCL.

The TV industry finally concedes that the future may not be in 8K Read More »

Developers say AI coding tools work—and that’s precisely what worries them

AI, AI agents, AI and work, AI coding, Anthropic, Biz & IT, Claude, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, large language models, machine learning, microsoft, openai, openai codex, Programming, software development, vibe coding / Mike M. / January 30, 2026

Ars spoke to several software devs about AI and found enthusiasm tempered by unease.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

Software developers have spent the past two years watching AI coding tools evolve from advanced autocomplete into something that can, in some cases, build entire applications from a text prompt. Tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex can now work on software projects for hours at a time, writing code, running tests, and, with human supervision, fixing bugs. OpenAI says it now uses Codex to build Codex itself, and the company recently published technical details about how the tool works under the hood. It has caused many to wonder: Is this just more AI industry hype, or are things actually different this time?

To find out, Ars reached out to several professional developers on Bluesky to ask how they feel about these tools in practice, and the responses revealed a workforce that largely agrees the technology works, but remains divided on whether that’s entirely good news. It’s a small sample size that was self-selected by those who wanted to participate, but their views are still instructive as working professionals in the space.

David Hagerty, a developer who works on point-of-sale systems, told Ars Technica up front that he is skeptical of the marketing. “All of the AI companies are hyping up the capabilities so much,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong—LLMs are revolutionary and will have an immense impact, but don’t expect them to ever write the next great American novel or anything. It’s not how they work.”

Roland Dreier, a software engineer who has contributed extensively to the Linux kernel in the past, told Ars Technica that he acknowledges the presence of hype but has watched the progression of the AI space closely. “It sounds like implausible hype, but state-of-the-art agents are just staggeringly good right now,” he said. Dreier described a “step-change” in the past six months, particularly after Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5. Where he once used AI for autocomplete and asking the occasional question, he now expects to tell an agent “this test is failing, debug it and fix it for me” and have it work. He estimated a 10x speed improvement for complex tasks like building a Rust backend service with Terraform deployment configuration and a Svelte frontend.

A huge question on developers’ minds right now is whether what you might call “syntax programming,” that is, the act of manually writing code in the syntax of an established programming language (as opposed to conversing with an AI agent in English), will become extinct in the near future due to AI coding agents handling the syntax for them. Dreier believes syntax programming is largely finished for many tasks. “I still need to be able to read and review code,” he said, “but very little of my typing is actual Rust or whatever language I’m working in.”

When asked if developers will ever return to manual syntax coding, Tim Kellogg, a developer who actively posts about AI on social media and builds autonomous agents, was blunt: “It’s over. AI coding tools easily take care of the surface level of detail.” Admittedly, Kellogg represents developers who have fully embraced agentic AI and now spend their days directing AI models rather than typing code. He said he can now “build, then rebuild 3 times in less time than it would have taken to build manually,” and ends up with cleaner architecture as a result.

One software architect at a pricing management SaaS company, who asked to remain anonymous due to company communications policies, told Ars that AI tools have transformed his work after 30 years of traditional coding. “I was able to deliver a feature at work in about 2 weeks that probably would have taken us a year if we did it the traditional way,” he said. And for side projects, he said he can now “spin up a prototype in like an hour and figure out if it’s worth taking further or abandoning.”

Dreier said the lowered effort has unlocked projects he’d put off for years: “I’ve had ‘rewrite that janky shell script for copying photos off a camera SD card’ on my to-do list for literal years.” Coding agents finally lowered the barrier to entry, so to speak, low enough that he spent a few hours building a full released package with a text UI, written in Rust with unit tests. “Nothing profound there, but I never would have had the energy to type all that code out by hand,” he told Ars.

Of vibe coding and technical debt

Not everyone shares the same enthusiasm as Dreier. Concerns about AI coding agents building up technical debt, that is, making poor design choices early in a development process that snowball into worse problems over time, originated soon after the first debates around “vibe coding” emerged in early 2025. Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy coined the term to describe programming by conversing with AI without fully understanding the resulting code, which many see as a clear hazard of AI coding agents.

Darren Mart, a senior software development engineer at Microsoft who has worked there since 2006, shared similar concerns with Ars. Mart, who emphasizes he is speaking in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Microsoft, recently used Claude in a terminal to build a Next.js application integrating with Azure Functions. The AI model “successfully built roughly 95% of it according to my spec,” he said. Yet he remains cautious. “I’m only comfortable using them for completing tasks that I already fully understand,” Mart said, “otherwise there’s no way to know if I’m being led down a perilous path and setting myself (and/or my team) up for a mountain of future debt.”

A data scientist working in real estate analytics, who asked to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of his work, described keeping AI on a very short leash for similar reasons. He uses GitHub Copilot for line-by-line completions, which he finds useful about 75 percent of the time, but restricts agentic features to narrow use cases: language conversion for legacy code, debugging with explicit read-only instructions, and standardization tasks where he forbids direct edits. “Since I am data-first, I’m extremely risk averse to bad manipulation of the data,” he said, “and the next and current line completions are way too often too wrong for me to let the LLMs have freer rein.”

Speaking of free rein, Nike backend engineer Brian Westby, who uses Cursor daily, told Ars that he sees the tools as “50/50 good/bad.” They cut down time on well-defined problems, he said, but “hallucinations are still too prevalent if I give it too much room to work.”

The legacy code lifeline and the enterprise AI gap

For developers working with older systems, AI tools have become something like a translator and an archaeologist rolled into one. Nate Hashem, a staff engineer at First American Financial, told Ars Technica that he spends his days updating older codebases where “the original developers are gone and documentation is often unclear on why the code was written the way it was.” That’s important because previously “there used to be no bandwidth to improve any of this,” Hashem said. “The business was not going to give you 2-4 weeks to figure out how everything actually works.”

In that high-pressure, relatively low-resource environment, AI has made the job “a lot more pleasant,” in his words, by speeding up the process of identifying where and how obsolete code can be deleted, diagnosing errors, and ultimately modernizing the codebase.

Hashem also offered a theory about why AI adoption looks so different inside large corporations than it does on social media. Executives demand their companies become “AI oriented,” he said, but the logistics of deploying AI tools with proprietary data can take months of legal review. Meanwhile, the AI features that Microsoft and Google bolt onto products like Gmail and Excel, the tools that actually reach most workers, tend to run on more limited AI models. “That modal white-collar employee is being told by management to use AI,” Hashem said, “but is given crappy AI tools because the good tools require a lot of overhead in cost and legal agreements.”

Speaking of management, the question of what these new AI coding tools mean for software development jobs drew a range of responses. Does it threaten anyone’s job? Kellogg, who has embraced agentic coding enthusiastically, was blunt: “Yes, massively so. Today it’s the act of writing code, then it’ll be architecture, then it’ll be tiers of product management. Those who can’t adapt to operate at a higher level won’t keep their jobs.”

Dreier, while feeling secure in his own position, worried about the path for newcomers. “There are going to have to be changes to education and training to get junior developers the experience and judgment they need,” he said, “when it’s just a waste to make them implement small pieces of a system like I came up doing.”

Hagerty put it in economic terms: “It’s going to get harder for junior-level positions to get filled when I can get junior-quality code for less than minimum wage using a model like Sonnet 4.5.”

Mart, the Microsoft engineer, put it more personally. The software development role is “abruptly pivoting from creation/construction to supervision,” he said, “and while some may welcome that pivot, others certainly do not. I’m firmly in the latter category.”

Even with this ongoing uncertainty on a macro level, some people are really enjoying the tools for personal reasons, regardless of larger implications. “I absolutely love using AI coding tools,” the anonymous software architect at a pricing management SaaS company told Ars. “I did traditional coding for my entire adult life (about 30 years) and I have way more fun now than I ever did doing traditional coding.”

Benj Edwards is Ars Technica’s Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site’s dedicated AI beat in 2022. He’s also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC.

Developers say AI coding tools work—and that’s precisely what worries them Read More »

How often do AI chatbots lead users down a harmful path?

AI, Anthropic, Artificial Intelligence, Claude, disempowerment, research / Mike M. / January 29, 2026

While these worst outcomes are relatively rare on a proportional basis, the researchers note that “given the sheer number of people who use AI, and how frequently it’s used, even a very low rate affects a substantial number of people.” And the numbers get considerably worse when you consider conversations with at least a “mild” potential for disempowerment, which occurred in between 1 in 50 and 1 in 70 conversations (depending on the type of disempowerment).

What’s more, the potential for disempowering conversations with Claude appears to have grown significantly between late 2024 and late 2025. While the researchers couldn’t pin down a single reason for this increase, they guessed that it could be tied to users becoming “more comfortable discussing vulnerable topics or seeking advice” as AI gets more popular and integrated into society.

The problem of potentially “disempowering” responses from Claude seems to be getting worse over time. Credit: Anthropic

User error?

In the study, the researcher acknowledged that studying the text of Claude conversations only measures “disempowerment potential rather than confirmed harm” and “relies on automated assessment of inherently subjective phenomena.” Ideally, they write, future research could utilize user interviews or randomized controlled trials to measure these harms more directly.

That said, the research includes several troubling examples where the text of the conversations clearly implies real-world harms. Claude would sometimes reinforce “speculative or unfalsifiable claims” with encouragement (e.g., “CONFIRMED,” “EXACTLY,” “100%”), which, in some cases, led to users “build[ing] increasingly elaborate narratives disconnected from reality.”

Claude’s encouragement could also lead to users “sending confrontational messages, ending relationships, or drafting public announcements,” the researchers write. In many cases, users who sent AI-drafted messages later expressed regret in conversations with Claude, using phrases like “It wasn’t me” and “You made me do stupid things.”

How often do AI chatbots lead users down a harmful path? Read More »

Australian plumber is a YouTube sensation

competence porn, culture, Internet culture, plumbing, youtube, youtube creators, youtube culture / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

My personal favorites are when Bruce takes on clogged restaurant grease traps, including the one at the top of this article in which he pulls out a massive greaseberg “the size of a chihuahua.” When it’s Bruce versus a nasty grease trap, the man remains undefeated (well, almost—sometimes he needs to get a grease trap pumped out before he can fix the problem). And I have learned more than I probably ever needed to know about how grease traps work.

schematic illustration showing how a grease trap works — Credit: YouTube/Drain Cleaning Australia

Each video is its own little adventure. Bruce arrives on a job, checks out the problem (“she is chock-a-block, mate!”), and starts methodically working that problem until he solves it, which inevitably involves firing up “the bloody jet” to blast through blockages with 5,000 psi of water pressure (“Go, you good thing!”). This being Australia, he’ll occasionally encounter not just cockroaches but poisonous spiders and snakes. And he’s caught so many facefulls of wastewater and sewage while jetting that he really ought to invest in a hazmat suit. Even the cheesy canned techno-music playing during lulls in the action is low-budget perfection.

Bruce isn’t the only plumber with a YouTube channel—it’s a surprisingly good-size subgenre—but he’s the most colorful and entertaining. His unbridled enthusiasm for what many would consider the dirtiest of jobs is positively infectious. He regularly effuses about having the best job in the world, insisting that unclogging gross drains is “living the dream,” and regularly asks his audience, “How good is this? I mean, where else would you rather be?” Sure, he says it with an ironic (unseen) wink at the camera, but deep down, you know he truly loves the work.

And you know what? Bruce is right. It might not be your definition of “what dreams are made of,” but there really is something profoundly satisfying about a free-flowing drain—and a job well done.

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Apple patches ancient iOS versions to keep iMessage, FaceTime, other services working

Apple, iOS 12, iOS 15, iOS 16, ios 18, Tech / Mike M. / January 27, 2026

When Apple stops supporting older iPhones and iPads with the latest version of iOS or iPadOS, it usually isn’t the end of the line—Apple keeps releasing new security-only patches for those devices for another year or two, keeping them usable while their hardware is still reasonably capable.

Once those updates dry up, it’s rare for Apple to revisit those older operating systems, but the company does sometimes make exceptions. That was the case yesterday, when the company released a batch of updates for long-retired iOS and iPadOS versions that otherwise hadn’t seen a new patch in months or years. Those updates include iOS 12.5.8, available for devices as old as 2013’s iPhone 5S and 2014’s iPhone 6; iOS 15.8.6, available for devices like the iPhone 6S, iPhone 7, and iPad Air 2; and iOS 16.7.13, available for devices like the iPhone 8 and iPhone X.

Both iOS 15 and iOS 16 were last patched in mid-2025, but iOS 12’s last patch was released in January 2023.

These updates don’t patch security flaws or add new features. According to Apple’s release notes for the iOS 12 and iOS 15 updates, all they do is update a security certificate to ensure that iMessage, FaceTime, and Apple account sign-in will continue working past January 2027, when the operating systems’ original certificate would have expired.

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Apple’s AirTag 2 is easier to find thanks to new chip

AirTag, Apple, bluetooth, location tracker, Tech / Mike M. / January 26, 2026

Additionally, the speaker in the AirTag is now 50 percent louder, Apple says. These two things together address some user complaints that, as useful as an AirTag can be in ideal circumstances, sometimes it is frustrating trying to get things just right to find something. It won’t eliminate all edge cases, but it ought to help.

Apple used this announcement to also talk up some of the features of the AirTag, including the encryption that it says prevents anyone but the AirTag owner from using it, and an arrangement with airlines where users can temporarily give airlines the ability to use Apple’s network to find a specific AirTag to locate lost luggage and the like.

To be clear, the new AirTag doesn’t introduce any major new features that aren’t already offered in the previous generation—this is just an update to the device’s accuracy, volume, and range.

The price remains unchanged, at $29 for one AirTag or $99 for a pack of four. The new model is available for order on Apple’s website now and will hit physical stores later this week.

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How to encrypt your PC’s disk without giving the keys to Microsoft

BitLocker, Security, Tech, Windows 10, Windows 11 / Mike M. / January 26, 2026

If you want to encrypt your Windows PC’s disk but you don’t want to store your recovery key with Microsoft, you do have options. We’ll recap the requirements, as well as the steps you’ll need to take.

You’ll need Windows 11 Pro for this

Settings > System > Activation will tell you what edition of Windows 11 you have and offer some options for upgrades. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Before we begin: Disk encryption is one of the handful of differences between the Home and Pro versions of Windows.

Both the Home and Pro versions of Windows support disk encryption, but only the Pro versions give users full control over the process. The Home version of Windows only supports disk encryption when logged in with a Microsoft account and will only offer to store your encryption key on Microsoft’s servers.

To access the full version of BitLocker and back up your own recovery key, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version of Windows. Microsoft offers its own first-party upgrade option through the Microsoft Store for a one-time fee of $99, but it’s also possible to bring your own product key and upgrade yourself. This Macworld-affiliated listing from StackCommerce claims to be an official Microsoft partner and is offering a Windows 11 Pro key for just $10, though your mileage with third-party key resellers may vary.

However you get it, once you have a valid key, open Settings, then System, then Activation, click upgrade your edition of Windows, click change product key, and then enter your Windows 11 Pro key (Windows 10 Pro keys should also work, if you already have one). Luckily, changing Windows editions doesn’t require anything more disruptive than a system restart. You won’t need to reinstall Windows, and you shouldn’t lose any of your installed apps or data.

And once you’ve upgraded a PC to Windows 11 Pro once, you should be able to reinstall and activate Windows 11 Pro on that system again any time you want without having to re-enter your product key. Keep the product key stored somewhere, though, just in case you do need to use it for a reinstall, or if you ever need to re-activate Windows after a hardware upgrade.

How to encrypt your PC’s disk without giving the keys to Microsoft Read More »

Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now”

artemis, axiom space, Commercial space, Features, human spaceflight, kate rubins, mike barratt, NASA, Science, Space, spacesuits / Mike M. / January 26, 2026

“These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.”

NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara kneels down to pick up a rock during testing of Axiom’s lunar spacesuit inside NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies.

Kate Rubins, who retired from the space agency last year, presented the committee with her views on the health risks for astronauts on lunar missions. She outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

Scientists and astronauts have come to understand many of these effects after a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. But the Moon is different in a few important ways. The Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, lunar dust is pervasive, and the Moon has partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth.

Each of these presents challenges for astronauts living and working on the lunar surface, and their effects are amplified for crew members who venture outside for spacewalks. NASA selected Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, for a $228 million fixed-price contract to develop commercial pressurized spacesuits for the Artemis III mission, slated to be the first human landing mission on the Moon since 1972.

NASA hopes to fly the Artemis III mission by the end of 2028, but the schedule is in question. The readiness of Axiom’s spacesuits and the availability of new human-rated landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin are driving the timeline for Artemis III.

Stressing about stress

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space.

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.”

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins inside the International Space Station in 2020. Credit: NASA

Rubins is now a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She said treks on the Moon will be “even more challenging” than her spacewalks outside the ISS.

The Axiom spacesuit design builds on NASA’s own work developing a prototype suit to replace the agency’s decades-old Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) used for spacewalks at the International Space Station (ISS). The new suits allow for greater mobility, with more flexible joints to help astronauts use their legs, crouch, and bend down—things they don’t have to do when floating outside the ISS.

Astronauts on the Moon also must contend with gravity. Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

On paper, the Axiom suits for NASA’s Artemis missions are more capable than the Apollo suits. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the new suits are heavier, and for astronauts used to spacewalks outside the ISS, walks on the Moon will be a slog, Rubins said.

“I think the suits are better than Apollo, but I don’t think they are great right now,” Rubins said. “They still have a lot of flexibility issues. Bending down to pick up rocks is hard. The center of gravity is an issue. People are going to be falling over. I think when we say these suits aren’t bad, it’s because the suits have been so horrible that when we get something slightly less than horrible, we get all excited and we celebrate.”

The heavier lunar suits developed for Artemis missions run counter to advice from former astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” Schmitt said in a NASA oral history interview in 2000. “Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

NASA won’t have a rover on the first Artemis landing mission. That will come on a later flight. A fully pressurized vehicle for astronauts to drive across the Moon may be ready sometime in the 2030s. Until then, Moonwalkers will have to tough it out.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

NASA astronaut Mike Barratt inside the International Space Station in 2024. Credit: NASA

Barratt met with the same National Academies panel this week and presented a few hours before Rubins. The committee was chartered to examine how human explorers can enable scientific discovery at sites across the lunar surface. Barratt had a more favorable take on the spacesuit situation.

“This is not a commercial for Axiom. I don’t promote anyone, but their suit is getting there,” Barratt said. “We’ve got 700 hours of pressurized experience in it right now. We do a lot of tests in the NBL, and there are techniques and body conditioning that you do to help you get ready for doing things like this. Bending down in the suit is really not too bad at all.”

Rubins and Barratt did not discuss the schedule for when Axiom’s lunar spacesuit will be ready to fly to the Moon, but the conversation illuminated the innumerable struggles of spacewalking, Moonwalking, and the training astronauts undergo to prepare for extravehicular outings.

The one who should know

I spoke directly with Rubins after her discussion with the National Academies. Her last assignment at NASA was as chief of the EVA and robotics branch in the astronaut office, where she assisted in the development of the new lunar spacesuits. I asked about her experiences testing the lunar suit and her thoughts on how astronauts should prepare for Moonwalks.

“The suits that we have are definitely much better than Apollo,” Rubins said in the interview. “They were just big bags of air. The joints aren’t in there, so it was harder to move. What they did have going for them was that they were much, much lighter than our current spacesuits. We have added a lot of the joints back, and that does get some mobility for us. But at the end of the day, the suits are still quite heavy.”

You can divide the weight of the suit by six to get an idea of how it might feel to carry it around on the lunar surface. While it won’t feel like 300 pounds, astronauts will still have to account for their mass and momentum.

Rubins explained:

Instead of kind of floating in microgravity and moving your mass around with your hands and your arms, now we’re ambulating. We’re walking with our legs. You’re going to have more strain on your knees and your hips. Your hamstrings, your calves, and your glutes are going to come more into play.

I think, overall, it may be a better fit for humans physically because if you ask somebody to do a task, I’m going to be much better at a task if I can use my legs and I’m ambulating. Then I have to pull myself along with my arms… We’re not really built to do that, but we are built to run and to go long distances. Our legs are just such a powerful force.

So I think there are a lot of things lining up that are going to make the physiology easier. Then there are things that are going to be different because we’re now in a partial gravity environment. We’re going to be bending, we’re going to be twisting, we’re going to be doing different things.

It’s an incredibly hard engineering challenge. You have to keep a human alive in absolute vacuum, warm at temperatures that you know in the polar regions could go as far down as 40 Kelvin (minus 388° Fahrenheit). We haven’t sent humans anywhere that cold before. They are also going to be very hot. They’re going to be baking in the sunshine. You’ve got radiation. If you put all that together, that’s a huge amount of suit material just to keep the human physiology and the human body intact.

Then our challenge is ‘how do you make that mobile?’ It’s very difficult to bend down and pick up a rock. You have to manage that center of gravity because you’re wearing that big life support system on your back, a big pack that has a lot of mass in it, so that brings your center of gravity higher than you’re used to on Earth and a little bit farther backward.

When you move around, it’s like wearing a really, really heavy backpack that has mass but no weight, so it’s going to kind of tip you back. You can do some things with putting weights on the front of the suit to try to move that center of gravity forward, but it’s still higher, and it’s not exactly at your center of mass that you’re used to on the Earth. On the Earth, we have a center of our mass related to gravity, and nobody ever thinks about it, and you don’t think about it until it moves somewhere else, and then it makes all of your natural motion seem very difficult.

Those are some of the challenges that we’re facing engineering-wise. I think the new suits, they’ve gone a long way toward addressing these, but it’s still a hard engineering challenge. And I’m not talking about any specific suit. I can’t talk about the details of the provider’s suits. This is the NASA xEMU and all the lunar suits I have tested over the years. That includes the Mark III suit, the Axiom suit. They have similar issues. So this isn’t really anything about a specific vendor. These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.

NASA trains astronauts for spacewalks in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, an enormous pool in Houston used for simulating weightlessness. They also use a gravity-offloading device to rehearse the basics of spacewalking. The optimal test environment, short of the space environment itself, will be aboard parabolic flights, where suit developers and astronauts can get the best feel for the suit’s momentum, according to Rubins.

Axiom and NASA are well along assessing the new lunar spacesuit’s performance underwater, but they haven’t put it through reduced-gravity flight testing. “Until you get to the actual parabolic flight, that’s when you can really test the ability to manage this momentum,” Rubins said.

NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Stan Love test Axiom’s lunar spacesuit inside NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Recovering from a fall on the lunar surface comes with its own perils.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

The lunar suits are sleeker than the suits NASA uses on the ISS, but they are still bulky. “If you’re trying to kneel, if you’re thinking about bending forward at your waist, all that material in your waist has nowhere to go, so it just compresses and compresses,” Rubins said. “That’s why I say it’s harder to kneel. It’s harder to bend forward because you’re having to compress the suit in those areas.

“We’ve done these amazing things with joint mobility,” Rubins said. “The mobility around the joints is amazing… but now we’re dealing with this compression issue. And there’s not an obvious engineering fix to that.”

The fix to this problem might come in the form of tools instead of changes to the spacesuit itself. Rubins said astronauts could use a staff, or something like a hiking pole, to brace themselves when they need to kneel or bend down. “That way I’m not trying to compress the suit and deal with my balance at the same time.”

A bruising exertion

The Moonwalker suit can comfortably accommodate a wider range of astronauts than NASA’s existing EMUs on the space station. The old EMUs can be resized to medium, large, and extra-large, but that leaves gaps and makes the experience uncomfortable for a smaller astronaut. This discomfort is especially noticeable while practicing for spacewalks underwater, where the tug of gravity is still present, Rubins said.

“As a female, I never really had an EMU that fit me,” Rubins said. “It was always giant. When I’m translating around or doing something, I’m physically falling and slamming myself, my chest or my back, into one side of the suit or the other underwater, whereas with the lunar suit, I’ve got a suit that fits me right. That’s going to lead to less bruising. Just having a suit that fits you is much better.”

Mission planners should also emphasize physical conditioning for astronauts assigned to lunar landing missions. That includes preflight weight and endurance training, plus guidance on what to eat in space to maximize energy levels before astronauts head outside for a stroll.

“That human has to go up really maximally conditioned,” Rubins said.

Rubins and Barratt agreed that NASA and its spacesuit provider should be ready to rapidly respond to feedback from future Moonwalkers. Engineers modified and upgraded the Apollo spacesuits in a matter of months, iterating the design between each mission.

“Our general design is on a good path,” Rubins said. “We need to make sure that we continue to push for increasing improvements in human performance, and some of that ties back to the budget. Our first suit design is not where we’re going to be done if we want to do a really sustained lunar program. We have to continue to improve, and I think it’s important to recognize that we’re going to learn so many lessons during Artemis III.”

Barratt has a unique perspective on spacesuit design. He has performed spacewalks at the ISS in NASA’s spacesuit and the Russian Orlan spacesuit. Barratt said the US suit is easier to work in than the Orlan, but the Russian suit is “incredibly reliable” and “incredibly serviceable.”

“It had a couple of glitches, and literally, you unzip a curtain and it’s like looking at my old Chevy Blazer,” Barratt said. “Everything is right there. It’s mechanical, it’s accessible with standard tools. We can fix it. We can do that really easily. We’ve tried to incorporate those lessons learned into our next-generation EVA systems.”

Contrast that with the NASA suits on the ISS, where one of Barratt’s spacewalks in 2024 was cut short by a spacesuit water leak. “We recently had to return a suit from the space station,” Barratt said. “We’ve got another one that’s sort of offline for a while; we’re troubleshooting it. It’s a really subtle problem that’s extremely difficult to work on in places that are hard to access.”

It’s happened before. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt loses his balance on the Moon, then quickly recovers. Credit: NASA

Harrison Schmitt, speaking with a NASA interviewer in 2000, said his productivity in the Apollo suit “couldn’t have been much more than 10 percent of what you would do normally here on Earth.”

“You take the human brain, the human eyes, and the human hands into space. That’s the only justification you have for having human beings in space,” Schmitt said. “It’s a massive justification, but that’s what you want to use, and all three have distinct benefits in productivity and in gathering new information and infusing data over any automated system. Unfortunately, we have discarded one of those, and that is the hands.”

Schmitt singled out the gloves as the “biggest problem” with the Apollo suits. “The gloves are balloons, and they’re made to fit,” he said. Picking something up with a firm grip requires squeezing against the pressure inside the suit. The gloves can also damage astronauts’ fingernails.

“That squeezing against that pressure causes these forearm muscles to fatigue very rapidly,” Schmitt said. “Just imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously for eight hours or 10 hours, and that’s what you’re talking about.”

Barratt recounted a conversation in which Schmitt, now 90, said he wouldn’t have wanted to do another spacewalk after his three excursions with commander Gene Cernan on Apollo 17.

“Physically, and from a suit-maintenance standpoint, he thought that that was probably the limit, what they did,” Barratt said. “They were embedded with dust. The visors were abraded. Every time they brushed the dust off the visors, they lost visibility.”

Getting the Artemis spacesuit right is vital to the program’s success. You don’t want to travel all the way to the Moon and stop exploring because of sore fingers or an injured knee.

“If you look at what we’re spending on suits versus what we’re spending on the rocket, this is a pretty small amount,” Rubins said. “Obviously, the rocket can kill you very quickly. That needs to be done right. But the continuous improvement in the suit will get us that much more efficiency. Saving 30 minutes or an hour on the Moon, that gives you that much more science.”

“Once you have safely landed on the lunar surface, this is where you’ve got to put your money,” Barratt said.

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.

Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now” Read More »

A decade of Star Trek-themed fart jokes: The Greatest Generation podcast turns 10

culture, greatest generation, podcast, Star Trek / Mike M. / January 25, 2026

How two podcasters turned a Star Trek side project into a full-time career.

A decade is a long time for a TV series; no single iteration of Star Trek has made it that far.

But “a Star Trek podcast by two guys just a little bit embarrassed to have a Star Trek podcast” has now passed the milestone. January 25, 2026, marks a full decade since The Greatest Generation, my favorite podcast, debuted. Like a bottle of Château Picard, the show has only improved with age. (I interviewed the guys behind the show back in 2016 when they were just getting started.)

The podcast helped me rediscover, and appreciate more fully, Star Trek: The Next Generation—which is also my favorite TV show. The Greatest Generation continues to delight with its irreverent humor, its celebration of the most minor of characters, and its technical fascination with how a given episode was made.

Over the last decade, hosts Ben Harrison and Adam Pranica have both moved to Los Angeles and become full-time podcasters. They have completed an episode-by-episode recap of all of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, and they’re now nearing the end of Enterprise. When finished, they’re threatening/promising to start over again.

The podcast has spawned its own (sometimes NSFW!) lexicon (a “friend of DeSoto” means a listener to and fan of The Greatest Generation), its own recurring and hilarious segments (“Drunk Shimoda,” “Bad Bit Moment,” and “Polo? Polo? Or Pollo?”), and most importantly, its own delightful fandom. It’s the coolest and dorkiest secret club that I will ever be a part of.

In 2016, the podcast was folded into the Maximum Fun organization. Harrison and Pranica formed their own company, Uxbridge-Shimoda LLC, that takes its name from two obscure TNG-era characters.

Like the original Star Trek, the podcast even spawned its own 2017 spinoff—now called The Greatest Trek—entirely devoted to the newer series in the Star Trek universe.

Harrison and Pranica also produce two irregularly released, members-only podcasts called Santa Monica Mountains (about the 1980s and 1990s TV show Baywatch) and Factory Seconds (where they eat at various Cheesecake Factory restaurants). Last year, they also started—in conjunction with YouTube cooking star Adam Ragusea—yet another podcast, called Wholesome, which is only available to Patreon subscribers.

In a world replete with chaos and awfulness, I’m just here for the hang.

(This interview, which was conducted earlier this month, has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.)

Ars: When I first spoke to you guys back in 2016, Adam was living in Seattle. Ben, I believe you were living in New York. You guys were still working in film production. As best as I could tell, this was just a fun little side project. Who knew how long it would run?

Ben: I think that us talking to you has a lot to do with it taking over our lives.

Ars: Sorry, not sorry? I don’t know! [laughs]

Adam: Your Ars article was one of the reasons we catapulted into the sort of audience we got afterward. It’s an audience that has meant we’ve been able to do the show professionally for 10 years.

Ben: Yeah. And when we meet people—all the time—people will say: “Oh, I’ve been listening to you guys since the beginning. Like, I was on at episode five because of that Ars Technica article.”

Ars: Do you feel like you are over it? It’s been a decade now. Is Greatest Gen as we know it going to continue?

Adam: I think the thing that’s changed is that in the beginning, it felt like a fun hobby. But when you professionalize a thing and you hire employees and you are depended on for the thing that you make in a way that you’ve never been before, it’s serious business.

It’s serious funny business, you know?

This is the best job I’ve ever had, but it’s also the most seriously I’ve ever taken a job because it means so much to our well-being, but also the folks who appreciate what we do.

Ben: Yeah, one thing that Adam has said many times is we’re going to die in these chairs.

And I think also, as we come toward the end of Enterprise and have sort of run out of the well of Old Trek, as it were, I have been thinking about [what] if I hadn’t had this show? I would still be about ready to start my next TNG rewatch.

Loving Star Trek is a lot about watching it over again, you know? In the same way that I’ll put on an old rerun of The Simpsons or Seinfeld. And I love rewatching those shows. I love rewatching Star Trek.

I think Adam and I have grown as both a comedy duo but also as observers of Star Trek and what it means on an ongoing basis. So I feel like it would be unfair for us not to go back and start painting the bridge from the beginning.

Adam: I think one of the things that we’ve learned from doing the show, especially live in front of people, is that we are told by the people who enjoy this show that it’s about Star Trek, sure, but that’s not the thing that people love the most about the show.

And I think that’s what makes a return to the beginning of it make so much sense in the way Ben’s describing. It’s about the hang and your life as it relates to a Star Trek rerun that you’re watching in that moment.

Ars: I have watched zero minutes of Baywatch in my life. But I have listened to every single episode of the Santa Monica Mountains. I enjoy hearing you guys talk about it.

I think you’ve hit on a format: “Let’s talk about a thing in the way that we like to talk about it and make jokes in the way that we like to make jokes about it.” Which for me really resonates more than the format of a podcast that’s like: “Let’s get comedians to talk about a thing.”

Adam: Or let’s get celebrities in a room to talk about anything and have that be good enough.

Ben: The format that our shows tend to follow is something that I think just kind of was an emergent property of the way Adam and I talked to each other, much more so than it was us attempting to create a show that was our version of anything else.

I don’t really listen to other recap podcasts. It’s kind of a funny thing, but we weren’t really inspired by any recap podcasts in particular. I guess the Flop House a little bit for me, but what they do is so different and such its own thing.

It’s hard to feel like we are connected to the universe of recap podcasts. Like when we go to add our show to a podcast service like iTunes or Apple Podcasts, you have to pick the category that you’re going to be in, and we’ve always picked comedy.

Properly, I guess we probably would be in the television recap podcast section. We just never really thought of ourselves as being that. We were just doing what we wanted to do.

You know, we’re just making a show that makes us laugh. Making each other laugh has always been the primary goal of the show. So it’s very funny to me that we’re in a category that we’ve never really aspired to be in or compared ourselves to in any way.

Ars: Any favorite moments, perhaps at live shows, that have happened to you over the last 10 years?

Ben: Getting to do live shows at all has been a total shock to me. When we talked to you for that first article, we barely knew what we were doing as entertainers. And I’ve taken improv classes and stuff but never really had any personal aspirations to be someone who gets up on a stage and does something. And I found that I fucking love it!

I really love doing the show in front of an audience! And we just have had so many amazing adventures getting to go all over the country doing that.

And all over the world—we’ve done the show in Canada and London now. That was a total surprise to me.

Like, if you grabbed me on the street 15 years ago and said, “Hey, you’re going to have a show that you get to travel around and do in front of audiences of 300 people someday!” I would have said, “Get the hell out of here! That’s not possible. That’s not something I am working toward in any way.”

Adam: There’s an unexpected quality to the type of—I mean, barf, right? I’m going to say the word “celebrity.” But David Letterman said that when you achieve a certain amount of notoriety, the world becomes a neighborhood to you.

A week ago, I was at a bar with friends, and a stranger came up and told me that they really like our show and they thanked me for making it. And that is something that happens in my life in a way that I never could have anticipated at all.

It’s those little moments that you have with people. Those perfect interactions where it’s just like: “I like what you do and thanks for doing it.”

That makes my life seem meaningful in a way that any previous job did not create the conditions for, you know? You do the work and you think it matters and it’s important, and largely it is in its own way, in its own ecosystem.

But to have a broad interest from folks in what you do and that it matters to them and what they do in their lives? That’s the very best part of this entire thing: knowing that the times that I can make Ben laugh are also the times that I can make 500 people laugh in a room or 25,000 people laugh on a Monday when the episode drops, you know?

That’s really powerful stuff! And it keeps me on my best behavior when I’m out in public in case an FOD is out there watching what I’m doing.

Ben: Oh, yeah. You don’t want to see all the videos of Adam on Worldstar.

Adam: Exactly. Yeah. So lock it up!

Ars: You try really hard to make the show sound great, which it does. It is well-engineered. It is well mixed. You guys put a lot of care into the production of the show.

But also, to my knowledge, you have never missed a show’s publish date. I’m curious about how you balance all of that with whatever else is going on in your lives. Ben, you have two young kids. I know Adam has martinis to drink and golf to play.

Ben: I think the best thing that has happened to us as a duo over the years has been all of the people who have been here to help us along the way.

You know, for a while, we were working with a producer named Rob Schulte, who was really great. And we’re now very fortunate to have a full-time producer named Wynde Priddy, who is so good at anticipating things that are coming up and keeping our minds on what we need to be prepping for the future. And also taking all of the stuff off of our plate that involves the day-in, day-out of editing and producing the shows.

So when it’s all running as it should be, which is most of the time—Adam and I get to focus on prepping, sitting down and recording, and then listening back to basically finished episodes. At that point, we’re just pitching jokes. Like: “Hey, we could add a little audio here to illustrate this point or whatever.” But 90 percent of the time we listen to an episode that’s pretty much ready to go and are just signing off on it for Wynde.

I think that the logistics of making this are complex in some ways. But at its core, it’s just me and Adam having to watch a TV show and then talk to each other about it. And that period of the day, that period of the week where I’m talking to my buddy about a thing we both really love is still the best part of my week.

Adam: We’ve been doing this for 10 years. If you need to take some time off, we know about it usually a month before, and we prepare for it. We know that we record two or three or four episodes a week, every week.

We know that if one of us gets sick, we will have to record more than that in a given week. And I think part of it is if you know that’s what your life is, it’s not stressful or disappointing when that’s your responsibility. That’s just what it takes.

We were both in alignment right away initially that you cannot miss a week doing this because people depend on it for the rhythm of their own weeks. But also, be a fucking professional! Are you telling me you don’t have an afternoon in a given week to do the thing that you’re doing professionally? Get out of here. Of course you do! Find a way.

And this is why, when people over the years have told us, “I really want to do a podcast,” the first advice is: “The same time, the same day, every week. Forever.” And that’s the only advice I give because if you can do that for a year and you ask me what else you need to do, then we can have that conversation.

But if you’re not willing to be a pro like that, good luck. I doubt your ability to get traction with an audience, because I think so much depends on that.

Ben: The podcasts that I listen to throughout the week are something I really look forward to—those shows being there at that time when I do the thing that I do when I listen to them. And so we’ve been very lucky to burrow under the skin of a lot of people—

Adam: I wonder if that’s how we know, Ben? Like, we’re not just the president of Hair Club, we’re also the clients? I think we know what’s meaningful to a podcast listener because we are them ourselves. In a way, I feel like nouveau podcasting right now is often made up of hosts who are doing it because it’s lucrative in their niche, you know?

Ben: Wait, this can be lucrative? Shit, what have we been doing?

Ars: I’m at a place in my life right now—and maybe you guys are, too—where I find it very hard to emotionally engage with the news. I find myself turning off the news on the radio, on my phone, in ways that I didn’t three years ago, five years ago. I used to be hyper-on: all the news, all the things, all the time. And I just can’t now. I just want to hear some guys talk about martinis.

Ben, you mentioned earlier that this is a show about the hang, and it’s sort of loosely anchored around the thing that you love, Star Trek.

Do you have that same feeling when it’s chatting with Adam Pranica about Baywatch? Does the subject for you, both of you, matter at all? Or does Star Trek have a particular emotional resonance in a way that, you know, lawns don’t?

Ben: I think that the Trek of it all is still really important to the show. And I think that we’re in an era where the news is devastating and exhausting in equal measure, and, you know, Trek has a lot of politics in it.

Adam and I share a lot of politics, but we also, I think, are pretty conscious of this being a place where the horrors of the world aren’t the center of attention.

So we’ve been pretty intentional about trying to make a thing that is a refuge and not a giant bummer.

And I think in its own way, that is an act of defiance. Still being able to have the hang despite all of the horrific shit going on is a sort of powerful statement—no, we’re not going to be ground into bummer pulp.

Adam: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I’m not interested in introducing that into our programs at all. I think a person’s politics is largely their behavior, and I don’t want to compare the things that I’m watching to the things that are happening in the real world generally.

But I think I might take a different side than Ben, about how Star Trek-located the project needs to be for it to be—I don’t know—fun or enriching.

I think those other projects, whether they’re about Baywatch or food or whatever—I’m interested in interesting conversations that are challenging or comedically interesting to me. It largely doesn’t matter what the subject is at its core. I want to be the sort of person that could make anything funny in conversation and through our various other types of shows, that’s become the truth, I hope.

Ben: That’s very fair. I still sort of think it’s the on-ramp for a lot of people. Like, oh, yeah, I like Star Trek. I’ll give that a try. And then it becomes about more than that.

Ultimately, I couldn’t make a show with Adam Pranica and Adam Ragusea if I wasn’t delighted by their perspective on things on an ongoing basis. The thing that’s amazing about this is we’ve made 600-something episodes of The Greatest Generation and 300-something episodes of Greatest Trek and dozens and dozens of episodes of Wholesome, and Adam says stuff every single time we sit down that surprises and delights me. That’s a complete magic trick.

Adam: You can’t do this for 10 years if it’s a bummer-hate show with a bunch of politics in it. That would have been exhausting nine years ago, you know? I don’t listen to any news or politics podcasts. Why would you? Look for the light where you can find it.

Ars: Going back to our original interview, you guys didn’t have very much in the way of established bits and jokes in the way that you do now.

I’m looking here at the Wikia and there’s a long list of bits and phrases: 50-year-old Ensign. Anybody Canyon. Bangers. Ball-kicking machine. Big Rod. McLaughlin Group. Miriam. Mount Armis. Natural Yeager.

Do you feel like any bits are played out? As I read through this, I’m like, “Oh yeah, I totally forgot about ‘Fuck Bokai.’ That’s pretty funny!”

Ben: Oh man, Fuck Bokai. That may have been the high-water mark! I think that one of the cool things about some of these is that they sort of ebb and flow depending on what we’re covering, you know?

There were things that were kind of jokes that stayed within the confines of Deep Space Nine or Voyager that sometimes you get an idea and you can pull one out of the cold storage.

But often the group of active working runners is very influenced by what we are actively covering. I think it’ll be very interesting to see how that long list of old inside jokes interacts with the show when we start going back through the second time.

Because I’m kind of tempted to not reference any of that stuff. I don’t know. I will have to see what happens when we start doing it.

Adam: I feel the same way, Ben. I think we don’t do a bit just because it’s “time to do the bit.” I have felt for a long time that it’s not funny if you’re trying to be funny. If we choose to turn it around and go back from the beginning—these are going to be new experiences for the time that we record them.

And they’re going to feel brand new. I wouldn’t expect a retread of much of anything. Because that doesn’t sound funny to me.

Ben: Well, also 10 years older. Our lives are different. Our world is different.

We will see new things in the show. And that’s one of the things that’s so cool about Star Trek: I feel like I experience it in new ways each time I watch it. So I think it’s kind of inevitable that it will get something that is really different and novel. And maybe some of those old runners will find their way back because they happen to be the funny thing at that moment.

But generally speaking, I’m really excited for crumpling up the paper and throwing it away and writing something fresh, you know?

Adam: Cyrus, you mentioned the Wiki, and I just want to say, one of the best things that’s happened to us over the 10 years of making the show has been the community that formed around it to do things, like making the wiki, making the Discord, that have formed groups where they watch movies together and date each other and marry each other and whatever.

This is a thing that we didn’t intend—imagine doing a thing so important that a large audience would enjoy it—but this large audience has their own lives, and they’re enjoying this thing that we do completely separate from us in their own way.

In a way, that’s great. Neither Ben nor I have the time or the inclination to make a wiki about our show, for example. And yet the folks that put in the effort here to make the experience of listening to the show better for everyone—that’s selfless and good and appreciated.

Ars: Given that there’s such a large body of work that you guys have produced, do you ever get people asking: “You guys have done a thousand episodes. Where do I start?”

I’ll give my answer first. I always tell people who are Star Trek fans but who have maybe not listened to Greatest Gen, “Choose a Star Trek episode that you love or that is memorable to you in some way and listen to the podcast episode about that episode.”

Adam: That’s my answer, too.

Ben: I like that, too. I also get the question “Oh, you know a lot about Star Trek. I want to get my kid into it. Where should we start?” And I don’t really think that there’s a right answer to that kind of question. Like, going back to the beginning doesn’t necessarily work for me or doesn’t necessarily work as an answer for everybody.

So I like the suggestion to jump in somewhere where you feel like you’ve got some fluency, but I also think it’s totally cool to jump in midstream on the show now or, you know, start at the beginning of one of the series that you really like or jump around. We hear from people that do it all different kinds of ways.

We’ve heard from people who got into the Greatest Generation because of Greatest Trek. We’ve heard from people who started listening to the Greatest Generation and were like: “Well, there’s a lot of references to old stuff in here. So I better go back and listen from the beginning.”

And then they binge the entire thing in three months. And I’m concerned that there may be some kind of exposure toxicity!

Adam: It’s an interesting quality to consider because a lot of the podcasts I listen to are about sports, and the sports that just happened over the weekend. No one listens to that show a month after it comes out.

But 10 years of our conversations are still being listened to in a way that I feel [isn’t the case] if you’re podcasting about the football game.

Ben: As many things as we’ve done in the past of the show, they stay in the present for a lot of people—I think more than half of our downloads in a given week are old episodes.

So that is a place where people hang out, and I think a lot of people that have jobs where they’re working with their hands but they don’t need to be processing language—[they] love podcasts. So we hear from a lot of graphic designers and truckers who like the show.

And that huge back catalog is such a boon to them because by the time you’re on your second listen through, you’re not going to remember exactly how the bit went from episode 324. So the comedy works again for that person.

Ars: I presume you guys have received screeners for Starfleet Academy. How are you feeling about Starfleet Academy as a show? And how are you guys feeling about doing it for your own show?

Ben: I’ve watched two episodes now. And I remain pretty optimistic about Starfleet Academy as a show. I think that there is some melancholy to it being the only one that’s actively being made now of any of the shows. I think they’ve wrapped on Strange New Worlds, even though they haven’t released season four. And none of the others are, like, in production at this point.

Adam: I’m also two episodes in—two very long episodes. I think that one of the qualities to Starfleet Academy that’s been surprising is the hour-long nature of it.

I think many years ago I coined the phrase “Star Trek is a place.” And what that means definitionally is that it’s not a ship or a particular captain or a planet or a federation. It’s a place to tell stories.

That’s just my way of saying that Starfleet Academy at this point, two episodes in, feels like the expression of that idea. Like, Starfleet Academy exists in a place that is Star Trek.

So I don’t hate it because they put out a cheesy poster. I don’t hate it at all! I am enjoying what I’ve seen so far. It’s interesting and new. I think the feeling that I have about it is something that Ben touched on a little bit there, which was like, are we getting near the end of it? Are we going to go back into the desert of ten years without Star Trek?

I hope not because I think my preference is going to always be that I would rather have Star Trek even if it’s difficult or disliked by folks or whatever, than to go without it at all because it provokes thought. I mean, even when it’s not your Star Trek, I think it’s still fun to talk about.

Ars: One of your greatest wishes—maybe the greatest wish of your lives—is to be blown out of an airlock in a new episode of Star Trek. How close are we to seeing that on screen?

Adam: It’s happened in comic books.

Ars: Have you actually pitched this to somebody who could make it happen?

Ben: There are people inside the walled garden that are aware that a lot of people are invested in this idea. And yeah, it’s happened in comics, it’s happened in fan productions several times now.

We leap at every opportunity we have to get blown out of an airlock. If and when the call comes from inside the Star Trek house, it will be the thrill of a lifetime. That remains the overarching goal of the show, I would say.

We’ve gone so far as to say that if the offer is made, we will fly ourselves to Toronto. If [Paramount is] obligated by some kind of agreement with the union to pay us, we will donate that money to a charity.

This is not about fame or fortune for us. It is about getting blown out of an airlock, which…

Adam: It’s about finally experiencing the sweet, sweet peace of death.

A decade of Star Trek-themed fart jokes: The Greatest Generation podcast turns 10 Read More »

A weird, itchy rash is linked to the keto diet—but no one knows why

case report, dermatology, health, ketogenic, New England Journal of Medicine, rash, weight loss / Mike M. / January 24, 2026

Diet downsides

Otherwise, the keto diet is popular among people trying to lose weight, particularly those trying to lose visceral fat, like the man in the case study. Anecdotal reports promote the keto diet as being effective at helping people slim down relatively quickly while also improving stamina and mental clarity. But robust clinical data supporting these claims are lacking, and medical experts have raised concerns about long-term cardiovascular health, among other things.

There are also clear downsides to the diet. Ketones are acidic, and if they build up too much in the blood, they can be toxic, causing ketoacidosis. This is a particular concern for people with type 1 diabetes and for people with chronic alcohol abuse. For everyone else, there’s a list of common side effects, including nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea, bad breath, headache, fatigue, and dizziness. Ketogenic diets are also linked to high cholesterol and kidney stones.

But there’s one side effect that’s well established but little known and still puzzling to doctors: the “keto rash” or prurigo pigmentosa. This rash fits the man’s case perfectly—red, raised, itchy bumps on the neck, chest, and back, with areas of hyperpigmentation also developing.

The rash was first identified in Japan in 1971, where it was mostly seen in women. While it has been consistently linked to metabolic disorders and dietary changes, experts still don’t understand what causes it. It’s seen not only in people on a keto diet but also in people with diabetes and those who have had bariatric surgery or are fasting.

In a review this month, researchers in Saudi Arabia noted that a leading hypothesis is that the high levels of ketones in the blood trigger inflammation around blood vessels driven by a type of white blood cell called neutrophils, and this inflammation is what causes the rash, which develops in different stages.

While the condition remains poorly understood, effective treatments have at least been worked out. The most common treatment is to get the person out of ketosis and give them an antibiotic in the tetracycline class. Antibiotics are designed to treat bacterial infections (which this is not), but they can also dampen inflammation signals and thwart the activity of neutrophils.

In the man’s case, doctors gave him a two-week course of doxycycline and told him to ditch his keto diet. A week later, the rash was gone.

A weird, itchy rash is linked to the keto diet—but no one knows why Read More »

Author name: Mike M.