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(credit: Fullscreen)

YouTube Red isn't the only digital video service to put YouTube stars at the forefront of its content. The media company Fullscreen launched its online video subscription service featuring shows that star YouTube personalities, including Grace Helbig and Shane Dawson. The ad-free subscription service will be free for the first month and then users can pay $4.99 per month to continue watching.

Fullscreen started out as a type of talent agency that worked with social media stars to secure ad-sponsored deals on free sites like Instagram. Fullscreen's founder George Strompolos told the BCC, "Social media is a great place to make quick, inexpensive content to engage a fanbase. But when it comes to longer form or premium productions, the economics of producing it on the free web just don't work out." Now, with the company's roster of more than 75,000 partners (many of which are from YouTube), it will create a "premium destination" with original content featuring a lot of online personalities that young people already know, as well as licensed shows and movies.

Fullscreen didn't waste time in going for the big stars on YouTube. Comedian and personality Shane Dawson of ShaneDawsonTV has a huge following of more than 7.3 million subscribers, one movie under his belt with another on the way, and a podcast he's been recording for the past three years. Fullscreen will take his Shane and Friends podcast and produce it in video format, so fans who want to watch Dawson and his cohost Jessie Buttafuoco interact with guests can do so, while others can still listen to the podcast for free on iTunes or Soundcloud.

(credit: Kieran McCarthy)

The 2017 Agriculture Appropriations Bill may not seem like a stirring piece of legislation to most, but it raised quite a few eyebrows last week as it passed through a House subcommittee with a key amendment—one that aims to spare the vast majority of electronic cigarettes from impending federal regulations.

The bipartisan effort to protect the burgeoning e-cig market is just the latest in a long-smoldering debate reignited by the Food and Drug Administration’s plans this year to begin regulating the new devices as it does traditional tobacco products. The crux of the controversy is about whether e-cigarettes act more as a gateway into or a ticket out of dangerous tobacco use, the single largest cause of preventable deaths in the US.

E-cig flavors. (credit: Wikimedia)

Proponents argue that the new FDA regulations will protect children from bad habits. For instance, one of the proposed rules will prevent e-cig makers from using youth-based marketing—like edgy, rebellious ads and candy-flavored e-cigs—that can hook kids into lifelong nicotine addictions and deadly tobacco habits. Such marketing strategies were first used by tobacco companies decades ago and were highly successful until the FDA banned the practice. With e-cig companies already copying the tactics, many politicians and public health experts have chided the FDA for not rolling out regulations faster. The agency first proposed rules back in 2014.

Dropbox will soon be adding support on both Windows and OS X for placeholder files that create a full view of your cloud-synced files, even if they're not available locally.

OneDrive (or rather SkyDrive, as it was called then) in Windows 8.1 was a significant step forward in improving the cloud storage experience for desktop users thanks to its novel handling of cloud-synced files. Within Explorer and at the command prompt, every file stored on OneDrive was shown, even if it wasn't synced locally. Double-clicking a file (or using File... Open within an application) would automatically download it so that it could be read and edited as normal.

This system provided a great increase in usability, especially on machines with limited local storage. Instead of requiring you to pick and choose which files or folders to sync manually in order to avoid filling the local disk, you could see all your files and folders in your OneDrive folder. Only the ones that you actually opened locally would occupy their full size; everything else was shrunk to a few bytes of metadata.

Charter's footprint after the proposed merger. (credit: Charter)

With Charter Communications set to receive approval for its acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC), regulators plan to impose a series of conditions designed to stop anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies pursued by TWC.

Conditions proposed by the Department of Justice and Federal Communications Commission would prohibit the combined company from imposing data caps and overage fees on Internet customers, charging large online content providers for network interconnection, and stifling growth of online video by demanding restrictive clauses in contracts with programmers. Time Warner Cable has more aggressively pursued these types of policies than Charter.

Charter doesn't have a sterling reputation, ranking nearly as low as Comcast and TWC in consumer satisfaction rankings. But Charter seized on the differences between itself and TWC while arguing its case and suggested some of the merger conditions that ended up forming the basis of the DOJ's and FCC's final proposals.

Organic compounds in Titan’s seas and lakes. (credit: ESA)

Liquid seas exist on the surface of just two worlds in the Solar System: Earth and Saturn's moon Titan. Discovered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft about a decade ago, the hydrocarbon seas of Titan are more exotic, of course, as they exist in liquid form at temperatures around -180 degrees Celsius.

Now, after the Cassini spacecraft has made a number of flybys of Titan, scientists assessing light and other radiation emanating from the moon's surface say they have a better handle on exactly what is in one of those seas. And to their surprise, they have found that the second largest lake on Titan, Ligeia Mare, is composed of nearly pure methane.

“We expected to find that Ligeia Mare would be mostly ethane, which is produced in abundance in the atmosphere when sunlight breaks methane molecules apart,” said Alice Le Gall, lead author of the new study. “Instead, this sea is predominantly made of pure methane."

Enlarge / The arrow points to the very faint moon near Makemake. (credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Parker)

Today, NASA announced that images it has been sitting on for a year show a moon orbiting a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt. The moon, formally known as S/2015 (136472) and going informally as MK 2, is in orbit around Makemake, a dwarf planet two-thirds the size of Pluto that spends most of its time more than 40 Astronomical Units away from the Sun (1 AU is the typical Earth-Sun distance).

MK 2 is more than 1,300 times fainter than the planet it orbits, largely because it has a very dark surface compared to Makemake's icy white color. It also appears to orbit within the plane of the Solar System, which means it's indistinguishable from Makemake for much of its orbit—Hubble managed to catch it when it was more than 20,000km from the dwarf planet. Estimates are that MK 2 is about 160km across compared to Makemake's 1,400km.

Early observations show that the orbit takes at least 12 days, and the shape of the orbit is roughly circular. This data suggests that MK 2 formed from debris liberated from Makemake by an impact; passing objects that are captured by planets typically have eccentric orbits. Detailed observations of MK 2's orbit will allow us to determine the density of Makemake, which will then tell us something about its composition, so NASA will continue observing the new body.