Month: June 2019

Enlarge / A truck loaded with coal is viewed at the Eagle Butte Coal Mine, which is operated by Alpha Coal, on Monday May 08, 2017, in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler signed the "Affordable Clean Energy" rule, known as ACE, to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, or CPP.

The ACE rule was proposed last summer, and after going through the procedural steps required to enact the rule, Administrator Wheeler finally signed it today, along with an official repeal of the CPP. Details regarding the final rules have been submitted to the Federal Register, one of the last steps to making federal rules official in the US.

Obama's CPP attempted to set federal power plant emissions limits by state. Under the CPP, states would have had an incentive to push the most-polluting power plants (in most cases, coal plants) offline sooner. But coal interests and several states and utilities challenged this rule in court. Eventually, the Supreme Court stayed the rule, so it was never actually implemented.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | metamorworks)

Starry, a wireless home Internet provider, says it has acquired enough spectrum to offer service to 40 million households in more than 25 US states.

Starry's network already passes more than 1.5 million households in Boston, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, New York City, and Denver. Its first launch was in Boston in 2016. The company sells 200Mbps Internet service for $50 a month, but it doesn't reveal how many subscribers it has.

To expand its network, Starry spent $48.5 million on spectrum licenses in the Federal Communications Commission's recent 24GHz auction, as we previously reported. Yesterday, a Starry announcement provided more details on how the new spectrum holdings will be used to expand the network.

A new study suggests that the first humans to move into Australia and New Guinea came in larger numbers—and perhaps with more of a plan—than some researchers previously thought.

People have lived in Australia and New Guinea since at least 60,000 years ago, when sea levels were about 100 meters (300 feet) lower than today. Due to lower sea levels, a land bridge across the Torres Strait linked Australia and New Guinea into a single landmass (termed Sahul). The first humans to set foot on Sahul probably arrived via closely spaced islands that stretched like stepping-stones across the 1,800km (1,100 miles) of ocean from the exposed continental shelf of Southeast Asia. And a new study suggests that it would have taken at least 1,300 people crossing these islands to give us a lasting foothold.

Playing on hard mode

Trying to colonize a new, uninhabited land is a challenge. If you bring too many people at once, the sudden influx could put too much strain on local resources, and everyone would die. But if you don’t bring enough people to reproduce and maintain genetic diversity, each generation gets smaller until the group eventually runs out of people and everyone dies. Flinders University ecologist Corey Bradshaw and his colleagues wanted to figure out how many people needed to settle in Sahul to make sure humans didn’t end up going locally extinct.

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  Hey, look at how I'm playing this obviously real system with my obviously real hands.

In 2019, we've seen rumor after rumor after rumor after rumor that Nintendo is planning to release a new, smaller version of the Switch in the near future, possibly without the original system's signature detachable controllers. While Nintendo hasn't announced anything officially, some new listings from Chinese accessory manufacturer Honson have reignited the rumor mill surrounding a redesigned Switch system being potentially in the pipeline.

Honson's Nintendo Switch Mini landing page showcases 11 different products, including a variety of bags, carrying cases, hard shells, and a screen protector. One page promises a "professional design to perfect fit Nintendo Switch mini." Similar product images were posted to the company's Facebook page a week ago.

All of these products are listed as "out of stock" on Honson's own website (the company told NintenDIY that they'll be available starting next week). But some Honson products "for Nintendo Switch mini case" are already available for bulk order through Alibaba right now, complete with customized packaging and logo options for large bulk orders.

Enlarge / The researchers built 3D landscapes from spy satellite images like this one from the border between eastern Nepal and Sikkim, India, in 1975. (credit: Josh Maurer/LDEO)

The glaciers of the Himalayas are beautiful pieces of the unique landscape at the “roof of the world." But they’re also water towers, filling rivers used by hundreds of millions of people in East and South Asia. The need to understand how climate change is altering these glaciers is obvious.

Data is not plentiful in this inhospitable part of the world, and the climate is particularly complex and variable from across the region. For example, the monsoon rains mean that the glaciers in the eastern portion of the range actually gain most of their snowfall in the summer. With such a huge and varied area, studies have generally only been able to focus on a small subset of glaciers, making it harder to draw broad conclusions across the region. A new study led by Josh Maurer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory relies on spy satellite photos from the 1970s to make that possible.

Spying on ice

Photos from the US KH-9 Hexagon satellite have been declassified, much to the delight of geoscientists. The trick is extracting precise information from the photos—and in this case, the trick is getting 3D information from 2D images. It’s one thing to mark a glacier’s extent, but the truly valuable thing is to work out their change in thickness and, therefore, volume.

Enlarge / Security team KnownSec404 proof-of-concept image, showing an instance of Windows Calculator being run on the remote WebLogic server. (credit: KnownSec 404)

Oracle on Tuesday published an out-of-band update patching a critical code-execution vulnerability in its WebLogic server after researchers warned that the flaw was being actively exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2729, allows an attacker to run malicious code on the WebLogic server without any need for authentication. That capability earned the vulnerability a Common Vulnerability Scoring System score of 9.8 out of 10. The vulnerability is a deserialization attack targeting two Web applications that WebLogic appears to expose to the Internet by default—wls9_async_response and wls-wsat.war.

The flaw in Oracle's WebLogic Java application servers came to light as a zero-day four days ago when it was reported by security firm KnownSec404.