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Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt was the most difficult book I've ever written. I'm a cosmologist—I study the origins, structure, and evolution of the Universe. I love science. I live and breathe science. If science were a breakfast cereal, I'd eat it every morning. And at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I watched in alarm as public trust in science disintegrated.

But I don't know how to change people's minds. I don't know how to convince someone to trust science again. So as I started writing my book, I flipped the question around: is there anything we can do to make the institution of science more worthy of trust?

The short answer is yes. The long answer takes an entire book. In the book, I explore several different sources of mistrust—the disincentives scientists face when they try to communicate with the public, the lack of long-term careers, the complicitness of scientists when their work is politicized, and much more—and offer proactive steps we can take to address these issues to rebuild trust.

The section below is taken from a chapter discussing the relentless pressure to publish that scientists face, and the corresponding explosion in fraud that this pressure creates. Fraud can take many forms, from the "hard fraud" of outright fabrication of data, to many kinds of "soft fraud" that include plagiarism, manipulation of data, and careful selection of methods to achieve a desired result. The more that fraud thrives, the more that the public loses trust in science. Addressing this requires a fundamental shift in the incentive and reward structures that scientists work in. A difficult task to be sure, but not an impossible one—and one that I firmly believe will be worth the effort.

Modern science is hard, complex, and built from many layers and many years of hard work. And modern science, almost everywhere, is based on computation. Save for a few (and I mean very few) die-hard theorists who insist on writing things down with pen and paper, there is almost an absolute guarantee that with any paper in any field of science that you could possibly read, a computer was involved in some step of the process.

Whether it’s studying bird droppings or the collisions of galaxies, modern-day science owes its very existence—and continued persistence—to the computer. From the laptop sitting on an unkempt desk to a giant machine that fills up a room, “S. Transistor” should be the coauthor on basically all three million journal articles published every year.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are making it increasingly difficult to distinguish between uniquely human behaviors and those that can be replicated by machines. Should artificial general intelligence (AGI) arrive in full force—artificial intelligence that surpasses human intelligence—the boundary between human and computer capabilities will diminish entirely.

In recent months, a significant swath of journalistic bandwidth has been devoted to this potentially dystopian topic. If AGI machines develop the ability to consciously experience life, the moral and legal considerations we’ll need to give them will rapidly become unwieldy. They will have feelings to consider, thoughts to share, intrinsic desires, and perhaps fundamental rights as newly minted beings. On the other hand, if AI does not develop consciousness—and instead simply the capacity to out-think us in every conceivable situation—we might find ourselves subservient to a vastly superior yet sociopathic entity.

Neither potential future feels all that cozy, and both require an answer to exceptionally mind-bending questions: What exactly is consciousness? And will it remain a biological trait, or could it ultimately be shared by the AGI devices we’ve created?

Enlarge / No, we haven't photoshopped the rear wheel of this electric motorcycle; it uses a hubless motor. (credit: Michael Teo Van Runkle)

Despite the fact that Americans buy more electric bicycles than electric cars, widespread adoption of electric motorcycles still lags well behind both. Part of the sluggish sales pace likely comes down to high prices, but as tech continues to evolve, e-moto sticker shock will eventually subside.

Lower prices will only enhance the obvious benefits of electrifying motorbikes: silent operation, quick and easy charging, fewer moving parts to service, and a smaller footprint while commuting. In the meantime, one of the most interesting concepts on the market today comes courtesy of a company called Verge, in Finland, with an utterly baffling hubless rear-wheel motor design.

As usual with bleeding-edge tech, Verge's first model, the TS, commands a serious premium: a base TS starts at $26,900, and the mid-level TS Pro adds $3,000 to that, while the TS Ultra ramps all the way up to $49,900. I recently test-rode an early TS Pro that Verge shipped to the United States, hoping to prove whether this hubless rear motor truly deserves a future in the industry or simply represents another over-priced gimmick.

Enlarge / Interior view of the Rhino Barn. Exposed fossil skeletons left in-situ for research and public viewing. (credit: Rick E. Otto, University of Nebraska State Museum)

Death was everywhere. Animal corpses littered the landscape and were mired in the local waterhole as ash swept around everything in its path. For some, death happened quickly; for others, it was slow and painful.

This was the scene in the aftermath of a supervolcanic eruption in Idaho, approximately 1,600 kilometers (900 miles) away. It was an eruption so powerful that it obliterated the volcano itself, leaving a crater 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide and spewing clouds of ash that the wind carried over long distances, killing almost everything that inhaled it. This was particularly true here, in this location in Nebraska, where animals large and small succumbed to the eruption’s deadly emissions.

Eventually, all traces of this horrific event were buried; life continued, evolved, and changed. That's why, millions of years later in the summer of 1971, Michael Voorhies was able to enjoy another delightful day of exploring.

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For many artists, it's a precarious time to post art online. AI image generators keep getting better at cheaply replicating a wider range of unique styles, and basically every popular platform is rushing to update user terms to seize permissions to scrape as much data as possible for AI training.

Defenses against AI training exist—like Glaze, a tool that adds a small amount of imperceptible-to-humans noise to images to stop image generators from copying artists' styles. But they don't provide a permanent solution at a time when tech companies appear determined to chase profits by building ever-more-sophisticated AI models that increasingly threaten to dilute artists' brands and replace them in the market.

In one high-profile example just last month, the estate of Ansel Adams condemned Adobe for selling AI images stealing the famous photographer's style, Smithsonian reported . Adobe quickly responded and removed the AI copycats. But it's not just famous artists who risk being ripped off, and lesser-known artists may struggle to prove AI models are referencing their works. In this largely lawless world , every image uploaded risks contributing to an artist's downfall, potentially watering down demand for their own work each time they promote new pieces online.

Enlarge / Microsoft's Surface Pro 11, the first flagship Surface to ship exclusively using Arm processors. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Microsoft has been trying to make Windows-on-Arm-processors a thing for so long that, at some point, I think I just started assuming it was never actually going to happen.

The first effort was Windows RT , which managed to run well enough on the piddly Arm hardware available at the time but came with a perplexing new interface and couldn't run any apps designed for regular Intel- and AMD-based Windows PCs. Windows RT failed, partly because a version of Windows that couldn't run Windows apps and didn't use a familiar Windows interface was ignoring two big reasons why people keep using Windows.

Windows-on-Arm came back in the late 2010s, with better performance and a translation layer for 32-bit Intel apps in tow. This version of Windows, confined mostly to oddball Surface hardware and a handful of barely promoted models from the big PC OEMs, has quietly percolated for years. It has improved slowly and gradually, as have the Qualcomm processors that have powered these devices.

Enlarge / Image of Hurricane Beryl captured from the International Space Station on Monday. (credit: Matthew Dominick/NASA)

Officially, of course, the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1, But most years, the tropics remain fairly sleepy for the first month or two, allowing coastal residents to ease into the season.

Yes, a tropical storm might form here or a modest hurricane there. But the really big and powerful hurricanes, which develop from tropical waves in the central Atlantic and roar into the Caribbean Sea, do not spin up until August or September when seas reach their peak temperatures.

Not so this year, in which the Atlantic Ocean is boiling already. The seas in the main development region of the Atlantic have already reached temperatures not normally seen until August or September. This has led to the rapid intensification of Hurricane Beryl, which crashed through the Windward Islands on Monday and is now traversing the Caribbean Sea toward Jamaica.

Enlarge / Preparing to install the floppy disk edition of FreeDOS 1.3 in a virtual machine. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Two big things happened in the world of text-based disk operating systems in June 1994.

The first is that Microsoft released MS-DOS version 6.22, the last version of its long-running operating system that would be sold to consumers as a standalone product. MS-DOS would continue to evolve for a few years after this, but only as an increasingly invisible loading mechanism for Windows.

The second was that a developer named Jim Hall wrote a post announcing something called “PD-DOS.” Unhappy with Windows 3.x and unexcited by the project we would come to know as Windows 95, Hall wanted to break ground on a new “public domain” version of DOS that could keep the traditional command-line interface alive as most of the world left it behind for more user-friendly but resource-intensive graphical user interfaces.

Enlarge / The peloton passing through a sunflowers field during the stage eight of the 110th Tour de France in 2023. (credit: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Most readers probably did not anticipate seeing a Tour de France preview on Ars Technica, but here we are. Cycling is a huge passion of mine and several other staffers, and this year, a ton of intrigue surrounds the race, which has a fantastic route . So we're here to spread Tour fever.

The three-week race starts Saturday, paradoxically in the Italian region of Florence. Usually, there is a dominant rider, or at most two, and a clear sense of who is likely to win the demanding race. But this year, due to rider schedules, a terrible crash in early April, and new contenders, there is more uncertainty than usual. A solid case could be made for at least four riders to win this year's Tour de France.

For people who aren't fans of pro road cycling—which has to be at least 99 percent of the United States—there's a great series on Netflix called Unchained to help get you up to speed. The second season, just released, covers last year's Tour de France and introduces you to most of the protagonists in the forthcoming edition. If this article sparks your interest, I recommend checking it out.