Enlarge / Opal Sandy (center), who was born completely deaf because of a rare genetic condition, can now hear unaided for the first time after receiving gene therapy at 11-months-old. She is shown with her mother, father, and sister at their home in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, on May 7, 2024. (credit: GettyAndrew Matthews) There are few things more heartwarming than videos of children with deafness gaining the ability to hear, showing them happily turning their heads at the sound of their parents' voices and joyfully bobbing to newly discovered music. Thanks to recent advances in gene therapy, mor ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Apu Gomes / StringerGetty Images News) A US district judge William Alsup has dismissed Elon Musk's X Corp's lawsuit against Bright Data, a data-scraping company accused of improperly accessing X (formerly Twitter) systems and violating both X terms and state laws when scraping and selling data. X sued Bright Data to stop the company from scraping and selling X data to academic institutes and businesses, including Fortune 500 companies. According to Alsup, X failed to state a claim while arguing that companies like Bright Data should have to pay X to access public data posted ..read more

Enlarge / UNSW Sydney engineers developed a new way to make cold brew coffee in under three minutes without sacrificing taste. (credit: University of New South Wales, Sydney) Diehard fans of cold-brew coffee put in a lot of time and effort for their preferred caffeinated beverage. But engineers at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, figured out a nifty hack. They rejiggered an existing espresso machine to accommodate an ultrasonic transducer to administer ultrasonic pulses, thereby reducing the brewing time from 12 to 24 hours to just under three minutes, according to a new paper publ ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Verizon) T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T will pay a combined $10.2 million in a settlement with US states that alleged the carriers falsely advertised wireless plans as "unlimited" and phones as "free." The deal was announced yesterday by New York Attorney General Letitia James. "A multistate investigation found that the companies made false claims in advertisements in New York and across the nation, including misrepresentations about 'unlimited' data plans that were in fact limited and had reduced quality and speed after a certain limit was reached by the user," the announc ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Aurich LawsonGetty Images) OpenAI is coming for the most popular website on the Internet: Google Search. Reuters reports the company behind ChatGPT is planning to launch a search engine as early as this Monday. OpenAI has been inching toward a search engine for a while now. It has been working with Microsoft with a "Bing Chat" generative-AI search engine in Microsoft's search engine. Earlier this week, The Verge reported that "OpenAI has been aggressively trying to poach Google employees" for an upstart search team. "Search.chatgpt.com" is already being set up on OpenAI ..read more

Enlarge / WETA "Gollum" figure at Arclight at the opening of "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King." (credit: Barry King / ContributorWireImage) A day after announcing that the tentatively titled Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum was scheduled for a 2026 release, Warner Bros. immediately moved to block a beloved 2009 unauthorized fan film with the exact same name on YouTube. Less than 12 hours later, though, the studio appeared to back down from this copyright fight, reinstating the fan film on YouTube amid fan backlash protesting the copyright strike on Reddit as a "dick move ..read more

Enlarge / This peaceful, pastoral scene actually represents a ton of hard work! (credit: Slavic Magic) Do you ever look around at modern civilization and boggle at the sheer complexity of it all? Do you ever think about the generations of backbreaking labor needed to turn acres and acres of untamed wilderness into the layers of interconnected systems needed to provide basic necessities—much less luxuries—to both early settlers and their generations of descendants? All that infrastructure work is much harder to take for granted after playing Manor Lords. The Early Access version of the game—w ..read more

Enlarge / The Colorado River toad, also known as the Sonoran Desert Toad. (credit: Mark Newman) It is becoming increasingly accepted that classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and mescaline can act as antidepressants and anti-anxiety treatments in addition to causing hallucinations. They act by binding to a serotonin receptor. But there are 14 known types of serotonin receptors, and most of the research into these compounds has focused on only one of them—the one these molecules like, called 5-HT2A. (5-HT, short for 5-hydroxytryptamine, is the chemical name for serotonin.) Th ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Honda) Global carmakers are stepping up their investment in hybrid technologies as consumers’ growing wariness over fully electric vehicles forces the industry to rapidly shift gear, according to top executives. A combination of still high interest rates and concern over inadequate charging infrastructure has chilled buyers’ enthusiasm for fully electric cars, prompting a rebound in sales of hybrid vehicles that most of the industry had long regarded as nothing more than a stop-gap. Tapping the resurgent demand for hybrids was a priority, executives from General Motors, Niss ..read more

Enlarge (credit: Getty ImagesSOPA Images ) T-Mobile is reportedly close to buying a portion of the regional carrier US Cellular, while Verizon has also held talks about buying some of US Cellular's assets. "T-Mobile is closing in on a deal to buy a chunk of the regional carrier for more than $2 billion, taking over some operations and wireless spectrum licenses, according to people familiar with the matter," The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. When contacted by Ars today, T-Mobile said it doesn't "comment on rumors and speculation." We contacted US Cellular and will update this artic ..read more