Month: February 2018

(credit: Courtesy of @SDSheriff)

A San Diego-area high school student was arrested at his home in Lemon Grove, California, Tuesday evening on charges of terroristic threats after posting a picture of an AR-15-style assault rifle made of Lego on social media.

According to a Wednesday statement released by the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, the unnamed 14-year-old boy posted a picture around 10pm Tuesday evening on Instagram with the message, "Don’t come to school tomorrow." Another student asked him to take the image down, but he refused.

"It was learned he had access to hunting rifles," the SDCSD wrote. "The investigation is ongoing to determine if this student has access to other weapons. He was booked into Juvenile Hall on a felony charge of making a criminal threat."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | sshepard)

The Federal Communications Commission today collected a $614.3 million fine from Verizon and Straight Path, a company that Verizon just bought.

The merger and fine are related. Straight Path held about 1,000 FCC spectrum licenses but failed to use them. Straight Path thus entered a settlement with the FCC requiring it "to sell its licenses and remit 20 percent of the overall proceeds of the transaction to the US Treasury," the FCC said in its announcement today.

Verizon struck a deal to buy Straight Path in May 2017 for $3.1 billion and completed the acquisition today. Verizon and its new subsidiary were responsible for paying the $614.3 million, which "is the largest civil penalty ever paid to the US Treasury to resolve a Commission investigation," the FCC said.

Enlarge / Teams looks good, but it's unfortunate that its chat is quite bulky in a vertical direction. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's IRC-like, Slack-like collaboration tool Teams looks likely to pick up a couple of key features that will make it much more competitive.

The first of these is guest access. Currently on Teams, every person within a chat room must have an account in an organization's Azure Active Directory. This makes working with outside collaborators awkward, as many of these may not have, and may not want, such an account. Guest access was announced last September, which would allow organizations to create Teams accounts using any email address rather than specifically requiring an Azure AD account; the feature is finally being rolled out next week. Organizations will have to explicitly enable it for their systems, but once they do, their Teams instance will support guest accounts.

The second big feature is freemium pricing. Slack has made great inroads by enticing organizations to use it for free, and once they're hooked, getting them to pay for longer history and richer features. Teams is currently tied to Office 365; even with the guest access feature, there must be at least one paid Office 365 account to create an instance. However, it looks like this is set to change, and perhaps sooner rather than later. Brad Sams at Petri reported on signs that Microsoft is going to offer a freemium version, with a basic product available for free and paid upgrades to access further features. Indications are that freemium users will need a Microsoft Account to use the service, though what other restrictions will be applied is as yet unknown.

Enlarge / Beehive coke ovens. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Evidence of processing coal in what's called a "beehive coke oven" in China has been found dating as far back as the fourth century, and the technology involved has not changed much since. Beehive-shaped ovens are used to cook mined coal to turn it into coke, the preferred starting material for making iron and steel. Coke is also desirable since it has a higher proportion of combustible carbon than coal, so it burns better. The processing causes its volatile exhaust gases to be burned off and released into the atmosphere.

China banned beehive coke ovens in 1996. Yet, as a new analysis of the effects of this ban points out, “The poor implementation of environmental laws and regulations is common in China.” So the ovens did not actually disappear until 2011. The authors of the analysis hoped to quantify the effects of the ban—and the lackadaisical approach to enforcing it—on China’s health and environment. They hope that their data will strengthen the resolve of those who seek to pass—and enforce—similar laws in the future.

The authors used official government statistics and satellite images to track the emissions of polycyclic hydrocarbons and the incidence of lung cancer, checking their correlation with beehive coal oven use. In addition to the real-world data, they modeled two scenarios: (a) if no ban had ever been put in place; (b) if the ban had gone instantly into effect in 1996.

Enlarge / NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope was placed in Johnson Space Center’s historic Chamber A for vacuum testing on June 20, 2017. (credit: NASA)

A new report on the James Webb Space Telescope has found that ongoing technical issues with final testing and assembly of the $8.8 billion project will probably cause the launch date of the oft-delayed instrument to slip again to the right. Presently, NASA is targeting June 2019 for launch aboard an Ariane 5 rocket.

The US Government Accountability Office published the report on Wednesday. It concluded, "Given several ongoing technical issues, and the work remaining to test the spacecraft element and complete integration of the telescope and spacecraft, combined with continuing slower-than-planned work at Northrop Grumman, we believe that the rescheduled launch window is likely unachievable."

The report catalogs a number of issues that Northrop Grumman has dealt with during the integration process, particularly the technical challenges and workforce issues needed to meet them. For example, the report cites a worrying problem that cropped up during one of the tests to deploy the telescope's essential sunshield—one of its six membrane tensioning systems experienced a potentially crippling "snag."

Enlarge / Barbra Streisand and her original dog Sammie (Samantha) in 2006. (credit: Getty | KMazur)

Over tea in her Malibu estate, Barbra Streisand sat for an interview with Variety recently to discuss her storied career, the #MeToo movement, and breaking the glass ceiling in Hollywood. But in the meandering exchange, she inadvertently dropped some petri-dish cracking news as well: she had her late, beloved dog cloned.

Between a quick mention of future directing projects and an insult of President Donald Trump, the article breezily notes that two of her three Coton de Tulear dogs are clones of her previous dog Samantha, who died in 2017 at the age of 14. The two clones, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett, were created from cells collected from Samantha’s mouth and stomach. The third dog, Miss Fanny, is reportedly a distant cousin.

In appearance, the duplicate doggos are identical to Samantha as well as to each other. To tell them apart, Streisand fitted them with different colored attire—purple for one and red for the other—which was her inspiration for their names.

Enlarge / No, it's not a picnic table. It's an observatory that may have just upset our ideas about dark matter. (credit: Judd Bowman/ASU)

Today, a small team of researchers is announcing that its correspondingly small telescope picked up something that theoreticians had only suggested might exist: a signal produced by the very first stars in our Universe. Their radiotelescope, only two meters across, didn't image the stars directly. Instead, it picked up an imprint on the Cosmic Microwave Background left by the matter that these stars interacted with.

And, while the signal had been predicted by theoreticians, calculations had suggested that it would be substantially smaller than it actually is. If the results hold up, then it could be a sign that dark matter looks very different from what we had expected.

Ignition

The Cosmic Microwave Background was produced when the Universe cooled enough to allow electrons to settle down into the Universe's first atoms, releasing radiation as they did. It famously captures the state of the Universe when it was formed, telling us about the Big Bang that produced it, as well as the composition of the Universe's contents. But in many ways, it's the gift that keeps giving, as subtle details in the Background provide further details of the Universe's physics, and theorists regularly think up ways to extract more information from it.

After sending up various eras of video games in 2012, Disney's Wreck-It Ralph film series will return to theaters with a sequel this Thanksgiving—and Wednesday's trailer sees the franchise changing its jokes and references to an Internet theme.

Disney isn't being shy about the sequel's title, opting for the ambitious-sounding Ralph Breaks The Internet: Wreck It Ralph 2. However, the trailer doesn't show the titular hero, voiced again by John C. Reilly, facing off against Kim Kardashian's butt. Instead, the two-minute trailer shows him and his cohort Vanellope (again voiced by Sarah Silverman) shooting through a series of tubes to land in an avatar-filled approximation of the Internet.