China has blocked US tech giant Meta’s acquisition of the AI company Manus that was founded by Chinese tech entrepreneurs. That development indicates how difficult it has become for US and Chinese tech companies to strike and sustain such deals as government authorities on both sides take an increasingly hard line amid the deepening US-China AI rivalry.

The Chinese government formally asked Meta to unwind the acquisition on April 27 after deciding to ban foreign investment in Manus based on national security concerns. It had already spent months officially scrutinizing Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of Manus that took place in December 2025—Chinese regulators announced they were reviewing the deal in January 2026 and instructed the two Manus cofounders to not leave China while the investigation was ongoing, according to The Wall Street Journal .

Manus burst onto the scene in March 2025 with its “ general AI agent, ” designed to help users with tasks such as searching real estate sites for a new home or booking airline tickets and hotels for an international trip. The Manus AI agent is an “agentic wrapper” or “agentic harness” that enables an underlying AI model—in this case, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet —to take actions to carry out user requests. But Manus actually incorporates multiple AI agents to perform and verify tasks, including a planner agent that assigns tasks and an executor agent that can browse and interact with websites, create spreadsheets, use various software tools, and even code new applications.

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The next time you walk into a purportedly "haunted" house and sense a ghostly presence, consider that those feelings might be due to vibrating pipes, mechanical or climate control systems, rumbling from traffic, or wind turbines, rather than anything paranormal. That's the conclusion of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. All of those are sources of infrasound .

Scientists have long sought to find logical explanations for alleged hauntings. In 2003, for instance, University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman conducted two studies that investigated the psychological mechanisms underlying supposed "ghostly" activity. Subjects walked around Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, England, and the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh, Scotland—both with reputations for manifesting unusual phenomena—and reported back on which places at those sites they sensed such phenomena. The subjects reported more odd experiences in places rumored to be haunted, regardless of whether the subjects were aware of those rumors or not.

Those areas did, however, feature variances in local magnetic fields, humidity, and lighting levels, suggesting that such sensations are simply people responding to normal environmental factors. Wiseman hypothesized that stronger magnetic fields may affect the brain, similar to how electrical stimulation of the angular gyrus can make one feel as if there is another person standing behind, mimicking one's movements.

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Since time immemorial, serious PC gamers have proselytized about the superiority of mouse and keyboard control schemes over the more input-limited handheld controllers used by most console gamers ( and others ). In recent years, though, many PC gamers have started keeping a spare Xbox controller ( or similar ) nearby for the increasing number of PC games designed primarily or exclusively with thumbsticks and buttons in mind.

Valve's upcoming Steam Controller (not to be confused with the 2015 controller of the same name ) is the Steam maker's effort to replace those controllers with something more explicitly designed for the PC, and for the upcoming Steam Machine . After spending a few weeks with the controller, though, we're not quite sure it sets itself apart from the competition enough to justify its high $99 asking price.

Baseline quality

From the first time you hold a Steam Controller in your hands, it's clear that this is a well-made piece of hardware. There's a sturdy build quality to all the pieces that makes the controller feel solid in the hand, with just enough heft to feel substantial without being too heavy.

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All 22 members of the National Science Board were terminated by the Trump administration via a terse email Friday.

The administration has provided no explanation for purging the board, which helps steer the National Science Foundation and acts as an independent advisory body for the President and Congress on scientific and engineering issues, providing reports throughout the year. The ousters represent another severe blow to the NSF and the overall scientific enterprise in America.

On Friday, members received a two-sentence email saying that, "On behalf of President Donald J. Trump," their positions were "terminated, effective immediately."

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The Pacific Ocean is a giant climate cauldron, with a powerful heat engine that affects storms, fisheries, and rainfall patterns half a world away, and scientists are watching closely to see if it’s about to boil over.

Their projections suggest the tropical Pacific is simmering toward a strong El Niño , the warm phase of an ocean-atmosphere cycle that can intensify and shift those impacts.

In a world already superheated by greenhouse gases, a strong El Niño during the next 12 to 18 months could permanently push the planet’s average annual temperature past the 1.5 degrees Celsius warming threshold enshrined in scientific documents and political agreements as a turning point for potentially irreversible climate impacts.

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One of the more intriguing space stories in a while broke last week when NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said during a congressional hearing that the two habitation modules built for the Lunar Gateway had been corroded.

The immediate response to these comments on Wednesday before a House committee from some space industry observers was doubt—Isaacman, they said , must be lying .

However, the primary contractor for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, Northrop Grumman, soon acknowledged there was a manufacturing irregularity . On Friday the European Space Agency, providing the other habitation module (I-HAB), acknowledged that there had been "corrosion" observed.

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This week, players are being asked to pay $25 for early access to Masters of Albion , a god game throwback that legendary designer Peter Molyneux ( Populous, Dungeon Keeper, Black and White ) says will be the last game he ever works on . But the players who poured roughly $54 million in cryptocurrency into Molyneux’s previous game, Legacy , say they're still bitter about getting swept up in Molyneux’s broken promises of a best-in-class economic simulation and the opportunity for “play to earn” riches.

Legacy players who spoke to Ars Technica described pre-purchasing thousands of dollars' worth of NFTs, in some cases, to buy into the crypto-fueled vision offered by Molyneux, his development studio 22cans, and publisher Gala Games. Those players said the Legacy they got was a pale shadow of what was promised, with a broken-by-design economic system that caused players to abandon the game en masse within a couple of weeks of its 2023 launch.

Despite the game's almost total failure as a going concern, though, Legacy rode the crest of the crypto hype wave to pre-sold economic success that Molyneux said “[gave] us the money to fund Masters of Albion," in a 2024 interview . "That's what we used the majority of the money for…”

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Paramount+ unveiled a new teaser for the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds at CCXP in Mexico City over the weekend.

(Some spoilers for prior seasons below.)

The third season of Strange New Worlds was admittedly a bit uneven, with serious plot lines mixed in with some downright silly ones that divided fans.  Arguably the most significant moment was bidding farewell to Melanie Scrofano's Marie Batel, Pike's (Anson Mount) love interest. Her parting gift to Pike: an illusory alternate life where she and Pike got to grow old together. So expect Pike to be dealing with her loss in the upcoming season, among other challenges.

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If your spider-sense is tingling, perhaps it's because Prime Video released the official full trailer for its upcoming live action series, Spider-Noir , at CCXPMX26 in Mexico City over the weekend. As it did with the first teaser back in February, the streaming platform released the trailer in two formats: one in black and white (above)—very Raymond Chandler-esque—and another in color (below), which the showrunners are calling “True Hue.”

As previously reported , Marvel Comics created its “noir” line in 2009, reinterpreting familiar Marvel characters in an alternate universe, usually set during the Great Depression in the US. A version of the Spider-Noir character, voiced by Cage, briefly appeared in the animated masterpieces, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) and Across the Spider-Verse (2023). (He is set to reprise that role in the upcoming Beyond the Spider-Verse .)

Co-showrunner (with Steve Lightfoot) Oren Uziel is a film noir fan, so that Marvel series naturally appealed to him. The live-action series is still set in 1930s New York, but the spidery superhero is not Peter Parker. (Uziel thought the Parker character was too associated with a boyish high school type, which didn’t really fit the noir vibe.) So Cage is playing Ben Reilly, a hard-boiled PI with a secret superhero identity, The Spider. Per the official premise: “ Spider-Noir tells the story of Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage), a seasoned, down on his luck private investigator in 1930s New York, who is forced to grapple with his past life, following a deeply personal tragedy, as the city’s one and only superhero.”

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