For the first time, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists (ACOG) has released its own recommendations for maternal vaccination , providing formal guidance that diverges from that of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention amid unprecedented policy changes and meddling from anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

ACOG President Camille Clare blamed "changing national recommendations coupled with rampant vaccine misinformation" for the confusion among patients and health care professionals about vaccines during pregnancy.

"It is incredibly important for the public to have access to reliable, evidence-based information on maternal immunizations from a trusted source. ACOG is proud to be that source," Clare said in a statement .

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For years, Valve's physical Steam gift cards have been the closest you could come to buying a Steam game at a brick-and-mortar store. Now, Valve says it is phasing out the production of new retail gift cards, citing a losing battle against scammers exploiting the hard-to-track payment method.

PC Guide was among the first to note the end of Valve's retail gift card program, which was quietly announced in a recent update to a Steam support page . Since launching the retail cards in 2012, Valve says it has been fighting a constant battle with scammers, who instruct victims to purchase gift cards and share the pertinent details and security PIN. Those scammers can then resell the gift card details at a discount on gray-market sites to effectively launder the funds, creating an anonymous and hard-to-trace form of payment .

Valve says it has made various moves to slow scammers, including placing limits on redemption and availability and adding a prominent warning on the cards themselves: "Never share a pin via email, social media or over the phone."

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You can tell Honda was trying to manage expectations when it emailed me to stress that "the Prelude is not a sports car." And I can understand why. On paper, the specs make the sleek coupe—technically a three-door hatch—seem underwhelming. Especially if you start comparing it to alternatives.

A Mazda MX-5 or Subaru BRZ weighs hundreds of pounds less, and the Subaru packs more power than the Prelude's 200 hp (149 kW). A Volkswagen Golf GTI weighs about the same as the Prelude at 3,261 lbs (1,479 kg), but it delivers 20 percent more power and offers rear seats that actually accommodate adults. But after a week with the bright blue Prelude, it's hard to care about the specs. This might be one of the best cars we'll drive all year.

Then again, looking back across the previous five generations , the Prelude was never really a sports car. It has always been a technology showcase for Honda, introducing features like fuel injection, four-wheel steering, variable valve timing, and active torque transfer. For the sixth-generation Prelude, the headline feature is Honda's S+ shift, which adds some sporty character to the OEM's four-cylinder hybrid.

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Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. “We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time.

Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes.

The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period.

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Electric vehicle sales might be better now than the end of last year when demand fell off a cliff following the surge of purchases ahead of the end of the federal financial incentives, but it's clear they haven't panned out as well as many in the automotive industry had hoped.

Still, at a GM event Ars attended in San Francisco this week, the company continues to stick to its guns with an EV lineup spanning its brands. The automaker shared that it has also been working toward the adoption of bidirectional charging to help balance the grid.

With the rise of AI, data centers are placing more and more pressure on the nation's electric infrastructure. GM wants to relieve some of that pressure with news that its GM Energy products now support vehicle-to-grid (V2G) in addition to vehicle-to-home. The grid integration requires working with utilities and includes launch partners PG&E in California and DTE Energy in Michigan. For standalone energy storage solutions, the company also announced partnering with Peak Energy on the development of sodium-ion batteries built specifically for grid energy storage.

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Starlink has started charging a $10 monthly rental fee for hardware in a shift away from its longtime practice of selling hardware to customers for a one-time charge.

Starlink residential ordering pages now show an upfront hardware cost of $0 and a monthly kit fee of $10, similar to the hardware rental fees long charged by cable and telecom companies. Starlink hardware includes a terminal to receive satellite signals and a router to place in a user's home.

The monthly kit fee is in addition to Internet service prices, which Starlink recently raised by $5 to $10 per month. Starlink is charging $55 a month for 100Mbps, $85 for 200Mbps, and $130 for the "Max" tier that can go up to 400Mbps. Starlink also provides a professional-installation service for a one-time fee of $199, or for no additional charge if you subscribe to the Max plan.

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Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for two high-severity zero-days that were disclosed by a researcher who has been locked in a testy beef with the software giant.

Nightmare Eclipse, the pseudonym the researcher goes by, released a handful of high-severity vulnerabilities in recent months, making them zero-days that had the potential to be exploited in the wild. The researcher has said the disclosures, which included proof-of-concept code, came after Microsoft reneged on an arrangement the two made regarding vulnerabilities they had discussed.

Disclosure drama

“But someone violated our agreement and left me homeless with nothing,” Nightmare Eclipse wrote in March. “They knew this will happen and they still stabbed me in the back anyways, this is their decision not mine.”

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People often speak metaphorically of the heartbeat or pulse of a city, but according to the authors of a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, cities do indeed have an "urban pulse"—an indication of urban "metabolic activity" that can be measured to suss out telltale patterns. And those patterns could help inform future public policy around urban planning.

The precise definition of urbanization has shifted over the centuries. Zhe Zhu of the University of Connecticut and his fellow authors adopted a broad version for their study. It features fundamental "processes of concurrent change in at least six dimensions, including demography, economy, infrastructure, environment, governance and culture," they wrote. "Together they give rise to outcomes, measurable results of the process, such as population growth, urban land expansion, GDP growth, and innovation." Their chosen metrics reflect this dynamic view: Cities are not static grids but "living, adaptive ecosystems."

“For decades, we had just been capturing the outcome of urbanization—a house that’s been built, or a road expansion,” said Zhu . “But you don’t really see the dynamics within an urban area. This is going to be a very impactful tool influencing not only top-down policy decisions from governments but also bottom-up decisions from everyday people navigating their cities.” One day we may be able to check a neighborhood's "urban pulse" while house-hunting, for instance, or while scouting potential locations for a new business.

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The scientific community has a plan for achieving fusion power. It involves getting a better understanding of how to control fusion in a tokamak-style reactor using the currently under construction ITER reactor , and then using that knowledge to build DEMO-style plants . But ITER isn't even expected to see hot plasmas until the middle of the 2030s, by which point solar panels will be so cheap that we'll probably all be getting them free in our cereal boxes.

Commonwealth Fusion is a startup that's basically asking "what if we did that, but now?" Its ITER equivalent, a tokamak called SPARC, is over 70 percent complete and is planned to be operating as soon as next year. The company already has a site and customers for the power-generating follow-on, called ARC. Both of those projects are predicated on using high-temperature superconductors to generate an extremely powerful magnetic field that will allow the company to build a smaller reactor, and thus get things done faster.

Years of running plasmas through tokamaks has given us confidence that the basics of these plans are sound. But there are lots of potential devils in the details (otherwise there'd be little need for experimental reactors). So Commonwealth's scientists, in collaboration with the academic community, have recently released five peer-reviewed papers that detail its plans for ARC: what our best models tell us now, and what we'll still need to learn from SPARC to finalize the design of a production fusion plant.

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