Month: September 2017

Enlarge / Wind turbines, manufactured by Vestas Wind Systems A/S, operate near farmland in this aerial photo at the Botievo wind farm operated by DTEK Holdings Ltd. in Botievo, Ukraine, on Thursday, May 26, 2016. Photographer: Vincent Mundy/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

Danish company Vestas Wind Systems is one of the biggest makers of wind turbines in the world, recently surpassing GE’s market share in the US. But as the wind industry becomes more competitive, Vestas appears to be looking for ways to solidify its lead by offering something different. Now, the company says it’s looking into building wind turbines with battery storage onsite.

According to a Bloomberg report, Vestas is working on 10 projects that will add storage to wind installations, and Tesla is collaborating on at least one of those projects. Vestas says the cooperation between the two companies isn’t a formal partnership, and Tesla hasn’t commented on the nature of its work with Vestas. But the efforts to combine wind turbines with battery storage offer a glimpse into how the wind industry might change in the future.

The news about Vestas is just one datapoint in a summer of news about wind and storage projects. In August, offshore wind developer Deepwater Wind announced that it would pair a 144MW offshore wind farm planned for the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts, with a 40MWh battery storage system from Tesla. Construction on that project is set to end sometime in 2022. According to GreenTechMedia, Spanish wind power company Acciona recently connected two Samsung lithium-ion batteries to a 3-megawatt turbine in Spain, Dong installed a battery on the UK coastline in June to store some offshore wind energy, and Statoil will include a 1MWh lithium-ion battery in its designs for a floating offshore wind farm that will be completed in late 2018.

(credit: Marco Paköeningrat)

Facebook has confirmed a Washington Post report indicating that its ad sales team had sold advertising to a "shadowy Russian company" ahead of the 2016 Presidential election. These sponsored FB posts, in turn, were used to "target" American voters, either by directly naming presidential candidates or by focusing on "politically divisive issues."

This information was disclosed to congressional investigators, according to "several people familiar with the company’s findings," after an internal Facebook investigation this spring linked $100,000 of ad buys to a Russian company known as the Internet Research Agency. The WP's sources described the company as a pro-Kremlin "troll farm." Facebook's investigation confirmed, via "digital footprints," that 3,300 ads from 470 "suspicious and likely fraudulent Facebook accounts and pages" were all linked to the same Russian company.

Those ads were targeted, according to an unnamed Facebook official, at users who'd "expressed interest" in politically charged topics such as African-American social issues, the Second Amendment, immigration, and the LGBT community. Facebook declined to show congressional investigators the exact content of these ads, citing both the company's data policy and federal law about disclosing user data and content.

Neil Jordan

Though humans like to think of themselves as the only creatures on Earth who vote on what to do, they aren't. Many social animals engage in consensus-seeking behavior, from meerkats to honeybees to Capuchin monkeys. In these species and more, members of the group weigh in about what their next move should be.

Now, a new study of African wild dogs in Botswana adds another animal to the voting pool. It turns out that these endangered, undomesticated dogs "vote" on whether to start hunting by making noises that sound just like sneezes.

Enlarge (credit: Garrett Ziegler)

Banks, insurance companies, and Fortune 500 corporations take note: attack code has just gone public for a hard-to-patch vulnerability that hackers can exploit to take control of your website.

The critical vulnerability is located in Apache Struts 2, an open-source framework that large numbers of enterprise-grade organizations use to develop customer-facing Web applications. The bug, which has been active since 2008, allows end users to execute malicious code or commands by plugging maliciously modified data into search boxes or similar features hosted on the site.

Apache Struts maintainers released a patch on Tuesday. Unfortunately, installing the update is only the first step. Vulnerable sites must then use the new version to rebuild vulnerable Web apps and thoroughly test them before deploying them in their production sites. The process can be labor and time intensive. What's more, the particular vulnerability this time may require developers to change the code that calls the Struts framework. Further complicating matters: many sites don't always have a complete list of apps running on their sites, which makes finding out if they're at risk harder.

Enlarge / No, that's not an oddly-shaped black hole. It's a molecular cloud, which absorbs most wavelengths of light, making it hard to see what's inside one. (credit: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT Antu, ESO)

The biggest object in our galaxy is remarkably difficult to see. The core of our galaxy houses a supermassive black hole that weighs in at over a million times our Sun's mass. And when it's actively feeding on matter, it should be very bright. Yet for years, all we knew was that there was some sort of radio source there.

Evidence of a black hole at the center of our galaxy came indirectly by tracking the orbit of a nearby star. This demonstrated that there had to be something extraordinarily heavy in a very small region of space, strengthening the case that the object was an immense black hole.

Now, researchers are making a similar case for what may be the second-biggest black hole in the Milky Way. The object appears to be buried in a gas cloud that's keeping it obscured. But the gas itself is moving fast enough that calculations suggest that a 100,000 solar-mass black hole is holding it together. That would make the object an intermediate-mass black hole. While intermediate-mass black holes play a key role in many cosmological models, we have yet to confirm any actually exist.

Enlarge / War of the Chosen is by far the most story-driven XCOM product. (credit: Firaxis)

XCOM 2 looks, sounds, and plays like a turn-based strategy game about beating back an alien occupation. Trust me, though: it's really a game about putting out fires. Over time, the game grows increasingly overrun with tasks that force you to pick and choose just a handful of permadeath-laden, turn-based missions to send squads on. Not every mission can be tackled, of course, and you just have to live with the extra aliens, reduced monthly income, and encroaching game-ending conflicts from the fires you can't put out.

That's how the base game began, anyway. Over the course of a campaign, it became clear that XCOM 2 didn't have enough fuel to keep the fires burning. One crack squad with enough experience, arms, and armor could eventually put any number of aliens to shame in the turn-based ground game. The overarching strategy layer then became an exercise in endlessly beefing up until you were as ready as can be for the final assault.

War of the Chosen, the game's first and likely last full expansion, deals with that problem with a simple maxim: more is more. More maps, more enemies, more abilities, more buildings, more to manage between missions, more story and characters, more bosses. In short, more fires that grow into raging infernos in the mid-to-late-game.

Enlarge / Ayyadurai failed to win in court, although he has the option to appeal. (credit: Darlene DeVita / Aurich)

A federal judge in Massachusetts has dismissed a libel lawsuit filed earlier this year against tech news website Techdirt.

The claim was brought by Shiva Ayyadurai, who has controversially claimed that he invented e-mail in the late 1970s. Techdirt (and its founder and CEO, Mike Masnick) has been a longtime critic of Ayyadurai and institutions that have bought into his claims. "How The Guy Who Didn't Invent Email Got Memorialized In The Press & The Smithsonian As The Inventor Of Email," reads one Techdirt headline from 2012.

Numerous articles that dubbed Ayyadurai a "liar" and a "charlatan" followed. That, in turn, led to Ayyadurai's January 2017 libel lawsuit.

Enlarge / Mmmmm, plastic-y. (credit: Getty | Cate Gillon)

Tiny bits of plastic commonly come rushing out of water taps around the world, according to a new survey of 159 water samples collected from more than a dozen nations.

Overall, 83 percent of the 159 samples contained some amount of microplastics. Those samples came from various places in the US, Europe, Indonesia, Uganda, Beirut, India, and Ecuador. No country was without a plastic-positive water sample. In fact, after testing a handful of samples from each place, the lowest contamination rate was 72 percent. The highest—found in the US—was 94-percent positive rate.

The microplastic pieces found are tiny, as small as 2.5 micrometers in size. The amounts were tiny, too. When researchers looked at the average number of plastic bits per 500mL water sample in each nation, the highest average was from US water samples—with 4.8 plastic scraps per sample. A sample taken from the US Capitol had 16 plastic fragments in it, for instance. The lowest average was 1.9 microplastic shards per 500mL sample, seen in those from Indonesia and Europe.

Enlarge / Madsen, right, stands aboard the UC2 Kraka, alongside the UC3 Nautilus, as the two submarines are secured for a test run in this 2008 photo. (credit: Sonny W. / Flickr)

In a Copenhagen court hearing, Peter Madsen—the owner and skipper of the crowdfunded, amateur-built diesel-electric submarine UC3 Nautilus—testified that the death of Swedish reporter Kim Wall aboard the Nautilus was an accident. He also claimed that threw her body into the ocean, of which only the apparently deliberately dismembered torso was recovered, because he knew his career was over and burial at sea is a maritime tradition. He also claimed it was his intention to commit suicide by taking the sub to the depths of the Baltic Sea and sinking it.

According to a report from The New York Times, the judge called his account "not reasonable" and allowed prosecutors to raise the charges Madsen faces from involuntary manslaughter to the legal equivalent of murder. Madsen remains imprisoned for at least another four weeks, until his next court hearing in October.

Wall initially approached Madsen about his efforts to build a suborbital rocket through his organization RML Space Lab  (the RM standing for "Rocket Madsen," his nickname) and to launch himself into space. But she then became interested in his submarine, Madsen told the court. The Nautilus was to be used to assist in getting RML's rocket out to its launch site in the Baltic Sea.