Humans can’t live without lungs. And yet for 48 hours, in a surgical suite at Northwestern University, a 33-year-old man lived with an empty cavity in his chest where his lungs used to be. He was kept alive by a custom-engineered artificial device that represented a desperate last-ditch effort by his doctors. The custom hardware solved a physiological puzzle that has made bilateral pneumonectomy, the removal of both lungs, extremely risky before now.

The artificial lung system was built by the team of Ankit Bharat, a surgeon and researcher at Northwestern. It successfully kept a critically ill patient alive long enough to enable a double lung transplant, temporarily replacing his entire pulmonary system with a synthetic surrogate. The system creates a blueprint for saving people previously considered beyond hope by transplant teams.

Melting lungs

The patient, a once-healthy 33-year-old, arrived at the hospital with Influenza B complicated by a secondary, severe infection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa , a bacterium that in this case proved resistant even to carbapenems—our antibiotics of last resort. This combination of infections triggered acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a condition where the lungs become so inflamed and fluid-filled that oxygen can no longer reach the blood.

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Anthropic's secret to building a better AI assistant might be treating Claude like it has a soul—whether or not anyone actually believes that's true. But Anthropic isn't saying exactly what it believes either way.

Last week, Anthropic released what it calls Claude's Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company's vision for how its AI assistant should behave in the world. Aimed directly at Claude and used during the model's creation, the document is notable for the highly anthropomorphic tone it takes toward Claude. For example, it treats the company's AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation.

Among the stranger portions: expressing concern for Claude's "wellbeing" as a "genuinely novel entity," apologizing to Claude for any suffering it might experience, worrying about whether Claude can meaningfully consent to being deployed, suggesting Claude might need to set boundaries around interactions it "finds distressing," committing to interview models before deprecating them, and preserving older model weights in case they need to "do right by" decommissioned AI models in the future.

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Over the first quarter of the 21st century, two major trends have transformed the global space industry.

The first is the rapid rise of China's space program, which only flew its first human to orbit in 2003 but now boasts spaceflight capabilities second only to the United States. The second trend is the rise of the commercial space sector, first in the United States and led by SpaceX, but now spreading across much of the planet.

Both of these trends have had profound impacts on both civil and military space enterprises in the United States.

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Yesterday afternoon, following the end of trading on Wall Street for the day, Tesla published its financial results for 2025 . They weren't particularly good: Profits were almost halved, and revenues declined year on year for the first time in the company's history. The reasons for the company's troubles are myriad. CEO Elon Musk's bankrolling of right-wing politics and promotion of AI-generated revenge porn deepfakes and CSAM has alienated plenty of potential customers. For those who either don't know or don't care about that stuff, there's still the problem of a tiny and aging model line-up, with large question marks over safety and reliability . Soon, that tiny line-up will be even smaller.

The news emerged during Tesla's call with investors last night. As Ars and others have observed, in recent years Musk appears to have grown bored with the prosaic business of running a profitable car company. Silicon Valley stopped finding that stuff sexy years ago, and no other electric vehicle startup has been able to generate a value within an order of magnitude of the amount that Tesla has been determined to be worth by investors.

Musk's attention first turned away from building and selling cars to the goal of autonomous driving, spurred on at the time by splashy headlines garnered by Google spinoff Waymo. Combined with ride-hailing—a huge IPO by Uber took the spotlight off Tesla long enough for it to become a new business focus for the automaker too—Musk told adoring fans and investors that soon their cars would become appreciating assets that earned money for them at night. And as intermediary, Tesla would take a hefty cut for connecting rider and ridee.

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Illinois lawmakers plan to introduce a climate change superfund bill in the state legislature this session, the latest in a growing number of states seeking to make fossil fuel companies pay up for the fast-growing financial fallout of climate change.

As the costs of global warming rise—in the form of home insurance premiums, utility bills, health expenses, and record-breaking damages from extreme weather—local advocates are increasingly pushing states to require that fossil fuel companies contribute to climate “superfunds” that would support mitigation and adaptation.

Illinois State Rep. Robyn Gabel, who will introduce the bill in the House, said she is motivated by the growing threat of flooding and heat waves in the state.

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When the James Webb Space Telescope sent its first high-definition infrared images back to Earth, astronomers noticed several tiny, glowing, crimson stains. These objects, quickly named “Little Red Dots,” were too bright to be normal galaxies, and too red to be simple star clusters. They appeared to house supermassive black holes that were far more massive than they had any right to be.

But now a new study published in Nature suggests a solution to the Little Red Dots mystery. Scientists think young supermassive black holes may go through a “cocoon phase,” where they grow surrounded by high-density gas they feed on. These gaseous cocoons are likely what the JWST saw as the Little Red Dots.

The overmassive black hole problem

The first explanation scientists had for the Little Red Dots was that they were compact, distant galaxies, but something felt off about them right from the start. “They were too massive, since we saw they’d have to be completely filled with stars,” says Vadim Rusakov, an astronomer at the University of Manchester and lead author of the study. “They would need to produce stars at 100 percent efficiency, and that’s not what we’re used to seeing. Galaxies cannot produce stars at more than 20 percent efficiency, at least that’s what our current knowledge is.”

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Tesla published its financial results for 2025 this afternoon. If 2024 was a bad year for the electric automaker, 2025 was far worse: For the first time in Tesla's history, revenues fell year over year.

A bad quarter

Earlier this month , Tesla revealed its sales and production numbers for the fourth quarter of 2025, with a 16 percent decline compared to Q4 2024. Now we know the cost of those lost sales: Automotive revenues fell by 11 percent to $17.7 billion.

Happily for Tesla, double-digit growth in its energy storage business ($3.8 billion, an increase of 25 percent) and services ($3.4 billion, an increase of 18 percent) made up some of the shortfall.

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RAMP—the predominantly Russian-language online bazaar that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed”—had its dark web and clear web sites seized by the FBI as the agency tries to combat the growing scourge threatening critical infrastructure and organizations around the world.

Visits to both sites on Wednesday returned pages that said the FBI had taken control of the RAMP domains, which mirrored each other. RAMP has been among the dwindling number of online crime forums to operate with impunity, following the takedown of other forums such as XSS, which saw its leader arrested last year by Europol. The vacuum left RAMP as one of the leading places for people pushing ransomware and other online threats to buy, sell, or trade products and services.

I regret to inform you

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has seized RAMP,” a banner carrying the seals of the FBI and the Justice Department said. “This action has been taken in coordination with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida and the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section of the Department of Justice.” The banner included a graphic that appeared on the RAMP site, before it was seized, that billed itself as the “only place ransomware allowed.”

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Apple's new Creator Studio subscription bundle officially launches today , offering access to a wide range of updated professional apps for an all-or-nothing price of $13 a month or $130 a year. Teachers and students can get the same apps for $3 a month, or $30 a year.

The bundle includes either access to or enhanced features for a total of 10 Apple apps, though the base versions of several of these are available for free to all Mac and iPad owners:

• Final Cut Pro
• Logic Pro
• Pixelmator Pro
• Keynote, Pages, and Numbers
• Freeform
• Motion, Compressor, and MainStage (Mac only)

When companies introduce a subscription-based model for long-standing apps with an established user base, they often shift exclusively to a subscription model, offering continuous updates in return for a more consistent revenue stream. But these aren't always popular with subscription-fatigued users, who have seen virtually all major paid software shift to a subscription model in the last 10 or 15 years, and who in recent years have had to deal with prices that are continuously being ratcheted upward .

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