Delta and CrowdStrike have locked legal horns, threatening to drag out the aftermath of the worst IT outage in history for months or possibly years.

Each refuses to be blamed for Delta's substantial losses following a global IT outage caused by CrowdStrike suddenly pushing a flawed security update despite Delta and many other customers turning off auto-updates.

CrowdStrike has since given customers more control over updates and made other commitments to ensure an outage of that scale will never happen again, but Delta isn't satisfied. The airline has accused CrowdStrike of willfully causing losses by knowingly deceiving customers by failing to disclose an unauthorized door into their operating systems that enabled the outage.

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The rise of powerful generative AI models in the last few years has led to plenty of stories of corporations trying to use AI to replace human jobs . But a recent New York Times story highlights the other side of that coin, where AI models simply become a powerful tool aiding in work that still requires humanity's unique skillset.

The NYT piece in question isn't directly about AI at all. As the headline "Inside the Movement Behind Trump’s Election Lies" suggests, the article actually reports in detail on how the ostensibly non-partisan Election Integrity Network "has closely coordinated with the Trump-controlled Republican National Committee." The piece cites and shares recordings of group members complaining of "the left" rigging elections, talking of efforts to "put Democrats on the defensive," and urging listeners to help with Republican turnout operations.

To report the piece, the Times says it sifted through "over 400 hours of conversations" from weekly meetings by the Election Integrity Network over the last three years, as well as "additional documents and training materials." Going through a trove of information that large is a daunting prospect, even for the team of four bylined reporters credited on the piece. That's why the Times says in a note accompanying the piece that it "used artificial intelligence to help identify particularly salient moments" from the videos to report on.

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Today, Polestar electric vehicles gained access to the Tesla Supercharger network. That means US Polestar drivers have access to 17,800 more DC fast chargers than they did yesterday—once they get a NACS adapter, which can also be ordered today from their local Polestar service point. But right now, Polestar has bigger worries than expanding its charging options. Should proposed new rules banning Chinese connected-car software and hardware go into effect, they would effectively ban the automaker from the US market, the company says, including the EVs it builds in South Carolina.

The rule would ban Chinese connected-car software from US roads from model-year 2027 (midway through 2026) and Chinese connected car hardware from model-year 2030.

The ban on Chinese connected-car technology is the latest in a series of protectionist moves from the federal government and Congress . The revamped clean vehicle tax credit no longer applies to EVs made in China or with Chinese components in their battery packs, and the US Commerce Department has been pressuring Mexico to not offer generous incentives to Chinese automakers looking to set up shop nearby. Chinese-made EVs have also been subject to a 100 percent tariff since May.

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Apple's week of Mac announcements continues today , and as expected, we're getting a substantial new update to the Mac mini. Apple's least-expensive Mac, the mini, is being updated with new M4 processors, plus a smaller design that looks like a cross between an Apple TV box and a Mac Studio—this is the mini's first major design change since the original aluminum version was released in 2010. The mini is also Apple's first device to ship with the M4 Pro processor, a beefed-up version of the M4 with more CPU and GPU cores, and it's also the Mac mini's first update since the M2 models came out in early 2023 .

The cheapest Mac mini will still run you $599, which includes 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage; as with yesterday's iMac update , this is the first time since 2012 that Apple has boosted the amount of RAM in an entry-level Mac. It's a welcome upgrade for every new Mac in the lineup that's getting it, but the $200 that Apple previously charged for the 16GB upgrade makes an even bigger difference to someone shopping for a $599 system than it does for someone who can afford a $999 or $1,299 computer.

The M4 Pro Mac mini starts at $1,399, a $100 increase from the M2 Pro version. Both models go up for preorder today and will begin arriving on November 8.

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It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them, or something else.

For some people, including me, one piece stands out—the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel, and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.

As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.

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Zettabytes—that’s 10 ²¹ bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium ; it has amazing data density and is stable over millennia.

To date, people have encoded information into DNA the same way nature has, by linking the four nucleotide bases comprising DNA—A, T,  C, and G—into a particular genetic sequence. Making these sequences is time-consuming and expensive , though, and the longer your sequence, the higher chance there is that errors will creep in.

But DNA has an added layer of information encoded on top of the nucleotide sequence, known as epigenetics. These are chemical modifications to the nucleotides, specifically altering a C when it comes before a G. In cells, these modifications function kind of like stage directions; they can tell the cell when to use a particular DNA sequence without altering the “text” of the sequence itself. A new paper in Nature describes using epigenetics to store information in DNA without needing to synthesize new DNA sequences every time.

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For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, a burning question for the last year-and-a-half has been what caused the Orion spacecraft's heat shield to crack and chip away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022.

Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium.

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The history of the Silk Road, a vast network of ancient and medieval trade routes connecting Beijing and Hangzhou with Constantinople and Cairo, has mostly been focused on its endpoints: China and the West. Less was known about the people and cultures the traders encountered along the way. Given the length of the route, there must have been a lot of encounters. Traders passed through large cities like Tehran or Baghdad, which we know very well because they still stand today. They also crossed the Tien Shan, the largest east-west mountain range on the planet.

“People thought these mountains were just places the caravans had to cross and get through but not really a major contributor to commerce themselves,” says Michael Frachetti, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who led a team that used drone-based lidar to map two mountainous cities at the western end of Tien Shan in the modern-day Uzbekistan. Both were built over 2,000 meters above sea level like Machu Picchu or Lhasa, Tibet. One of them, the Tugunbulak, was larger than Siena, one of the most influential city-states in medieval Italy.

Into the mountains

“The Silk Road was a complicated complex representing in some cases actual pathways the caravans could traverse, but also general exchange between East Asia and Europe. If you ask me, as an archeologist, the foundations of Silk Road can be traced back to the Bronze Age. But the peak of this exchange we date to the medieval period, between the 6th century and the 11th century,” says Frachetti.

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Apple will adapt the classic educational game The Oregon Trail into a big-budget movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

The film is in early development, having just been pitched to Apple and approved. Will Speck and Josh Gordon ( Blades of Glory , Office Christmas Party ) will direct and produce. Given that pedigree (zany comedies), it's clear this film won't be a serious historical drama about the struggles of those who traveled the American West.

In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too. "The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie ," according to THR's sources. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will be responsible for the original music in the film.

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