Struggling electric truck company Nikola said it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Wednesday and would sell off its assets, effectively ending a challenging journey punctuated by rapid cash burn, allegations of fraud, and the incarceration of its first CEO and founder.

Nikola said it would seek an auction and sale process, pending court approval. The company said it had $47 million in cash on hand to fund its bankruptcy proceedings, implement the sale process, and exit Chapter 11. Nikola listed assets of between $500 million and $1 billion, and estimated its liabilities were between $1 billion and $10 billion, Reuters said citing a court filing.

“Like other companies in the electric vehicle industry, we have faced various market and macroeconomic factors that have impacted our ability to operate,” Steve Girsky, President and CEO of Nikola, said in a statement. “In recent months, we have taken numerous actions to raise capital, reduce our liabilities, clean up our balance sheet and preserve cash to sustain our operations. Unfortunately, our very best efforts have not been enough to overcome these significant challenges, and the Board has determined that Chapter 11 represents the best possible path forward under the circumstances for the Company and its stakeholders.”

The filing represents a fall from grace for the once buzzy company that aimed to transform the polluting heavy-truck industry into one based on zero emissions. Founded in 2015, Nikola pitched the idea of zero-emission big rigs using hydrogen fuel cell technology, and later said it would include battery-electric trucks as well. The company scored a huge win in 2020 when General Motors announced plans to would help Nikola engineer and manufacture its battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, including the Badger pickup truck. In exchange, GM would acquire an 11 percent equity stake in the startup.

But less than a week later, short-selling firm Hindenburg Research published a bombshell report accusing Nikola of fraud, including the video showing the truck rolling down a hill to simulate driving. The report set off a chain reaction that resulted in founder Trevor Milton’s stepping down as board chair and CEO and his eventual arrest.  Later, GM backed out of the equity deal.

In addition to staging the video, Milton was accused of falsely claiming to produce his own hydrogen fuels at below-market rates and obtaining “billions and billions and billions and billions” of dollars’ worth of committed truck orders. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Nikola went public in 2020, and started shipping its first trucks less than a year later. It ramped up production in 2024, but was losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on every truck it sold. As of the third quarter of last year, the company had only produced 600 vehicles, many of which have been recalled due to defects, costing the automaker tens of millions of dollars.

Nikola was the latest high-profile EV company to go belly after failing to meet high expectations. Other EV startups that failed include Lordstown, Proterra, and Fisker. TuSimple, a self-driving truck company from China, pivoted to gaming tech.

Mark Flores sits at the kitchen table drawing birthday cakes. At 44, he loves to draw circles, a skill he’s mastered over the past decade of his life. His thick black hair is neatly combed like the Superman cartoon on his T-shirt. Grasping thick Crayola markers, he lines up small circles in rows within larger oblong shapes. Mark has accomplished much more than his mother, Yvette, was told he ever could when he was born — when doctors said he wouldn’t be able to interact with people because of his intellectual disabilities.

Instead, Mark greets most people with a big, toothy smile, stoops over to give them a hug if they’re willing, and is quick to answer most questions with an enthusiastic “yeah.”

When Mark coughs at the table, Yvette asks him if he needs water. “You don’t have to, Mark, you can say no,” she says, her soft brown eyes behind black cat-eye glasses. “We’re learning ‘no,’” she says to me as an aside. Like her son, she’s quick to flash a smile. Her dark hair falls loosely around her shoulders, streaked with silver against her face. 

Yvette was working at a factory in the early days of Silicon Valley when she got pregnant with Mark. An …

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Working at the intersection of Apple's newest hardware and Linux kernel development, for the benefit of a free distribution, was never going to be easy. But it's been an especially hard couple of weeks for Hector Martin, project lead for Asahi Linux, capping off years of what he describes as burnout, user entitlement, and political battles within the Linux kernel community about Rust code.

In a post on his site, "Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead," Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking projects, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated games. Martin shifted his focus, and when Apple unveiled its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin writes, "I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project." This time, there was no jailbreaking and a relatively open, if tricky, platform.

Support and donations came quickly. The first two years saw rapid advancement of a platform built "from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation." Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, across "practically every Linux subsystem," was an "incredibly frustrating experience" (emphasis Martin's).

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The cadre of elite disease detectives at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is expected to be left in ruin today as the Trump administration continues to slash the federal workforce.

Many members of the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, EIS—a globally revered public health training program—were informed earlier Friday that they were about to be fired, according to reporting from Stat News. Multiple sources told CBS News that half of EIS officers are among the ongoing cuts.

The Trump administration is ousting thousands of probationary federal workers in a wide-scale effort to dramatically slim agencies.

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An asteroid discovered late last year is continuing to stir public interest as its odds of striking planet Earth less than eight years from now continue to increase.

Two weeks ago, when Ars first wrote about the asteroid, designated 2024 YR4, NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimated a 1.9 percent chance of an impact with Earth in 2032. NASA's most recent estimate has the likelihood of a strike increasing to 3.2 percent. Now that's not particularly high, but it's also not zero.

Naturally the prospect of a large ball of rock tens of meters across striking the planet is a little worrisome. This is large enough to cause localized devastation near its impact site, likely on the order of the Tunguska event of 1908, which leveled some 500 square miles (1,287 square kilometers) of forest in remote Siberia.

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On Wednesday, Microsoft released an update on its efforts to build quantum computing hardware based on the physics of quasiparticles that have largely been the domain of theorists. The information coincides with the release of a paper in Nature that provides evidence that Microsoft's hardware can actually measure the behavior of a specific hypothesized quasiparticle.

Separately from that, the company announced that it has built hardware that uses these quasiparticles as the foundation for a new type of qubit, one that Microsoft is betting will allow it to overcome the advantages of companies that have been producing qubits for years.

The zero mode

Quasiparticles are collections of particles (and, in some cases, field lines) that can be described mathematically as if they were a single particle with properties that are distinct from their constituents. The best-known of these are probably the Cooper pairs that electrons form in superconducting materials.

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