A walk down the tarmac at the National Air and Space Museum of France is guaranteed to thrill aviation enthusiasts. Several civilian and military aircraft of the past and the present are showcased in this museum, located at the Paris-Le Bourget airport. One of them is the legendary Concorde F-WTSS 001 prototype, the sight of which should give goosebumps to science enthusiasts as well.

That’s because right behind its long nose is a painted map that traces the path of a June 1973 total solar eclipse across Africa. It’s there on the Concorde 001 prototype because a group of eight scientists set a new world record of observing a total solar eclipse for 74 minutes by flying this aircraft at more than twice the speed of sound.

To put this figure into context, the maximum duration of totality on the ground is around 7.5 minutes when an eclipse is observed in the equatorial regions. For the upcoming solar eclipse of August 12, which can be seen from parts of Europe, the maximum duration of totality from the ground will be slightly more than two minutes.

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This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine."

This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle . The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time.

The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of Trenchbloom , a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days.

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It won't come as a surprise that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn't save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government's own watchdog has said it wasn't able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE's so-called "Wall of Receipts."

For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 billion from cutting grants, but almost none of it could be verified, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its report yesterday. The GAO is the auditing and investigating arm of Congress and issued the DOGE report in response to a June 2025 request from Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

"The Wall of Receipts did not provide sufficient information to verify the method DOGE used to calculate savings, or what the savings consisted of, for 13,553 of the 15,887 grants it reported as terminated. This corresponds to about 96 percent of the DOGE-reported grant savings," the GAO report said.

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OpenAI’s upcoming smart speaker will probably cost over $300, “people familiar with the matter” have told Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman .

The generative AI company has “discussed” charging up to $400, Bloomberg, which has been reporting on the yet-to-be-announced smart speaker since July, said today. The publication said that OpenAI is viewing the smart speaker as a smartphone replacement.

OpenAI has declined to comment on its product roadmap.

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Snails are well-known for their mucus. The slime is highly valued as an anti-inflammatory and anti-aging ingredient in certain skin care products, and snails can secrete different kinds of mucus with properties tailored to specific functions. A team of German scientists has determined a recipe for how snails achieve that so-called tunability: Collagen and calcium work in tandem to achieve the varying mechanical properties, according to a new paper in the journal Science.

Snail mucus is mostly water; it's the mucins (glycoproteins) and complex carbohydrates that give it that slimy, viscous texture. In addition to cosmetics, the mucus holds great potential for drug delivery. In 2020, scientists found that combining snail slime from a common garden snail with gold nanoparticles helped accelerate wound healing and exhibited anti-inflammatory properties in mice. Most relevant to this latest paper is a 2023 study on garden snail slime that identified three distinct types of secreted mucus: a hydrating version to protect its skin, one that acts as an adhesive glue, and a third that serves as a lubricant so the snail can more easily glide across a surface.

The team focused their research efforts on the grove snail/lemon snail ( Cepaea nemoralis ) , which they deemed well-suited as subjects because the snails secrete five different kinds of mucus with distinct functions. As with the garden snails, there is one that acts as a lubricant to help with locomotion and an adhesive mucus to help the snail stick to various surfaces. Then there's a mucus layer known as the epiphragm that the snail secretes when it hibernates in winter, which contains calcite and effectively seals the shell to protect the snail from predators and harsh environmental conditions.

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A US-made pickup truck by 2030 is part of Volkswagen Group's plan to revive its American business. According to a Reuters report , entering this competitive but high-margin market, as well as the large SUV segment, is the path forward, since both are areas the automaker currently ignores.

The report is anonymously sourced, and VW declined to comment, so take the news with a pinch of salt. But it does make sense: Love it or hate it, the four-door pickup truck is the go-to for Americans who want one vehicle that can carry passengers and cargo that doesn't need to be shielded from the elements. You might think a hatchback or a station wagon would be just as good or better, but that's probably why you're reading Ars Technica in the first place.

Tariffs and an antediluvian approach to emissions controls might make the US market a haven for vehicles that are uncompetitive or unsellable elsewhere, and the pickup truck market in the US will account for almost $200 billion in sales in 2026, with projections to continue growing each year, so one can certainly see merit in the idea. The global car might be dead , but that just means you need to develop cars for each region's taste. And Americans really like pickup trucks.

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The White House is drafting an executive order on the disproven link between vaccines and autism, according to independent reports from The Washington Post and Bloomberg , which both cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the efforts.

Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order's drafting so far is aimed at the childhood vaccine schedule, autism research, and parental choice for vaccinations.

Dozens of high-quality studies encompassing data from millions of children worldwide have already been carried out on the topic and have consistently found no link between childhood vaccines and autism. The claim of a link stems from an unethical, fraudulent study that was retracted years ago, and its author was stripped of his medical license.

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This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI’s ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong.

A January lawsuit described the story of a man who took his own life after being allegedly “coached” into suicide. A college student in Georgia sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT “pushed him into psychosis.”

In June, a Canadian family also sued OpenAI and argued that ChatGPT agreed with the young woman’s dismissiveness when it first gave her the option to seek professional mental health advice. ChatGPT allegedly “encouraged” her to end her life, too, and she did so.

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ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs.

The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters—three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

The ByteDance model is being pre-trained—a stage that typically takes three to six months—before it is fine-tuned and released if all goes well, one of the people said. The exact model size would only be determined at a later stage.

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