Month: October 2018

The Klingons have hair again, Rebecca Romijn debuts as Number One, and we catch our first glimpse of a young bearded Spock (Ethan Peck) in the action-packed new trailer for Star Trek: Discovery season 2. It's the flagship series for the fledgling CBS All Access streaming network, which unveiled this sneak peek at New York Comic Con last Saturday.

Discovery is a prequel to the original Star Trek, set roughly 10 years before Captain Kirk and his crew took over the USS Enterprise and boldly went where no man had gone before. Season one adopted a darker tone than TOS and irritated the more hardcore Star Trek fans, but season 2 looks like a return to its roots, with a fair sprinkling of humor to lighten things up—plus lots and lots of dramatic lens flares.

CBS

Enlarge / MIDLAND, Tex. - JANUARY 20: A pumpjack sits on the outskirts of town at dawn in the Permian Basin oil field on January 21, 2016 in the oil town of Midland, Texas. (credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

On Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that ExxonMobil had committed $1 million to a Republican-led carbon tax initiative called Americans for Carbon Dividends (AFCD). The story is a bit surprising on its face: it seems counterintuitive that an oil company would want to give money to an initiative that would tax its (considerable) carbon contribution. The other surprising factor is that some Republicans, who have traditionally resisted both climate policy and tax increases, are advocating for both.

But dig a little deeper and the story isn't terribly surprising. For ExxonMobil's part, the company has been fighting an image battle in recent years: it's facing significant lawsuits alleging that its scientists knew about climate change for decades and actively misled investors about it through advertisements and other public denials. Consequently, Exxon has made choices in recent years to reflect a more "eco-conscious" oil company, pledging to reduce methane emissions by 15 percent by 2020, for example.

Furthermore, Exxon's $1 million commitment is a drop in the company's considerable bucket. The donation to AFCD is just 0.00027 percent of ExxonMobil's $366 billion market capitalization, suggesting it isn't reflective of any serious change of course for the company. Additionally, that donation will be split up into two payments of $500,000, so the burden is even less significant.

Samuel Axon

This week, HP announced a new 14-inch machine running Google's Chrome OS: the HP Chromebook x360 14. That's not to be confused with the 14-inch HP Pavilion x360 that runs Windows or last year's HP Chromebook x360 11.

HP says this is its thinnest Chromebook ever, at just 16mm. The entry-level configuration ships equipped with an eighth-generation Core i3 CPU, but a Core i5 option will also be available. As for graphics, the x360 14 has Intel's UHD Graphics 620. Other specs include a 1080p display, 8GB DDR4-2400 SDRAM, and 64GB of storage. In terms of connectivity, it of course has 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi, plus Bluetooth 4.2. Ports include two USB-C and two USB-A, a headphone jack, and a microSD card slot. HP promises up to 13.5 hours of battery life. There's also a backlit keyboard and an HD webcam with a microphone. The device measures 12.81 x 8.93 x 0.63 inches.

Enlarge / Hurricane Michael satellite image as of 5pm ET Tuesday. (credit: NOAA)

Michael became a major hurricane on Tuesday afternoon as it zipped northward across the eastern Gulf of Mexico. As forecasters have suggested for the last day or so, Michael will make landfall on Wednesday, likely during the afternoon hours, along the Florida Panhandle. The most probable landfall location is near Panama City, but even less than 24 hours before landfall, the average position error is 30 to 40 miles.

On Monday and Tuesday, the storm has taken advantage of low wind shear—allowing it to maintain a tight circulation and organized vertical structure—as well as warm, late-summer waters in the Gulf of Mexico to intensify.

Undergoing a spate of rapid intensification, which is not unusual under these ideal conditions for hurricanes to strengthen, Michael has gone from a 40mph tropical storm on 1pm Sunday to a 120mph major hurricane as 5pm on Tuesday. Needless to say, the storm will have serious consequences for Florida (and downstream states such as Georgia) during the remainder of this week.

In an unusual film-news announcement, Warner Bros. Entertainment has exclusively confirmed to io9 that its DC Entertainment arm has picked up quite the contributor: writer and director James Gunn.

If that name sounds familiar, it should: that's the James Gunn who was recently fired from any future Marvel Studios projects, particularly his all-but-confirmed role writing and directing the next Guardians of the Galaxy film, after a deep dive into his blogging and social media history elicited an outcry from Disney's top brass.

Neither Warner Bros. nor DC Comics has used any of its official online platforms to confirm this news despite io9 having a lengthy report on exactly what the deal entails.

Enlarge / Pain or pleasure? (credit: Getty | Christopher Bernard)

In the unspoken language of love, the face you make at the pinnacle of pleasure may have something of an accent based on where you come from.

People from Western and East Asian cultures had consistently different ideas of what facial expressions indicate the moment of orgasm, researchers found in a study published Monday in PNAS. Specifically, Western participants expected widened eyes and gaping mouths, while East Asian participant’s ideas culminated in a slight, tight-lipped smile.

But contrary to those cultural climaxes, the look of dire pain had universal contortions. Participants from both cultures recognized the apex of anguish by inward-pulling facial expressions, such as lowered brows, wrinkled noses, and raised cheeks.

The sharpened end of a building support post from the Payne's Creek salt works. Some of the stone tools used to process fish had also been used for woodworking. (credit: PNAS)

If you stand on the shore of a briny lagoon near the mouth of Belize’s Monkey River, you won’t see many signs that ancient industry once flourished here. Today, all that’s left are dozens of submerged clusters of wooden posts—some now overgrown with mangroves, all long buried in silt—and artifacts like pottery and stone tools. But a thousand years ago, the community now submerged beneath the lagoon’s placid surface may have supplied salt and dried fish to a network of Maya cities.

As airborne laser studies reveal how complex Maya trade networks were hundreds of years ago, microscopic analysis of Maya stone tools suggests that salt cakes and dried fish may have been among the most important goods carried on those trade routes.

Before Etsy, there were Maya marketplaces

A thousand years ago, the people who lived near the lagoon’s shores would have spent the four-month dry season—when water in the lagoon evaporated, leaving behind an especially salty brine—heating brine in clay pots over fires and boiling away the water until a cake of salt was left in the bottom of the pot. Each household here would have maintained its own salt kitchen, and many would have lived adjacent to their work (at least during the dry season) or in the nearby community of Wild Cane Cay.