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      To reuse or not reuse—the eternal debate of New Glenn's second stage reignites

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 6 February 2026

    Engineers at Blue Origin have been grappling with a seemingly eternal debate that involves the New Glenn rocket and the economics of flying it.

    The debate goes back at least 15 years, to the early discussions around the design of the heavy lift rocket. The first stage, of course, would be fully reusable. But what about the upper stage of New Glenn, powered by two large BE-3U engines?

    Around the same time, in the early 2010s, SpaceX was also trading the economics of reusing the second stage of its Falcon 9 rocket. Eventually SpaceX founder Elon Musk abandoned his goal of a fully reusable Falcon 9, choosing instead to recover payload fairings and push down manufacturing costs of the upper stage as much as possible. This strategy worked, as SpaceX has lowered its internal launch costs of a Falcon 9, even with a new second stage, to about $15 million. The company is now focused on making the larger Starship rocket fully reusable.

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      Driven: The 2026 Lamborghini Temerario raises the bar for supercars

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 6 February 2026 • 1 minute

    While mainstream vehicles usually get comprehensive updates every few years, low-volume exotics tend evolve more gradually. Supercar platforms often remain unchanged for a decade or more, with manufacturers instead focusing on what can be tuned, massaged, added, or subtracted to keep their lineups fresh. Every once in a while, though, a performance car debuts that truly earns the label “all-new,” and the Lamborghini Temerario is one of them.

    As the replacement for the Huracán, Lamborghini’s best-selling sports car to date, the Temerario has big shoes to fill. At first glance, it might seem like a more subdued affair than its predecessor, but the Huracán debuted in a similar fashion before wilder iterations like the STO and Sterrato were introduced to the lineup.

    During a technical briefing late last year, Lamborghini sales chief Frederick Foschini noted that the Temerario’s streamlined look is intentional. The team sought to increase downforce by more than 100 percent compared with the Huracán Evo through the car's core design, rather than relying on big wings, splitters, and other racy aerodynamic bits. Designers were also tasked with creating an all-new car that was distinctive yet instantly recognizable as a Lamborghini. Judging by the number of heads this car turned during my time with it, I’d say the company was successful.

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      AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    On Thursday, Anthropic and OpenAI shipped products built around the same idea: instead of chatting with a single AI assistant, users should be managing teams of AI agents that divide up work and run in parallel. The simultaneous releases are part of a gradual shift across the industry, from AI as a conversation partner to AI as a delegated workforce, and they arrive during a week when that very concept reportedly helped wipe $285 billion off software stocks.

    Whether that supervisory model works in practice remains an open question. Current AI agents still require heavy human intervention to catch errors, and no independent evaluation has confirmed that these multi-agent tools reliably outperform a single developer working alone.

    Even so, the companies are going all-in on agents. Anthropic's contribution is Claude Opus 4.6 , a new version of its most capable AI model, paired with a feature called " agent teams " in Claude Code. Agent teams let developers spin up multiple AI agents that split a task into independent pieces, coordinate autonomously, and run concurrently.

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      The Switch 2 is getting a new Virtual Console (kind of)

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    In 2018, we lamented as Nintendo officially replaced the Virtual Console—its long-running line of downloadable classic games on the Wii and Wii U—with time-limited access to a set of games through a paid Nintendo Switch Online subscription . Now, Hamster Corporation is doing what Nintendo no longer will, by offering downloadable versions of retro console games for direct individual purchase on the Switch 2.

    As part of today's Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase , Hamster announced a new Console Archives line of emulated classics available for download starting today on the Switch 2 and next week on the PlayStation 5 (sorry, Xbox and OG Switch fans). So far that lineup only includes the original PlayStation snowboarding title Cool Boarders for $12 and the NES action platformer Ninja Gaiden II: The Dark Sword of Chaos for $8 , but Hamster promises more obscure games, including Doraemon and Sonic Wings Special , will be available in the future.

    If the name Hamster Corporation sounds familiar, it's because the company is behind the Arcade Archive series , which has repackaged individual arcade games for purchase and emulated play on modern consoles since 2014. That effort, which celebrated its 500th release in December , even includes some of Nintendo's classic arcade titles , which the Switch-maker never officially released on the original Virtual Console.

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      With GPT-5.3-Codex, OpenAI pitches Codex for more than just writing code

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    Today, OpenAI announced GPT-5.3-Codex, a new version of its frontier coding model that will be available via the command line, IDE extension, web interface, and the new macOS desktop app . (No API access yet, but it's coming.)

    GPT-5.3-Codex outperforms GPT-5.2-Codex and GPT-5.2 in SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench 2.0, and other benchmarks, according to the company's testing.

    There are already a few headlines out there saying "Codex built itself," but let's reality-check that, as that's an overstatement. The domains OpenAI described using it for here are similar to the ones you see in some other enterprise software development firms now: managing deployments, debugging, and handling test results and evaluations. There is no claim here that GPT-5.3-Codex built itself.

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      "ICE Out of Our Faces Act" would ban ICE and CBP use of facial recognition

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    A few Senate Democrats introduced a bill called the ‘‘ICE Out of Our Faces Act," which would ban Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from using facial recognition technology.

    The bill would make it "unlawful for any covered immigration officer to acquire, possess, access, or use in the United States—(1) any biometric surveillance system; or (2) information derived from a biometric surveillance system operated by another entity." All data collected from such systems in the past would have to be deleted. The proposed ban extends beyond facial recognition to cover other biometric surveillance technologies, such as voice recognition.

    The proposed ban would prohibit the federal government from using data from biometric surveillance systems in court cases or investigations. Individuals would have a right to sue the federal government for financial damages after violations, and state attorneys general would be able to bring suits on behalf of residents.

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      Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    One of the weirdest corners of the Internet is suddenly hard to find on Bing, after the search engine inexplicably started blocking approximately 1.5 million independent websites hosted on Neocities.

    Founded in 2013 to archive the "aesthetic awesomeness" of GeoCities websites , Neocities keeps the spirit of the 1990s Internet alive. It lets users design free websites without relying on standardized templates devoid of personality. For hundreds of thousands of people building websites around art , niche fandoms , and special expertise —or simply seeking a place to get a little weird online —Neocities provides a blank canvas that can be endlessly personalized when compared to a Facebook page. Delighted visitors discovering these sites are more likely to navigate by hovering flashing pointers over a web of spinning GIFs than clicking a hamburger menu or infinitely scrolling.

    That's the style of Internet that Kyle Drake, Neocities' founder, strives to maintain. So he was surprised when he noticed that Bing was curiously blocking Neocities sites last summer. At first, the issue seemed resolved by contacting Microsoft, but after receiving more recent reports that users were struggling to log in, Drake discovered that another complete block was implemented in January. Even more concerning, he saw that after delisting the front page, Bing had started pointing users to a copycat site where he was alarmed to learn they were providing their login credentials.

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      Watch Kanzi the bonobo pretend to have a tea party

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026 • 1 minute

    Little kids hosting make-believe tea parties is a fixture of childhood playtime and long presumed to be exclusively a human ability. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University presented evidence in a new paper published in the journal Science that a bonobo named Kanzi was also able to participate in pretending to hold a tea party. For the authors, this suggests that apes are capable of using their imagination just like human toddlers.

    “It really is game-changing that their mental lives go beyond the here and now," said co-author Christopher Krupenye. "Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative. Jane Goodall discovered that chimps make tools, and that led to a change in the definition of what it means to be human, and this, too, really invites us to reconsider what makes us special and what mental life is out there among other creatures."

    Per Krupenye et al., by the age of two, human children are able to navigate imaginary scenarios like a tea party, pretending there is real tea present even if the teapot and cups are actually empty. Cognitively speaking, it's an example of secondary representation, because it involves decoupling an imagined or simulated state (pretending there is actual tea in the cup) with the reality (the cup is empty).

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      Bad sleep made woman's eyelids so floppy they flipped inside out, got stuck

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica • 5 February 2026

    A poor night's sleep might leave you feeling like your eyelids have filled with lead—and keeping them open is the ultimate dead lift. But for some, bad sleep brings on eyelids so droopy and floppy that they can do curl ups on their own.

    That was the unfortunate case for a 39-year-old woman who sought care at an ophthalmology clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She told the doctors that for six weeks she felt like she had something in her eyes, and they were watery. By the time of her appointment, her eyelids had rolled up, flipping inside-out on their own—and were staying that way. In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report her eye-opening case —and its unexpected solution.

    (You can see images of her eyelids—flipped and recovered— here . The images may seem graphic to some, but they are not much worse than that kid in elementary school who would flip their eyelids just to freak everyone out for laughs. You know the one.)

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