Month: July 2018

Enlarge / A home at the corner of B 72nd Street and Bayfield Avenue is surrounded by marsh in Averne on the Rockaway peninsula in the Queens borough of New York, US, on Friday, October 10, 2014. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

On Thursday, a US District judge dismissed a lawsuit from the City of New York against major oil companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, and Shell. New York City had alleged that the oil majors created a nuisance by actively promoting oil use for decades, even after they were presented with significant and reliable information showing that catastrophic effects from climate change would result. The judge didn't dispute the effects of climate change, but he did dispute (PDF) that courts exercising state law could remedy the situation.

In the January complaint, NYC demanded that the oil majors pay for the costs of adapting to climate change, like expanding wastewater storage areas, building new pumping facilities to prevent flooding, and installing new infrastructure to weather storms. The city stated that the oil companies named in the suit were responsible for more than 11 percent of carbon and methane emissions that had built up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, more than all other individual industrial contributors.

The oil companies didn't dispute that, and neither did the judge. As early as the mid-1980s, the judge's opinion states, "Exxon and other major oil and gas companies, including Mobil and Shell, took actions to protect their own business assets from the impacts of climate change, including raising the decks of offshore platforms, protecting pipelines from coastal erosion, and designing helipads, pipelines, and roads in the warming Arctic."

Enlarge / An artist's conception of the star bathed in debris, along with an image of the surge in X-rays (inset). (credit: NASA/Chandra)

Planets don't sit still. The seemingly stable orbits of our Solar System could easily give the impression that once a planet forms, it tends to stay in orbit where it started. But evidence has piled up that our Solar System probably isn't as stable as we'd like to think, and many of the exosolar systems we've now seen can't possibly have formed in their current state. In a few cases, we've spotted stars that contain elements that were probably delivered by a planet spiraling in.

Now, scientists may have caught the process while it was happening. A star that dimmed for a couple years has somehow ended up with 15 times the iron it had in earlier observations, suggesting it ran into a planet or a few smaller planet-forming bodies.

Not so stable

If you were to take the current configuration of the Solar System and run it forward a million years, nothing much would change—all the planets would be in the same orbits they started in. But run it forward a few billion years and strange things can happen. The orbital setup is chaotic, and future changes are very sensitive to the starting conditions. In addition, many of the features of the Solar System are hard to explain using planetary formation models, leading to the proposal of the Grand Tack, in which a much younger Jupiter migrated inward toward the Sun before being dragged out to its current position by Saturn.

Enlarge / Ludicrous speed. (credit: Hello Games)

The last time Hello Games' Sean Murray spoke to us, or anyone else in the press, he was still in the pre-launch, hype-building phase for the incredibly ambitious, procedurally generated universe exploration simulator No Man's Sky. Then the game launched. The summer 2016 release drew some critical praise but also loud, sometimes virulent Internet criticism saying the launch version didn't live up to the pre-release promise.

Murray and Hello Games have gone quiet since, keeping their heads down and focusing on building and releasing numerous updates that have layered plenty of important new features onto the launch version of the game. With the upcoming release of No Man's Sky's multiplayer-focused "NEXT" update, Murray has finally broken the studio's radio silence, giving wide-ranging interviews to Waypoint, The Guardian, Eurogamer, and GamesRadar about the game's past, present, and future.

Too much hype?

First off, Murray told Waypoint that he "never really wanted to talk to the press. I didn't enjoy it when I had to do it. I think that was super obvious watching me doing interviews." Keeping quiet and silently working on the game over the last two years, on the other hand, means that "this is the happiest I think we've ever been, as a result," Murray said.

Enlarge (credit: Stephen Melkisethian)

One of the stranger conspiracy theories against climate science is that corporate interests are pulling all the strings so that “Big Green” can get rich from action against climate change. Of course, it’s no secret that industries related to fossil fuels have lobbied for the exact opposite, pushing to avoid any significant climate policy.

So what do American industries spend to lobby Congress on this issue?

Drexel University’s Robert Brulle used lobbying reporting laws to find out. Not every penny spent on persuading congresspeople has to be reported—and a lot of political activities, like think tank funding, don’t count as lobbying. But spending on lobbying itself has been tracked in the US since a 1995 law mandated it. Brulle was able to sift through climate-related expenditures between 2000 and 2016, sorting the entities into groups.

Enlarge / T-Mobile CEO John Legere (left) and then-Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure during an interview on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on April 30, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Federal Communications Commission will accept petitions from now until August 27 to deny the $26 billion T-Mobile USA/Sprint merger, the commission announced yesterday.

Petitions to deny—as well as less formal comments—can be submitted online at the FCC's docket page. Recent filings can be found here.

After petitions to deny the merger are filed, T-Mobile and Sprint or other supporters of the merger can submit oppositions to the petitions until September 17. Under the current schedule, a final round of replies would be due on October 9.

Enlarge (credit: Volkswagen)

At the end of June, Volkswagen and French racing driver Romain Dumas did something many of us thought impossible. Using a highly specialized electric vehicle called the "I.D. R Pikes Peak," Dumas raced to the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado in under eight minutes, shattering the existing records for EVs by a full minute and the overall record (set by Peugeot and Sebastian Loeb in 2013) by a hefty 16 seconds.

Ars was there to see it happen, but truth be told you don't actually see that much of anyone's run at Pikes Peak if you're there in person. The course is 12.4 miles (19.99km) long, so even if you have a media vest and are free to roam outside the official spectating zones, you still really have to pick a corner and then be content with watching a small slice of each attempt from there.

But one of the marvels of living in the early 21st century is our access to small and rugged digital cameras. In fact, the organizers of the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb are pretty good about putting a GoPro on every car and bike that runs up the mountain in anger, and within a week almost all of these were posted to YouTube. But not Dumas' run, no matter how often I begged on Twitter.