Tim Belzer – Page 15

Tech billionaires are now shaping the militarization of American cities

benioff, Policy, Politics, Trump / Tim Belzer / October 24, 2025

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced on social media that he had been planning to “surge” troops into San Francisco this weekend—but was dissuaded from doing so by several tech billionaires.

“Friends of mine who live in the area called last night to ask me not to go forward with the surge,” Trump wrote.

Who are these “friends”? Trump named “great people like [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang, [Salesforce CEO] Marc Benioff, and others” who told him that “the future of San Francisco is great. They want to give it a ‘shot.’ Therefore, we will not surge San Francisco on Saturday. Stay tuned!”

Ludicrously wealthy tech execs have exerted unparalleled sway over Trump in the last year. Not content with obsequious flattery—at one recent White House dinner, Sam Altman called Trump “a pro-business, pro-innovation president” who was “a very refreshing change,” while Tim Cook praised the legendarily mercurial Trump’s “focus and your leadership”—tech leaders have also given Trump shiny awards, built him a bulletproof ballroom, and donated massive sums to help him get elected.

Most of these execs also have major business before the federal government and have specific “asks” around AI regulation, crypto, tariffs, regulations, and government contracts.

Now, tech execs are even helping to shape the militarization of American cities.

Consider Benioff, for instance. On October 10, he gave an interview to The New York Times in which he spoke to a reporter “by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco.” (Benioff lives in Hawaii most of the time now.)

His big annual “Dreamforce” conference was about to take place in San Francisco, and Benioff lamented the fact that he had to hire so much security to make attendees feel safe. (Over the last decade, several Ars staffers have witnessed various unpleasant incidents involving urine, sidewalk feces, and drug use during visits around downtown San Francisco, so concerns about the city are not illusory, though critics say they are overblown.)

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Trump eyes government control of quantum computing firms with Intel-like deals

chips funding, Policy, quantum computing, trump administration / Tim Belzer / October 23, 2025

Donald Trump is eyeing taking equity stakes in quantum computing firms in exchange for federal funding, The Wall Street Journal reported.

At least five companies are weighing whether allowing the government to become a shareholder would be worth it to snag funding that the Trump administration has “earmarked for promising technology companies,” sources familiar with the potential deals told the WSJ.

IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum are currently in talks with the government over potential funding agreements, with minimum awards of $10 million each, some sources said. Quantum Computing Inc. and Atom Computing are reportedly “considering similar arrangements,” as are other companies in the sector, which is viewed as critical for scientific advancements and next-generation technologies.

No deals have been completed yet, sources said, and terms could change as quantum-computing firms weigh the potential risks of government influence over their operations.

Quantum-computing exec called deals “exciting”

In August, Intel agreed to give the US a 10 percent stake in the company, then admitted to shareholders that “it is difficult to foresee all the potential consequences” of the unusual arrangement. If the deal goes through, the US would become Intel’s largest shareholder, the WSJ noted, potentially influencing major decisions that could prompt layoffs or restrict business in certain foreign markets.

“Among other things, there could be adverse reactions, immediately or over time, from investors, employees, customers, suppliers, other business or commercial partners, foreign governments, or competitors,” Intel wrote in a securities filing. “There may also be litigation related to the transaction or otherwise and increased public or political scrutiny with respect to the Company.”

But quantum computing companies that are closest to entering deals appear optimistic about possible government involvement.

Quantum Computing Inc. chief executive Yuping Huang told the WSJ that “the government’s potential equity stakes in companies in the industry are exciting.” The funding could be one of “the first significant signs of support for the sector from Washington,” the WSJ noted, potentially paving the way for breakthroughs such as Google’s recent demonstration of a quantum algorithm running 13,000 times faster than a supercomputer.

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Reports suggest Apple is already pulling back on the iPhone Air

Apple, IPhone, iphone air, iPhone mini, iphone plus, Tech / Tim Belzer / October 23, 2025

Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review. But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.

A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.

Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities (via MacRumors) and Nikkei Asia. Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.

The standard iPhone, the regular-sized iPhone Pro, and the big iPhone Pro have all been mainstays in Apple’s lineup, but the company has had a harder time coming up with a fourth phone that sells well enough to stick around. The small-screened iPhone mini and the large-screened iPhone Plus were each discontinued after two generations.

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Tesla profits fall 37% in Q3 despite healthy sales

Cars, Tesla earnings / Tim Belzer / October 22, 2025

Tesla reported its financial results for the third quarter of 2025 this afternoon. Earlier this month, we learned that the electric vehicle manufacturer had a pretty good Q3 in terms of sales, which grew by 7.3 percent year over year and cleared out tens of thousands of cars from inventory in the process. However, that hasn’t translated into greater profitability.

Even though revenues grew by 12 percent to $28 billion compared to the same period last year, Tesla’s operating expenses grew by 50 percent. As a result, its operating margin halved to just 5.8 percent. And so its profit for the quarter fell by 37 percent to $1.4 billion.

Some growth in revenue came from its battery and solar division; this increased by 44 percent to $3.4 billion compared to Q3 2024. Services—including the Supercharger network, which is now open to an increasing number of other makes of EV—also grew, increasing by 25 percent to $3.4 billion. EV deliveries increased by 7 percent to 497,099, most of which were the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. Automotive revenues grew slightly less, increasing 6 percent year over year to $21.2 billion.

Q3 saw a bigger profit decline than last quarter, and the first quarter wasn’t great either, but despite that, the automaker isn’t in much danger of falling behind on the rent. Free cash flow grew by 46 percent, and between cash, cash equivalents, and investments at the end of September, Tesla had $41.6 billion with which to pay for its future plans.

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General Motors will integrate AI into its cars, plus new hands-free assist

AI, cadillac, Cars, Gemini, General Motors / Tim Belzer / October 22, 2025

I asked Dave Richardson, GM’s SVP of software, how the company will avoid the enshittification of vehicles as it integrates more AI.

“There’s a lot of hype around AI right now,” he told me. “But there’s also practical use. I’ve been trying to focus the company on practical use cases. I think there’s a lot of pretty compelling things we can do to try to add real value.”

He gave some examples, such as a car knowing you have a meeting and setting the navigation appropriately or knowing that you’re going on a road trip, so it should queue up the appropriate media for your kids to stream in the back seat.

While the company is using Gemini at first, it eventually plans to have its own model on board. “With advanced processing in the car, we can handle interference on board so that it works in low-data-connection areas,” Richardson said.

Ultimately, GM will deploy its own LLM that knows about the car and is limited in overall parameters, Richardson told me. It won’t need to rely on the cloud to operate, increasing responsiveness in the car and keeping personal information with you, he said.

There are reasons to be skeptical, of course. One of my biggest concerns is how much driver data the car will collect. One reason GM doesn’t offer Android Auto or Apple CarPlay, the company has said, is that it wants to protect customer data. The owner must consent to any data sharing, GM said.

And although GM says it has made some internal changes to protect customer data, there have been some very public instances of the company selling data. “Data privacy and security is priority one for us,” Richardson told me about his work at GM. He said he has hired people specifically tasked with ensuring that customer data protection frameworks are in place.

“We have no interest in selling that data to third parties. When we think about data, whether it’s for Super Cruise or the AI, it’s really for us to develop the product and make it better. We don’t want to sell that data as the product itself,” he said.

I believe there’s space for a privacy-focused automaker, and while I’m not sure whether that will be GM, I hope that privacy and data protection are as important to the company in the future as it says it is today.

As for consumers wanting AI in their vehicles? GM thinks they do.

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When sycophancy and bias meet medicine

AI, health, medicine / Tim Belzer / October 22, 2025

Biased, eager-to-please models threaten health research replicability and trust.

Once upon a time, two villagers visited the fabled Mullah Nasreddin. They hoped that the Sufi philosopher, famed for his acerbic wisdom, could mediate a dispute that had driven a wedge between them. Nasreddin listened patiently to the first villager’s version of the story and, upon its conclusion, exclaimed, “You are absolutely right!” The second villager then presented his case. After hearing him out, Nasreddin again responded, “You are absolutely right!” An observant bystander, confused by Nasreddin’s proclamations, interjected, “But Mullah, they can’t both be right.” Nasreddin paused, regarding the bystander for a moment before replying, “You are absolutely right, too!”

In late May, the White House’s first “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) report was criticized for citing multiple research studies that did not exist. Fabricated citations like these are common in the outputs of generative artificial intelligence based on large language models, or LLMs. LLMs have presented plausible-sounding sources, catchy titles, or even false data to craft their conclusions. Here, the White House pushed back on the journalists who first broke the story before admitting to “minor citation errors.”

It is ironic that fake citations were used to support a principal recommendation of the MAHA report: addressing the health research sector’s “replication crisis,” wherein scientists’ findings often cannot be reproduced by other independent teams.

Yet the MAHA report’s use of phantom evidence is far from unique. Last year, The Washington Post reported on dozens of instances in which AI-generated falsehoods found their way into courtroom proceedings. Once uncovered, lawyers had to explain to judges how fictitious cases, citations, and decisions found their way into trials.

Despite these widely recognized problems, the MAHA roadmap released last month directs the Department of Health and Human Services to prioritize AI research to “…assist in earlier diagnosis, personalized treatment plans, real-time monitoring, and predictive interventions…” This breathless rush to embed AI in so many aspects of medicine could be forgiven if we believe that the technology’s “hallucinations” will be easy to fix through version updates. But as the industry itself acknowledges, these ghosts in the machine may be impossible to eliminate.

Consider the implications of accelerating AI use in health research for clinical decision making. Beyond the problems we’re seeing here, using AI in research without disclosure could create a feedback loop, supercharging the very biases that helped motivate its use. Once published, “research” based on false results and citations could become part of the datasets used to build future AI systems. Worse still, a recently published study highlights an industry of scientific fraudsters who could deploy AI to make their claims seem more legitimate.

In other words, a blind adoption of AI risks a downward spiral, where today’s flawed AI outputs become tomorrow’s training data, exponentially eroding research quality.

Three prongs of AI misuse

The challenge AI poses is threefold: hallucination, sycophancy, and the black box conundrum. Understanding these phenomena is critical for research scientists, policymakers, educators, and everyday citizens. Unaware, we risk vulnerability to deception as AI systems are increasingly deployed to shape diagnoses, insurance claims, health literacy, research, and public policy.

Here’s how hallucination works: When a user inputs a query into an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini, the model evaluates the input and generates a string of words that is statistically likely to make sense based on its training data. Current AI models will complete this task even if their training data is incomplete or biased, filling in the blanks regardless of their ability to answer. These hallucinations can take the form of nonexistent research studies, misinformation, or even clinical interactions that never happened. LLMs’ emphasis on producing authoritative-sounding language shrouds their false outputs in a facsimile of truth.

And as human model trainers fine-tune generative AI responses, they tend to optimize and reward the AI system responses that favor their prior beliefs, leading to sycophancy. Human bias, it appears, begets AI bias, and human users of AI then perpetuate the cycle. A consequence is that AIs skew toward favoring pleasing answers over truthful ones, often seeking to reinforce the bias of the query.

A recent illustration of this occurred in April, when OpenAI canceled a ChatGPT update for being too sycophantic after users demonstrated that it agreed too quickly and enthusiastically with the assumptions embedded in users’ queries. Sycophancy and hallucination often interact with each other; systems that aim to please will be more apt to fabricate data to reach user-preferred conclusions.

Correcting hallucinations, sycophancy, and other LLM mishaps is cumbersome because human observers can’t always determine how an AI platform arrived at its conclusions. This is the “black box” problem. Behind the probabilistic mathematics, is it even testing hypotheses? What methods did it use to derive an answer? Unlike traditional computer code or the rubric of scientific methodology, AI models operate through billions of computations. Looking at some well-structured outputs, it is easy to forget that the underlying processes are impenetrable to scrutiny and vastly different from a human’s approach to problem-solving.

This opacity can become dangerous when people can’t identify where computations went wrong, making it impossible to correct systematic errors or biases in the decision-making process. In health care, this black box raises questions about accountability, liability, and trust when neither physicians nor patients can explain the sequence of reasoning that leads to a medical intervention.

AI and health research

These AI challenges can exacerbate the existing sources of error and bias that creep into traditional health research publications. Several sources originate from the natural human motivation to find and publish meaningful, positive results. Journalists want to report on connections, e.g., that St. John’s Wort improves mood (it might). Nobody would want to publish an article with the results: “the supplement has no significant effect.”

The problem compounds when researchers use a study design to test not just a single hypothesis but many. One quirk of statistics-backed research is that testing more hypotheses in a single study raises the likelihood of uncovering a spurious coincidence.

AI has the potential to supercharge these coincidences through its relentless ability to test hypotheses across massive datasets. In the past, a research assistant could use an existing dataset to test 10 to 20 of the most likely hypotheses; now, that assistant can set an AI loose to test millions of likely or unlikely hypotheses without human supervision. That all but guarantees some of the results will meet the criteria for statistical significance, regardless of whether the data includes any real biological effects.

AI’s tireless capacity to investigate data, combined with its growing ability to develop authoritative-sounding narratives, expands the potential to elevate fabricated or bias-confirming errors into the collective public consciousness.

What’s next?

If you read the missives of AI luminaries, it would appear that society is on the cusp of superintelligence, which will transform every vexing societal conundrum into a trivial puzzle. While that’s highly unlikely, AI has certainly demonstrated promise in some health applications, despite its limitations. Unfortunately, it’s now being rapidly deployed sector-wide, even in areas where it has no prior track record.

This speed may leave us little time to reflect on the accountability needed for safe deployment. Sycophancy, hallucination, and the black box of AI are non-trivial challenges when conjoined with existing biases in health research. If people can’t easily understand the inner workings of current AI tools (often comprising up to 1.8 trillion parameters), they will not be able to understand the process of future, more complex versions (using over 5 trillion parameters).

History shows that most technological leaps forward are double-edged swords. Electronic health records increased the ability of clinicians to improve care coordination and aggregate data on population health, but they have eroded doctor-patient interactions and have become a source of physician burnout. The recent proliferation of telemedicine has expanded access to care, but it has also promoted lower-quality interactions with no physical examination.

The use of AI in health policy and research is no different. Wisely deployed, it could transform the health sector, leading to healthier populations and unfathomable breakthroughs (for example, by accelerating drug discovery). But without embedding it in new professional norms and practices, it has the potential to generate countless flawed leads and falsehoods.

Here are some potential solutions we see to the AI and health replicability crisis:

Clinical-specific models capable of admitting uncertainty in their outputs
Greater transparency, requiring disclosure of AI model use in research
Training for researchers, clinicians, and journalists on how to evaluate and stress-test AI-derived conclusions
Pre-registered hypotheses and analysis plans before using AI tools
AI audit trails
Specific AI global prompts that limit sycophantic tendencies across user queries

Regardless of the solutions deployed, we need to solve the failure points described here to fully realize the potential of AI for use in health research. The public, AI companies, and health researchers must be active participants in this journey. After all, in science, not everyone can be right.

Amit Chandra is an emergency physician and global health policy specialist based in Washington, DC. He is an adjunct professor of global health at Georgetown University’s School of Health, where he has explored AI solutions for global health challenges since 2021.

Luke Shors is an entrepreneur who focuses on energy, climate, and global health. He is the co-founder of the sustainability company Capture6 and previously worked on topics including computer vision and blockchain.

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M5 iPad Pro tested: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before

Apple, Apple M5, ipad, ipad pro, Reviews, Tech / Tim Belzer / October 21, 2025

It’s a gorgeous tablet, but what does an iPad need with more processing power?

Apple’s 13-inch M5 iPad Pro. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

This year’s iPad Pro is what you might call a “chip refresh” or an “internal refresh.” These refreshes are what Apple generally does for its products for one or two or more years after making a larger external design change. Leaving the physical design alone preserves compatibility with the accessory ecosystem.

For the Mac, chip refreshes are still pretty exciting to me, because many people who use a Mac will, very occasionally, assign it some kind of task where they need it to work as hard and fast as it can, for an extended period of time. You could be a developer compiling a large and complex app, or you could be a podcaster or streamer editing or exporting an audio or video file, or maybe you’re just playing a game. The power and flexibility of the operating system, and first- and third-party apps made to take advantage of that power and flexibility, mean that “more speed” is still exciting, even if it takes a few years for that speed to add up to something users will consistently notice and appreciate.

And then there’s the iPad Pro. Especially since Apple shifted to using the same M-series chips that it uses in Macs, most iPad Pro reviews contain some version of “this is great hardware that is much faster than it needs to be for anything the iPad does.” To wit, our review of the M4 iPad Pro from May 2024:

Still, it remains unclear why most people would spend one, two, or even three thousand dollars on a tablet that, despite its amazing hardware, does less than a comparably priced laptop—or at least does it a little more awkwardly, even if it’s impressively quick and has a gorgeous screen.

Since then, Apple has announced and released iPadOS 26, an update that makes important and mostly welcome changes to how the tablet handles windowed multitasking, file transfers, and some other kinds of background tasks. But this is the kind of thing that isn’t even going to stress out an Apple M1, let alone a chip that’s twice as powerful.

All of this is to say: A chip refresh for an iPad is nice to have. This year’s model (still starting at $999 for the 11-inch tablet and $1,299 for the 13-inch) will also come with a handy RAM increase for many buyers, the first RAM boost that the base model iPad Pro has gotten in more than four years.

But without any other design changes or other improvements to hang its hat on, the fact is that chip refresh years for the iPad Pro only really improve a part of the tablet that needs the least amount of improvement. That doesn’t make them bad; who knows what the hardware requirements will be when iPadOS 30 adds some other batch of multitasking features. But it does mean these refreshes don’t feel particularly exciting or necessary; the most exciting thing about the M5 iPad Pro means you might be able to get a good deal on an M4 model as retailers clear out their stock. You aren’t going to notice the difference.

Design: M4 iPad Pro redux

The 13-inch M5 iPad Pro in its Magic Keyboard accessory with the Apple Pencil Pro attached. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Lest we downplay this tablet’s design, the M4 version of the iPad Pro was the biggest change to the tablet since Apple introduced the modern all-screen design for the iPad Pro back in 2018. It wasn’t a huge departure, but it did introduce the iPad’s first OLED display, a thinner and lighter design, and a slightly improved Apple Pencil and updated range of accessories.

As with the 14-inch M5 MacBook Pro that Apple just launched, the easiest way to know how much you’ll like the iPad Pro depends on how you feel about screen technology (the iPad is, after all, mostly screen). If you care about the 120 Hz, high-refresh-rate ProMotion screen, the option to add a nano-texture display with a matte finish, and the infinite contrast and boosted brightness of Apple’s OLED displays, those are the best reasons to buy an iPad Pro. The $299/349 Magic Keyboard accessory for the iPad Pro also comes with backlit keys and a slightly larger trackpad than the equivalent $269/$319 iPad Air accessory.

If none of those things inspire passion in you, or if they’re not worth several hundred extra dollars to you—the nano-texture glass upgrade alone adds $700 to the price of the iPad Pro, because Apple only offers it on the 1TB and 2TB models—then the 11- and 13-inch iPads Air are going to give you a substantively identical experience. That includes compatibility with the same Apple Pencil accessory and support for all the same multitasking and Apple Intelligence features.

The M5 iPad Pro supports the same Apple Pencil Pro as the M4 iPad Pro, and the M2 and M3 iPad Air. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One other internal change to the new iPad Pro, aside from the M5, is mostly invisible: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread connectivity provided by the Apple N1 chip, and 5G cellular connectivity provided by the Apple C1X. Ideally, you won’t notice this swap at all, but it’s a quietly momentous change for Apple. Both of these chips cap several years of acquisitions and internal development, and further reduce Apple’s reliance on external chipmakers like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which has been one of the goals of Apple’s A- and M-series processors all along.

There’s one last change we haven’t really been able to adequately test in the handful of days we’ve had the tablet: new fast-charging support, either with Apple’s first-party Dynamic Power Adapter or any USB-C charger capable of providing 60 W or more of power. When using these chargers, Apple says the tablet’s battery can charge from 0 to 50 percent in 35 minutes. (Apple provides the same battery life estimates for the M5 iPads as the M4 models: 10 hours of Wi-Fi web usage, or nine hours of cellular web usage, for both the 13- and 11-inch versions of the tablet.)

Two Apple M5 chips, two RAM options

Apple sent us the 1TB version of the 13-inch iPad Pro to test, which means we got the fully enabled version of the M5: four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency GPU cores, 10 GPU cores, a 16-core Neural Engine, and 16GB of RAM.

Apple’s Macs still offer individually configurable processor, storage, and RAM upgrades to users—generally buying one upgrade doesn’t lock you into buying a bunch of other stuff you don’t want or need (though there are exceptions for RAM configurations in some of the higher-end Macs). But for the iPads, Apple still ties the chip and the RAM you get to storage capacity. The 256GB and 512GB iPads get three high-performance CPU cores instead of four, and 12GB of RAM instead of 16GB.

For people who buy the 256GB and 512GB iPads, this amounts to a 50 percent increase in RAM capacity from the M1, M2, and M4 iPad Pro models, or the M1, M2, and M3 iPad Airs, all of which came with 8GB of RAM. High-end models stick with the same 16GB of RAM as before (no 24GB or 32GB upgrades here, though the M5 supports them in Macs). The ceiling is in the same place, but the floor has come up.

Given that iPadOS is still mostly running on tablets with 8GB or less of RAM, I don’t expect the jump from 8GB to 12GB to make a huge difference in the day-to-day experience of using the tablet, at least for now. If you connect your iPad to an external monitor that you use as an extended display, it might help keep more apps in memory at a time; it could help if you edit complex multi-track audio or video files or images, or if you’re trying to run some kind of machine learning or AI workflows locally. Future iPadOS versions could also require more than 8GB of memory for some features. But for now, the benefit exists mostly on paper.

As for benchmarks, the M5’s gains in the iPad are somewhat more muted than they are for the M5 MacBook Pro we tested. We observed a 10 or 15 percent improvement across single- and multi-core CPU tests and graphics benchmark improvements that mostly hovered in the 15 to 30 percent range. The Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark was one outlier, pointing to a 35 percent increase in GPU performance; it’s possible that GPU or rendering-heavy workloads benefit a little more from the new neural accelerators in the M5’s GPU cores than games do.

In the MacBook review, we observed that the M5’s CPU generally had higher peak power consumption than the M4. In the fanless iPad Pro, it’s likely that Apple has reined the chip in a little bit to keep it cool, which would explain why the iPad’s M5 doesn’t see quite the same gains.

The M5 and the 12GB RAM minimum help to put a little more distance between the M3 iPad Air and the Pros. Most iPad workloads don’t benefit in an obvious user-noticeable way from the extra performance or memory right now, but it’s something you can point to that makes the Pro more “pro” than the Air.

Changed hardware that doesn’t change much

The M5 iPad Pro is nice in the sense that “getting a little more for your money today than you could get for the same money two weeks ago” is nice. But it changes essentially nothing for potential iPad buyers.

I’m hard-pressed to think of anyone who would be well-served by the M5 iPad Pro who wouldn’t have been equally well-served by the M4 version. And if the M4 iPad Pro was already overkill for you, the M5 is just a little more so. Particularly if you have an M1 or M2 ; People with an A12X or A12Z version of the iPad Pro from 2018 or 2020 will benefit more, particularly if you’re multitasking a lot or running into limitations or RAM complaints from the apps you’re using.

But even with the iPadOS 26 update, it still seems like the capabilities of the iPad’s software lags behind the capabilities of the hardware by a few years. It’s to be expected, maybe, for an operating system that has to run on this M5 iPad Pro and a 7-year-old phone processor with 3GB of RAM.

I am starting to feel the age of the M1 MacBook Air I use, especially if I’m pushing multiple monitors with it or trying to exceed its 16GB RAM limit. The M1 iPad Air I have, on the other hand, feels like it just got an operating system that unlocks some of its latent potential. That’s the biggest problem with the iPad Pro, really—not that it’s a bad tablet, but that it’s still so much more tablet than you need to do what iPadOS and its apps can currently do.

The good

A fast, beautiful tablet that’s a pleasure to use.
The 120Hz ProMotion support and OLED display panel make this one of Apple’s best screens, period.
256GB and 512GB models get a bump from 8GB to 12GB of memory.
Maintains compatibility with the same accessories as the M4 iPad Pro.

The bad

More iPad than pretty much anyone needs.
Passively cooled fanless Apple M5 can’t stretch its legs quite as much as the actively cooled Mac version.
Expensive accessories.

The ugly

All other hardware upgrades, including the matte nano-texture display finish, require a $600 upgrade to the 1TB version of the tablet.

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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Rocket Report: China launches with no advance warning; Europe’s drone ship

rocket report, Space / Tim Belzer / October 18, 2025

Starlink, Kuiper, and the US military all saw additions to their mega-constellations this week.

SpaceX’s Starship descends toward the Indian Ocean at the conclusion of Flight 11. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 8.15 of the Rocket Report! This year has been, at best, one of mixed results for SpaceX’s Starship program. There have been important steps forward, including the successful reuse of the rocket’s massive Super Heavy booster. Clearly, SpaceX is getting really good at launching and recovering the 33-engine booster stage. But Starship itself, part spacecraft and part upper stage, hasn’t fared as well—at least it hadn’t until the last couple of months. After four Starships were destroyed in flight and on the ground in the first half of 2025, the last two missions ended with pinpoint splashdowns in the Indian Ocean. The most recent mission this week was arguably the most successful yet for Starship, which returned to Earth with little damage, suggesting SpaceX’s improvements to the heat shield are working.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

SpaceX vet will fly with Blue Origin. Hans Koenigsmann is one of SpaceX’s earliest, longest-tenured, and most-revered employees. He worked at Elon Musk’s space company for nearly two decades, rising to the role of vice president for mission assurance and safety before leaving SpaceX in 2021. He led the investigations into every Falcon rocket failure, mentored young engineers, and became a public face for SpaceX through numerous presentations and press conferences. And now he has announced he is going to space on a future suborbital flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle, Ars reports.

Due diligence … Koenigsmann will fly to space alongside his friend Michaela “Michi” Benthaus as early as next month. She’s notable in her own right—a mountain biking accident in 2018 left her with a spinal cord injury, but she did not let this derail her from her dream. She will become the first wheelchair user to fly in space. Koenigsmann said one of his main concerns with the flight was safety, but meeting with Blue Origin engineers gave him confidence to climb aboard New Shepard. “When we met them, I asked a lot of technical questions on the safety side, and I feel like they answered the majority of them thoughtfully and correctly.” So, what’s it like for a long-time SpaceXer to work with a former competitor, Blue Origin? Read Eric Berger’s interview with Koenigsmann to learn more.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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Europe’s drone ship. The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded a contract for the design of a reusable rocket stage recovery vessel to the Italian aerospace and defense systems company Ingegneria Dei Sistemi (IDS), European Spaceflight reports. The project is part of a broader contract awarded to the Italian rocket builder Avio for the development of a reusable rocket upper stage, which Ars reported on last month. The contract covers preliminary design work for the launch system and the ground system, and could be applied to a reusable evolution of Avio’s Vega family of rockets.

Looks familiar … On Wednesday, IDS announced that it had been awarded the contract to design the project’s recovery vessel, which falls under the systems ground segment. The company has subcontracted Italian naval systems consultancy Cetena and Norwegian shipbuilder Vard to assist with the project. An artist’s illustration of the vessel gives it a familiar look. It appears similar to the recovery ships that SpaceX used to attempt recovery of the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairings, with giant nets to catch the hardware falling from space under parachute. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

JAXA looks abroad. The Japanese space agency JAXA has selected Rocket Lab to launch a set of technology demonstration satellites on Electron rockets after continued delays with a Japanese launch vehicle, Space News reports. The agreement covers two launches from New Zealand, the first in December with JAXA’s 242-pound (110-kilogram) Rapid Innovative Payload Demonstration Satellite-4 (RAISE-4) technology demonstration satellite, and the second in early 2026 with a batch of eight smaller satellites for educational, ocean monitoring, and other demonstrations.

No more waiting … These satellites were supposed to launch on Japan’s solid-fueled Epsilon S rocket, but JAXA looked to another launch provider after lengthy delays with the Epsilon program. Epsilon S is an upgraded version of Japan’s Epsilon rocket, which has flown six times. The first flight of Epsilon S was originally expected in 2023, but back-to-back ground test failures of the vehicle’s second stage solid rocket motor have effectively grounded the rocket. Japanese officials are considering ditching the upgraded second stage design and going back to the original Epsilon configuration, but a launch is still at least a year away.

An update on a German launch startup. German rocket builder HyImpulse announced Thursday that it had secured $53 million (45 million euros) in new funding to continue developing its SL-1 rocket, European Spaceflight reports. HyImpulse said it will use the new capital to “drive forward the development and commercialization of the SL1 orbital rocket and expand its production capacities.” HyImpulse is one of a handful of serious European launch startups, having raised more than $86 million (74 million euros) since its foundation in 2018.

Still years away … The SL1 rocket will consist of three stages with hybrid propulsion, capable of delivering up to more than 1,300 pounds (600 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The first flight of HyImpulse’s orbital rocket is scheduled for 2027. SL1 builds on the company’s SR75 suborbital rocket, which made its first test flight from Australia in 2024.

iRocket touts rapid build. Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc. (iRocket) reports a successful flight test of the company’s 2.75-inch (70-millimeter) diameter IRX-100 version of the Hydra 70 rocket system from a launch tube under its own power to exercise a range of motor and missile properties, Aviation Week & Space Technology Reports. The IRX-100 is iRocket’s version of the Hydra 70 short-range unguided missile primarily used on military helicopters. Asad Malik, iRocket’s CEO, wrote in a post on LinkedIn that the company designed and launched the rocket in just 30 days. “Speed, precision, and innovation are what define our team,” Malik wrote.

Pathfinder … The IRX-100 rocket launched from a desert location in California and reached an altitude of more than 12,000 feet, according to iRocket. We’ve reported on iRocket in several recent editions of the Rocket Report. In July, the company announced it was going public in a deal with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company founded by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But the SPAC and iRocket itself appear to have little money. Company officials hope the IRX-100 might offer a short-term source of revenue through military sales. iRocket’s longer-term goals include the development of a reusable orbital-class rocket, named Shockwave.

SpaceX launches for Kuiper. After more than a week of launch delays, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with two dozen of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband Internet satellites onboard Monday night, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, dubbed Kuiper Falcon 03 or KF-03, faced several days of launch delays due to poor weather both at the Cape as well as offshore. This was the third and final Kuiper launch currently booked on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and the sixth launch of operational Kuiper satellites overall. Amazon now has 153 of its planned 3,232 Kuiper satellites in orbit.

SDA, too … Two days later, SpaceX launched a different Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to add 21 satellites to the Space Development Agency’s burgeoning low-Earth orbit constellation, Spaceflight Now reports. These satellites were built by Lockheed Martin, and they will join a batch of 21 similar spacecraft manufactured by York Space Systems launched last month. The satellites form the foundation for the Pentagon’s proliferated missile tracking and data relay network.

China launches another mysterious satellite. China conducted an orbital launch Monday with no apparent advance indication, successfully sending the Shiyan-31 remote sensing test satellite into orbit, Space News reports. The mission lifted off aboard a Long March 2D rocket from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. The Long March 2D can deliver up to 3.5 metric tons (7,700 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. Shiyan-31 is believed to have an optical surveillance mission, and US tracking data indicated it was flying in an orbit about 300 miles (500 kilometers) above the Earth.

Surprise! … What was unusual about this launch was the fact that China did not publicize it in advance. Like most spacefaring nations, China typically issues airspace and maritime warning notices for airplanes and ships to steer clear of downrange zones where rocket debris may fall. No such warnings were released for this launch.

Starship flirts with perfection. SpaceX closed a troubled but instructive chapter in its Starship rocket program Monday with a near-perfect test flight that carried the stainless steel spacecraft halfway around the world from South Texas to the Indian Ocean, Ars reports. This was the 11th full-scale test flight of the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, and it was arguably the most successful Starship test flight to date. It comes after a rough start to the year with a series of Starship failures and explosions that set the program back by at least six months.

Close to pristine … This time, Starship came back through the atmosphere with little sign of visible damage. The previous test flight in August also nailed its splashdown in the Indian Ocean, but it came down with a banged-up heat shield. This was the final flight of the second generation of Starship, called Starship V2. SpaceX plans to debut the larger, more powerful Starship V3 configuration in early 2026. If all goes well, SpaceX could be in position to attempt to recover Starship on land next year.

Orion’s other options. The Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System rocket have been attached at the hip for the better part of two decades. The big rocket lifts, the smaller spacecraft flies, and Congress keeps the money rolling in. But now there are signs that the twain may, in the not-too-distant future, split, Ars reports. This is because Lockheed Martin has begun to pivot toward a future in which the Orion spacecraft—thanks to increasing reusability, a focus on cost, and openness to flying on different rockets—fits into commercial space applications. In interviews, company officials said that if NASA wanted to buy Orion missions as a “service,” rather than owning and operating the spacecraft, they were ready to work with the space agency.

Staying power … This represents a significant change. Since the US Congress called for the creation of the Space Launch System rocket a decade and a half ago, Orion and this rocket have been discussed in tandem, forming the backbone of an expendable architecture that would launch humans to the Moon and return them to Earth inside Orion. But time is running out for the uber-expensive SLS rocket, with differing proposals from the Trump administration and Congress to terminate the program after either two or perhaps four more flights. This appears to be one reason Lockheed is exploring alternative launch vehicles for Orion. If the spacecraft is going to be competitive on price, it needs a rocket that does not cost more than $2 billion per launch. Any near-term plan to send astronauts to the Moon will still require Orion.

Doubling up at Vandenberg. The Department of the Air Force has approved SpaceX’s plans to launch up to 100 missions per year from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. This would continue the tectonic turnaround at the spaceport on California’s Central Coast. Five years ago, Vandenberg hosted just a single orbital launch. This year’s number stands at 51 orbital flights, or 53 launches if you count a pair of Minuteman missile tests, the most in a single calendar year at Vandenberg since the early 1970s. Military officials have now authorized SpaceX to double its annual launch rate at Vandenberg from 50 to 100, with up to 95 missions using the Falcon 9 rocket and up to five launches of the larger Falcon Heavy.

No big rush … There’s more to the changes at Vandenberg than launching additional rockets. The authorization gives SpaceX the green light to redevelop Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) to support Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions. SpaceX plans to demolish unneeded structures at SLC-6 (pronounced “Slick 6”) and construct two new landing pads for Falcon boosters on a bluff overlooking the Pacific just south of the pad. SLC-6 would become the West Coast home for Falcon Heavy, but SpaceX currently has no confirmed contracts to fly the heavy-lifter from Vandenberg.

Next three launches

Oct. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-19 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23: 46 UTC

Oct. 19: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 03: 30 UTC

Oct. 19: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-17 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 14: 52 UTC

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

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RFK Jr.’s MAHA wants to make chemtrail conspiracy theories great again

health / Tim Belzer / October 18, 2025

A prominent voice in the Make America Healthy Again movement is pushing for health secretary and anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to make the topic of chemtrail conspiracy theories a federal priority, according to a report by KFF News.

KFF obtained a memo, written by MAHA influencer Gray Delany in July, presenting the topic to Calley Means, a White House health advisor. The memo lays out a series of unsubstantiated and far-fetched claims that academic researchers and federal agencies are secretively spreading toxic substances from airplanes, poisoning Americans, and spurring large-scale weather events, such as the devastating flooding in Texas last summer.

“It is unconscionable that anyone should be allowed to spray known neurotoxins and environmental toxins over our nation’s citizens, their land, food and water supplies,” Delany writes in the memo.

Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, told KFF that the memo presents claims that are false and, in some cases, physically impossible. “That is a pretty shocking memo,” he said. “It doesn’t get more tinfoil hat. They really believe toxins are being sprayed.”

Delany ends the memo with recommendations for federal agencies: form a joint task force to address this alleged geoengineering, host a roundtable on the topic, include the topic in the MAHA commission report, and publicly address the health and environmental harms.

It remains unclear if Kennedy, Means, or federal agencies are following up on Delany’s suggestions. Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson Emily Hilliard told KFF that “HHS does not comment on future or potential policy decisions and task forces.”

However, one opportunity has already been missed: The MAHA Commission released its “Make Our Children Healthy Again” report on September 9, along with a strategy document. Neither document mentions any of the topics raised in Delany’s memo.

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Vaginal condition treatment update: Men should get treated, too

ACOG, bacterial vaginosis, dysbiosis, health, microbiota, partners / Tim Belzer / October 17, 2025

For some cases of bacterial vaginosis, treatment should include a package deal, doctors now say.

The American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) updated its clinical guidance Friday to fit with recent data indicating that treatment for recurring bacterial vaginosis (BV) in women is significantly more effective if their male partners are also treated at the same time—with both an oral antibiotic and an antibiotic cream directly onto the potentially offending member.

“Partner therapy offers us another avenue for hopefully preventing recurrence and helping people feel better faster,” Christopher Zahn, chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality at ACOG, said in a statement.

BV is a common condition affecting nearly 30 percent of women worldwide. Still, it’s potentially stigmatizing and embarrassing, with symptoms including itching, burning, a concerning fishy smell, and vaginal discharge that can be green or gray. With symptoms like this, BV is often described as an infection—but it’s actually not. BV is an imbalance in the normal bacterial communities that inhabit the vagina—a situation called dysbiosis.

This imbalance can be especially difficult to correct; of the women who suffer with BV, up to 66 percent will end up having the condition recur after treatment.

BV symptoms are “incredibly uncomfortable and disrupt people’s daily lives,” Zahn said, and that discomfort “becomes compounded by frustration when this condition comes back repeatedly.”

Firm recommendation

Studies in recent years have started to expose the reasons behind recurrence. Though again, BV is an imbalance, it has the profile of a sexually transmitted infection, with links to new sexual partners and similar incubation periods. Going further, microbial communities of penises can silently harbor the bacterial species linked to BV, and penile microbial communities can be predictive of BV risk in partners.

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Ring cameras are about to get increasingly chummy with law enforcement

Amazon, privacy, ring, Smart Home, Tech / Tim Belzer / October 17, 2025

Amazon’s Ring partners with company whose tech has reportedly been used by ICE.

Ring’s Outdoor Cam Pro. Credit: Amazon

Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety. Ring cooperating with law enforcement and the reported use of Flock technologies by federal agencies, including US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has resurfaced privacy concerns that have followed the devices for years.

According to Flock’s announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software “to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance.” Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.

“Any footage a Ring customer chooses to submit will be securely packaged by Flock and shared directly with the requesting local public safety agency through the FlockOS or Flock Nova platform,” the announcement reads.

Flock said its local law enforcement users will gain access to Ring Community Requests in “the coming months.”

A flock of privacy concerns

Outside its software platforms, Flock is known for license plate recognition cameras. Flock customers can also search footage from Flock cameras using descriptors to find people, such as “man in blue shirt and cowboy hat.” Besides law enforcement agencies, Flock says 6,000 communities and 1,000 businesses use their products.

For years, privacy advocates have warned against companies like Flock.

This week, US Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter [PDF] to Flock CEO Garrett Langley saying that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the US Navy’s Criminal Investigative Service have had access to footage from Flock’s license plate cameras.

“I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them,” Wyden wrote.

In August, Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst for the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, wrote that “Flock is building a dangerous, nationwide mass-surveillance infrastructure.” Stanley pointed to ICE using Flock’s network of cameras, as well as Flock’s efforts to build a people lookup tool with data brokers.

Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Ars via email that Flock is a “mass surveillance tool” that “has increasingly been used to spy on both immigrants and people exercising their First Amendment-protected rights.”

Flock has earned this reputation among privacy advocates through its own cameras, not Ring’s.

An Amazon spokesperson told Ars Technica that only local public safety agencies will be able to make Community Requests via Flock software, and that requests will also show the name of the agency making the request.

A Flock spokesperson told Ars:

Flock does not currently have any contracts with any division of [the US Department of Homeland Security], including ICE. The Ring Community Requests process through Flock is only available for local public safety agencies for specific, active investigations. All requests are time and geographically-bound. Ring users can choose to share relevant footage or ignore the request.

Flock’s rep added that all activity within FlockOS and Flock Nova is “permanently recorded in a comprehensive CJIS-compliant audit trail for unalterable custody tracking,” referring to a set of standards created by the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division.

But there’s still concern that federal agencies will end up accessing Ring footage through Flock. Guariglia told Ars:

Even without formal partnerships with federal authorities, data from these surveillance companies flow to agencies like ICE through local law enforcement. Local and state police have run more than 4,000 Flock searches on behalf of federal authorities or with a potential immigration focus, reporting has found. Additionally, just this month, it became clear that Texas police searched 83,000 Flock cameras in an attempt to prosecute a woman for her abortion and then tried to cover it up.

Ring cozies up to the law

This week’s announcement shows Amazon, which acquired Ring in 2018, increasingly positioning its consumer cameras as a law enforcement tool. After years of cops using Ring footage, Amazon last year said that it would stop letting police request Ring footage—unless it was an “emergency”—only to reverse course about 18 months later by allowing police to request Ring footage through a Flock rival, Axon.

While announcing Ring’s deals with Flock and Axon, Ring founder and CEO Jamie Siminoff claimed that the partnerships would help Ring cameras keep neighborhoods safe. But there’s doubt as to whether people buy Ring cameras to protect their neighborhood.

“Ring’s new partnership with Flock shows that the company is more interested in contributing to mounting authoritarianism than servicing the specific needs of their customers,” Guariglia told Ars.

Interestingly, Ring initiated conversations about a deal with Flock, Langely told CNBC.

Flock says that its cameras don’t use facial recognition, which has been criticized for racial biases. But local law enforcement agencies using Flock will soon have access to footage from Ring cameras with facial recognition. In a conversation with The Washington Post this month, Calli Schroeder, senior counsel at the consumer advocacy and policy group Electronic Privacy Information Center, described the new feature for Ring cameras as “invasive for anyone who walks within range of” a Ring doorbell, since they likely haven’t consented to facial recognition being used on them.

Amazon, for its part, has mostly pushed the burden of ensuring responsible facial recognition use to its customers. Schroeder shared concern with the Post that Ring’s facial recognition data could end up being shared with law enforcement.

Some people who are perturbed about Ring deepening its ties with law enforcement have complained online.

“Inviting big brother into the system. Screw that,” a user on the Ring subreddit said this week.

Another Reddit user said: “And… I’m gone. Nope, NO WAY IN HELL. Goodbye, Ring. I’ll be switching to a UniFi[-brand] system with 100 percent local storage. You don’t get my money any more. This is some 1984 BS …”

Privacy concerns are also exacerbated by Ring’s past, as the company has previously failed to meet users’ privacy expectations. In 2023, Ring agreed to pay $5.8 million to settle claims that employees illegally spied on Ring customers.

Amazon and Flock say their collaboration will only involve voluntary customers and local enforcement agencies. But there’s still reason to be concerned about the implications of people sending doorbell and personal camera footage to law enforcement via platforms that are reportedly widely used by federal agencies for deportation purposes. Combined with the privacy issues that Ring has already faced for years, it’s not hard to see why some feel that Amazon scaling up Ring’s association with any type of law enforcement is unacceptable.

And it appears that Amazon and Flock would both like Ring customers to opt in when possible.

“It will be turned on for free for every customer, and I think all of them will use it,” Langely told CNBC.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

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Dead Ends is a fun, macabre medical history for kids

books, children's books, culture, medical history, medicine, Science / Tim Belzer / October 17, 2025

flukes, flops, and failures

Ars chats with co-authors Lindsey Fitzharris and Adrian Teal about their delightful new children’s book.

In 1890, a German scientist named Robert Koch thought he’d invented a cure for tuberculosis, a substance derived from the infecting bacterium itself that he dubbed Tuberculin. His substance didn’t actually cure anyone, but it was eventually widely used as a diagnostic skin test. Koch’s successful failure is just one of the many colorful cases featured in Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels, a new nonfiction illustrated children’s book by science historian Lindsey Fitzharris and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.

And in 2020, she hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. For his part, Teal is a well-known caricaturist and illustrator, best known for his work on the British TV series Spitting Image. His work has also appeared in The Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph, among other outlets.

The couple decided to collaborate on children’s books as a way to combine their respective skills. Granted, “[The market for] children’s nonfiction is very difficult,” Fitzharris told Ars. “It doesn’t sell that well in general. It’s very difficult to get publishers on board with it. It’s such a shame because I really feel that there’s a hunger for it, especially when I see the kids picking up these books and loving it. There’s also just a need for it with the decline in literacy rates. We need to get people more engaged with these topics in ways that go beyond a 30-second clip on TikTok.”

Their first foray into the market was 2023’s Plague-Busters! Medicine’s Battles with History’s Deadliest Diseases, exploring “the ickiest illnesses that have infected humans and affected civilizations through the ages”—as well as the medical breakthroughs that came about to combat those diseases. Dead Ends is something of a sequel, focusing this time on historical diagnoses, experiments, and treatments that were useless at best, frequently harmful, yet eventually led to unexpected medical breakthroughs.

Failure is an option

The book opens with the story of Robert Liston, a 19th-century Scottish surgeon known as “the fastest knife in the West End,” because he could amputate a leg in less than three minutes. That kind of speed was desirable in a period before the discovery of anesthetic, but sometimes Liston’s rapid-fire approach to surgery backfired. One story (possibly apocryphal) holds that Liston accidentally cut off the finger of his assistant in the operating theater as he was switching blades, then accidentally cut the coat of a spectator, who died of fright. The patient and assistant also died, so that operation is now often jokingly described as the only one with a 300 percent mortality rate, per Fitzharris.

Liston is the ideal poster child for the book’s theme of celebrating the role of failure in scientific progress. “I’ve always felt that failure is something we don’t talk about enough in the history of science and medicine,” said Fitzharris. “For everything that’s succeeded there’s hundreds, if not thousands, of things that’s failed. I think it’s a great concept for children. If you think that you’ve made mistakes, look at these great minds from the past. They’ve made some real whoppers. You are in good company. And failure is essential to succeeding, especially in science and medicine.”

“During the COVID pandemic, a lot of people were uncomfortable with the fact that some of the advice would change, but to me that was a comfort because that’s what you want to see scientists and doctors doing,” she continued. “They’re learning more about the virus, they’re changing their advice. They’re adapting. I think that this book is a good reminder of what the scientific process involves.”

The details of Liston’s most infamous case might be horrifying, but as Teal observes, “Comedy equals tragedy plus time.” One of the reasons so many of his patients died was because this was before the broad acceptance of germ theory and Joseph Lister’s pioneering work on antiseptic surgery. Swashbuckling surgeons like Liston prided themselves on operating in coats stiffened with blood—the sign of a busy and hence successful surgeon. Frederick Treves once observed that in the operating room, “cleanliness was out of place. It was considered to be finicking and affected. An executioner might as well manicure his nails before chopping off a head.”

“There’s always a lot of initial resistance to new ideas, even in science and medicine,” said Teal. “A lot of what we talk about is paradigm shifts and the difficulty of achieving [such a shift] when people are entrenched in their thinking. Galen was a hugely influential Roman doctor and got a lot of stuff right, but also got a lot of stuff wrong. People were clinging onto that stuff for centuries. You have misunderstanding compounded by misunderstanding, century after century, until somebody finally comes along and says, ‘Hang on a minute, this is all wrong.’”

You know… for kids

Writing for children proved to be a very different experience for Fitzharris after two adult-skewed science history books. “I initially thought children’s writing would be easy,” she confessed. “But it’s challenging to take these high-level concepts and complex stories about past medical movements and distill them for children in an entertaining and fun way.” She credits Teal—a self-described “man-child”—for taking her drafts and making them more child-friendly.

Teal’s clever, slightly macabre illustrations also helped keep the book accessible to its target audience, appealing to children’s more ghoulish side. “There’s a lot of gruesome stuff in this book,” Teal said. “Obviously it’s for kids, so you don’t want to go over the top, but equally, you don’t want to shy away from those details. I always say kids love it because kids are horrible, in the best possible way. I think adults sometimes worry too much about kids’ sensibilities. You can be a lot more gruesome than you think you can.”

The pair did omit some darker subject matter, such as the history of frontal lobotomies, notably the work of a neuroscientist named Walter Freeman, who operated an actual “lobotomobile.” For the authors, it was all about striking the right balance. “How much do you give to the kids to keep them engaged and interested, but not for it to be scary?” said Fitzharris. “We don’t want to turn people off from science and medicine. We want to celebrate the greatness of what we’ve achieved scientifically and medically. But we also don’t want to cover up the bad bits because that is part of the process, and it needs to be acknowledged.”

Sometimes Teal felt it just wasn’t necessary to illustrate certain gruesome details in the text—such as their discussion of the infamous case of Phineas Gage. Gage was a railroad construction foreman. In 1848, he was overseeing a rock blasting team when an explosion drove a three-foot tamping iron through his skull. “There’s a horrible moment when [Gage] leans forward and part of his brain drops out,” said Teal. “I’m not going to draw that, and I don’t need to, because it’s explicit in the text. If we’ve done a good enough job of writing something, that will put a mental picture in someone’s head.”

Miraculously, Gage survived, although there were extreme changes in his behavior and personality, and his injuries eventually caused epileptic seizures, one of which killed Gage in 1860. Gage became the index case for personality changes due to frontal lobe damage, and 50 years after his death, the case inspired neurologist David Ferrier to create brain maps based on his research into whether certain areas of the brain controlled specific cognitive functions.

“Sometimes it takes a beat before we get there,” said Fitzharris. “Science builds upon ideas, and it can take time. In the age of looking for instantaneous solutions, I think it’s important to remember that research needs to allow itself to do what it needs to do. It shouldn’t just be guided by an end goal. Some of the best discoveries that were made had no end goal in mind. And if you read Dead Ends, you’re going to be very happy that you live in 2025. Medically speaking, this is the best time. That’s really what Dead Ends is about. It’s a celebration of how far we’ve come.”

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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Author name: Tim Belzer