Month: March 2017

Enlarge / See that vortex on the back edge of the wing? That means lift. (credit: Bomphrey/Nakata/Phillips/Walker)

It's unmistakable. A high-pitched whine tells you you're sharing a room with a mosquito, and you are unlikely to end the evening without some itchy welts. The sound alone is enough to make you shudder.

You're not imagining things. Within the insect world, mosquitoes have a distinctive flight, with a short wing stroke and a very high frequency of wing beats. And now, researchers have figured out the physics behind their flight. They have identified two mechanisms for generating lift that had not previously been seen in any animal. "Much of the aerodynamic force that supports [the mosquito's] weight," the authors conclude, "is generated in a manner unlike any previously described for a flying animal."

The work, done by a small team of Japanese and UK researchers, involved setting up a series of eight high-speed cameras to capture every instant of a mosquito's wing flap from multiple angles. The resulting data allowed them to create a digital model of the wings as they went through a full stroke. This was then used to solve fluid dynamics equations for the air around the wings, letting the researchers track the movement of the air as the wing beat through it.

Thanks to the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, blockbuster sci-fi adventures can be trippy again. Bulbous monsters, sparkly outfits, zero-G hairstyles, starscapes that look like 1970s prog rock album covers—it's all cool now. And that means, strangely, that the world is finally ready for a movie based on the 1960s comic book that started the psychedelic sci-fi craze in the first place.

That's what you'll see in this first full-length trailer for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, the tale of Valerian and Laureline, two spacio-temporal agents hired to guard the universe's only intergalactic library in the insanely colorful cosmopolis Alpha. The film is directed by The Fifth Element mastermind Luc Besson, whose most recent movie was the transhumanist hit Lucy, starring Scarlett Johansson. As for Valerian's plot, there's some kind of vague menace threatening not just the future of knowledge, but all of space-time.

The story looks fun, but the backstory is downright fascinating. Director Besson has been obsessed with the original French comic Valérian et Laureline for almost his entire career. Created in 1967 by French literature professor Pierre Christin and illustrated by Jean-Claude Mézières, the comic tackled social and philosophical issues with a strong dose of mid-century radicalism. What made it unique was the combination of political commentary with Mézières' crazy, colorful art. Mézières was a close friend of Jean Giraud, known as influential sci-fi comic creator Moebius. Both Mézières and Giraud's work were the immediate forerunners of the sexy/otherworldly style found in Métal Hurlant (Heavy Metal) magazine.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft announced today that CodePlex, the company's open source project-hosting service, will be closed down.

Started in 2006, the service offered an alternative to SourceForge. It was based initially on Microsoft's Team Foundation Server source control and later added options to use Subversion, Mercurial, and git.

At the time, there weren't a tremendous number of good options for hosting projects. SourceForge was the big one, but it always seemed light on feature development and heavy on advertising. CodePlex on the Web was much more attractive and less cluttered. The use of TFS for source control meant it also had strong integration in Visual Studio.

Enlarge / A screen shot showing the exploit taking control of a Samsung TV.

A new attack that uses terrestrial radio signals to hack a wide range of Smart TVs raises an unsettling prospect—the ability of hackers to take complete control of a large number of sets at once without having physical access to any of them.

The proof-of-concept exploit uses a low-cost transmitter to embed malicious commands into a rogue TV signal. That signal is then broadcast to nearby devices. It worked against two fully updated TV models made by Samsung. By exploiting two known security flaws in the Web browsers running in the background, the attack was able to gain highly privileged root access to the TVs. By revising the attack to target similar browser bugs found in other sets, the technique would likely work on a much wider range of TVs.

"Once a hacker has control over the TV of an end user, he can harm the user in a variety of ways," Rafael Scheel, the security consultant who publicly demonstrated the attack, told Ars. "Among many others, the TV could be used to attack further devices in the home network or to spy on the user with the TV's camera and microphone."

Enlarge

On Friday, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported that US energy production in 2016 fell by 4 percent, with fossil fuel production contributing to most of that decline.

The numbers are not terribly surprising. Global carbon emissions have been stalled for years even as economic activity has increased (although that doesn’t mean we’re not still emitting massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere). We’ve also seen big shifts in the market for fossil fuels—cheap natural gas is beating coal dramatically and renewables like wind and solar are starting to be cheap enough to compete with more traditional energy sources. And the EIA found recently that energy intensity, which is defined as units of energy per unit of GDP, has fallen by a third in the last 25 years. That means economic output needs less energy than it did before.

According to the EIA’s numbers, the US produced 84.1 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu) of energy in 2016, down 4 percent from 2015. That's the first time energy production has been down year-over-year since 2009. Fossil fuel-related energy production, which includes coal, natural gas, and petroleum, was responsible for most of that, dropping from 7 percent from the previous year. Even natural gas-related energy production dropped two percent from the previous year, and petroleum dropped 5 percent. Coal-related energy production dropped a dramatic 18 percent.