Range Rover provided flights from Washington, DC, to London and accommodation so Ars could see the RR GT, as well as some other things you can read about in early September. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

WOLVERHAMPTON, England—One can argue about whether or not Range Rover invented the luxury SUV category, but there's no question that since the first Range Rover went on sale in 1970, the brand has made itself the standard that other luxury SUVs have to measure against. But what if Range Rover built something that wasn't an SUV?

That's exactly what it's doing with the new Range Rover GT. Spy shots have been circulating for at least a year of what was believed to be an all-electric replacement for the Range Rover Velar . It turns out that was a misapprehension; the heavily camouflaged prototypes were examples of the Range Rover GT being tested at the Nürburgring and the Arctic Circle .

Will this be Range Rover's answer to the Lucid Air and Porsche Taycan? Credit: Range Rover

Range Rover still isn't ready to reveal an uncamouflaged GT, but the car you see is much less disguised than the boxy-looking prototypes seen in earlier spy shots.

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One of Rhode Island's most-wanted fugitives was arrested in New York last week after being on the run for more than 20 years, which was at least partially spent hiding as a biotech executive, according to Stat News .

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday, California-based Immix Biopharma noted that Richard Graydon was terminated Friday for " reasons unrelated to his activities at the Company ."

It turns out, Richard Graydon was an alias for Ronald Fischer, a 70-year-old former anesthesiologist licensed in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, who fled amid his 2005 trial for first-degree sexual assault. Fischer was accused of raping a woman during a date on his yacht, Lion King .

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The Odyssey might be cleaning up at the box office at the moment, but in two weeks another mega-blockbuster hits theaters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day , directed by Destin Daniel Cretton ( Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ). Sony Pictures dropped one last trailer for this follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home, which is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the title role.

No Way Home ended on a pretty bleak note , with Peter Parker (Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya). Per the official synopsis:

It’s a Brand New Day for Peter Parker. Fighting crime full-time as Spider-Man in a world that doesn’t remember him—and the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him—sparks a change in Peter he may not have the power to control. But that transformation might also be the only thing that can stop a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves–a powerful villain no one can even see. The world may have forgotten Peter Parker, but he hasn’t forgotten them.

Holland is reprising his role as Peter Parker/Spider-Man, along with Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalon as Peter’s former bestie Ned Leeds. The film also features Jon Bernthal as Frank Castle/Punisher, Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/Hulk, Michael Mando as Mac Gargan/Scorpion (captured by Spider-Man in Homecoming ), Marvin Jones III as albino crime lord Lonnie Lincoln/Tombstone, Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil (briefly Peter’s lawyer in No Way Home ); Liza Colon-Zayas as detective Jean DeWolf; Eman Esfandi as MJ's new boyfriend; and Trammell Tillman as Bill Metzger of the Department of Damage Control (DODC) who is policing superpowered individuals.

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Federal officials on Monday reaffirmed that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms still appears to be the source of Cyclospora, the microscopic parasite behind a multi-state surge in explosive diarrhea cases.

The assertion was intended to clear up confusion that began swirling over the weekend around a false positive test from the Food and Drug Administration —which Taylor Farms celebrated , sparking confusion. Still, many details of the outbreak remain murky, largely due to the vague recall information Taylor Farms has publicly provided.

On Friday, the FDA, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, announced that the FDA's traceback investigations for the outbreak converged on Taylor Farms. Traceback investigations work by tracking backward from sick people and the foods they ate to where those foods came from through the supply chain, down to individual farms or production facilities. When the FDA said their investigation converged on Taylor Farms, the agency means that, over and over again, tracebacks led them to shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Central Mexico and supplied by Taylor Farms—which also goes by Taylor Fresh Foods.

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Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government.

Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are "ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-price completed sales simply because the legal landscape has changed." Nintendo said the plaintiffs "have no legal entitlement to the tariff refunds Nintendo stands to receive."

The lawsuit was filed in April by two customers who seek to represent a class of all US residents who bought Nintendo products from February 2025 to February 2026. California resident Gregory Hoffert and Washington resident Prashant Sharan filed the class action complaint in US District Court for the Western District of Washington, alleging unjust enrichment and a violation of the Washington Consumer Protection Act's prohibition on unfair or deceptive acts.

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When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum , killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song ). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detective" to bring the people of Pompeii to vivid life. That would be National Geographic's new three-part docuseries, Pompeii: Out of Time .

The Marvel connection made Out of Time happen. Executive producer Kevin Wright was also a producer on the Disney+ series Loki , which included a scene where Hiddleston's Loki travels through time to visit Pompeii. Hiddleston also studied classics at Cambridge University and had visited the Pompeii archaeological site as a teenager, which the Marvel star attributes to indirectly influencing his career path into acting.

"There is just a passion to the way Tom tells stories that's infectious," Wright told Ars. "We knew that if we could capture that and put it into [the series], it might interest people who wouldn't normally want to watch a documentary about Pompeii. "

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Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which is decades longer than similarly sized rodents. They are also eusocial, like ants, bees, or termites—in a colony that can hold more than a hundred animals, only one female, the queen, breeds.

We didn’t know how exactly naked mole-rat queens stop other females from breeding. For a long time, our leading hypothesis was bullying and violence, but that may be a bit impractical, given their kingdoms are vast networks of tunnels that can stretch for up to three kilometers. But now a team of Lewin Lab scientists at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin discovered it’s actually just one part of a sophisticated olfactory signaling program.

Running on smell

"It's very clear that mole rats actually have quite big noses and smell a lot," says Gary Lewin, a neurobiologist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine and senior author of the study. Naked mole rats have around 1200 olfactory receptor genes, more than mice (which have roughly 1,000 of them) and way more than the few hundred in humans. They're also blind. "They have to be able to navigate and move around without vision, so smell is one of those things that’s enhanced," Lewin said.

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On Monday, a judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors, ending the largest copyright class-action ever certified and granting the largest copyright settlement ever reached .

Back in May, some authors fought to block the settlement , which was proposed after the court ruled that Anthropic training AI on books was fair use; however, its piracy of works was likely not.

Authors opposing the settlement argued that lawyers’ fees were too high and authors’ payouts were too low. Hoping to avoid accepting the estimated $3,000-per-work payout and file separate lawsuits to seek higher damages, a handful of authors tried to opt out past the deadline.

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Since its 2022 launch, the Steam Deck has consistently been at or near the top of the company's "top selling products by revenue" charts , with brief dips outside of the top 10 treated as newsworthy events . But sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently been on a steep decline since the system relaunched at a higher price in May .

Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam breaks down the historical data , showing how the Deck's chart position has fallen from fifth place immediately after orders resumed in late May down to 14th place for two weeks in early July (the hardware sits at 12th place in the current edition of those charts ).

That's in sharp contrast to 2025, when the Steam Deck never dropped below seventh place on the bestseller charts and was only rarely outside the Top 5. Then Valve warned of "intermittent shortages" for the Steam Deck starting in February, leading to weeks of lower chart positions before the Deck became completely unavailable until May.

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