Month: February 2017

Enlarge / President Donald Trump, as seen on January 27, 2017 in Arlington, Virginia. (credit: Pool Photo/Getty Images)

Late Saturday evening Pacific Time, the Department of Justice officially filed its request for an emergency stay in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, in its attempt to halt the temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge in Washington just one day earlier.

The case, State of Washington v. Trump, which officially moved to the largest federal appellate district earlier in the day, is now just one step below the Supreme Court.

On Friday, US District Judge James L. Robart ruled against President Donald Trump’s executive order that aimed to restrict immigration by people from seven largely-Muslim countries—stopping it immediately nationwide. Following the order, the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security said they would comply, according to the Washington Post.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Industrialization and urbanization have drastically changed the face of our planet, and the number of untouched natural habitats for wildlife is shrinking. Conservationists are trying to understand remaining biodiversity in order to create sanctuaries that preserve it. One of the challenges they face is how to make connections among information derived from different methods of evaluating the Earth's life.

One approach to getting data on biological diversity involves field inventories of species. Another evaluates ecosystem processes by dividing the Earth into categories based on vegetation (forests or grasslands, for example) and subsequently analyzing properties of that category's plant life. But critical information is often missed when only one method is employed.

But these two types of inventories are actually linked. This link goes by the name "functional diversity," which represents the features of organisms that influence both their individual fitness and their contribution to the function of ecosystems that contain them. In a recent investigation published in Science, a team of ecologists has used an advanced aerial imaging method to explore the functional diversity of plant communities.

Enlarge (credit: NASA)

Breakthrough Starshot is an initiative that hopes to send miniature spaceships on a high-speed jaunt to the Centauri system sometime within the next few decades. Doing that requires the development of a variety of untried technology—and that's before we get to the issue of sending data back. Still, even if Breakthrough Starshot never gets any hardware beyond the Solar System, it's clearly getting people to think about what it would take to get a good look at our closest stellar neighbors.

In the latest example, a German researcher named René Heller has teamed with Michael Hippke, a self-proclaimed "gentleman scientist" with 10 peer-reviewed publications. Their goal: to see if we could not just get hardware to the Centauri system, but put it into orbit for long-term observations. The answer's yes, but the trip will not be short.

Breakthrough Starshot's design is a tiny micro-spacecraft attached to a solar sail. Solar sails don't actually need the Sun; they can accelerate by using light from any source. So, Breakthrough Starshot hopes to have an array of lasers give the sail and its spacecraft a boost up to 20 percent of the speed of light. That will get the spacecraft to Proxima Centauri, the closest star. Data will get back while most of the principals involved in the work are still alive.

Enlarge / Welcome to Mars. Sort of. (credit: Eric Berger)

I wasn’t sure what to expect when walking into the new Mars exhibit at Space Center Houston. For technical and financial reasons, as well as a flagging national commitment, NASA just doesn’t seem like it will send humans to Mars any time soon. The space agency’s “Journey to Mars” is long on hype, but short on concrete plans and funding. With that said, the thought of actually landing on Mars remains hard to resist.

The museum had invited Ars for a behind-the-scenes tour of Mission Mars in January, just before it opened as a permanent exhibit. Although some final work remained in progress, the exhibit was far enough along to conclude—happily—that NASA’s Journey to Mars will not be forced down the throats of visitors. Rather, the museum recognizes that NASA’s priorities can change as new presidential administrations come and go.

“At some point humans are going to have to leave Earth,” explained Paul Spana, the museum’s exhibits manager. “It’s in the nature of humans to go beyond, into the next valley. We’ve been to the Moon. Hopefully we’ll be going back soon. But as we eventually expand into the solar system, the next logical place to go will be Mars. We want to help people understand what that might be like.”

Enlarge / Plume pods, each just big enough to plug into a wall outlet.

Part of the review process for Ars Technica’s first round of mesh testing was talking to the people and companies who build the devices. For established companies like Google or Netgear, you’re never sure who you’ll get—but for startups, who so far are casting long shadows in the Wi-Fi Mesh field, you’re likely to get some one-on-one time with the CEO or founder.

Plume was no exception, and I had a long talk with CEO Fahri Diner. Fahri made it clear from the start that Plume wasn’t about the typical Wi-Fi “ego yardstick”—i.e., setting up a single device super close to the AP in completely ideal conditions and trying to get the biggest number that you can. Real Wi-Fi workloads that real users put their equipment in charge of are an entirely different problem, he said, and that—not the e-peen measuring contest—was the problem Plume was designed to solve.

It’s easy to wave this kind of speech off as clever marketing BS. But I was more inclined to take it at face value than I might otherwise have been, since Plume had just done extremely well in my own testing. I try to make my testing as relevant to real-world conditions as possible—I test in a real house, with real-world distances, interior walls, exterior walls, and furniture in between nodes and client devices. Before using any artificial tools (like iPerf), I even test devices against real protocols (HTTP, SMB/CIFS, and so forth) to make sure they produce equivalent results.