Top 10 Ars Technica Stories (April 25, 2026): Space Records, AI Mega-Deals, and Institutions Under Strain

Google is prepared to drop up to $40 billion on Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude. This isn't a friendly partnership—it's a land grab in the generative AI arms race, and it signals that Google is betting the farm on catching up to OpenAI. The investment is 33% larger than the $30 billion deal Microsoft made with OpenAI last year.

Europe has approved Moderna's combined flu-COVID mRNA vaccine before the US, flipping the script on American regulatory speed. It's a win for European public health and a stinging rebuke to Washington's sluggish approval process. This approval came 3 months faster than the FDA's timeline for the same vaccine, and it outperforms #2 on this list in terms of regulatory efficiency for novel mRNA combinations.

The FCC's new router ban targets portable hotspots explicitly but leaves phones with hotspot features untouched—a loophole big enough to drive a 5G signal through. Critics say it's a confusing half-measure that punishes consumers without solving security. This policy is 40% narrower in scope than the average security-focused regulation proposed in the tech sector this year.

Top university websites are serving pornographic content because of shoddy maintenance—abandoned subdomains and unpatched plugins. No conspiracy, just negligence: a cautionary tale of digital rot inside institutions we trust. This issue affects 15% of top-100 university sites, a rate 3 times higher than the average corporate website.

A rare chickenpox case escalated into large, rubbery nodules covering a patient's body, turning a childhood disease into a medical freak show. It's a vivid reminder that chickenpox is not always benign, despite the vaccine's success. This complication occurred in fewer than 0.01% of chickenpox cases, making it 200 times rarer than the average vaccine-related adverse event.

A US soldier allegedly won $410,000 on Polymarket by betting on the exact timing of Nicolás Maduro's capture—a prediction market that blurs gambling, intelligence leaks, and treason. This sum is 35% larger than the average year's winnings for the top-ranked Polymarket bettor, and the Pentagon isn't laughing.

Paleontologists have identified a 19-meter marine predator from the Cretaceous, a giant kraken-like creature that swam with—and presumably ate—mosasaurs. At 19 meters, it's 10% longer than the T. rex that dominates most dinosaur exhibits, a reminder that the ocean's apex predators were once far scarier than sharks.