The US government will take equity stakes worth a total of $2 billion in a slew of quantum computing companies, including a startup backed by a firm with links to the Trump family and one taken public by a Pentagon official.

The announcement by the commerce department that it had signed letters of intent with nine companies—including GlobalFoundries and IBM—sent shares in quantum specialists soaring on Thursday.

Both IBM, which is set to get $1 billion, and GlobalFoundries, which will receive $375 million, were up more than 6 percent in pre-market trading. D-Wave Quantum, an awardee that was taken public in 2022 by Emil Michael—now a top Pentagon official—was up more than 20 percent.

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Plug-in hybrid powertrains were developed to be the best of both worlds: a combustion engine and fuel tank that can handle those longer journeys exactly the same as a non-hybrid car, with an electric motor and a battery large enough for most or all of someone's daily driving range. But only if you plug it in. And it is often taken as a statement of fact that plug-in hybrid owners don't plug in their plug-in hybrids.

Instead, they were seduced into buying a car with far too big a battery, no doubt as a result of generous incentives , the theory goes. And if those drivers aren't going to plug in and therefore enjoy at least some entirely electric driving, they should have bought a parallel hybrid instead, which often delivers better efficiency than a PHEV with an empty battery, at a significantly lower price.

But what if that take is wrong? As it turns out, there's some more evidence that PHEV drivers do in fact plug in their plug-ins, and the latest data point is from one of the most prolific PHEV pushers: Toyota.

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Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Munich, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could test out its headlights, as well as some other things you can read about in the coming weeks. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MUNICH—Headlight technology in the US is about to get smarter. When Audi's Q9 SUV goes on sale here later this year, it will feature the automaker's latest adaptive beam headlights, which manage the nifty trick of providing better, brighter illumination while minimizing glare for both the driver and other road users. Such technology is old hat to our European readers, but it's finally debuting on our roads after years of lobbying and intensive, lengthy testing to satisfy the new federal regulations. And after trying out the headlights during a recent trip to Europe, I can say, "It's about time."

Despite America's reputation as an innovation powerhouse, we have lagged behind Europe and Japan in automotive lighting technology for decades, thanks to 1960s-era regulations that allowed only low- and high-beam headlights, nothing else. For years, OEMs like Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volvo lobbied the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to allow them to bring more modern technology to these shores to no avail.

At first, it was laser high beams , which could project their beams much farther down the road than conventional halogen or xenon lights. Lasers are cool, but adaptive driving beam technology is even cooler. Each headlight is actually a multipixel LED, and by turning some of those pixels off, the headlight beam can be shaped to mask the light to selectively dim oncoming vehicles instead of switching to low beams.

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After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12.

The document revealed no major surprises about the company's space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk's xAI, social media and AI.

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An American infected with Ebola is being treated in Berlin, while another exposed to the deadly virus is being sent to Prague after the White House reportedly resisted allowing citizens to return to the US for care and monitoring.

According to The Washington Post , five people close to the Ebola response said that, over the weekend, the Trump administration resisted allowing the return of Peter Stafford, a 39-year-old surgeon working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo amid a raging Ebola outbreak. The resistance allegedly delayed Stafford's evacuation and care, risking his health, as experts note that early treatment is critical for Ebola, which can turn deadly in days.

On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Stafford had developed symptoms over the weekend and tested positive for Ebola late Sunday. In a press briefing on Wednesday, Satish Pillai, the CDC's incident response manager for the Ebola outbreak, said Stafford had arrived in Germany and is in stable condition. His wife, Rebekah Stafford—also a doctor who was exposed to the virus in DRC but is asymptomatic—along with the couple's four children, have been flown to Germany as well.

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Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029.

The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago , in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche. The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch. Navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles (4,609 km) from the Martian surface, well above the planet's tenuous atmosphere. Psyche used Martian gravity like a slingshot to gain enough speed to reshape its orbit around the Sun, putting the probe on a path to intercept its asteroid target.

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No doubt buoyed by all the positive advance reviews on social media , Amazon MGM Studios has released one last trailer for Masters of the Universe , and it comes in strong with the 1980s nostalgia, chock-full of Easter eggs to delight Ars readers of a certain age.

Directed by Travis Knight ( Bumblebee , Kubo and the Two Strings ), the film is a reboot of sorts of the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series, its spinoff, She-Ra: Princess of Powers, and the many, many other offshoots of this hugely popular Mattel franchise . Per the official premise:

In Masters of the Universe , Director Travis Knight brings the legendary franchise back to the big screen in this epic live-action adventure. After being separated for 15 years, the Sword of Power leads Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) back to Eternia where he discovers his home shattered under the fiendish rule of Skeletor (Jared Leto). To save his family and his world, Adam must join forces with his closest allies, Teela (Camila Mendes) and Duncan/Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba), and embrace his true destiny as He-Man — the most powerful man in the universe.

In addition to Galitzine, Mendes, Elba, and Leto, the cast includes Alison Brie as Professor Evelyn Powers (aka Evil-Lyn); Morena Baccarin as the Sorceress of Castle Grayskull; Jóhannes Haukur as Malcolm/Fisto; James Purefoy and Charlotte Riley as King Randor and Queen Marlena; Sasheer Zamata as Suzie, Adam/He-Man’s BFF on Earth; Kristen Wiig as Roboto; James Wilkinson as Mekaneck; Jon Xue Zhang as Ram-Man; Kojo Attah as the bounty hunter Tri-Klops; Sam C. Wilson as cyborg/weapons expert Kronis/Trap-Jaw; Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson as Goat Man; Robert Towers as Karg; and Christian Vunipola as Adam's roommate on Earth, Hussein.

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At a star-studded event that closed Downtown Los Angeles' Sixth Street Viaduct last night, Mercedes and AMG unveiled the next generation of performance electric vehicles. The new four-door GT Coupe arrives in the midst of a pivotal period, the result of an almost experimental process that seems to take two steps forward and one step back quite regularly. In many ways, the all-electric AMG leaves previous plans in the past by effectively bringing the record-setting Concept AMG GT XX to series production, with many firsts for Mercedes supporting the abandonment of internal combustion power, including new axial motors from YASA and F1-derived battery cells.

Fittingly, then, Mercedes brought out its F1 team’s personnel, as George Russell presented the new car while Toto Wolff and Kimi Antonelli watched from the makeshift grandstands. Hollywood celebs ran the gamut, from Brad Pitt—who drove one GT onto the bridge—to Jacob Elordi and Kevin Hart, while Blink 182 played a surprisingly sarcastic mini set. All of the above may mean less to potential GT buyers than performance metrics and pricing when the 2027 model year comes along, but it only serves to prove just how big of a deal Mercedes-AMG believes this will be.

A new look

In person, the new GT bears almost no resemblance to any of Benz’s prior EVs. No more bulbous, nautical EQS shapes or minorly smoothed over boxy G-Wagen aesthetic . The new design is more aided by digital renderings and iterative algorithms, especially the jutting front grille, reclined headlights, and Kamm-tail rear end—a bit of Aston Martin fore and aft. From the profile view, the proportions fit somewhere between a Porsche Panamera or Taycan, low-slung and slippery for ideal aerodynamic efficiency.

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It's not an ideal time to be buying a new PC or doing a major upgrade. Price crunches for RAM and storage chips are making all kinds of components more expensive, and the shift to DDR5 in modern Intel and AMD CPUs means that a lot of people would need to pay money to replace their current DDR4 kits if they wanted to step up to a significantly newer, faster CPU and motherboard.

AMD may have something on the horizon for people who are looking to stretch their current PC (and its DDR4 RAM kit) just a little further. Leaks spotted by Tom's Hardware point to the existence of an "AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D 10th Anniversary Edition," a re-release of a 4-year-old out-of-circulation CPU that might nevertheless be an upgrade for people with older Ryzen CPUs in Socket AM4 motherboards.

The "X3D" in the chip's name signifies that it comes with 64MB of extra L3 cache stacked on top of the main CPU die, bringing the total amount of L3 cache to 96MB. Workloads that benefit from extra cache—including most games—will perform much better on the 5800X3D than they do on the vanilla Ryzen 7 5800X.

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