There has been considerable debate among physicists over the last 15 years about conflicting measurements of the charge radius of a hydrogen atom's proton—some confirming the predictions of our strongest theoretical models, others suggesting it was smaller than expected. The discrepancy hinted at possible exciting new physics. Now the debate seems to be winding down with the latest experimental measurements, described in two recent papers published in the journals Nature and Physical Review Letters , respectively. And the evidence has tilted in favor of a smaller proton radius and against new physics.

"We believe this is the final nail in the coffin of the proton radius puzzle," Lothar Maisenbacher, of the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the Nature paper, told Ars.

As previously reported , most popularizations discussing the structure of the atom rely on the much-maligned Bohr model , in which electrons move around the nucleus in circular orbits. But quantum mechanics gives us a much more precise (albeit weirder) description. The electrons aren’t really orbiting the nucleus; they are technically waves that take on particle-like properties when we do an experiment to determine their position. While orbiting an atom, they exist in a superposition of states, both particle and wave, with a wave function encompassing all the probabilities of its position at once. A measurement will collapse the wave function, giving us the electron’s position. Make a series of such measurements and plot the various positions that result, and it will yield something akin to a fuzzy orbit-like pattern.

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HOUSTON—Their mission is complete. The four people who flew beyond the Moon on NASA's Artemis II mission are back home in Houston with their families. But the lessons from Artemis II are just beginning to be told.

There are tangible, objective takeaways from the nine-day mission. How did NASA's Space Launch System rocket perform? Nearly perfectly. Was the Orion spacecraft up to the job of flying to the Moon and back? Absolutely. Will engineers need to make any changes before the next Artemis mission? Yes, and that's not terribly surprising for a program that, 20 years in, has just flown a crew to space for the first time.

Ars has covered the technical lessons from Artemis II, such as hydrogen leaks on the launch pad , helium leaks in space , and a toilet that wasn't always available for No. 1.

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So you thought you'd just read that webpage and then go back to the previous page? A bold assumption. All too often, clicking the back button in your browser doesn't actually take you back. It's called back button hijacking, and Google has thus far tolerated it. That ends in June , when the company will designate it a "malicious practice," and any site continuing to do it will face consequences.

Back button hijacking is a way of wringing more pageviews out of visitors. It's common on sites that live and die on search traffic. You may end up on a page because it looks like something you want, but instead of letting you leave the domain, it manipulates your page history to insert something else when you click back.

The phantom page is usually a collection of additional content suggestions or a pop-up that tries to eke out a few more clicks from each visitor. Some sites get a little more creative with it, though. For example, LinkedIn has a nasty habit of sending you "back" to the social feed after you land on a link to a profile or job posting.

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Today, the IONNA charging network announced that it's partnering with Circle K to bring its "Rechargery" experience to more than 350 Circle K locations in the US. IONNA will start with 85 existing Circle K charging sites, with the first Rechargeries powering up electric vehicles by the end of the year, "followed by additional scale in 2027," IONNA said.

IONNA was founded back in 2023 by eight OEMs: BMW, General Motors, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota. Its plan is to deploy 30,000 high-speed chargers across the US by 2030, starting with its first locations in 2024. Currently, there are 108 IONNA locations operational with 375 NACS and 658 CCS plugs, assuming the Department of Energy's Alternative Fueling Station Locator remains a reliable resource.

Lengthy permitting delays are one of the main factors slowing the build-out of fast-charging infrastructure, and partnering with sites that already have some chargers installed will certainly help speed things up, at least a little.

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If you were working a retail job at a movie rental store in the early '90s, there's a decent chance you couldn't wait to clock out for the day and escape from the daily grind with a mindless video game. Here in the 2020s, on the other hand, at least one mindless video game is striving to re-create the daily grind of working at a video rental store.

Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is the latest in a burgeoning field of "work simulators" that has found indie success on Steam . And while the depth of the game's overall retail simulation is pretty shallow, there is a sort of soothing, zen comfort to be found in the repetitive nostalgia of that menial workaday world of the past.

Working 9 to 5

Unlike simulations that rely heavily on menus or spreadsheets, Retro Rewind puts you in the first-person perspective of the manager of a small local VHS rental joint circa 1990. That means you have to run around doing everything from buying the tapes to laying out the furniture and decorations in the store. And while you can technically display those tapes out on any shelf you want, grouping them together by genre makes for both a better customer experience and helps to quiet those anal-retentive organizational voices in your head.

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A person with measles passed through the busiest airport in Idaho, shedding one of the world's most infectious viruses in the state with the country's lowest measles vaccination rate.

Health officials are now warning residents and travelers about the exposure while trying to directly notify passengers who shared flights with the infected person. In an announcement on April 9 , the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare (DHW) said the infected person was at the Boise airport on March 29 between 1:30 am and 7:40 am while traveling through the area.

Measles symptoms—which begin with fever, cough, runny nose, and watery, red eyes—can develop between seven and 21 days after exposure, but typically start after 11 or 12 days. That means that for anyone infected during the airport exposure, the initial generic symptoms would likely have started over the weekend. The telltale rash of measles typically doesn't appear until two to four days after those early flu-like symptoms. The rash begins on the head and moves down the body, while fever may spike to 104° F or higher. Infected people are infectious for four days before the rash appears and for four days after its onset.

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Modern smartphone operating systems have myriad systems in place to improve security, but none of that helps when attackers target the modem. Google's Project Zero team has shown it's possible to secure remote code execution on Pixel phone modems over the Internet, which prompted Google to reevaluate how it secures this vital, low-level system. The solution wasn't to rewrite modem software but rather to shoehorn a safer Rust-based component into the Pixel 10 modem.

Cellular modems are something of a black box. Your phone's baseband is its own operating system running legacy C and C++ code, which makes it an increasingly appealing attack surface. The core issue is that memory management in these systems is difficult and often leads to memory-unsafe firmware code on production devices. That can allow attackers to leverage serious vulnerabilities like buffer overflows and memory leaks to compromise devices.

So that's not great—why are we still using this stuff? Part of the issue is just the inertia of embedded systems. Companies have been developing modem firmware based on 3GPP specifications for decades, so there's a lot of technical debt at this point. Modems also have to operate in real time to send and receive data effectively, and C/C++ code is fast.

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PC hardware company NZXT and its billing partner, Fragile, have agreed to a $3,450,000 settlement in response to a class-action complaint regarding NZXT’s Flex PC rental program.

NZXT announced Flex in August 2024, saying that it would charge customers $59 to $169 a month to rent an NZXT gaming desktop (as of this writing, Flex prices are $79 to $279 per month. At the time, NZXT said that the PCs would be “new or like new.” Subscribers had the option to receive an upgraded rental PC every two years.

The program was met with criticism. Renting a PC can quickly become more costly than buying one, depending on the rental, and YouTube channel Gamers Nexus claimed in November 2024 that customers received less powerful components than expected and that NZXT advertised the rental PCs with inaccurate benchmark results. There was also concern about what NZXT did with customer data left on returned computers.

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Michael Cotter had a problem: "Chargebacks" at his tech support company were too high. The reason for this was not hard to find; people at his company, Tech Live Connect, were scamming Cotter's fellow Americans.

The scams usually began with a pop-up message warning that a user's computer might have a virus. The pop-up then claimed to run a "scan" (which was always positive) of the computer and provided a toll-free number to call for more help. Those who called were connected to Tech Live Connect's Indian call center, where they were asked for remote access to their computers, diagnosed with fake problems, and charged hundreds of dollars to "fix" them. Call center workers often pretended to be Apple or Microsoft employees.

Defrauded people complained in droves.

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