Month: August 2018

Enlarge (credit: Disney)

Another month, another new Star Wars TV show. On Friday morning, Disney released a trailer for Star Wars Resistance, a new animated series that debuts on the Disney Channel on October 7. Set between the events of Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, the show will follow the adventures of Kazuda Xiono (voiced by Christopher Sean), a young pilot in the resistance tasked with gathering intelligence on the First Order.

Xiono gets his orders from the Poe Dameron—played by Oscar Isaac—and will be helped in his mission by everyone's new favorite astromech droid, BB-8. Gwendoline Christie's Captain Phasma will also appear in the animated series. The first episode takes place on the Colossus, a giant fighter base floating above the surface on an ocean planet in the outer rim, and the show looks set to feature plenty of aerial combat.

Star Wars Resistance is the brainchild of Dave Filoni, who was also responsible for The Clone Wars animated series. As we detailed in July, that show is being resurrected for a new season that will appear in 2019 on Disney's planned over-the-top streaming service. Luckily we don't have to wait as long to see this new show, which uses a distinctive anime-inspired style that—like almost everything else Star Wars other than Rogue One and maybe Solo—is obviously meant to appeal to children.

Google's employees and Google's management are clashing over ethical issues again. Just two months after Google's "Project Maven" military drone project was seemingly resolved, Google's employees are now up in arms over company plans to create censored products for China. The internal protests resulted in the issue being addressed at an all-hands meeting, and we got to learn a bit more about Google's China plans.

Reports from earlier this month claimed Google was working on products for the Chinese market, detailing plans for a search engine and news app that complied with the Chinese government's censorship and surveillance demands. The news was a surprise to many Googlers, and yesterday an article from The New York Times detailed a Maven-style internal revolt at the company. Fourteen hundred employees signed a letter demanding more transparency from Google's leadership on ethical issues, saying, "Google employees need to know what we’re building." The letter says many employees only learned about the project through news reports and that "currently we do not have the information required to make ethically informed decisions about our work, our projects, and our employment."

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Google addressed the issue of China at this week's all-hands meeting. The report says CEO Sundar Pichai told employees the company was “not close to launching a search product” in China but that Pichai thinks Google can do good by engaging with China. “I genuinely do believe we have a positive impact when we engage around the world," The Journal quotes Pichai as saying, "and I don’t see any reason why that would be different in China.”

Enlarge / The palm nuts satiating the world's hunger for vegetable oil and fueling habitat loss. (credit: flickr user: Carsten ten Brink)

Palm oil is ubiquitous and is set to become more so over the next few decades. The oil is used in food, cleaning, and beauty products and as biofuel, so demand is set to grow rapidly. With this skyrocketing demand comes a need for the land on which to grow more oil palms—and a threat to the ecosystems currently using that land.

Currently, Southeast Asia is the oil palm hotspot, and the deforestation and ensuing damage in the region have been well publicized. But much of the future expansion may happen in Africa, introducing the likelihood of new conservation problems. A paper published in this week’s PNAS argues that there's a huge overlap between the land where oil palms could be grown and the land that houses the continent’s primates. “Large-scale expansion of oil palm cultivation in Africa will have unavoidable, negative effects on primates,” write Giovanni Strona and his colleagues.

Growth in demand, loss in habitat

The tree that provides us with palm oil (which is pressed from its fruit) is a tropical species. Currently, palm oil agriculture uses approximately 20 million hectares. One million hectares (or 10,000 km²) is about half the area of New Jersey; 20 million is about the area of Nebraska. Most of these plantations are in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks in Austin, Texas, on March 10, 2018. (credit: Photo by FilmMagic/FilmMagic for HBO)

Update: A new report from Bloomberg calls into question Musk's account of the grueling schedule surrounding his brother's wedding. Flight records obtained by Bloomberg show Musk spending five days away from Tesla. And while Musk told The New York Times he flew straight to the wedding and flew straight home afterwards, Bloomberg says he stopped off in Belfast so his kids could visit the set of Game of Thrones.

Tesla declined to comment on the apparent discrepancy. The Times reporter who interviewed Musk, David Gelles, didn't respond to a direct message seeking comment.

Original story [11:11ET, 8/17/2018]: Elon Musk is one of the most famous people in the business world and serves as the CEO of two multibillion dollar companies at the same time. And that adds up to a lot of stress, as Musk made clear in an interview with The New York Times.

Enlarge / Even in 2018, there's still a wooden sign proudly advertising "Free Wi-Fi." (credit: Cyrus Farivar)

One of the least fun jobs when writing a scientific paper is coming up with a motivation. It should be easy and fun: look at this awesomely cool thing we did—aren’t the results interesting? Instead, we typically have to claim to reveal the secrets of the Universe, cure cancer, or protect the public. Preferably all three at the same time.

A recent paper (PDF) on using Wi-Fi as an environmental sensor has some really exciting results. But my heart shrunk three sizes after reading the following: “Traditional baggage check involves either high manpower for manual examinations or expensive and specialized instruments, such as X-ray and CT. As such, many public places (i.e., museums and schools) that lack of strict security check are exposed to high risk.”

As I said, the research is totally cool. It's just not likely to ever help with security unless molesting people with hip replacements is your version of improved security.