Month: May 2017

Enlarge / The "high bay" at Boeing's Satellite Development Center in El Segundo, California. A Boeing employee sold documents from the plant to an FBI undercover agent posing as a Russian intelligence agent.

Gregory Allen Justice, a 49-year-old engineer living in Culver City, Calif., has pleaded guilty to charges of attempted economic espionage and attempted violation of the Export Control Act. Justice, who according to his father worked for Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, Calif., was arrested last July after selling technical documents about satellite systems to someone he believed to be a Russian intelligence agent. Instead, he sold the docs to an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation employee. The sting was part of a joint operation by the FBI and the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

The documents provided by Justice to the undercover agent included information on technology on the US Munitions List, meaning they were regulated by government International Trade in Arms regulations (ITAR). "In exchange for providing these materials during a series of meeting between February and July of 2016, Justice sought and received thousands of dollars in cash payments," a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement. "During one meeting, Justice and the undercover agent discussed developing a relationship like one depicted on the television show 'The Americans.'"

Just before he was arrested, Justice offered to take the agent on a tour of the facility where he worked—where he told the agent "all military satellites were built," according Justice's plea agreement.

Enlarge / China's 19-year-old Go player Ke Jie (L) prepares to make a move during the first match against Google's artificial intelligence program AlphaGo in Wuzhen, east China's Zhejiang province on May 23, 2017. (credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images)

DeepMind's AlphaGo AI has defeated Ke Jie in the first round of a best-of-three Go match in China. A video of the match is embedded below. Ke Jie was defeated by just a half a point—the closest margin possible—but scoring versus AlphaGo is a little bit disingenuous: DeepMind's AI doesn't try to win by a large margin; it just plots the surest route to victory, even if it's only by half a point.

Ke Jie is generally considered to be the world's best human Go player, but he wasn't expected to win; AlphaGo defeated the Chinese 19-year-old earlier in the year during an unbeaten online 60-match victory streak.

Today's real-life match was a little different, though. According to DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Ke Jie "used the ideas AlphaGo used in the online games in January"; in other words, Ke Jie tried to use AlphaGo's own moves against itself. Clearly it didn't quite work out, but "some wonderful moves were played," says Hassabis.

Enlarge / Flooding under clear skies is an increasing reality for coastal communities. (credit: NOAA)

Humanity has trillions of dollars of infrastructure within a meter of the current sea level. Given that, it's rather important that we understand how long that sea level will stay at its current measurement and how quickly it will change. Unfortunately, we don't have very good data for this. Modern satellite records of sea level only go back a few decades; before that, we have about a century of tide gauge readings.

Unfortunately, those tide gauges weren't uniformly distributed throughout the globe. And, in many cases, the solid ground they are attached to has been shifting slightly. Attempts to account for these and other factors has produced a variety of estimates of past sea level rise, most being fairly similar but differing in a number of ways. Now, the latest attempt suggests that sea level rose more slowly early this century—which means it has accelerated dramatically in recent decades.

Doing the books

Ocean levels are rising due to a combination of added water (from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets) and the fact that water expands as it warms up. But that's not the only factor at play. Humanity has trapped a lot of water behind dams, and it has taken lots of groundwater and placed it back into the regular cycling of evaporation and precipitation. Collectively, these factors create what's called a "budget" for the sea level. If we knew how much they changed, we should have a good estimate of ocean levels.

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Huawei has only been making PCs for a few years now, but the company has been paying attention to its competition. Today, Huawei announced a new laptop, the Matebook X, which looks like Apple's MacBook with its slim profile, light metal body, and fanless design. The Matebook X has many of the same features as the MacBook, but Huawei added its own practical flare to this Windows notebook, which may be enough to make it stand out.

At first glance, you might mistake the Matebook X for the MacBook if you overlook the Huawei logo in the middle of the lid. Huawei describes the material the 13-inch notebook is made of as "microencapsulated phase change material," and it looks and feels like metal. The company claims this construction is better at absorbing heat produced by the machine, so it shouldn't overheat like other laptops. It measures 12.5mm thick at its widest point, which is just slightly thinner than the Macbook's 13.1mm thickness. The Matebook X will come to the US in two colors: space gray and a warm, bronze-like gold called "prestige gold." China will receive an extra rose gold version.