By the time you read this, the Audi RS6 Avant is dead. Production at the factory in Neckarsulm, Germany, has already switched over to new models ; any unsold wagons at dealerships will be the last of their kind. Time moves on, leaving the unelectrified 2026 RS6 Avant Performance as a relic from a bygone age where people didn't care quite so much about melting glaciers. In this regard progress is good and climate catastrophe is bad, but there are other things to like about the RS6 Avant, and much that Audi could and should bring to its other cars.

The car was always something of a unicorn here in the US. As the SUV became ascendant, the station wagon suffered a corresponding decline with the general public, and automakers like Audi responded by not importing them anymore. The economics, we were told, didn't add up: wagon sales would just cannibalize SUV sales but at too small a rate to make the imported wagons profitable. But with smaller volumes, the math made more sense, which is why in 2019 the car maker buckled to pressure and said fine, we'll import the RS6 Avant . And with a starting price of $130,700, you can understand why this is a low-volume model.

Subtly swollen

A look down its flanks reveals wheel arches that bulge to accommodate larger wheels, part of Audi Sport's RS transformation applied to the sedate A6 starting point. Larger wheels provide clearance for larger brakes, which in turn help stop it from prodigious velocities—if you have a long enough runway or the right stretch of German Autobahn, top speed for this version, the Performance, tops out at 190 mph (305 km/h). Under the hood, hidden from view by plastic paneling, lies a twin-turbocharged 4.0 L V8 engine, which generates 621 hp (463 kW) and 627 lb-ft (850 Nm), sending power to all four wheels via an eight-speed ZF automatic transmission.

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Bourbon is a multi-billion-dollar market, but the American barrel-aged whiskey also produces a lot of wasted grain at distilleries. Chemists at the University of Kentucky developed a method to transform that stillage into electrodes and used those electrodes to build supercapacitors with energy storage capacity on par with existing commercial devices. They presented their work at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in  Atlanta, Georgia.

US distillers began making bourbon in the 18th century, particularly in Kentucky, but it really took off commercially, in terms of consumption and exports, after World War II. Legally, a whiskey can only be sold as bourbon if its mash is comprised of at least 51 percent corn, with any other cereal grain (usually rye and barley) making up the remainder.

The grain is ground up and mixed with water, and mash from a previous distillation is added to create a sour mash. The addition of yeast launches fermentation, after which the mash is distilled to a clear spirit called "white dog." That spirit is poured into charred new oak barrels for aging of at least two years. It's the caramelized sugars and vanillin in the charred wood that give bourbon its distinctive dark color and flavor. The barrels are never reused for bourbon, typically being recycled for making barrel-aged beer, wine, and even barbecue and hot sauces.

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One of the federal vaccine advisors hand-selected by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has angrily resigned from his position, complaining of "drama" amid a spat with a spokesperson. Robert Malone—a former researcher turned outspoken anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist—confirmed he was stepping down Tuesday afternoon to CQ Roll Call , which first reported the news.

He told the outlet that his decision to quit came after a "miscommunication" about the fate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). Kennedy had populated ACIP with anti-vaccine allies including Malone, who served as vice chair, after summarily firing all 17 experts on the panel last June. Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked Kennedy's ACIP appointments , including Malone. He also stayed the changes that its members had made to federal vaccine guidance, as well as the dramatic overhaul of the childhood vaccine schedule Kennedy made without them. The judge ruled all the moves were likely illegal.

On Thursday, Malone claimed on social media that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) had disbanded ACIP and planned to completely reconstitute it (again) , without appealing the judge's ruling or defending Kennedy's ACIP picks from the judge's claims that they were unqualified. But soon after, Malone retracted his claim, saying it was a miscommunication and that disbanding ACIP was merely one of the "options being considered."

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Roughly a year ago, Spain and Portugal went dark when the electrical grid of the entire Iberian Peninsula failed. While the grid operators did a heroic job of restarting the grid quickly, there were obvious questions about what had led to the blackout in the first place. A preliminary report suggested that a combination of grid-level voltage oscillations and early disconnections was the main factor.

Over the weekend, the European grid coordinator, ENTSO-e, released its final, detailed report on the event. While it's largely consistent with the preliminary conclusions, the report provides much more detail about what went wrong and, more significantly, offers a clear picture of how the Iberian grid operators could make changes to prevent a similar event in the future.

Oscillations

The expert committee that prepared the report had access to a wealth of data, including status logs from most of the major hardware on the Spanish and Portuguese grid, often recorded with sub-second precision. There's also data from the two major interchanges between the Spanish grid and those in France and Morocco. The group even obtained data from two manufacturers of the small inverters used for rooftop solar about the performance of their hardware on the day in question.

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Prospective Vizio TV buyers should know there’s a good chance the set won’t work properly without a Walmart account. In an attempt to better serve advertisers, Walmart, which bought Vizio in December 2024, announced this week that select newly purchased Vizio TVs now require a Walmart account for setup and accessing smart TV features.

Since 2024, Vizio TVs have required a Vizio account, which a Vizio OS website says is necessary for accessing “exclusive offers, subscription management, and tailored support.” Accounts are also central to Vizio’s business, which is largely driven by ads and tracking tied to its OS.

A Walmart spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica that Walmart accounts will be mandatory on “select new Vizio OS TVs” for owners to complete onboarding and to use smart TV features. The representative added:

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Mozilla developer Peter Wilson has taken to the Mozilla.ai blog to announce cq, which he describes as "Stack Overflow for agents." The nascent project hints at something genuinely useful, but it will have to address security, data poisoning, and accuracy to achieve significant adoption.

It's meant to solve a couple of problems. First, coding agents often use outdated information when making decisions, like attempting deprecated API calls. This stems from training cutoffs and the lack of reliable, structured access to up-to-date runtime context. They sometimes use techniques like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to get updated knowledge, but they don't always do that when they need to—"unknown unknowns," as the saying goes—and it's never comprehensive when they do.

Second, multiple agents often have to find ways around the same barriers, but there's no knowledge sharing after said training cutoff point. That means hundreds or thousands of individual agents end up using expensive tokens and consuming energy to solve already-solved problems all the time. Ideally, one would solve an issue once, and the others would draw from that experience.

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OpenAI is preparing to shut down Sora, the video generation app that drew widespread attention when it launched in late 2024 .

OpenAI announced the move in a social media post Tuesday just after a Wall Street Journal story broke the news . The company said it will have more to share soon on "timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work."

"To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you," OpenAI wrote. "What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing."

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Back in 2022 when Cindy Cohn, the executive director of a US digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, started writing her memoir, Privacy's Defender , she worried that people would think she was an "old fuddy duddy" still sounding alarms about government spying online.

As one of EFF's first litigators and then its longtime leader, Cohn witnessed firsthand how government surveillance became one of the earliest concerns for civil rights advocates when the Internet became mainstream in the 1990s. Since then, attention has pivoted away from caring about government's Internet abuses to focusing much more on Big Tech harms, she said.

But then Donald Trump's second term started, launching aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations nationwide that depended on abusing tech to support its goals of mass deportation. Railing against ICE raids, communities have quickly mobilized to defend online privacy, even banding together across political divides to tear down Flock cameras that can aid in arrests. Maybe even more concerning, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has increasingly sought to unmask ICE critics on social media—and largely failed —EFF has filed and backed lawsuits fighting to protect Americans' rights to track ICE activity and share information anonymously online.

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The Federal Communications Commission yesterday announced it will no longer approve consumer-grade routers made outside of the US, citing a President Trump directive on reducing the use of foreign technology for national security reasons. The action will prevent foreign-made routers from being imported into or sold in the US.

Routers already approved for sale in the US can continue to be sold, and consumers can keep using any router they've previously obtained, the FCC said. But the FCC will not approve new device models made at least partly outside the US unless the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security determines that the router does not pose national security risks.

The prohibition applies to both US and foreign companies that produce routers outside the US. Foreign production includes "any major stage of the process through which the device is made, including manufacturing, assembly, design, and development."

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