2026's historic snow drought is bad news for the West

2026's historic snow drought is bad news for the West

fivenewscrypto    mars 27, 2026   

Across much of the Western United States, winter 2026 was the year the snow never came. Many ski resorts got by with snowmaking but shut down their winter operations early. Fire officials and water supply managers are worried about summer.

Where I live in Boise, Idaho, temperatures hit the low 80s Fahrenheit (high-20s Celsius) in mid-March. The same heat dome sent temperatures soaring to 105° F (40° C) in Phoenix.

Ordinarily, water managers and hydrologists like me who study the Western US expect the mountain snowpacks to be at their fullest around April 1. Snowpacks are natural reservoirs of water that farms and communities depend on through the hot, dry summer. Their snow water equivalent, meaning the amount of liquid water in the snowpack, is seen as a bellwether for water supplies.

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We got an audience with the "Lunar Viceroy" to talk how NASA will build a Moon base

We got an audience with the "Lunar Viceroy" to talk how NASA will build a Moon base

fivenewscrypto    mars 27, 2026   

At the end of a long day on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked down at a table littered with microphones and jokingly referred to the space agency's new Moon base manager, Carlos Garcia-Galan, as the "Lunar Viceroy." It was a bit of humor, but it also seemed to represent affection from Isaacman for a long-time NASA employee so willingly taking on a major new challenge.

Garcia-Galan was, in many ways, the emerging star at the daylong Ignition event in Washington, DC. Heretofore he has largely been an anonymous engineer at NASA who has now been thrust into a very public role of leading the agency's ambitious Moon base initiative. (His official title, by the way, is program executive.)

Ars had a chance to speak with Garcia-Galan about NASA's plans and, more importantly, how they might be implemented. Here is a lightly edited (for clarity) transcript of that conversation.

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Meta, YouTube must pay $3M to woman who got hooked on apps as a child

Meta, YouTube must pay $3M to woman who got hooked on apps as a child

fivenewscrypto    mars 27, 2026   

On Wednesday, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and YouTube to pay $3 million in damages to a young woman who successfully argued that the companies' social media apps were designed to addict children.

Meta will pay the majority of the fine, 70 percent, while YouTube-owner Google is on the hook for 30 percent, the jury decided.

During the six-week trial, the jury heard that Meta and Google designed apps with features like auto-play, infinite scroll, and algorithmic recommendations to keep kids online. Feeling trapped in a cycle of constantly using these apps caused the plaintiff, known as K.G.M., "crippling mental distress," CNBC reported. She developed "severe body dysmorphia, depression, and suicidal thoughts," and every notification that came through made it harder to stop logging in.

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Nintendo's physical Switch 2 games will soon cost more than digital copies

Nintendo's physical Switch 2 games will soon cost more than digital copies

fivenewscrypto    mars 27, 2026   

Update, March 26, 2:45pm ET: Nintendo has released a clarifying statement on its announcement from yesterday, suggesting that it’s actually lowering prices of digital games rather than raising the prices of physical ones. The statement, as reported by IGN, is as follows:

"The cost of physical games is not going up. This means that when Nintendo sells digital versions of Nintendo published games exclusive to Nintendo Switch 2 to consumers in the U.S., those prices will have an MSRP that is lower than their physical counterparts. Retail partners set their own prices for physical and digital games, and pricing for each title may vary."

Whether prices are being “raised” or “lowered” depends on your point of view; the upcoming Yoshi game will cost $60 for a digital copy, which up until last year was the price that Nintendo charged for most of its first-party Switch 1 titles. But it is true that $60 is $10 less than the digital versions of recent Switch 2 first-party releases like Donkey Kong Bananza or Kirby Air Riders (to date, Nintendo has charged $70 or $80 for new Switch 2 games, but hasn’t said what makes a $70 game a $70 game or an $80 game an $80 game).

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Supreme Court rejects Sony's attempt to kick music pirates off the Internet

Supreme Court rejects Sony's attempt to kick music pirates off the Internet

fivenewscrypto    mars 26, 2026   

The Supreme Court today decided that Internet service providers cannot be held liable for their customers' copyright infringement unless they take specific steps that cause users to violate copyrights. The court ruled unanimously in favor of Internet provider Cox Communications, though two justices did not agree with the majority's reasoning.

The ruling effectively means that ISPs do not have to conduct mass terminations of Internet users accused of illegally downloading or uploading pirated files. If the court had ruled otherwise, ISPs could have been compelled to strictly police their networks for piracy in order to avoid billion-dollar court verdicts under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The long-running case is Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment. Cox was hit with a $1 billion verdict for music piracy in 2019. Although the damages award was overturned in 2024, a federal appeals court still found that Cox was liable for willful contributory infringement.

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Antibiotic resistance among germs swells during droughts, study suggests

Antibiotic resistance among germs swells during droughts, study suggests

fivenewscrypto    mars 26, 2026   

For as long as we've known that soil bacteria manufacture molecular weapons to fight each other, we've been swiping their battle plans. In clinics and hospitals, those turf-war weapons have become miraculous drugs of modern medicine—antibiotics—that blow away otherwise deadly infections.

But, of course, there's a dark side of mimicking microbial munitions—bacteria have defenses, too, namely antibiotic resistance. You're probably aware that we're facing a rising threat of drug resistance among disease-causing bacteria, one that is rendering much of our stolen weaponry obsolete and making infections harder to defeat.

Often, this growing crisis is framed as a clinical failure: We're overusing and misusing antibiotics, hastening our bacterial foes' natural ability to develop and spread resistance. While this is certainly true, a new study in Nature Microbiology this week identifies a potentially new driver of rising antibiotic resistance—and we're at least partly to blame for this one, too.

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Disney cancels $1 billion OpenAI partnership amid Sora shutdown plans

Disney cancels $1 billion OpenAI partnership amid Sora shutdown plans

fivenewscrypto    mars 26, 2026   

OpenAI's recently announced plans to shutter its Sora video-generating app have also scuttled the company's planned $1 billion licensing partnership with Disney, according to multiple press reports.

"As the nascent AI field advances rapidly, we respect OpenAI’s decision to exit the video generation business and to shift its priorities elsewhere," Disney said in a statement provided to media outlets. "We appreciate the constructive collaboration between our teams and what we learned from it, and we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators."

Disney and OpenAI announced the blockbuster three-year licensing deal in December, saying that over 200 Disney-owned characters would be available for use in Sora-generated videos. At the same time, Disney said it would be making a $1 billion equity investment in the AI company.

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