Month: August 2016

Enlarge / Bubble wrap isn't just for stress relief. (credit: George Ni)

To boil water using the Sun, we typically burn fossil fuels carrying several-hundred-million-year-old solar energy that was extracted from underground at great expense. It’s kind of Rube-Goldbergian. We’re fortunate that the Sun’s heat isn’t strong enough to boil the oceans (or us), but extracting the Sun’s energy at a significant scale is tricky.

The usual solution, as many magnifying-glass-toting children already know, is to concentrate sunlight and increase its intensity. Solar thermal plants, for example, use massive arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight and generate electricity. All that extra equipment gets pretty expensive—especially if you need the mirrors to track the Sun’s position across the sky.

So how do we engineer another way? In the past, researchers made clever designs to concentrate the heat generated by lower-intensity sunlight into small volumes of water. This heat consequently created higher localized temperatures. While they managed to boil water with this method, they weren’t able to ditch optical concentration completely.

Enlarge / Disclosing the warrantless surveillance program won Thomas Tamm the "Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling." (credit: War on Whistleblowers/YouTube)

The Justice Department lawyer who disclosed the secret and warrantless surveillance program then-President George W. Bush adopted in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks was publicly censured Thursday by a federal appeals court for breaching legal ethics. As a Lawyer for the Justice Department's Intelligence Policy and Review unit, Thomas Tamm violated professional conduct rules for disclosing to The New York Times "confidences" and "secrets," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded. (PDF)

As part of his Justice Department duties, Tamm was tasked with requesting electronic surveillance warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals Board of Professional Responsibility said Tamm became aware in 2004 that certain applications to that FISA Court for national security surveillance authority "were given special treatment" and he leaked details of the program to the newspaper.

Tamm, who could have been disbarred, but now can continue practicing law as a Maryland state public defender (he resigned from the Justice Department in 2006), said he learned that "these applications derived from special intelligence obtained not pursuant to prior applications to the Court, but from an extra-judicial source referred to as 'the program.'" After digging into it, he "concluded that it was probably illegal as it was not court-supervised."

Enlarge (credit: Google Fiber)

Google Fiber has been battling AT&T over access to utility poles for a few years now. During a dispute in Austin, Texas late in 2013, AT&T said it could deny access to its poles because Google wasn't a "qualified" telecom or cable provider.

Things have gone a bit smoother since then because the companies signed a nationwide agreement granting Google Fiber access to AT&T poles on a city-by-city basis. But in Nashville, Tennessee, Google Fiber construction has stalled partly because the new ISP still has problems getting access to AT&T poles. AT&T confirmed to Ars earlier this month that the terms of the previous nationwide agreement cover Nashville, but it declined to explain why there are still holdups.

An AT&T executive has now detailed the telco's objections in an interview with FierceTelecom. Google Fiber has been making mistakes in engineering drawings that it needs to submit before attaching fiber to AT&T poles, according to Joelle Phillips, president of AT&T Tennessee.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have many great deals to share that are part of Dell's Early Labor Day sale. Now you can get an XPS Core i7 desktop for $685, a $100 gift card on a PlayStation 4 Call of Duty bundle, and nearly $100 off a Dell UltraSharp monitor plus a $75 gift card. Those are just some of the steals going on during the sale, so be sure to check them all out.

Take a look at the full list of deals below.

Dell Early Labor Day Sale

One of a set of three new mouse lemur species described this year. Microbus ganzhorni hails from Madagascar—as do all lemurs. (credit: Giuseppe Donati.)

Read any estimate of the number of species present on Earth, and you'll notice two things: the numbers vary wildly, and they're always well above the number of species we actually know about. It's tempting to think we've exhausted the exploration of the Earth, that there's nothing new to see. But one area that we've barely scratched the surface of is the biological diversity that we're a part of.

There are several reasons for this. One is that some habitats, like the deep ocean, are both vast and hard to get to. Others, like caves and islands, isolate populations and generate species at a phenomenal rate. Finally, there's just a tendency to view, say, all ants as being roughly the same. That can allow species to hide in plain sight, with nobody taking the time to look for the details that distinguish them from their close relatives. DNA sequencing is also telling us that some populations that look identical to us haven't actually interbred in a very long time, and may be separate species.

As researchers gradually look more closely, the results are a steady stream of new discoveries. We thought we'd share some with you. We set a few simple guidelines for inclusion. The first is that the species had to be discovered this year. The second is that it has to be still living—paleontologists find new species almost as often as biologists do. The final thing is that we had to be able to come up with a decent photo of it.

(credit: Amazon)

Last week, we learned that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update caused trouble for many webcam users. Today, it's the turn of Kindle owners to cry foul, with numerous reports that plugging a Kindle into a Windows 10 machine with the update will make the PC crash with a Blue Screen of Death.

This problem has more than a hint of the same feeling as the webcam issue: it's the kind of thing that shows up quickly when using Windows 10 on a primary system but is going to be much more obscure if you only tested the Windows Insider previews in a virtual machine or secondary system—such systems are much less likely to be plugged in to all the many peripherals and gadgets that primary machines are. Microsoft's own advice is that the Insider previews should not be installed on your "everyday computer." That's good advice; the quality of the builds released to the Insider program is far too inconsistent to make it a good option for a machine that you depend on. But that has consequences: the Insider program is going to consistently miss this kind of hardware interaction.

Investigation of the issue and development of a fix is apparently underway.