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The release of the next Magic: The Gathering set, Oath of the Gatewatch is fast approaching, and thus spoiler season has officially begun! Ars Technica has a few exclusive cards to show off, starting with a new Expedition—one of the new set of twenty super-rare full-art foil lands.

Dust Bowl, from the Oath of the Gatewatch Expeditions sub-set. (credit: Wizards of the Coast / Florian de Gesincourt)

Dust Bowl was last printed more than fifteen years ago in Mercadian Masques. Wasteland’s little brother has turned up in tournament lists occasionally, and is especially appropriate in the Zendikar block where your opponents have access to all sorts of special lands. Unlike Wasteland, Dust Bowl can be used over and over at the low cost of sacrificing your own basic lands.

Looking closely you’ll see something strange about the mana produced by Dust Bowl: it’s not any of the five cardinal colours, but it’s not the generic mana symbol number either. The difference is obvious if you take a look at the original Dust Bowl card:

(credit: Lamro/Wikimedia)

There’s no accounting for taste, but it may be a good thing that some microbes are cadaver connoisseurs—their picky palates for flesh, aged to their exacting preferences, may help forensic detectives call a time of death in unsolved murders, a new study suggests.

Regardless of season, surroundings, and the species of the dead, communities of flesh-eating microbes seem to have a predictable timetable for when they dine on corpses, researchers report in Science. The new data allowed researchers to accurately estimate the time of death of mice and human corpses to within a two-to-four-day window, even after the bodies had decomposed for weeks.

Forensic scientists are eager to have new methods to determine time of death, Jessica Metcalf, lead study author and an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, told Ars. Currently, there are no precise ways to determine how long ago a person died just given the corpse, she said. Some forensic scientists use the life cycle of blow flies, which seek out and lay eggs on corpses. But there’s a lot of variability between fly species and seasonal effects, she said.

Infographic of winning names for nearly four dozen stars and exoplants. (credit: IAU)

Everyone who lived through the demotion of Pluto as a planet knows that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the final arbiter when it comes to designating all things astronomical, including official names for celestial bodies. And now the IAU has turned its international eyes on exoplanets for the first time, with public input, to name 14 stars and 31 exoplanets orbiting them.

Members of the public from the United States ended up suggesting the winning name for one star (42 Draconis) and two planets (42 Draconis b, Fomalhaut b). The names chosen were Fafnir for the star, and Orbitar and Dagon for the planets. Fafnir is named for a Norse mythological dwarf who turned into a dragon. Orbitar is a "contrived word paying homage to the space launch and orbital operations of NASA." Dagon was a Semitic diety, half-man, half-fish.

Color us unimpressed with those names.

(credit: Jaguar Land Rover)

Jaguar has been on quite the roll recently. The company made its name in the 1950s and 1960s with cars like the C-Type (the first use of disc brakes in a car) and the E-Type. But by the mid-1980s, things weren't looking so good. Owned for a time by British Leyland, it suffered from industrial malaise and chronic underinvestment. Things looked better under Ford's ownership for a while, but a foray into Formula 1 proved disastrous, and a misguided reliance on focus groups led to underwhelmingly retro-styled cars like X-Type (built on a Ford platform) and XJ (X350, which under that boring skin was actually quite clever).

Ford sold Jaguar and Land Rover to Tata Motors in 2008. And the Indian parent company has done what many Jaguar fans—your author included—had been crying out for: invested heavily in the brand. Lightweight aluminum chassis have been a focus, but so too has technology. The C-X75 supercar may never have made it to the showroom (although you can see it in Spectre), but the boffins at the company's Gaydon HQ have been working on some rather exciting stuff like remote-control via smartphones and full-windscreen heads-up displays. Today, the company announced that it will return to the racetrack with a full factory effort, competing in Formula E next season (Autumn 2016).

Jaguar will partner with Williams Advanced Engineering (a sister company to the Williams F1 team); the companies collaborated on the C-X75, and Williams currently provides the batteries used by every Formula E car. In a press release, Jaguar Land Rover's engineering director Nick Rogers said, "Electric vehicles will absolutely play a role in Jaguar Land Rover's future product portfolio, and Formula E will give us a unique opportunity to further our development of electrification technologies. The Championship will enable us to engineer and test our advanced technologies under extreme performance conditions."

An artist's impression of the Centaur upper stage detaching from the LCROSS spacecraft. (credit: NASA)

It was time for the spent rocket to die. So the 2,000kg Centaur upper stage, about the size of a yellow school bus, detached from its spacecraft and began falling toward the Moon six years ago. Soon lunar gravity took hold, tugging the Centaur ever faster toward the Moon’s inky black South Pole. An hour after separation, the rocket slammed into terra incognita at 9,000kph (or roughly 5,600mph).

Named for a mythical creature with the upper body of a human and lower body of a horse, the empty Centaur burrowed several meters into a crater that had not seen the Sun’s light for billions of years. The impact kicked a plume of Moon dust as high as 20 km into space. The detached spacecraft followed just minutes later, sampling the plume. “We knew within hours that we had measured something really interesting,” recalled Anthony Colaprete, the mission’s principal investigator.

Interesting indeed. After more than a decade of speculation and intriguing findings, the Centaur had blasted up grains of pure ice. It provided dazzling confirmation that a world once thought entirely barren and desiccated harbors the most valuable commodity for human exploration—water. Yet even as Colaprete and other scientists announced their findings in the fall of 2009, NASA’s lunar program was dying.

(credit: Yuri Samoilov/Flickr)

As politicians and counter-terrorism officials search for lessons from the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, senior officials have called for limits on technology that sends encrypted messages.

It's a debate that has repeatedly recurred for more than a decade.In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration directed technology companies to store copies of their encryption keys with the government. That would have given the government a "backdoor" to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies easy access to encrypted communications. That idea was dropped after sharp criticism from technologists and civil liberties advocates.

More recently, intelligence officials in Europe and the United States have asserted that encryption hampers their ability to detect plots and trace perpetrators. But many have questioned whether it would be practical or wise to allow governments widespread power to read encrypted messages.