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"Hey guys, do you think we can land with just two of those?" (credit: Blue Origin)

On Sunday morning, Blue Origin plans to continue pushing the capabilities of its New Shepard launch system, as well as the boundaries of the company's own transparency.

The company conducted the first two flights of New Shepard, which consists of a propulsion module and a capsule that can make a suborbital flight, in secret, only announcing the results afterward. During the third flight in April, founder Jeff Bezos announced the launch from west Texas in advance and live-tweeted its progress. Now for the vehicle's fourth flight, Blue Origin plans a webcast, set to begin at 9:45am ET, with liftoff planned for 10:15am ET (3:15pm UK time). The webcast will be embedded in this post when it's available.

The rocket company is also continuing to push the fault tolerances of its propulsion module and spacecraft. This time the primary objective is determining whether the crew vehicle can land with one of its three parachutes intentionally failing. "There are three strings of chutes, and two of the three should still deploy nominally and, along with our retrothrust system, safely land the capsule," Bezos explained in an e-mail. "Works on paper, and this test is designed to validate that."

(credit: National Institutes of Health)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has access to as many as 411.9 million images as part of its face-recognition database. The bulk of those images are photographs of people who have committed no crime, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report says the bureau's Facial Analysis, Comparison, and Evaluation Services Unit contains not only 30 million mug shots, but also has access to driver license photos from 16 states, the State Department's visa and passport database, and the biometric database maintained by the Defense Department.

The GAO report, titled "FACE RECOGNITION TECHNOLOGY: FBI Should Better Ensure Privacy and Accuracy," comes nearly two years after the bureau said its facial recognition project graduated from a pilot project to "full operational capability." The facial recognition project is combined with a fingerprint database. Here's how the GAO report summarized the program:

LOS ANGELES—Another E3 is officially in the books, and we at Ars are still forming opinions and parsing the real content from the hype and illusions. While we work on writing impressions and picking conference favorites, please enjoy our gallery of photos from the event's weirdest and largest stations. Click through to see selections from all three major publishers, along with a mix of indie fare, weird costumes, and, er, sex toys as game controllers.

Don't worry, the giant NES controller was back this year.

64 more images in gallery

These galleries are missing a few photos, including shots from EA's off-site event, as well as photos and videos we've already included in other E3 pieces, like our hands-on look at the new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, coming in 2017 for Wii U and Nintendo NX.

We've included an additional gallery for any of you who want a better look at Microsoft's new Xbox Design Lab, which lets fans pick and choose colors and accents for every element of an Xbox One controller. It's one thing to see the product's website, but getting to handle the controllers and see how the colors pop is another. Full disclosure: Ars' Sam Machkovech placed an order after going hands-on with these suckers.

Jonathan Gitlin

This tractor is planting seeds according to a precise GPS-based map of the field.

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Despite misperceptions to the contrary, farming in the 21st century is a high-tech endeavor. We're not just talking about genetically modified crops or biotech-derived pesticides though; farm vehicles like tractors and combines are now networked to the cloud and in many cases are even capable of driving themselves. To find out more about what the modern technofarm is all about, I drove up to Clear Meadow Farm in Harford County, Maryland to meet farmer Greg Rose and his self-driving John Deeres.

Rose and his family have been farming in the area for decades, and Clear Meadow is an 8000-acre farm that grows corn, soy, wheat, barley, sunflowers and sorghum in addition to raising Black Angus cattle (which you might find in Whole Foods). "We first dipped our hand into precision agriculture with yield monitors in 2000," Rose told me as I checked out a gigantic combine, its tires taller than me. His description of the job is as much data science as it is field work. Complex field maps are informed by a multitude of sensors from different farm machines, all gathering data to feed it to Rose via the cloud. The setup allows for extremely precise seed and nutrient prescriptions that can vary multiple times across the same field.

"The combine has load sensors in it that sense the volume of crop coming in, recording that as you go across the field," Rose said. That tells him how many bushels per acre each field is producing, data that gets fed into multi-year maps of each field that are color-coded to indicate different yields. "We take several years of data and make composite maps of a given field, then divide it into zones. You can manage those zones individually—taking soil samples to measure nutrient levels, and from there you know how much nutrients you need to apply in different areas," he told Ars.

Randall Newman and his colleagues have filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against The Richmond Organization (TRO) and Ludlow Music, the two entities that also claim to own the copyright for "We Shall Overcome."

The new suit is filed on behalf of a Brooklyn, New York-based band, Satorii, which obtained a license (at $45.40 for the privilege) to record a version that they sell as a download. However, the band has recorded another version with a different melody, and the musicians are concerned that they'll be sued over it.