Month: December 2018

Enlarge / Honorees Rus Yusupov (L) and Colin Kroll accept the Breakthrough Award for Emerging Technology onstage at the Variety Breakthrough of the Year Awards during the 2014 International CES at The Las Vegas Hotel & Casino on January 9, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Jeff Bottari/Getty Images for Variety)

The co-founder of the popular smartphone-based trivia game, HQ Trivia, Colin Kroll, was found dead at his New York apartment on Sunday, local media reported.

A New York Police Department spokesman told Ars that Kroll died of a drug overdose.

According to the New York Post, citing anonymous police sources, Kroll, 34, was found with marijuana and heroin near his body.

Kroll, back in 2012, also co-founded Vine, a popular video looping app that was quickly acquired by Twitter and later shuttered four years later.

On Sunday afternoon, HQ Trivia issued this tweet:

We learned today of the passing of our friend and founder, Colin Kroll, and it's with deep sadness that we say goodbye. Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.

— HQ Trivia (@hqtrivia) December 16, 2018

Rus Yusupov, Kroll’s fellow co-founder, also tweeted:

So sad to hear about the passing of my friend and co-founder Colin Kroll. My thoughts &  prayers go out to his loved ones. I will forever remember him for his kind soul and big heart. He made the world and internet a better place. Rest in peace, brother.

— Rus (@rus) December 16, 2018

HQ Trivia, a live online game that awards cash prizes became incredibly popular in the months after its August 2017 debut, but its popularity has since waned.

Enlarge / Honorees Rus Yusupov (L) and Colin Kroll accept the Breakthrough Award for Emerging Technology onstage at the Variety Breakthrough of the Year Awards during the 2014 International CES at The Las Vegas Hotel & Casino on January 9, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Jeff Bottari/Getty Images for Variety)

The co-founder of the popular smartphone-based trivia game, HQ Trivia, Colin Kroll, was found dead at his New York apartment on Sunday, local media reported.

A New York Police Department spokesman told Ars that Kroll died of a drug overdose.

According to the New York Post, citing anonymous police sources, Kroll, 34, was found with marijuana and heroin near his body.

Kroll, back in 2012, also co-founded Vine, a popular video looping app that was quickly acquired by Twitter and later shuttered four years later.

On Sunday afternoon, HQ Trivia issued this tweet:

We learned today of the passing of our friend and founder, Colin Kroll, and it's with deep sadness that we say goodbye. Our thoughts go out to his family, friends and loved ones during this incredibly difficult time.

— HQ Trivia (@hqtrivia) December 16, 2018

Rus Yusupov, Kroll’s fellow co-founder, also tweeted:

So sad to hear about the passing of my friend and co-founder Colin Kroll. My thoughts &  prayers go out to his loved ones. I will forever remember him for his kind soul and big heart. He made the world and internet a better place. Rest in peace, brother.

— Rus (@rus) December 16, 2018

HQ Trivia, a live online game that awards cash prizes became incredibly popular in the months after its August 2017 debut, but its popularity has since waned.

Enlarge / US Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke arrives at the US Capitol prior to the service for former President George H. W. Bush on December 03, 2018 in Washington, DC. (credit: Photo by Shawn Thew - Pool/Getty Images)

On Friday, President Trump announced on Twitter that Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will step down from his post in the coming weeks. Zinke has headed the Department of the Interior (DOI) since 2017 and overseen some of the more significant rollbacks in environmental policy in the US.

Trump said a successor to Zinke would be named in the coming week. A likely successor, according to Reuters, is David Bernhardt, the current Interior Deputy Secretary and a former oil, gas, and water industry lobbyist. According to Politico, Bernhardt played an active role in weakening Endangered Species protections to make it easier for oil and gas drilling to occur on ecologically sensitive land.

Zinke's time in office was marked by a similar effort to stymie the environmental protections put in place by the Obama Administration in the name of oil and gas interests. In one of his most controversial moves, Zinke reopened vast tracts of federal waters that had previously been off-limits to offshore oil and gas drilling. The Secretary drew sharp criticism for opening up federal waters adjacent to states that didn't want offshore drilling, while exempting Florida from the same treatment after a meeting from the state's Republican governor.

Enlarge / LIGO's February 11, 2016, press conference in Washington, DC, where they announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves. (credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Just last month, we told you about a small group of Danish physicists who were casting doubt on the original gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), saying it was an "illusion." The researchers alleged that the collaboration mistook patterns in the noise for a signal. Now Quanta is reporting that two independent analyses have been completed that confirm that detection. This should lay any doubts about the momentous discovery to rest.

“We see no justification for lingering doubts about the discovery of gravitational waves,” the authors of one of the papers, Martin Green and John Moffat of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, told Quanta. That paper appeared Physics Letters B in September. A second paper by Alex Nielsen of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Hannover, Germany, and three coauthors, was posted to the physics preprint site arXiv.org last month and is under review by the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

But some drama still remains. Andrew Jackson, group spokesman for the skeptical physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is refusing to accept the results of the two independent groups' analyses. Quanta's Natalie Wolchover writes:

Enlarge / One of Antelope Valley Transit Authority's 79 electric buses. (credit: Megan Geuss)

On Friday, California's Air Resources Board (CARB) unanimously approved a regulation that would compel the state's public transit agencies to build zero-emissions fleets by 2040. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the regulation would also prohibit transit agencies from investing in diesel- or gas-powered buses after 2029. Buses usually last about 12 years before they need to be replaced, the Chronicle noted.

In a press release on Friday, CARB noted that the transportation sector contributes 40 percent of the state's greenhouse gas emissions, and 80 to 90 percent of the state's smog-creating pollutants. "Full implementation of the regulation adopted today is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 19 million metric tons from 2020 to 2050 – the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road," CARB wrote.

Battery-electric and fuel cell buses are two potential avenues for investment, CARB noted. The air resources board added that roughly 12,000 gas- or diesel-burning buses are on California's roads today, but only 153 zero-emissions buses are in operation in California today. Still, based on orders placed by transit agencies, 1,000 such buses are expected to be in service by 2020.