The macOS 15 Sequoia update will inevitably be known as “the AI one” in retrospect, introducing, as it does, the first wave of “Apple Intelligence” features.
That’s funny because none of that stuff is actually ready for the 15.0 release that’s coming out today. A lot of it is coming “later this fall” in the 15.1 update, which Apple has been testing entirely separately from the 15.0 betas for weeks now. Some of it won’t be ready until after that—rumors say image generation won’t be ready until the end of the year—but in any case, none of it is ready for public consumption yet.
But the AI-free 15.0 release does give us a chance to evaluate all of the non-AI additions to macOS this year. Apple Intelligence is sucking up a lot of the media oxygen, but in most other ways, this is a typical 2020s-era macOS release, with one or two headliners, several quality-of-life tweaks, and some sparsely documented under-the-hood stuff that will subtly change how you experience the operating system.
The AI-free version of the operating system is also the one that all users of the remaining Intel Macs will be using, since all of the Apple Intelligence features require Apple Silicon. Most of the Intel Macs that ran last year’s Sonoma release will run Sequoia this year—the first time this has happened since 2019—but the difference between the same macOS version running on different CPUs will be wider than it has been. It’s a clear indicator that the Intel Mac era is drawing to a close, even if support hasn’t totally ended just yet.
Enlarge/ The Ig Nobel Prizes honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.”
Aurich Lawson / Getty Images
Curiosity is the driving force behind all science, which may explain why so many scientists sometimes find themselves going in some decidedly eccentric research directions. Did you hear about the WWII plan to train pigeons as missile guidance systems? How about experiments on the swimming ability of a dead rainbow trout or that time biologists tried to startle cows by popping paper bags by their heads? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2024 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.
Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor “achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think.” The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn’t mean it’s devoid of scientific merit.
Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a “non-opera” featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening’s theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.
Without further ado, here are the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel prizes.
Peace
Citation: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.
This entertaining 1960 paper by American psychologist B.F. Skinner is kind of a personal memoir relating “the history of a crackpot idea, born on the wrong side of the tracks intellectually speaking but eventually vindicated in a sort of middle class respectability.” Project Pigeon was a World War II research program at the Naval Research Laboratory with the objective of training pigeons to serve as missile guidance systems. At the time, in the early 1940s, the machinery required to guide Pelican missiles was so bulky that there wasn’t much room left for actual explosives—hence the name, since it resembled a pelican “whose beak can hold more than its belly can.”
Skinner reasoned that pigeons could be a cheaper, more compact solution since the birds are especially good at responding to patterns. (He dismissed the ethical questions as a “peacetime luxury,” given the high global stakes of WWII.) His lab devised a novel harnessing system for the birds, positioned them vertically above a translucent plastic plate (screen), and trained them to “peck” at a projected image of a target somewhere along the New Jersey coast on the screen—a camera obscura effect. “The guiding signal was picked up from the point of contact of screen and beak,” Skinner wrote. Eventually, they created a version that used three pigeons to make the system more robust—just in case a pigeon got distracted at a key moment or something.
Enlarge/ Nose cone of NIST glide bomb showing the three-pigeon guidance system.
American Psychological Association/B.F. Skinner Foundation
There was understandably a great deal of skepticism about the viability of using pigeons for missile guidance; at one point, Skinner lamented, his team “realized that a pigeon was more easily controlled than a physical scientist serving on a committee.” But Skinner’s team persisted, and in 1944, they finally got the chance to demonstrate Project Pigeon for a committee of top scientists and show that the birds’ behavior could be controlled. The sample pigeon behaved perfectly. “But the spectacle of a living pigeon carrying out its assignment, no matter how beautifully, simply reminded the committee of how utterly fantastic our proposal was.” Apparently, there was much “restrained merriment.”
Even though this novel homing device was resistant to jamming, could react to a wide variety of target practice, needed no scarce materials, and was so simple to make that production could start in 30 days, the committee nixed the project. (By this point, as we now know, military focus had shifted to the Manhattan Project.) Skinner was left with “a loftful of curiously useless equipment and a few dozen pigeons with a strange interest in a feature of the New Jersey coast.” But vindication came in the early 1950s when the project was briefly revived as Project ORCON at the Naval Research Laboratory, which refined the general idea and led to the development of a Pick-off Display Converter for radar operators. Skinner himself never lost faith in this particular “crackpot idea.”
But that doesn’t make it a bad time to buy a PC, especially if you’re looking for some cost-efficient builds. Prices of CPUs and GPUs have both fallen a fair bit since we did our last build guide a year or so ago, which means all of our builds are either cheaper than they were before or we can squeeze out a little more performance than before at similar prices.
We have six builds across four broad tiers—a budget office desktop, a budget 1080p gaming PC, a mainstream 1440p-to-4K gaming PC, and a price-conscious workstation build with a powerful CPU and lots of room for future expandability.
You won’t find a high-end “god box” this time around, though; for a money-is-no-object high-end build, it’s probably worth waiting for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake desktop processors, AMD’s expected Ryzen 9000X3D series, and whatever Nvidia’s next-generation GPU launch is. All three of those things are expected either later this year or early next.
We have a couple of different iterations of the more expensive builds, and we also suggest multiple alternate components that can make more sense for certain types of builds based on your needs. The fun of PC building is how flexible and customizable it is—whether you want to buy what we recommend and put it together or want to treat these configurations as starting points, hopefully, they give you some idea of what your money can get you right now.
Notes on component selection
Part of the fun of building a PC is making it look the way you want. We’ve selected cases that will physically fit the motherboards and other parts we’re recommending and which we think will be good stylistic fits for each system. But there are many cases out there, and our picks aren’t the only options available.
As for power supplies, we’re looking for 80 Plus certified power supplies from established brands with positive user reviews on retail sites (or positive professional reviews, though these can be somewhat hard to come by for any given PSU these days). If you have a preferred brand, by all means, go with what works for you. The same goes for RAM—we’ll recommend capacities and speeds, and we’ll link to kits from brands that have worked well for us in the past, but that doesn’t mean they’re better than the many other RAM kits with equivalent specs.
For SSDs, we mostly stick to drives from known brands like Samsung, Crucial, or Western Digital, though going with a lesser-known brand can save you a bit of money. All of our builds also include built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you don’t need to worry about running Ethernet wires and can easily connect to Bluetooth gamepads, keyboards, mice, headsets, and other accessories.
We also haven’t priced in peripherals, like webcams, monitors, keyboards, or mice, as we’re assuming most people will re-use what they already have or buy those components separately. If you’re feeling adventurous, you could even make your own DIY keyboard! If you need more guidance, Kimber Streams’ Wirecutter keyboard guides are exhaustive and educational.
Finally, we won’t be including the cost of a Windows license in our cost estimates. You can pay a lot of different prices for Windows—$139 for an official retail license from Microsoft, $120 for an “OEM” license for system builders, or anywhere between $15 and $40 for a product key from shady gray market product key resale sites. Windows 10 keys will also work to activate Windows 11, though Microsoft stopped letting old Windows 7 and Windows 8 keys activate new Windows 10 and 11 installs relatively recently. You could even install Linux, given recent advancements to game compatibility layers!
Enlarge/ It’s hard to fit the perfomance-minded but pricey ROG Ally X into a simple product category. It’s also tricky to fit it into a photo, at the right angle, while it’s in your hands.
Kevin Purdy
The first ROG Ally from Asus, a $700 Windows-based handheld gaming PC, performed better than the Steam Deck, but it did so through notable compromises on battery life. The hardware also had a first-gen feel and software jank from both Asus’ own wraparound gaming app and Windows itself. The Ally asked an awkward question: “Do you want to pay nearly 50 percent more than you’d pay for a Steam Deck for a slightly faster but far more awkward handheld?”
The ROG Ally X makes that question more interesting and less obvious to answer. Yes, it’s still a handheld that’s trying to hide Windows annoyances, and it’s still missing trackpads, without which some PC games just feel bad. And (review spoiler) it still eats a charge faster than the Steam Deck OLED on less demanding games.
But the improvements Asus made to this X sequel are notable, and its new performance stats make it more viable for those who want to play more demanding games on a rather crisp screen. At $800, or $100 more than the original ROG Ally with no extras thrown in, you have to really, really want the best possible handheld gaming experience while still tolerating Windows’ awkward fit.
The ROG Ally X is essentially the ROG Ally with a bigger battery packed into a shell that is impressively not much bigger or heavier, more storage and RAM, and two USB-C ports instead of one USB-C and one weird mobile port that nobody could use. Asus reshaped the device and changed the face-button feel, and it all feels noticeably better, especially now that gaming sessions can last longer. The company also moved the microSD card slot so that your cards don’t melt, which is nice.
There’s a bit more to each of those changes that we’ll get into, but that’s the short version. Small spec bumps wouldn’t have changed much about the ROG Ally experience, but the changes Asus made for the X version do move the needle. Having more RAM available has a sizable impact on the frame performance of demanding games, and you can see that in our benchmarks.
We kept the LCD Steam Deck in our benchmarks because its chip has roughly the same performance as its OLED upgrade. But it’s really the Ally-to-Ally-X comparisons that are interesting; the Steam Deck has been fading back from AAA viability. If you want the Ally X to run modern, GPU-intensive games as fast as is feasible for a battery-powered device, it can now do that a lot better—for longer—and feel a bit better while you do.
The Rog Ally X has better answered the question “why not just buy a gaming laptop?” than its predecessor. At $800 and up, you might still ask how much portability is worth to you. But the Ally X is not as much of a niche (Windows-based handheld) inside a niche (moderately higher-end handhelds).
I normally would not use this kind of handout image with descriptive text embedded, but Asus is right: the ROG Ally X is indeed way more comfortable (just maybe not all-caps).
Asus
How it feels using the Rog Ally X
My testing of the Rog Ally X consisted of benchmarks, battery testing, and playing some games on the couch. Specifically: Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor and Tactical Breach Wizards on the devices lowest-power setting (“Silent”), Deathloop on its medium-power setting (“Performance”), and Shadow of the Erdtree on its all-out “Turbo” mode.
All four of those games worked mostly fine, but DRG: Survivor pushed the boundaries of Silent mode a bit when its levels got crowded with enemies and projectiles. Most games could automatically figure out a decent settings scheme for the Ally X. If a game offers AMD’s FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) upscaling, you should at least try it; it’s usually a big boon to a game running on this handheld.
Overall, the ROG Ally X was a device I didn’t notice when I was using it, which is the best recommendation I can make. Perhaps I noticed that the 1080p screen was brighter, closer to the glass, and sharper than the LCD (original) Steam Deck. At handheld distance, the difference between 800p and 1080p isn’t huge to me, but the difference between LCD and OLED is more so. (Of course, an OLED version of the Steam Deck was released late last year.)
Enlarge/ A Starliner spacecraft mounted on top of an Atlas V rocket before an unpiloted test flight in 2022.
Ten years ago next month NASA announced that Boeing, one of the agency’s most experienced contractors, won the lion’s share of government money available to end the agency’s sole reliance on Russia to ferry its astronauts to and from low-Earth orbit.
At the time, Boeing won $4.2 billion from NASA to complete development of the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two, and potentially up to six, operational crew flights to rotate crews between Earth and the International Space Station (ISS). SpaceX won a $2.6 billion contract for essentially the same scope of work.
A decade later the Starliner program finds itself at a crossroads after Boeing learned it will not complete the spacecraft’s first Crew Flight Test with astronauts onboard. NASA formally decided Saturday that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the Starliner capsule June 5, will instead return to Earth inside a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Put simply, NASA isn’t confident enough in Boeing’s spacecraft after it suffered multiple thrusters failures and helium leaks on the way to the ISS.
So where does this leave Boeing with its multibillion contract? Can the company fulfill the breadth of its commercial crew contract with NASA before the space station’s scheduled retirement in 2030? It now seems that there is little chance of Boeing flying six more Starliner missions without a life extension for the ISS. Tellingly, perhaps, NASA has only placed firm orders with Boeing for three Starliner flights once the agency certifies the spacecraft for operational use.
Boeing’s bottom line
Although Boeing did not make an official statement Saturday on its long-term plans for Starliner, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters he received assurances from Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, that the company remains committed to the commercial crew program. And it will take a significant commitment from Boeing to see it through. Under the terms of its fixed price contract with NASA, the company is on the hook to pay for any expenses to fix the thruster and helium leak problems and get Starliner flying again.
Boeing has already reported $1.6 billion in charges on its financial statements to pay for delays and cost overruns on the Starliner program. That figure will grow as the company will likely need to redesign some elements in the spacecraft’s propulsion system to remedy the problems encountered on the Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner program, and the agency has already paid out most of that funding.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
The next step for Starliner remains unclear, and we’ll assess that in more detail later in the story. Had the Starliner test flight ended as expected, with its crew inside, NASA targeted no earlier than August 2025 for Boeing to launch the first of its six operational crew rotation missions to the space station. In light of Saturday’s decision, there’s a high probability Starliner won’t fly with astronauts again until at least 2026.
Starliner safely delivered astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the space station on June 6, a day after their launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. But five of the craft’s 28 reaction control system thrusters overheated and failed as it approached the outpost. After the failures on the way to the space station, NASA’s engineers were concerned Starliner might suffer similar problems, or worse, when the control jets fired to guide Starliner on the trip back to Earth.
On Saturday, senior NASA leaders decided it wasn’t worth the risk. The two astronauts, who originally planned for an eight-day stay at the station, will now spend eight months on the orbiting research lab until they come back to Earth with SpaceX.
If it’s not a trust problem, is it a judgement issue?
Boeing managers had previously declared Starliner was safe enough to bring Wilmore and Williams home. Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner program manager, regularly appeared to downplay the seriousness of the thruster issues during press conferences throughout Starliner’s nearly three-month mission.
So why did NASA and Boeing engineers reach different conclusions? “I think we’re looking at the data and we view the data and the uncertainty that’s there differently than Boeing does,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, and the agency’s most senior civil servant. “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s our technical expertise and our experience that we have to balance. We balance risk across everything, not just Starliner.”
The people at the top of NASA’s decision-making tree have either flown in space before, or had front-row seats to the calamitous decision NASA made in 2003 to not seek more data on the condition of space shuttle Columbia’s left wing after the impact of a block of foam from the shuttle’s fuel tank during launch. This led to the deaths of seven astronauts, and the destruction of Columbia during reentry over East Texas. A similar normalization of technical problems, and a culture of stifling dissent, led to the loss of space shuttle Challenger in 1986.
“We lost two space shuttles as a result there not being a culture in which information could come forward,” Nelson said Saturday. “We have been very solicitous of all of our employees that if you have some objection, you come forward. Spaceflight is risky, even at its safest, and even at its most routine. And a test flight by nature is neither safe nor routine. So the decision to keep Butch and Suni aboard the International Space Station and bring the Starliner home uncrewed is the result of a commitment to safety.”
Now, it seems that culture may truly have changed. With SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft available to give Wilmore and Williams a ride home, this ended up being a relatively straightforward decision. Ken Bowersox, head of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, said the managers polled for their opinion all supported bringing the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without anyone onboard.
However, NASA and Boeing need to answer for how the Starliner program got to this point. The space agency approved the launch of the Starliner CFT mission in June despite knowing the spacecraft had a helium leak in its propulsion system. Those leaks multiplied once Starliner arrived in orbit, and are a serious issue on their own that will require corrective actions before the next flight. Ultimately, the thruster problems superseded the seriousness of the helium leaks, and this is where NASA and Boeing are likely to face the most difficult questions moving forward.
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station.
Boeing’s previous Starliner mission, known as Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2), successfully launched in 2022 and docked with the space station, later coming back to Earth for a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico. The test flight achieved all of its major objectives, setting the stage for the Crew Flight Test mission this year. But the spacecraft suffered thruster problems on that flight, too.
Several of the reaction control system thrusters stopped working as Starliner approached the space station on the OFT-2 mission, and another one failed on the return leg of the mission. Engineers thought they fixed the problem by introducing what was essentially a software fix to adjust timing and tolerance settings on sensors in the propulsion system, supplied by Aerojet Rocketdyne.
That didn’t work. The problem lay elsewhere, as engineers discovered during testing this summer, when Starliner was already in orbit. Thruster firings at White Stands, New Mexico, revealed a small Teflon seal in a valve can bulge when overheated, restricting the flow of oxidizer propellant to the thruster. NASA officials concluded there is a chance, however small, that the thrusters could overheat again as Starliner departs the station and flies back to Earth—or perhaps get worse.
“We are clearly operating this thruster at a higher temperature, at times, than it was designed for,” said Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager. “I think that was a factor, that as we started to look at the data a little bit more carefully, we’re operating the thruster outside of where it should be operated at.”
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits.
After months of consideration, NASA said Thursday that it will finally decide the fate of two astronauts on board the International Space Station, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, by this weekend. As soon as Saturday, the two crew members will learn whether they’ll return on a Starliner spacecraft in early September or a Crew Dragon vehicle next February.
On the eve of this fateful decision, the most consequential human spaceflight safety determination NASA has had to make in more than two decades, Ars has put together a summary of what we know, what we believe to be true, and what remains yet unknown.
Why has NASA taken so long?
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station 11 weeks ago. Their mission was supposed to last eight days, but there was some expectation that they might stay a little longer. However, no one envisioned the crew remaining this long. That changed when, during Starliner’s flight to the space station, five of the 28 small thrusters that guide Starliner failed. After some touch-and-go operations, the astronauts and flight controllers at Johnson Space Center coaxed the spacecraft to a safe docking at the station.
This failure in space led to months of testing, both on board the vehicle in space and with similar thrusters on the ground in New Mexico. This has been followed by extensive data reviews and modeling by engineers to try to understand the root cause of the thruster problems. On Friday, lower-level managers will meet in a Program Control Board to discuss their findings and make recommendations to senior managers. Those officials, with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson presiding, will make a final decision at a Flight Readiness Review on Saturday in Houston.
What are the two options?
NASA managers will decide whether to send the astronauts home on Starliner, possibly as early as September 2, or to fly back to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle scheduled to be launched on September 24. To make room for Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, this so-called “Crew-9” mission would launch with two astronauts instead of a full complement of four. Wilmore and Williams would then join this mission for their six-month increment on board the space station—their eight-day stay becoming eight months.
How are Butch and Suni feeling about this?
We don’t know, as they have not spoken to the media since it became apparent they could be in space for a long time. However, based on various sources, both of the crew members are taking it more or less in stride. They understand this is a test flight, and their training included the possibility of staying in space for an extended period of time if there were problems with Starliner.
That’s not to say it’s convenient. Both Wilmore and Williams have families back on Earth who expected them home by now, and the station was not set up for an extended stay. Wilmore, for example, has been having to sleep in a science laboratory rather than a designated sleeping area, so he has to pack up his personal things every morning.
What does seem clear is that Wilmore and Williams will accept NASA’s decision this weekend. In other words, they’re not going to stage a revolt in space. They trust NASA officials to make the right safety decision, whatever it ends up being. (So, for that matter, does Ars.)
Why is this a difficult decision?
First and foremost, NASA is concerned with getting its astronauts home safely. However, there are myriad other secondary decision factors, and bringing Butch and Suni home on Dragon instead of Starliner raises a host of new issues. Significantly among these is that it would be devastating for Boeing. Their public optics, should long-time rival SpaceX have to step in and “rescue” the crew from an “unsafe” Boeing vehicle, would be terrible. Moreover, the company has already lost $1.6 billion on the Starliner program, and there is the possibility that Boeing will shut it down. NASA does not want to lose a second provider of crew transport services to the space station.
Enlarge/ Firaxis has upped the ante on presentation for the cities. It’s still a bit abstract and removed, but they have more vibrancy, detail, and movement than before.
2K Games
2K Games provided a flight from Chicago to Baltimore and accommodation for two nights so that Ars could participate in the preview opportunity for Civilization VII. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
From squares to hexes, from tech trees to civic trees, over its more than 30 years across seven mainline entries, the Civilization franchise continues to evolve.
Firaxis, the studio that has developed the Civilization games for many years, has a mantra when making a sequel: 33 percent of the game stays the same, 33 percent gets updated, and 33 percent is brand new.
Recently, I had the opportunity to play Civilization VII, the next entry, which is due to launch in February 2025. The build I played was an early alpha build, but the bones of the game it will become were there, and it’s interesting to see which third Firaxis kept the same and which third it has reimagined.
It turns out that the core of the game that its developers won’t much want to change is the turn-to-turn experience. But in the case of Civilization VII, all bets are off when it comes to the overall arc of a long journey, from sticks and stones to space travel.
Rethinking the structure of a Civilization game
Most of the time, playing Civilization VII feels a lot like playing Civilization VI—but there’s one big change that spans the whole game that seems to be this sequel’s tentpole feature.
That’s the new Ages system. The long game is now broken into three segments: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Each Age has some unique systems and gameplay, though most systems span all three.
Within each age, you’re given a handful of “Legacy Paths” to choose from. These map closely to the franchise’s long-standing victory conditions: Science, Economic, Cultural, and Military. The idea is that you pick the Legacy Path you want to pursue, and each Legacy Path has different success conditions that change across each of the three Ages.
These conditions are big and broad, and Firaxis thankfully hasn’t gotten too jazzy with them. For example, I played in the Age of Antiquity and pursued the Cultural path, so my goal was to build a certain number of Wonders before the end of the Age.
In some ways, this is similar to the boom-and-bust cycle of Dark and Golden Ages in Civilization VI, but I found it much more natural in VII. In VI, I often found myself making arbitrary-seeming choices I didn’t think made sense for my long-term strategy just to game the system and get the Age transition I wanted. In this new game, the Legacy Path objectives are likely to always be completely in line with the overall victory strategy you’re pursuing.
One of the advantages of this new structure is support for shorter games that aren’t just hyper-compressed versions of a larger game. Previously, the only way to play a game of Civilization that wasn’t a dozen or more hours long was to pick one of the faster game speeds, but that fundamentally changed how the game felt to play.
Enlarge/ This is a Roman city, but you could have a non-Roman historical leader, like Egypt’s Hatshepsut, at the helm.
2K Games
Now, Civilization VII gives you the ability to play a match that’s just one Age, if you choose to.
The new Ages system is integrated with another big change: your choice of leader and civilization are no longer tied together when you start a new game, and they’re not set in stone, either.
Now you pick both a civilization and a leader separately at the start—and you can do some weird, ahistorical combinations, like Greece’s Alexander as the leader of China. Each leader and civilization offers specific bonuses, so this gives more customization of your playstyle at the start.
It doesn’t end there, though. At the end of each Age, you can essentially change civilizations (though as far as I could tell, you stick with the leader). Firaxis says it took inspiration for this feature from history—like the fact that London was a Roman city before it became an English one in the Medieval era.
Which civilization you can transition to is dictated by what you did within the Legacy Path system, among other things.
The amount of time I had to play the game was just enough to almost finish the Antiquity Age, so I didn’t get to see this in action, but it sounds like an interesting new system.
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?
The value of software
Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.
Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.
A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20 percent to reach $46 billion next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”
Automatic content recognition (ACR) tech is at the heart of the smart TV ads business. Most TV brands say users can opt out of ACR, but we’ve already seen Vizio take advantage of the feature without user permission. ACR is also sometimes turned on by default, and the off switch is often buried in a settings menu. Including ACR on a TV at all says a lot about a TV maker’s priorities. Most users have almost nothing to gain from ACR and face privacy concerns by sharing information—sometimes in real time—about what they do with their TVs.
At this point, consumers have come to expect ads and tracking on budget TVs from names like Vizio or Roku. But the biggest companies in TV are working on turning their sets into data-prolific billboards, too.
When TVs watch you back, so do corporations
In recent years, we’ve seen companies like LG and Samsung increase their TVs’ ad capabilities as advertisers become more eager to access tracking data from TVs.
LG, for example, started sharing data gathered from its TVs with Nielsen, giving the data and market measurement firm “the largest ACR data footprint in the industry,” according to an October announcement. The deal gives Nielsen streaming and linear TV data from LG TVs and provides firms buying ads on LG TVs with “‘Always On’ streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions” via Nielsen’s ONE Ads dashboard.
LG, which recently unveiled a goal of evolving its hardware business into an ad-pushing “media and entertainment platform company,” expects there to be 300 million webOS TVs in homes by 2026. That represents a huge data-collection and recurring-revenue opportunity. In September, LG said it would invest 1 trillion KRW (about $737.7 million) through 2028 into its “webOS business,” or the business behind its smart TV OS. The company said updates will include improving webOS’s UI, AI-based recommendations, and search capabilities.
Similarly, Samsung recently updated its ACR tech to track exposure to ads viewed on its TVs via streaming services instead of just from linear TV. Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.
Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in turning their products into lucrative smart TVs. In this case, “smart” isn’t about Internet connectivity but rather how well the TV understands its viewer.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, seen docked at the International Space Station through the window of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
As soon as this week, NASA officials will make perhaps the agency’s most consequential safety decision in human spaceflight in 21 years.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are nearly 10 weeks into a test flight that was originally set to last a little more than one week. The two retired US Navy test pilots were the first people to fly into orbit on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft when it launched on June 5. Now, NASA officials aren’t sure Starliner is safe enough to bring the astronauts home.
Three of the managers at the center of the pending decision, Ken Bowersox and Steve Stich from NASA and Boeing’s LeRoy Cain, either had key roles in the ill-fated final flight of Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003 or felt the consequences of the accident.
At that time, officials misjudged the risk. Seven astronauts died, and the Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed as it reentered the atmosphere over Texas. Bowersox, Stich, and Cain weren’t the people making the call on the health of Columbia‘s heat shield in 2003, but they had front-row seats to the consequences.
Bowersox was an astronaut on the International Space Station when NASA lost Columbia. He and his crewmates were waiting to hitch a ride home on the next Space Shuttle mission, which was delayed two-and-a-half years in the wake of the Columbia accident. Instead, Bowersox’s crew came back to Earth later that year on a Russian Soyuz capsule. After retiring from the astronaut corps, Bowersox worked at SpaceX and is now the head of NASA’s spaceflight operations directorate.
Stich and Cain were NASA flight directors in 2003, and they remain well-respected in human spaceflight circles. Stich is now the manager of NASA’s commercial crew program, and Cain is now a Boeing employee and chair of the company’s Starliner mission director. For the ongoing Starliner mission, Bowersox, Stich, and Cain are in the decision-making chain.
All three joined NASA in the late 1980s, soon after the Challenger accident. They have seen NASA attempt to reshape its safety culture after both of NASA’s fatal Space Shuttle tragedies. After Challenger, NASA’s astronaut office had a more central role in safety decisions, and the agency made efforts to listen to dissent from engineers. Still, human flaws are inescapable, and NASA’s culture was unable to alleviate them during Columbia‘s last flight in 2003.
NASA knew launching a Space Shuttle in cold weather reduced the safety margin on its solid rocket boosters, which led to the Challenger accident. And shuttle managers knew foam routinely fell off the external fuel tank. In a near-miss, one of these foam fragments hit a shuttle booster but didn’t damage it, just two flights prior to Columbia‘s STS-107 mission.
“I have wondered if some in management roles today that were here when we lost Challenger and Columbia remember that in both of those tragedies, there were those that were not comfortable proceeding,” Milt Heflin, a retired NASA flight director who spent 47 years at the agency, wrote in an email to Ars. “Today, those memories are still around.”
“I suspect Stich and Cain are paying attention to the right stuff,” Heflin wrote.
The question facing NASA’s leadership today? Should the two astronauts return to Earth from the International Space Station in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, with its history of thruster failures and helium leaks, or should they come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule?
Under normal conditions, the first option is the choice everyone at NASA would like to make. It would be least disruptive to operations at the space station and would potentially maintain a clearer future for Boeing’s Starliner program, which NASA would like to become operational for regular crew rotation flights to the station.
But some people at NASA aren’t convinced this is the right call. Engineers still don’t fully understand why five of the Starliner spacecraft’s thrusters overheated and lost power as the capsule approached the space station for docking in June. Four of these five control jets are now back in action with near-normal performance, but managers would like to be sure the same thrusters—and maybe more—won’t fail again as Starliner departs the station and heads for reentry.
Antitrust law professors aren’t impressed by Elon Musk’s lawsuit alleging a supposed X advertising boycott amounts to an antitrust violation. Based on the initial complaint filed by Musk’s X Corp., it looks like “a very weak case,” Vanderbilt Law School Associate Dean for Research Rebecca Haw Allensworth told Ars.
“Given how difficult this will be to win, I would call it an unusual strategy,” she said.
The lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and several large corporations says that the alleged boycott is “a naked restraint of trade without countervailing benefits to competition or consumers.” The “collective action among competing advertisers to dictate brand safety standards to be applied by social media platforms shortcuts the competitive process and allows the collective views of a group of advertisers with market power to override the interests of consumers,” X claims.
Musk already won a victory of sorts as the WFA yesterday shut down the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative that is the main subject of X’s allegations. “GARM is a small, not-for-profit initiative, and recent allegations that unfortunately misconstrue its purpose and activities have caused a distraction and significantly drained its resources and finances. GARM therefore is making the difficult decision to discontinue its activities,” the WFA said.
But the GARM shutdown won’t result in Musk’s company obtaining any financial damages unless X also wins in court. The company formerly named Twitter sued in a federal court in Texas, part of the conservative 5th Circuit, a venue that Musk likely believes will be more favorable to him than a court in another state. The District Court judge overseeing the lawsuit is also handling Musk’s case against Media Matters for America, a nonprofit that conducted research on ads being placed next to pro-Nazi content on X.
Texas is one of three states, along with Louisiana and Mississippi, where appeals go to the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. “The 5th Circuit is well known as the most conservative circuit in the country,” Professor Stephen Calkins of Wayne State University Law School told Ars.
“The law here is very unfavorable to X”
Despite the potentially friendly Texas court venue, Musk’s X faces a high legal bar in proving that it was the victim of an illegal boycott.
Allensworth said X must show “that the defendants did actually enter into an agreement—that they had a deal with each other to pull advertising spend from X as a group, not that each brand did it individually to protect their own brand status or make their own statement about Elon Musk. The law here is very unfavorable to X, but the complaint describes a lot of conduct that could support a jury or judge finding an agreement. But it’s a fact question, and we only have half the story.”
A bigger problem for Musk “is that X must show that the boycott harmed competition, not just that it harmed X,” Allensworth said. “The complaint is far from clear on what competition was harmed. A typical boycott will harm competition among the boycotters, but that doesn’t seem to be what the complaint is about. The complaint says the competition that was harmed was between platforms (like X/Twitter and Facebook, for example) but that’s a bit garbled. Again, we may know more as the suit develops.”
There’s one more problem that may be even bigger than the first two, according to Allensworth. Even if X proves there was an explicit agreement to pull advertising and that a boycott harmed competition, the advertisers would have a strong defense under the First Amendment’s right to speech.
“Concerted refusals to deal (boycotts) are not vulnerable to antitrust suit if they are undertaken to make a statement—essentially to engage in speech,” Allensworth explained. “It would seem here like that was the purpose of this boycott (akin to lunch counter boycotts in the ’60s, which were beyond the reach of the antitrust laws). Given that the Supreme Court has only increased First Amendment rights for corporations recently, I think this defense is very strong.”
All of those factors “add up, to me, to a very weak case,” Allensworth told Ars. But she cautions that at this early stage of litigation, “there’s a lot we don’t know; no one can judge a case based on the complaint alone—that’s the point of the adversarial system.”
An X court win wouldn’t force companies to advertise on the platform. But “if somehow they prevail, X could ask for treble damages—three times the revenue they lost because of the boycott,” Allensworth said.
After US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets—general search services and general text advertising—everybody is wondering how Google might be forced to change its search business.
Specifically, the judge ruled that Google’s exclusive deals with browser and device developers secured Google’s monopoly. These so-called default agreements funneled the majority of online searches to Google search engine result pages (SERPs), where results could be found among text ads that have long generated the bulk of Google’s revenue.
At trial, Mehta’s ruling noted, it was estimated that if Google lost its most important default deal with Apple, Google “would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default.”
Experts told Ars that disrupting these default deals is the most obvious remedy that the US Department of Justice will seek to restore competition in online search. Other remedies that may be sought range from least painful for Google (mandating choice screens in browsers and devices) to most painful (requiring Google to divest from either Chrome or Android, where it was found to be self-preferencing).
But the remedies phase of litigation may have to wait until after Google’s appeal, which experts said could take years to litigate before any remedies are ever proposed in court. Whether Google could be successful in appealing the ruling is currently being debated, with anti-monopoly advocates backing Mehta’s ruling as “rock solid” and critics suggesting that the ruling’s fresh takes on antitrust law are open to attack.
Google declined Ars’ request to comment on appropriate remedies or its plan to appeal.
Previously, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, confirmed in a statement that the tech giant would be appealing the ruling because the court found that “Google is ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,’ that Google ‘has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,’ ‘has continued to innovate in search,’ and that ‘Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.'”
“Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal,” Walker said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”
But Mehta found that Google was wielding its outsize influence in the search industry to block rivals from competing by locking browsers and devices into agreements ensuring that all searches went to Google SERPs. None of the pro-competitive benefits that Google claimed justified the exclusive deals persuaded Mehta, who ruled that “importantly,” Google “exercised its monopoly power by charging supra-competitive prices for general search text ads”—and thus earned “monopoly profits.”
While experts think the appeal process will delay litigation on remedies, Google seems to think that Mehta may rule on potential remedies before Google can proceed with its appeal. Walker told Google employees that a ruling on remedies may arrive in the next few months, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ars will continue monitoring for updates on this timeline.
As the DOJ’s case against Google’s search business has dragged on, reports have long suggested that a loss for Google could change the way that nearly the entire world searches the Internet.
Adam Epstein—the president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, which bills itself as “the largest consumer search technology company outside of Google and Bing”—told Ars that innovations in search could result in a broader landscape of more dynamic search experiences that draw from sources beyond Google and allow searchers to skip Google’s SERPs entirely. If that happens, the coming years could make Google’s ubiquitous search experience today a distant memory.
“By the end of this decade, going to a search engine results page will seem quaint,” Epstein predicted. “The court’s decision sets the stage for a remedy that will dramatically improve the search experience for everyone connected to the web. The era of innovation in search is just around the corner.”
The DOJ has not meaningfully discussed potential remedies it will seek, but Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, celebrated the ruling.
“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” Kanter said. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”
In 1972, Janet Rowley sat at her dining room table and cut tiny chromosomes from photographs she had taken in her laboratory. One by one, she snipped out the small figures her children teasingly called paper dolls. She then carefully laid them out in 23 matching pairs—and warned her kids not to sneeze.
The physician-scientist had just mastered a new chromosome-staining technique in a year-long sabbatical at Oxford. But it was in the dining room of her Chicago home where she made the discovery that would dramatically alter the course of cancer research.
Enlarge/ Rowley’s 1973 partial karyotype showing the 9;22 translocation
Looking over the chromosomes of a patient with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), she realized that segments of chromosomes 8 and 21 had broken off and swapped places—a genetic trade called a translocation. She looked at the chromosomes of other AML patients and saw the same switch: the 8;21 translocation.
Later that same year, she saw another translocation, this time in patients with a different type of blood cancer, called chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Patients with CML were known to carry a puzzling abnormality in chromosome 22 that made it appear shorter than normal. The abnormality was called the Philadelphia chromosome after its discovery by two researchers in Philadelphia in 1959. But it wasn’t until Rowley pored over her meticulously set dining table that it became clear why chromosome 22 was shorter—a chunk of it had broken off and traded places with a small section of chromosome 9, a 9;22 translocation.
Rowley had the first evidence that genetic abnormalities were the cause of cancer. She published her findings in 1973, with the CML translocation published in a single-author study in Nature. In the years that followed, she strongly advocated for the idea that the abnormalities were significant for cancer. But she was initially met with skepticism. At the time, many researchers considered chromosomal abnormalities to be a result of cancer, not the other way around. Rowley’s findings were rejected from the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. “I got sort of amused tolerance at the beginning,” she said before her death in 2013.
The birth of targeted treatments
But the evidence mounted quickly. In 1977, Rowley and two of her colleagues at the University of Chicago identified another chromosomal translocation—15;17—that causes a rare blood cancer called acute promyelocytic leukemia. By 1990, over 70 translocations had been identified in cancers.
The significance mounted quickly as well. Following Rowley’s discovery of the 9;22 translocation in CML, researchers figured out that the genetic swap creates a fusion of two genes. Part of the ABL gene normally found on chromosome 9 becomes attached to the BCR gene on chromosome 22, creating the cancer-driving BCR::ABL fusion gene on chromosome 22. This genetic merger codes for a signaling protein—a tyrosine kinase—that is permanently stuck in “active” mode. As such, it perpetually triggers signaling pathways that lead white blood cells to grow uncontrollably.
Enlarge/ Schematic of the 9;22 translocation and the creation of the BCR::ABL fusion gene.
By the mid-1990s, researchers had developed a drug that blocks the BCR-ABL protein, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) called imatinib. For patients in the chronic phase of CML—about 90 percent of CML patients—imatinib raised the 10-year survival rate from less than 50 percent to a little over 80 percent. Imatinib (sold as Gleevec or Glivec) earned approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 2001, marking the first approval for a cancer therapy targeting a known genetic alteration.
With imatinib’s success, targeted cancer therapies—aka precision medicine—took off. By the early 2000s, there was widespread interest among researchers to precisely identify the genetic underpinnings of cancer. At the same time, the revolutionary development of next-generation genetic sequencing acted like jet fuel for the soaring field. The technology eased the identification of mutations and genetic abnormalities driving cancers. Sequencing is now considered standard care in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of many cancers.
The development of gene-targeting cancer therapies skyrocketed. Classes of TKIs, like imatinib, expanded particularly fast. There are now over 50 FDA-approved TKIs targeting a wide variety of cancers. For instance, the TKIs lapatinib, neratinib, tucatinib, and pyrotinib target human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), which runs amok in some breast and gastric cancers. The TKI ruxolitinib targets Janus kinase 2, which is often mutated in the rare blood cancer myelofibrosis and the slow-growing blood cancer polycythemia vera. CML patients, meanwhile, now have five TKI therapies to choose from.
