Just days before the trial started, Elon Musk tried to settle his lawsuit, which alleges that under Sam Altman's direction, OpenAI abandoned its mission to serve as a nonprofit making AI to benefit humanity.

According to a Sunday court filing from OpenAI, Musk messaged OpenAI President Greg Brockman two days ahead of the trial to "gauge interest" in a possible settlement. Brockman promptly responded, suggesting that "both sides" drop their claims. But Musk refused, then appeared to grow threatening enough that the court may allow Brockman to testify on the message as evidence supposedly revealing Musk's true motives for pursuing the litigation.

"By the end of this week, you and Sam will be the most hated men in America," Musk responded to Brockman's suggestion that all claims be dropped. "If you insist, so it will be."

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The Trump administration has brought US onshore wind development to a halt citing national security concerns, representing a major escalation in the president’s crusade against renewable energy.

Approvals for about 165 onshore wind projects on private lands are being stalled by the Department of Defense, including wind farms which were awaiting final sign-off, others in the middle of negotiations and some that typically would not require oversight by the department, according to the American Clean Power Association (ACP) and people close to the matter.

Wind farms require routine approval from the defence department to ensure they do not interfere with radar systems. This typically involves the level of risk being assessed and the developer paying an agreed sum for the army to update its radar filter system so it can locate the windmill. Some projects can be deemed not to pose a risk due to their distance from army facilities and flight paths. Normally these assessments can take as little as a few days to complete.

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Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument's final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstaking process with their new virtual violin. It's a computer simulation tool that can capture the precise physics of the instrument and even reproduce a realistic sound of a plucked string, according to a paper published in the journal npj Acoustics.

Unlike the more common software programs and plugins that simulate violin sounds via sampling, averaging the final sound based on thousands of notes, the MIT model is based on the fundamental physics of the instrument. “We’re not saying that we can reproduce the artisan’s magic,” said co-author Nicholas Makris . “We’re just trying to understand the physics of violin sound, and perhaps help luthiers in the design process.”

Violin acoustics has long been a hot topic of research among acousticians, particularly when it comes to unlocking the secret to the superior sounds of violins crafted during the so-called "Golden Age"—notably the instruments of famed Cremona luthier Antonio Stradivari , as well as those of the Amati family and Giuseppe Guarneri . There are plenty of variables to consider, given a violin's acoustic complexity.

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Toyota provided flights from Albany, New York, to Tokyo and accommodation so Ars could visit Woven City. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in 2020, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda pledged to build a city of the future, a place where researchers, engineers, and scientists could live and work together. It was framed as the start of a transformation for the world's largest car company, moving it toward becoming a fully fledged mobility company.

Six months ago, after Toyota spent an estimated $10 billion to build an urban paradise atop a disused factory, the first residents moved in. One-hundred handpicked "Weavers," residents chosen to boost the tech cred of the sensor-laden mini-metropolis, began settling in.

Last week, I got a chance to check it out. Here's what I learned while wandering the streets of Toyota's vision of the future.

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. April’s list includes tracking Roman ship repairs, the discovery that mushrooms can detect human urine, crushing soda cans for science, and the physics of why dolphins can swim so fast.

Physics of why dolphins swim so fast

Dolphins are very good swimmers but the exact mechanisms by which they achieve their impressive speed and agility in water have remained murky. Japanese scientists from the University of Osaka ran multiple supercomputer simulations to learn more about how dolphins optimize their propulsion and found it has to do with the vortices, or eddies, produced by dolphin kicks, according to a paper published in the journal Physical Review Fluids.

Per the authors, when dolphins flap their tails up and down, the kicking motion pushes water backward and produces swirling currents of varying sizes.  The computer simulations enabled the team to break down those different sizes, revealing that the initial tail oscillations produce large vortex rings that generate thrust, and those larger ones then produce many more smaller vortices. However, the smaller ones don't contribute to the forward motion.

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In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out.

The science of acoustic fire suppression, which has long been known and documented in scientific literature and the press , works by vibrating oxygen molecules away from a fuel source, depriving the fire of a critical component needed for combustion.

Indeed, after just a few seconds of infrasound, the tiny kitchen blaze goes out.

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In human-to-human communication, the desire to be empathetic or polite often conflicts with the need to be truthful—hence terms like “being brutally honest” for situations where you value the truth over sparing someone’s feelings. Now, new research suggests that large language models can sometimes show a similar tendency when specifically trained to present a "warmer" tone for the user.

In a new paper published this week in Nature , researchers from Oxford University’s Internet Institute found that specially tuned AI models tend to mimic the human tendency to occasionally “soften difficult truths” when necessary “to preserve bonds and avoid conflict.” These warmer models are also more likely to validate a user's expressed incorrect beliefs, the researchers found, especially when the user shares that they're feeling sad.

How do you make an AI seem “warm”?

In the study, the researchers defined the "warmness" of a language model based on "the degree to which its outputs lead users to infer positive intent, signaling trustworthiness, friendliness, and sociability." To measure the effect of those kinds of language patterns, the researchers used supervised fine-tuning techniques to modify four open-weights models (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Mistral-Small-Instruct-2409, Qwen-2.5-32B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-70BInstruct) and one proprietary model (GPT-4o).

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Valve and its SteamOS operating system have already done what a bunch of companies (including Apple) have been trying to do for decades: make a dent in Windows’ dominance in PC gaming.

I mean, sure, according to Valve’s own statistics, Microsoft remains dominant. Over 92 percent of PCs in the Steam Hardware Survey run some version of Windows. But five years ago, this number was just over 96 percent . Ten years ago, it was just under 96 percent . Fifteen years ago? It was 96 percent . Go back any further than that and Steam only runs on Windows in the first place, itself a testament to Microsoft's ubiquity.

Between April 2021 and now, Linux’s share has climbed from under 1 percent to over 5 percent. This is a small number, and it's not all SteamOS (Valve's OS isn't broken out, but Arch, the base distribution for SteamOS, accounts for about 0.33 of that just-over-5-percent). But it’s also more than these numbers have ever moved. By making Windows games run on Linux , rather than trying to push game developers to make Linux-native ports, Valve has done via organic word-of-mouth success what the company utterly failed to do in the early 2010s when it tried to take on Windows directly .

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Over the course of six months, black lesions and deep ulcers formed over the body of a 78-year-old man, puzzling doctors. His face was covered in dark scabs. A lesion had destroyed his left eyelid, and one had created a hole between the roof of his mouth and his nasal cavity.

It wasn't until he was transferred to a Yale School of Medicine hospital for higher-level care that doctors finally identified the cause of his ghastly affliction: a common free-living amoeba that can be found almost anywhere, including tap water. But by then, it was too late. The man's case is reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. (A graphic image of his case is here , but be warned.)

Unicellular terror

The amoeba the doctors found was Acanthamoeba , which is known to cause such horrifying infections. But it's rare, and when it explodes into a full-body, often deadly malady, it tends to be in patients who have compromised immune systems or are otherwise debilitated. As such, the opportunistic pathogen is most often found in people with HIV/AIDS, cancers, and diabetes, as well as those on powerful immunosuppressive drugs, like transplant patients. The man didn't fit into any of these categories.

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