Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Automobiles entering the USA from Canada at the Customs and Border Protection Sweetgrass border crossing on Interstate 15 in Sweetgrass, Montana. (credit: William Campbell / Corbis via Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on ProPublica on November 22, 2017. It has been lightly edited.

The Department of Immigration & Customs Enforcement is taking new steps in its plans for monitoring the social media accounts of applicants and holders of US visas. At a tech industry conference last Thursday in Arlington, Virginia, ICE officials explained to software providers what they are seeking: algorithms that would assess potential threats posed by visa holders in the United States and conduct ongoing social media surveillance of those deemed high risk.

The comments provide the first clear blueprint for ICE’s proposed augmentation of its visa-vetting program. The initial announcement of the plans this summer, viewed as part of President Donald Trump’s calls for the “extreme vetting” of visitors from Muslim countries, stoked a public outcry from immigrants and civil liberties advocates. They argued that such a plan would discriminate against Muslim visitors and potentially place a huge number of individuals under watch.

AUSTIN, Texas—If you’re not a regular Fantastic Fest attendee or a disciple of folks like Richard Linklater or Wes Anderson, it may surprise you just how much Austin, Texas loves film. Just know there’s a reason major movie outfits like the Alamo Drafthouse and Mondo started and succeed here.

Within this sneaky cinema town, perhaps no event outpaces the annual Austin Film Festival & Conference. It’s a non-profit-led, eight-day movie love affair with panels devoted to screenwriting (both practical industry advice and folks like the team behind Arrival sharing insight on crafting believable sci-fi) and a wide-reaching film program. This year, buzzy A-list work like Armie Hammer’s Call Me By Your Name or Margot Robbie’s I, Tonya shared the schedule with “documentaries” about Apollo 18, actual documentaries on famed political cartoonists, and a slew of independent filmmakers (from both Texas and beyond).

That last category caught our eye in particular because of an unexpected overarching theme—curses. Among the handful of films we managed to catch, many relied on an inexplicable, supernatural omen to bring the story together. Luckily, none of ‘em left us muttering the four-letter variety on the way out. Instead, each took a familiar brand of ominous curse and used it within a new context.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

The heart of the iPhone X's pitch is third-party apps. From augmented reality features to the TrueDepth sensor, the new features are meant to stir creativity and action in the developer community, bringing innovative new app experiences to iPhone X users. But even as Apple gives developers new toys to play with, it also has to make sure it doesn't break their old ones.

The iPhone X is the most significant change to the iPhone in several years. It has a higher resolution and a different screen shape. It disposes of the home button and adds or changes touch gestures. Every one of those changes could create work for designers and developers... and then there’s the notch. You can expect more phones to do this, not just from Apple. But how do you design around it? How much work is it to adapt an app for it? Is it, as some critics say, bad design?

To find out, I spoke with designers and developers of apps and games for iOS who recently went through the process of updating their apps for the iPhone X. I wanted to ask some of these very questions, but by and large I wanted to hear how the transition to the new phone went for everyone working behind the scenes.

It's Thanksgiving week in the US, and most of our staff is recovering from food and family rather than a Friday at the office. As such, we're resurfacing this story of visiting old nuclear bunkers in the UK (you know, in case you need a break from family this weekend). This story originally ran on November 19, 2015, and it appears unchanged below.

Press events are usually decadent affairs of food, drink, and well-dressed executives in up-market hotels. Not this one. A small number of journalists including your correspondent were dumped at dusk in a wet field in the Essex countryside, given blue boilersuits and a small knapsack containing bottle-tops and leaflets, and told to await developments. As most press events don’t ask for disclosure of any medical conditions, nor involve signing a waiver against accidents, those developments were unlikely to be pleasant.

But then, it’s rarely pleasant after a nuclear war. In honour of the launch of Fallout 4, set in the aftermath of virtual atomic conflict, we were about to be taken into an ex-government, ex-secret nuclear bunker and trained to survive the apocalypse. Not the zombie kind, which has of late spawned an entire industry of movies, games, and survival books, but the real thing, which hasn’t.

Enlarge / Don't mind us, just performing some alchemy here. (credit: NOAA)

Thunderstorms have a lot of overt indications of power, from the thunder and lightning to torrential rains and hail. But the full extent of their power wasn't obvious until recent years, when we discovered they generate antimatter. Now, researchers in Japan have looked at this phenomenon more closely and determined that a lightning bolt generates a zone that contains unstable isotopes of oxygen and nitrogen, leading to series of radioactive decays over the next minute.

Transformative

All of these phenomena are powered by the fact that the electric fields within thunderstorms are able to accelerate electrons to extremely high energies. Whenever these electrons move along a curved path, they emit radiation that's proportional to their energy. As a result, a storm can be associated with bursts of gamma rays, extremely high-energy photons.

Gamma rays rays are primarily noted for their interaction with the electrons of any atoms they run into—it's why they're lumped in the category of ionizing radiation. But they can also interact with the nucleus of the atom. With sufficient energy, they can kick out a neutron from some atoms, transforming them into a different isotope. Some of the atoms this occurs with include the most abundant elements in our atmosphere, like nitrogen and oxygen. And, in fact, elevated neutron detections had been associated with thunderstorms in the past.