Last Friday, in an op-ed piece on the Trump administration's war on American universities , we called for academia to 1) band together and 2) resist coercive control over hiring and teaching, though we noted that the 3) "temperamental caution of university administrators" means that they might "have trouble finding a clear voice to speak with when they come under thundering public attacks from a government they are more used to thinking of as a funding source."

It only took billions of dollars in vindictive cuts to make it happen, but higher education has finally 1) banded together to 2) resist coercive control over its core functions. More than 230 leaders, mostly college and university presidents, have so far signed an American Association of Colleges and Universities statement that makes a thundering call gentle bleat for total resistance "constructive engagement" with the people currently trying to cripple, shutter, and/or dominate them. Clearly, 3) temperamental caution remains the watchword. Still, progress! (Even Columbia University, which has already capitulated to Trump administration pressure, signed on.)

The statement largely consists of painful pablum about how universities "provide human resources to meet the fast-changing demands of our dynamic workforce," etc, etc. As a public service, I will save you some time (and nausea) by excerpting the bits that matter:

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Climate tipping points pose grave risks to human health—and, unsurprisingly, approaching them while tipsy only makes the fallout more blistering, according to a case study in the New England Journal of Medicine .

In this week's issue, NEJM spotlights the effects of the climate crisis on clinical health with a series of case studies. One is the searing story of an inebriated gentleman who regrettably took a one-minute walk while barefoot during the unprecedented 2021 Northwest heat dome . The man walked across asphalt during the extreme weather, in which air temperatures reached as high as 42° C (108° F). That's about 21° C (38° F) above historical averages for the area.

Asphalt can absorb 95 percent of solar radiation and easily reach 40° F to 60° F above air temperatures on hot days. It's unclear how hot the asphalt was when the man walked across it, but it was clearly hot enough to melt some flesh.

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The remedy phase of Google's antitrust trial is underway, with the government angling to realign Google's business after the company was ruled a search monopolist . The Department of Justice is seeking a plethora of penalties, but perhaps none as severe as forcing Google to sell Chrome . But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.

Among the DOJ's witnesses on the second day of the trial was Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI. He wasn't there to talk about Chrome exclusively—the government's proposed remedies also include forcing Google to share its search index with competitors.

OpenAI is in bed with Microsoft, but Bing's search data wasn't cutting it, Turley suggested (without naming Microsoft). "We believe having multiple partners, and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users," OpenAI told Google in an email revealed at trial. However, Google turned OpenAI down because it believed the deal would harm its lead in search. The companies have no ongoing partnership today, but Turley noted that forcing Google to license its search data would restore competition.

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Google has made an unusual announcement about browser cookies, but it may not come as much of a surprise given recent events. After years spent tinkering with the Privacy Sandbox, Google has essentially called it quits. According to Anthony Chavez, VP of the company's Privacy Sandbox initiative , Google won't be rolling out a planned feature to help users disable cookies. Instead, cookie support will remain in place as is, possibly forever.

Beginning in 2019, Google embarked on an effort under the Privacy Sandbox banner aimed at developing a new way to target ads that could preserve a modicum of user privacy. This approach included doing away with third-party cookies, small snippets of code that advertisers use to follow users around the web.

Google struggled to find a solution that pleased everyone. Its initial proposal for FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) was widely derided as hardly any better than cookies. Google then moved on to the Topics API , but the company's plans to kill cookies have been delayed repeatedly since 2022.

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T-Mobile is making another long-term price guarantee, but wireless users will rightfully be skeptical since T-Mobile refused to honor a previously offered lifetime price lock and continues to fight a lawsuit filed by customers who were harmed by that broken promise. Moreover, the new plans that come with a price guarantee will have extra fees that can be raised at any time.

T-Mobile today announced new plans with more hotspot data and a five-year price guarantee, saying that "T-Mobile and Metro customers can rest assured that the price of their talk, text and data stays the same for five whole years, from the time they sign up." The promise applies to the T-Mobile "Experience More" and "Experience Beyond" plans that will be offered starting tomorrow. The plans cost $85 or $100 for a single line after the autopay discount, which requires a debit card or bank account.

The price-lock promise also applies to four new Metro by T-Mobile plans that launch on Thursday. T-Mobile's announcement came three weeks after Verizon announced a three-year price lock.

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In 2019, Garrett Mitchell was already an Internet success. His YouTube channel, Cleetus McFarland , had over a million followers . If you perused the channel at that time, you would’ve found a range of grassroots motorsports videos with the type of vehicular shenanigans that earn truckloads of views. Some of those older videos include " BLEW BY A COP AT 120+mph! OOPS! ," " THERE'S A T-REX ON THE TRACK! ," and " Manual Transmission With Paddle Shifters!?! ."

Those videos made Mitchell, aka Cleetus McFarland, a known personality among automotive enthusiasts. But the YouTuber wanted more financial independence beyond the Google platform and firms willing to sponsor his channel.

“… after my YouTube was growing and some of my antics [were] getting videos de-monetized, I realized I needed a playground,” Mitchell told Ars Technica in an email.

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Over 12 years ago, a reclusive DoomWorld forum member going by the handle Okuplok released what he called "a slaughter map" for Doom 2 . Packed to the gills with 23,211 enemies (often in extremely claustrophobic corridors), the level quickly gained a reputation in the classic Doom player community as being one of the hardest ever constructed .

That reputation didn't stop classic FPS streamer Coincident , who has been grinding away at the "Okuplok slaughter map" in some form or another for years. And over the weekend, Coincident became the first player to defeat every enemy and complete the map in a single segment during a livestreamed marathon run that clocked in at just over six hours.

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Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.

These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ East Coast, in pockets of the West Coast, and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.

What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life at all—and the ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.

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Whether anything ever lived on Mars is unknown. And the present environment, with harsh temperatures, intense radiation, and a sparse atmosphere, isn’t exactly propitious for life. Despite the red planet’s brutality, lichens that inhabit some of the harshest environments on Earth could possibly survive there.

Lichens are symbionts, or two organisms that are in a cooperative relationship. There is a fungal component (most are about 90 percent fungus) and a photosynthetic component (algae or cyanobacteria). To see if some species of lichen had what it takes to survive on Mars, a team of researchers led by botanist Kaja Skubała used the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences to expose the lichen species Diploschistes muscorum and Cetrarea aculeata to simulate Mars conditions.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate that the metabolism of the fungal partner in lichen symbiosis was active while being in a Mars-like environment,” the researchers said in a study recently published in IMA Fungus. “X-rays associated with solar flares and SEPs reaching Mars should not affect the potential habitability of lichens on this planet.”

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