Today, federal safety investigators opened a new investigation aimed at Tesla's electric vehicles. This is now the 14th investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and one of several currently open . This time, it's the automaker's highly controversial "full self-driving" feature that's in the crosshairs—NHTSA says it now has four reports of Teslas using FSD and then crashing after the camera-only system encountered fog, sun glare, or airborne dust.

Of the four crashes that sparked this investigation , one caused the death of a pedestrian when a Model Y crashed into them in Rimrock, Arizona, in November 2023.

NHTSA has a standing general order that requires it to be told if a car crashes while operating under partial or full automation. Fully automated or autonomous means cars might be termed "actually self-driving," such as the Waymos and Zooxes that clutter up the streets of San Francisco. Festooned with dozens of exterior sensors, these four-wheel testbeds drive around—mostly empty of passengers—gathering data to train themselves with later, with no human supervision. (This is also known as SAE level 4 automation.)

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At this point, we're used to AI-powered image tools that instantly pull off previously high-effort edits, like filling in the missing bits of a scene or erasing unwanted parts of a photo without affecting the background. But a new Adobe Illustrator tool demonstrated at this week's Adobe MAX conference takes 2D image editing things in a literal different direction, letting artists instantly transform 2D vector images into 3D models that can be rotated around the axis of the screen itself.

"Project Turntable" is currently just a tightly controlled demo, part of a set of "Sneaks" that aren't ready to roll out to the public just yet. But even the short early demo shown on stage has some intriguing time-saving implications for working 2D artists.

You spin me right round

In a quick five-minute stage presentation at the MAX conference, Adobe researcher Zhiqin Chen starts with a 2D, vectorized Illustrator scene of a warrior fighting a dragon. The warrior is staring directly out of the screen, though, and turning him to face the dragon on his left would usually require "redraw[ing] the entire shape, which is going to take a lot of time," as Chen points out.

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If you're using a large battery for a specialized purpose—say grid-scale storage or an electric vehicle—then it's possible to tweak the battery chemistry, provide a little bit of excess capacity, and carefully manage its charging and discharging so that it enjoys a long life span. But for consumer electronics, the batteries are smaller, the need for light weight dictates the chemistry, and the demand for quick charging can be higher. So most batteries in our gadgets start to see serious degradation after just a couple of years of use.

A big contributor to that is an internal fragmentation of the electrode materials. This leaves some of the electrode material disconnected from the battery's charge handling system, essentially stranding the material inside the battery and trapping some of the lithium uselessly. Now, researchers have found that, for at least one battery chemistry, it's possible to partially reverse some of this decay, boosting the remaining capacity of the battery by up to 30 percent.

The only problem is that not many batteries use the specific chemistry tested here. But it does show how understanding what's going on inside batteries can provide us with ways to extend their lifespan.

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Welcome to Edition 7.16 of the Rocket Report! Even several days later, it remains difficult to process the significance of what SpaceX achieved in South Texas last Sunday. The moment of seeing a rocket fall out of the sky and be captured by two arms felt historic to me, as historic as the company's first drone ship landing in April 2016. What a time to be alive.

As always, we welcome reader submissions , and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Surprise! Rocket Lab adds a last-minute mission . After signing a launch contract less than two months ago, Rocket Lab says it will launch a customer as early as Saturday from New Zealand on board its Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab added that the customer for the expedited mission, to be named "Changes In Latitudes, Changes In Attitudes," is confidential. This is an impressive turnaround in launch times and will allow Rocket Lab to burnish its credentials for the US Space Force, which has prioritized "responsive" launch in recent years.

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A few months back, I put together a big fat guide on how to configure DNS and DHCP on your LAN the old-school way , with bind and dhcpd working together to seamlessly hand out addresses to hosts on your network and also register those hosts in your LAN's forward and reverse DNS lookup zones. The article did really well—thanks for reading it!—but one thing commenters pointed out was that my preferred dhcpd implementation, the venerable isc-dhcp-server, reached end-of-life in 2022 . To replace it, ISC has for many years been working on the development of a new DHCP server named Kea .

Kea (which for this piece will refer mainly to the isc-kea-dhcp4 and isc-kea-dhcp-ddns applications) doesn't alter the end-user experience of receiving DHCP addresses—your devices won't much care if you're using isc-dhcp-server or isc-kea-dhcp4. Instead, what Kea brings to the table is a new codebase that jettisons the older dhcpd's multi-decade pile of often crufty code for a new pile of much less crufty code that will (hopefully) be easier to maintain and extend.

Many Ars readers are aware of the classic Joel on Software blog post about how rewriting your application from scratch is almost never a good idea , but something like isc-dhcp-server—whose redesign is being handled planfully by the Internet Systems Consortium—is the exception to the rule.

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Enlarge / 3D rendering of an NK Cell destroying a cancer cell. (credit: https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/cell-destroying-a-cancer-cell-royalty-free-image/1250270667 )

Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

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Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | AaronP/Bauer-Griffin )

A mistrial was declared today in the trial of former AT&T Illinois President Paul La Schiazza, who was accused of bribing a powerful state lawmaker's ally in order to obtain legislation favorable to AT&T's business.

"The jury report they have reached an impasse and cannot reach a unanimous verdict. For the reasons stated on the record, the court declares a mistrial," US District Judge Robert Gettleman wrote in an order today after the trial in the Northern District of Illinois.

La Schiazza could be tried again. AT&T itself agreed to pay a $23 million fine in 2022 to resolve a federal criminal investigation into alleged misconduct involving efforts to influence former Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan. AT&T "admitted that in 2017 it arranged for an ally of Madigan to indirectly receive $22,500 in payments from the company," the Justice Department said in October 2022 .

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Enlarge / Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma and Virendra Sachdeva, two members of Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party, celebrate the landing of India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft on the Moon on August 23, 2023. (credit: Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images )

All at once, India's government has approved plans to develop a new reusable rocket, the centerpiece of an Indian space station, and robotic sample return mission to the Moon, and a science probe to explore Venus.

"Great news for the space sector!" Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X . Collectively, the projects authorized by India's union cabinet will cost an estimated $2.7 billion. Most of the funding will go toward the country's space station and a reusable launch vehicle.

If the projects reach their goals, the approvals announced by Modi on Wednesday will put India on a trajectory to become the third-largest space power in the 2030s, after the United States and China. V. Narayanan, director of India's Liquid Propulsion Systems Center, stated this was the objective in a recent presentation , writing that India's space initiatives will catapult the country to a place "among the three important space powers in the world."

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Enlarge / The Windows App runs on Windows, but also macOS, iOS/iPadOS, web browsers, and Android. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced today that it's releasing a new app called Windows App as an app for Windows that allows users to run Windows and also Windows apps (it's also coming to macOS, iOS, web browsers, and is in public preview for Android).

On most of those platforms, Windows App is a replacement for the Microsoft Remote Desktop app, which was used for connecting to a copy of Windows running on a remote computer or server—for some users and IT organizations, a relatively straightforward way to run Windows software on devices that aren't running Windows or can't run Windows natively.

The new name, though potentially confusing, attempts to sum up the app's purpose: It's a unified way to access your own Windows PCs with Remote Desktop access turned on, cloud-hosted Windows 365 and Microsoft Dev Box systems, and individual remotely hosted apps that have been provisioned by your work or school.

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