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Members of VMware's "Hosted UI" team—the developers responsible for the virtualization company's Workstation and Fusion desktop products—were apparently laid off on Monday as part of a restructuring of the company that was announced yesterday. The developers were just a part of a larger layoff as the company moved to cut costs and brought aboard a new chief financial officer.

"VMware… announced a restructuring and realignment of approximately 800 roles," a company spokesperson said in a press release Monday, "and plans to take a GAAP charge estimated to be between $55 million and $65 million related to this action over the course of the first half of 2016. The company plans to reinvest the associated savings in field, technical and support resources associated with growth products."

In a blog post, Christian Hammond, a former member of the Hosted UI team, reported the layoff, along with concerns about the future of the "award winning and profitable" desktop virtualization products. "VMware lost a lot of amazing people, and will be feeling that for some time to come, once they realize what they’ve done," Hammond wrote. "It’s a shame. As for our team, well, I think everyone will do just fine. Some of the best companies in the Silicon Valley are full of ex-VMware members, many former Hosted UI, who would probably welcome the chance to work with their teammates again."

The newest addition to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, Tesla VP of Human Resources Arnnon Geshuri, has stepped down just a few weeks after he was appointed.

Geshuri's appointment was immediately controversial with editors of the site. The controversy grew this weekend when Ashley Van Haeften, who goes by the username Fae on Wikipedia, initiated a non-binding "vote of no confidence", in which Wikipedia's volunteer editors asked the board to remove Geshuri. The vote was ultimately 290-22 in favor of Geshuri's removal.

Geshuri's decision was announced in an e-mail message written by current board Chair Patricio Lorente and Vice-chair Alice Wiegand. The message reads:

A new Windows 10 insider version has been released.

The new build doesn't bring much that you'll notice. For the past few months, Microsoft has been updating and refining the processes used to build and develop Windows 10 to better meet the needs of a continuously developed, continuously delivered operating system, and this has meant that user visible feature work has taken a back seat. But the new build does have one big change: its build number has leaped from 11107 to 14251.

This isn't because the company quickly rattled off 300-odd builds in the last couple of weeks but because of continued synchronization between Windows 10 on the PC and Windows 10 Mobile. The build numbers had already been synced between the two versions, but various internal components were different. These differences are being eliminated as the codebases are unified and brought together. As part of unifying the code, the build numbers have to be brought together, too. It happens that the Mobile fork was already using higher version numbers internally than the desktop one, so the desktop operating system has had to have its build number rolled forward.

Computers have already beaten the best humans at Checkers, Chess, and Jeopardy, but mastery of the ancient Chinese game Go has eluded computer scientists for the longest time. Deepmind, Google's artificial intelligence division, claims to have made a big breakthrough using neural networks, and it recently took on and defeated a Go world champion.

As Google's blog posts puts it, "There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions" in Go, which makes the game very complex. Mapping out every possible move won't work for Go, making it the one game computers can't beat humans at. Performing well at Go is considered by some to be a benchmark for artificial intelligence.

Deepmind's AI, called "AlphaGo," recently took on reigning three-time European Go champion Fan Hui and won all five games. In March, AlphaGo has a throw-down scheduled with Lee Sedol, who has been the top Go player in the world for the past decade.

A group of mayors from communities in south Florida has released an open letter to one of their senators, Marco Rubio, in which they call for a meeting to discuss the challenges posed by climate change. The mayors, from communities like Key Biscayne, Miami, and West Palm Beach, say that the challenge of climate change requires a strong presidential commitment to action, one they argue Rubio is lacking.

"As mayors representing municipalities across Florida, we call on you to acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change and to address the upcoming crisis it presents our communities," the letter reads. "Our cities and towns are already coping with the impacts of climate change today." Flooding at high tides, severe storm surges, and the intrusion of saltwater into municipal water supplies are all problems these cities face.

Those issues come thanks to 20cm of sea-level rise over the previous century. Studies project that the area could see up to another 30cm rise by 2050, which the mayors say "could wipe out as much as $4 billion in taxable real estate in the four-county region of Southeast Florida." If those projections are low, things get bad quickly; a 90cm rise takes out $31 billion and leaves cities and the Everglades decisively under water.

Humans are not the only farmers on Earth. The many species of leafcutter ants that inhabit the region stretching from Argentina to the southern United States are incredibly sophisticated food growers. They spend most of their lives harvesting and processing leaves, turning them into a well-tended substrate for growing a nutritious fungus that feeds all the colony's young. A new study reveals why these ants may have evolved their complicated systems of cooperative agricultural activities in the first place.

A complex farming society

A group of researchers at the University of Oregon studied leafcutter ants in their lab colony, as well as wild ants in Colombia and Ecuador. In a paper published today in Royal Society Open Science, the scientists describe the widely studied agricultural feats of leafcutter ants.

Previous observations have revealed that some of the ants venture forth from their colonies to gather leaves that serve as food for adult ants—and as agricultural fodder for the fungus. Inside the colony, another group of ants cuts the leaves down into what the researchers call "fragments." The ants use prehensile, finger-like leg tips called tarsi to manipulate the leaves.

On Tuesday evening, Southern California’s air quality regulator sued SoCal Gas, the company that owns a leaking natural gas storage well just north of Los Angeles. The leaking well has been venting hundreds of thousands of pounds of methane per hour into the atmosphere for the last three months.

The civil lawsuit demands damages (PDF) from SoCal Gas for creating a nuisance for the residents of the nearby Porter Ranch community and for negligently operating the Aliso Canyon storage facility that houses 115 storage wells, including the leaking SS-25 well. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is asking for up to $440,000 per day that the leak continues, based on six alleged violations.

The leak began on October 23, and after several failed attempts to plug it, SoCal Gas began drilling a relief well down to the 8,500-foot-deep reservoir where the natural gas is stored. (The reservoir is just one of many cavities that once held oil and were sucked dry decades ago. SoCal Gas repurposed these reservoirs in the 1970s to store natural gas.) In the meantime, the gas has been venting into the atmosphere.

Pay-TV providers would have to make video programming available to the makers of third-party devices and software under a proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler.

The FCC is planning for a software-based, cardless replacement for CableCard. Without needing a physical card that plugs into a third-party set-top box, consumers would be able to get TV channels on tablets, smart TVs, or set-top boxes that they can buy from other companies instead of renting a box from a cable company.

"Consumers should be able to choose how they access the Multichannel Video Programming Distributor’s (MVPDs)—cable, satellite, or telco companies—video services to which they subscribe," the FCC's summary of the proposal said. "For example, consumers should be able to have the choice of accessing programming through the MVPD-provided interface on a pay-TV set-top box or app, or through devices such as a tablet or smart TV using a competitive app or software. MVPDs and competitors should be able to differentiate themselves and compete based on the experience they offer users, including the quality of the user interface and additional features like suggested content, integration with home entertainment systems, caller ID and future innovations."