The Cadillac Lyriq was the first of a new breed of General Motors' electric vehicles. Built around a common battery platform ( which used to be called Ultium ), the midsize SUV has been on sale for about three years now, and for model year 2026, there's a new version available, the first Cadillac EV to wear the V-series badge.

"V-Series captures the spirit of Cadillac, embodying our relentless pursuit of engineering excellence through our racing and production vehicles," said John Roth, vice president of Global Cadillac. "LYRIQ-V takes this commitment a step further in the EV era, pushing our performance pedigree of V-Series to new heights with a powerful, personalized and high-tech driving experience that fits perfectly into our customers' lives," Roth said.

As with other Cadillac V-series cars, you can expect a much higher power output than the base models. In this case, that's a hefty 615 hp (459 kW) and 650 lb-ft (880 Nm)—not quite double the output of the single-motor Lyriq we drove back in 2023. The Lyriq-V uses a pair of motors to achieve that output, powered by the same 102 kWh battery pack as in the normal Lyriq.

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The US Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Friday it has ordered eight launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts.

The eight launches are divided into two fixed-price "task orders" that Space System Command opened up for bids earlier this year. One covers seven launches with groups of spacecraft for the Space Development Agency's constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites. The other task order is a single mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.

Two eligible bidders

The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $91.7 million per mission. All the missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025.

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It is a matter of settled law on the Judge John Hodgman podcast that people like what they like, and you can't force someone to like something. It is called the Tom Waits Principle.

I thought about that principle constantly while I was trying to open myself up to MechWarrior 5: Clans . Trying to jump into this game and like it, so that I'd have some critical assessment of it, was akin to handing a friend The Black Rider and assuming they would come back begging for more.

From everything I can tell and what I have read, this game largely delivers on the simulation, and notably a lot of the story, that BattleTech / MechWarrior fans revere. Clans seems very good at what it sets out to do, and I do get the sense that it is relatively accommodating to newcomers compared to other entries. It just did not, despite its stand-alone nature and alleged newcomer friendliness, convert me into a loadout tactician or stomp-and-shoot enthusiast.

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Evolution has turned out bizarre and baffling creatures, such as walking fish. It only gets weirder from there. Some of these fish not only walk on the seafloor, but use their leg-like appendages to taste for signs of prey that might be hiding.

Most species of sea robins are bottom-dwellers that both swim and crawl around on “legs” that extend from their pectoral fins. An international team of researchers has now discovered that the legs of the northern sea robin, Prionotus carolinus, double as sensory organs. They are covered in bumps called papillae (similar to those on a human tongue) with taste receptors that detect chemical stimuli coming from buried prey. If they taste something appetizing, they will dig for their next meal.

There is more to this fish than its extraordinary way of hunting. Analysis of P. carolinus genes found that a gene that may date back to the origin of animals controls the formation of both legs and sensory papillae, which hints at how they might have evolved.

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US District Judge Mark Walker had a blunt message for the Florida surgeon general in an order halting the government official's attempt to censor a political ad that opposes restrictions on abortion.

"To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid," Walker, an Obama appointee who is chief judge in US District Court for the Northern District of Florida, wrote yesterday in a ruling that granted a temporary restraining order .

"Whether it's a woman's right to choose, or the right to talk about it, Plaintiff's position is the same—'don't tread on me,'" Walker wrote later in the ruling. "Under the facts of this case, the First Amendment prohibits the State of Florida from trampling on Plaintiff's free speech."

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Fresh water we can use for drinking or agriculture is only about 3 percent of the global water supply, and nearly 70 percent of that is trapped in glaciers and ice caps. So far, that was enough to keep us going, but severe draughts have left places like Jordan, Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa, Spain, and California with limited access to potable water.

One possible solution is to tap into the remaining 97 percent of the water we have on Earth. The problem is that this water is saline, and we need to get the salt out of it to make it drinkable. Desalination is also an energy-expensive process. But MIT researchers led by Jonathan Bessette might have found an answer to that. They built an efficient, self-regulating water desalination system that runs on solar power alone with no need for batteries or a connection to the grid.

Probing the groundwaters

Oceans are the most obvious source of water for desalination. But they are a good option only for a small portion of people who live in coastal areas. Most of the global population—more or less 60 percent—lives farther than 100 kilometers from the coast, which makes using desalinated ocean water infeasible. So, Bessette and his team focused on groundwater instead.

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Amazon workers are being reminded that they can find work elsewhere if they’re unhappy with Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate.

In September, Amazon told staff that they’ll have to RTO five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon employees are currently allowed to work remotely twice a week. A memo from CEO Andy Jassy announcing the policy change said that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” when working at the office.

On Thursday, at what Reuters described as an “all-hands meeting” for Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly told workers:

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Yesterday, it was reported that the US Department of Commerce is investigating the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) over suspicions that the chipmaker may have been subverting 5G export controls to make "artificial intelligence or smartphone chips for the Chinese tech giant Huawei Technologies," sources with direct knowledge told The Information .

The Department of Commerce has yet to officially announce the probe and declined Ars' request for comment. But TSMC promptly issued a statement today, defending itself as "a law-abiding company" that's "committed to complying with laws and regulations, including export controls."

For the past four years, the US has considered Huawei a national security risk after Huawei allegedly provided financial services to Iran , violating another US export control . In that time, US-China tensions have intensified, with the US increasingly imposing tariffs to limit China's access to US tech, most recently increasing tariffs on semiconductors . As competitiveness over AI dominance has heightened, Congress also recently introduced a bill to stop China and other foreign adversaries from accessing American-made AI and AI-enabling technologies.

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Elon Musk's X updated its terms of service to steer user lawsuits to US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, the same court where a judge who bought Tesla stock is overseeing an X lawsuit against the nonprofit Media Matters for America.

The new terms that apply to users of the X social network say that all disputes related to the terms "will be brought exclusively in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas or state courts located in Tarrant County, Texas, United States, and you consent to personal jurisdiction in those forums and waive any objection as to inconvenient forum."

X recently moved its headquarters from San Francisco to Texas, but the new headquarters are not in the Northern District or Tarrant County. X's headquarters are in Bastrop, the county seat of Bastrop County, which is served by US District Court for the Western District of Texas .

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