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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.—The annual 24 hour race that kicks off the American racing season took place this past weekend at Daytona International Speedway. Each year, the crowd gets bigger and bigger, drawn in large part by the hybrid prototypes that contest the GTP class for overall victory. After Formula 1, these are some of the most complex, sophisticated race cars ever to turn a wheel—and it doesn't hurt that they look extremely cool too. But yet again, endurance racing wants to offer more than just entertainment.

A large number of automotive technologies or safety features that we mostly take for granted today made their way into road cars from the race track . Seatbelts, rear view mirrors, turbocharged engines, aerodynamics, direct-injection engines, dual-clutch gearboxes, and more owe their existence to competition. Although, truth be told, direct examples of racing technology transfer in the mid-21st century seem less common than the intangible benefits gained when a bunch of motorsports-trained engineers have lunch every day with their road car colleagues.

That is starting to change, though, but now the domain is in simulation. Vast amounts of data are generated during the course of a race—each of the 11 GTP cars that raced at Daytona collects 1,600 different channels of data from onboard sensors, with nearly as many on the GTD machines that are based on road-going cars like Porsche's 911 or Chevrolet's Corvette. With 60 cars running for 24 hours—and that's just the first race of the year—that's a heck of a lot of high-quality data being generated, and now IMSA wants to leverage that to help automotive and technology companies develop better simulation tools, with the creation of IMSA Labs.

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For close to a century, geoscientists have pondered a mystery: Where did Earth’s lighter elements go? Compared to amounts in the Sun and in some meteorites, Earth has less hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur, as well as noble gases like helium—in some cases, more than 99 percent less.

Some of the disparity is explained by losses to the solar system as our planet formed. But researchers have long suspected that something else was going on too.

Recently, a team of scientists reported a possible explanation—that the elements are hiding deep in the solid inner core of Earth. At its super-high pressure—360 gigapascals, 3.6 million times atmospheric pressure—the iron there behaves strangely, becoming an electride: a little-known form of the metal that can suck up lighter elements.

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A company that seeks to disrupt the way in which data from space is received and transmitted has found some key investors and customers.

On Tuesday morning Northwood Space announced that it has closed a $100 million Series B round of funding to support a rapid ramp-up in the deployment of its phased-array radar system, known as Portal. The company also said it has received a $49.8 million contract from the US Space Force to augment the Satellite Control Network, which provides telemetry and tracking for the military's satellites.

"We made our last fundraise announcement in April of 2025, so less than a year, but there's been a lot of activity and progress on the Northwood side that reflects the importance of ground as an enabler for pushing forward more capable missions on shorter timelines," said Bridgit Mendler, co-founder and CEO of Northwood, during a media roundtable. "That's why we're here, that's why we're building what we're building, is because we believe that there's a lot of important capability in space that needs to be built faster, and the way to do that is through a vertically integrated ground network."

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On Friday, OpenAI engineer Michael Bolin published a detailed technical breakdown of how the company's Codex CLI coding agent works internally, offering developers insight into AI coding tools that can write code, run tests, and fix bugs with human supervision. It complements our article in December on how AI agents work by filling in technical details on how OpenAI implements its "agentic loop."

AI coding agents are having something of a "ChatGPT moment," where Claude Code with Opus 4.5 and Codex with GPT-5.2 have reached a new level of usefulness for rapidly coding up prototypes, interfaces, and churning out boilerplate code. The timing of OpenAI's post details the design philosophy behind Codex just as AI agents are becoming more practical tools for everyday work.

These tools aren't perfect and remain controversial for some software developers. While OpenAI has previously told Ars Technica that it uses Codex as a coding tool to help develop the Codex product itself, we also discovered , through hands-on experience, that these tools can be astonishingly fast at simple tasks but remain brittle beyond their training data and require human oversight for production work. The rough framework of a project tends to come fast and feels magical, but filling in the details involves tedious debugging and workarounds for limitations the agent cannot overcome on its own.

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The chair of a federal vaccine advisory panel under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made his stance clear on vaccines in a podcast last week—and that stance was so alarming that the American Medical Association was compelled to respond with a scathing statement.

Kirk Milhoan, who was named chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in December, appeared on the aptly named podcast " Why Should I Trust You ." In the hour-long interview, Milhoan made a wide range of comments that have concerned medical experts and raised eyebrows.

Early into the discussion, Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist, declared, "I don't like established science," and that "science is what I observe." He lambasted the evidence-based methodology that previous ACIP panels used to carefully and transparently craft vaccine policy.

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From the Department of Bizarre Anomalies: Microsoft has suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined to example.com—a domain reserved for testing purposes—to a maker of electronics cables located in Japan.

Under the RFC2606 —an official standard maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force—example.com isn't obtainable by any party. Instead it resolves to IP addresses assigned to Internet Assiged Names Authority. The designation is intended to prevent third parties from being bombarded with traffic when developers, penetration testers, and others need a domain for testing or discussing technical issues. Instead of naming an Internet-routable domain, they are to choose example.com or two others, example.net and example.org.

Misconfig gone, but is it fixed?

Output from the terminal command cURL shows that devices inside Azure and other Microsoft networks have been routing some traffic to subdomains of sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Sumitomo Electric. Most of the resulting text is exactly what’s expected. The exception is the JSON-based response. Here’s the JSON output from Friday:

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Apple is introducing a new version of its AirTag tracking device—simply dubbed "the new AirTag"—and claims it offers substantial improvements thanks to a new Bluetooth chip.

The original AirTag came out five years ago now, and it became popular in a variety of contexts. There were some problems, though—there was real concern about unwanted tracking and stalking with the devices, based on real stories of it being used for that. The company gradually introduced new features and protections against that, getting it to a much better place.

This new version is focused on making the device more effective in general. Thanks to the inclusion of the second-generation Ultra Wideband chip (the same one found in other recently released Apple devices like the iPhone 17), Apple says the new AirTag can work with the Precision Finding feature in the Find My app to direct users to the AirTag (and whatever lost item it's stored with or attached to) from up to 50 percent farther away.

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The US Department of Transportation apparently thinks it's a good idea to use artificial intelligence to draft rules impacting the safety of airplanes, cars, and pipelines, a ProPublica investigation revealed Monday.

It could be a problem if DOT becomes the first agency to use AI to draft rules, ProPublica pointed out, since AI is known to confidently get things wrong and hallucinate fabricated information. Staffers fear that any failure to catch AI errors could result in flawed laws, leading to lawsuits, injuries, or even deaths in the transportation system.

But the DOT's top lawyer, Gregory Zerzan, isn't worried about that, December meeting notes revealed, because the point isn't for AI to be perfect. It's for AI to help speed up the rule-making process, so that rules that take weeks or months to draft can instead be written within 30 days. According to Zerzan, DOT's preferred tool, Google Gemini, can draft rules in under 30 minutes.

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In early 2025, Forbes reports , investigators at the FBI served Microsoft with a warrant seeking the BitLocker encryption recovery keys for several laptops it believed held evidence of fraud in Guam's COVID-19 unemployment assistance program. And Microsoft complied with the FBI's request.

BitLocker is the name of the full-disk encryption technology that has been part of Windows for nearly two decades. Though initially only available to owners of the Pro editions of Windows who turned it on manually, during the Windows 8 era Microsoft began using BitLocker to encrypt local disks automatically for all Windows 11 Home and Pro PCs that signed in with a Microsoft account. Using BitLocker in this way also uploads a recovery key for your device to Microsoft's servers—this makes it possible to unlock your disk so you don't lose data if something goes wrong with your system, or if you install a CPU upgrade or some other hardware change that breaks BitLocker. But it also (apparently) makes it possible for Microsoft to unlock your disk, too.

A Microsoft rep said that the company handled "around 20" similar BitLocker recovery key requests from government authorities per year, and that these requests often fail because users haven't stored their recovery keys on Microsoft's servers. Microsoft and other tech companies have generally refused requests to install universal encryption backdoors for law enforcement purposes, and some companies (like Apple) claim to store device encryption keys using another layer of encryption that renders the keys inaccessible to the company.

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