Still feeling uneasy about Meta's acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission will be appealing a November ruling that cleared Meta of allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly in a market dubbed "personal social networking."

The FTC hopes the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will agree that "robust evidence at trial" showed that Meta's acquisitions were improper. In the initial trial, the FTC sought a breakup of Meta's apps, with Meta risking forced divestments of Instagram or WhatsApp.

In a press release Tuesday, the FTC confirmed that it "continues to allege" that "for over a decade Meta has illegally maintained a monopoly in personal social networking services through anticompetitive conduct—by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp."

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Verizon has started enforcing a 365-day lock period on phones purchased through its TracFone division, one week after the Federal Communications Commission waived a requirement that Verizon unlock handsets 60 days after they are activated on its network.

Verizon was previously required to unlock phones automatically after 60 days due to restrictions imposed on its spectrum licenses and merger conditions that helped Verizon obtain approval of its purchase of TracFone . But an update applied today to the TracFone unlocking policy said new phones will be locked for at least a year and that each customer will have to request an unlock instead of getting it automatically.

The "new" TracFone policy is basically a return to the yearlong locking it imposed before Verizon bought the company in 2021. TracFone first agreed to provide unlocking in a 2015 settlement with the Obama-era FCC , which alleged that TracFone failed to comply with a commitment to unlock phones for customers enrolled in the Lifeline subsidy program. TracFone later shortened the locking period from a year to 60 days as a condition of the Verizon merger.

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YouTubers have been increasingly frustrated with Google's management of the platform, with disinformation welcomed back and an aggressive push for more AI (except where Google doesn't like it ). So it's no surprise that creators have been up in arms over the suspicious removal of YouTube's advanced SRV3 caption format. You don't have to worry too much just yet—Google says this is only temporary, and it's working on a fix for the underlying bug.

Google added support for this custom subtitle format around 2018, giving creators more customization options than regular users get with traditional captions. SRV3 (also known as YTT or YouTube Timed Text) allows for custom colors, transparency, animations, fonts, and precise positioning in videos. Uploaders using this format can color-code and position captions to help separate multiple speakers, create sing-along animations, or style them to match the video.

Over the last several days, creators who've become accustomed to this level of control have been dismayed to see that YouTube is no longer accepting videos with this Google-created format. Many worried Google had ditched the format entirely, which could be problematic for all those previously uploaded videos.

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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health alert to clinicians Tuesday, warning that the savage, flesh-eating parasitic fly— the New World Screwworm —is not only approaching the Texas border, but also felling an increasing number of animals in the bordering Mexican state of Tamaulipas.

The advisory, released through the agency's Health Alert Network, directs doctors, veterinarians, and other health workers to be on the lookout for patients with wounds teeming with ferocious maggots burrowing into their living flesh. The alert also provides guidance on what to do if any such festering wounds are encountered—namely, remove each and every maggot to prevent the patient from dying, and, under no circumstance allow any of the parasites to survive and escape.

The New World Screwworm (NWS) is a fly that lays its eggs—up to 400 at a time—in the wounds, orifices, and mucus membranes of any warm-blooded animal. The eggs hatch into flesh-eating maggots, which look and act much like screws, twisting and boring into their victims while eating them alive.

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Recent advances in brain-computer interfaces have made it possible to more accurately extract speech from neural signals in humans, but language is just one of the tools we use to communicate. “When my young nephew asks for ice cream before dinner and I say ‘no,’ the meaning is entirely dictated by whether the word is punctuated with a smirk or a stern frown,” says Geena Ianni, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s why in the future, she thinks, neural prostheses meant for patients with a stroke or paralysis will decode facial gestures from brain signals in the same way they decode speech.

To lay a foundation for these future facial gesture decoders, Ianni and her colleagues designed an experiment to find out how neural circuitry responsible for making faces really works. “Although in recent years neuroscience got a good handle on how the brain perceives facial expressions, we know relatively little about how they are generated,” Ianni says. And it turned out that a surprisingly large part of what neuroscientists assumed about facial gestures was wrong.

The natural way

For a long time, neuroscientists thought facial gestures in primates stemmed from a neat division of labor in the brain. “Case reports of patients with brain lesions suggested some brain regions were responsible for certain types of emotional expressions while other regions were responsible for volitional movements like speech,” Ianni explains. We’ve developed a clearer picture of speech by tracing the origin of these movements down to the level of individual neurons. But we’ve not done the same for facial expressions. To fill this gap, Ianni and her team designed a study using macaques—social primates that share most of their complex facial musculature with humans.

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Netflix agreed to pay all cash for Warner Bros. Discovery, amending its $72 billion deal in an attempt to fight off Paramount's hostile takeover bid.

Netflix originally agreed to buy the company with a mix of cash and stock. To sweeten the offer for shareholders, Netflix and Warner Bros. today announced that Netflix will pay all cash instead. If successful, Netflix's purchase will include HBO Max, WB Studios, and other assets.

The price is unchanged at $27.75 per share, and Warner Bros. is targeting an April 2026 shareholder vote. The original plan was for Netflix to buy each Warner Bros. share with $23.25 in cash and $4.50 in Netflix stock.

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TCL is taking majority ownership of Sony’s Bravia series of TVs, the two companies announced today.

The two firms said they have signed a memorandum of understanding and aim to sign binding agreements by the end of March. Pending “relevant regulatory approvals and other conditions,” the joint venture is expected to launch in April 2027.

Under a new joint venture, Huizhou, China-headquartered TCL will own 51 percent of Tokyo, Japan-headquartered Sony’s “home entertainment business,” and Sony will own 49 percent, per an announcement today, adding:

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As Ars reported last week , NASA's plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.

Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in "phase two" of NASA's commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.

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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

"This is the start of a very long journey," said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17."

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