As we've mentioned previously , Nintendo did not see fit to provide press with early review hardware for the Switch 2. Today, though, with the June 5 launch of the Switch 2 having already arrived in regions like Japan and Australia, the ever-efficient UPS driver delivered final retail hardware straight from Nintendo of America to the Ars Orbiting HQ.

The 14-hour lead time between our receipt of the hardware and the midnight launch of the Switch 2 on the US East Coast isn't close to enough time to put together a comprehensive review. For now, though, we thought we'd take you through a pictorial journey of our unboxing and initial setup process, ahead of much more coverage to come.

And while you peruse the images, we recommend listening to the absolute bop that is the Switch 2 setup music, which we've embedded below:

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The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) teamed up with DOGE to fire 10,000 employees while relying on "hopelessly error-ridden" personnel records, a class action complaint filed yesterday alleged. The lawsuit said the HHS terminated thousands of workers on April 1, shortly after sharing the flawed personnel records with the US DOGE Service, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

"These agencies knew that the records were hopelessly error-ridden, and that the records should have been used, if at all, with great caution," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia. "Instead of taking steps to verify the contents of the records and correct the systemic inaccuracies, the agencies promptly used them to fire 10,000 employees."

The case was filed by a law firm founded by former Justice Department attorneys on behalf of seven named plaintiffs and all others who were laid off as part of the April 1 Reduction in Force (RIF). It alleges that the government violated the Privacy Act, which requires agencies to verify the accuracy of information used as the basis for adverse actions against employees.

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Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with various methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography , i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them.

However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program—dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought.

As reported earlier , these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran , just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946–1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans , circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia.

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Now that most of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have been released, it's clear that they give AMD and Intel their best opportunity this decade to claw back some market share and make the dedicated graphics card business a little less lopsided.

It's not that the 50-series GPUs have been bad cards, but a focus on sometimes-useful, sometimes-not AI-generated frames and a lack of major manufacturing advancements relative to the 40-series have eroded Nvidia's usual lead in performance and power efficiency.

That's the advantage AMD is trying to press with the new Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics cards , which at $299 and $349 for 8GB and 16GB are both priced and configured to comprehensively undercut Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. As with the RX 9070 series earlier this year, the RDNA 4 architecture goes a long way toward addressing the RX 6000 and RX 7000-series' lackluster ray-tracing performance and mediocre power efficiency, and a relatively affordable 16GB version will help insulate buyers from the RAM limitations that are slowly but surely becoming more of a problem for 8GB cards.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk's big government adventure appears to be at an end. As promised in April , Musk has returned his attention to his car company, which is facing serious headwinds. In the first quarter of the year, Tesla sold tens of thousands fewer electric vehicles than it did the year before, despite a rise in worldwide EV sales. Data from April looked even worse, with substantial sales declines in Europe and China. May's numbers don't look much better.

Although Tesla only publishes its global production and sales numbers—and only at the end of each quarter—some countries provide monthly new car registration information, making it possible to track sales on a national level. And according to Germany's KBA, in May, Tesla sales fell by just over 36 percent year over year, even as overall EV registrations increased by 45 percent. At least that's a few hundred more cars than it managed in April.

Similar trends were seen in the UK and Italy. In the UK, Tesla sales decreased by 45 percent, even as overall EV sales increased by 28 percent. In Italy, EV sales increased by almost 41 percent, but Tesla's deliveries dropped by 20 percent.

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On an average day, you might unlock or look at your phone dozens of times, which makes the lock screen a hot property for advertising. Ad tech company Glance has been taking advantage of that for years with its ad-laden lock screen experiences , but it's going further in the age of AI. Samsung and Glance have teamed up to deliver a new "AI shopping" experience that uses a selfie to create custom fashion ads. This feature is rolling out to numerous Samsung phones in the next month.

Glance has been around for a while—its non-AI lock screen experience has been bundled on various phones from Samsung, Motorola, and others. Before the AI era, Glance lured people in with promises of pretty pictures and news alerts, which came with a side of ads and tracking. The new Glance AI feature has all that, but it adds an unsettling face-stealing layer to the experience.

The AI-infused Glance will arrive on Samsung phones as both a standalone app and a fully integrated lock screen. Thankfully, this is a fully opt-in experience. If you never open or set up Glance, you can keep using the normal lock screen on your phone.

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A top expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who was overseeing the process to update COVID-19 vaccine recommendations resigned on Tuesday.

The resignation, first reported by The Associated Press and confirmed by CBS News , comes just a week after health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally revoked and altered some of the CDC's recommendations for COVID-19 vaccines , restricting access to children and pregnant people. The resignation also comes three weeks before CDC's experts and advisors are scheduled to meet to publicly evaluate data and discuss the recommendations for this season—a long-established process that was disrupted by Kennedy's announcement.

The departing CDC official, Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, a pediatric infectious disease expert, was a co-leader of a working group on COVID-19 vaccines who advised experts on the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). She informed her ACIP colleagues of her resignation in an email on Tuesday.

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Since the National Science Foundation first started collecting postgraduation data nearly 70 years ago, the number of Ph.D.s awarded in the United States has consistently risen. Last year, more than 45,000 students earned doctorates in science and engineering, about an eight-fold increase compared to 1958.

But this level of production of science and engineering Ph.D. students is now in question. Facing significant cuts to federal science funding, some universities have reduced or paused their Ph.D. admissions for the upcoming academic year. In response, experts are beginning to wonder about the short and long-term effects those shifts will have on the number of doctorates awarded, and the consequent impact on science if Ph.D. production does drop.

Such questions touch on longstanding debates about academic labor. Ph.D. training is a crucial part of nurturing scientific expertise. At the same time, some analysts have worried about an oversupply of Ph.D.s in some fields, while students have suggested that universities are exploiting them as low-cost labor .

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This week an in-space propulsion company, Impulse Space, announced that it had raised a significant amount of money, $300 million. This follows a fundraising round just last year in which the Southern California-based company raised $150 million.

This is one of the largest capital raises in space in a while, especially for a non-launch company. To understand why Impulse was able to raise so much additional money so quickly, Ars caught up with founder Tom Mueller and the company's chief executive, Eric Romo. They explained that demand for Impulse's efficient in-space vehicles is high, and since early missions have worked well, the company wants to seize the moment to scale up its operations.

"We had been operating relatively conservatively, in how many people we were allowing ourselves to hire and capital expenditures," Romo said. "This will allow us to release a little bit of that conservatism and lean into some stuff like electric propulsion and potentially other vehicles that are going to allow us to grow long-term."

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