We all know streaming services’ usual tricks for making more money: get more subscribers, charge those subscribers more money, and sell ads. But science streaming service Curiosity Stream is taking a new route that could reshape how streaming companies, especially niche options , try to survive.

Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. The streaming service costs $40 per year, and it doesn’t have commercials.

The streaming business has grown to also include the Curiosity Channel TV channel. CuriosityStream Inc. also makes money through original programming and its Curiosity University educational programming. The firm turned its first positive net income in its fiscal Q1 2025, after about a decade of business.

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Over the past couple of weeks, friends and colleagues have made me aware of multiple ingeniously implemented, browser-based ways to play classic MS-DOS and Windows games with other people on basically any hardware.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were the peak of multiplayer gaming for me. It was the era of real-time strategy games and boomer shooters, and not only did I attend many LAN parties, but I also played online with friends.

That’s still possible today with several old-school games; there are Discord servers that arrange scheduled matches of Starsiege Tribes , for example. But oftentimes, it’s not exactly trivial to get those games running in modern Windows, and as in the old days, you might have some annoying network configuration work ahead of you—to say nothing of the fact that many folks who were on Windows back in those days are now on macOS or Linux instead.

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Thousands of Asus routers have been hacked and are under the control of a suspected China-state group that has yet to reveal its intentions for the mass compromise, researchers said.

The hacking spree is either primarily or exclusively targeting seven models of Asus routers, all of which are no longer supported by the manufacturer, meaning they no longer receive security patches, researchers from SecurityScorecard said . So far, it’s unclear what the attackers do after gaining control of the devices. SecurityScorecard has named the operation WrtHug.

Staying off the radar

SecurityScorecard said it suspects the compromised devices are being used similarly to those found in ORB (operational relay box) networks, which hackers primarily use to conduct espionage to conceal their identity.

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While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

During an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Google’s AI infrastructure head Amin Vahdat told employees that the company must double its serving capacity every six months to meet demand for artificial intelligence services, reports CNBC. Vahdat, a vice president at Google Cloud, presented slides showing the company needs to scale “the next 1000x in 4-5 years.”

While a thousandfold increase in compute capacity sounds ambitious by itself, Vahdat noted some key constraints: Google needs to be able to deliver this increase in capability, compute, and storage networking “for essentially the same cost and increasingly, the same power, the same energy level,” he told employees during the meeting. “It won’t be easy but through collaboration and co-design, we’re going to get there.”

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AI systems have recently had a lot of success in one key aspect of biology: the relationship between a protein’s structure and its function. These efforts have included the ability to predict the structure of most proteins and to design proteins structured so that they perform useful functions . But all of these efforts are focused on the proteins and amino acids that build them.

But biology doesn’t generate new proteins at that level. Instead, changes have to take place at the nucleic acid level before eventually making their presence felt at the protein level. And the DNA level is fairly removed from proteins, with lots of critical non-coding sequences, redundancy, and a fair degree of flexibility. It’s not necessarily obvious that learning the organization of a genome would help an AI system figure out how to make functional proteins.

But it now seems like using bacterial genomes for the training can help develop a system that can predict proteins, some of which don’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before.

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The US crackdown on chip exports to China has continued with the arrests of four people accused of a conspiracy to illegally export Nvidia chips. Two US citizens and two nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all of whom live in the US, were charged in an indictment unsealed on Wednesday in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

The indictment alleges a scheme to send Nvidia “GPUs to China by falsifying paperwork, creating fake contracts, and misleading US authorities,” John Eisenberg, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s National Security Division, said in a press release yesterday.

The four arrestees are Hon Ning Ho (aka Mathew Ho), a US citizen who was born in Hong Kong and lives in Tampa, Florida; Brian Curtis Raymond, a US citizen who lives in Huntsville, Alabama; Cham Li (aka Tony Li), a PRC national who lives in San Leandro, California; and Jing Chen (aka Harry Chen), a PRC national who lives in Tampa on an F-1 non-immigrant student visa.

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AT&T provided flights from Washington, DC, to Las Vegas and accommodation so Ars could attend the Las Vegas Grand Prix. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

LAS VEGAS—A Formula 1 car runs on soon-to-be-synthetic gasoline, but an F1 team runs on data. It’s always been an engineering-driven sport, and while you can make decisions based on a hunch, the kinds of people who become good engineers prefer something a little more convincing. And the volumes of data just continue to get bigger and bigger each season. A few years ago we spoke to Red Bull Racing about how it stayed on top of the task, but a lot has changed in F1 since 2017, as we found out at this year’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.

It’s hugely popular now, for one thing, even in the United States: a 200 mph soap opera now with 24 episodes a season. Superficially the cars look the same—exposed wheels, front and rear wings, the driver in between some side pods. And the hybrid powertrains that make the cars move are still the same format: 1.6 L turbocharged V6 engines that recover energy from the rear wheels under braking as well as the turbine as it gets spun by hot exhaust gases.

But the cars are actually fundamentally different, particularly the way they generate their aerodynamic grip mostly via ground effect generated by the specially sculpted underside of their floors rather than the front and rear wings. A bigger change lurks in everyone’s accounts. The days where teams were free to spend as much money as they could find are gone.

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For months, the Trump administration has warned that semiconductor tariffs are coming soon, leaving the tech industry on pins and needles after a chaotic year of unpredictable tariff regimes collectively cost firms billions.

The semiconductor tariffs are key to Donald Trump’s economic agenda, which is intended to force more manufacturing into the US by making it more expensive to import materials and products. He campaigned on axing the CHIPS Act —which provided subsidies to companies investing in manufacturing chips in the US—complaining that it was a “horrible, horrible thing” to “give hundreds of billions of dollars” away when the US could achieve the same objective by instead taxing companies and “use whatever is left over” of CHIPS funding to “reduce debt.” However, as 2025 winds down, the US president faces pressure on all sides to delay semiconductor tariffs, insiders told Reuters , and it appears that he is considering caving.

According to “two people with direct knowledge of the matter and a third person briefed on the conversations,” US officials have privately told industry and government stakeholders that semiconductor tariffs will likely be delayed.

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Millions of people around the world are living with the harsh reality of Alzheimer’s disease, which also significantly impacts family members. Nobody is immune, as A-list actor Chris Hemsworth discovered when his own father was recently diagnosed. The revelation inspired Hemsworth to embark on a trip down memory lane with his father, which took them to Australia’s Northern Territory . The experience was captured on film for A Road Trip To Remember, a new documentary film from National Geographic.

Director Tom Barbor-Might had worked with Hemsworth on the latter’s documentary series, Limitless , also for National Geographic. Each episode of Limitless follows Hemsworth on a unique challenge to push himself to the limits, augmented with interviews with scientific experts on such practices as fasting, extreme temperatures, brain-boosting, and regulating one’s stress response. Barbor-Might directed the season 1 finale, “Acceptance,” which was very different in tone, dealing with the inevitability of death and the need to confront one’s own mortality.

“It was really interesting to see Chris in that more intimate personal space, and he was great at it,” Barbor-Might told Ars. “He was charming, emotional, and vulnerable, and it was really moving. It felt like there was more work to be done there.” When Craig Hemsworth received his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to explore that personal element further.

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