The companies that make RAM and flash memory chips are enjoying record profits because of the AI-induced memory crunch—and they’re also indicating that they don’t expect conditions to improve much if at all in 2026. And while RAM kits have been hit the fastest and hardest by shortages and price increases, we shouldn't expect SSD pricing to improve any time soon, either.

That's the message from Shunsuke Nakato ( via PC Gamer ), managing director of the memory division of Kioxia, the Japanese memory company that was spun off from Toshiba at the end of the 2010s. Nakato says that Kioxia’s manufacturing capacity is sold out through the rest of 2026, driving the market for both enterprise and consumer SSDs to a “high-end and expensive phase.”

“There is a sense of crisis that companies will be eliminated the moment they stop investing in AI, so they have no choice but to continue investing,” said Nakato, as reported by the Korean-language publication Digital Daily. Absent a big change in the demand for generative AI data centers, that cycle of investments will keep prices high for the foreseeable future.

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Researchers at Princeton University have built a swarm of interconnected mini-robots that "bloom" like flowers in response to changing light levels in an office. According to their new paper published in the journal Science Robotics, such robotic swarms could one day be used as dynamic facades in architectural designs, enabling buildings to adapt to changing climate conditions as well as interact with humans in creative ways.

The authors drew inspiration from so-called "living architectures," such as beehives. Fire ants provide a textbook example of this kind of collective behavior. A few ants spaced well apart behave like individual ants. But pack enough of them closely together, and they behave more like a single unit, exhibiting both solid and liquid properties. You can pour them from a teapot like ants, as Goldman’s lab demonstrated several years ago, or they can link together to build towers or floating rafts—a handy survival skill when, say, a hurricane floods Houston. They also excel at regulating their own traffic flow. You almost never see an ant traffic jam.

Naturally scientists are keen to mimic such systems. For instance, in 2018 , Georgia Tech researchers built ant-like robots and programmed them to dig through 3D-printed magnetic plastic balls designed to simulate moist soil. Robot swarms capable of efficiently digging underground without jamming would be super beneficial for mining or disaster recovery efforts, where using human beings might not be feasible.

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When shadow library Anna's Archive lost its .org domain in early January, the controversial site's operator said the suspension didn't appear to have anything to do with its recent mass scraping of Spotify .

But it turns out, probably not surprisingly to most people, that the domain suspension resulted from a lawsuit filed by Spotify, along with major record labels Sony, Warner, and Universal Music Group (UMG). The music companies sued Anna's Archive in late December in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, and the case was initially sealed.

A judge ordered the case unsealed on January 16 "because the purpose for which sealing was ordered has been fulfilled." Numerous documents were made public on the court docket yesterday, and they explain events around the domain suspension.

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The announcement came out of the blue, from Blue, on Wednesday.

The space company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, said it was developing a new megaconstellation named TeraWave to deliver data speeds of up to 6Tbps anywhere on Earth. The constellation will consist of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites, with a majority in low-Earth orbit and the remainder in medium-Earth orbit.

The satellites in low-Earth orbit will provide up to 144Gbps through radio spectrum, whereas those in medium-Earth orbit will provide higher data rates through optical links.

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After a teaser campaign that included a world exclusive with Ars , Volvo has officially unveiled its next electric vehicle, the EX60. We already knew it would have up to 400 miles of range, according to the US EPA test cycle, and be capable of charging at rates of up to 400 kW. And we learned last week that the EX60 is packed full of powerful computer hardware from Nvidia and Qualcomm, enabling both advanced driver assistance systems and a new AI personal assistant. Today, we got full tech specs for the three different EX60 powertrain variants, as well as a pair of rugged EX60 Cross Country models.

P6, P10, P12

The entry-level version of Volvo's next midsize crossover is the EX60 P6. This is a single-motor variant, with 369 hp (275 kW), 354 lb-ft (480 Nm) on tap at the rear wheels. The 80 kWh (usable, 83 kWH gross) battery pack can charge at up to 320 kW and can take as little as 18 minutes to DC charge from 10 to 80 percent. The EX60 will also be the first Volvo model on sale in the US with a built-in NACS port. Range for the P6 version is 310 miles (490 km) when fitted with 20-inch wheels; subtract 10 miles (16 km) for the 21-inch wheels and 20 miles (32 km) for the 22-inch wheels. 0–60 mph (0–98 km/h) takes 5.7 seconds, and like all modern Volvos, the EX60 is speed-limited to 112 mph (180 km/h).

(Again, all range estimates are based on the US EPA test cycle; if you see different numbers online at non-US publications, those are using Europe's WLTP test.)

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The last time we did comparative tests of AI models from OpenAI and Google at Ars was in late 2023 , when Google's offering was still called Bard. In the roughly two years since, a lot has happened in the world of artificial intelligence. And now that Apple has made the consequential decision to partner with Google Gemini to power the next generation of its Siri voice assistant, we thought it was high time to do some new tests to see where the models from these AI giants stand today.

For this test, we're comparing the default models that both OpenAI and Google present to users who don't pay for a regular subscription— ChatGPT 5.2 for OpenAI and Gemini 3.2 Fast for Google. While other models might be more powerful, we felt this test best recreates the AI experience as it would work for the vast majority of Siri users, who don't pay to subscribe to either company's services.

As in the past, we'll feed the same prompts to both models and evaluate the results using a combination of objective evaluation and subjective feel. Rather than re-using the relatively simple prompts we ran back in 2023, though, we'll be running these models on an updated set of more complex prompts that we first used when pitting GPT-5 against GPT-4o last summer .

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Even as exposure to floods, fire, and extreme heat increase in the face of climate change, a popular tool for evaluating risk has disappeared from the nation’s leading real estate website.

Zillow removed the feature displaying climate risk data to home buyers in November after the California Regional Multiple Listing Service, which provides a database of real estate listings to real estate agents and brokers in the state, questioned the accuracy of the flood risk models on the site.

Now, a climate policy expert in California is working to put data back in buyers’ hands.

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On Saturday, tech entrepreneur Siqi Chen released an open source plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code AI assistant that instructs the AI model to stop writing like an AI model. Called "Humanizer," the simple prompt plugin feeds Claude a list of 24 language and formatting patterns that Wikipedia editors have listed as chatbot giveaways. Chen published the plugin on GitHub, where it has picked up over 1,600 stars as of Monday.

"It's really handy that Wikipedia went and collated a detailed list of 'signs of AI writing,'" Chen wrote on X. "So much so that you can just tell your LLM to ... not do that."

The source material is a guide from WikiProject AI Cleanup, a group of Wikipedia editors who have been hunting AI-generated articles since late 2023. French Wikipedia editor Ilyas Lebleu founded the project. The volunteers have tagged over 500 articles for review and, in August 2025, published a formal list of the patterns they kept seeing.

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The Helix Nebula is one of the most well-known and commonly photographed planetary nebulae because it resembles the " Eye of Sauron ." It is also one of the closest bright nebulae to Earth, located approximately 655 light-years from our Solar System.

You may not know what this particular nebula looks like when reading its name, but the Hubble Space Telescope has taken some iconic images of it over the years. And almost certainly, you'll recognize a photograph of the Helix Nebula, shown below.

Like many objects in astronomy, planetary nebulae have a confusing name, since they are formed not by planets but by stars like our own Sun, though a little larger. Near the end of their lives, these stars shed large amounts of gas in an expanding shell that, however briefly in cosmological time, put on a grand show.

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