2025-08-15 21:44:59
Acura's next RSX crossover has broken cover. The automaker has used this year's Monterey Car Week as a stage to show off a bright yellow prototype—the color is called Propulsion Yellow Pearl—ahead of the production car going on sale next year. And unlike the current generation (which Ars last tested back in 2019) RDX, this crossover will be fully electric.
It will be built at the Honda Marysville Auto Plant that we checked out back in January. The 40-year old factory has been given a high-tech refit that has not only made the factory more energy efficient and a better working environment for employees but also prepared it to incorporate electric vehicles into the assembly line.
In recent years, Acura has grappled with its self-image. Although it's often perceived as a luxury brand, Acura has always been more of a North American performance arm of Honda, and the automaker wants to lean into that. Unlike the brand's first battery electric vehicle the ZDX, which is a rebadged General Motors EV, the RSX was designed entirely in-house.
2025-08-15 19:00:44
Porsche 911 enthusiasts tend to be obsessive about their engines. Some won't touch anything that isn't air-cooled, convinced that everything went wrong when emissions and efficiency finally forced radiators into the car. Others love the "Mezger" engines; designed by engineer Hans Mezger, they trace their roots to the 1998 Le Mans-winning car, and no Porschephile can resist the added shine of a motorsports halo.
I'm quite sure none of them will feel the same way about the powertrain in the new 911 Carrera GTS T-Hybrid (MSRP: $175,900), and I think that's a crying shame. Because not only is the car's technology rather cutting-edge—you won't find this stuff outside an F1 car—but having spent several days behind the wheel, I can report it might just be one of the best-driving, too.
This is not just one of Porsche's existing flat-six engines with an electric motor bolted on; it's an all-new 3.6 L engine designed to comply with new European legislation that no longer lets automakers rich out a fuel mixture under high load to improve engine cooling. Instead, the engine has to maintain the same 14.7:1 stoichiometric air-to-fuel ratio (also known as lambda = 1) across the entire operating range, thus allowing the car's catalytic converters to work most efficiently.
2025-08-15 06:18:06
Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"?
The answer is countries.
Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai-Shek," and the number "13."
2025-08-15 05:11:06
xAI apparently lost a government contract after a tweak to Grok's prompting triggered an antisemitic meltdown where the chatbot praised Hitler and declared itself MechaHitler last month.
Despite the scandal, xAI announced that its products would soon be available for federal workers to purchase through the General Services Administration. At the time, xAI claimed this was an "important milestone" for its government business.
But Wired reviewed emails and spoke to government insiders, which revealed that GSA leaders abruptly decided to drop xAI's Grok from their contract offering. That decision to pull the plug came after leadership allegedly rushed staff to make Grok available as soon as possible following a persuasive sales meeting with xAI in June.
2025-08-15 04:32:02
Starlink operator SpaceX is fighting Virginia's plan to deploy fiber Internet service to residents, claiming that federal grant money should be given to Starlink instead. SpaceX is already in line to win over $3 million in grant money in the state but is seeking $60 million.
Starlink is poised to benefit from the Trump administration rewriting rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program. While the Biden administration decided that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future-proof networks, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a "tech-neutral approach" and lower the average cost of serving each location.
With the Trump administration backing its attempt to obtain more federal funding for Starlink, SpaceX is likely to object to state plans that still include significant fiber builds. That's what happened yesterday when SpaceX filed comments on Virginia's final proposal, which will be reviewed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).
2025-08-15 04:04:22
Big tech has spent the last few years creating ever-larger AI models, leveraging rack after rack of expensive GPUs to provide generative AI as a cloud service. But tiny AI matters, too. Google has announced a tiny version of its Gemma open model designed to run on local devices. Google says the new Gemma 3 270M can be tuned in a snap and maintains robust performance despite its small footprint.
Google released its first Gemma 3 open models earlier this year, featuring between 1 billion and 27 billion parameters. In generative AI, the parameters are the learned variables that control how the model processes inputs to estimate output tokens. Generally, the more parameters in a model, the better it performs. With just 270 million parameters, the new Gemma 3 can run on devices like smartphones or even entirely inside a web browser.
Running an AI model locally has numerous benefits, including enhanced privacy and lower latency. Gemma 3 270M was designed with these kinds of use cases in mind. In testing with a Pixel 9 Pro, the new Gemma was able to run 25 conversations on the Tensor G4 chip and use just 0.75 percent of the device's battery. That makes it by far the most efficient Gemma model.
