Month: May 2016

(credit: Tristan Schnurr)

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington state tossed all the evidence in a child pornography case that was obtained via an FBI-deployed Tor exploit. Absent a successful government appeal, it seems extremely difficult for prosecutors going forward in United States v. Michaud, suggesting that judges are continuing to push back on the FBI’s deployment of hacking tools.

"It's hard to see how the government can secure a conviction without this key evidence," Ahmed Ghappour, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings, told Ars.

Judges in at least two related cases in other states have also ruled in favor of defendants, on the grounds that the Virginia-issued warrant to deploy the NIT (network investigative technique) malware was invalid from the start. Those judges found that the warrant to search their computers in other parts of the country couldn’t have had force of law in other states as issued by the Virginia magistrate judge. Other judges, meanwhile, have said that the warrants were also invalid, but they did not go so far as to suppress evidence.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

Oracle's lawyers have made their final pitch to paint Google as a copyright outlaw, and the decision is now up to a 10-person jury. The jurors are deliberating in a room on the 19th floor of the US Federal Courthouse in San Francisco. Deliberations have gone on for two days now, and the jury will return to court Thursday to continue its debate.

During a 90-minute closing argument on Monday, Oracle attorney Peter Bicks said every fair use factor weighed in Oracle's favor and that Google's behavior showed "bad faith." Here are some of the slides Bicks showed jurors during his closing argument.

We also asked Google for some of the visuals it showed to the jury, but Google declined to provide them. (These in-court visuals aren't evidence, according to the rules of the court, so it's up to the parties as to whether or not to show them outside court.)

In the later Universe, supermassive black holes are easy to spot. (credit: NASA/Chandra)

It seems that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its core. Based on the presence of extremely bright objects early in the Universe's history, it seems that this relationship goes back to the galaxy's very start—galaxies seem to have been built around these monstrous black holes.

But this presents a bit of a problem. There's a limit to how fast black holes can grow, and they shouldn't have gotten to the supermassive stage anywhere near this quickly. There have been a few models to suggest how they might grow fast enough, but its hard to get any data on what's going on that early in the Universe's history. Now, however, a team is announcing some of the first observational support for one model: the direct collapse of gas into a black hole without bothering to form a star first.

Most black holes form through the collapse of a star with dozens of times the Sun's mass. The resulting black holes end up being a few times more massive than our local star. But supermassive black holes are a different breed entirely, with masses ranging anywhere from 100,0000 times to a billion times that of the Sun.

The European Extremely Large Telescope is, indeed, extremely large at 39 meters across. (credit: ESO)

An astronomy organization consisting of 15 European countries, as well as Chile and Brazil, has signed a €400 million ($450 million) contract to move forward with the construction of a large dome and structure to support a massive optical telescope that will have a 39-meter wide main mirror.

The European Southern Observatory said the contract keeps it on track to begin observing the night sky with its European Extremely Large Telescope (EELT) as early as 2024. The telescope will operate from a 3,000-meter mountaintop site in northern Chile. The agency said that this is the most expensive contract ever awarded by ESO and the largest contract ever in ground-based astronomy. However, it represents only a fraction of the telescope's overall multi-billion dollar cost.

The largest optical telescopes in the world today are only about 10 meters in diameter. The European instrument is part of a new generation of much larger telescopes being built to extend the ability of astronomers to peer back further into the history of the universe, when the first stars and galaxies formed. The newly possible observations may also elucidate the nature of dark matter and dark energy and could potentially sniff out the signatures of life in the atmospheres of exoplanets. As such, there is a tremendous race to reach first light and begin using these large instruments. Nobel Prizes await.

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Inside Bruniquel Cave, where scientists have discovered an elaborate stone structure created by Neanderthals more than 175 thousand years ago. (credit: Etienne Fabre / SSAC)

176,500 years ago, long before modern humans left Africa for the Eurasian continent, a band of Neanderthals conducted an elaborate ritual deep inside Bruniquel Cave in a region we know today as southern France. The Neanderthal group wrested hundreds of stalagmites from the floor of the cave to build elaborate circular structures, their work illuminated only by firelight. Discovered by archaeologists in the 1990s, the cave system is so large that many of its great treasures are hidden far from its entrance, which suggests it was thoroughly explored and probably inhabited for some period of time. This new part of the cave, analyzed only recently, adds to our understanding of Neanderthal social life.

Bruniquel Cave, in southern France, was discovered in the 1990s to be full of Neanderthal artifacts. The site of this study was deep inside the cave and would have been lit by torches and fire.

The Neanderthal structure was mostly undisturbed for tens of thousands of years with the exception of a few hibernating bears. Recounting their discovery in Nature, a group of archaeologists say there is no question that the structures were created deliberately by humans, especially because there is evidence that the stalagmites were wrenched from the cave floor and stacked in circular patterns. Burn marks on the roughly 400 stones show that fires were built inside the structure, and one area contains burned bones. The bones could mean that this was a feasting place, but its difficult-to-reach location and the nature of the design suggest a more symbolic use. Based on the burn patterns, it seems that the structures themselves were designed to light on fire, creating what would have appeared to be circles of flaming stone in the otherwise pitch-black cave.

The stalagmite structures in Bruniquel Cave are curved lines and circles built from layered stalagmites, some of which were hollowed out. Burn marks reveal that fires were lit inside the stalagmite structures, creating what were probably burning circles of stone. The orange spots represent the heated zones, and the red spot (structure B) represents a char concentration (mainly burnt bone fragments) on the ground.

There is little evidence of human activity in the space other than the unusual structures, which don't resemble any of the art or funeral rites associated with more recent Neanderthal dwellings we've discovered. Most Neanderthal sites are from the past 50 thousand years, and these contain paintings, ochre for body decoration, and graves full of flowers. Some contain complex tools made after contact with modern humans from Africa, and it's often difficult to say whether they were made by Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, or some combination of the two. After all, there was a roughly 10,000 year period when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens co-existed in Europe, and we know they formed families and had children together.