Audi has a new flagship designed with the US in mind: The 2027 Q9

Audi has a new flagship designed with the US in mind: The 2027 Q9

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Munich, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could see the Q9 and Q7. And we also drove the new RS5. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

MUNICH—It has taken Audi a little longer than its rivals, but with the debut of the 2027 Q9 this evening, the company has joined them in offering a range-topping full-size SUV. No, not the Q7, although a third-generation version of that vehicle broke cover in June. The car was designed first and foremost for Europe, with a third row of seats that's fine for small children or occasional use. But in America, there's a segment one size larger, pioneered by the Cadillac Escalade, and it's here we find the new Audi. With no concrete plans to replace the A8 sedan yet, the Q9 SUV becomes the brand's new flagship.

At 209 inches (5,309 mm) long, 79.2 inches (2,012 mm) wide, and 71.4 inches (1,814 mm) tall, it's definitely not diminutive, although parked next to the aforementioned Caddy, you'll find the American SUV exceeds this one by a few inches here and there. The 123.5-inch wheelbase (3,137 mm) is 5.6 inches (142 mm) longer than the Q7's, much of which translates to more room for the third row.

The silhouette is like a station wagon, but scaled up by 1.3x. Credit: Audi

OLED rear lights are an option. Credit: Audi

The Q9 looked big in the studio, but it was less imposing than a Mercedes-Benz GLS or BMW X7. The body panels feature more curves and more subtle creases than the Audis of a few years ago. And there are definite station wagon vibes, but that’s mostly because its big wheels make it look smaller and closer rather than bigger and farther away (aka, the Father Dougal principle.)

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Reaction wheel failures leave Swift rescue mission spinning in orbit

Reaction wheel failures leave Swift rescue mission spinning in orbit

fivenewscrypto    juillet 30, 2026   

Nearly a month since its launch, a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite built to save NASA's Swift gamma-ray telescope from a fiery reentry is having problems of its own, the agency announced Tuesday.

The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies "experienced issues with attitude control" over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.

"Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link's three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system," NASA said.

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College lab class ends with 32 people on antibiotics for deadly germ exposure

College lab class ends with 32 people on antibiotics for deadly germ exposure

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

A bizarre series of events in a college microbiology lab class left 33 people—including students, professors, and lab workers—believing they were exposed to a deadly germ. Of those, 32 began taking an antibiotic regimen as a precaution to prevent a life-threatening infection. Two also underwent lumbar punctures—aka spinal taps—after developing mild symptoms.

But none of them had actually been exposed to a dangerous pathogen, a fortunate twist in the strange incident, which otherwise stands to be a cautionary tale for the ages. The incident was published in a recent issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

It began with a simple laboratory exercise. The microbiology lab students were supposed to be given mystery bacteria by their instructors and then identify the microbe based on a series of biochemical tests and morphological characterization.

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We now have a better understanding how OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face

We now have a better understanding how OpenAI hacked into Hugging Face

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

Last week’s unprecedented security event in which two OpenAI security hacking models trespassed into the network of fellow AI company Hugging Face was enabled by exploiting one or more zero-day vulnerabilities in Artifactory, JFrog, the product’s developer, said Monday.

In an incident mimicking a dystopian sci-fi novel, two OpenAI models broke out of the restricted environment meant to keep them from accessing the Internet during an internal test, the AI company revealed last week. The models went on to breach Hugging Face’s network and steal confidential information and credentials. OpenAI said its agent achieved the feat by exploiting a previously unknown vulnerability. The company called the event “unprecedented,” and outsiders largely agreed.

Not the triumph it was made out to be

OpenAI said the models exploited multiple attack vectors, including stolen credentials and zero-days, to gain remote code execution capabilities, but until now, the vulnerable software was unknown. JFrog’s Monday disclosure said the product was a self-managed instance Artifactory, a repository management system that secures and streamlines customers’ software development operations. JFrog says Artifactory is used by more than 7,500 developer Teams, 80 percent of which work for Fortune 100 companies.

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eBay pays $46M to journalists it targeted in bizarre harassment campaign

eBay pays $46M to journalists it targeted in bizarre harassment campaign

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

eBay and three former executives agreed to pay nearly $56 million in a settlement over a macabre campaign of cyberstalking and harassment that targeted two journalists in 2019.

As we've previously written, the case involved deliveries of live cockroaches, a funeral wreath, a book about surviving the loss of a spouse, and a bloody pig mask to the home of a couple who run a news website. There were also harassing messages sent via email and Twitter, and an attempt to install a GPS tracking device on the victims' car. Criminal charges resulted in guilty pleas and prison terms for former eBay employees.

The victims were Ina and David Steiner of Natick, Massachusetts, who run the news website EcommerceBytes. "David and I officially settled the lawsuit we filed in 2021 against eBay and its former executives over the stalking and harassment campaign we endured in 2019 designed to stop our reporting," Ina Steiner wrote on EcommerceBytes yesterday. "The landmark civil rights settlement includes $55.7 million in compensation and charitable commitments."

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Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact

Study: Dinosaurs were charbroiled after Chicxulub impact

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

Some 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact wiped out three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, most notably taking down the dinosaurs. But exactly how that impact caused those extinctions has been the subject of fierce debate. According to a new paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, the impact would have produced an immense cloud of dust that superheated the upper atmosphere, charbroiling living organisms unable to take shelter and igniting widespread wildfires.

As previously reported, the most widely accepted explanation for what triggered that catastrophic mass extinction is known as the “Alvarez hypothesis,” after the late physicist Luis Alvarez and his geologist son, Walter. In 1980, they proposed that the extinction event may have been caused by a massive asteroid or comet hitting the Earth. They based this conclusion on their analysis of sedimentary layers at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary(the K-Pg boundary, formerly known as the K-T boundary) found all over the world, which included unusually high concentrations of iridium—a metal more commonly found in asteroids than on Earth. (That same year, Dutch geophysicist Jan Smit independently arrived at a similar conclusion.)

Since then, scientists have identified a likely impact site: a large crater in Chicxulub, Mexico, in the Yucatan Peninsula, first discovered by geophysicists in the late 1970s. The impactor that created it was sufficiently large (between 11 and 81 kilometers, or 7 to 50 miles) to melt, shock, and eject granite from deep inside the Earth, probably causing a megatsunami and ejecting vaporized rock and sulfates into the atmosphere. It has been estimated that the impact would have released energy over a billion times higher than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

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Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

fivenewscrypto    juillet 29, 2026   

Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers.

The Trump administration and the two largest prediction markets—Kalshi and Polymarket—sued Minnesota after the state enacted the law in May. The cases were consolidated, and a ruling issued yesterday imposed a preliminary injunction blocking the law that was scheduled to take effect on August 1.

Minnesota lawmakers saw prediction markets as indistinguishable from gambling, but the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) argues it has exclusive authority to regulate the platforms under federal law. One of the primary legal questions is whether event contracts are "swaps," which are regulated by the CFTC.

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