Month: August 2018

Enlarge / Train up: Iron Fist's second season premieres on Netflix on September 7. (credit: Netflix)

You’d be forgiven for losing track of Marvel’s various Defenders series and characters on Netflix over the past few years—particularly if you let its weakest standalone series, Iron Fist, fall through your viewing queue. But thanks to the new trailer for Iron Fist’s second season, which arrived on Thursday, we may have good reason to get excited when this Defender returns to Netflix on September 7.

(Mild spoilers for IF S1 and Defenders below.)

Hopes for a more compelling Iron Fist took a while to come to fruition: sometime through the first Defenders season, when Danny "Iron Fist" Rand (Finn Jones) received a verbal beatdown from Luke Cage ("You had power the day you were born"). That potential was fulfilled when Rand guested in Luke Cage's second season. This downright likable two-episode arc delivered what was arguably missing from his series' first season: a sense of deeper personal growth, even as he overcame tremendous physical odds to become the Iron Fist.

Enlarge / Soon to be an actual MOS? (credit: Imgur, uncredited)

President Donald Trump's enthusiasm for a new military branch focused on space is apparently not widely shared. Two polls released today show that a majority—and in one poll, a plurality—of respondents said that the Space Force is a bad idea.

The Trump administration plans to cleave Space Force from the Air Force and have it largely in place by 2020. The first step would be to create US Space Command—a joint command within the Pentagon similar to the Joint Special Operations Command and US Cyber Command that would oversee space operations of all the services—by the end of 2018. The Pentagon will also create a Space Development Agency that will pull military space research, development, and procurement out of the Defense Department's current acquisition system. The agency's goal would be accelerating the development of new space stuff.

The Space Force plan has been widely derided, though some members of Congress have previously voiced support for creating a space-focused branch. Concerns about anti-satellite technology being developed by Russia and China—and the perception that the Air Force is not focused enough on the space portion of its mission, which is under the Air Force Space Command—have driven some support for creation of a separate force. There have been similar discussions about creating a US cyber force as well, though those discussions have gotten significant pushback from the service branches.

Enlarge (credit: State Historical Society of North Dakota)

Bread, like wine, is pivotal in Judeo-Christian rituals. Both products exemplify the use of human ingenuity to re-create what nature provides, and the fermentation they both require must have seemed nothing less than magical to ancient minds. When toasted, rubbed with garlic and tomato, doused with olive oil and sprinkled with salt like the Catalans do, there are few things more delicious than bread.

Wheat is the most widely cultivated crop on the planet, accounting for about a fifth of all calories consumed by humans and more protein than any other food source. Although we have relied on bread wheat so heavily and for so long (14,000 years-ish), an understanding of its genetics has been a challenge. Its genome has been hard to solve because it is ridiculously complex. The genome is huge, about five times larger than ours. It's hexaploid, meaning it has six copies of each of its chromosomes. More than 85 percent of the genetic sequences among these three sets of chromosome pairs are repetitive DNA, and they are quite similar to each other, making it difficult to tease out which sequences reside where.

The genomes of rice and corn—two other staple grain crops—were solved in 2002 and 2009, respectively. In 2005, the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium determined to get a reference genome of the bread wheat cultivar Chinese Spring. Thirteen years later, the consortium has finally succeeded.

Enlarge / Delicious, non-cancerous, coffee. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

After a judge ruled in March that coffee should be served with jolting labels that alert drinkers to a cancer risk, the state of California seems to have woken up to the concern that its pervasive health warnings may have gone too far.

“There’s a danger to overwarning—it’s important to warn about real health risks,” Sam Delson told The New York Times.

Delson is the deputy director for external and legislative affairs for California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. The office proposed a regulation shortly after a March ruling that would unequivocally declare that any cancer-linked components of roasted and brewed coffee “pose no significant risk of cancer.” Today, August 16, the proposed regulation is getting a public hearing in Sacramento.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai speaks during an FCC oversight hearing held by the Senate Commerce Committee on Thursday, August 16, 2018. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The Federal Communications Commission chairman has known that his agency's claims about being hit by DDoS attacks were false for more than six months, but he says he could not correct the record publicly because of an internal investigation that didn't wrap up until this month.

The FCC Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued its report on the matter last week, finding that the FCC lied to Congress when it claimed that DDoS attacks caused a May 2017 outage that temporarily prevented net neutrality supporters from filing comments opposing Pai's plan to kill net neutrality rules. The false claims were made primarily by former Chief Information Officer David Bray, and Bray's false statements were sent to Congress in attachments to letters that Pai wrote to lawmakers.

At an FCC oversight hearing held today by the Senate Commerce Committee, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) pressed FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on his failure to correct those false statements until this month.