Switching from one smartphone to another is mostly a smooth procedure. You log into your accounts and your apps, preferences, and contacts should sync to the new hardware. But in the world of robotics, swapping an old robotic arm for a newer model has meant setting everything up from scratch.

To fix that, a team of researchers at the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) has developed what they call Kinematic Intelligence, a framework that makes switching robots work more like switching smartphones. They describe their system in a recent Science Robotics paper.

Demonstrating skills

For years, roboticists have been working on getting robots to learn from demonstration—teaching them new skills by showing them what to do, rather than writing lines of code. The idea is to remotely control or physically guide the robot's arm to teach it a task like wiping a table, stacking boxes, or welding a car component. The problem is that most of these taught skills end up tied to the specific robot the training was done with.

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After more than 25 years of US astronauts wearing off-the-rack clothes while living in Earth orbit, a company working to launch the world's first commercial space station has adopted a more custom approach to its crew attire.

Vast has revealed its astronaut flight suit , a two-piece outfit designed to be worn both on and off the planet. The company also certified a custom-Swiss wristwatch for use aboard its upcoming Haven-1 space station.

"Over the last two decades on the International Space Station, astronauts have moved away from wearing flight suits every day," Drew Feustel, Vast's lead astronaut and former NASA mission specialist who spent 225 days in space, said in a statement . "The environment has become safer and more like how we work on Earth."

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The US is preparing to crack down on China's allegedly "industrial-scale theft of American artificial intelligence labs’ intellectual property," the Financial Times reported Thursday.

Since the launch of DeepSeek—a Chinese model that OpenAI claimed was trained using outputs from its models —other AI firms have accused global rivals of using a method called distillation to steal their IP. In January, Google claimed that "commercially motivated" actors not limited to China attempted to clone its Gemini AI chatbot by promoting the model more than 100,000 times in bids to train cheaper copycats. The next month, Anthropic accused Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax of using the same tactic to generate "over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts." Also in February, OpenAI confirmed that most attacks it saw originated from China.

For the US, these distillation attacks supposedly threaten to help China quickly catch up in the AI race. In a memo that FT reviewed, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, warned that "the US government has information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems."

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Shortly after their discovery, carbon nanotubes seemed to be a material wonder. There were metallic and semiconducting forms; they were tiny and incredibly light; and they could only be broken by tearing apart chemical bonds. The ideas for using them seemed endless.

But then the reality of working with them set in. It was hard to get a pure population of metallic or semiconducting forms. Synthesis techniques tended to produce a tangle of mostly short nanotubes; those that extended for more than a couple of centimeters remain rare. And while the metallic version offered little resistance to carrying electric current, it was hard to send many electrons down the nanotube.

Materials scientists, however, are a stubborn bunch, and they're still trying to get them to work. Today's issue of Science includes a paper describing the addition of a chemical to carbon nanotube bundles to boost their ability to carry current to levels closer to those of copper. While the more conductive nanotubes weren't stable, the discovery may point the way toward something with a longer shelf life.

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The gravitational constant, affectionally known as "Big G," is one of the most fundamental constants of our universe. Its value describes the strength of the gravitational force acting on two masses separated by a given distance—or if you want to be relativistic about it, the amount a given mass curves space-time. Physicists have a solid ballpark figure for the value of Big G, but they've been trying to measure it ever more precisely for more than two centuries, each effort yielding slightly different values. And we do mean slight: The values vary by roughly one part in 10,000.

Still, other fundamental constants are known much more precisely. So Big G is the black sheep of the family and a point of frustration for physicists keen on precision metrology. The problem is that gravity is so weak, by far the weakest of the four fundamental forces, so there is significant background noise from the gravitational field of the Earth (aka "little g"). That weakness is even more pronounced in a laboratory.

In the latest effort to resolve the issue, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) spent the last decade replicating one of the most divergent recent experimental results. The group just announced their results in a paper published in the journal Metrologia. It does not resolve the discrepancy, but it gives physicists one more data point in their ongoing quest to nail down a more precise value for Big G.

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A relatively new ransomware family is using a novel approach to hype the strength of the encryption used to scramble files—making, or at least claiming, that it is protected against attacks by quantum computers.

Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September and quickly attracted attention for the claim that it used ML-KEM , short for Module Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism and is a standard shepherded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The Kyber ransomware name comes from the alternate name for ML-KEM, which is also Kyber. For the rest of the article, Kyber refers to the ransomware; the algorithm is referred to as ML-KEM.

It's all about marketing

ML-KEM is an asymmetric encryption method for exchanging keys. It involves problems based on lattices, a structure in mathematics that quantum computers have no advantage in solving over classic computing. ML-KEM is designed to replace Elliptic Curve and RSA cryptosystems, both of which are based on problems that quantum computers with sufficient strength can tackle.

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In a Congressional hearing on Wednesday , Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) directly confronted anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on his rejection of germ theory—the unquestionable scientific idea that specific pathogenic microbes cause specific diseases. After Kennedy defended his fringe view, Senator Bill Cassidy fact-checked and debunked Kennedy's denialist arguments in real time.

The exchanges mark a rare instance in which Kennedy's dismissal of germ theory has been raised in such a high-profile public setting, in this case, a hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. Kennedy, who has no background in science, medicine, or public health, is well known as an ardent anti-vaccine activist and peddler of conspiracy theories. But his startling rejection of a cornerstone theory in biomedical science has mostly been underreported.

As Ars Technica reported last year , Kennedy wrote about his germ theory denialism explicitly in his 2021 book The Real Anthony Fauci . In it, Kennedy maligns germ theory as a tool of pharmaceutical companies, scientists, and doctors to promote the use of modern medicines. Instead of accepting germ theory, Kennedy promotes a concept akin to the discarded terrain theory, in which diseases stem not from germs, but from imbalances in the body's inner "terrain." Those imbalances are claimed to be caused by poor nutrition and exposure to environmental toxins and stressors. (In his book, Kennedy erroneously labels this as "miasma theory," but that is a different theory that suggests diseases derive from breathing bad air, vapors, or mists from decaying or corrupting matter. The idea was supplanted by germ theory, while terrain theory was never widely accepted.)

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It's a good time to be in the market for a MacBook, between the affordability of the MacBook Neo , the power of the M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros , and the all-around appeal of the M5 MacBook Air . But Apple's desktop computers are another story, and not just because they're all about due for their own M5 upgrades.

Over the last few months, the Mac mini and the Mac Studio have gradually become harder to buy. The 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio was removed from Apple's website , and other models of both desktops have seen their ship times slip from days to weeks to months. In the last couple of weeks , several other configurations of Mac mini and Studio have begun showing up as "currently unavailable" on Apple's website, which virtually never happens even when Apple is planning an imminent hardware refresh.

This week ( as spotted by MacRumors ), the baseline $599 M4 Mac mini, which offers 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, earned the "currently unavailable" label for the first time.

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After several tests of unusual "nesting doll" satellites in low-Earth orbit, Russia is now fielding operational anti-satellite weapons with valuable US government satellites in their crosshairs, the four-star general leading US Space Command said this week.

Gen. Stephen Whiting didn't name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.

US officials have compared the Nivelir architecture to a Matryoshka doll , or a Russian nesting doll, with an outer shell concealing smaller, unknown figures inside.

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