theck1 IT/AI news

Don’t lick that cold metal pole in winter—if you do, don’t panic

Jennifer Ouellette • March 11, 2026 We all remember that infamous scene in the 1983 classic, A Christmas Story, where a boy licks a cold metal post on the playground and ends up getting his tongue stuck to the surface. It’s practically a childhood rite of passage. A 1996 case study coined the term “tundra

What crackdown? Trump’s EPA enforcement claims don’t pass sniff test.

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Wyatt Myskow and Lisa Sorg, Inside Climate News • March 11, 2026 For over a decade, Hino Motors Ltd. imported and sold more than 105,000 vehicles and engines with misleading or fabricated emissions data, until testing by the Environmental Protection Agency revealed the emissions-fraud scheme. The case would lead the Toyota subsidiary to plead guilty

Verdict: Yes, you should go see Project Hail Mary as soon as possible

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Lee Hutchinson • March 11, 2026 First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re

NIH director launches “Scientific Freedom” lectures with non-scientist

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John Timmer • March 11, 2026 On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it’s calling “Scientific Freedom Lectures,” with the first scheduled for March 20. The “freedom” theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered

Nvidia is reportedly planning its own open source OpenClaw competitor

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Kyle Orland • March 11, 2026 Chipmaker Nvidia is preparing to launch its own open source AI agent platform to compete with the likes of OpenClaw, according to a recent Wired report. The magazine cites “people familiar with the company’s plans” in reporting that Nvidia has been pitching the platform, which it is calling NemoClaw,

Anduril, the autonomous weapons maker, doubles the size of its space unit

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Stephen Clark • March 11, 2026 Anduril Industries announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring ExoAnalytic Solutions, a space intelligence firm that operates a vast network of sensors monitoring the veiled movements of satellites thousands of miles above Earth. “For nearly twenty years, ExoAnalytic has delivered important advantage[s] for the nation’s most critical missions,” Anduril

Intel shores up its desktop CPU lineup with boosted Core Ultra 200S Plus chips

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Andrew Cunningham • March 11, 2026 Intel’s Core Ultra 200S desktop chips, codenamed “Arrow Lake,” first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel’s desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn’t mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they’re power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th-

A glimpse into tuner culture: Fast and Furious exhibit at the Petersen

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Jonathan M. Gitlin • March 11, 2026 The Fast and Furious franchise has come a long way in the quarter-century since the first film’s release. Originally an undercover cop story, the franchise has morphed into… something else entirely. It’s now a bombastic expression of automotive culture combined with some kind of caper, maybe to save

Binance sues WSJ, panicked by gov’t probes into sanctioned crypto transfers

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Ashley Belanger • March 11, 2026 Binance is hoping that suing The Wall Street Journal for defamation might help shake off a fresh round of government probes into how the cryptocurrency exchange failed to detect $1.7 billion in transfers to a network that was funding Iran-backed terror groups. The lawsuit comes after a Wall Street

“Use a gun” or “beat the crap out of him”: AI chatbot urged violence, study finds

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Jon Brodkin • March 11, 2026 An advocacy group said its study of 10 artificial intelligence chatbots found that most of them gave at least some help to users planning violent attacks and that nearly all failed to discourage users from violence. Several chatbot makers say they have made changes to improve safety since the