Paul Patrick – Page 19

The case for memes as a new form of comics

culture, Internet memes, memes, Science, sequential art / Paul Patrick / July 30, 2025

Both comics and memes rely on the same interplay of visual and verbal elements for their humor.

Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

It’s undeniable that the rise of the Internet had a profound impact on cartooning as a profession, giving cartoonists both new tools and a new publishing and/or distribution medium. Online culture also spawned the emergence of viral memes in the late 1990s. Michelle Ann Abate, an English professor at The Ohio State University, argues in a paper published in INKS: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, that memes—specifically, image macros—represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.

“One of my areas of specialty has been graphic novels and comics,” Abate told Ars. “I’ve published multiple books on various aspects of comics history and various titles: everything from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts to The Far Side, to Little Lulu to Ziggy to The Family Circus. So I’ve been working on comics as part of the genres and texts and time periods that I look at for many years now.”

Her most recent book is 2024’s Singular Sensations: A Cultural History of One-Panel Comics in the United States, which Abate was researching when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. “I was reading a lot of single panel comics and sharing them with friends during the pandemic, and memes were something we were always sharing, too,” Abate said. “It occurred to me one day that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the single panel comics I’m sharing and the memes. In terms of how they function, how they operate, the connection of the verbal and the visual, there’s more continuity than there is difference.”

So Abate decided to approach the question more systematically. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” in his 1976 popular science book, The Selfish Gene, well before the advent of the Internet age. For Dawkins, it described a “unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of information”: ideas, catchphrases, catchy tunes, fashions, even arch building.

distraught woman pointing a finger and yelling, facing an image of a confused cat in front of a salad — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

In a 21st century context, “meme” refers to a piece of online content that spikes in popularity and gets passed from user to user, i.e., going viral. These can be single images remixed with tailored text, such as “Distracted Boyfriend,” “This Is Fine,” or “Batman Slapping Robin.” Or they can feature multiple panels, like “American Chopper.” Furthermore, “Memes can also be a gesture, they can be an activity, they can be a video like the Wednesday dance or the ice bucket challenge,” said Abate. “It’s become such a part of our lexicon that it’s hard to imagine a world without memes at this point.”

For Abate, Internet memes are clearly related to sequential art like comics, representing a new stage of evolution in the genre. In both cases, the visual and verbal elements work in tandem to produce the humor.

Granted, comic artists usually create both the image and the text, whereas memes adapt preexisting visuals with new text. Some might consider this poaching, but Abate points out that cartoonists like Charles Schulz have long used stencil templates (a static prefabricated element) to replicate images, a practice that is also used effectively in, say, Dinosaur Comics. And meme humor depends on people connecting the image to its origin rather than obscuring it. She compares the practice to sampling in music; the end result is still an original piece of art.

In fact, The New Yorker’s hugely popular cartoon caption contest—in which the magazine prints a single-panel drawing with no speech balloons or dialogue boxes and asks readers to supply their own verbal jokes—is basically a meme generator. “It’s seen more as a highbrow thing, crowdsourcing everybody’s wit,” said Abate. “But [the magazine supplies] the template image and then everybody puts in their own text or captions. They’re making memes. If they only published the winner, folks would be disappointed because the fun is seeing all the clever, funny things that people come up with.”

Memes both mirror and modify the comic genre. For instance, the online nature of memes can affect formatting. If there are multiple panels, those panels are usually arranged vertically rather than horizontally since memes are typically read by scrolling down one’s phone—like the “American Chopper” meme:

American Chopper meme with each frame representing a stage in the debate — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflip

Per Abate, this has the added advantage of forcing the reader to pause briefly to consider the argument and counter-argument, emphasizing that it’s an actual debate rather than two men simply yelling at one another. “If the panels were arranged horizontally and the guys were side by side in each other’s face, installments of ‘American Chopper’ would come across very differently,” she said.

A pad with infinite sheets

Scott McCloud is widely considered the leading theorist when it comes to the art of comics, and his hugely influential 2000 book, Reinventing Comics: The Evolution of an Art Form, explores the boundless potential for digital comics, freed from the constraints of a printed page. He calls this aspect the “infinite canvas,” because cartoonists can now create works of any size or shape, even as tall as a mountain. Memes have endless possibilities of a different kind, per Abate.

“[McCloud] thinks of it very expansively: a single panel could be the size of a city block,” said Abate. “You could never do that with a book because how could you print the book? How could you hold the book? How could you read the book? How could you download the book on your Kindle? But when you’ve got a digital world, it could be a city block and you can explore it with your mouse and your cursor and your track pad and, oh, all the possibilities for storytelling and for the medium that will open up with this infinite canvas. There have been many places and titles where this has played out with digital comics.

“Obviously with a meme, they’re not the size of a city block,” she continued. “So it occurred to me that they are infinite, but almost like you’re peeling sheets off a pad and the pad just has an endless number of sheets. You can just keep redoing it, redo, redo, redo. That’s memes. They get revised and repurposed and re-imagined and redone and recirculated over and over and over again. The template gets used inexhaustibly, which is what makes them fun, what makes them go viral.”

comic frame showing batman slapping robin — Credit: Jennifer Ouellette via imgflp

Just what makes a good meme image? Abate has some thoughts about that, too. “It has to be not just the image, but the ability for the image to be paired with a caption, a text,” she said. “It has to lend itself to some kind of verbal element as well. And it also has to have some elasticity of being specific enough that it’s recognizable, but also being malleable enough that it can be adapted to different forms.”

In other words, a really good meme must be generalizable if it is to last longer than a few weeks. The recent kiss-cam incident at a Coldplay concert is a case in point. When a married tech CEO was caught embracing his company’s “chief people officer,” they quickly realized they were on the Jumbotron, panicked, and hid their faces—which only made it worse. The moment went viral and spawned myriad memes. Even the Phillies mascots got into the spirit, re-enacting the moment at a recent baseball game. But that particular meme might not have long-term staying power.

“It became a meme very quickly and went viral very fast,” said Abate. “I may be proved wrong, but I don’t think the Coldplay moment will be a meme that will be around a year from now. It’s commenting on a particular incident in the culture, and then the clock will tick, and folks will move on. Whereas something like ‘Distracted Boyfriend’ or ‘This is Fine’ has more staying power because it’s not tied to a particular incident or a particular scandal but can be applied to all kinds of political topics, pop culture events, and cultural experiences.”

black man stroking his chin, mouth partly open in surprise — Credit: Sean Carroll via imgflp

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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Microsoft is revamping Windows 11’s Task Manager so its numbers make more sense

microsoft, Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / Paul Patrick / July 29, 2025

Copilot+ features, and annoying “features”

Microsoft continues to roll out AI features, particularly to PCs that meet the qualifications for the company’s Copilot+ features. These betas enable “agent-powered search” for Intel and AMD Copilot+ PCs, which continue to get most of these features a few weeks or months later than Qualcomm Snapdragon+ PCs. This agent is Microsoft’s latest attempt to improve the dense, labyrinthine Settings app by enabling natural-language search that knows how to respond to queries like “my mouse pointer is too small” or “how to control my PC by voice” (Microsoft’s examples). Like other Copilot+ features, this relies on your PC’s neural processing unit (NPU) to perform all processing locally on-device. Microsoft has also added a tutorial for the “Click to Do” feature that suggests different actions you can perform based on images, text, and other content on your screen.

Finally, Microsoft is tweaking the so-called “Second Chance Out of Box Experience” window (also called “SCOOBE,” pronounced “scooby”), the setup screen that you’ll periodically see on a Windows 11 PC even if you’ve already been using it for months or years. This screen attempts to enroll your PC in Windows Backup, to switch your default browser to Microsoft Edge and its default search engine to Bing, and to import favorites and history into Edge from whatever browser you might have been trying to use before.

If you, like me, experience the SCOOBE screen primarily as a nuisance rather than something “helpful,” it is possible to make it go away. Per our guide to de-cluttering Windows 11, open Settings, go to System, then to Notifications, scroll down, expand the “additional settings” drop-down, and uncheck all three boxes here to get rid of the SCOOBE screen and other irritating reminders.

Most of these features are being released simultaneously to the Dev and Beta channels of the Windows Insider program (from least- to most-stable, the four channels are Canary, Dev, Beta, and Release Preview). Features in the Beta channel are usually not far from being released into the public versions of Windows, so non-Insiders can probably expect most of these things to appear on their PCs in the next few weeks. Microsoft is also gearing up to release the Windows 11 25H2 update, this year’s big annual update, which will enable a handful of features that the company is already quietly rolling out to PCs running version 24H2.

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Trump promised a drilling boom, but US energy industry hasn’t been interested

Energy, fossil fuels, Science, syndication / Paul Patrick / July 29, 2025

Exec: “Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” President Donald Trump declared at his inauguration on January 20. Echoing the slogan that exemplified his energy policies during the campaign, he made his message clear: more oil and gas, lower prices, greater exports.

Six months into Trump’s second term, his administration has little to show on that score. Output is ticking up, but slower than it did under the Biden administration. Pump prices for gasoline have bobbed around where they were in inauguration week. And exports of crude oil in the four months through April trailed those in the same period last year.

The White House is discovering, perhaps the hard way, that energy markets aren’t easily managed from the Oval Office—even as it moves to roll back regulations on the oil and gas sector, offers up more public lands for drilling at reduced royalty rates, and axes Biden-era incentives for wind and solar.

“The industry is going to do what the industry is going to do,” said Jenny Rowland-Shea, director for public lands at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy think tank.

That’s because the price of oil, the world’s most-traded commodity, is more responsive to global demand and supply dynamics than to domestic policy and posturing.

The market is flush with supplies at the moment, as the Saudi Arabia-led cartel of oil-producing nations known as OPEC+ allows more barrels to flow while China, the world’s top oil consumer, curbs its consumption. Within the US, a boom in energy demand driven by rapid electrification and AI-serving data centers is boosting power costs for homes and businesses, yet fossil fuel producers are not rushing to ramp up drilling.

There is one key indicator of drilling levels that the industry has watched closely for more than 80 years: a weekly census of active oil and gas rigs published by Baker Hughes. When Trump came into office January 20, the US rig count was 580. Last week, the most recent figure, it was down to 542—hovering just above a four-year low reached earlier in the month.

The most glaring factor behind this stagnant rig count is the current level of crude oil prices. Take the US benchmark grade: West Texas Intermediate crude. Its prices were near $66 a barrel on July 28, after hitting a four-year low of $62 in May. The break-even level for drilling new wells is somewhere close to $60 per barrel, according to oil and gas experts.

That’s before you account for the fallout of elevated tariffs on steel and other imports for the many companies that get their pipes and drilling equipment from overseas, said Robert Rapier, editor-in-chief of Shale Magazine, who has two decades of experience as a chemical engineer.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’ quarterly survey of over 130 oil and gas producers based in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, conducted in June, suggests the industry’s outlook is pessimistic. Nearly half of the 38 firms that responded to this question saw their firms drilling fewer wells this year than they had earlier expected.

Survey participants could also submit comments. One executive from an exploration and production (E&P) company said, “It’s hard to imagine how much worse policies and DC rhetoric could have been for US E&P companies.” Another executive said, “The Liberation Day chaos and tariff antics have harmed the domestic energy industry. Drill, baby, drill will not happen with this level of volatility.”

Roughly one in three survey respondents chalked up the expectations for fewer wells to higher tariffs on steel imports. And three in four said tariffs raised the cost of drilling and completing new wells.

“They’re getting more places to drill and they’re getting some lower royalties, but they’re also getting these tariffs that they don’t want,” Rapier said. “And the bottom line is their profits are going to suffer.”

Earlier this month, ExxonMobil estimated that its profit in the April-June quarter will be roughly $1.5 billion lower than in the previous three months because of weaker oil and gas prices. And over in Europe, BP, Shell, and TotalEnergies issued similar warnings to investors about hits to their respective profits.

These warnings come even as Trump has installed friendly faces to regulate the oil and gas sector, including at the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of the Interior, the latter of which manages federal lands and is gearing up to auction more oil and gas leases on those lands.

“There’s a lot of enthusiasm for a window of opportunity to make investments. But there’s also a lot of caution about wanting to make sure that if there’s regulatory reforms, they’re going to stick,” said Kevin Book, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, which produces analyses for energy companies and investors.

The recently enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains provisions requiring four onshore and two offshore lease sales every year, lowering the minimum royalty rate to 12.5 percent from 16.67 percent, and bringing back speculative leasing—when lands that don’t invite enough bids are leased for less money—that was stopped in 2022.

“Pro-energy policies play a critical role in strengthening domestic production,” said a spokesperson for the American Petroleum Institute, the top US oil and gas industry group. “The new tax legislation unlocks opportunities for safe, responsible development in critical resource basins to deliver the affordable, reliable fuel Americans rely on.”

Because about half of the federal royalties end up with the states and localities where the drilling occurs, “budgets in these oil and gas communities are going to be hit hard,” Rowland-Shea of American Progress said. Meanwhile, she said, drilling on public lands can pollute the air, raise noise levels, cause spills or leaks, and restrict movement for both people and wildlife.

Earlier this year, Congress killed an EPA rule finalized in November that would have charged oil and gas companies for flaring excess methane from their operations.

“Folks in the Trump camp have long said that the Biden administration was killing drilling by enforcing these regulations on speculative leasing and reining in methane pollution,” said Rowland-Shea. “And yet under Biden, we saw the highest production of oil and gas in history.”

In fact, the top three fossil fuel producers collectively earned less during Trump’s first term than they did in either of President Barack Obama’s terms or under President Joe Biden. “It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry,” said Rapier.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that the Trump administration’s actions won’t have long-lasting climate implications. Even though six months may be a significant amount of time in political accounting, investment decisions in the energy sector are made over longer horizons, ClearView’s Book said. As long as the planned lease sales take place, oil companies can snap up and sit on public lands until they see more favorable conditions for drilling.

It’s an irony that when Democrats are in there and they’re putting in policies to shift away from oil and gas, which causes the price to go up, that is more profitable for the oil and gas industry.

What could pad the demand for oil and gas is how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will withdraw or dilute the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax incentives and subsidies for renewable energy sources. “With the kneecapping of wind and solar, that’s going to put a lot more pressure on fossil fuels to fill that gap,” Rowland-Shea said.

However, the economics of solar and wind are increasingly too attractive to ignore. With electricity demand exceeding expectations, Book said, “any president looking ahead at end-user prices and power supply might revisit or take a flexible position if they find themselves facing shortage.”

A recent United Nations report found that “solar and wind are now almost always the least expensive—and the fastest—option for new electricity generation.” That is why Texas, deemed the oil capital of the world, produces more wind power than any other state and also led the nation in new solar capacity in the last two years.

Renewables like wind and solar, said Rowland-Shea, are “a truly abundant and American source of energy.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

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The first company to complete a fully successful lunar landing is going public

Science, Space / Paul Patrick / July 29, 2025

The financial services firm Charles Schwab reported last month that IPOs are on the comeback across multiple sectors of the market. “After a long dry spell, there are signs of life in the initial public offerings space,” Charles Schwab said in June. “An increase in offerings can sometimes suggest an improvement in overall market sentiment.”

Firefly Aerospace started as a propulsion company. This image released by Firefly earlier this year shows the company’s family of engines. From left to right: Miranda for the Eclipse rocket; Lightning and Reaver for the Alpha rocket; and Spectre for the Blue Ghost and Elytra spacecraft.

Firefly is eschewing a SPAC merger in favor of a traditional IPO. Another space company, Voyager Technologies, closed an Initial Public Offering on June 11, raising nearly $383 million with a valuation peaking at $3.8 billion despite reporting a loss of $66 million in 2024. Voyager’s stock price has been in a precipitous decline since then.

Financial information disclosed by Firefly in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals the company registered $60.8 million in revenue in 2024, a 10 percent increase from the prior year. But Firefly’s net loss widened from $135 million to $231 million, largely due to higher spending on research and development for the Eclipse rocket and Elytra spacecraft.

Rocket Lab, too, reported a net loss of $190 million in 2024 and another $60.6 million in the first quarter of this year. Despite this, Rocket Lab’s stock price has soared for most of 2025, further confirming that near-term profits aren’t everything for investors.

Chad Anderson, the founder and managing partner of Space Capital, offered a “gut check” to investors listening to his quarterly podcast last week.

“90 percent of IPOs that double on day one deliver negative returns over three years,” Anderson said. “And a few breakout companies become long-term winners… Rocket Lab being chief among them. But many fall short of expectations, even with some collapsing into bankruptcy, again, as we’ve seen over the last few years.

“There’s a lot of excitement about the space economy, and rightly so,” Anderson said. “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for investors, but unfortunately, I think this is going to be another example of why specialist expertise is required and the ability to read financial statements and understand the underlying business fundamentals, because that’s what’s really going to take companies through in the long term.”

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Blender developers begin work on full-fledged mobile version

3D Modeling, Blender, Creative, ipad, Open Source, Software, tablet, Tech / Paul Patrick / July 29, 2025

To that end, some features developed for the mobile version of Blender will cross-pollinate to desktop, like icon support for sidebar tabs and a helper overlay with curated shortcuts, among other things.

You can see some mockups over at the Blender blog. Development has begun in earnest on a new, separate branch for this tablet application. It will be developed first to target the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil, with other platforms and tablets to get tailored support later.

It sounds like the team already has some knowledgable designers and developers on this branch, but the blog post is also an invitation for new contributors. Specifically, it calls for “developers with extensive experience in this area” to contribute to building the application, touch events and gestures support, “File System / iCloud / AirDrop support,” and OpenSubdiv.

It sounds like things are already moving relatively quickly, as a tech demo is planned for SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver next month.

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Robots eating other robots: The benefits of machine metabolism

Computer science, metabolism, robotics, Science / Paul Patrick / July 27, 2025

If you define “metabolism” loosely enough, these robots may have one.

For decades we’ve been trying to make the robots smarter and more physically capable by mimicking biological intelligence and movement. “But in doing so, we’ve been just replicating the results of biological evolution—I say we need to replicate its methods,” argues Philippe Wyder, a developmental robotics researcher at Columbia University. Wyder led a team that demonstrated a machine with a rudimentary form of what they’re calling a metabolism.

He and his colleagues built a robot that could consume other robots to physically grow, become stronger, more capable, and continue functioning.

Nature’s methods

The idea of robotic metabolism combines various concepts in AI and robotics. The first is artificial life, which Wyder termed “a field where people study the evolution of organisms through computer simulations.” Then there is the idea of modular robots: reconfigurable machines that can change their architecture by rearranging collections of basic modules. That was pioneered in the US by Daniela Rus or Mark Yim at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s.

Finally, there is the idea that we need a shift from a goal-oriented design we’ve been traditionally implementing in our machines to a survivability-oriented design found in living organisms, which Magnus Egerstedt proposed in his book Robot Ecology.

Wyder’s team took all these ideas, merged them, and prototyped a robot that could “eat” other robots. “I kind of came at this from many different angles,” Wyder says.

The key source of inspiration, though, was the way nature builds its organisms. There are 20 standard amino acids universally used by life that can be combined into trillions of proteins, forming the building blocks of countless life forms. Wyder started his project by designing a basic robotic module that was intended to play a role roughly equivalent to a single amino acid. This module, called a Truss Link, looked like a rod, being 16 centimeters long and containing batteries, electronic controllers, and servomotors than enabled them to expand, contract, and crawl in a straight line. They had permanent magnets at each end, which let them connect to other rods and form lightweight lattices.

Wyder’s idea was to throw a number of these modules in a confined space to see if they would assemble into more complex structures by bumping into each other. The process might be analogous to how amino acids spontaneously formed simple organic molecules roughly 4 billion years ago.

Robotic growth

The first stage of Wyder’s experiment was set up in a space with a few terrain features, like a drop, a few obstacles, and a standing cylinder. The robots were operated by the team, which directed them to form various structures. Three Truss Links connected with the magnets at one center point formed a three-pointed star. Other structures they formed included a triangle, a diamond with a tail that was a triangle connected with a three-pointed star, or a tetrahedron, and a 3D structure that looked like a triangular pyramid. The robots had to find other Truss Links and make them part of their bodies to grow into more complex forms.

As they were growing, they were also becoming more capable. A single Truss Link could only move in a straight line, a triangle could turn left and right, a diamond with a tail could traverse small bumps, while a tetrahedron could move itself over small walls. Finally, a tetrahedron with a ratchet—an additional Truss Link the robot could use a bit like a walking stick—could assist other robots in forming tetrahedrons, which was a difficult, risky maneuver that took multiple attempts even for the skilled operators.

Still, all this growth in size and capability was orchestrated by the researchers controlling the hardware. The question was whether these self-assembly processes could work with no human overlords around.

“We wanted to know if the Truss Links would meet on their own,” Wyder says. “If the Truss Links are exactly parallel, they will never connect. But being parallel is just one configuration, and there are infinite configurations where they are not parallel.” To check how this would play out, the team used computer simulations of six randomly spawned and randomly moving Truss Links in a walled environment. In 2,000 runs, each 20 minutes long, the modules ended up with a 64 percent chance of forming two three-pointed star shapes; a roughly 8.4 percent of assembling into two triangles, and nearly 45 percent of ending up as a diamond with a tail. (Some of these configurations were intermediates on the pathway to others, so the numbers add up to more than 100 percent.)

When moving randomly, Truss Links could also repair structures after their magnets got disconnected and even replace a malfunctioning Truss Link in the structure with a new one. But did they really metabolize anything?

Searching for purpose

The name “metabolism” comes from the Greek word “metabolē” which means “change.” Wyder’s robots can assemble, grow, reconfigure, rebuild, and, to a limited extent, sustain themselves, which definitely qualifies as change.

But metabolism, as it’s commonly understood, involves consuming materials in ways that extract energy and transform their chemicals. The Truss Links are limited to using prefabricated, compatible modules—they can’t consume some plastic and old lithium-ion batteries and metabolize them into brand-new Truss Links. Whether this qualifies as metabolism depends more on how far we want to stretch the definition than on what the actual robots can do.

And stretching definitions, so far, may be their strongest use case. “I can’t give you a real-world use case,” Wyder acknowledges. “We tried to make the truss robots carry loads from one point to another, but it’s not even included in our paper—it’s a research platform at this point.” The first thing he thinks the robotic metabolism platform is missing is a wider variety of modules. The team used homogeneous modules in this work but is already thinking about branching out. “Life uses around 20 different amino acids to work, so we’re currently focusing on integrating additional modules with various sensors,” Wyder explains. But the robots are also lacking something way more fundamental: a purpose.

Life evolves to improve the chances of survival. It does so in response to pressures like predators or a challenging environment. A living thing is usually doing its best to avoid dying.

Egerstedt in “Robot Ecology“ argues we should build and program robots the same way with “survivability constraints” in mind. Wyder, in his paper, also claims we need to develop a “self-sustained robot ecology” in the future. But he also thinks we shouldn’t take this life analogy too far. His goal is not creating a robotic ecosystem where robots would hunt and feed on other robots, constantly improving their own designs.

“We would give robots a purpose. Let’s say a purpose is to build a lunar colony,” Wyder says. Survival should be the first objective, because if the platform doesn’t survive on the Moon, it won’t build a lunar colony. Multiple small units would first disperse to explore the area and then assemble into a bigger structure like a building or a crane. “And this large structure would absorb, recycle, or eat, if you will, all these smaller robots to integrate and make use of them,” Wyder claims.

A robotic platform like this, Wyder thinks, should adapt to unexpected circumstances even better than life itself. “There may be a moment where having a third arm would really save your life, but you can’t grow one. A robot, given enough time, won’t have that problem,” he says.

Science Advances, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adu6897

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Echelon kills smart home gym equipment offline capabilities with update

Apps, Smart Home, Tech / Paul Patrick / July 26, 2025

Some might never have purchased Echelon equipment if they knew the machines might one day fail to work without a web connection or Echelon account.

Third-party app connections severed

For some owners of Echelon equipment, QZ, which is currently rated as the No. 9 sports app on Apple’s App Store, has been central to their workouts. QZ connects the equipment to platforms like Zwift, which shows people virtual, scenic worlds while they’re exercising. It has also enabled new features for some machines, like automatic resistance adjustments. Because of this, Viola argued in his blog that QZ has “helped companies grow.”

“A large reason I got the [E]chelon was because of your app and I have put thousands of miles on the bike since 2021,” a Reddit user told the developer on the social media platform on Wednesday.

However, Echelon’s firmware update likely seeks to regain some of the revenue opportunities that overlap with the capabilities that apps like QZ enable. Echelon’s subscription-based app, which starts at $40 per month, also offers “guided scenic rides,” for example. QZ can allow people to watch Peloton classes from their Echelon device, but Echelon sells its own fitness classes. The Tennessee-headquartered company has been investing in ways to get customers more engaged with its personalized workout platform, too, which requires the machines to be online.

There’s also value in customer data. Getting more customers to exercise with its app means Echelon may gather more data for things like feature development and marketing.

Echelon is a private company, and we don’t know how much money it is making, but it’s likely that its financial goals hinge on subscription sales, which can generate more revenue than expensive equipment purchases. Meanwhile, Echelon is competing with other tech-centric companies offering gym equipment and classes, like the Peloton.

Viola runs QZ, which costs $7 to $8 to download, alone, offering users a lot of support via online communities. He told Ars that revenue from app purchases covers his costs “more or less.”

“It was never my intention to damage anyone’s business. This is just competition. The best product should prevail,” Viola said. “I never created QZ to get rich; I just wanted users to have a great hour of fitness when they choose, without connection issues, subscriptions, or [other limitations].”

In terms of QZ, the user community is “working on a fully open-source Echelon controller to unlock bikes that have already received this update,” per Viola. It’s in the very early stages, he said.

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OpenAI and partners are building a massive AI data center in Texas

AI, AI chips, AI GPU, AI infrastructure, Biz & IT, datacenters, Larry Ellison, machine learning, microsoft, NVIDIA, openai, oracle, sam altman, SoftBank, Stargate / Paul Patrick / July 24, 2025

Stargate moves forward despite early skepticism

When OpenAI announced Stargate in January, critics questioned whether the company could deliver on its ambitious $500 billion funding promise. Trump ally and frequent Altman foe Elon Musk wrote on X that “They don’t actually have the money,” claiming that “SoftBank has well under $10B secured.”

Tech writer and frequent OpenAI critic Ed Zitron raised concerns about OpenAI’s financial position, noting the company’s $5 billion in losses in 2024. “This company loses $5bn+ a year! So what, they raise $19bn for Stargate, then what, another $10bn just to be able to survive?” Zitron wrote on Bluesky at the time.

Six months later, OpenAI’s Abilene data center has moved from construction to partial operation. Oracle began delivering Nvidia GB200 racks to the facility last month, and OpenAI reports it has started running early training and inference workloads to support what it calls “next-generation frontier research.”

Despite the White House announcement with President Trump in January, the Stargate concept dates back to March 2024, when Microsoft and OpenAI partnered on a $100 billion supercomputer as part of a five-phase plan. Over time, the plan evolved into its current form as a partnership with Oracle, SoftBank, and CoreWeave.

“Stargate is an ambitious undertaking designed to meet the historic opportunity in front of us,” writes OpenAI in the press release announcing the latest deal. “That opportunity is now coming to life through strong support from partners, governments, and investors worldwide—including important leadership from the White House, which has recognized the critical role AI infrastructure will play in driving innovation, economic growth, and national competitiveness.”

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Conduct rules are coming for Google and Apple in the UK

Apple, Google, Policy / Paul Patrick / July 23, 2025

“The targeted and proportionate actions we have set out today would enable UK app developers to remain at the forefront of global innovation while ensuring UK consumers receive a world-class experience,” Cardell said. “Time is of the essence: as competition agencies and courts globally take action in these markets, it’s essential the UK doesn’t fall behind.”

Google and Apple oppose the outlined changes, arguing they could threaten user security and delay the launch of new products and services in the UK.

“We’re concerned the rules the UK is now considering would undermine the privacy and security protections that our users have come to expect, hamper our ability to innovate, and force us to give away our technology for free to foreign competitors,” Apple said. “We will continue to engage with the regulator to make sure they fully understand these risks.”

Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition, said the CMA’s move was “both disappointing and unwarranted” and that it was “crucial that any new regulation is evidence-based, proportionate, and does not become a roadblock to growth in the UK.”

Apple has repeatedly clashed with Brussels over the implementation of the EU’s Digital Markets Act, making changes to its platform after the European Commission accused the iPhone maker of failing to comply with its “online gatekeeper” rules.

The DMA also requires Apple to open up iOS features and data to its rivals and has demanded changes to its App Store, such as allowing users to install apps from outside its store.

The CMA said it was taking a different approach to the EU by being more “tailored” and iterative than the DMA’s blanket rules.

Last month, Google’s search services were the first Big Tech product to be targeted under the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, which was passed last year.

If a company’s products or services are designated as having “strategic market status,” it can last for a five-year period. Companies can be fined up to 10 percent of global turnover for breaching conduct rules.

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Nearly 3,000 people are leaving NASA, and this director is one of them

federal budget, goddard space flight center, NASA, nasa budget, Science, Space, space policy, space science / Paul Patrick / July 22, 2025

You can add another name to the thousands of employees leaving NASA as the Trump administration primes the space agency for a 25 percent budget cut.

On Monday, NASA announced that Makenzie Lystrup will leave her post as director of the Goddard Space Flight Center on Friday, August 1. Lystrup has held the top job at Goddard since April 2023, overseeing a staff of more than 8,000 civil servants and contractor employees and a budget last year of about $4.7 billion.

These figures make Goddard the largest of NASA’s 10 field centers primarily devoted to scientific research and development of robotic space missions, with a budget and workforce comparable to NASA’s human spaceflight centers in Texas, Florida, and Alabama. Officials at Goddard manage the James Webb and Hubble telescopes in space, and Goddard engineers are assembling the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, another flagship observatory scheduled for launch late next year.

“We’re grateful to Makenzie for her leadership at NASA Goddard for more than two years, including her work to inspire a Golden Age of explorers, scientists, and engineers,” Vanessa Wyche, NASA’s acting associate administrator, said in a statement.

Cynthia Simmons, Goddard’s deputy director, will take over as acting chief at the space center. Simmons started work at Goddard as a contract engineer 25 years ago.

Lystrup came to NASA from Ball Aerospace, now part of BAE Systems, where she managed the company’s work on civilian space projects for NASA and other federal agencies. Before joining Ball Aerospace, Lystrup earned a doctorate in astrophysics from University College London and conducted research as a planetary astronomer.

Formal dissent

The announcement of Lystrup’s departure from Goddard came hours after the release of an open letter to NASA’s interim administrator, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, signed by hundreds of current and former agency employees. The letter, titled the “The Voyager Declaration,” identifies what the signatories call “recent policies that have or threaten to waste public resources, compromise human safety, weaken national security, and undermine the core NASA mission.”

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FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

broadband, FCC, Policy / Paul Patrick / July 22, 2025

“As part of our return to following the plain language of section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500Mbps established in the 2024 Report,” Carr’s plan said. “Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in section 706, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers.”

Fiber networks can already meet a 1,000/500Mbps standard, and the Biden administration generally prioritized fiber when it came to distributing grants to Internet providers. The Trump administration changed grant-giving procedures to distribute more funds to non-fiber providers such as Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network.

Carr’s proposal alleged that the 1,000/500Mbps long-term goal would “appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner,” as it “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”

100/20Mbps standard appears to survive

When the 100/20Mbps standard was adopted last year, Carr alleged that “the 100/20Mbps requirement appears to be part and parcel of the Commission’s broader attempt to circumvent the statutory requirement of technological neutrality.” It appears the Carr FCC will nonetheless stick with 100/20Mbps for measuring availability of fixed broadband. But his plan would seek comment on that approach, suggesting a possibility that it could be changed.

“We propose to again focus our service availability discussion on fixed broadband at speeds of 100/20Mbps and seek comment on this proposal,” the plan said.

If any regulatory changes are spurred by Carr’s deployment inquiry, they would likely be to eliminate regulations instead of adding them. Carr has been pushing a “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative to eliminate rules that he considers unnecessary, and his proposal asks for comment on broadband regulations that could be removed.

“Are there currently any regulatory barriers impeding broadband deployment, investment, expansion, competition, and technological innovation that the Commission should consider eliminating?” the call for comment asks.

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$gemini-deep-think-learns-math,-wins-gold-medal-at-international-math-olympiad$

Gemini Deep Think learns math, wins gold medal at International Math Olympiad

AI, artificial inteligence, deepmind, Google, math / Paul Patrick / July 22, 2025

In the past, making LLMs better at math would involve reinforcement learning with final answers. Luong explained to Ars that models trained in this way can get to the correct answer, but they have “incomplete reasoning,” and part of the IMO grading is based on showing your work. To prepare Deep Think for the IMO, Google used new reinforcement learning techniques with higher-quality “long answer” solutions to mathematical problems, giving the model better grounding in how to handle every step on the way to an answer. “With this kind of training, you can actually get robust, long-form reasoning,” said Luong.

As you might expect, Deep Think takes more time to generate an output compared to the simpler versions you can access in the Gemini app. However, the AI followed the same rules as the flesh-and-blood participants, which was only possible because of its ability to ingest the problems as natural language. Gemini was provided with the problem descriptions and gave its answers within the 4.5-hour time limit of the competition.

Rigorous proofs

AI firms like DeepMind have taken an interest in the IMO over the past few years because it presents a unique challenge. While the competition is aimed at pre-university mathematicians, the questions require critical thinking and an understanding of multiple mathematical disciplines, including algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and number theory. Only the most advanced AI models have any hope of accurately answering these multi-layered problems.

The DeepMind team has pointed out some interesting aspects of Deep Think’s performance, which they say come from its advanced training. In the third problem (below), for example, many human competitors applied a graduate-level concept called Dirichlet’s Theorem, using mathematics outside the intended scope of the competition. However, Deep Think recognized that it was possible to solve the problem with simpler math. “Our model actually made a brilliant observation and used only elementary number theory to create a self-contained proof of the given problem,” said DeepMind researcher and Brown University professor Junehyuk Jung.

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Author name: Paul Patrick