Two people in Oklahoma have likely contracted measles infections linked to a mushrooming outbreak that began in West Texas, which has now risen to at least 258 cases since late January.

On Tuesday, Oklahoma's health department reported that two people had "exposure associated with the Texas and New Mexico outbreak" and then reported symptoms consistent with measles. They're currently being reported as probable cases because testing hasn't confirmed the infections.

There was no information about the ages, vaccination status, or location of the two cases. The health department said that the people stayed home in quarantine after realizing they had been exposed. In response to local media , a health department spokesperson said it was withholding further information because "these cases don’t pose a public health risk and to protect patient privacy."

Read full article

Comments

The long-running rumors and hints that Microsoft is planning to enter the portable gaming market accelerated forward this week. That's thanks to a Windows Central report that Microsoft is planning to partner with a "PC gaming OEM" for "an Xbox-branded gaming handheld" to be released later this year. The device, code-named Keenan, will reportedly feature "Xbox design sensibilities," such as the branded Xbox guide button, but will almost certainly be a PC gaming device running Windows at its core.

Any Microsoft entry into the world of gaming handhelds will join a market that has become quite crowded in the wake of the Steam Deck's success . To make its own portable gaming effort stand apart, Microsoft will have to bring something unique to the table. Here are some of the features we're hoping will let Microsoft do just that.

A bespoke user interface

For decades, Windows has been designed first and foremost for the world of large monitors driven by a mouse and keyboard world. When hardware makers try to simply stick that OS into a handheld screen size controlled by buttons and analog sticks, the results can be awkward at best .

Read full article

Comments

When Ars finally drove the single-motor BMW i4 eDrive40 last year, we came away very impressed. Until then we'd only sampled the powerful twin-motor i4 M50 , which is fast and fun but a bit too expensive, and it gives away a little too much range in the process. But neither of those is the model most people will buy. All-wheel drive is non-negotiable to car buyers in many parts of the country, and that means they want this one: the i4 xDrive40 Gran Coupe.

If the pictures are giving you a bit of deja vu , that's perfectly normal. Yes, it looks a lot like the BMW 430i Gran Coupe we reviewed yesterday , and the two cars share a lot more than just the CLAR platform that underpins much of BMW's current lineup.

All things being equal, designing a vehicle to be an electric vehicle from the ground up involves many fewer compromises than using a platform that has to cater not just to batteries and electric motors but also internal combustion engines and transmissions and gas tanks.

Read full article

Comments

It's a truism at this point to say that Americans own a lot of guns. Case in point: This week, a fire chief in rural Alabama stopped to help a driver who had just hit a deer . The two men walked up the driveway of a nearby home. For reasons that remain unclear, a man came out of the house with a gun and started shooting. This was a bad idea on many levels, but most practically because both the fire chief and the driver were also armed . Between the three of them, everyone got shot, the fire chief died, and the man who lived in the home was charged with murder.

But despite the ease of acquiring legal weapons, a robust black market still exists to traffic in things like "ghost guns" (no serial numbers) and machine gun converters (which make a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic). According to a major new report released this month by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, there was a 1,600 percent increase in the use of privately made "ghost guns" during crimes between 2017 and 2023. Between 2019 and 2023, the seizure of machine gun converters also increased by 784 percent.

Ars Technica has covered these issues for years , since both "ghost guns" and machine gun converters can be produced using 3D-printed parts, the schematics for which are now widely available online. But you can know about an issue and still be surprised when local prosecutors start talking about black market trafficking rings, inept burglary schemes, murder—and 3D printing operations being run out of a local apartment.

Read full article

Comments

The World Health Organization has begun cost-cutting measures in preparation for a US withdrawal next year, according to reporting by Reuters .

On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withdraw the US from the United Nation's health agency. The country was a founding member of the WHO in 1948 and has since been a key member of the organization, which has 193 other member states. The executive order cited Trump's long-standing complaints about the agency's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, dues payments, and alleged protection of China as the reasons for the withdrawal.

In a statement on Tuesday , the WHO said it "regrets" the announcement and hopes the US will reconsider.

Read full article

Comments

Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted by Tom's Hardware .

The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures "is considered feature-complete and will be frozen in an upcoming release." While all of these architectures—which collectively cover GeForce GPUs from the old GTX 700 series all the way up through 2016's GTX 1000 series, plus a couple of Quadro and Titan workstation cards—are still currently supported by Nvidia's December Game Ready driver package, the end of new CUDA feature support suggests that these GPUs will eventually be dropped from these driver packages soon.

It's common for Nvidia and AMD to drop support for another batch of architectures all at once every few years; Nvidia last dropped support for older cards in 2021 , and AMD dropped support for several prominent GPUs in 2023 . Both companies maintain a separate driver branch for some of their older cards but releases usually only happen every few months, and they focus on security updates, not on providing new features or performance optimizations for new games.

Read full article

Comments

On Thursday, Anthropic announced Citations , a new API feature that helps Claude models avoid confabulations (also called hallucinations) by linking their responses directly to source documents. The feature lets developers add documents to Claude's context window, enabling the model to automatically cite specific passages it uses to generate answers.

"When Citations is enabled, the API processes user-provided source documents (PDF documents and plaintext files) by chunking them into sentences," Anthropic says. "These chunked sentences, along with user-provided context, are then passed to the model with the user's query."

The company describes several potential uses for Citations, including summarizing case files with source-linked key points, answering questions across financial documents with traced references, and powering support systems that cite specific product documentation.

Read full article

Comments

The founder of an AI startup in San Francisco was indicted this week for allegedly conspiring with his wife for six years to defraud investors out of $60 million.

According to a press release from the US Attorney's Office in the Northern District of California, Alexander Beckman—founder of GameOn Technology (now known as ON Platform)—and Valerie Lau Beckman—an attorney hired by GameOn who later became his wife—were charged with 25 counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, identity theft, and other offenses. Lau also faces one charge of obstruction of justice after allegedly deleting evidence.

If convicted, the maximum penalties for Beckman, 41, could exceed 60 years and for Lau, 38, potentially 80 years.

Read full article

Comments

The game of chess has long been central to computer science and AI-related research, most notably in IBM's Deep Blue in the 1990s and, more recently, AlphaZero. But the game is about more than algorithms, according to Marc Barthelemy , a physicist at the Paris-Saclay University in France, with layers of depth arising from the psychological complexity conferred by player strategies.

Now, Barthelmey has taken things one step further by publishing a new paper in the journal Physical Review E that treats chess as a complex system, producing a handy metric that can help predict the proverbial "tipping points" in chess matches.

In his paper, Barthelemy cites Richard Reti , an early 20th-century chess master who gave a series of lectures in the 1920s on developing a scientific understanding of chess. It was an ambitious program involving collecting empirical data, constructing typologies, and devising laws based on those typologies, but Reti's insights fell by the wayside as advances in computer science came to dominate the field. That's understandable. "With its simple rules yet vast strategic depth, chess provides an ideal platform for developing and testing algorithms in AI, machine learning, and decision theory," Barthelemy writes.

Read full article

Comments