If you'll indulge me for a moment, here's some ancient history.

In 2008, when Apple took the very first MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, it was not positioned as Apple's new entry-level Mac laptop. The innovative but flawed system started at $1,799, far above the $999 price of the entry-level plastic MacBook and well into MacBook Pro territory.

In those early, formative years, the "Air" branding denoted not a midrange or entry-level model but an alternate branching path from the baseline MacBook. Paying Apple more money could get you more computer—the Pro model, with more processor, more screen, more storage, more everything—or it could get you a different kind of computer, with fundamentally different benefits and tradeoffs.

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It's a rare occurrence for scientists to witness sharks mating in the wild. It's even rarer to catch three leopard sharks—two males and one female—engaging in what amounts to a threesome in the wild on camera, particularly since they are considered an endangered species. But that's just what one enterprising marine biology team achieved, describing the mating sequence in careful, clinical detail in a paper published in the Journal of Ethology.

It's not like scientists don't know anything about leopard shark mating behavior; rather, most of that knowledge comes from studying the sharks in captivity. Whether the behavior is identical in the wild is an open question because there hadn't been any documented observations of leopard shark mating practices in the wild—until now.

Hugo Lassauce, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC) in Australia, was working with the Aquarium des Lagons in Nouméa, New Caledonia, to monitor sharks off the coast of that South Pacific territory. Lassauce has been snorkeling daily with sharks for a year as part of that program—always with an accompanying boat for safety purposes—and had seen bits of the leopard shark mating behavior before, but never the entire sequence. Then he spotted a female shark on the sand below with two males hanging onto her pectoral fins—classic pre-copulation (courtship) behavior observed in captive leopard sharks.

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There's an old saying that life is not about how many times you fall down but how many times you get back up. In my roughly 13 hours of walking through the surreal mountain wilderness of Baby Steps , I'd conservatively estimate I easily fell down 1,000 times.

If so, I got up 1,001 times, which is the entire point.

When I say "fell down" here, I'm not being metaphorical. In Baby Steps , the only real antagonist is terrain that threatens to send your pudgy, middle-aged, long-underwear-clad avatar tumbling to the ground (or down a cliff) like a rag doll after the slightest misstep. You pilot this avatar using an intentionally touchy and cumbersome control system where each individual leg is tied a shoulder trigger on your controller.

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The US Secret Service announced this morning that it has located and seized a cache of telecom devices large enough to "shut down the cellular network in New York City." And it believes a nation-state is responsible.

According to the agency, "more than 300 co-located SIM servers and 100,000 SIM cards" were discovered at multiple locations within the New York City area. Photos of the seized gear show what appear to be "SIM boxes" bristling with antennas and stuffed with SIM cards, then stacked on six-shelf racks. (SIM boxes are often used for fraud .) One photo even shows neatly stacked towers of punched-out SIM card packaging, suggesting that whoever put the system together invested some quality time in just getting the whole thing set up.

The gear was identified as part of a Secret Service investigation into "anonymous telephonic threats" made against several high-ranking US government officials, but the setup seems designed for something larger than just making a few threats. The Secret Service believes that the system could have been capable of activities like "disabling cell phone towers, enabling denial of services attacks and facilitating anonymous, encrypted communication between potential threat actors and criminal enterprises."

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NASA is pressing ahead with preparations for the first launch of humans beyond low-Earth orbit in more than five decades, and officials said Tuesday that the Artemis II mission could take flight early next year.

Although work remains to be done, the space agency is now pushing toward a launch window that opens on February 5, 2026, officials said during a news conference on Tuesday at Johnson Space Center.

The Artemis II mission represents a major step forward for NASA and seeks to send four astronauts—Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen—around the Moon and back. The 10-day mission will be the first time astronauts have left low-Earth orbit since the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972.

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On Monday, a judge blocked the Trump Administration's latest attempt to stifle the US's nascent offshore wind industry. The ruling allows construction to restart on Revolution Wind, which the Danish company Orsted is building in the waters off Rhode Island and Connecticut. While the preliminary injunction can still be appealed, the project is already 80 percent complete, so construction could potentially wrap up while the case is still pending.

The Trump Administration has made no secret of its animosity toward renewable power and issued early executive orders that blocked further offshore leases and re-evaluated the permitting process for others. But it has also gone beyond that and issued stop-work orders for sites that had already been through the permitting process and were under construction. Its reasons for doing so have been remarkably vague, with suggestions of unspecified flaws to the permitting process that involve everything from environmental impacts to detail-free national security concerns.

But those reasons could apparently be ignored under the right circumstances. After blocking further construction of New York's Empire Wind, the administration lifted the block without bothering to explain why its supposed reasons for instituting it no longer applied.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic forced kids to stay home, educators flocked to VMware, and thousands of school districts adopted virtualization. The technology became a solution for distance learning during the pandemic and after, when events such as bad weather and illness can prevent children from physically attending school.

But the VMware being sold to K-12 schools today is different from the VMware before and during the pandemic. Now a Broadcom business, the platform features higher prices and a business strategy that favors big spenders . This has created unique problems for educational IT departments juggling restrictive budgets and multiple technology vendors with children's needs.

Curriculum impacted by IT delays

Ars Technica recently spoke with an IT director at a public school district in Indiana. The director requested anonymity for themself and the district out of concern about potential blowback. The director confirmed that the district has five schools and about 3,000 students. The district started using VMware’s vSAN, a software-defined storage offering, and the vSphere virtualization platform in 2019. The Indiana school system bought the VMware offerings through a package that combined them with VxRail, which is hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) hardware that Dell jointly engineered with VMware.

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The Supreme Court yesterday allowed President Trump to fire a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and will decide whether to overturn a 90-year-old precedent that says the president cannot fire an FTC commissioner without cause.

Trump fired Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter in March with a notice that said her "continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration's priorities." Trump did so despite the 1935 ruling in Humphrey's Executor v. United States , in which the Supreme Court unanimously held that the president can only remove FTC commissioners for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.

An appeals court reinstated Slaughter three weeks ago, with judges finding that "the government has no likelihood of success on appeal given controlling and directly on point Supreme Court precedent." But on September 8, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts granted a stay that temporarily blocked the lower-court ruling against Trump.

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The era of Google's Play's unrivaled dominance may be coming to an end in the wake of the company's antitrust loss , but Google's app store isn't going anywhere. In fact, the Play Store experience is getting a massive update with more personalization, content, and yes, AI. This is Google, after all.

The revamped Google Play Games is a key part of this update. Gamer profiles will now have a public face, allowing you to interact with other players if you choose. Play Games will track your activity for daily streaks, which will be shown on your profile and unlock new Play Points rewards. Your profile will also display your in-game achievements.

Your gaming exploits can also span multiple platforms. Google Play Games for PC is officially leaving beta. Google says there are now 200,000 games that work across mobile and PC, and even more PC-friendly titles, like Deep Rock Galactic Survivor , are on the way. Your stats and streaks will apply across both mobile and PC as long as the title comes from the Play Store.

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