FX/Hulu dropped a surprise short teaser for its upcoming spinoff series, Alien: Earth , during the AFC Championship game last night. What makes it intriguing is the way it's shot entirely from a Xenomorph's point of view as the creature races through a spaceship's corridor while a "containment breached!" warning repeats. The final shot said the spaceship is headed on a crash course toward Earth.

The official premise is short and sweet: "When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat." We know very little yet about the specifics of the series other than that it is set two years before the events of the first film, Alien (1979).

It's promising that showrunner Noah Hawley has said that the style and mythology will be closer to that film, rather than Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant , both of which were also prequels. “In the prequels, Ridley [Scott] made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien , which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future," he said last January . "There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films, and so that’s the choice I’ve made—there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple Store technology is not available to me.”

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It was apparently a busy weekend for key players involved in Donald Trump's efforts to make a deal to save TikTok.

Perhaps the most appealing option for ByteDance could be if Trump blessed a merger between TikTok and Perplexity AI—a San Francisco-based AI search company worth about $9 billion that appears to view a TikTok video content acquisition as a path to compete with major players like Google and OpenAI.

On Sunday, Perplexity AI submitted a revised merger proposal to TikTok-owner ByteDance, reviewed by CNBC, which sources told AP News included feedback from the Trump administration.

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Broadcom's ownership of VMware has discouraged many of its customers , as companies are displeased with how the trillion-dollar firm has run the virtualization business since buying it in November 2023. Many have discussed reducing or eliminating ties with the company .

Now, over a year after the acquisition, the pressure is on for customers to start committing to a VMware subscription, forego VMware support, or move on from VMware technologies. The decision is complex, with long-term implications no matter which way a customer goes.

Ars Technica spoke with an IT vendor manager who has been using VMware's vSphere since the early 2000s. The employee, who works for a global food manufacturing firm with about 5,500 employees, asked to keep their name and company anonymous due to privacy concerns for the business.

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DAYTONA, Florida—This might make you feel old, but the Mazda MX-5 Miata just turned 35. Still in its fourth generation— better known to Miata nerds as the "ND" —this small, affordable, lightweight sports car is the perfect antidote to, well, just about everything else on the roads. And to celebrate this latest milestone, Mazda has created a new special anniversary edition, which it unveiled at this past weekend's Rolex 24 at Daytona.

When the Miata debuted in 1989, it was something of a game-changer. Inspired by classic European roadsters like those built by MG and Alfa Romeo, it was small, lithe, and, most importantly, reliable. It didn't hurt that it looked nice and was great to drive.

It's also been something of a hit among amateur racers—Mazda is proud that each weekend, more Miatas are on track than any other make of car. That goes some way to explaining why Mazda chose this year's Rolex 24 at Daytona to reveal the new 35th Anniversary Edition—the MX-5 Cup series is probably IMSA's most exciting support series.

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On Monday morning, Nvidia stock dove 11 percent amid worries over the rise of Chinese AI company DeepSeek , whose R1 reasoning model stunned industry observers last week by challenging American AI supremacy with a low-cost, freely available AI model, and whose AI assistant app jumped to the top of the iPhone App Store's "Free Apps" category over the weekend, overtaking ChatGPT.

What’s the big deal about DeepSeek?

The drama started around January 20 when Chinese AI startup DeepSeek announced R1 , a new simulated reasoning (SR) model that it claimed could match OpenAI's o1 in reasoning benchmarks. Like o1, R1 is trained to work through a simulated chain of thought process before providing an answer, which can potentially improve the accuracy or usefulness of the AI models' outputs for some types of questions posed by the user.

That first part wasn't too surprising since other AI companies like Google are hot on the heels of OpenAI with their own simulated reasoning models. In addition, OpenAI itself has announced an upcoming SR model (dubbed "o3") that can surpass o1 in performance.

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If one were to observe that I have written critically about Blue Origin over the last half-decade, they would not be wrong.

The reality is that the space company founded by Jeff Bezos has underperformed. Its chief executive for most of this time, Bob Smith, was poorly regarded by his employees. He brought the worst of "old space" tendencies to Blue Origin from Honeywell. And under Smith's leadership, Blue was litigious, slow, and unproductive.

Frankly, it was a bad look for Bezos. He was pumping something on the order of $2 billion a year into Blue Origin for what, exactly? Lawsuits against NASA? Jokes about BE-4 rocket engine delays?

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This year marks the return of the Jeep Wagoneer, which formerly served as a more luxurious version of the Cherokee, but now hits the market as Jeep's first full EV. The challenge? How to merge the modern electric lifestyle with the outdoorsy, rugged ethos that defines Jeep as a brand, alongside the more recent addition of the internal-combustion Grand Wagoneer SUV's enormous luxury.

First of all, the new Wagoneer S wound up much smaller in person than I expected. The overall profile falls more in line with the shape of mid-size electric crossovers including the Kia EV6 , Hyundai Ioniq 5 , Chevrolet Equinox , and of course, Tesla's Model Y. But the interior volume belies that relatively compact exterior, with plenty of space for me at 6'1" (185 cm) to sit comfortably in both the front and rear seats. Total cargo volumes of 30.6 cubic feet (866 L) with the second row up and 61 cubic feet (1,727 L) with the second row folded flat end up mattering less than the large floor footprint, because the height used to calculate those measurements drops with the low sloping roofline and rear window.

Much of the interior space can be attributed to packaging of the Wagoneer EV's battery. Rather than going for all-out kilowatt-hours in a dedicated skateboard layout, Jeep instead used the Stellantis group's STLA Large platform, in this case stuffed with a 100.5-kWh lithium ion pack built on 400 V architecture. That's enough for an EPA-estimated 303 miles of range (487 km), a solid figure but not a seriously impressive efficiency stat. In comparison, the world-beating Lucid Air Pure RWD manages about 40 percent more range per kilowatt-hour and a Polestar 3 AWD does about 18 percent worse. Claimed DC fast charge times of 23 minutes for a 20-80 percent top up, or 100 miles (160 km) in 10 minutes similarly get the job done without standing out from the pack.

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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.

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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.

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