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(credit: NASA/JPL)

Thursday marked the official end of the primary mission of NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Dawn demonstrated the potential of ion engines in the exploration of the Solar System, as it was able to rendezvous with and enter orbit around two different asteroids, Vesta and Ceres. Scientifically, its findings have changed what we thought we knew about some of the bodies of the asteroid belt.

Dawn isn't going to shut down now that its mission is over, as it's in reasonable working order and still observing Ceres. But there's a hint that NASA has bigger plans for the spacecraft.

Yesterday, the Jet Propulsion Lab (which operates Dawn) put up and then removed what it calls a "Dawn Journal" entry. The entry described the future plans for Dawn, and they don't involve staying in orbit around Ceres. Instead, the craft's ion engines will be used to gradually nudge it away from Ceres. The low-power, high-efficiency engines will take until the end of the year to get the spacecraft free of the dwarf planet's gravitational pull.

(credit: Getty Images)

Adnan Syed, the focus of the first Serial podcast back in 2014, has been granted a retrial for the alleged murder of his ex-girlfriend.

Syed's defence lawyers argued in February that his original trial lawyer, Maria Cristina Gutierrez, had failed to cross-examine the state's "cell tower expert" about the reliability of tracking someone's location via cellular network masts. Syed's defence team also presented new evidence, including testimony from Asia McClain, an alibi who said she was chatting with Syed in a library at the time of the crime.

On Thursday, June 30, judge Martin Welch agreed with the defence lawyers and ordered a new trial. In a memo seen by the New York Times, Welch said that Gutierrez failing to question the cell tower expert witness “created a substantial possibility that the result of the trial was fundamentally unreliable.”

Winds in the 250mb level of the atmosphere, as seen on June 29. (credit: earth.nullschool.net/modified by Ars)

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about the Earth's climate, from rising seas to droughts and intense heat waves. But amidst these concerns there is the potential for hyperbole, and we saw some of that flare up during the last few days, when two protagonists put forward the idea that the planet's jet streams are spinning out of control.

One of the people making this claim was Paul Beckwith, a self-described "well-known climate science educator," who noted that the jet stream in the Northern Hemisphere has crossed the equator and joined up with the jet stream in the Southern Hemisphere. "Welcome to climate chaos," Beckwith wrote. "We must declare a global climate emergency." He then encouraged readers to donate to his site. Another person, Robert Scribbler, declared that the jet stream was now wrecked. These claims went viral.

It sounds terrible, of course, and we definitely need to be concerned with rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases playing havoc with global atmospheric circulations. But in this case, we can probably view these claims as a bit of hot air.

The WRT54GL. (credit: Linksys)

In a time when consumers routinely replace gadgets with new models after just two or three years, some products stand out for being built to last.

Witness the Linksys WRT54GL, the famous wireless router that came out in 2005 and is still for sale. At first glance, there seems to be little reason to buy the WRT54GL in the year 2016. It uses the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, which has been surpassed by 802.11n and 802.11ac. It delivers data over the crowded 2.4GHz frequency band and is limited to speeds of 54Mbps. You can buy a new router—for less money—and get the benefit of modern standards, expansion into the 5GHz band, and data rates more than 20 times higher.

Despite all that, people still buy the WRT54GL in large enough numbers that Linksys continues to earn millions of dollars per year selling an 11-year-old product without ever changing its specs or design.