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Some may like it hot, but probably not quite this hot. (credit: Climate.gov)

This summer has been particularly hot across the US, and scorching temperatures have forced most of us to take refuge somewhere with air-conditioning. This leads to high electricity demand, especially in the hottest regions. As climate change continues, we are likely to experience similar hot temperatures more frequently.

Climate change modeling also forecasts that these increased temperatures will result in increased storm intensity and flooding. These types of extreme weather-related events could have a profound impact on the population distribution, if populations shift away from regions affected by extreme storms.

Combined, the change in weather and population movement can present regional infrastructure challenges due to significant changes in electricity demand. Understanding where electricity service is most vulnerable is of utmost importance if we're going to plan ahead for these future challenges. In an investigation recently published in Nature Energy, researchers have predicted how this combination of climate and population stresses will influence electricity demand using high-resolution, spatially explicit tools.

Seymour Papert (right) seen here in 2005. (credit: Rodrigo Mesquita)

Seymour Papert, one of the creators of the Logo programming language and a significant influence behind One Laptop Per Child and Lego Mindstorms, died Sunday at home in Maine. He was 88.

On Monday, the Logo Foundation announced Papert’s passing in a tweet, but it did not cite a cause of death. Papert had sustained a serious brain injury after being hit by a motorcycle in Vietnam in 2006.

Papert was born February 29, 1928 in Pretoria, South Africa, where he completed his doctorate in mathematics in 1952 at the University of the Witwatersrand. He then emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he completed another doctorate at Cambridge University. After bouncing around European universities in the early 1960s as a researcher, he finally landed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963.

Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson today announced a $100 million consumer protection lawsuit against Comcast, alleging that the nation's biggest cable company "engag[ed] in a pattern of deceptive practices constituting more than 1.8 million individual violations of the Washington Consumer Protection Act." Comcast's conduct affected about 500,000 customers who purchased service protection plans in Washington, Ferguson said.

State officials filed the lawsuit (full text) in King County Superior Court, seeking refunds for consumers. The "lawsuit accuses Comcast of misleading 500,000 Washington consumers and deceiving them into paying at least $73 million in subscription fees over the last five years for a near-worthless 'protection plan' without disclosing its significant limitations," the state AG's announcement said. "Customers who sign up for Comcast’s Service Protection Plan pay a $4.99 monthly fee ostensibly to avoid being charged if a Comcast technician visits their home to fix an issue covered by the plan."

Washington said it alleges 1.8 million violations because Comcast made false claims regarding the scope of its service protection plans to 700,000 customers, and "deceptively represented the scope of its Customer Guarantee to over 1.17 million Washington consumers." Comcast allegedly led customers to believe that they needed to buy service protection plans to get services that were actually covered for free by the "Customer Guarantee."

Alden Ehrenreich, who will play Han Solo in at least one upcoming film, appears at the Star Wars Celebration 2016 in London, England. (credit: Getty Images / Ben A. Pruchnie)

The nebulous cloud of upcoming Star Wars content is hard to keep up with. There's the official trilogy, this winter's Rogue One spin-off film, and a ton of still-in-production, big-budget video games starting off the list. This cache also includes a new film featuring a much younger Han Solo than the one fans met in the original Star Wars.

Actually, scratch that. We might be getting an entire Han Solo trilogy as well.

That's the buzz, at any rate, suggested by a New York Daily News story that broke on Monday. Actor Alden Ehrenreich, the 26-year-old who's been tapped to lead the still-unnamed Han Solo film, has signed a three-film contract with Disney. The point of the contract, according to the Daily News, is to lock the actor down should the first Han Solo film "strike gold at the box office."

Nelson Piquet Jr takes me for a ride in his Global Rallycross Ford Fiesta. (video link)

WASHINGTON, DC—Red Bull Global Rallycross (GRC) paid its annual visit to the nation's capital this past weekend. As a form of racing, rallycross has been doing something few other series have managed in recent years—it's growing new fans and appealing to kids who, by and large, are more interested in getting the latest phone than a driver's license. With that in mind, we spent a couple of days at RFK Stadium watching the action and talking to some of the drivers to find out what makes this flavor of the sport so successful.

A brief primer: the cars all start life as regular production cars—Volkswagen Beetles, Ford Fiestas, and so on. They're eventually stripped down and highly modified. Highly turbocharged two-liter engines pump out more than 600hp, driving all four wheels. The tracks are a mix of tarmac and gravel and include dramatic jump over a dirt ramp. And the races are fast and furious, a series of short heats with plenty of opportunity for door-banging and paint-trading.

(credit: Didi Chuxing)

Uber and its primary Chinese on-demand car service rival, Didi Chuxing, have finally buried the hatchet in a landmark deal.

The California startup has been reportedly spending at least $1 billion per year to try to dominate the massive Chinese market, while Didi Chuxing has spent similar amounts of money trying to stave off its American rival.

According to a Monday press release, the Chinese startup will obtain "all assets of UberChina" for operation on the mainland. Earlier this year, Apple invested $1 billion in Didi Chuxing.

Enlarge (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is out this week, and it offers an interesting mobile feature aimed not at Windows Phone, but at Android: mirrored Android notifications. The idea is that when a notification pops up on your Android phone, it should also pop up on your Windows PC, allowing you to then deal with your notifications remotely on the PC. For now most of the features come with a well-deserved "beta" tag, but it's worth a look to see where this feature is and how much more work needs to be done.

Beaming Android notifications to your PC isn't a new idea—third-party apps like Pushbullet and AirDroid can already do it, but it's still interesting that Microsoft has introduced its own first-party implementation (it's also a tacit admission that Microsoft's own mobile platform is quickly fading). The way all these services work is to basically "become a really big smartwatch." The services plug in to all of the remote notification capabilities Google originally introduced for Android Wear, but they're available to any app that is granted the proper permissions. We'd expect our ideal notification service to be able to do everything Android Wear can do with a notification, just inside of a PC app instead of a watch.

In Android 4.3, Google added a Notification API, which can mirror the entire notification panel to another device. Apps can sign up to be a Notification Listener Service, which allows the remote app to dismiss notifications on the phone and to remotely press the notification action buttons. These are things like "Archive" or "Delete" for e-mails and "Reply" for e-mails, IMs, and SMSes. The transportation of these notifications all happens at the OS level and requires no developer support.