Month: December 2016

(credit: Deepwater Wind)

On Monday, energy company Deepwater Wind announced that its wind farm three miles off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island, has the all-clear to sell electricity to the regional power grid.

The Block Island Wind Farm is the first offshore wind energy plant in the US, and it's expected to produce 30 MW of electricity at full capacity. Deepwater Wind is slowly ramping up energy output and still must provide additional paperwork to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council, but the executive director of that organization, Grover Fugate, told the Providence Journal, “we don't anticipate any major issues” to getting the wind farm fully online.

The one hitch in the Deepwater's plan is that one of the five turbines was recently damaged when a drill bit was left in a critical part of turbine. According to the Providence Journal, "the bit had caused damage to an unspecified number of the 128 magnet modules that line the circular generator and are critical to producing energy." Although the magnet modules can apparently be replaced easily, Deepwater needs to have the components shipped from France, where General Electric, the manufacturer of the wind turbines, makes them.

Enlarge / Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, is arrested outside the Comet Ping Pong restaurant December 4 in Washington, DC. (credit: ABC News/YouTube)

Last week, we brought you the bizarre tale of a gunman who drove from his North Carolina home to Washington, DC, to "self-investigate" a pizza restaurant at the center of a whacko fake news conspiracy called "Pizzagate."

The story began when DC's Metropolitan Police Department arrested 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch on allegations of assault with a dangerous weapon. The feds took over the case on Tuesday and have charged Welch with Interstate Transportation of a Firearm with Intent to Commit an Offense, which carries a maximum 5-year term. Welch appeared in federal court in Washington, DC, on Tuesday and asked for a lawyer. He remains jailed until at least Friday, when a detention hearing is scheduled.

According to a federal agent's affidavit, Welch went into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant December 4 armed with a loaded AR-15 assault-style rifle and carrying a loaded .38-caliber revolver.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Curiosity has been on the surface of Mars for more than four years and has covered roughly 15km of the red planet. In that time, the rover has drilled into and analyzed countless rocks to learn more about the planet’s mineralogy. According to Curiosity, Mars was once a wet world with much of the chemistry required for life.

The rover has also climbed about 200 vertical meters from the bottom of Gale Crater, near Yellowknife Bay, onto the lower slopes of Mount Sharp and into the Murray Buttes feature. Amid these travels, Curiosity has revealed the changing composition of the clays and rocks. For example, scientists working with data collected by Curiosity announced on Tuesday they had recently found boron on Mars for the first time, an indicator of past habitability.

Enlarge (credit: Dawn Endico)

Police in Mountain View, California, told Ars on Tuesday that they are set to formally present the results of their months-long investigation of an online nude photo exchange of high school girls. The presentation will go to county prosecutors before the end of the year.

“No arrests or charges filed yet in this case,” Katie Nelson, a spokeswoman for the Mountain View Police Department, told Ars by e-mail. “We are presenting the case to the [district attorney] by year's end, and they will ultimately decide what direction this goes.”

As has happened in similar cases in other parts of the country for years now, ringleaders could be prosecuted with child pornography, among other felony charges.

Enlarge / I'm not sure I need Cortana on my fridge, toaster, or thermostat, but there we have it. (credit: Microsoft)

At its WinHEC event in Shenzhen last week, Microsoft revealed more of its hardware and software plans for Windows devices. This included major announcements, such as Windows returning to ARM systems with built-in x86 emulation, but the company also had things to reveal about the evolving Windows platform.

Mary Jo Foley spotted a presentation describing the next iteration of Cortana and Microsoft's speech-driven user interface that will be coming in the Creators Update in spring of next year and, beyond, in future Windows iterations. The plan is to make Cortana ever more widely available and accessible, with better hardware capabilities and a greater number of Cortana-capable devices.

First up, Cortana is being added to Windows IoT, the version of Windows for all kinds of embedded devices (in spite of the branding, it's not just for "Internet of Things" gizmos; it's also for traditional embedded applications such as point-of-sale systems). Frustratingly, however, this update still isn't going to enable Cortana on cheap Amazon Echo-style headless hardware. Although Windows IoT itself can be used on headless systems, only IoT devices with screens will be able to enable Cortana.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan )

Last Thursday, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy made headlines by boldly proclaiming that teen e-cigarette use is a “major public health concern.” The assertion came alongside a government report with some eye-popping figures, including that e-cigarette use among high school students increased by more than 900 percent between 2011 and 2015. The apparent blaze in popularity led Murthy and other public health experts to worry that vaping could blow up rates of teen smoking and life-long nicotine addictions.

But new data released stands to stamp out some of that alarm.

In 2016, e-cigarette use among teens dipped for the first time since the devices gained popularity in the last decade or so, according to public health researchers at the University of Michigan. And e-cigs aren’t the only unhip substances among the youths—teen use of regular cigarettes, as well as alcohol and illicit drugs, continued its long-term decline, hitting record lows this year.