The electric car transition isn't going great for America's domestic automakers, but it's far from over. Ford may have ended production of the full-size F-150 Lightning pickup truck , but next year, it will debut a new "Universal EV Platform," beginning with a midsize truck that it says will start at a much more reasonable $30,000, should all go to plan. The company seems serious about the idea, having created an internal "skunkworks" several years ago to design this new affordable platform from first principles.

Doing more with less is the key: fewer components and using less energy to go the same distance. Now, the company has given us a clearer picture of how it plans to make that happen.

A few years ago, Ford and its crosstown rival bet that full-size pickup truck customers would be wowed enough by instant torque and minuscule running costs to overlook how towing heavily diminished range. They created electric versions of their best-selling behemoths, packed with clever features like power sockets for job sites and the ability to power a home during an emergency.

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Europe’s privacy watchdog has opened a “large-scale” inquiry into Elon Musk’s X over AI-generated non-consensual sexual imagery, in the latest sign of how regulators are scrutinising the social media site’s Grok chatbot.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which is responsible for enforcing the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, said late on Monday that it had opened a probe into the creation and publication of “potentially harmful” sexualised images by Grok that contained or involved the processing of EU user data.

The Grok chatbot is integrated into X’s social media feeds, and developed by Musk’s AI start-up xAI, which last year acquired X. Earlier this month, xAI merged with Musk’s rocket maker SpaceX to create a $1.5 trillion behemoth.

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In a recent study, University of Alaska Fairbanks paleontologist Matthew Wooller and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated what they thought were pieces of two mammoth vertebrae, only to get a whale of a surprise and a whole new mystery.

At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two “mammoth” bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale—which raised a whole new set of questions. The team’s hunt for Alaska’s last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.

“ The first signs that something was amiss”

The aptly named Wooller and his team have radiocarbon-dated more than 300 mammoth fossils over the last four years, looking for the last survivors of the wave of extinctions that wiped out woolly mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna at the end of the last Ice Age. Two specimens stood out immediately. Based on the radiocarbon dates, two mammoths had lived near Fairbanks as recently as 2,800 and 1,900 years ago. Wooller and his colleagues had been looking for the youngest woolly mammoth specimen in Alaska but were completely mystified.

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When you think about what makes a perfect single-car garage—occupied solely by a vehicle that can do it all—you probably think of some crossover or SUV like the Toyota RAV4 or BMW X5. Something that can handle the snow and weekend camping trips with a decent-sized cargo capacity. If you're European, you might gravitate towards a wagon like any of the Volvo Cross Country models or an Allroad from Audi . For the longest time, Subaru offered a near-perfect solution in the Outback, but the new one is much more SUV than wagon.

That left an opening for Toyota to swoop in, and the bZ Woodland is not only the best take on the Subaru Outback I've driven, but the nearly perfect single-car solution for the electric age.

What makes it a Woodland?

The bZ Woodland is a lifted wagon electric vehicle that is 6 inches longer than the non-Woodland bZ and has 33.8 cubic feet (957 L) of rear cargo space. That, on paper, is 6.1 more cubes (173 L) of storage with the second row in place but in practice feels even more spacious. The Woodland also has 8.3 inches (211 mm) of ground clearance, which is up one-tenth (2.5 mm) over the normal bZ. But like the cargo space, how the bZ Woodland uses those extra numbers is what makes it feel so different.

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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it's one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem—in fact, it could even cloud it.

In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket—and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of the people in the study had no problems with their shoulders.

The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain—and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening).

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It may be more tempting to take that aging Mac you've been coddling and put it out to pasture soon. Apple has announced an event for March 4, which in usual Apple fashion, it has branded a "Special Apple Experience." Also in usual Apple fashion, it has not come out and said what it's going to be announcing. We have a pretty good idea, though.

The event will kick off at 9AM ET on March 4—Ars will be on the ground in New York City to cover Apple's latest unveiling, whatever form it may take. Apple doesn't release most products on a set schedule, but some recent speculation about likely hardware updates can point us in the right direction.

As we reported recently, the iPhone 17e may be making an appearance in Apple's lineup soon. This updated version of the budget-oriented iPhone will have an A19 chip inside, similar to the one powering the base model iPhone 17. It may also add MagSafe charging. Don't expect to see a multi-camera array like you'd get on the more expensive Apple phones, though. Pricing will be the most important thing to watch for should Apple announce this phone. Right now, the non-Pro iPhone 16 and 17 (including the 16e) are all clustered in the $600-800 range. Another $599 budget iPhone won't make waves.

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A Best Buy employee in Florida was charged with fraud after allegedly using his manager's code to heavily discount nearly 150 items that he and his accomplices purchased and pawned.

It seems that the manager first started growing suspicious about "strange sales numbers" in December 2024, an ABC News affiliate in West Palm Beach reported . Private investigators traced the weird sales back to a 36-year-old employee, Matthew Lettera, who allegedly conducted 97 discounted purchases for himself and 52 additional transactions for others. Some MacBooks were discounted as much as 99 percent, a local CW affiliate reported . In total, Best Buy lost more than $118,000 from the scheme.

According to a LinkedIn profile that matches Lettera's information, he started working at Best Buy in January 2020 after pivoting from career training as a chef.

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ByteDance says that it's rushing to add safeguards to block Seedance 2.0 from generating iconic characters and deepfaking celebrities, after substantial Hollywood backlash after launching the latest version of its AI video tool.

The changes come after Disney and Paramount Skydance sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance urging the Chinese company to promptly end the allegedly vast and blatant infringement.

Studios claimed the infringement was widescale and immediate, with Seedance 2.0 users across social media sharing AI videos featuring copyrighted characters like Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and SpongeBob Square Pants. In its letter, Disney fumed that Seedance was "hijacking" its characters, accusing ByteDance of treating Disney characters like they were "free public domain clip art," Axios reported .

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Heating accounts for nearly half of the global energy demand, and two-thirds of that is met by burning fossil fuels like natural gas, oil, and coal. Solar energy is a possible alternative, but while we have become reasonably good at storing solar electricity in lithium-ion batteries, we’re not nearly as good at storing heat.

To store heat for days, weeks, or months, you need to trap the energy in the bonds of a molecule that can later release heat on demand. The approach to this particular chemistry problem is called molecular solar thermal (MOST) energy storage. While it has been the next big thing for decades, it never really took off.

In a recent Science paper, a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and UCLA demonstrate a breakthrough that might finally make MOST energy storage effective.

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