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Enlarge / USPTO Deputy Director Michelle K. Lee, left, tours the Denver satellite office of the US Patent and Trademark Office in 2014. US Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is on the right. (credit: Kathryn Scott Osler/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

With President Donald Trump having taken office today, many government offices are in the midst of a major transition. In one office that's closely watched by technology and internet companies, however, the leadership looks to remain the same—the US Patent and Trademark Office.

There's been no official announcement about USPTO leadership from Trump's team, with the new president having been inaugurated earlier today. But The Hill reported yesterday that Michelle Lee, a former top lawyer at Google, will remain as USPTO director under President Trump. Politico reported the same news, sourcing it to statement from Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and confirming it with other unnamed sources.

Lee's remaining at USPTO is a a surprise victory for the technology sector, which offered scant support for President Trump while he was campaigning for office. She supported President Barack Obama's patent reform agenda, and Trump's views on patents are a cipher.

Enlarge / A scene from Prelude to Axanar. (credit: Axanar)

On Friday, litigants announced a settlement to end a contentious copyright lawsuit over a short film and a proposed feature-length film based in the Star Trek universe. The lawsuit was filed last year and involves Star Trek fan-fiction producer Axanar Productions, Paramount Studios, and CBS.

The parties did not disclose all the details of the settlement, which is sealed from the public record. But a joint statement from Axanar and the plaintiffs noted that the defendants “acknowledge that both films were not approved by Paramount or CBS and that both works crossed boundaries acceptable to CBS and Paramount relating to copyright law.” A spokesperson from Axanar told Ars Technica in an e-mail “we’re not paying anything,” with respect to the settlement.

The settlement will also require the fanfic producer to “make substantial changes to Axanar to resolve this litigation.” According to a statement from Axanar, this includes changing the proposed feature-length film into two 15-minute short film episodes, which will be posted on YouTube without advertising from which Axanar could earn revenue. The 20-minute Prelude to Axanar will be allowed to stay on YouTube.

FCC Republican Commissioner (and soon-to-be Chairman) Ajit Pai. (credit: FCC)

Update on Monday, January 23: President Trump today made it official, selecting Ajit Pai as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. "I am deeply grateful to the President of the United States designating me the 34th Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission," Pai said in a statement. "I look forward to working with the new Administration, my colleagues at the Commission, members of Congress, and the American public to bring the benefits of the digital age to all Americans."

Fellow Republican Commissioner Michael O'Rielly offered congratulations. [Pai's] "thoughtful approach, deep knowledge base, and sense of humor have been great assets to the Commission, and it makes sense that President Trump hand-picked him to carry out the new Administration’s broad vision for the agency," O'Rielly said. Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn also congratulated Pai, saying, "Ajit is bright, driven and committed to bringing connectivity to all Americans. I am hopeful that we can come together to serve the public interest by supporting competition, public safety, and consumer protection.”

Paramount

Jam-packed with fantastic character actors, full of ridiculously insane fight scenes, and centered on a functionally impossible piece of technology, xXx: Return of Xander Cage is everything you need from an action flick. There's a thin scrim of a plot involving an evil laptop called Pandora's Box, whose superpowers involve "spying on everybody," "controlling satellites," and injecting hostile poop emojis into Web sessions. Just kidding about that last bit. This movie does not know about Web sessions. But I'm not kidding about how Vin Diesel's performance as "underground blogger" Xander Cage is goofily badass, and the hijinks of his crew are equally fun.

This is the third xXx film, though only the second with Vin Diesel. Ice Cube took the X helm for the second movie, and this flick picks up basically a few years after that. There's still a secret international X program associated with various intelligence agencies, and the X agents are all underground rebel celebs who do things like skateboard for great justice.

Enlarge / A 12-year-old boy in Texas checks his arm after receiving an HPV vaccination. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post )

Nearly half of all men in the US have some type of genital human papillomavirus infection—and about 25 percent have a type linked to cancer, according to a study appearing Thursday in JAMA Oncology.

The study is the first to look at the prevalence of HPV among American men. Much of the past attention paid to HPV has focused on women, because the virus is the cause of nearly every case of cervical cancer in the US. For this reason, health experts have been recommending since 2006 that girls and young women get vaccinated against HPV.

Experts updated that recommendation to include boys and young men in 2011, but the new study shows that few are actually getting those shots—just 10 percent were vaccinated. But with the new prevalence data, the authors suggest that vaccinating men may not only prevent thousands of cancer cases, but it could also be key to stamping out cancer causing-HPV transmission overall.

Enlarge / Venus, as seen by the Akatsuki spacecraft, displaying the bow-shaped feature. Lighter colors reflect higher light emissions; the white regions are about 233 Kelvin. (credit: ©Planet-C)

The Akatsuki spacecraft arrived in orbit of Venus in December 2015, and it quickly captured a very strange feature: an atmospheric disturbance in the shape of a bow. The feature is enormous, stretching from the planet’s north pole to its south (10,000 kilometers, or 6,200 miles in total), and it's visible in both infrared and (dimly) ultraviolet light.

Images from this mission were recently released, and researchers have had the chance to review them and do some science. They’ve concluded that the mysterious structure is probably a gravity wave, caused by mountains on the surface and propagating up into the atmosphere. It’s “the only reasonable interpretation,” according to a new paper on the feature.

Gravity waves—not to be confused with gravitational waves, the kind recently observed by LIGO—are waves in a fluid, like water or air, caused by gravity. When some of the fluid is displaced upwards, gravity tries to correct it and restore equilibrium, a process that creates waves. The Earth’s atmosphere also has gravity waves created by the influence of mountains, which displace air upwards.