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The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court prepares to hear oral arguments in the case on January 8.

Some teenagers successfully lobby for access to the family car on a Friday night. Others successfully sue governments about not doing enough about greenhouse gas emissions.

Aided by the Conservation Law Foundation and the Mass Energy Consumers Alliance, four teens won a case before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Tuesday that will force the state to follow through on its greenhouse gas emissions goals. The state’s 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act pledged to reduce emissions to 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, but the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) never created any emissions regulations to make that happen.

The lawsuit argued that the 2008 legislation required the DEP to actually do something, while the state said it interpreted the law to mean it would merely need to define numbers that would be consistent with the goal. The Supreme Judicial Court overturned a lower court’s decision, telling the DEP that it is not free to interpret the law that way.

(credit: Google Earth)

The linear chains of islands running across the Pacific Ocean aren’t improbable coincidences of orderliness—they’re the product of hot towers of mantle rock punching volcanic holes through a tectonic plate sliding overhead. But if you follow the Hawaiian chain back to where the older seamounts no longer rise above the waves, you find a sharp dogleg, as you can see above.

We haven't had a satisfactory explanation for this sudden turn. One idea was that, given a stationary mantle hotspot, the tectonic plate must have changed direction at one point in time. This theory has never been entirely satisfactory, however—not least because the Louisville seamount chain in the South Pacific sports a gentler kink.

We still have a lot to figure out about how mantle hotspot plumes work, but we do know that the Hawaii and Louisville plumes go all the way down to the deepest part of the Earth’s mantle. Plumes like these are rooted near the edges of unusual, lumpy regions of rock at the base of the mantle beneath the Pacific (as well as Africa). These structures are known as large low-shear-velocity provinces—for lack of any reasonable alternative, we’ll grit our teeth and refer to them as LLSVPs.

Concept art for NASA's flyby mission to Europa. (credit: NASA)

Planetary scientists have identified Jupiter's icy moon of Europa as one of their top targets for exploration, believing that its warm interior oceans may well harbor life. A new study published just this week, authored by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, found that conditions in the oceans on Europa may indeed be Earth-like and capable of harboring life.

Despite the wishes of the planetary science community to further investigate Europa, NASA has been wary of mounting such a mission because of the high cost—well above $1 billion. Additionally, planetary science hasn't been a priority in President Obama's NASA budgets, and the space agency has preferred to focus most of its robotic solar system exploration on Mars. The red planet is easier to reach, and NASA says it wants to explore Mars further to enable future human missions.

Congress has been more interested in planetary science, however. And in particular, the chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over NASA's budget, John Culberson (R-Texas), has fancied Europa. Even when NASA wasn't asking for Europa funds, the congressman was funneling money to the scientists at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Between the 2013 and 2016 fiscal years, NASA requested just $45 million in Europa funding, but Congress appropriated $395 million. For fiscal year 2017, NASA requested $49.6 million in Europa funding, but a House appropriations bill released this week by Culberson's committee proposes $260 million for mission planning and development.

(credit: Eric Norris)

A federal judge in Tacoma, Washington has put himself in a Catch 22: ruling a man charged with possessing child pornography has the right to review malware source code while also acknowledging that the government has a right to keep it secret.

"The resolution of Defendant’s Third Motion to Compel Discovery places this matter in an unusual position: the defendant has the right to review the full NIT code, but the government does not have to produce it," US District Judge Robert Bryan wrote on Wednesday. "Thus, we reach the question of sanctions: What should be done about it when, under these facts, the defense has a justifiable need for information in the hands of the government, but the government has a justifiable right not to turn the information over to the defense?"

In this case, the defense wants prosecutors to disclose the full source code of the NIT, or network investigative technique—a piece of government-created malware that compromised Tor and exposed users of a Tor-only child porn site. The Department of Justice did so in a related case in Nebraska, United States v. Cottom, but a DOJ spokesman now says this case, United States v. Michaud, and Cottom are entirely different cases and have no bearing on one another.

The interface of the main screen. That center portion is basically the Android Auto interface.

10 more images in gallery

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California—Google has a full car infotainment operating system on display at I/O. We've long heard rumors of such a project and have spotted references to "Android Automotive" in Google's compatibility documents, but a car-focused version of Android is now quietly sitting in the back corner of Google I/O.

Previous forms of Google automotive computing came in the form of Android Auto, which was a casted interface that was beamed from a phone to a car screen. The car still ran some kind of host operating system, but that OS would move out of the way and let the Android phone use the built-in display like an external monitor. In contrast, this is a full operating system that runs directly on the car hardware. The car version of Android doesn't really have a launch date, or even a special name—"cars" are now just a supported form factor in Android N.

Google is demoing the OS in a Maserati Quattroporte, which it says it loaded up with Android without involvement from the car manufacturer. Inside, the Maserati runs a Snapdragon 820 with a 4K display in the center console. There is also a gauge cluster display that Android can control.

To outsiders, the Star Ocean series can be impenetrable, even downright adverse. Without digging into optional content, Star Ocean can easily take 100 hours to complete, while its many cut scenes—sometimes as much as 10 hours in a single game—are as confusing as they are long. Fans love it. But for Shuichi Kobayashi, producer of the upcoming Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness (known simply as Star Ocean 5), wildly sprawling narratives and content for content's sake just won't cut it any more.

Star Ocean 5 is on a different path, one where even RPG newcomers can give it a try—and Kobayashi, visiting London on his first trip outside of his native Japan, knows just how to make it happen.

"The audience for games these days is made up with a lot of people that don't have that kind of time to spend with a single game," Kobayashi explains, "and they are put off by a game that asks them to put in 100 hours to get to the end and see everything. Because of that we deliberately made the pacing a lot faster than Star Ocean has seen in the past and that can make the game seem shorter, but maybe that is not what some of the core fans wanted."

Theranos CEO and founder, Elizabeth Holmes (credit: NBC Today)

After federal regulators threatened to revoke Theranos’ license to perform blood tests and ban its CEO and COO from the industry altogether, the company reportedly issued tens of thousands of corrections to blood tests it performed. Theranos has also voided all of the 2014 and 2015 results reported from its once-famed Edison blood testing machines, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Edison machines, which were said to be able to perform more than 200 medical tests with just a few drops of blood, were key to the young biotech company earning a whopping $9 billion valuation in 2014. Yet, in the wake of reports that the machines were inaccurate and unreliable and that employees were unqualified and failing to follow proper protocols and fix problems, the company acknowledged that it had completely stopped using the devices in June 2015. Instead, the company performed its blood tests—890,000 blood tests a year, according to records—on standard lab equipment.

The corrections and voided results mean that clinics and doctor’s offices are receiving stacks of notifications. One such doctor’s office, a family practitioner in a suburb of Phoenix, told the WSJ that it received 20 corrected reports a few weeks ago. One of those corrected reports was for a patient who the doctor had sent straight to the emergency room upon receiving her Theranos results in late 2014. The corrected report shows the patient had normal results.