Month: September 2016

This figurine was discovered at the neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. It was carefully buried beneath a platform in a house, along with a valuable piece of obsidian. Made of marble, it's nearly 7 inches long. (credit: Çatalhöyük Research Project)

Nine thousand years ago in Turkey, a large settlement called Çatalhöyük thrived for over a millennium. Full of densely-packed mud brick houses covered in paintings and symbolic decorations, its population hovered around 5,000. That made it one of the biggest settlements of its era, somewhere between an outsized village and tiny city. Now, archaeologists excavating there have discovered a rare, intact statuette of a woman buried carefully with a valuable piece of obsidian.

Figurines resembling this one, with large breasts, belly, and buttocks, have been found throughout the Anatolian region. But this is one of the only intact examples ever found. At nearly seven inches long, it's also one of the largest. Made of marble, it lay buried beneath the floor of a neolithic home for 8,000 years before its excavation this past summer.

News of the discovery first broke in The Daily Sabah, and spread quickly through Turkish media. Few details were available, but Ars has confirmed the find with Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder, who has led excavations at Çatalhöyük since the 1990s. He offered a complete description of the figurine, as well as thoughts about its context in both the ancient city and the Anatolian region in the 6th millennium BCE.

On Thursday, Tesla announced that it had been chosen “through a competitive process” to supply utility company Southern California Edison with 20 MW (or 80 MWh) of battery storage. In May, regulators ordered Southern California Edison to invest in utility-scale battery networks after natural gas provider SoCal Gas leaked 1.6 million pounds of methane into the atmosphere when a well ruptured at its Aliso Canyon Natural Gas Storage Facility.

The Aliso Canyon leak was the second-largest methane leak in US history, but it was far more damaging to the environment than the largest methane release, which happened in Texas in 2004. The Texas methane leak occurred when a natural gas storage facility collapsed, but a subsequent fire turned much of the escaping methane into carbon dioxide as it burned up. Carbon dioxide, while a pollutant, is considered less polluting than methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas in the short-term.

Last May, Tesla announced its intentions to sell stationary storage batteries in addition to its electric vehicles. The company now sells two stationary battery products: the Powerwall battery, meant for homeowners, and the Powerpack battery network, meant for business and industry. The batteries are being built at Tesla’s Gigafactory, a $5 billion factory outside of Reno, Nevada, that has been slowly opening its lines to daily operation.

Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30^th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+.

Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

Enlarge / FBI Director James Comey has forcefully advocated the need to unlock this phone in light of the larger "Going Dark" problem. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images News)

A trio of major media entities—The Associated Press, USA Today, and Vice Media—sued the FBI on Friday in an attempt to force the agency to reveal details from a mysterious deal that the agency struck in order to bust into a seized iPhone used by a now-deceased terrorist.

In April 2016, FBI Director James Comey suggested that his agency paid over $1.3 million to an unnamed company to unlock the iPhone 5C that was used by Syed Farook Rizwan, the man behind an attack in San Bernardino, California in December 2015.

The Department of Justice and Apple were set to square off in federal court in California in March 2016 before the hearing was called off. The government soon announced that it had been shown a new technique to unlock the phone and no longer needed Apple's help. The DOJ previously received a court order that would have compelled Apple to create an entirely new customized iOS to allow investigators to brute force the passcode on the device. Apple, for its part, forcefully argued that this was a significant government overreach.

Enlarge (credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

Mark it down, Arctic sea ice watchers: the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) has (preliminarily) called the annual minimum ice extent. On September 10, Arctic sea ice coverage dipped to 4.14 million square kilometers (1.6 million square miles) before ticking back upward for a few days. While it’s possible that a couple more days of shrinkage could come along, that was probably the low point for the year.

That puts 2016 in second place for the lowest minimum on record—statistically tied with 2007, which was within the error bars of this year's data. The record low is retained by 2012, which fell to an incredible 3.39 million square kilometers. This continues the trend of marked decline observed by satellites since 1979.

The ice was a little harder to track than usual this time around. Earlier this year, the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellite used by the NSIDC to track Arctic sea ice went on the fritz. After careful calibration, they switched to the next satellite in the series, bringing daily updates back online a couple months later and ensuring that there was no gap in the record.

Enlarge / Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle )

Between 2011 and 2012, large, secret donations from a billionaire owner of one of America’s leading lead producers provided critical support to Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and the Republican-led legislature as they weathered recall elections. Not coincidentally, around that time the lawmakers passed two laws that would effectively make it impossible for childhood victims of lead poisoning to sue lead companies, according to leaked documents obtained by The Guardian.

Since the laws were passed, federal courts have overturned key elements of them, ruling them unconstitutional and allowing legal challenges to go forward. However, if the laws had stayed in effect, it would have spared lead industries from potentially paying out millions in damages to hundreds of victims who were exposed to extremely high doses of the poisonous metal through paint during childhood.

“These children were perfectly innocent. They entered life with all the gifts and health that God gave them and were devastated by this neurotoxin,” Peter Earle, the principal attorney on 171 cases that are currently ongoing against lead producers and lead paint manufacturers, told The Guardian.

(credit: Virginia Tech)

The city council in Wilson, North Carolina, has reluctantly voted to turn off the fiber Internet service it provides to a nearby town because of a court ruling that prevents expansion of municipal broadband services.

The Federal Communications Commission in February 2015 voted to block laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. After that vote, Wilson's Greenlight fiber Internet service expanded to the nearby town of Pinetops.

But the states of North Carolina and Tennessee sued the FCC to keep their anti-municipal broadband laws in place, and last month they won a federal appeals court ruling that reinstated the law that prevents Wilson from offering Internet service to nearby municipalities. At last night's city council meeting, Wilson decided not to appeal the court decision and voted to terminate the service agreement with the town of Pinetops, Wilson's city spokesperson, Rebecca Agner, told Ars today.