Month: December 2015

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.