Month: June 2016

NASA

Eight probes have captured some stunning imagery of Jupiter over the last four decades.

12 more images in gallery

At first blush Jupiter may seem like a rather dull planet. A failed star. A ball of gas. A large, red storm. Sure, it's big, but what more is there? And we’ve been there before—lots of times, in fact. Beginning with Pioneer 11 and 12, NASA has flown seven probes by the gas world. One mission, Galileo, studied the Jovian system for nearly a decade from 1995 to 2003. So why is the space agency sending yet another probe, Juno, to once again visit the solar system's giant?

We're still studying Jupiter because despite all of these missions NASA has literally only scratched the surface. Its inner structure remains largely a mystery—and an intriguing one, too. The planet is essentially made of gas piled upon more gas. And like a big stack of pillows, as more gas is added on top, the bottom layers become more and more compressed as gravity pulls down on the gas. This creates extremely dense conditions inside the planet. Jupiter, after all, is only a little bit larger than Saturn—but it has three times the mass. Scientists have almost no idea how hydrogen will behave at the extreme pressures deep beneath Jupiter's outer layers toward its core. Indeed, does Jupiter even have a core? We simply don’t know.

The Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011 and arriving at Jupiter on July 4th this year, will be able to scrutinize the planet's gravity field and peer beneath its upper cloud layer. This should help offer some clarity about Jupiter’s interior. During a presentation in May at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, mission scientist Fran Bagenal discussed just how strange that interior might be.

This is Lucky's Tale running on the HTC Vive. It's a scene Oculus never wants you to see.

As PC-based virtual reality gets off the ground, Oculus has come under fire from some corners of the community for saddling certain Oculus Rift games with exclusivity deals, barring them from working on competing headsets like the HTC Vive. Detractors argue this unfairly limits the market for competing VR hardware and goes against the ethos of interoperable accessories and controllers that's traditionally been key to the PC hardware market.

Speaking to Ars at E3 this week, though, Oculus executives defended their continuing efforts to secure exclusives for the Rift, and the technological measures meant to stop exclusivity-breaking workarounds like Revive.

The thrust of Oculus' argument for headset-exclusive software is that these exclusives are games that wouldn't exist (or wouldn't exist in quite as polished a form) if not for Oculus' often substantial funding investment. "The developer normally wouldn't be able to go and make these titles as big and immersive and deep as we enable them to do," Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe told Ars.

Matt Davis

A preserved specimen of the Blue Lanternfish (Tarletonbeania) with bioluminescent photophores.

12 more images in gallery

Bioluminescent animals have the power of light. Sometimes they emit a bright glow from one specialized body part, trying to attract prey or mates. Sometimes they radiate dimly on the undersides of their bodies for camouflage counter-illumination, hiding their shadows on the seafloor by matching the light levels coming from the surface. As weird as it sounds, bioluminescence turns out to be an incredibly beneficial adaptation. A new study shows that it has evolved no less than 27 times in biological history, for countless reasons.

A group of zoologists described how bioluminescence evolved in the journal PLoS One, noting that 80 percent of glowing animals live in the oceans. Only a few land animals emit light, and they are all arthropods like fireflies and millipedes. There are only two ways that animals start radiating. Either they have intrinsic bioluminescence, mixing chemicals in their bodies to regulate the color and intensity of light, or they have symbiotic bioluminescence, cultivating colonies of glowing bacteria in specialized organs or pouches. The question that intrigued the researchers was why so many animals adapted to their environments by starting to glow.

University of Kansas evolutionary biologist Leo Smith, who contributed to the study, told Ars that fish use their built-in lights for many different reasons. In coastal areas, fish use patterns of flashing lights to "communicate during mating," which is important because they live in sandy areas where visibility is low. Like aquatic ravers on the prowl, these fish also use light patterns to recognize each other in areas where many species swim together. Fish that live in the deeper ocean also flash their mates, but they mainly use bioluminescence like flashlights to find prey.

A Walking Dead spoiler website has acquiesced to a threatened copyright lawsuit from AMC, the television studio behind the hit series. The Spoiling Dead will not publish who the character "Negan" killed at the end of Season 6, which aired in early April 2016. During that episode it was not revealed who in fact was killed in that particular episode.

According to a demand letter that The Spoiling Dead received on June 7, 2016, the production company behind the hit television show threatened to sue if The Spoiling Dead did not halt its planned reveal, citing trade secrets and potential copyright infringement.

This demand doesn’t take into account the fact that the "victim" here [SPOILER ALERT] was already revealed in the comics upon which the TV show is based.