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(credit: Android Police)

Over the weekend a new set of real-life Nexus pictures hit the Internet, and the device looks... pretty much like what we were expecting. The slow drip of Nexus leaks continues at Android Police, which had its source send over a set of heavily cropped pictures. The device looks almost exactly like the renders the site created back in July.

There's no branding in the pictures at all, but Android Police is still maintaining that a "G" logo will be on the final device to the exclusion of a "Nexus" logo. We're calling this a "Nexus device," but maybe it would be more accurate to start calling it a "Google Phone."

The devices are being built by HTC, so of course they come with HTC's trademark humongous top and bottom bezels. The device is supposed to be a custom design by Google, but we're starting to think the outside is heavily based on the HTC A9. This would explain the bottom bezel—it's that big because it used to house a fingerprint scanner.

(credit: Scott K. Johnson)

Ice sheets are large and complex things. Figuring out how quickly—and where—they’ll melt as the world warms is a monumental task. We worry about some portions (like the vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet) collapsing entirely, but we know some other parts will be disappearing in the foreseeable future. Records from past periods of climate change are important guides here. What better way to figure out what will happen than to see what has happened before?

For the Greenland Ice Sheet, there has been some debate about how small it has gotten in past warm periods where we know sea level was higher than it is today. The problem is that Greenland's ice doesn’t go nearly so far back in time as Antarctica’s. Snowfall is greater here, and ice flows more quickly to the edges of the continent where it disappears from the pages of the history we read from ice cores. Few Greenland cores go back more than about 110,000 years, failing to tell us about the last interglacial warm period.

But at the bottom of a couple of ice cores from the thickest parts of the ice sheet, there is some messed up ice we know could be a lot older. Figuring out how old is another matter. Without an orderly stack of annual layers to count back through, there aren’t many reference points preserved in the ice. To make things worse, water can refreeze to the underside of glaciers, so it might not have even been glacial ice in the first place.

Selected scenes from Ars' first few hours playing No Man's Sky (video link)

The video game No Man's Sky captured our hearts the moment its veil was lifted for one reason: seeming infinity, right now. A very sci-fi, virtual version, of course, but its abstract take is still something wild: more than 18 quintillion planets, all "magically" generated on the fly, for us to immediately fly toward, excavate, and marvel at.

It's not flying cars or an auto-mutating vaccine that can cure all influenza or anything, but it still seems like some sort of sci-fi dream. The marriage of technology and infinity is the kind of thing you might not have ever expected to see, especially on current systems.

(credit: Nissan)

The vast majority of American drivers could switch to battery electric vehicles (BEVs) tomorrow and carry on with their lives unaffected, according to a new study in Nature Energy. What's more, those BEVs need not be a $100,000 Tesla, either. That's the conclusion from a team at MIT and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico that looked at the potential for BEV adoption in the US in light of current driving patterns. Perhaps most interestingly, the study found that claim to be true for a wide range of cities with very distinct geography and even per-capita gasoline consumption.

The authors—led by MIT's Zachary Needell—used the Nissan Leaf as their representative vehicle. The Leaf is one of the best-selling BEVs on the market, second only to the Tesla Model S in 2015 (10,990 sold vs 13,300 Teslas). But it's not particularly long-legged; although the vehicle got an optional battery bump from 24kWh to 30kWh for 2016, its quoted range is 107 miles on a full charge. You don't need to spend long browsing comment threads or car forums to discover that many drivers think this is too short a range for their particular use cases. Yet, Needell and colleagues disagree.

The authors use the 24kWh Nissan Leaf as the basis for their calculations, based on a probabilistic model of BEV range based on driving behavior (rather than just looking at average commute distances and BEV range). This involved using information from the National Household Travel Survey, hourly temperature data for 16 US cities, and GPS data from travel surveys in California, Atlanta, and Houston (to calculate second-by-second speed profiles of different trip types).

(credit: Infiniti)

One of the key variables for an internal combustion engine is its compression ratio. This is the ratio of the maximum volume within the cylinder (when the piston is at bottom dead center) and the minimum volume within the cylinder (when the piston is at top dead center). Obviously, this ratio is fixed at the point of design—the amount of travel of a piston within a cylinder is determined by the profile of the crankshaft and the length of the connecting rod between the two.

At least that has always been the case. But Infiniti plans to change that with the debut of its new VC-T engine, which is debuting at next month's Paris Motor Show.

The higher an engine's compression ratio is, the more mechanical energy it converts from the combustion of a given amount of fuel mixed with a given amount of air. But too high a ratio causes knocking—premature detonation of fuel-air mixture during the engine's compression stroke caused by high cylinder temperatures.