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Enlarge / SpaceX has released the first image of its Falcon Heavy rocket. (credit: SpaceX)

On Wednesday afternoon SpaceX released the first photo of actual hardware for the Falcon Heavy rocket—the interstage, which connects the first and second stages of booster—and the photo included the massive launch vehicle's official logo. Published on Instagram, the photo included this caption: "Falcon Heavy interstage being prepped at the rocket factory. When FH flies next year, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two."

Ars understands that the new photo does not augur any kind of major announcement regarding a Falcon Heavy launch—at least not yet. A company official told Ars last week that SpaceX is now targeting "early-to-mid" 2017 for the launch of the massive rocket, which would indeed immediately become the most powerful operational booster on the planet, doubling the capacity of the Delta IV Heavy.

But could the long-delayed rocket actually be close to flying? A photo of real hardware offers a positive sign that the rocket may indeed be getting closer to the launch pad. And the fact that the Falcon Heavy's pad at Launch Complex 39A in Florida is now almost ready for use also lends credence to the fact that the long-promised booster may soon fly.

Enlarge / The Atacama Desert today is barren, its sands encrusted with salt. And yet there were thriving human settlements there 12,000 years ago. (credit: Vallerio Pilar)

When humans first arrived in the Americas, roughly 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, they traveled by boat along the continents' shorelines. Many settled in coastal regions or along rivers that took them inland from the sea. Some made it all the way down to Chile quite quickly; there's evidence for a human settlement there from more than 14,000 years ago at a site called Monte Verde. Another settlement called Quebrada Maní, dating back almost 13,000 years, was recently discovered north of Monte Verde in one of the most arid deserts in the world: the Atacama, whose salt-encrusted sands repel even the hardiest of plants. It seemed an impossible place for early humans to settle, but now we understand how they did it.

At a presentation during the American Geophysical Union meeting this month, UC Berkeley environmental science researcher Marco Pfeiffer explained how he and his team investigated the Atacama desert's deep environmental history. Beneath the desert's salt crust, they found a buried layer of plant and animal remains between 9,000 and 17,000 years old. There were freshwater plants and mosses, as well as snails and plants that prefer brackish water. Quickly it became obvious this land had not always been desert—what Pfeiffer and his colleagues saw suggested wetlands fed by fresh water.

Quaternary Science Reviews

Enlarge / Always listening—but can it solve a murder? (credit: Valentina Paladino)

In November of 2015, former Georgia police officer Victor Collins was found dead in a backyard hot tub at the Bentonville, Arkansas, home of acquaintance James Andrew Bates. Bates claimed it was an accidental drowning when he contacted police at 9:30am, claiming he had gone to bed and left Collins and another man behind in the tub. But Bentonville Police investigators determined that Collins had died after a fight, while being strangled and held underwater—and that Bates was the only person at the scene at the time. Now investigators have reportedly served a search warrant to Amazon in hopes of getting testimony from a possible witness: the Amazon Echo that was streaming music near the hot tub when they arrived at the scene.

The police were immediately suspicious when they found that the water of the hot tub was tinted red and that Collins had injuries suggesting a struggle—including cuts on an eyelid, a bloodied nose, and swollen lips. There were signs of blood on the sides of the hot tub and on the patio around it and evidence that the tub and the patio had been hosed down to remove the blood. A water meter record from the city’s utility department showed that 140 gallons of water had been used between 1:00am and 3:00am on the night of the incident.

Report filed with the court on warrants served to Amazon for James Bates' Echo data.

As investigators continued to gather evidence, as first reported by The Information, the Bentonville Police Department requested a search warrant to obtain records from Amazon for anything the Echo might have recorded that night. Police obtained a search warrant for Bates’ Amazon account information on December 4, 2015 and went back to Amazon again in January of 2016 with an extension of the warrant; according to a warrant return affidavit filed by police, Amazon "eventually complied with the warrants on February 8, 2016, but only supplied a portion of what was requested in both search warrants."

Qualcomm displays some of its patents on a wall in its headquarters in San Diego, California. (credit: Nathan Rupert / flickr)

South Korean regulators say that Qualcomm's patent-licensing methods violate Korean unfair competition laws, and the company must pay a fine of 1.03 trillion won, or about $850 million. Qualcomm has said it will fight the massive fine in court.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission, or KFTC, held that Qualcomm refused to license certain standard-essential patents on its chips to rival chipmakers including Intel, Samsung, and MediaTek. The commission ordered Qualcomm to renegotiate those licenses in good faith, according to a Reuters report on the matter. The fine is the largest ever issued in Korea.

In its report on the Korean fine, Bloomberg notes that Qualcomm makes most of its profits, about $6.5 billion in its most recent year, from selling the rights to its chip technology.

Enlarge / Actors Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher speak onstage during Star Wars celebration on April 16, 2015 in Anaheim, California. (credit: Getty Images / Jesse Grant)

Spoiler warning: This article makes educated guesses about future Star Wars films, including casting decisions, and makes references to plot points in the mainline Star Wars films (meaning, not Rogue One).

With Tuesday's tragic passing of actor and writer Carrie Fisher came a major question from fans of the Star Wars series: what will happen to the ongoing trilogy films, which (so far) feature both the original trilogy characters of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa Solo?

Reports from Variety and Deadline have confirmed that filming of Fisher's performance in the upcoming Star Wars: Episode VIII film wrapped earlier this year, with both articles citing unnamed sources. Deadline's report goes one further by indicating that Leia has a "larger role" in the upcoming film, and while it also mentions Fisher's real-life daughter, Billie Lourd, appearing in Episode VIII, there's no indication of how much screen time Lourd will receive or whether she and Fisher will interact meaningfully in the film. (Lourd appeared ever-so-briefly in The Force Awakens, but she has teased a larger appearance in a future film.)

Enlarge / Ford's next-generation Fusion Hybrid autonomous test vehicle. (credit: Ford)

On Wednesday Ford announced that it would be testing a set of next-generation autonomous vehicles in 2017—a step along a path to building a market-ready, fully autonomous fleet for ride-hailing services by 2021. The automaker will triple the size of its test fleet in 2017, bringing the number of Ford research cars on US roads to 90.

Ford, like many traditional automakers, has been playing catch-up in the autonomous vehicle race after Google’s pioneering of the space and Tesla’s aggressive roll-out of its Advanced Driver Assist software. Where companies like Volvo are helping their customers stick their toes in the self-driving waters with systems that can take over driving on highways, Ford has decided it’s going to skip partial autonomy and go straight to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ (SAE) Level Four autonomy (PDF), or “High Automation,” where a driver does not need to intervene. Ford doesn’t intend to sell these cars to retail customers right away; instead it hopes to find customers in ride-hailing companies.

Ford says its next-generation autonomous test cars, all modified Ford Fusion Hybrids, will have two powerful lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors that “see” up to two football fields in any direction (this is down from four or five weaker lidar sensors in previous versions of Ford's prototype cars). The Fusion Hybrids will also have three cameras on the roof of the car, a camera mounted under the windshield, and short- and long-range radar sensors to detect objects in inclement weather.