Month: October 2017

Enlarge / Front row from left, US Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, and Associate Justice Stephen Breyer, back row from left, Associate Justice Elena Kagan, Associate Justice Samuel Alito Jr., Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch pose for a group portrait in the East Conference Room of the Supreme Court. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether law enforcement authorities, armed with a valid search warrant from a federal judge, can demand that the US tech sector hand over data that is stored on overseas servers. In this case, which is now one of the biggest privacy cases on the high court's docket, the justices will review a lower court's ruling that US warrants don't apply to data housed on foreign servers, in this instance, a Microsoft server in Ireland.

The US government appealed, contending it has the legal right, with a valid court warrant, to reach into the world's servers with the assistance of the tech sector, no matter where the data is stored.

The case has huge foreign policy ramifications as well. Federal authorities sometimes demand that the US tech sector comply with court orders that conflict with laws of countries where the data is housed.

Enlarge / The Champagne Pool at the southern end of the Okataina volcanic area. (credit: Flickr user: Darren Puttock)

ROTORUA, New Zealand—If you head east from my parents' home in New Zealand, you'll travel through rolling hills for a while. Then, as you crest a rather unremarkable climb, an unexpectedly spectacular view opens up before you. Mokoia Island is small, bushy, and brooding, and it sits at the center of a wide blue lake in what appears to be a large valley.

But that's no valley. From the distant view of that crest, the only obvious clue lies in a large hill, grandiosely named Mount Ngongotaha, off to one side. It is not attached to the valley walls and stands alone, a land-locked cousin to Mokoia Island.

The view is from the collapsed wall of the caldera of the Rotorua volcano, part of the Okataina volcanic area. Mokoia and Ngongotaha are the remnants of eruptions that are slowly re-filling the huge volume of rock that was blasted out of Okataina in the distant past. This process is called caldera-repairing. The town of Rotorua sits right inside the caldera and is surrounded by evidence of the energy stored just beneath the surface. The town abounds with hot springs, boiling mud, and, yes, the sulfurous farts of the gods.

Annapurna Pictures

2017 has been the year of Wonder Woman, at least in the realm of pop culture, and now there's a fascinating behind-the-scenes tale of the people who dreamed up the Amazonian superhero who stands for love. Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is about William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans), Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Rebecca Hall), and Olive Byrne (Bella Heathcote), three psychology researchers at Tufts University who fell in love during the liberated 1920s. Eventually they had four children (each woman bore two) and lived together for their whole adult lives. Along the way, they invented Wonder Woman together, though only William Marston (under the pen name William Moulton) was given credit for it.

It's one of the most unusual love stories ever to be told on film, and it illuminates a time in history that most have forgotten. Between roughly 1910 and the mid-1930s, there was a flowering of feminist and sexual liberation movements in Europe and the US, leading to birth-control clinics, women's suffrage, the infamous Kinsey Reports, and even a 1919 German film called Different from the Others, about the urgent need for gay rights. Marston, who championed women's right to vote, was deeply involved in these movements with his partners. Byrne was the daughter of feminist activist Ethel Byrne, who cofounded the organization that later became Planned Parenthood with her sister Margaret Sanger. Elizabeth Marston was one of the first women to earn a law degree in the US and had a master's degree in psychology.

Enlarge (credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet)

We've been extremely lucky. The LIGO and VIRGO detectors only operated simultaneously for a few weeks, but they were a remarkably busy few weeks. Today, those behind the joint collaboration announced that they've observed the merger of two neutron stars. And, because neutron stars don't swallow everything they encounter, the gravitational waves were accompanied by photons, including an extended afterglow. So dozens of telescopes, and many in space, had representatives involved in the announcement.

The number of major astrophysical issues cleared up by this collision is impressive. The collision was simultaneously detected with the Fermi space telescope, confirming that neutron star mergers produce a phenomenon known as a short gamma-ray burst. The gravitational waves were detected nearly simultaneously with the gamma ray burst, confirming that they move at the speed of light. And heavy elements like gold were detected in the debris, indicating that these mergers are a source of elements that would otherwise be difficult to produce in a supernova.

Finally, the gravitational waves from this event were detected over a period of roughly 100 seconds, which should allow a detailed analysis of their production.

Enlarge / It's safe to say that as a major hurricane, Ophelia was something of an outlier on Saturday. (credit: Sam Lillo/Twitter)

The system formerly known as Hurricane Ophelia is moving into Ireland on Monday, bringing "status red" weather throughout the day to the island. The Irish National Meteorological Service, Met Éireann, has warned that, "Violent and destructive gusts of 120 to 150km/h are forecast countrywide, and in excess of these values in some very exposed and hilly areas. There is a danger to life and property."

Ophelia transitioned from a hurricane to an extra-tropical system on Sunday, but that only marginally diminished its threat to Ireland and the United Kingdom on Monday, before it likely dissipates near Norway on Tuesday. The primary threat from the system was high winds, with heavy rains.

Forecasters marveled at the intensification of Ophelia on Saturday, as it reached Category 3 status on the Saffir-Simpson scale and became a major hurricane. For a storm in the Atlantic basin, this is the farthest east that a major hurricane has been recorded during the satellite era of observations. Additionally, it was the furthest north that a major hurricane, at 35.9 degrees north, that an Atlantic major hurricane existed this late in the year since 1939.

Enlarge (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Huawei's first "AI-powered" smartphone, the Mate 9, debuted last year, and the Chinese company continues to dive further into the benefits of artificial intelligence in its newest smartphones. Huawei announced the Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro smartphones today, both of which promise not only hardware improvements over the Mate 9, but also more AI power thanks to a dedicated neural network processing unit (NPU). While most of us are accustomed to AI assistants on our smartphones (think Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Alexa), Huawei is taking a more embedded approach to AI, focusing on how a dedicated NPU can increase performance and efficiency over time as it learns about everything you do with your smartphone.

Design

The Mate 10 and Mate 10 Pro have a number of small and somewhat confusing differences between them. Let's first cover what they have in common: both run Android Oero and EMUI 8.0. Huawei's Kirin 970 CPU, 12-core Mali G72 GPU, and new NPU for AI processing power both devices. The handsets also have the same 4,000 mAh battery that supports fast charging, allowing them to charge up to 58 percent in just 30 minutes.

Huawei continues its collaboration with Leica on the Mate 10 handsets. Both have dual f/1.6 rear camera setups, featuring a 20MP monochrome lens and a 12MP RGB lens with optical image stabilization. The front-facing camera is the same, standard 8MP shooter on both models, too. Both the Mate 10 and the Mate 10 Pro have all-glass bodies with a nearly one-inch-wide, reflective stripe on the back of the handset underneath the camera setup. The smartphones' design is very similar to the Mate 9, just with slightly slimmer bezels and refined details.