Beyond screens: Mercedes-Benz's new holographic heads-up display

Beyond screens: Mercedes-Benz's new holographic heads-up display

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

Mercedes-Benz provided flights from Los Angeles to Stuttgart, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could experience the holographic display. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

Do screens in cars represent luxury? Judging by the latest car interiors, the answer would seem to be an emphatic “yes.” Screens aren't just getting larger; they are multiplying across the dashboard and morphing into different forms and concepts. Indeed, an interior’s screens are a pretty good indicator of what brand made the car—or at least how much the owner paid for it.

But is this actually what customers want? Are more screens really better? And even if they are, luxury car features inevitably trickle down to cheaper, more mainstream offerings, and screens can only get so big. That leaves luxury automakers with another question to answer: “What’s next?”

Mercedes-Benz is working on a new display alternative that could provide an answer. For now, it's known as the holographic display. Forget the images from Star Trek and Star Wars that just popped into your head, though. It's effectively a more advanced form of heads-up display, or HUD.

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"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation

"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

After seven years of work and nearly $1 billion, the Smithsonian has completed the renovation of the National Air and Space Museum's flagship building in Washington, DC.

On October 30, the museum debuted its last-to-open spaceflight exhibition, returning "home" with a gallery devoted to establishing a spacefaring civilization.

"Welcome to 'At Home in Space'!" said curator Jennifer Levasseur, who guided us through a virtual tour of the gallery. "This is the story of long-duration spaceflight in the last few decades. We generally call it 'reaching orbit.'"

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Why large dogs age faster than small ones, and other October research highlights

Why large dogs age faster than small ones, and other October research highlights

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. October’s list includes an epigenetic mechanism for why large dogs age faster than smaller ones; physicists who trapped a single particle of antimatter for months; and invisible tattoo inks that only show up under UV light.

Why large dogs age faster

In many mammalian species, larger creatures tend to have longer lifespans. Mice, for instance, live an average of just two years, while some whales can last for as long as 200 years. Dogs, however, buck this pattern; larger dogs tend to age faster and die younger than smaller ones, which makes canines an ideal model for biologists to study to learn more about aging in general. Arizona State University scientists report that these lifespan differences seem to be due to so-called "jumping genes," according to a paper published in the journal Science.

The authors used data from 864 dogs collected in the Dog Aging Project to map patterns of DNA methylation (which influences how much certain genes are turned on or off) across the entire genome. It's part of the epigenome, whose markers can change over time in response to stress and other environmental factors. Genetic sequences, by contrast, are largely fixed. So DNA methylation is a good chemical indicator of aging and DNA regulation.

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Third person dies of bird flu since virus started jumping to livestock

Third person dies of bird flu since virus started jumping to livestock

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

A person in Washington state has died from bird flu after exposure at an infected dairy farm, state health officials reported Sunday. It marks the third human bird flu death in the US since a strain of highly pathogenic (H5) avian influenza (HPAI) made the unprecedented jump from wild, migratory birds to dairy cows, which was first reported in the US in March 2024.

The person who died was a Yakima County resident and was said to have had underlying health conditions, which could have made the person more vulnerable to the infection. On Friday, county officials reported that the person was severely ill and hospitalized. In the subsequent announcement of the person's death, officials said they would not be releasing further information about the person, including their name, gender, or age, out of respect for the family's privacy.

"Our hearts go out to the individual's family and loved ones during this difficult time," Dave Atteberry, health officer for the Yakima Health District, said in a statement. "Avian influenza can cause severe illness, particularly among people who have underlying health conditions. While this is a serious and heartbreaking outcome, the risk to the general public remains low."

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Googling "Zelda" today offers a glimpse of how search worked in 1998

Googling "Zelda" today offers a glimpse of how search worked in 1998

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

The year was 1998. Britney Spears topped the charts, Bill Clinton was impeached, and a couple of little websites called Google and Ars Technica came online. It was also the year Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64. Google, which has come to dominate the Internet (Ars is still working on that), is celebrating the imminent release of the Ocarina of Time remaster by temporarily transporting us back to that storied year with a search Easter egg.

To access the Google time machine, you just have to search for either "Zelda" or "Ocarina of Time." Google will load the standard 2026 results page, but you'll see an animated Master Sword in the lower right corner. It appears on both mobile and desktop—just click the sword and enjoy the show.

After a little time-skipping animation and a Link shout (you know the one), you'll swear it's 1998 again. The search page is transformed into a simple list of blue links with retro Google branding. This is particularly apt given the time-shifting mechanics in Ocarina of Time.

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Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree

Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

It's widely acknowledged that it's nearly impossible to publish negative results in scientific journals. "We didn't see anything" is a much harder sell than finding that a hypothesis is clearly right. Findings of no effect tend to either be shuffled off to low-profile journals or left behind as unpublished lab lore.

The high-profile journal Nature, however, made a notable exception this week, publishing a study that tells us that a bunch of methods we have been using to try to measure a key emotional ability don't seem to be measuring the same thing. The results mean that we don't have a good way to measure the impact of a concept that is the basis of a key method in therapy.

Inconsistencies

One of the most successful forms of therapy is cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. In part, CBT is based on getting people to step back and engage in "cognitive reappraisal." This requires people to think over a situation that has caused a negative emotional response and find ways to reinterpret it so that it has less impact on them. The ability to engage in this process has been linked to emotional resilience.

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Coming in 2027: Apple’s $1,000 home robot for FaceTime and switching on lights

Coming in 2027: Apple’s $1,000 home robot for FaceTime and switching on lights

fivenewscrypto    novembre 03, 2026   

Apple’s new CEO, John Ternus, is apparently pushing the tech company’s development of household robots—and the first to debut may be a home robot designed to autonomously roam around while supporting FaceTime calls and switching lights on whenever a person enters the room.

People who worked on Apple’s robotic projects told The Information that the AI-driven home robot, code-named J595, could be named HomeView Ultra in line with Apple’s new HomeView stationary smart display. The company is reportedly aiming to launch the robotic product with a possible price tag of $1,000 or more by 2027, although development delays may push that back to 2028.

The earliest prototypes of the home robot first came out in 2018 and received approval from former Apple CEO Tim Cook to continue the project. The Information describes Apple’s engineers as trying to give the robot more capabilities beyond being a “fancy way to make FaceTime calls” in order to justify a high price tag, even as the team has spent years refining the software and incorporating more AI technologies.

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