Elon Musk’s business empire has been hit by a wave of senior departures over the past year, as the billionaire’s relentless demands and political activism accelerate turnover among his top ranks.

Key members of Tesla’s US sales team, battery and power-train operations, public affairs arm, and its chief information officer have all recently departed, as well as core members of the Optimus robot and AI teams on which Musk has bet the future of the company.

Churn has been even more rapid at xAI, Musk’s two-year-old artificial intelligence start-up, which he merged with his social network X in March. Its chief financial officer and general counsel recently departed after short stints, within a week of each other.

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Subaru provided flights from Los Angeles to Portland, Oregon, and accommodation so Ars could drive the new Crosstrek. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Even at a brief glance, the Subaru Crosstrek clearly prioritizes rugged design and personality over any semblance of aerodynamic efficiency. Subaru’s best-seller also comes only in all-wheel drive, to stay true to customer expectations of all-weather confidence and the appeal of an aspirational adventure lifestyle. And yet, the latest-generation Crosstrek’s new hybrid variant improves power and torque output significantly, while simultaneously resulting in the most efficient Crosstrek to date.

Any consideration of aerodynamic improvements for this generation can best be thought of as minor. And yet, the wheel well vents do reduce turbulence and pressure while more cleanly skirting air around the side panels. And some mild smoothing versus the previous generations include tiny elements like the forward-facing edge of the roof rail mounts. However, reduced plastic cladding on the hybrid Crosstreks that might seem intended to improve airflow counterintuitively came about only because Subaru builds the hybrids in Japan for all international markets, and only Americans prefer going overboard on tacky plastic trim pieces.

More importantly than aero, the Crosstrek now shares a hybrid powertrain with the Forester SUV. If a naturally aspirated 2.5 L horizontally opposed Boxer four-cylinder engine sounds familiar from Subarus over the past four decades, in reality, this hybrid system significantly works over the flat-four versus even current internal-combustion siblings. This year introduces a host of mechanical modifications to the cylinder head, block, camshaft, crank pulley, fuel system, intake, exhaust, cooling, and more. But more importantly, the engine now runs on an Atkinson cycle, which holds the intake valves open longer to reduce piston resistance during the expansion stroke, resulting in reduced power output but improved fuel efficiency.

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Porsche provided flights from Washington to Leipzig and accommodation so Ars could be briefed on the Cayenne Electric. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

LEIPZIG, Germany—Porsche is synonymous with sports cars in which the engine lives behind the driver. From the company's first open-top 356/1—which it let us drive a couple of years ago—to the latest stupendously clever 911 variants, these are the machines most of us associate with the Stuttgart-based brand. And indeed, the company has sold more than a million 911s since the model's introduction in 1963. But here's the bald truth: It's the SUVs that keep the lights on. Without their profit, there would be no money to develop the next T-Hybrid or GT3 . The first Cayenne was introduced just 23 years ago; since then, Porsche has sold more than 1.5 million of them. And the next one will be electric.

Of course, this won't be Porsche's first electric SUV. That honor goes to the electric Macan , which is probably becoming a more common sight on the streets in more well-heeled neighborhoods. Like the Macan, the Cayenne Electric is based on Volkswagen Group's Premium Platform Electric, but this is no mere scaled-up Macan.

"It's not just a product update; it's a complete new chapter in the story," said Sajjad Khan, a member of Porsche's management board in charge of car IT.

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To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported , the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016 , Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

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Google owner Alphabet today agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit that President Trump filed against YouTube in 2021. Trump sued YouTube over his account being suspended after Trump supporters' January 6 attack on the US Capitol.

Alphabet agreed to pay $22 million "to settle and resolve with Plaintiff Donald J. Trump... which he has directed to be contributed, on his behalf, to the Trust for the National Mall, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom," a court filing said. Trump recently announced plans for the 90,000-square-foot ballroom.

The settlement notice , filed today in US District Court for the Northern District of California, said Alphabet will also pay $2.5 million to settle claims with plaintiffs the American Conservative Union, Andrew Baggiani, Austen Fletcher, Maryse Veronica Jean-Louis, Frank Valentine, Kelly Victory, and Naomi Wolf. Under the settlement, Alphabet admits no wrongdoing and the parties agreed to dismiss the case.

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The booster stage for Firefly Aerospace's next Alpha rocket was destroyed Monday in a fiery accident on the company's vertical test stand in Central Texas.

Engineers were testing the rocket before shipment to Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, to prepare for launch later this year with a small commercial satellite for Lockheed Martin. Activities at the vertical test stand in Briggs, Texas, include propellant loading and test-firings of the booster's four kerosene-fueled engines. The rocket was undergoing one of these test-firings on Monday when the accident occurred.

Firefly released a statement confirming the rocket "experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage." The company confirmed all personnel were safe and said ground teams followed "proper safety protocols."

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On Monday, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 4.5, a new AI language model the company calls its "most capable model to date," with improved coding and computer use capabilities. The company also revealed Claude Code 2.0 , a command-line AI agent for developers, and the Claude Agent SDK , which is a tool developers can use to build their own AI coding agents.

Anthropic says it has witnessed Sonnet 4.5 working continuously on the same project "for more than 30 hours on complex, multi-step tasks," though the company did not provide specific details about the tasks. In the past, agentic models have been known to typically lose coherence over long periods of time as errors accumulate and context windows (a type of short-term memory for the model) fill up. In the past, Anthropic has mentioned that previous Claude 4.0 models have played Pokémon for over 24 hours or refactored code for seven hours.

To understand why Sonnet exists, you need to know a bit about how AI language models work. Traditionally, Anthropic has produced three differently sized AI models in the Claude family: Haiku (the smallest), Sonnet (mid-range), and Opus (the largest). Anthropic last updated Haiku in November 2024 (to 3.5), Sonnet this past May (to 4.0), and Opus in August (to 4.1). Model size in parameters, which are values stored in its neural network, is roughly proportional to overall contextual depth (the number of multidimensional connections between concepts, which you might call "knowledge") and better problem-solving capability, but larger models are also slower and more expensive to run. So AI companies always seek a sweet spot in the middle with reasonable performance-cost trade-offs. Claude Sonnet has filled that role for Anthropic quite well for several years now.

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Popular piracy website Streameast is back to illegally streaming sporting events, just 13 months after Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) seized the domain.

In August 2024, HSI seized several domains belonging to the Streameast piracy network, including some backup domains. After the seizure, trying to access those sites resulted in a pop-up from HSI stating, ‘THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED.”

Seized Streameast websites show this notice.

At the time, Streameast was one of the most well-known sites in the US for watching sporting events, including from the NBA, NFL, and MLB, illegally and even claimed LeBron James as a user .

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This morning's announcement that EA plans to sell itself to a consortium of private equity firms is one of the biggest business stories of the year. The $55 billion deal is the largest leveraged buyout in history and will send ripples through the world of high finance, both within and outside the gaming sector.

But even players who have no interest in the business side of the game industry should be paying attention to the news. Analysts who spoke to Ars Technica said that the privately owned version of Electronic Arts will likely be very different from the old public company, in ways that could directly affect the kinds of games the mega-publisher produces.

A $20 billion hole to fill

One of the biggest differences between a publicly owned EA and a privately owned version is that the latter will be saddled with roughly $20 billion of fresh debt provided by JP MorganChase, which is being used to help finance the leveraged buyout. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter estimates the firm will be on the hook for roughly $1 billion a year in service payments on that debt after the deal closes.

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