On Monday, Google announced an agreement with Kairos Power to purchase nuclear energy from multiple small modular reactors (SMRs), marking the first deal of its kind. The partnership aims to bring Kairos Power's initial SMR online by 2030, with additional reactor deployments planned through 2035. With the energy demands of AI growing, Google has not been alone in encouraging new development of alternative, no-emission power sources.

"The grid needs new electricity sources to support AI technologies," Google Senior Director of Energy and Climate Michael Terrell said in a press statement. "This agreement helps accelerate a new technology to meet energy needs cleanly and reliably and unlock the full potential of AI for everyone."

If the Google-Kairos plan succeeds, it will reportedly enable up to 500 MW of carbon-free power to be added to US electricity grids. For Google, it's a key step toward making its headlong rush into power-hungry (and sometimes dubious ) AI applications seem environmentally clean and ethical at a time when the world has seen devastating meteorological effects from climate change.

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The birth of a planet starts with a microscopic grain floating in a protoplanetary disk, a swirling cloud of gas and other particles surrounding a young star. How the gas and dust interact has implications for the formation of new worlds.

“Those teeny grains—those are the building blocks of planets,” said Zhe-Yu Daniel Lin, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. He describes the shape of the grains as “potatoes.”

It’s hot and breezy in the interstellar cloud, but it's not entirely chaotic. Astronomical observations have found that the grains, instead of tumbling through space, are oriented neatly along their orbital trajectories. To explain how the grains float in formation, new research led by Lin leans on the working principle behind an Earthly object: the badminton shuttle.

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Apple quietly announced a new version of its iPad mini tablet via press release this morning , the tablet's first update since 2021.

The seventh-generation iPad mini looks mostly identical to the sixth-generation version , with a power-button-mounted Touch ID sensor and a slim-bezeled display. But Apple has swapped out the A15 Bionic chip for the Apple A17 Pro, the same processor it used in the iPhone 15 Pro last year.

The new iPad mini is available for preorder now and starts at $499 for 128GB (an upgrade over the previous base model's 64GB of storage). 256GB and 512GB versions are available for $599 and $799, and cellular connectivity is an additional $150 on top of any of those prices.

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Porsche provided flights from Washington to Stuttgart and accommodation so Ars could drive the Macan and Macan 4S. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

STUTTGART, Germany—Porsche made its reputation with its rear-engined sports cars, but today it's the SUVs that even make that possible. But it makes those SUVs in order to appeal to Porsche drivers, offering five-door practicality but with driver-engaging handling, and a certain level of fit and finish. I've always thought of the Macan as Porsche's answer to the hot hatch , and now it's gone electric. We tested two variants of the new Macan EV earlier this year, and came away impressed. Now we've had seat time in another pair: the $75,300 rear-wheel drive Macan, and the $84,900 Macan 4S.

Ars has written quite a lot about the development of the Macan's Premium Platform Electric, which it helped develop with VW sibling Audi. Porsche has a lot of history adapting VW group platforms, from the previous generations of Cayenne and Macan all the way back to the very first car to wear the family name , 356/1, which spiced up some Beetle bits in a handsome roadster body.

Macan

The entry level Macan is unique among the range for having just a single electric motor, which drives the rear wheels. With a nominal 335 hp (250 kW)—boosted to 355 hp (265 kW) with launch control—and 415 lb-ft (562 Nm), it's the least-powerful Macan but also the lightest (by 242 lbs/110 kg) and the most efficient, with an EPA range estimate of 315 miles (506 km) from the 100 kWh (95 kWh useable) battery pack.

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NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, kicking off a $5.2 billion robotic mission to explore one of the most promising locations in the Solar System for finding extraterrestrial life.

The Falcon Heavy rocket fired its 27 kerosene-fueled engines and vaulted away from Launch Complex 39A at 12:06 pm EDT (16:06 UTC) Monday. Delayed several days due to Hurricane Milton, which passed through Central Florida late last week, the launch of Europa Clipper signaled the start of a five-and-a-half year journey to Jupiter, where the spacecraft will settle into an orbit taking it repeatedly by one the giant planet's numerous moons.

The moon of Jupiter that has most captured scientists' interest, Europa, is sheathed in ice. There's strong evidence of a global ocean of liquid water below Europa's frozen crust, and Europa Clipper is going there to determine if it has the ingredients for life.

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On Monday, Adobe announced Firefly Video Model, a new AI-powered text-to-video generation tool that can create novel videos from written prompts. It joins similar offerings from OpenAI , Runway , Google , and Meta in an increasingly crowded field. Unlike the competition, Adobe claims that Firefly Video Model is trained exclusively on licensed content, potentially sidestepping ethical and copyright issues that have plagued other generative AI tools.

Because of its licensed training data roots, Adobe calls Firefly Video Model "the first publicly available video model designed to be commercially safe." However, the San Jose, California-based software firm hasn't announced a general release date, and during a beta test period, it's only granting access to people on a waiting list.

In the works since at least April 2023 , the new model builds off of techniques Adobe developed for its Firefly image synthesis models. Like its text-to-image generator, which the company later integrated into Photoshop, Adobe hopes to aim Firefly Video Model at media professionals, such as video creators and editors. The company claims its model can produce footage that blends seamlessly with traditionally created video content.

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For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.

The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable mathematical reasoning capabilities. "Current LLMs are not capable of genuine logical reasoning," the researchers hypothesize based on these results. "Instead, they attempt to replicate the reasoning steps observed in their training data."

Mix it up

In "GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models"—currently available as a pre-print paper —the six Apple researchers start with GSM8K's standardized set of over 8,000 grade-school level mathematical word problems , which is often used as a benchmark for modern LLMs' complex reasoning capabilities. They then take the novel approach of modifying a portion of that testing set to dynamically replace certain names and numbers with new values—so a question about Sophie getting 31 building blocks for her nephew in GSM8K could become a question about Bill getting 19 building blocks for his brother in the new GSM-Symbolic evaluation.

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A New York judge recently called out an expert witness for using Microsoft's Copilot chatbot to inaccurately estimate damages in a real estate dispute that partly depended on an accurate assessment of damages to win.

In an order Thursday, judge Jonathan Schopf warned that "due to the nature of the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence and its inherent reliability issues" that any use of AI should be disclosed before testimony or evidence is admitted in court. Admitting that the court "has no objective understanding as to how Copilot works," Schopf suggested that the legal system could be disrupted if experts started overly relying on chatbots en masse.

His warning came after an expert witness, Charles Ranson, dubiously used Copilot to cross-check calculations in a dispute over a $485,000 rental property in the Bahamas that had been included in a trust for a deceased man's son. The court was being asked to assess if the executrix and trustee—the deceased man's sister—breached her fiduciary duties by delaying the sale of the property while admittedly using it for personal vacations.

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On Friday, Ward Christensen, co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system ( BBS ), died at age 78 in Rolling Meadows, Illinois. Christensen, along with Randy Suess , created the first BBS in Chicago in 1978, leading to an important cultural era of digital community-building that presaged much of our online world today.

Friends and associates remember Christensen as humble and unassuming, a quiet innovator who never sought the spotlight for his groundbreaking work. Despite creating one of the foundational technologies of the digital age, Christensen maintained a low profile throughout his life, content with his long-standing career at IBM and showing no bitterness or sense of missed opportunity as the Internet age dawned.

"Ward was the quietest, pleasantest, gentlest dude," said BBS: The Documentary creator Jason Scott in a conversation with Ars Technica. Scott documented Christensen's work extensively in a 2002 interview for that project. "He was exactly like he looks in his pictures," he said, "like a groundskeeper who quietly tends the yard."

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