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schwit1 quotes a report from The New York Times: Social isolation is a growing epidemic (Warning: may be paywalled; alternate source) -- one that's increasingly recognized as having dire physical, mental and emotional consequences. Since the 1980s, the percentage of American adults who say they're lonely has doubled from 20 percent to 40 percent. About one-third of Americans older than 65 now live alone, and half of those over 85 do. People in poorer health -- especially those with mood disorders like anxiety and depression -- are more likely to feel lonely. Those without a college education are the least likely to have someone they can talk to about important personal matters. A wave of new research suggests social separation is bad for us. Individuals with less social connection have disrupted sleep patterns, altered immune systems, more inflammation and higher levels of stress hormones. One recent study found that isolation increases the risk of heart disease by 29 percent and stroke by 32 percent. Another analysis that pooled data from 70 studies and 3.4 million people found that socially isolated individuals had a 30 percent higher risk of dying in the next seven years, and that this effect was largest in middle age. Loneliness can accelerate cognitive decline in older adults, and isolated individuals are twice as likely to die prematurely as those with more robust social interactions. These effects start early: Socially isolated children have significantly poorer health 20 years later, even after controlling for other factors. All told, loneliness is as important a risk factor for early death as obesity and smoking.

vikingpower writes: Dutch prodigy and Amsterdam University Professor Erik Verlinde published a paper on arXiv yesterday, November 7, titled "Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe." In the paper, Verlinde derives gravity from the so-called Holographic Principle, which -- simply put -- states that gravity emerges from the interplay between and entropy re-arrangement of sub-atomic "strings" that live in a negatively curved spacetime. At that level [...] spacetime and gravity are emergent from an underlying microscopic description in which they have no a priori meaning." Most importantly, Verlinde's paper has as a consequence that dark matter, nemesis of many an astronomer, is nothing more than an illusion. Verlinde, who was awarded the Dutch national Spinoza science prize in the recent past, already completed the tour de force of deriving Newtonian gravity from the same principles in a 2010 paper, also on arXiv. We are probably looking at Nobel-prize material here, as Verlinde is acknowledged by his peers to "go one better than Einstein's General Theory of Relativity." Slashdot reader turkeydance adds from a report via Forbes (Warning: source may be paywalled): As dark matter continues to vex astronomers, new solutions to the dark matter question are proposed. Most focus on pinning down the form of dark matter, while others propose modifying gravity to account for the effect. But a third proposal is simply to remove gravity from the equation. What if the effects of gravity aren't due to some fundamental force, but are rather an emergent effect due to other fundamental interactions? A new paper proposes just that, and if correct it could also explain the effects of dark matter.

Magic Leap is an incredibly secretive company based in Florida that develops "mixed reality" technology. While the company was valued at $4.5 billion in its latest round of financing, Magic Leap has never released a product. "It has never given a public demonstration of a product, never announced a product, and never explained the proprietary 'lightfield' technology that powers its products," writes David M. Ewalt for Forbes. That may be about to change, however, as the CEO Rony Abovitz said in a rare interview that the company has spent a billion dollars perfecting a prototype and has begun constructing manufacturing lines in Florida (Editor's note: may be paywalled, alternate source), gearing up for a release of a consumer version of its technology. "We are building a new kind of contextual computer," Abovitz says. "We're doing something really, really different." The final product of theirs is expected to fit into a pair of glasses when everything is said and done. "When you're wearing the device, it doesn't block your view of the world; the hardware projects an image directly onto your retina through an optics system built into a piece of semitransparent glass (the product won't fry your eyeballs; it's replicating the way we naturally observe the world instead of forcing you to stare at a screen)." Forbes adds: The hardware also constantly gathers information, scanning the room for obstacles, listening for voices, tracking eye movements and watching hands. As a result, mixed-reality objects are aware of their environment and have the ability to interact with the real world. On Magic Leap's hardware a Pokemon might escape capture by ducking behind your couch or, assuming you live in a "smart" home, turning off your lights and hiding in the dark. In one of its demos the Magic Leap team shows off a computer-generated "virtual interactive human," life-size and surprisingly realistic. Abovitz and his team imagine virtual people (or animals or anything else) as digital assistants -- think Siri on steroids, except with a physical presence that makes her easier to work with and harder to ignore. Ask your virtual assistant to deliver a message to a coworker and it might walk out of your office, reappear beside your colleague's desk via his or her own MR headset and deliver the message in person. Ewalt goes on to write about Abovitz's life growing up and the past companies he has founded, which have ultimately helped lead him to Magic Leap.

The founder of Oculus, Palmer Luckey, has backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America that is dedicated to "shitposting" and spreading inflammatory memes about Hillary Clinton. In 2014, Luckey's virtual-reality company, Oculus, was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The Daily Beast reports: "The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym "NimbleRichMan" on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization's founders. Nimble America says it's dedicated to providing that "shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real," according to the company's introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton's face alongside the words "Too Big to Jail." "We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it's time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not," a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit. Potential donors from Donald Trump's biggest online community -- Reddit's r/The_Donald, where one of the rules is "no dissenters" -- turned on the organization this weekend, refusing to believe "NimbleRichMan" was the anonymous "near-billionaire" he claimed to be and causing a rift on one of the alt-right's most powerful organizational tools. Luckey insists he's just the group's money man -- a wealthy booster who thought the meddlesome idea was funny. But he is also listed as the vice-president of the group on its website. In another post written under Luckey's Reddit pseudonym, Luckey echoes Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire who used his wealth to secretly bankroll Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker. The Daily Beast adds: "'The American Revolution was funded by wealthy individuals," NimbleRichMan wrote on Saturday. Luckey confirmed to The Daily Beast he penned the posts under his Reddit pseudonym. 'The same has been true of many movements for freedom in history. You can't fight the American elite without serious firepower. They will outspend you and destroy you by any and all means.'"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Tesla is suing an oil executive under suspicion of impersonating Elon Musk to dig up confidential financial information from the company, Forbes reported on Wednesday. The lawsuit, reportedly filed Wednesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, claimed that Todd Katz, the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, emailed Tesla's chief financial officer using a similar email address as Musk's looking to gain information that wasn't disclosed in an earnings call with investors. Quest Integrity Group has partnerships with BP, Chevron, and ExxonMobil, the Forbes report said. According to the lawsuit, Katz used "elontesla@yahoo.com" to send an email to Tesla CFO Jason Wheeler asking about the company's sales and financial projections. The email named in the suit reads: "why you so cautious w Q3/4 gm guidance on call? also what are your thoughts on disclosing M3 res#? Pros/cons from ir pov? what is your best guess as to where we actually come in on q3/4 deliverables. honest guess? no bs. thx 4 hard work prepping 4 today. em." Tesla is seeking "undisclosed financial compensation," as well as compensation for the cost of the investigation and legal fees, according to Forbes.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Digital Trends: Among the 100 new products the company founder James Dyson wants to invent by 2020, the greatest investment in people and money is to improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, as reported by Forbes (Warning: paywalled). And Dyson is not planning incremental improvements. His opinion is that current Li-ion batteries don't last long enough and aren't safe enough -- the latter as evidenced by their propensity to spontaneously catch on fire, which is rare but does happen. Dyson believes the answer lies in using ceramics to create solid-state lithium-ion batteries. Dyson says he intended to spend $1.4 billion in research and development and in building a battery factory over the next five years. Last year Dyson bought Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Sakti3, which focuses on creating advanced solid-state batteries, for $90 million. The global lithium-ion battery market accounts for $40 billion in annual sales, according to research firm Lux as cited by Forbes. Dyson's company (which is an accurate description since he has 100-percent ownership) currently employs 3,000 engineers worldwide. He intends to hire another 3,000 by 2020. Their average age is 26. Dyson values young engineers, saying, "The enthusiasm and lack of fear is important. Not taking notice of experts and plowing on because you believe in something is important. It's much easier to do when you're young."

Sony is expected to announce two new PlayStation 4 consoles at a scheduled event on September 7th in New York City, but as that date nears more leaks of the consoles have emerged. The most recent leak appears to show the upcoming PlayStation 4 Slim, which Sony is trying to remove from the internet by taking down news articles from social media accounts about the leak. Erik Kain via @erikkain on Twitter tweeted (Tweet no longer exists): "Sony issued a takedown and had this post removed from my Facebook page: https://t.co/fIjP0buTdY (Warning: may be paywalled)." Techdirt reports: "[The Forbes post] references the work Eurogamer did in visiting the leaker of the image to confirm the console is for real (it is), as well as generating its own image and even video of the console working for its story on the leak. But if you go today to the Eurogamer post about the leak, the video has been replaced by the following update. UPDATE, 7.30pm: Upon taking legal advice, we have removed the video previously referenced in this article. Left unsaid is whether or not any contact had been made by Sony with Eurogamer, thus prompting this 'legal advice,' but one can imagine that being the case, particularly given Sony's threats to social media users sharing images and reporting of Sony leaks and, more to the point, threats against any media that might report on those leaks."

schwit1 quotes a report from Bloomberg: The net worth of the world's richest person Bill Gates hit $90 billion on Friday, fueled by gains in public holdings including Canadian National Railway Company and Ecolab Inc. Gates's fortune is now $13.5 billion bigger than that of the world's second-wealthiest person, Spanish retail mogul Amancio Ortega, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. At $90 billion, the Microsoft Corp. co-founder's net worth is equal to 0.5 percent of U.S. GDP. Less than two weeks ago, Bill Gates topped Forbes' "100 Richest Tech Billionaires In The World 2016" (Warning: may be paywalled) list with an estimated fortune of $78 billion.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GulfNews: The "100 Richest Tech Billionaires In The World 2016" list has been topped by Microsoft founder Bill Gates with an estimated fortune of $78 billion. The titans on Forbes' second annual list of the world's richest in technology are worth a combined $892 billion, six percent more than a year ago. Just over half of the 100 richest in tech are from the U.S., including eight of the top 10 richest on the list. Forbes said the second richest person in tech Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is also the biggest gainer on the list this year and has an estimated $66.2 billion fortune, an increase of $18.4 billion since this list was released last year. That puts him ahead of Oracle chairman Larry Ellison, who comes in on the fourth spot. Ellison was also beaten by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who climbed from fourth to third place thanks to a 30 percent jump in the value of Facebook's stock; he is now also California's richest person, another title that previously belonged to Ellison.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BBC: Strong earnings from Amazon and a boost to the company's stock have made its founder, Jeff Bezos, the world's third richest person, according to Forbes. Mr Bezos owns 18% of Amazon's shares, which rose 2% in trading on Thursday. Forbes estimated his fortune to be $65.3 billion (49.5 billion British Pound). Amazon's revenue beat analysts' expectations, climbing 31% from last year to $30.4 billion in the second quarter. Profit for the e-commerce giant was $857 million, compared with $92 million in 2015. According to Forbes estimates, Mr Bezos's fortune is only surpassed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, worth $78 billion (59 billion British Pound), and the $73.1 billion (55 billion British Pound) fortune of Zara founder Amancio Ortega. Amazon had developed a reputation for announcing little or no profit each quarter, but appeared to hit a turning point last year and has seen improving earnings since. Amazon shares have spiked 50% since February. BBC's report includes some bullet points about Bezos. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. He studied at Princeton University and worked on Wall Street. In 1994, he launched Amazon as an online book retailer. A lifelong Star Trek fan, Bezos launched Blue Origin spaceflight and aerospace firm in 2000, and more than a decade later, he purchased The Washington Post newspaper in 2013.

The reports were spot on. Verizon Communications on Monday announced that it plans to purchase Yahoo's Web assets for a sum of $4.83 billion in cash. The multi-billion dollars deal will get Verizon Yahoo's core internet business and some real estate. The announcement also marks a remarkable fall for the Silicon Valley web pioneer, which once had a market capitalization of more than $125 billion. For Verizon, the deal adds another piece to the mammoth digital media and advertising empire it owns. The deal is expected to close early 2017. CNBC reports: The transaction is seen boosting Verizon's AOL internet business, which the company acquired last year for $4.4 billion, by giving it access to Yahoo's advertising technology tools, as well as other assets such as search, mail, messenger and real estate. It also marks the end of Yahoo as an operating company, leaving it only as the owner of a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, as well as its 15 percent interest in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba. In December, Yahoo scrapped plans to spin off its Alibaba stake after investors worried about whether that transaction could have been carried out on a tax-free basis. It instead decided to explore a sale of its core assets, spurred on by activist hedge fund Starboard Value. Forbes has called it one of the "saddest $5B deals in tech history."Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who was expected to leave -- or get fired -- said she intends to stay. "For me personally, I'm planning to stay," Mayer said in a note on Yahoo's Tumblr page. "I love Yahoo, and I believe in all of you. It's important to me to see Yahoo into its next chapter."

SonicSpike quotes a report from the Foundation for Economic Education that first appeared at Forbes: Imagine traveling from Boston to Martha's Vineyard in under an hour and for less than $70. Believe it or not, this option was available from Flytenow's website or app, by looking for a general aviation pilot who was making that trip, and then splitting the cost with that pilot and whoever else was sharing the flight. Entrepreneurs were bringing private air travel to the masses until Flytenow's leadership met with members of the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure that they were complying with all laws and regulations. Instead of embracing this service, the FAA used tortuous logic to ban Flytenow and other online flight-sharing websites because it considered these to be "common carriers" (such as Delta Airlines). Private pilots cannot possibly comply with the myriad regulations that apply to the large airlines. In what follows, Flytenow founders Alan Guichard and Matt Voska explain why the federal government should make the FAA allow flight sharing to get off the ground.

If you're a powerful Silicon Valley billionaire, and there's a media house which actively points out flaws in your investments, can you do something about it? If you're Peter Thiel, you certainly can. The New York Times and Forbes magazine have independently reported that Thiel has been funding a steady stream of lawsuits -- including three different ones filed by Hulk Hogan -- to destroy Gawker Media. Gawker reports: Gawker and Valleywag, Gawker Media's defunct tech gossip vertical, have often written critically of Thiel, a self-identified libertarian (and, it turns out, a California delegate for Donald Trump) and his investments, covering the failure of his hedge fund Clarium Capital, his right-wing politics, and his personal life. In just the last month, Gawker Media's tech site Gizmodo published a series of stories on Facebook's use of "news curators" to manipulate the site's "trending" module, sparking a congressional investigation into the social network's practices.Jay Rosen, media critic and a professor of journalism at New York University, said: Trying to kill a publication you don't like by funding lawsuits against them isn't very libertarian, is it?

An anonymous reader writes: Facebook has paid $10,000 to a 10-year-old hacker who discovered how one could hack into Instagram and delete comments made by users. Speaking to local publication Iltalehti, Jani said: "I would have been able to eliminate anyone, even Justin Bieber." The Finnish hacker just became the youngest person to receive cash from Facebook for hacking its products. The previous record was set by a 13-year-old back in 2013. What's funny is Jani isn't technically old enough to sign-up and use Facebook or Instagram, as it's supposed to be restricted to those under the age of 13. Jani found he could alter code on Instagram's servers and force-delete users' posts. This was confirmed by Facebook using a test account and patched in February, Facebook told Forbes. Facebook has received more than 2,400 valid submissions and awarded upwards of $4.3 million to over 800 researchers since the bounty program launched in 2011.

Slashdot reader StartsWithABang writes: If you were to send a space probe to a distant star system, gather information about it and send it back to Earth, you'd have to wait years for the information to arrive. But if you have an entangled quantum system -- say, two photons, one with spin +1 and one with spin -1 -- you could know the spin of the distant one instantly by measuring the spin of the one in your possession.
This "incredible idea to exploit quantum weirdness" for communication was the subject of a recent Forbes article [which blocks ad-blockers] as well as a NASA mission directorate. ("Entanglement-assisted Communication System for NASA's Deep-Space Missions: Feasibility Test and Conceptual Design".) And Friday MIT News reported a research team is now making progress toward capturing paired electron halves for quantum computing on gold film. "Our first goal is to look for the Majorana fermions, unambiguously detect them, and show this is it. "

This week even 85-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner cited quantum entanglement in a discussion of Star Trek's transporter technology, arguing that "Although a lot of the concepts in science fiction are absurd to our Newtonian minds, anything is possible because of the new language of quantum physics."

An anonymous reader writes: It's no secret Google and their parent company Alphabet are interested in developing smart contact lenses for monitoring diabetes. Well, Google-parent Alphabet has filed a patent which takes their development to another level. The patent specifically covers a method for "injecting a fluid into a lens capsule of an eye, wherein a natural lens of the eye has been removed from the lens capsule." It's powered by "radio frequency energy" received by a small antenna inside. The gadget even has its own data storage. Forbes reports, it is designed to help the focusing of light onto the retina, resulting in the correction of poor vision. Samsung is one of the most recent companies to receive a patent for smart contact lenses. Their lenses are for experimenting with new methods of delivering augmented reality interfaces and data.

An anonymous reader writes: At least 12 different drones have been shot from the sky in the United States, including drone shootings in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Virginia, Kentucky, and New Jersey. Now the FAA is confirming that drone shooting is a federal offense, citing regulations against aircraft sabotage. An aviation attorney (teaching drone law at New York's Vaughn College of Aeonautics) tells Forbes this means penalties of up to 20 years in prison for interfering with the "authorized" operation of an aircraft, while threatening a drone or a drone operator would also be a federal crime subject to five years in prison.
Slate notes that "This is bad news if you were planning to invest in the DroneDefender, a goofy-looking gun that promised to disrupt intrusive drones by bombarding them 'with radio waves that disrupt [their] remote control and GPS signals'." And Popular Science adds that "It also poses a complication for some local and state laws, like Utah's proposed HB 420, which would let police shoot down drones in emergency situations." Meanwhile, police in the Netherlands are actually training eagles to attack drones. And last week in South Africa, a drone crashed through the window of an office building and hit an unarmed office worker on the head.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from WordPress Tavern: Authorities have not yet identified the hacker behind the Panama Papers breach, nor have they isolated the exact attack vector. It is clear that Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm that protected the assets of the rich and powerful by setting up shell companies, had employed a dangerously loose policy towards web security and communications. The firm ran its unencrypted emails through an outdated (2009) version of Microsoft's Outlook Web Access. Outdated open source software running the frontend of the firm's websites is also now suspected to have provided a vector for the compromise. Forbes has identified outdated WordPress and Drupal installations as security holes that may have led to the data leak. [WordPress Tavern Editor Sarah Gooding] found that the firm's WordPress-powered site is currently running on version 4.1 (released in December 2014), based on its version of autosave.js, which is identical to the autosave.js file shipped in 4.1. The main site is also loading a number of outdated scripts and plugins. Its active theme is a three-year-old version of Twenty Eleven (1.5), which oddly resides in a directory labeled for /twentyten/. The Mossack Fonseca client portal changelog.txt file is public, showing that its Drupal installation hasn't been updated for three years. Since the release of version 7.23, the software has received 25 security updates, which means that the version it is running includes highly critical known vulnerabilities that could have given the hacker access to the server.

An anonymous reader cites a report on VentureBeat: NVIDIA chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang announced that the company has created a new chip, the Tesla P100, with 15 billion transistors, 16GB high-bandwidth memory for deep-learning computing. It's the biggest chip ever made, Huang said. "We decided to go all-in on A.I.," Huang said. "This is the largest FinFET chip that has ever been done." The chip has 15 billion transistors, or three times as much as many processors or graphics chips on the market. It takes up 600 square millimeters. The chip can run at 21.2 teraflops. Huang said that several thousand engineers worked on it for years. Jim McGregor, writing for Forbes (the link is not accessible to ad-blocking tool users): It features NVIDIA's new Pascal GPU architecture, the latest memory and semiconductor process, and packaging technology -- all to create the densest compute platform to date. In addition, it combines 16GB of die stacked second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM2). The memory and GPU are combined into a multichip module on a state-of-the-art silicon substrate. The P100 has NVIDIA's NVLink interface technology to connect to multiple Tesla P100 GPU modules.

An anonymous reader writes: Ever since LIGO first announced the direct detection of gravitational waves from two merging black holes, the physics and astronomy community has been struggling to understand an unexpected phenomenon that appears to have come along with it: a short-period gamma ray burst. Arriving just 0.4 seconds after the gravitational waves did, the Fermi satellite's detection doesn't line up with models of black hole mergers. It's thought that short-period GRBs originate from neutron star-neutron star mergers, and so seeing this has led to speculation of new physics, including from Avi Loeb at Harvard that perhaps LIGO's twin black holes came from inside the same star. However, this explanation is exceedingly unlikely, and there are a number of astrophysical explanations that don't require new physics like Loeb's explanation would.

An anonymous reader writes: It's long been a dream of humanity to travel interplanetary distances at great speeds, or to make it to another star system within a human lifetime. Until recently, technologies to get us there — antimatter propulsion, wormholes or warp drive — have all been composed of physically unrealistic solutions. But recent developments in laser technology make directed energy propulsion a feasible solution. By building a giant laser array in space and developing a new type of solar sail that reflects the laser light with incredible efficiency, a laser sail, this propulsion system is scalable to arbitrarily large powers. There are many technical obstacles to be overcome, and so it's unlikely we'll see the fruit of this anytime in the next few decades (despite the promises of some), but this may well be the technology that takes us to the stars in the coming centuries.

TheAlexKnapp writes: Dr. Kathy Niakan, who is leading the scientific team that just got the go-ahead to edit genes in human embryos, explains why their work won't lead to designer babies. The genes that they're looking at, she says, are unique to the human embryo, and the work's sole purpose is to understand early development. "We can use this new method that's extremely precise and efficient to ask questions about early development that has profound importance for stem cell biology, and for our understanding of why some embryos fail to thrive." But really ... how long until it turns into designer babies?

jones_supa writes: Gordon F. Kelly of Forbes whipped up a frenzy over Windows 10 when a Voat user found out in a little experiment that the operating system phones home thousands of times a day. ZDNet's Ed Bott has written a follow-up where he points out how the experiment should not be taken too dramatically. 602 connection attempts were to 192.168.1.255 using UDP port 137, which means local NetBIOS broadcasts. Another 630 were DNS requests. Next up was 1,619 dropped connection attempts to address 94.245.121.253, which is a Microsoft Teredo server. The list goes on with NTP, random HTTP requests, and various cloud hosts which probably are reached by UWP apps. He summarizes by saying that a lot of connections are not at all about telemetry. However, what kind of telemetry and data-mined information Windows specifically sends still remains largely a mystery; hopefully curious people will do analysis on the operating system and network traffic sent by it.

StartsWithABang writes: When we look out into the Universe, we normally gain information about it by gathering light of various wavelengths. However, there are other possibilities for astronomy, including by looking for the neutrinos emitted by astrophysical sources - first detected in the supernova explosion of 1987 - and in the gravitational waves emitted by accelerating masses. These ripples in the fabric of space were theorized back in the early days of Einstein's General Relativity, and experiments to detect them have been ongoing since the 1960s. However, in September of 2015, Advanced LIGO came online, and it was the first gravitational wave observatory that was expected to detect a real gravitational wave signal. The press conference on Thursday is where the collaboration will make their official announcement, and in the meantime, here's an explainer of what gravitational waves are, what Advanced LIGO can teach us, and how.

StartsWithABang writes: If you want to see farther, deeper and at higher resolution than ever before into the Universe, you need four things: the largest aperture possible, the best-quality optical systems and cameras/CCDs, the least interference from the atmosphere, and the analytical techniques and power to make the most of every photon. While the last three have improved tremendously over the past 25 years, telescope size hasn't increased at all. That's all about to change over the next decade, as three telescopes — the Giant Magellan Telescope, the Thirty Meter Telescope and the European Extremely Large Telescope — are set to take us from 8-10 meter class astronomy to 25-40 meter class. While the latter two are fighting over funding, construction rights and other political concerns, the Giant Magellan Telescope is already under construction, and is poised to be the first in line to begin the future of ground-based astronomy.

Ars Technica reports that Morgan, idiosyncratic maker of idiosyncratic cars, is about to make a move that might seem surprising, in light of the company's tradition of conservative design. "Yes," says the article, "you'll be able to buy a wood-framed electric car in 2019." From the article: The Morgan Motor Companyâ"best known for still using postwar styling and wooden body frames for some of its carsâ"will have a full hybrid and electric range within the next three years. The British car maker is going to invest $8.6 million (£6 million) to develop hybrid and electric powertrains for all the models in its range by 2019, working in conjunction with Delta Motorsport and Potenza technology.

An anonymous reader writes: In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched and deployed, becoming the first space-based observatory. In the years since, many others have followed, covering the entire electromagnetic spectrum, but with nothing superseding Hubble over the wavelengths it covers. That will all change with the James Webb Space Telescope, currently on schedule and almost ready for its October 2018 launch date. The science instruments are all complete, the final mirrors are being inserted into the optical assembly, the sunshield (a new, innovative component) is almost complete, and then it just needs assembly and launch. When it's all said and done, JWST will be orders of magnitude greater than all the other observatories that came before, and will finally allow us to truly see the first stars, galaxies and quasars in the Universe, not limited by the obscuring neutral gas that currently blocks our view with other observatories.

An anonymous reader writes: On January 27, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was performing a "plugs-out" test of the Command/Service Module, an essential simulation of how the three-person capsule would perform under in-space conditions under its own power. At 6:30 PM, a voltage spike occurred, leading to a disaster. In 26 seconds, everything changed. The Apollo 1 fire and the tragic death of all three astronauts wasn't due to just a single point-of-failure, but rather due to five independent confounding factors that if any one of them had been different, the astronauts Grissom, White and Chaffee might have survived. As it stands, all the crewed Apollo missions were scrapped for 20 months while NASA changed how they did business. The changes worked remarkably well, and 2.5 years later, humans walked on the Moon.

New submitter mdnuclear writes: In a strange echo of the depressed oil economy SolarCity recently announced a layoff of a quarter of its workforce as the apparent result of the Nevada PUC's decision to phase solar net-metering customers down from retail to wholesale per kWh. A scathing editorial in the WSJ last December took both solar leasing companies and their financial underwriters to task, calling net metering a "regressive political income redistribution in support of a putatively progressive cause."

Wednesday the PUC fronted a possible compromise, 'grandfathering' existing net metering customers to their current rates to create a third caste of energy consumers, those who had been in the right place at the right time — for awhile. One who had paid $22k into solar lamented, "I'm not happy; my wife isn't happy, we could have done something else with that money." Like many who leave Vegas, perhaps they should have. But this begs the real question... are net-metering schemes ultimately 'right' or 'wrong' for the grid?

An anonymous reader writes: Earlier today, the team of Pluto-killer Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin announced that they had found evidence of a ninth planet in our Solar System beyond the orbit of Pluto, larger and more massive than even Earth. However, a closer inspection of the work shows that they predict a few things that haven't been observed, including a population of Kuiper belt objects with large inclinations and retrograde orbits, long-period Kuiper belt objects with opposite ecliptic latitudes and longitudes, and infrared data showing the emission from such an outer world. There are many good reasons to be skeptical, and not conclude that there's a ninth planet without more (and better) evidence.

StartsWithABang writes: As we peel back the layers of information deeper and deeper into the Universe's history, we uncover progressively more knowledge about how everything we know today came to be. The discovery of distant galaxies and their redshifts led to expanding Universe, which led to the Big Bang and the discovery of very early phases like the cosmic microwave background and big bang nucleosynthesis. But before that, there was a period of cosmic inflation that left its mark on the Universe. What came before inflation, then? Did it always exist? Did it have a beginning? Or did it mark the rebirth of a cosmic cycle? Maddeningly, this information may forever be inaccessible to us, as the nature of inflation wipes all this information clean from our visible Universe.

StartsWithABang writes: Geoff Marcy. Tim Slater. Christian Ott. And a great many more who are just waiting to be publicly exposed for what they've done (and in many cases, are still doing). Does it mean that astronomy has a harassment problem? Of course it does, but that's not the real story. The real story is that, for the first time, an entire academic field is recognizing a widespread problem, taking steps to change its policies, and is beginning to support the victims, rather than the senior, more famous, more prestigious perpetrators. Astronomy is the just start; hopefully physics, computer science, engineering, philosophy and economics are next.

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they're more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we've collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday's post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.)

As manufacturing gets more distributed, it gets more anonymous in some ways: the parts for one computer might have been made in several countries, and even the assembly might have been split between more than one place; place of origin is complicated, and typically opaque for the purchaser of consumer goods. However, modern logistics and tracking mean that it doesn't have to be a mystery, and stages of a device's production can in theory be traced, which means that buyers and intermediaries can decide to buy essentially identical products and components based on factors like whether coffee is shade grown, or whether production line workers are treated in line with the buyer's own ethical demands. A slice from an article at Forbes about this kind of logistics-based practical ethics: An anonymous reader writes: Certain companies are taking this a step further, by using technology to assist workers in their day-to-day activities – for example, BMW is creating bespoke thermoplastic polyurethane thumb protectors for their factory workers. Others are working on ways of incentivizing behavior on top of these systems. Levi's is piloting a program where they offer cheaper short-term credit to companies that meet their safety levels. While it's true that this would result in an initial upfront cost, the whole reason CSR programs were created to begin with was to obtain legitimacy and the appearance of good corporate citizenship. If consumers wanted fair supply chains to be a priority, they could let their shopping habits speak louder than their words. Technologically speaking, we are not far off from a point where price tags could also include a QR code that has a geotagged history of all the places the item has been.

StartsWithABang writes: With the launch of the Fermi satellite in the late 2000s, we began observing the highest energy photons in the Universe — gamma rays — all over the sky, to unprecedented precision. Produced from cosmic ray showers in space when high energy protons run into other, stationary protons, these gamma rays locate point sources from supermassive black holes to supernova remnants to pulsars. There is, additionally, a great correlation between the infrared sky and the gamma ray sky, since the great high-energy background scatters off of the diffuse infrared gas, producing gamma rays there as well. But while a great many sources can be correlated with known structures, Fermi reveals at least one unknown, intense behemoth that emits spectacularly in gamma rays.

StartsWithABang writes: In 2012, astronomers announced that the nearest star system to us, the Alpha Centauri system, possessed at least one exoplanet around it. A periodic signal that recurred just every 3.24 days was consistent with an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting and gravitationally tugging on the second largest member of the star system: Alpha Centauri B. That planet, named Alpha Centauri Bb, turns out not to actually be there. A reanalysis of the data shows that a combination of stellar properties and the times at which the observations were made conspired to produce this spurious signal: a signal that goes away if the data is handled correctly. Accounting for everything correctly reveals something else of interest, a periodic 20-day signal, which may turn out — with better observations — to be Alpha Centauri's first exoplanet after all.

An anonymous reader writes: The stars call to us through the ages, with each and every one holding the promise of a future for humanity beyond Earth. For generations, this was a mere dream, as our technology allowed us to neither know what worlds might lie beyond our own Solar System or to reach beyond our planet. But time and development has changed both of those things significantly. Now, when we look to the stars, we know that potentially habitable worlds lurk throughout our galaxy, and our spaceflight capabilities can bring us there. But so far, it would only be a very long, lonely, one-way trip. This isn't necessarily going to be the case forever, though, as physically feasible technology could get humans to another star within a single lifetime, and potentially groundbreaking technology might make the journey almost instantaneous.

An anonymous reader writes: Major League Gaming (MLG) is one of the biggest e-sports operations out there. Or it was, until Activision Blizzard purchased most of its assets for $46 million. MLG's CEO has been removed, and nobody's quite sure what will become of the league once Activision is done with it. MLG has been struggling for some time, and it's expected that most of the sale's proceeds will go toward paying off debts. Shareholders are not pleased. Analysis at Forbes notes that "MLG has been most closely tied with Call of Duty for a long while now (though recently Activision partnered with MLG rival ESL for a new COD league), and has a history with Starcraft 2, both Activision Blizzard titles. It could make sense that in order to bolster their eSports division, Activision would assimilate MLG, though parts of this sound more like a liquidation of assets rather than MLG continuing to operate under its own banner, just with a new owner." Others note with skepticism the idea of a game publisher buying an e-sports league, which could lead to concerns about how games from other publishers are treated.

An anonymous reader writes: When the Sun emits a flare or a mass ejection in the direction of Earth, these fast moving particles are when Earth's magnetosphere and atmosphere are of the utmost importance for shielding us. The magnetic field bends these ions harmlessly away from our planet, only funneling a small fraction down into a ring surrounding the poles. The atmosphere absorbs the impact, shielding all living creatures below from this radiation, while simultaneously putting on a show. Thanks to a coronal mass ejection on the 28th, the northern and southern lights will put on quite a display on the night of the 30th for all skywatchers at or above 50 degrees latitude, with chances that observers further towards the equator might have something to see, too. But the best views of all will belong to the unshielded astronauts aboard the ISS, who will pass around the Earth a full 7 times during our "night," and at the peak of the storm.

StartsWithABang writes: Looking out at the distant stars, galaxies and radiation in the Universe today, we've been able to determine not only what it's made out of, but how long it's been since the Big Bang: 13.8 billion years. Put all that information together, and you can also figure out how large the observable part of that Universe is today. From our point of view, it appears to extend for 46.1 billion light years in all directions. So what if you extrapolate backwards, to the very end of inflation and the start of the hot, dense state we identify with the Big Bang, and ask how large that 46.1 billion light year "size" was back then? How big would it be? Depending on the particulars of when inflation came to an end, the answer is somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and the size of a city block, no smaller and no larger.

MarkWhittington writes: The last time men walked on the moon was during the flight of Apollo 17, 43 Decembers ago. According to a story in Forbes, lunar soil and rock samples returned by the last moonwalkers are still yielding new insights into the history and nature of Earth's nearest neighbor. In the meantime, the latest explorer to go to the moon, a Chinese robotic rover named Yutu has made some discoveries of its own.

StartsWithABang writes: Earlier this month, a conference was held devoted to the question of whether untestable scientific ideas like string theory and the multiverse are actually science or not. While many opinions were stated and no one changed their mind, the answer is apparent: unless you're willing to change the definition of science to include "this thing that isn't science," then no, string theory is not science. It's a theory in the sense of a mathematical theory — like set theory, group theory or number theory — but it isn't yet a scientific theory. Of course, it could become science, but that would require that it actually do the things a scientific theory does: make testable predictions that can be validated or falsified.

StartsWithABang writes: They say that one of the most exciting phrases to hear in science is not "eureka!" but "that's funny," and the Apollo 17 astronauts, just over 43 years ago, certainly got such a moment when they discovered orange soil just beneath the grey regiolith. What turned out to be volcanic glass with tin inclusions had another surprise: olivine deposits that showed signs that they contained significant amounts of water inclusions when they were baked, at about ~1200 parts-per-million. This matches the water levels in Earth's upper mantle along ocean ridges, providing further evidence for the giant impact hypothesis and a common origin for the Earth and Moon.

Lauren Weinstein sends word about this admission by the FAA that has led many to have concerns about privacy. Forbes reports: "The FAA finally confirmed this afternoon that model aircraft registrants’ names and home addresses will be public. In an email message, the FAA stated: 'Until the drone registry system is modified, the FAA will not release names and address. When the drone registry system is modified to permit public searches of registration numbers, names and addresses will be revealed through those searches.'"

StartsWithABang writes: Many of us dreamed of becoming astronauts as a child, but gave up on that dream for a number of reasons — the seemingly impossible odds, the demands of daily life, the rigors of preparation — and never even applied. But for a great many, that dream remains alive; the last time NASA had open applications, over 6,000 people threw their hat in the ring, with eight selected. Yesterday, NASA once again opened up astronaut applications, and one prospective applicant has written a manifesto about lessons learned in becoming an aspiring astronaut. While not all of us have the desire to strap ourselves to a rocket and orbit in a tin can above Earth, we all have something to learn from this perspective.

StartsWithABang writes: When you take a look at a spiral galaxy in the night sky, it seems obvious that the stars on the inner parts of the galaxy are going to orbit in less time than the stars in the outer part. This turns out to be true, something we've figured out even though the timescales for galaxies to complete a full revolution are far longer than we've ever been able to observe. But one thing that doesn't happen is that the arms don't "wind up," meaning that the galaxies don't see the spiral patterns intensify as they age. Even though we first observed spiral structure in galaxies back in the mid-1800s, we didn't understand what the cause of this effect was for over 100 years. Yet now, not only do we understand it, but we can explain why galaxies will never wind up over time, and how this effect is true with or without dark matter.

StartsWithABang writes: If you calculate the forces between two fundamental particles separated by subatomic distances, you find that the strong, electromagnetic or weak nuclear force could all be the strongest, dependent on the particulars of your setup. But throw gravity in there, and it turns out to be weaker by some 40 orders of magnitude. This discrepancy, that gravity is such an oddball, is known as the hierarchy problem, and is by many measures the greatest unsolved problem in theoretical physics. Yet the new, upgraded run of the LHC has the potential to uncover any one of four possible solutions, some of which we have hints for already.

TheAlexKnapp writes: In a recent paper (abstract), a team used techniques from computational topology to look at the neural activity in the rat hippocampus as it solved a maze. Mathematician Kevin Knudson explains the findings: "This is the first time geometric structure has been found intrinsically in neural data. Certainly such a structure is to be expected since the rat's place cells keep track of the geometry of the environment, but this result is confirmation that it can be detected using only the pattern of correlations among the neurons. And it suggests that such geometric structure is a property of the underlying place cell network and not a result of the spatial structure of the input cells."

StartsWithABang writes: One of the most damning, albeit accurate, condemnations of String Theory that has been leveled at it is that it's untestable, non-empirical, and offers no concrete predictions or methods of falsification. Yet some have attempted to address this failing not by coming up with concrete predictions or falsifiable tests, but by redefining what is meant by theory confirmation. Many physicists and philosophers have jumped into this debate, and a recently completed workshop has produced no agreements, but lots of interesting perspectives being live blogged by a physicist. Also weighing in is a philosopher in three separate parts.

StartsWithABang writes: If you want to explore the Universe, you need a telescope with good light gathering power, a high-quality camera to make the most out of each photon, and a superior observing location, complete with dark skies, clear nights, and still, high-altitude air. There are only a few places on Earth that have all of these qualities consistently, and perhaps the best one is atop Mauna Kea on Hawaii. Yet generations of wrongs have occurred to create the great telescope complex that's up there today, and astronomers continue to lease the land for far less than it's worth despite violating the original contract. That's astronomy as we know it so far, and perhaps the Mauna Kea protests signal a long awaited end to that.