Enlarge / Welcome back. We’ve been expecting you. Nine years ago, The Secret of Monkey Island creator and designer Ron Gilbert wrote a blog post laying out what he would do if he made another Monkey Island game. But now that Gilbert is actually working on Return to Monkey Island—his first work on the franchise in over […]
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Aurich Lawson) Earth Day is April 22nd, and its usual message—take care of our planet—has been given added urgency by the challenges highlighted in the latest IPCC report. This year, Ars is taking a look at the technologies we normally cover, from cars to chipmaking, and finding out how we […]
Enlarge / This illustration shows a concept for a commercial lunar lander from Astrobotic Technology. (credit: NASA) For more than three years, NASA has been intensely focused on the Artemis Moon program. This high-profile international effort, spearheaded by the US space agency at a cost of nearly $7. 5 billion per year, seeks to return […]
Produced and directed by Corey Eisenstein. Click here for transcript. (video link) After spending three episodes looking to the heavens—first at dark matter, then Mars, then black holes—our intrepid host Paul Sutter now turns his gaze to a more terrestrial topic: Why are we here? And I don’t mean in a Nietzschean sense (and if […]
Enlarge / A drone from Alphabet’s Wing delivers a package to a customer. (credit: Wing) Earlier this month, Google’s sister company, Wing, began offering a drone delivery service in the Dallas suburbs of Frisco and Little Elm. Wing drones take off from “nests” in two Walgreens parking lots to deliver things like health products or […]
Cranking in downtown Seattle. [credit: Sam Machkovech ] The cute, portable, and banana yellow $179 Playdate console is now shipping to its first batch of preorder customers, so we’re now free to review the quirkiest gaming system in years. Thanks to chip shortages and general manufacturing chaos, buying Playdate is much less fun than using […]
Enlarge / The OnePlus 10 Pro. It’s a pretty normal smartphone for $900. (credit: Ron Amadeo) OnePlus is in a period of upheaval. The Chinese company lost its co-founder, Carl Pei, in 2020, and it has been undergoing a turbulent merger with Oppo over the past year. No one outside the company knows what the future […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) Ars Technica is pleased to announce its inaugural single-day Frontiers conference, to be held this May 12 in Washington, DC. The conference will explore the interconnectedness of innovation in today’s most pressing matters. As we do so, we will be exploring one key question: Can we still drive explosive growth in […]
Enlarge / The new hotness: RH Rotors at right, compared to older RX Vipers at left. (credit: Lee Hutchinson) It’s always exciting to see an e-mail pop up from Wiaczesław Oziabło—better known as the “Slaw” behind Slaw Device. An engineer and purveyor of high-end flight control pedals for the “crazy enthusiast” market, he’s famous for […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) Benn Jordan was flattered when he scanned his inbox. Jordan is a musician who records and performs under various pseudonyms, most famously as The Flashbulb. His music is best described as electronica with occasional hints of modern jazz, and while he has become pretty successful, he hasn’t headlined […]