If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you that the review you're about to read would be one of the most-read car reviews of the year. For a while—quite a long while, in fact—the Volkswagen ID Buzz was the hottest electric vehicle you couldn't buy. Starting in 2001, VW began teasing concept after concept that called back to its various Transporters and Kombis, classic microbuses reimagined as modern minivans. When the electric Buzz was greenlit for production after wowing crowds in 2017, it caught the attention of the kind of people who don't normally care about such things. Early coverage of the Buzz showed plenty of interest, and it looked like VW might have a real hit on its hands.

At least, that's how things looked for the first couple of years. It actually took seven years for a version of the ID Buzz to go on sale in North America , two years after Europe . Much of the optimism about EV adoption has now gone. Rather than reaching price parity with regular cars as battery prices dropped, everything just got more expensive during the pandemic. Add in recent worries about import tariffs and clean vehicle tax credits (available if you lease), and you start to understand why they remain a rare sight on the roads. Expect stares, glances, and even people taking out their phones as you drive past.

Some of the wait was for VW's more powerful rear drive unit, which provides this 2025 ID Buzz Pro S Plus with 282 hp (210 kW) and 413 lb-ft (560 Nm), paired with a 91 kWh battery pack. The official EPA range is 234 miles, which sounds disappointingly low, but it's correct . It does seem like a very conservative estimate based on a week with the Buzz. 3.1 miles/kWh (20 kWh 100/km) was possible if I drove carefully, with high-twos possible when I didn't, and with 89 percent state of charge in the battery, the Buzz's onboard brain figured we had 255 miles (410 km) of range.

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If you were looking for some motivation to follow your doctor's advice or remember to take your medicine, look no further than this grisly tale.

A 64-year-old man went to the emergency department of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston with a painful festering ulcer spreading on his left, very swollen ankle. It was a gruesome sight; the open sore was about 8 by 5 centimeters (about 3 by 2 inches) and was rimmed by black, ashen, and dark purple tissue. Inside, it oozed with streaks and fringes of yellow pus around pink and red inflamed flesh. It was 2 cm deep (nearly an inch). And it smelled.

The man told doctors it had all started two years prior, when dark, itchy lesions appeared in the area on his ankle—the doctors noted that there were multiple patches of these lesions on both his legs. But about five months before his visit to the emergency department, one of the lesions on his left ankle had progressed to an ulcer. It was circular, red, tender, and deep. He sought treatment and was prescribed antibiotics, which he took. But they didn't help.

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After months of backlash over alleged pollution concerns, xAI has finally secured an air permit covering some of the methane gas turbines powering its Colossus supercomputer data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

On Wednesday, the Shelby County Health Department granted xAI an air permit that allows it to power 15 gas turbines while adhering to a range of restrictions designed to minimize emissions. Expiring on January 2, 2027, the permit requires xAI to install and operate the best available control technology (BACT) by September 1 to ensure emissions do not exceed certain limits.

Any failure to comply could trigger enforcement actions by the Environmental Protection Agency or the county health department, the permit notes.

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Apple is facing resistance from the automotive industry over its CarPlay Ultra software system, which the tech group launched in an attempt to take over a vehicle’s dashboard for the first time.

German luxury brands Mercedes-Benz and Audi as well as Volvo Cars, Polestar, and Renault said they had no plans to bring the upgraded software to their vehicles, despite earlier indications from Apple that they would.

While few have followed General Motors, which announced in 2023 it would stop installing CarPlay or Android Auto on some of its EV models in North America, there is increasing debate as to how much carmakers should allow tech groups to take over the inside of a vehicle.

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Some developers prefer to live in the command line interface (CLI), eschewing the flashy graphics and file management features of IDEs. Google's latest AI tool is for those terminal lovers. It's called Gemini CLI, and it shares a lot with Gemini Code Assist , but it works in your terminal environment instead of integrating with an IDE. And perhaps best of all, it's free and open source.

Gemini CLI plugs into Gemini 2.5 Pro, Google's most advanced model for coding and simulated reasoning. It can create and modify code for you right inside the terminal, but you can also call on other Google models to generate images or videos without leaving the security of your terminal cocoon. It's essentially vibe coding from the command line.

This tool is fully open source, so developers can inspect the code and help to improve it. The openness extends to how you configure the AI agent. It supports Model Context Protocol (MCP) and bundled extensions, allowing you to customize your terminal as you see fit. You can even include your own system prompts—Gemini CLI relies on GEMINI.md files, which you can use to tweak the model for different tasks or teams.

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In recent years, a curious hypothetical particle called the axion, invented to address challenging problems with the strong nuclear force, has emerged as a leading candidate to explain dark matter. Although the potential for axions to explain dark matter has been around for decades, cosmologists have only recently begun to seriously search for them. Not only might they be able to resolve some issues with older hypotheses about dark matter, but they also offer a dizzying array of promising avenues for finding them.

But before digging into what the axion could be and why it’s so useful, we have to explore why the vast majority of physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists accept the evidence that dark matter exists and that it’s some new kind of particle. While it’s easy to dismiss the dark matter hypothesis as some sort of modern-day epicycle, the reality is much more complex (to be fair to epicycles, it was an excellent idea that fit the data extremely well for many centuries).

The short version is that nothing in the Universe adds up.

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A NASA spacecraft bound for an unexplored metal-rich asteroid has reignited its plasma thrusters, continuing its cruise deeper into the Solar System after switching to a backup fuel line.

The $1.4 billion Psyche mission, built to explore an asteroid with the same name, has four electric thrusters fueled by xenon gas. Psyche's solar electric propulsion system is more fuel efficient than conventional rocket thrusters, and it works by flowing xenon through an electromagnetic field, which ionizes the gas and expelling the ions at high speed to produce thrust.

The plasma engines generate lower thrust than chemical rocket engines, but they can accumulate years of run time over the course of a mission, enabling a spacecraft to make significant changes in its velocity to steer its way through space.

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Legend has it that physicist Ernest Rutherford once dismissed all sciences other than physics as mere "stamp collecting." (Whether he actually said it is a matter of some debate.) But we now live in the information age, and scientists have found tremendous value in amassing giant databases of information for large-scale analysis, enabling them to explore different kinds of questions.

The latest addition is the Marine Organizational Body Size (MOBS) database, an open-access resource that—as its name implies—has collected body size data for more than 85,000 marine animal species and counting, ranging from microscopic creatures like zooplankton to the largest whales. MOBS is already enabling new research on the ocean's biodiversity and global ecosystem, according to a paper published in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography. The database is now available though GitHub and currently covers 40 percent of all described marine animal species, with a goal of achieving 75 percent coverage.

"We've really lacked that broader persecutive for a lot of ocean life," marine ecologist Craig McClain of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette told Ars. McClain is the lead creator of MOBS,. "We know about evolution and ecology for mammals and birds especially, and to a lesser extent reptiles and amphibians. We just haven't had these big collated body size data sets for the marine groups, especially the invertebrates." The MOBS project is basically constructing a "library of [marine] life."

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This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News , a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here .

John Belizaire says he has a secret hiding in plain sight. But before revealing it, the CEO of Soluna, a green data center development firm headquartered in Albany, New York, asks people to picture the last time they drove through a gusty stretch of countryside and saw wind turbines in the distance. But when they zoom into that frame, he asks, did they notice that not all of those turbines were spinning despite it being windy?

It’s not typically because they’re broken, Belizaire said. It’s because they’ve been turned off.

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