Month: November 2016

Enlarge / Detail from Christopher Doll's cover art for The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. (credit: Christopher Doll)

Up here in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the time of year when curling up with a book—or a stack of books—is pretty much mandatory. If you're wondering where to start, we've got a list of new novels from 2016 to help you escape and make you think strange new thoughts. Many of these are part of longer series, so you can come back for more and more and more.

Four Roads Cross, by Max Gladstone

This is the fifth standalone novel in Gladstone's utterly riveting Craft Sequence, a series about lawyers and financial experts in a world where magic takes the form of contractual obligations and market forces. Most of the gods in this world have been overthrown, but a few remain. Talented lawyer Tara Abernathy has to represent the interests of one whose creditors are trying to mount a hostile takeover of his church. Unfortunately, she already has her hands full trying to help a moon goddess recover control of her seized property, while her friends in the local police force are trying to stop a rash of demonic possessions. Smart, funny, and action-packed, this is fantasy writing for people who love politics and economics.

Because Gladstone is a complete weirdo, he decided to write this series out of order, so the first novel is actually the third, the second is actually the first, and so on. You can tell the actual order from the number in the title (so this is the fifth novel released, but it's fourth in the cycle). The good news is that you can read them in any order, because they stand on their own. Characters do recur, however, so if you want to encounter them in chronological order, feel free to start with Last First Snow and make your way up to Four Roads Cross.

Enlarge / Yeah, it's nice, and there's a lot of it, but it's horribly inefficient. (credit: Brookhaven National lab)

There's no question that humans are driving long-term changes in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. But the human influence is taking place against a backdrop of natural carbon fluxes that are staggering in scale. Each year, for example, the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere cycles up and down by over a percent purely due to seasonal differences in plant growth.

The effectiveness of biological activity provides the hope that we could leverage it to help us pull some of our carbon back out of the atmosphere at an accelerated pace. But the incredible scale of biology hides a bit of an ugly secret: the individual enzymes and pathways that are used to incorporate CO₂ into living organisms aren't that efficient. These pathways are also linked to a complex biochemistry inside the cell that doesn't always suit our purposes.

Fed up with waiting for life to evolve a solution to our industrialization problem, a German-Swiss team of researchers has decided to roll its own. In an astonishing bit of work, they've taken enzymes from nine different organisms in all three domains of life and used them to build and optimize a synthetic cycle that can use carbon dioxide with an efficiency 20 times that of the system used by plants.

(credit: Stephen Melkisethian)

Beginning December 1, the US surveillance state is to expand—all without a congressional vote.

Earlier this year, a new Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure was amended, after three years of study, by an unelected advisory committee and signed by the US Supreme Court. It allows judges to sign warrants to allow the authorities to hack into computers outside a judge's jurisdiction. Rule 41 also grants judges the power to use one warrant to search multiple computers anywhere, instead of requiring warrants for each computer. Absent the rule, federal judges may only authorize electronic searches within their own judicial district.

While this may seem bureaucratic or like a technicality, in practice the new rule will have a big impact on investigating cybercrime, according to the Justice Department. Evidence has been suppressed in some child pornography prosecutions because a Virginia magistrate allowed the FBI to seize and operate the Tor-hidden site Playpen for 13 days. Investigators also deployed malware that disrupted Tor's privacy protections and revealed more than 1,000 true IP addresses, which led to 137 prosecutions nationwide. In a few of those prosecutions, judges tossed cases because of the jurisdiction rule that Rule 41 now cures.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler testifying before the House Communications and Technology Subcommittee in March 2016. (credit: House Energy and Commerce Committee)

As Republicans prepare to take over the Federal Communications Commission, outgoing Chairman Tom Wheeler today defended his Democratic majority’s decisions and said he hopes the FCC will continue to protect consumers under President Donald Trump.

Wheeler made the remarks in a press conference after a very short FCC meeting. The agenda was stripped bare after Republicans in Congress asked Wheeler to halt any controversial rulemakings until the Trump inauguration in January.

The agenda originally included votes on reduced price caps and other regulations for “special access” business data services, Universal Service funding to expand mobile broadband networks, wireless roaming obligations, and requirements for audio description of TV programming for blind and visually impaired people. All of those were taken off the agenda; Wheeler said that any item that drew objections from at least one commissioner was deleted.

Enlarge (credit: Volvo)

LOS ANGELES, CALIF.—On Thursday at the LA Auto Show, Volvo announced a new connected car app that aims to free users from having to deal with pesky things like taking the car to the gas station or car wash. It's called Volvo Concierge Services, and it's a pilot program in the Bay Area that will allow S90 and XC90 owners to get their cars refueled, serviced, or valeted from their smartphones.

We spoke to Volvo US CEO Lex Kersemakers to find out more about the idea:

We have a number of important missions, but one of them is to make life less complicated—for our customers, not for ourselves. We want to reach a point where our customers never need to fill up their car again, or drive to the car wash themselves. We have the technology, so we realized we could create a digital key which gives a vendor temporary access to a car. We've created a secure open platform, with secure vendors to see how we can extend the level of convenience for our customers. It uses preselected vendors in your area, you send them a digital key, they come pick up the car, fill it up, return it, and you get billed digitally. It sounds very easy, but there's a lot of technology, if not a lot of lawyers involved.

Volvo is taking advantage of its new Scalable Product Architecture vehicle platform (that's used by the XC90 and S90) to try out something that until now has been the preserve of discussions around autonomous cars of the future—freeing owners from some of the day-to-day grind of car maintenance. Proponents of autonomous tech often refer to the idea of one's car going off and parking or refueling itself while the owner is busy getting on with their life, and this is (sort of) the first step along that path—although for now actual humans are involved in the process.

Enlarge / James Clapper testifying to a House committee today in Washington DC. He said he has submitted his letter of resignation.

The nation's top intelligence official, who became a controversial figure in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations about mass surveillance, has said he's stepping down. This morning, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that he submitted his resignation letter, "which felt pretty good."

Clapper's resignation was not unexpected, but it does leave a key role for the new Trump Administration to fill.

Clapper had over 50 years of military and intelligence service. His office was created after the events of 9/11 to oversee 17 other intelligence agencies. Clapper had moved into the private sector, but he rejoined government service in September 2001. He became the fourth director of ODNI in 2010.