The Chevrolet Bolt was one of the earliest electric vehicles to offer well over 200 miles (321 km) of range at a competitive price. For Ars, it was love at first drive , and that remained true from model year 2017 through MY2023. On the right tires, it could show a VW Golf GTI a thing or two , and while it might have been slow-charging, it could still be a decent road-tripper .

All of this helped the Bolt become General Motors' best-selling EV, at least until its used-to-be-called Ultium platform got up and running. And that's despite a costly recall that required replacing batteries in tens of thousands of Bolts because of some badly folded cells . But GM had other plans for the Bolt's factory, and in 2023, it announced its impending death .

The reaction from EV enthusiasts, and Bolt owners in particular, was so overwhelmingly negative that just a few months later, GM CEO Mary Barra backtracked, promising to bring the Bolt back , this time with a don't-call-it-Ultium-anymore battery.

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Welcome to Edition 8.14 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than a week into a federal government shutdown, but there's been little effect on the space industry. Military space operations are continuing unabated, and NASA continues preparations at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the launch of the Artemis II mission around the Moon early next year. The International Space Station is still flying with a crew of seven in low-Earth orbit, and NASA's fleet of spacecraft exploring the cosmos remain active. What's more, so much of what the nation does in space is now done by commercial companies largely (but not completely) immune from the pitfalls of politics. But the effect of the shutdown on troops and federal employees shouldn't be overlooked. They will soon miss their first paychecks unless political leaders reach an agreement to end the stalemate.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Danger from dead rockets. A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions, Ars reports . "The things left before 2000 are still the majority of the problem," said Darren McKnight, lead author of a paper presented October 3 at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. "Seventy-six percent of the objects in the top 50 were deposited last century, and 88 percent of the objects are rocket bodies. That's important to note, especially with some disturbing trends right now."

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On January 1, 2008, at 1:59 AM in Calipatria, California, an earthquake happened. You haven’t heard of this earthquake; even if you had been living in Calipatria, you wouldn’t have felt anything. It was magnitude -0.53, about the same amount of shaking as a truck passing by. Still, this earthquake is notable, not because it was large but because it was small—and yet we know about it.

Over the past seven years, AI tools based on computer imaging have almost completely automated one of the fundamental tasks of seismology: detecting earthquakes. What used to be the task of human analysts—and later, simpler computer programs—can now be done automatically and quickly by machine learning tools.

These machine learning tools can detect smaller earthquakes than human analysts, especially in noisy environments like cities. Earthquakes give valuable information about the composition of the Earth and what hazards might occur in the future.

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An October meeting of a key federal vaccine advisory committee has been canceled without explanation, sparing the evidence-based childhood vaccination schedule from more erosion—at least for now.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was planning to meet on October 22 and 23 , which would have been the committee's fourth meeting this year. But the meeting schedule was updated in the past week to remove those dates and replace them with "2025 meeting, TBD."

Ars Technica contacted the Department of Health and Human Services to ask why the meeting was canceled. HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard offered no explanation, only saying that the "official meeting dates and agenda items will be posted on the website once finalized."

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Scraping the open web for AI training data can have its drawbacks. On Thursday, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute released a preprint research paper suggesting that large language models like the ones that power ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude can develop backdoor vulnerabilities from as few as 250 corrupted documents inserted into their training data.

That means someone tucking certain documents away inside training data could potentially manipulate how the LLM responds to prompts, although the finding comes with significant caveats.

The research involved training AI language models ranging from 600 million to 13 billion parameters on datasets scaled appropriately for their size. Despite larger models processing over 20 times more total training data, all models learned the same backdoor behavior after encountering roughly the same small number of malicious examples.

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New York Comic Con (NYCC) has kicked off with an extended teaser for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms , a new Game of Thrones spinoff series based on George R.R. Martin's novella series, Tales of Dunk and Egg .

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms adapts the first novella in the series, The Hedge Knight, and is set 50 years after the events of House of the Dragon . Per the official premise:

A century before the events of Game of Thrones , two unlikely heroes wandered Westeros: a young, naïve but courageous knight, Ser Duncan the Tall, and his diminutive squire, Egg. Set in an age when the Targaryen line still holds the Iron Throne and the last dragon has not yet passed from living memory, great destinies, powerful foes and dangerous exploits all await these improbable and incomparable friends.

Peter Claffey co-stars as Ser Duncan the Tall, aka a hedge knight named "Dunk," along with Dexter Sol Ansell as Prince Aegon Targaryen, aka "Egg," a child prince and Dunk's squire. The main cast also includes Finn Bennett as Egg's older brother, Prince Aerion "Brightflame" Targaryen; Bertie Carvel as Egg's uncle, Prince Baelor "Breakspear" Targaryen, heir to the Iron Throne; Tanzyn Crawford as a Dornish puppeteer named Tanselle; Daniel Ings as Ser Lyonel "Laughing Storm" Baratheon, heir to House Baratheon; and Sam Spruell as Prince Maekar Targaryen, Egg's father.

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For gamers of a certain age, gibberish character sequences like idkfa , torg , ABACABB , and UUDDLRLRBA are akin to long-lost magical incantations. They evoke an era where game developers frequently and routinely let players use cheat codes to customize their gameplay experience with everything from infinite health and instant level selection to full debug menus or gigantic anime-style giant-headed avatars . There were even external cheat devices that let players hack console games with cheat codes the developers never intended.

While the cheat code's heyday is long in the past, the idea of letting players manipulate their gameplay experiences in similar ways is coming back into fashion for some developers. Last month, Square Enix announced that upcoming Switch 2 and Xbox ports of Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade would include new "streamlined progression" features. As the name implies, the new options menu will give players the opportunity to blaze through the game with infinite health, magic, and money, quicker leveling, maximum damage attacks, and more.

While some responded negatively to what they derisively called a "cheat mode," director Naoki Hamaguchi defended the new options in a recent interview with Automaton . "Personally, I like to try many different games just to keep myself up to date, but I don’t really have the time, so I only get so far," he said. "I personally believe that, with digital entertainment today, the player should have the choice in how they interact with content. That’s why I pushed for it."

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A few weeks ago, Google told US Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) that it would allow creators banned for COVID and election misinformation to rejoin the platform . It didn't offer many details in the letter, but now YouTube has explained the restoration process . YouTube's "second chances" are actually more expansive than the letter made it seem. Going forward, almost anyone banned from YouTube will have an opportunity to request a new channel. The company doesn't guarantee approval, but you can expect to see plenty of banned creators back on Google's video platform in the coming months.

This program appears much broader than Google's letter to Jordan suggested. YouTube will now allow any banned creator to request reinstatement, but this is separate from appealing a ban. If a channel is banned, creators continue to have the option of appealing the ban. If successful, their channel comes back as if nothing happened. After one year, creators will now have the "second chance" option.

"We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance," the blog post reads. The option for getting a new channel will appear in YouTube Studio on the desktop, and Google expects to begin sending out these notices in the coming months. However, anyone terminated for copyright violations is out of luck—Google does not forgive such infringement as easily as it does claiming that COVID is a hoax.

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Apple yesterday announced a plan to comply with a Texas age verification law and warned that changes required by the law will reduce privacy for app users.

"Beginning January 1, 2026, a new state law in Texas—SB2420—introduces age assurance requirements for app marketplaces and developers," Apple said yesterday in a post for developers . "While we share the goal of strengthening kids' online safety, we are concerned that SB2420 impacts the privacy of users by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores."

The Texas App Store Accountability Act requires app stores to verify users' ages and imposes restrictions on those under 18. Apple said that developers will have "to adopt new capabilities and modify behavior within their apps to meet their obligations under the law."

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