Enlarge / BMW has a new 5 Series, and it's starting with the fully electric version seen here, the 2024 BMW i5. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

LISBON, Portugal—Electric vehicles are becoming normalized. Take BMW, for instance. When the electric i3 went on sale a decade ago, it looked—and still looks, in fact—like nothing else on the road. Fast forward to 2023 and we've reached the point where you'd have to be very observant to spot the differences between the fully electric and internal combustion versions of the new BMW 5 Series. In fact, it's a testament to the importance of the fully electric version that the 2024 BMW i5 is the one the company chose to offer up to the world's journalists for a first drive.

The eighth-generation 5 Series—internal BMW code G60, for those who keep track—broke cover this past May. It has a more restrained look than other electric BMWs we've driven recently.

Back when its range was mostly just 3, 5, and 7, they all wore roughly similar kidney grilles. But in the 21st century, BMW has series going from 1 to 8, not to mention SUVs, with almost as many variations of that famous grille among them. Here, it's a horizontal design, and it's technically not a grille if we're being literal—there's no grate or mesh covering a big air inlet. Behind the plastic exterior live some of the car's forward-looking sensors. And for those who think the design is maybe too restrained, you can opt for an illuminated surround.

Enlarge / From left to right: iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max. (credit: Samuel Axon)

It’s been six years since the iPhone X hit store shelves, but at a glance, 2023’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Pro aren't all that different. Thanks to a few steps of iteration, though, these smartphones still feel like a big step up—maybe not compared to last year’s iPhone, but certainly compared to 2017's, or even 2020’s.

Though I don’t have any insight into what’s coming next year, the iPhone 15 seems like the final form of a product that has gone through a multi-year cycle. It sees Apple cementing a likely long-term strategy of treating the cheaper model as a rerun of the previous year’s pro model, it addresses one of the longest-standing complaints about iPhones (even if Apple’s hand was forced by regulation), and it refines a tried-and-true design.

The iPhone 15, its pricier siblings, and its strong competitors on the Android side make the case that for better or worse (mostly better), we’ve reached peak smartphone.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The world has been flooded with misinformation. Falsehoods and conspiracy theories bubble up on everything from the weather to vaccines to the shape of the Earth. Purveyors of this garbage may be motivated by attention, money, or simply the appeal of sticking it to the educated elite. For people who try to keep both feet planted in the real world, it's enough to make you want to scream. Even if you spend 24 hours a day pushing back against the wrongness on the Internet, it seems impossible to make a dent in it.

I've been pondering this, and I've decided that we need a way to target the worst sources of misinformation—a way to identify the people who are both the most wrong and the most dangerous. So, as a bit of a thought experiment, I started playing with a simplified scoring system for misinformation merchants.

I'm calling it the 10-point Ladapo scale in honor of the surgeon general of Florida, for reasons I hope are obvious. Any person can be given a score of zero or one (fractions are discouraged) for each of the following questions; scores are then totaled to provide a composite picture of just how bad any source is. To help you understand how to use it, we'll go through the questions and provide a sense of how each should be scored. We'll then apply the Ladapo scale to a couple of real-world examples.

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I was preparing to write an intro calling macOS Sonoma—version 14.0 of Apple's desktop operating system, for those of you who can't keep the ever-lengthening list of California codenames straight—a "low-key" or "small" release. Because it definitely feels that way, and it's tempting to think that Apple is taking it easy on new features for older OSes because it's devoting so much internal time to VisionOS and the Vision Pro.

But looking back, I've said something along those lines for each of the last few macOS releases (and several others before that). Honestly, these days, what macOS update hasn't been "low-key"? Every one since Big Sur (11.0) overhauled the UI and added Apple Silicon support has been content to add a few pieces on top of the foundation, fiddle a bit with under-the-hood enhancements and new security measures, maintain feature parity with iOS for the built-in apps, and call it a day. That's what Sonoma does, too.

So macOS Sonoma is a perfectly typical macOS release, a sort of "Ventura-plus" that probably has one or two additions that any given person will find useful but which otherwise just keeps your Mac secure and avoids weird iCloud compatibility problems with whatever software is running on your phone. You probably don't need to run out and install it, but there's no real reason to avoid it if you're not aware of some specific bug or compatibility problem that affects the software you use. It's business as usual for Mac owners. Let's dive in.

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As I watched a few berries I had just carted home roll gently down my driveway and into the road, it was hard to escape the sense that my plan to use nothing but a cargo bike for two weeks might have been overly ambitious. Several weeks filled with Canadian wildfire smoke and tornado warnings later, it was pretty clear that I had greatly underestimated the complexities involved.

The e-bike I used for my testing, the newly introduced Trek Fetch+ 2, is very good, and it readily hauled whatever I asked of it. But using a cargo bike is very different from any other biking experience I've had—and that's saying something, given the large range of bike styles I've now had the pleasure of sampling.

So this review will be divided into two parts. In the first, I'll talk a bit about the cargo bike experience; if you already know what that's like, you can skip ahead to the second half, where we'll go in-depth on the Fetch+ 2.

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If there's one thing Unity Create President and General Manager Marc Whitten wants to make clear, it's that he appreciates your feedback.

"It's been a very feedback-giving week for Unity," Whitten told Ars, possibly the biggest understatement he made during an interview accompanying the new, scaled-back fee structure plans the company announced today. "There was a lot more [feedback than we expected] for sure... I think that feedback has made us better, even though it has sometimes been difficult."

But Whitten was also quick to find the bright side of the tsunami of backlash that came Unity's way in the week since the company announced its (now outdated) plans for per-install fees of up to $0.20 on all Unity games starting in 2024. That's because that anger reflected "the extraordinary passion that our community has for their craft, their livelihoods, and their tools, including Unity," Whitten said. "When Unity disappoints them, in a way where they're overly surprised or whatever, they give very, very critical feedback. I don't love hearing every single one of those pieces of feedback—sometimes they can be pretty pointed—but I love that that passion exists."

Enlarge / iOS 17 isn't a radical step forward, but there's still plenty to dig into. (credit: Samuel Axon)

With the impending launch of Vision Pro and visionOS, it might look like iOS and iPadOS aren’t Apple’s main focus right now. Nevertheless, this year’s update promises some notable additions—even if some won’t be available until weeks or months down the line.

There’s one major new feature that’s available right away—StandBy, which turns your phone into a smart display. Core communications apps like Messages, Phone, and FaceTime are cornerstones of this update, too, along with new ways to use AirDrop. And as usual, Apple has introduced some new AI-powered features, including improved autocorrect and typing suggestions.

Meanwhile, the iPad got some key features from last year’s iPhone software update, plus improvements to the controversial Stage Manager multitasking view.

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The Signal Foundation, maker of the Signal Protocol that encrypts messages sent by more than a billion people, has rolled out an update designed to prepare for a very real prospect that’s never far from the thoughts of just about every security engineer on the planet: the catastrophic fall of cryptographic protocols that secure some of the most sensitive secrets today.

The Signal Protocol is a key ingredient in the Signal, Google RCS, and WhatsApp messengers, which collectively have more than 1 billion users. It’s the engine that provides end-to-end encryption, meaning messages encrypted with the apps can be decrypted only by the recipients and no one else, including the platforms enabling the service. Until now, the Signal Protocol encrypted messages and voice calls with X3DH, a specification based on a form of cryptography known as Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman.

A brief detour: WTF is ECDH?

Often abbreviated as ECDH, Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman is a protocol unto its own. It combines two main building blocks. The first involves the use of elliptic curves to form asymmetric key pairs, each of which is unique to each user. One key in the pair is public and available to anyone to use for encrypting messages sent to the person who owns it. The corresponding private key is closely guarded by the user. It allows the user to decrypt the messages. Cryptography relying on a public-private key pair is often known as asymmetric encryption.

Enlarge / Planetary vampire Perseverance takes a selfie with two sample drill holes. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

It’s easy to take it for granted, but we’re driving around on freakin’ Mars right now.

We’ve done this a few times before, sure, but it remains one of humankind’s most impressive technological feats. The latest rover to continue our presence on the Red Planet is Perseverance, the star of the Mars 2020 mission that launched in July of that year and landed in February of 2021.

It’s now been busy roving for over two years. News of what we’re discovering—beyond the stream of photos—tends to come in discrete bits that can be hard to connect into a bigger picture if you aren’t following closely. Consider this your wide-angle recap.

Enlarge / Pray I don't alter it any further... (credit: Aurich Lawson | Star Wars)

If you were developing a Unity Engine game on Monday, you did so with the general understanding that you wouldn't be charged additional royalties or fees beyond your subscription to the Unity Editor software itself. If you were developing that same game on Tuesday, you were suddenly subject to shocking new terms that would impose charges of up to $0.20 per install (starting next year) after certain per-game revenue and install thresholds were reached.

This change led to a firestorm of understandable anger and recrimination across the game development community. But it has also led some to wonder how such a massive change is even legally possible. Can Unity just unilaterally alter the fee structure its developers were relying on, even for development projects that were started (or even completed) under completely different legal terms?

The answer, it seems, depends on how you interpret some seemingly contradictory clauses that have appeared in various Unity terms of service in recent years.

Enlarge / The Ig Nobel Prizes honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Curious about why geologists lick rocks or how many nose hairs there are on a human cadaver? Perhaps you'd like a snazzy dead wolf spider to use as a biodegradable robotic gripper? How about a "smart toilet" that analyzes your urine stream and fecal deposits while taking a picture of your anus for good measure? These and other unusual research endeavors were honored tonight in a virtual ceremony to announce the 2022 recipients of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. Yes, it's that time of year again, when the serious and the silly converge—for science.

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes; they honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." The unapologetically campy awards ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24/7 lectures whereby experts must explain their work twice: once in 24 seconds and the second in just seven words. Acceptance speeches are limited to 60 seconds. And as the motto implies, the research being honored might seem ridiculous at first glance, but that doesn't mean it's devoid of scientific merit.

Viewers can tune in for the usual 24/7 lectures, as well as the premiere of a "non-opera" featuring various songs about water, in keeping with the evening's theme. In the weeks following the ceremony, the winners will also give free public talks, which will be posted on the Improbable Research website.

Enlarge / Kaboom! (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

For years, the Unity Engine has earned goodwill from developers large and small for its royalty-free licensing structure, which meant developers incurred no extra costs based on how well a game sold. That goodwill has now been largely thrown out the window due to Unity's Tuesday announcement of a new fee structure that will start charging developers on a "per-install" basis after certain minimum thresholds are met.

The newly introduced Unity Runtime Fee—which will go into effect on January 1, 2024—will impose different per-install costs based on the company's different subscription tiers. Those on the Unity Personal tier (which includes free basic Editor access) will be charged $0.20 per install after an individual game reaches $200,000 in annual revenue and 200,000 lifetime installs.

Users of Unity's Pro and Enterprise tiers (which charge a separate annual subscription for access to a more full-featured Unity Editor) will pay slightly smaller per-install fees starting at $0.125 to $0.15 after a game reaches $1 million in annual revenue and 1 million total installs. The per-install fees for the paid subscription tiers are also subject to "volume discounts" for heavily installed games, going down as low as $0.01 per install for games that are installed 1 million times per month.

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In 1829, Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a doctor living near Wellclose Square in London, dropped a few seeds of fern and grass into a bottle partially filled with soil. Soon, he witnessed tiny blades of grass and one little fern sprouting from the soil, despite the bottle having been sealed. It turned out that plants, cycling through whatever water, minerals, nutrients, and atmosphere they had in their bottle, could live and grow almost completely isolated from the outside world, using sunlight as their only energy source. 

Today, after over six decades of researching bioregenerative life support systems, we’re edging closer to pulling the same trick off in habitats designed to support astronauts on alien worlds.

BIOS and CELSS

Bioregenerative life support systems are the product of two visionaries. In 1926, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky, the founder and first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, elaborated the concept of the biosphere, a closed material cycle on a planetary scale that could be indefinitely sustained in part through life itself. In 1929, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, a Russian rocket scientist, applied Vernadsky’s concept to space travel and proposed using small-scale closed ecosystems to support life on spaceships. The job of those ecosystems would be to produce air and food while recycling waste. 

Enlarge / As usual, Internet forum denizens are picking apart the teaser image for clues. (credit: Apple)

At 1 pm EST on Tuesday, September 12, Apple will begin broadcasting its annual event focused on new flagship iPhones and Apple Watch wearables. As has long been a tradition here at Ars Technica, we'll be liveblogging the proceedings right here. Head back to this page when the event starts to see the updates roll in!

Apple hasn't talked publicly about what it plans to announce, but given the timing and past history, you can bet we'll see the iPhone 15 family of phones—likely including the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Ultra, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Max. The Apple Watch will also get some airtime, with new updates to the Apple Watch Series 8 and possibly the Apple Watch Ultra.

We're expecting the big news to be Apple's inclusion of a USB-C port in the iPhone 15—thrilling, right? But there are surely other new features and tweaks planned. We know comparatively little about what to expect from the Watch lineup, though.

Enlarge / FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) were the heart and soul of The X-Files. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

In September 1993, fictional FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) made their broadcast TV debut on The X-Files and went on to investigate alien abductions and all manner of strange phenomena for nine full seasons and two feature films, followed by two additional limited-run seasons in 2016 and 2018. This hugely popular and influential series celebrates its 30th anniversary this month, giving us a prime opportunity to pay homage to our favorite episodes and characters.

(Spoilers for The X-Files below.)

The X-Files was created by Chris Carter, who was a fan of the 1970s horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, featuring a wire service reporter (Darren McGavin) investigating mysterious crimes with a supernatural or science fiction element. Other cited influences included The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Twin Peaks (in which Duchovny played a transgender DEA agent), and Jonathan Demme's 1988 Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, a fairly ordinary tech company was transformed into a most unusual private corporation. Many strange things have happened at the Musk-owned social network, but this article will focus on just one puzzling aspect of Musk's leadership: His apparent refusal to pay bills.

Over two dozen lawsuits alleged that Twitter—which rebranded itself as "X" in late July—refused to pay money owed to vendors who started providing services to the company before Musk bought it. In fact, suing X seems to be the most effective method of collecting on unpaid invoices. This article will provide a summary of each lawsuit and an update on each case's status.

X agreed to settle some of the allegations, allowing some vendors to recoup at least part of what they were owed. Settlement talks are proceeding in other cases, and at least one went to arbitration. But X has taken a hard stance in fighting some unpaid-bill lawsuits, and several could head to jury trials.

Enlarge / AMD's Radeon RX 7800 XT. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Nearly a year ago, Nvidia kicked off this GPU generation with its GeForce RTX 4090. The 4090 offers unparalleled performance but at an unparalleled price of $1,600 (prices have not fallen). It's not for everybody, but it's a nice halo card that shows what the Ada Lovelace architecture is capable of. Fine, I guess.

The RTX 4080 soon followed, along with AMD's Radeon RX 7900 XTX and XT. These cards also generally offered better performance than anything you could get from a previous-generation GPU, but at still-too-high-for-most-people prices that ranged from between $900 and $1,200 (though all of those prices have fallen by a bit). Fine, I guess.

By the time we got the 4070 Ti launch in May, we were getting down to the level of performance that had been available from previous-generation cards. These GPUs offered a decent generational jump over their predecessors (the 4070 Ti performs kind of like a 3090, and the 4070 performs kind of like a 3080). But those cards also got big price bumps that took them closer to the pricing levels of the last-gen cards they performed like. Fine, I guess.

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Did you know that improper food canning can lead to death? Botulism—the result of bacteria growing inside improperly treated canned goods—is rare, but people can die from it. In any case, they'll certainly get very ill.

The dangers of food canning were explained to me clearly, succinctly, and with cited sources by Brad Barclay and someone going by Dromio05 on Reddit (who asked to withhold their real name for privacy reasons). Both were recently moderators on the r/canning subreddit and hold science-related master's degrees.

Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.

(credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

August was an eventful month for driverless taxis in San Francisco. On August 10, the California Public Utilities Commission voted to allow Google’s Waymo and GM’s Cruise to begin charging customers for driverless taxi rides across the city. A week later, Cruise vehicles were involved in two serious crashes within hours of one another. The next day, the California Department of Motor Vehicles demanded that Cruise cut its driverless taxi fleet in half while these crashes were investigated.

A few days later, New York Times reporter Cade Metz appeared on the Times’s flagship podcast, The Daily, to discuss these developments and the state of the self-driving industry.

Metz argued that in recent weeks, it has become “more and more clear to the people riding the cars, and to other citizens in the city, that they are flawed, that they do make mistakes, that they can gum up traffic, that they can cause accidents.”

Enlarge / We are all but specks amid Starfield's vast cosmos.

There's a quote from Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. “Space is big,” he writes. “You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.”

Starfield may as well put this quote on the cover page of its design document. The deafening prerelease hype for the game emphasizes its inclusion of “over 1,000 planets,” across hundreds of realistically rendered star systems throughout the galaxy. That promotion has also focused on just how much stuff there is to do across those myriad planets; Bethesda Head of Publishing Pete Hines said in a recent interview with IGN that he’s spent 150–160 hours in the game and “hasn’t even come close” to seeing everything.

After a few dozen hours with a prerelease version of Starfield, I’m comfortable saying that Hines isn’t being hyperbolic. One look at the game’s intricate star map and the myriad star systems you can reach with a series of warp-speed jumps is enough to give you vertigo.

If you can focus on Starfield’s “core story” questline, which focuses on a collection of mysterious, vision-granting Artifacts strewn across the galaxy, you may well be able to reach the “ending” of the game in a reasonable amount of time. If you’re anything like me, though, you’ll find yourself quickly sidetracked by a cornucopia of optional missions that start to grow almost fractally, with each new quest flowing into offers of multiple further quests along the way.