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Top Gear, one of the BBC's most successful shows, returned on Sunday night with a new cast—and very few fresh ideas. Ratings in the UK missed the 5 million mark that host Chris Evans set as a measure for success, and the best parts were relegated to the Web-only Extra Gear, starring Rory Reid and Chris Harris. The debut could prove troublesome for a BBC that needs strong foreign sales of the show to fill its coffers in times of ever-decreasing government support.

The show, which premiered Monday night on BBC America and Sunday night on BBC Two in the UK, is the third iteration of Top Gear since 1977. The original format wasn't particularly good, but it did well because the UK had only a handful of TV channels to watch at the time. 2002 brought the Andy Wilman-produced reboot, starring Jeremy Clarkson, James May, and Richard Hammond. Under their tenure, the show didn't just succeed with UK audiences—it built up a global cult following with fans either watching it on local broadcasters or more commonly via Internet piracy.

But last year, Top Gear's machinery ground to a halt after the show's frontman berated and then attacked a producer during a toddler-like tantrum (if toddlers punched people and called them c*nts). The latest of an increasingly long list of Clarksonian scandals was too much for the state-funded BBC to endure, and the grand oaf of television was fired. With the frontman gone, Wilman, May, and Hammond threw in the towel as well, but things ended well for the gang. They landed a multimillion dollar contract with Amazon to make a new series called The Grand Tour, which debuts later this year.

After difficulties with the first attempt to expand a new room on the International Space Station, NASA had little trouble with Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable module over the Memorial Day weekend.

On Saturday morning, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams allowed short bursts of air to escape into the module, allowing it to expand, as flight controllers at Johnson Space Center checked the module's internal pressure. Then, after this initial, successful expansion, NASA pressed ahead and fully pressurized the module on Saturday afternoon.

When packed inside the trunk of a Dragon cargo spacecraft, the Bigelow module measure 7 feet long by 7.75 feet wide; when expanded, it measures 13 feet long and 10.5 feet in diameter, creating 565 cubic feet of space and weighing 3,000 pounds. If all goes well during this week with a series of leak and pressure checks, Williams could enter the Bigelow module as early as next Monday.

EU research ministers have published a commitment to make “open access to scientific publications as the option by default by 2020.” The decision was taken during a meeting of the Competitiveness Council, which is made up of ministers from the EU’s member states. In addition, ministers agreed “to the best possible reuse of research data as a way to accelerate the transition towards an open science system.”

The formal “conclusions” of the meeting define open access to publications as “free availability on the public Internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.” This is taken from the key Budapest Open Access Initiative that helped to define open access back in 2002—an indication of how slow progress has been so far.

Although the open access commitment by the EU ministers has been hailed as a “major boost” for open science by the League of European Research Universities, it is a political signal, rather than a plan for implementation. The Competitiveness Council is made up of ministers from each of the EU member states, and they have now committed their respective governments to move to open access in the next four years, but there is no legal mechanism to force them to do so.

Thanks to standardised components and simplified operating systems (RIP MS-DOS), building a PC isn't all that difficult these days—so long as you're comfortable with wielding a Phillips head screwdriver, at least. Asus, however, thinks that it "can do it better."

Enter the Asus ROG (Republic of Gamers) Avalon concept PC, unveiled at Computex 2016 in Taiwan: a tightly integrated system that combines the motherboard and case into one, allowing for a modular and easily upgradable system that's (mostly) devoid of complex cabling.

Plus, it looks like a hi-fi straight out of a 1970's Technics catalogue—and as we all know, retro hi-fi is so in right now.

What's the biggest problem with PC-based virtual reality right now? Is it the price? The lack of deep gaming experiences? Or is it that darned cord that keeps you from properly leaping around like a lunatic while playing Space Pirate Trainer? For the PC manufacturers gathered at Computex 2016 in Taiwan, it's very much the latter. Yes, in a weird and quite frankly surprising trend, HP, MSI, Gigabyte, and Zotac are all showing off backpack-based PCs for free-to-roam VR gaming.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and yes, you could just pick up a powerful gaming laptop—one of those GTX 980-based ones should do the trick—stick some shoulder straps on it, and call it a day. Indeed, that's precisely what Gigabyte did with its Aorus X7 DT laptop earlier this year, creating a custom holster for lugging the huge 17.3-inch, 3.44kg (7.6lb) device around. But this brings with it some issues, namely that a laptop's cooling system isn't really designed for being used in a backpack. That's not to the mention that, at least in the case of the Aorus, gaming laptops have terrible battery life.

MSI claims to have solved these problems with its Backpack PC, a wonderfully garish system that packs a 6th-gen (Skylake) Core i7 Intel processor, Nvidia GTX 980 GPU, and a battery rated for up to 90 minutes of gaming into a bright red LED-lit backpack. Weighing in at around 5kg (12lb), the Backpack PC isn't exactly light, but it does offer niceties such as being fully upgradeable (MSI is planning to bump up the GPU to a GTX 1080 in later versions), as well as a user replaceable battery. Ports are mounted at the top of the backpack for hooking up a VR headset (there's a power socket for the Vive's breakout box), and you can use the system as an odd-looking desktop PC too.