Apple’s Power Mac and Mac Pro towers used to be the company’s primary workstations, but it has been years since they were updated with the same regularity as the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro. The Mac Pro has seen just four hardware updates in the last 15 years, and that’s counting a 2012 refresh that was mostly identical to the 2010 version.

Long-suffering Mac Pro buyers may have taken heart when Apple finally added an M2 Ultra processor to the tower in mid-2023 , making it one of the very last Macs to switch from Intel to Apple Silicon—surely this would mean that the computer would at least be updated once every year or two, like the Mac Studio has been? But Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says that Mac Pro buyers shouldn’t get their hopes up for new hardware in 2026.

Gurman says that the tower is “on the back burner” at Apple and that the company is “focused on a new Mac Studio” for the next-generation M5 Ultra chip that is in the works. As we reported earlier this year, Apple doesn’t have plans to design or release an M4 Ultra , and the Mac Studio refresh from this spring included an M3 Ultra alongside the M4 Max.

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Nothing says it’s holiday season quite like a new installment of Rian Johnson’s delightful Knives Out mystery series. The final trailer for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery was just released, featuring Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc in all his Southern gentleman detective glory. This time, he’s tackling the strange death of a parish priest in a spookily Gothic small-town setting.

As we’ve previously reported , the original Knives Out was a masterfully plotted winning mashup of Clue and Murder on the Orient Express —or any number of adaptations of novels by the grande dame of murder mysteries, Agatha Christie—along with other classics like Deathtrap , Gosford Park , and Murder by Death . Craig clearly found Blanc a refreshing counter to the 007 franchise, and he and Johnson soon committed to filming a sequel: 2022’s Glass Onion , inspired particularly by the Christie-based “tropical getaway” whodunnit Evil Under the Sun (1982) and an under-appreciated 1973 gem called The Last of Sheila .

And now we have Wake Up Dead Man . With this franchise, the less one knows going in, the better. But Johnson has assembled yet another winning all-star cast. Josh Brolin plays the victim, the fire-and-brimstone-spewing Monseigneur Jefferson Wicks; Josh O’Connor plays a young priest named Rev. Jud Duplenticy; Glenn Close plays a devout churchgoer named Martha Delacroix, Wick’s loyal helper; Mila Kunis plays local police chief Geraldine Scott; Jeremy Renner plays town doctor Nat Sharp; Kerry Washington plays uptight lawyer Vera Draven; Daryl McCormack plays aspiring politician Cy Draven; Thomas Haden Church plays groundskeeper Samson Holt; Andrew Scott plays bestselling author Lee Ross; and Cailee Spaeny plays Simone Vivane, a disabled former classical cellist.

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A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord , the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.

The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”

Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concord only sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.

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Oracle has been hit harder than Big Tech rivals in the recent sell-off of tech stocks and bonds, as its vast borrowing to fund a pivot to artificial intelligence unnerved Wall Street.

The US software group founded by Larry Ellison has made a dramatic entrance to the AI race, committing to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the next few years on chips and data centers—largely as part of deals to supply computing capacity to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The speed and scale of its moves have unsettled some investors at a time when markets are keenly focused on the spending of so-called hyperscalers—big tech companies building vast data centers.

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For well over a decade now, the Cities franchise has done its best to pick up the urban simulation ball that EA’s SimCity famously dropped . Going forward, though, that ball will be handed off from longtime developer Colossal Order to Finnish studio Iceflake (a subsidiary of Cities publisher Paradox Interactive).

The surprise announcement Monday morning on Paradox’s official forums says that Cities ‘ developer and publisher “mutually decided to pursue independent paths” without going into many details as to why. “The decision was made thoughtfully and in the interest of both teams—ensuring the strongest possible future for the Cities: Skylines franchise,” the announcement says.

“Both companies are excited for what the future holds while remaining deeply appreciative of our shared history and grateful to the Cities ’ community,” the statement continues. Colossal Order “will work on new projects and explore new creative opportunities,” Paradox wrote in an accompanying FAQ .

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When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, and that we could reconsider that evidence. “You know—ask ourselves if we should really believe that based on the evidence we’ve got,” says Jan M. Engelmann, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Engelmann says that from the beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, people thought that only humans are rational. So, he designed a study to see if rationality shows up in chimpanzees. It turned out that they’re almost as rational as we are.

Food puzzles

“There was quite a bit of research showing that chimpanzees can form their beliefs in response to evidence,” Engelmann says. The experiments usually involved chimpanzees deciding which of the two boxes contained a snack. When the researchers shook both boxes and there was a rattling sound coming from one of them, the chimps almost always chose the box where the rattling came from.

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A Chinese plant scientist at the University of Michigan, who drew national attention in June 2025 when she was arrested and accused along with another Chinese scientist of smuggling a crop-damaging fungus into the US, pleaded guilty on November 12, 2025, to charges of smuggling and making false statements to the FBI. Under her plea agreement, Yunqing Jian, 33, was sentenced to time served and expected to be deported .

Her arrest put a spotlight on Fusarium graminearum , a harmful pathogen. But while its risk to grains such as wheat, corn, and rice can be alarming, Fusarium isn’t new to American farmers. The US Department of Agriculture estimates it costs wheat and barley farmers more than $1 billion a year .

Tom Allen , an extension and research professor of plant pathology at Mississippi State University, explains what Fusarium graminearum is and isn’t.

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Back in 2012, Dishonored earned the first Game of the Year honor of my tenure at Ars Technica. Looking back on the game some 13 years later, Arkane’s well-constructed world of steam punk magical realism earns its place as a modern classic.

The game does a great job of drawing you into that world immediately, with a memorable opening sequence that sees you framed for the on-screen murder of the empress you’ve been sworn to protect. The scene does a great job establishing the emotional stakes of the coming missions while also throwing you into the deep end of the political infighting that has consumed a besieged, plague-beset kingdom.

A Victorian steam punk world you can lose yourself in. Credit: Arkane Studios

Those stakes, and a battle against a real feeling of injustice, drive the plot through some admittedly predictable beats as Dishonored continues through a set of sneak-and-assassinate missions. But it’s hard to care about that predictability when even minor side characters on both sides of the conflict quickly develop from stereotypes to engaging, fleshed-out characters.

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The rocket company founded a quarter-century ago by billionaire Jeff Bezos made history Thursday with the pinpoint landing of an 18-story-tall rocket on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The on-target touchdown came nine minutes after the New Glenn rocket, built and operated by Bezos’ company Blue Origin, lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 3:55 pm EST (20:55 UTC). The launch was delayed from Sunday, first due to poor weather at the launch site in Florida, then by a solar storm that sent hazardous radiation toward Earth earlier this week.

“We achieved full mission success today, and I am so proud of the team,” said Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin. “It turns out Never Tell Me The Odds (Blue Origin’s nickname for the first stage) had perfect odds—never before in history has a booster this large nailed the landing on the second try. This is just the beginning as we rapidly scale our flight cadence and continue delivering for our customers.”

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