In 2019, Nintendo announced a new benefit for subscribers to its Switch Online service: a pair of game vouchers , available for $100, that could be redeemed for any two Switch games on Nintendo's eligibility list . If you already knew you were going to be buying first-party games, the voucher could save you $20 or even $30, if you used it on the normally $70 The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom .

However, Nintendo announced today that it will soon end the program, rather than carrying it forward into the Switch 2 era. Switch Online subscribers can still buy a pair of vouchers until the end of January 2026, and those vouchers will be redeemable for up to a year after purchase, but you can't buy new vouchers after that.

The vouchers were already notably not usable to buy Switch 2-exclusive games like Mario Kart World or Donkey Kong Bananza . However, for hybrid Switch games with a separate Switch 2 Edition, you could still use them to buy a game like Tears of the Kingdom and then upgrade it to the Switch 2 edition separately. Nintendo also said on its FAQ page that new titles would be added to the eligibility list between now and January 2026, raising the possibility that upcoming high-profile hybrid games like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond or Pokémon Legends: Z-A could make the list.

Read full article

Comments

After flying three missions into low-Earth orbit this year, Varda Space Industries appears to be making credible progress toward developing the nascent manufacturing-in-space industry.

Investors seem to think the same, as the California-based company announced an impressive $187 million Series C round of funding on Thursday. This brings the company's total amount of money raised since its founding in 2021 to $325 million.

"A decent chunk of the capital is going to go toward scaling up our production and operations," said the company's cofounder and president, Delian Asparouhov, in an interview. "And another chunk of that we're going to invest in our next-generation capabilities and spacecraft. With a vehicle like ours, there is a benefit to increasing the percentage of the total vehicle that is reusable."

Read full article

Comments

The European Union is moving to force AI companies to be more transparent than ever, publishing a code of practice Thursday that will help tech giants prepare to comply with the EU's landmark AI Act.

These rules—which have not yet been finalized and focus on copyright protections, transparency, and public safety—will initially be voluntary when they take effect for the biggest makers of "general purpose AI" on August 2.

But the EU will begin enforcing the AI Act in August 2026, and the Commission has noted that any companies agreeing to the rules could benefit from a "reduced administrative burden and increased legal certainty," The New York Times reported . Rejecting the voluntary rules could force companies to prove their compliance in ways that could be more costly or time-consuming, the Commission suggested.

Read full article

Comments

In late June, we hosted this year's second Ars Live event, a conversation with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather , who holds positions with the financial services company Stripe and at the Berkeley Earth Project, which tracks the global surface temperatures. We wanted to get his perspective on why those temperatures have been setting extreme records with regularity of late, but we took a little detour on the way, asking how he ended up doing climate science in the first place.

It turned out to be a very indirect route. He'd been a climate activist during his college years and helped launch a couple of cleantech startups afterward. At the time, some of the first academic climate bloggers were getting started, and Hausfather found himself doing small projects with them. Over time, he decided "my hobby was more fun than my day job," so he decided to take time off from the business world and get a PhD in climate science. From there, he has kept his feet in both the climate and business worlds.

The conversation then moved to the record we have of the Earth's surface temperatures and the role of Berkeley Earth in providing an alternate method of calculating those. While the temperature records were somewhat controversial in the past, those arguments have largely settled down, and Berkeley Earth played a major role in helping to show that the temperature records have been reliable.

Read full article

Comments

On Wednesday night, Elon Musk unveiled xAI's latest flagship models Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy via livestream , just one day after the company's Grok chatbot began generating outputs that featured blatantly antisemitic tropes in responses to users on X.

Among the two models, xAI calls Grok 4 Heavy its "multi-agent version." According to Musk, Grok 4 Heavy "spawns multiple agents in parallel" that "compare notes and yield an answer," simulating a study group approach. The company describes this as test-time compute scaling (similar to previous simulated reasoning models ), claiming to increase computational resources by roughly an order of magnitude during runtime (called "inference").

During the livestream, Musk claimed the new models achieved frontier-level performance on several benchmarks. On Humanity's Last Exam , a deliberately challenging test with 2,500 expert-curated questions across multiple subjects, Grok 4 reportedly scored 25.4 percent without external tools, which the company says outperformed OpenAI's o3 at 21 percent and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro at 21.6 percent. With tools enabled, xAI claims Grok 4 Heavy reached 44.4 percent. However, it remains to be seen if these AI benchmarks actually measure properties that translate to usefulness for users.

Read full article

Comments

Brembo provided flights from Austin to Paris and accommodation so Ars could attend Le Mans and visit the Brembo factory. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

LE MANS, FRANCE—It's 2 am at the Circuit de la Sarthe, just a few hours from Paris, France. The 24 Hours of Le Mans race is nearly halfway through, and fans are late-night snacking, snoozing in their sleeping bags, or pressed up against the fence to watch the cars zip by. The sound is thunderous as a batch of hypercars pass, each brand with a distinctive pattern of notes.

The real show after darkness falls is not the laser lights or drone formation but the sight of red-hot brake calipers glowing through the front wheels at the turns. Turn four, in particular, put on a display of fiery orange and red, visible to the naked eye.

For the first time, all 62 cars on the 2025 Le Mans starting grid were equipped with at least one component—including calipers, discs, and pads—made by a single manufacturer: Brembo. The glowing brakes are a result of high friction and high temperatures that start at 574˚ Fahrenheit (300˚ Celsius) and soar past the 1500˚ F (815˚ C) mark, and the components undergo extreme stress. Impressively, these systems are designed to endure through a whole race without changing a single element, despite Le Mans now being a 24-hour sprint race. (Mid-race brake changes were commonplace back when the cars were more fragile.)

Read full article

Comments

A new version of Mazda's popular CX-5 SUV is on the way. Earlier today, the Japanese automaker revealed details about the third-generation CX-5, which goes on sale in Europe later this year before coming here in 2026.

The current CX-5, first introduced in 2017 , marked Mazda's move upmarket, with a renewed focus on elegant interiors and keen handling without luxury automaker prices. Mazda remains committed to its core principle of "Jinba Ittai"—the horse and rider being at one—and the cars remain popular with enthusiasts, but it's fair to say that the available powertrains often leave something to be desired in terms of fuel efficiency.

At one time, Mazda readied a new diesel engine to try to improve its fleet average, although that option disappeared within a couple of years due to minimal demand. And for a while, we were teased with the clever "Skyactiv-X" compression ignition engine , which promised diesel-like efficiency on regular pump gasoline. It seems the odds of that one actually going on sale in the US are now remote, though.

Read full article

Comments

wGoogle's Veo 3 videos have propagated across the Internet since the model's debut in May, blurring the line between truth and fiction . Now, it's getting even easier to create these AI videos. The Gemini app is gaining photo-to-video generation, allowing you to upload a photo and turn it into a video. You don't have to pay anything extra for these Veo 3 videos, but the feature is only available to subscribers of Google's Pro and Ultra AI plans.

When Veo 3 launched, it could conjure up a video based only on your description, complete with speech, music, and background audio. This has made Google's new AI videos staggeringly realistic—it's actually getting hard to identify AI videos at a glance. Using a reference photo makes it easier to get the look you want without tediously describing every aspect. This was an option in Google's Flow AI tool for filmmakers, but now it's in the Gemini app and web interface.

To create a video from a photo, you have to select "Video" from the Gemini toolbar. Once this feature is available, you can then add your image and prompt, including audio and dialogue. Generating the video takes several minutes—this process takes a lot of computation, which is why video output is still quite limited.

Read full article

Comments

Greetings, Arsians! We love games here at the Ars Orbiting HQ, and I'm not just talking the latest AAA blockbusters—we love all kinds of games, from modern to ancient and all points in between.

With that in mind, we're trying something different for the next few months to see how it goes: We've partnered with the folks at GOG.com to create a store page featuring a hand-curated list of some of our favorites from GOG's catalog. At the end of every month, we'll rotate a couple of titles off the list and add a few new ones; altogether, we have a list of about 50 games to set in front of you.

(Please forgive the messy affiliate link—it points to https://www.gog.com/en/partner/ArsTechnica if you'd prefer to go there directly, but arriving on GOG's site via that affiliate link gives Ars a small portion of revenue for anything you buy during your session once you're there. This helps us out quite a bit!)

Read full article

Comments