Month: February 2019

Enlarge / The Montana State Capitol building, site of a rather unusual hearing. (credit: Montana.gov)

It's no secret that some of our federal legislators don't have a firm grip on scientific evidence; it only takes watching a session of the House Science Committee, where one member suggested the climate-driven rise of the oceans might instead be caused by rocks falling into the ocean.

What's often overlooked is that state legislators are even worse (though it's not clear how much this is a product of there simply being more of them). Each year, they oversee a variety of attempts to introduce pseudoscience into the public schools of a number of states.

But it recently came out that a legislator in Montana was attempting to have the state officially renounce the findings of the scientific community. And, if the federal government decides to believe the scientists and do something about emissions, he wants the Treasure State to somehow sit those efforts out.

Enlarge / This Spring, Media Molecule's latest "play, create, share" game could be yours... once we figure out what they mean by "limited early access." (credit: Media Molecule)

Dreams, the first major PS4 exclusive from longtime PlayStation developer Media Molecule, is finally almost here. But if you think its protracted development cycle is anywhere near over, think again.

PlayStation Blog has the news today: starting "this Spring," gamers will be able to buy the latest "play, create, share" title from the makers of LittleBigPlanet for $29.99 ($39.99CDN in Canada, €29.99 in Europe). But there's a catch: this version of the game will be given a loud "early access" label, a rarity on the PlayStation Store.

"If you participated in the [closed] beta and felt like Dreams wasn’t fully featured enough for you yet, or you wanted more Media Molecule game content, then Early Access might not be for you," Media Molecule director Siobhan Reddy wrote on Wednesday. The sales pitch seems targeted at excited content creators who are ready to dive into the game, even without a full-fledged "campaign" mode or finalized UI and tutorials.

Enlarge / Construction at the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility before the project was stopped. (credit: MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility)

Last week, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against a company called CB&I Areva MOX Services and its subcontractor, Wise Services, for allegedly billing the US government for supplies that were never delivered. According to the complaint, a manager at Wise offered kickbacks including football tickets, guns, a YETI cooler, and a television to receive preferential treatment on a US government project to build a nuclear fuel reforming facility.

MOX Services was contracted by the United States National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to build the Mixed Oxides Fuel Fabrication Facility (MFFF), which would have repurposed weapons-grade plutonium as fuel for nuclear reactors in the United States.

After wasting more than $7.6 billion on the MFFF, the US Department of Energy (DOE) canceled work on the South Carolina facility. The department has been quietly moving plutonium out of the area since then.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

In 2017, Microsoft changed its Edge browser so that Flash content would be click-to-run (or disabled outright) on virtually every site on the Web. A handful of sites were to be whitelisted, however, due to a combination of Flash dependence and high popularity.

The whitelist was intended to make it easier to move to a world using HTML5 for rich interactive content and to limit the impact of any future Flash vulnerabilities. At the same time, the list would still allow sites with complex Flash-dependent content to keep on running. If only a few trusted sites can run Flash content by default, it should be much harder for bad actors to take advantage of Flash flaws. A similar approach was adopted by other browsers; Google, for example, whitelisted the top-10 Flash-using sites for one year after switching Chrome to "click-to-run."

But Google figured out how Edge's whitelist worked (via ZDNet) and found that its implementation left something to be desired. The list of 58 sites (56 of which have been identified by Google) including some that were unsurprising; many of the entries are sites with considerable numbers of Flash games, including Facebook. Others seemed more peculiar; a Spanish hair salon, for example, was listed.

Enlarge (credit: Gerardo Mora/Getty Images)

Florida inmate William Demler says that since 2012, he has spent $569.50 on digital music via a proprietary digital music service sponsored by the Florida prison system. Demler listened to his music on a prison-sponsored music player he purchased for $99.95. Demler, who is serving a life sentence, says ads for the prison-sponsored service promised access to his music for his entire prison term.

But last year, the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) switched music vendors, and as a result, Demler lost access to his music collection. He was told that he'd need to buy the same songs again using the new system if he wanted to continue listening to them.

So Demler is suing the FDOC, arguing that the prison system broke its own promises and violated the US Constitution by depriving him of his music without compensation. He is seeking class-action status, allowing him to represent every prisoner in the Sunshine State who has lost access to the music.

Enlarge / A shot from the EPA's Recycle City Challenge. Not shown: The Yoshi's Island DS music that played in the background of the game. (credit: EPA.gov)

A flash game available on the Environmental Protection Agency website since at least early 2017 made surprising use of copyrighted music from Nintendo's 2006 game Yoshi's Island DS.

Recycle City Challenge is an extremely simple educational Flash game that asks players to answer basic questions about how to reduce waste and energy use. But yesterday, fan site Nintendo Soup was among the first to publicly notice that the Web game used a looping version of Yoshi's Island DS' "Underground" theme in the background.

The music, which played in a version of Recycle City Challenge accessed by Ars as recently as this morning, has since been removed from the live version on the EPA's website. You can still hear it in this Internet Archive copy of the site, though, and compare that directly to the same song on the Yoshi's Island DS soundtrack. Perhaps not coincidentally, a file named "yoshisdunderground.mp3" containing a copy of the song in question was in a music subfolder on the EPA website (as cataloged in this Internet Archive link) until earlier today.

Enlarge / An artist's concept of the tiny moon Hippocamp. (credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Olmsted)

As the Voyager probes moved through the outer Solar System, they compiled a massive record of discovery. Among the newly found objects and phenomena were a large collection of small moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Most of these were beyond the ability of Earth-based hardware to image at the time—we actually had to be there to see them.

Since then, however, improvements in ground-based optics and the existence of the Hubble Space Telescope have enabled us to find a few small bodies that had been missed by the Voyagers, as well as other small objects elsewhere in the Solar System, such as the Kuiper Belt object recently visited by New Horizons. Now, researchers have found a way to use advances in computation to increase what we can do with imaging even further, spotting a tiny new moon at Neptune and possibly spotting another for the first time since Voyager 2 was there.

Finding moons

Given that Neptune has been visited by Voyager 2 and imaged frequently since then, any moons we haven't already spotted are going to be pretty hard to see, presumably because they're some combination of small and/or dim. The simplest way to see them is to increase the exposure time, allowing more opportunity for dim signals to emerge from the noise. This method won't work if there's a bright object nearby, which isn't so much of a problem with the outer planets.