Month: April 2018

Enlarge / That's Kubrick Mons to you, sir! (credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute)

On Wednesday, the International Astronomical Union officially announced the names of features on Pluto's moon Charon. The features were revealed when the New Horizons probe shot past Pluto and its five moons, and the names were provided by the public. While astronomers working on the New Horizons data had been using the monikers provisionally, the IAU's announcement makes them formal designations that will be used in all scientific publications about Charon.

While four of Pluto's moons are so small that New Horizons captured them as pixellated blobs, Charon is quite different. And, while all moons and their planets orbit a common center of gravity, usually the size difference is large enough that the center of gravity resides inside the planet. The Pluto-Charon system is the big exception, as the size difference between the two is small enough that Pluto orbits a point that's located outside the dwarf planet's radius. That makes Charon one of the largest bodies among the icy worlds of the Kuiper Belt, and it's the second largest body we've gotten a detailed look at.

While Charon doesn't seem to be as dynamic as Pluto, it does have many notable features, including large peaks, deep canyons, and massive craters, as well as a dusting of material that has evaporated off Pluto. In 2015, the public was invited to give these names; the New Horizons team informally adopted a number of suggestions, and the IAU has made them official. The theme of the names centers around travel and exploration, often (but not always) with a connection to the underworld or the deeps.

Enlarge (credit: Book Catalog)

Facebook recently teamed up with Google, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon in order to kill a privacy law that's being considered in California.

The five companies each donated $200,000 to create a $1 million fund to oppose the California Consumer Privacy Act, a ballot question that could be voted on in the November 2018 state election. If approved, the law would make it easier for consumers to find out what information is collected about them and to opt out of the sale or sharing of any personal information.

But as Facebook handles the fallout from a privacy breach affecting up to 87 million users, the social network is dropping its public opposition to the proposed privacy law and won't donate any more money to the opposition.

Enlarge / Sweet potatoes growing in a field. (credit: Robert Scotland)

Sweet potatoes are a staple food crop in most of the world today, but they're also a bit of an enigma. We don't know for sure how or when they evolved from their closest wild relatives or whether humans were involved. A new genetic study answers some of those burning questions about the sweet potato's past, and, in the process, it casts some doubt on a popular idea about pre-Columbian sea travel between the Americas and the islands of Polynesia.

Pre-Columbian cultural exchange?

A few tantalizing threads of evidence have emerged over the years to suggest that the people of the Polynesian Islands and the people of the Americas could have maintained at least sporadic contact with each other long before Europeans arrived in either place. None of that evidence has stood up to much scrutiny, though—except for one fact: sweet potatoes, a crop native to Central and South America, had already firmly taken root in the islands of Polynesia by the time Europeans arrived. It seemed logical that someone must have carried them across the Pacific.

But a new study says sweet potatoes actually reached the islands long before there were even people in the Americas—at least 111,500 years ago, and possibly even earlier.

The Verge

Red alert, people! Gmail is being redesigned. Google sent out an email to G Suite administrators warning them a "fresh, clean look" would be coming to Gmail.com soon. Shortly after the email went out, leaked pictures of the design were posted to Android Authority and The Verge, so we have a ton of pictures to obsess over. So let's dive in.

The existing Gmail for Web design is one of Google's oldest, dating all the way back to 2011. While some Google services seem to get a redesign every year or two (like YouTube) the lack of a redesign for Gmail always felt more like it stemmed from a "fear of screwing it up" than anything else. Some people who live inside Gmail will be very vocal if Google breaks anything. Even the 2011 redesign did not go over well.