YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google's management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn't like it ). So it's no surprise that creators have been up in arms over the suspicious removal of YouTube's advanced SRV3 caption format. You don't have to worry too much just yet—Google says this is only temporary, and it's working on a fix for the underlying bug.

Google added support for this custom subtitle format around 2018, giving creators more customization options than regular users get with traditional captions. SRV3 (also known as YTT or YouTube Timed Text) allows for custom colors, transparency, animations, fonts, and precise positioning in videos. Uploaders using this format can color-code and position captions to help separate multiple speakers, create sing-along animations, or style them to match the video.

Over the last several days, creators who've become accustomed to this level of control have been dismayed to see that YouTube is no longer accepting videos with this Google-created format. Many worried Google had ditched the format entirely, which could be problematic for all those previously uploaded videos.

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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert to clinicians Tuesday, warning that the savage, flesh-eating parasitic fly— the New World Screwworm —is not only approaching the Texas border, but also felling an increasing number of animals in the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

The advisory, released through the agency's Health Alert Network, directs doctors, veterinarians, and other health workers to be on the lookout for patients with wounds teeming with ferocious maggots burrowing into their living flesh. The alert also provides guidance on what to do if any such festering wounds are encountered—namely, remove each and every maggot to prevent the patient from dying, and, under no circumstance allow any of the parasites to survive and escape.

The New World Screwworm (NWS) is a fly that lays its eggs—up to 400 at a time—in the wounds, orifices, and mucus membranes of any warm-blooded animal. The eggs hatch into flesh-eating maggots, which look and act much like screws, twisting and boring into their victims while eating them alive.

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Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream before dinner and I say ‘no,’ the meaning is entirely dictated by whether the word is punctuated with a smirk or a stern frown,” says Geena Ianni, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s why in the future, she thinks, neural prostheses meant for patients with a stroke or paralysis will decode facial gestures from brain signals in the same way they decode speech.

To lay a foundation for these future facial gesture decoders, Ianni and her colleagues designed an experiment to find out how neural circuitry responsible for making faces really works. “Although in recent years neuroscience got a good handle on how the brain perceives facial expressions, we know relatively little about how they are generated,” Ianni says. And it turned out that a surprisingly large part of what neuroscientists assumed about facial gestures was wrong.

The natural way

For a long time, neuroscientists thought facial gestures in primates stemmed from a neat division of labor in the brain. “Case reports of patients with brain lesions suggested some brain regions were responsible for certain types of emotional expressions while other regions were responsible for volitional movements like speech,” Ianni explains. We’ve developed a clearer picture of speech by tracing the origin of these movements down to the level of individual neurons. But we’ve not done the same for facial expressions. To fill this gap, Ianni and her team designed a study using macaques—social primates that share most of their complex facial musculature with humans.

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Netflix agreed to pay all cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, amending its $72 billion deal in an attempt to fight off Paramount's hostile takeover bid.

Netflix originally agreed to buy the company with a mix of cash and stock. To sweeten the offer for shareholders, Netflix and Warner Bros. today announced that Netflix will pay all cash instead. If successful, Netflix's purchase will include HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets.

The price is unchanged at $27.75 per share, and Warner Bros. is targeting an April 2026 shareholder vote. The original plan was for Netflix to buy each Warner Bros. share with $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock.

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TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today.

The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant regulatory approvals and other conditions,” the joint venture is expected to launch in April 2027.

Under a new joint venture, Huizhou, China-headquartered TCL will own 51 percent of Tokyo, Japan-headquartered Sony’s “home entertainment business,” and Sony will own 49 percent, per an announcement today, adding:

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As Ars reported last week , NASA's plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.

Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in "phase two" of NASA's commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

"This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

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It's been nearly three years now since Destiny maker (and Sony subsidiary ) Bungie formally announced a revival of the storied Marathon FPS franchise. And it has been about seven months since the game's original announced release date of September 23, 2025 was pushed back indefinitely after a reportedly poor response to the game's first Alpha test.

But today, in a post on the PlayStation Blog , Bungie revealed that the new Marathon would finally be hitting PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X|S on March 5, narrowing down the month-long March release window announced back in December .

Unlike Destiny 2 , which transitioned to a free-to-play model in 2019 , the new Marathon sells for $40 in a Standard Edition or a $60 Deluxe Edition that includes some digital rewards and cosmetics. That mirrors the pricing of the somewhat similar Arc Raiders , which recently hit 12 million sales in less than 12 weeks.

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Mac power users waiting on new high-end MacBook Pro models may have been disappointed last fall, when Apple released an M5 upgrade for the low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro without touching the M4 Pro or Max versions of the laptop. But the wait for M5 Pro and M5 Max models may be nearing its end.

The tea-leaf readers at MacRumors noticed that shipping times for a handful of high-end MacBook Pro configurations have slipped into mid-to-late February, rather than being available immediately as most Mac models are. This is often, though not always, a sign that Apple has slowed down or stopped production of an existing product in anticipation of an update.

Currently, the shipping delays affect the M4 Max versions of both the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros. If you order them today, these models will arrive sometime between February 3 and February 24, depending on the configuration you choose; many M4 Pro versions are still available for same-day shipping, though adding a nano-texture display or upgrading RAM can still add a week or so to the shipping time.

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