The explosive measles outbreak in South Carolina has now reached 789 cases , breaking Texas's outbreak record last year of 762 cases , which at the time was the largest outbreak in the US since measles was declared eliminated from the US in 2000. The country is at grave risk of losing its elimination status in the coming months due to continuous spread.

With Texas' outbreak last year—which spanned January to August and spread to additional states—the US saw the largest measles case total since 1991, with 2,255 confirmed cases . Now, with South Carolina's unbridled outbreak, 2026 is already looking like it will be another record year.

Though South Carolina's outbreak began in October, the spread of the disease has dramatically accelerated this month, with cases jumping from 218 on December 28 to 789 on January 27.

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AMD has released three distinct generations of its 3D V-Cache technology, which initially appeared in the Ryzen 7 5800X3D in 2022. The kernel of the idea has remained the same throughout AMD's efforts: take an existing desktop processor design and graft 64MB of additional L3 cache onto it.

This approach disproportionately helps apps that benefit from more cache, particularly games, and the size of the boost that 3D V-Cache gives to game performance has always been enough to offset any downsides these chips have come with. And in the four years since the 5800X3D was released, AMD has steadily chipped away at those disadvantages, adding more CPU cores, improving power consumption and temperatures, and re-adding the typical Ryzen range of overclocking controls.

AMD's new Ryzen 7 9850X3D, which launches for $499 starting tomorrow, is the very definition of a mild upgrade. It's the year-old Ryzen 7 9800X3D but with an extra 400 MHz of turbo boost speed. That's it. That's the chip.

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When King Charles VIII of France occupied Naples in 1495, his army of nearly 20,000 mercenaries became the ground zero of the “Great Pox,” the first massive venereal syphilis pandemic in Europe, which went on to cause up to 5 million deaths. For a long time, the siege of Naples was considered the first time syphilis entered European accounts and culture. “But the evolutionary history of Treponema pallidum , the lineage of bacteria including the one that causes syphilis, goes way deeper in time,” says Elizabeth Nelson, an anthropologist at the Southern Methodist University.

Nelson and her colleagues found a 5,500-year-old Treponema pallidum genome in an individual excavated from a rock shelter in Colombia—a discovery that shows pathogens causing treponemal diseases like syphilis, bejel, or yaws are several millennia older than we thought. And this means we might have been thinking about the origins of syphilis in an entirely wrong way.

The blame game

While the French occupation of Naples did not introduce syphilis to this world, it created the perfect storm that shaped the perception of this disease and its origins for centuries to come. The first ingredient of this storm was the French army and its leader. Charles VIII invaded Naples with a vast melting pot of brigands and mercenaries from all over Europe, including the French, Swiss, Poles, and Spaniards. The king himself wasn’t exactly the epitome of morality. Chroniclers like Johannes Burckard noted his “fondness of copulation” and reported that, once he’d been with a woman, he “cared no more about her” and immediately sought another partner—a behavior eagerly mirrored by his soldiers.

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An open source AI assistant called Moltbot (formerly "Clawdbot") recently crossed 69,000 stars on GitHub after a month, making it one of the fastest-growing AI projects of 2026. Created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger , the tool lets users run a personal AI assistant and control it through messaging apps they already use. While some say it feels like the AI assistant of the future, running the tool as currently designed comes with serious security risks.

Among the dozens of unofficial AI bot apps that never rise above the fray, Moltbot is perhaps most notable for its proactive communication with the user. The assistant works with WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms. It can reach out to users with reminders, alerts, or morning briefings based on calendar events or other triggers. The project has drawn comparisons to Jarvis, the AI assistant from the Iron Man films, for its ability to actively attempt to manage tasks across a user's digital life.

However, we'll tell you up front that there are plenty of drawbacks to the still-hobbyist software: While the organizing assistant code runs on a local machine, the tool effectively requires a subscription to Anthropic or OpenAI for model access (or using an API key). Users can run local AI models with the bot, but they are currently less effective at carrying out tasks than the best commercial models. Claude Opus 4.5, which is Anthropic's flagship large language model (LLM), is a popular choice.

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If you're in the space business long enough, you learn there are numerous ways a rocket can fail. I've written my share of stories about misbehaving rockets and the extensive investigations that usually — but not always — reveal what went wrong.

But I never expected to write this story. Maybe this was a failure of my own imagination. I'm used to writing about engine malfunctions, staging issues, guidance glitches, or structural failures. Last April, Ars reported on the bizarre failure of Firefly Aerospace's commercial Alpha rocket.

Japan's H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.

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Nearly half of the databases that public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were updating on a monthly basis have been frozen without notice or explanation, according to a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine .

The study—led by Janet Freilich, a law expert at Boston University, and Jeremy Jacobs, a medical professor at Vanderbilt University—examined the status of all CDC databases, finding a total of 82 that had, as of early 2025, been receiving updates at least monthly. But, of those 82, only 44 were still being regularly updated as of October 2025, with 38 (46 percent) having their updates paused without public notice or explanation.

Examining the databases' content, it appeared that vaccination data was most affected by the stealth data freezes. Of the 38 outdated databases, 33 (87 percent) included data related to vaccination. In contrast, none of the 44 still-updated databases relate to vaccination. Other frozen databases included data on infectious disease burden, such as data on hospitalizations from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

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TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors —not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users' censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok's politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that "users' fears are absolutely justified" and explained why the "bugs" explanation is "insufficient."

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There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address—which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list—is delivering scam spam.

The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI . The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups . To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

From Microsoft, with malice

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. It provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn’t allowed). The email, captured in the two screenshots below, looked like this:

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The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user's viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global , hinges on the law's definition of the word "consumer."

Salazar filed a class action against Paramount in 2022, alleging that it "violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent," Salazar's petition to the Supreme Court said. Salazar had signed up for an online newsletter through 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount, and had to provide his email address in the process. Salazar then used 247Sports.com to view videos while logged in to his Facebook account.

"As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information—including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook," the petition said. "The disclosures occurred automatically because of the Facebook Pixel Paramount installed on its website. Facebook and Paramount then used this information to create and display targeted advertising, which increased their revenues."

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