I came across possibly one of the weirdest official automotive accessories this morning, courtesy of a friend's social media feed. It's called the "Truckle," and it's a hand-crafted silver and bronze belt buckle that might be the envy of every other cowboy out there, since this one has a place to keep your F-150's key fob without ruining the lines of your jeans.

The Truckle was designed by Utah-based A Cut Above Buckles, with a hand-engraved F-150 on the bump in the front. Behind the truck? Storage space for a Ford truck key fob, which should fit any F-150 from model year 2018 onward.

"You can put your key fob in the buckle—all your remote features work while it’s in the buckle," designer Andy Andrews told the Detroit Free Press . "Once you have it in there, you're not going to lose that key fob. You’re not going to be scratching your head (wondering) where it’s at. It's right there with you in the Truckle."

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Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn't ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded.

Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim to have experienced a powertrain failure at highway speeds.

Jeep pulled the update after reports of problems, but the software had already downloaded to many owners' cars by then. A member of Stellantis' social engagement team told 4xe owners at a Jeep forum to ignore the update pop-up if they haven't installed it yet.

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The Star Trek universe panel at New York Comic Con (NYCC) this weekend concluded with a brand new trailer for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. The ten-episode series will follow the exploits of the first new crop of cadets in a century.

Per the official premise:

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy introduces viewers to a young group of cadets who come together to pursue a common dream of hope and optimism. Under the watchful and demanding eyes of their instructors, they discover what it takes to become Starfleet officers as they navigate blossoming friendships, explosive rivalries, first loves and a new enemy that threatens both the Academy and the Federation itself.

The new cadets include Sandro Rosta as human orphan Caleb Mir; Karim Diané as a Klingon cadet, Jay-Den Kraag; Kerrice Brooks as Sam (Series Acclimation Mil), the first Kasquain to attend the Academy; George Hawkins as Darem Reymi, a Khionian cadet who wants to be a captain; Bella Shepard as Genesis Lythe, a Dar-Sha cadet; and Zoë Steiner as Tarima Sadal, daughter of the president of Betazed. In addition, Holly Hunter plays Academy chancellor Captain Nahla Ake; Gina Yashere plays Cadet Master Lura Thok; Becky Lynch plays a member of Starfleet bridge crew; and Paul Giamatti plays a half-Klingon, half-Tellarite character named Nus Braka, the series' chief villain.

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Cards Against Humanity (CAH) this week announced its newest stunt : a "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" edition that ditches the game's rules and adds explanatory notes to each card in the box. This makes the project "informational material" rather than a "game," and therefore CAH can avoid import tariffs. All profits from the one-off project will be donated to the American Library Association to fight censorship.

While a clever way to stick it to Trump, this week's news did raise a question I've heard from several readers: If CAH is this upset about the whiplash-inducing tariff rates, which are added and then removed with almost no warning, why doesn't it print the game in the US? I mean, it's just a box of cards! How hard can it be?

In the board game space, designers have wrestled with this question for years. While many US-based designers would like to work with local manufacturers, in reality, it's often not possible. Complex board games today may feature cardboard creations like constructible dice towers, custom-shaped and painted wooden markers, multicolored jewel pieces, plastic bits of nearly every possible variety, custom-printed component bags, molded miniatures, cards in multiple sizes, metallic coins, dry-erase boards, fancy box inserts, massive dual-sided playing boards, and long manuals. The only manufacturers capable of doing all this work are generally in China or central Europe (Germany still has good manufacturing, and there are also sites in Poland and the Czech Republic).

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Since launching its bug bounty program nearly a decade ago, Apple has always touted notable maximum payouts— $200,000 in 2016 and $1 million in 2019. Now the company is upping the stakes again. At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris on Friday, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture Ivan Krstić announced a new maximum payout of $2 million for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware .

The move reflects how valuable exploitable vulnerabilities can be within Apple's highly protected mobile environment—and the lengths the company will go to to keep such discoveries from falling into the wrong hands. In addition to individual payouts, the company's bug bounty also includes a bonus structure, adding additional awards for exploits that can bypass its extra secure Lockdown Mode as well as those discovered while Apple software is still in its beta testing phase. Taken together, the maximum award for what would otherwise be a potentially catastrophic exploit chain will now be $5 million. The changes take effect next month.

“We are lining up to pay many millions of dollars here, and there’s a reason,” Krstić tells WIRED. “We want to make sure that for the hardest categories, the hardest problems, the things that most closely mirror the kinds of attacks that we see with mercenary spyware—that the researchers who have those skills and abilities and put in that effort and time can get a tremendous reward."

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Every few weeks, it seems, yet another lab proclaims yet another breakthrough in the race to perfect solid-state batteries: next-generation power packs that promise to give us electric vehicles (EVs) so problem-free that we’ll have no reason left to buy gas-guzzlers.

These new solid-state cells are designed to be lighter and more compact than the lithium-ion batteries used in today’s EVs. They should also be much safer, with nothing inside that can burn like those rare but hard-to-extinguish lithium-ion fires. They should hold a lot more energy, turning range anxiety into a distant memory with consumer EVs able to go four, five, six hundred miles on a single charge.

And forget about those “fast” recharges lasting half an hour or more: Solid-state batteries promise EV fill-ups in minutes—almost as fast as any standard car gets with gasoline.

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An unknown number of federal health employees received termination notifications Friday afternoon as part of a mass reduction in force by the Trump administration that senior officials and federal employment lawyers say is almost certainly illegal.

The Department of Health and Human Services has taken heavy hits since Trump came to office. Early in the year, the Trump administration pushed out 10,000 employees through early retirements, deferred resignations, and other efforts while laying off 10,000 more, slashing the HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 in all. In the current government shutdown—which hinges on a dispute over Affordable Care Act tax credits that 80 percent of Americans support —more than 32,000 HHS employees are furloughed.

In an emailed statement to Ars Technica, HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said that HHS employees "across multiple divisions" have received termination notices.

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These are tough times for Russia's civilian space program. In the last few years, Russia has cut back on the number of Soyuz crew missions it is sending to the International Space Station, and a replacement for the nearly 60-year-old Soyuz spacecraft remains elusive.

While the United States and China are launching more space missions than ever before, Russia's once-dominant launch cadence is on a downhill slide.

Russia's access to global markets dried up after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the country's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The fallout from the invasion killed several key space partnership between Russia and Europe. Russia's capacity to do new things in space seems to be focused on military programs like anti-satellite weapons .

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Amazon Echo Show owners are reporting an uptick in advertisements on their smart displays.

The company's Echo Show smart displays have previously shown ads through the company's Shopping Lists feature, as well as advertising for Alexa skills . Additionally, Echo Shows may play audio ads when users listen to Amazon Music on Alexa.

However, reports on Reddit (examples here , here , and here ) and from The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, who owns more than one Echo Show, suggest that Amazon has increased the amount of ads it shows on its smart displays' home screens. The Echo Show’s apparent increase in ads is pushing people to stop using or even return their Echo Shows.

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