Does "bouba" sound round to you? How about "maluma"? Neither are real words, but we've known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate them with round objects. There have been plenty of ideas put forward about why that would be the case, and most of them have turned out to be wrong. Now, in perhaps the weirdest bit of evidence to date, researchers have found that even newly hatched chickens seem to associate "bouba" with round shapes.

The initial finding dates all the way back to 1947, when someone discovered that people associated some word-like sounds with rounded shapes, and others with spiky ones. In the years since, that association got formalized as the bouba/kiki effect, received a fair bit of experimental attention, and ended up with an extensive Wikipedia entry .

One of the initial ideas to explain it was similarity to actual words (either phonetically or via the characters used to spell them), but then studies with speakers of different languages and alphabets showed that it is likely a general human tendency. The association also showed up in infants as young as 4 months old, well before they master speaking or spelling. Attempts to find the bouba/kiki effects in other primates, however, came up empty. That led to some speculation that it might be evidence of a strictly human processing ability that underlies our capacity to learn sophisticated languages.

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It's just two weeks until F1 gets underway in Australia, and teams are currently in Bahrain, midway through their third and final preseason test. The 2026 season promises to be wildly different from those of the past few years, with all-new cars, engines, hybrid systems, and sustainable fuels entering the mix and shaking up the established order.

You shouldn't read too much into times from preseason testing. The cars don't have to conform to the in-season rules as teams test new components or fit-test rigs; for example, glowing brake discs could once again be seen on some cars that weren't running wheel covers at an earlier test, something we're unlikely to see during actual races.

You also don't know how much fuel—and therefore extra weight—anyone is carrying. In the past, some teams have even made headlines by running too light to set more competitive lap times in an effort to impress potential sponsors. And as the name explains, it's a test, so drivers will be following run plans devised with their engineers to learn specific things about their new cars. Or as one Internet wag once put it, the times mean as much as "a bacon briefcase."

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Another day, another Google AI model. Google has really been pumping out new AI tools lately, having just released Gemini 3 in November . Today, it's bumping the flagship model to version 3.1. The new Gemini 3.1 Pro is rolling out (in preview) for developers and consumers today with the promise of better problem-solving and reasoning capabilities.

Google announced improvements to its Deep Think tool last week, and apparently, the "core intelligence" behind that update was Gemini 3.1 Pro. As usual, Google's latest model announcement comes with a plethora of benchmarks that show mostly modest improvements. In the popular Humanity's Last Exam, which tests advanced domain-specific knowledge, Gemini 3.1 Pro scored a record 44.4 percent. Gemini 3 Pro managed 37.5 percent, while OpenAI's GPT 5.2 got 34.5 percent.

Credit: Google

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Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You've likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment," he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot off all company hardware and away from work-linked accounts.”

Grad isn’t the only tech executive who has raised concerns to staff about the experimental agentic AI tool, which was briefly known as MoltBot and is now named OpenClaw. A Meta executive says he recently told his team to keep OpenClaw off their regular work laptops or risk losing their jobs. The executive told reporters he believes the software is unpredictable and could lead to a privacy breach if used in otherwise secure environments. He spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly.

Peter Steinberger, OpenClaw’s solo founder, launched it as a free, open source tool last November. But its popularity surged last month as other coders contributed features and began sharing their experiences using it on social media. Last week, Steinberger joined ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which says it will keep OpenClaw open source and support it through a foundation.

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We love hearing about the latest findings coming out of an Eötvös Loránd University (ELU) research group focused on gifted word learner (GWL) dogs—if only for the pictures of adorable doggoes playing with their toys. Just last month , we learned that such dogs can learn the labels for new toys just by overhearing their owners talking about those toys. The group is back with yet another new paper , published in the journal Animal Cognition, presenting evidence that GWL dogs have a preference for novel toys and like to share them with their owners. That social interaction seems to be the key to the unique cognitive abilities of these rare dogs.

As previously reported , ELU co-author Claudia Fugazza has been studying canine behavior and cognition for several years as part of the Genius Dog Challenge . For instance, the group’s 2022 study discovered that dogs store key sensory features about their toys—notably what they look like and how they smell—and recall those features when searching for the named toy. Prior studies had suggested that dogs typically rely on vision, or a combination of sight and smell, to locate target objects. GWL dogs can also identify objects based on verbal labels.

Last fall , Fugazza’s group discovered that certain dogs can not only memorize the names of objects like their favorite toys, but also extend those labels to entirely new objects with a similar function, regardless of whether or not they are similar in appearance. It’s a cognitively advanced ability known as “label extension,” and for animals to acquire it usually involves years of intensive training in captivity. But the dogs in this new study developed the ability to classify their toys by function with no formal training, merely by playing naturally with their owners. It’s akin to a person calling a hammer and a rock by the same name, or a child understanding that “cup” can describe a mug, a glass, or a tumbler because they serve the same function.

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Following our report last week that Verizon is forcing people to wait 35 days for phone unlocks after paying off device installment plans, Verizon is apparently trying to eliminate the inconvenient delay. But Verizon hasn't confirmed the plan to Ars, and a statement to another news outlet did not provide any timeline for implementing the change.

As a refresher, the latest version of Verizon’s device unlocking policy for postpaid customers imposes a 35-day waiting period when a customer pays off the remaining balance of a device installment plan online, in the Verizon app, or with a Verizon gift card. There's also a 35-day waiting period after paying off an installment plan over the phone or at a Verizon Authorized Retailer.

Saying restrictions are needed to counter fraud, Verizon will only unlock a phone immediately when someone pays off their device-plan balance at a Verizon corporate store or when someone pays off an installment plan on schedule via automatic payments. If you're partway into one of Verizon’s 36-month device installment plans and pay off the remaining balance early, but without making a trip to a Verizon corporate store, you'd have to wait 35 days for an unlock that would allow you to switch the phone to a different carrier's network.

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2026 is looking like a pretty good year for affordable electric vehicles. There's a new Nissan Leaf that starts at a hair under $30,000 (as long as you ignore the destination charge). We'll soon drive the reborn Chevrolet Bolt—with a new lithium iron phosphate battery, it also has a price tag starting with a two (again, ignoring the destination charge). And the closer you get to $40,000, the more your options expand: the Hyundai Ioniq 5 , Chevy Equinox EV , Toyota bZ, Tesla Model 3, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Subaru Solterra all fall within that price bracket, and some of those are pretty good cars.

But what if you only want to spend a fraction of that? Well, you won't be buying anything new, but then neither do three-quarters of American car buyers, and there's nothing wrong with that. A few weeks ago, we looked at what passes for the used EV bargain basement —ones that cost $5,000 or less. As long as you're OK with limited range and slow charging, going electric on a shoestring is possible. But if you're prepared to spend twice that, it turns out you've got plenty of options.

As before, we stress that you should have a reliable place to charge an EV if you're going to buy one, which means at home at night or at work during the day. At this price range, you're unlikely to find something that DC fast charges quickly, and relying on public AC charging sounds stressful. You'll probably find a car with some battery degradation, but for the vast majority of models that use active battery cooling, this should be minimal; about 2 percent a year appears to be the average .

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In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency was accused of abandoning its mission to protect public health after repealing an "endangerment finding" that has served as the basis for federal climate change regulations for 17 years.

The lawsuit came from more than a dozen environmental and health groups, including the American Public Health Association, the American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), the Clean Air Council, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The groups have asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the EPA decision, which also eliminated requirements controlling greenhouse gas emissions in new cars and trucks. Urging a return to the status quo, the groups argued that the Trump administration is anti-science and illegally moving to benefit the fossil fuel industry, despite a mountain of evidence demonstrating the deadly consequences of unchecked pollution and climate change-induced floods, droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.

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This week, Apple released the first developer betas for iOS 26.4, iPadOS 26.4, macOS 26.4, and its other operating systems. On Tuesday, it followed those up with public beta versions of the same updates.

Usually released around the midpoint between one major iOS release and the next, the *.4 updates to its operating system usually include a significant batch of new features and other refinements, and if the first beta is any indication, this year's releases uphold that tradition.

A new "Playlist Playground" feature will let Apple Music subscribers generate playlists with text prompts, and native support for video podcasts is coming to the Podcasts app. The Creator Studio version of the Freeform drawing and collaboration app is also available in the 26.4 updates, allowing subscribers to access stock images from Apple's Content Hub and to insert AI-generated images.

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