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HAWTHORNE, CA—Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk took the stage at the Tesla Design Studio to reveal the Tesla Model 3. "It's very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport," Musk said. "The last time there was this level of carbon concentration in the atmosphere was 11 million years ago."

"Beyond global warming there are 53,000 deaths per year from auto emissions,"Musk added.

Tonight, Musk released the first official details on the company’s most important car to date, the Tesla Model 3. The base version of the all-electric vehicle will have a range of 215 miles, a continuous pane of glass on the rear roof, and front and rear trunks. Musk added that the car could comfortably fit a 7ft surfboard.

(credit: Cyrus Farivar)

Reddit has removed the warrant canary posted on its website, suggesting that the company may have been served with some sort of secret court order or document for user information.

At the bottom of its 2014 transparency report, the company wrote: "As of January 29, 2015, reddit has never received a National Security Letter, an order under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or any other classified request for user information. If we ever receive such a request, we would seek to let the public know it existed."

That language was conspicuously missing from the 2015 transparency report that was published Thursday morning. (Disclaimer: Ars and Reddit are owned by the same parent company, Advance Publications.)

Hospital-Associated Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) Bacteria (credit: NIAID)

WASHINGTON—The rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that trek between farms and clinics and across international boarders is unquestionably one of the most serious public health threats of our time. They currently sicken around two million people in the US each year, killing at least 23,000. To tackle the issue, the Obama Administration last year released a National Action Plan and established a panel of diverse experts to research and guide the government’s efforts to squash those deadly superbugs.

That 15-person panel, called the Presidential Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria or PACCARB, convened this week in Washington, DC to discuss and vote on its first progress report and key recommendations, which now head to the president’s desk. Thursday, the council unanimously voted for six recommendations, which spanned calls for funding and collaboration. But chief among them is the call for the president to establish a White House-level leader that could coordinate all of the government agencies’ efforts to fight drug resistance.

Such a leader would be critical, several panel members as well as panel chair Martin Blaser, told Ars. Currently, efforts to fight off drug resistant germs are scattered among several agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Defense, and several others—all of which have different priorities and budgets. The piece-meal approaches even made it difficult for the panel to assess what government agencies were up to and how they overlapped.

Forget what J.R.R. Tolkien taught you about hobbits for a moment. In real life, Homo floresiensis, affectionately dubbed “the hobbit,” is a diminutive hominin species defined by skeletons discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2004. Since then, its status and identity have been the subject of much speculation, mystery, and controversy. That's partly because the hobbits were thought to have lived startlingly recently—just 12,000 years ago.

The idea of another hominin species living as recently as 12 kya (12 thousand years ago) had been both exciting and incredibly confusing. “We know that modern humans had got to Australia ... probably by 50 kya,” Richard Roberts, one of the researchers involved in the work, told Ars. Modern humans had passed through Southeast Asia on their way there, which means that they must have existed alongside any species living in their path at the time. Flores is not too far off that path.

In fact, many originally argued that the Flores skeletons were those of modern humans. Rather than a new species, some researchers suggested a variety of ailments that could create skeletons with a similar set of features to those of the hobbits. This would have cleared up another mystery—where modern humans go, related species go extinct. “We could never work out how you could have hobbits surviving so long after modern humans had [arrived],” says Roberts.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: FCC)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted for two broadband-related proposals. One is designed to give Internet users more control over how Internet service providers monitor and monetize their Web usage. The second proposal will update the 31-year-old Lifeline phone subsidy program so that it can also be used to buy Internet service.

Both votes were 3-2, with Democrats approving and Republicans dissenting. The Lifeline vote was particularly contentious, as commissioners had worked on a bipartisan compromise last night and early this morning. The compromise fell apart at the last minute, delaying the meeting’s start by three-and-a-half hours.

The Lifeline proposal that was approved today will let poor people use a $9.25 monthly household subsidy to purchase home Internet or mobile broadband, or bundles including both voice and Internet. The vote set the Lifeline budget at $2.25 billion a year, indexed to inflation, while creating an independent entity to verify subscriber eligibility in order to reduce fraud.

SAN FRANCISCO—Yesterday at its Build developer conference, the topic was Microsoft's first major platform: Windows. Today, it was the turn of the other platform, Azure, with Microsoft talking up its cloud service.

Much of the news today was that services that were previously in preview have now gone live. Azure Service Fabric was announced at last year's event, and Microsoft described it as being its second generation platform-as-a-service offering. Service Fabric was already being used to power services such as Cortana and Skype for Business, and it offers useful features such as automatic scaling and phased deployments of new versions with automatic rollback in case of problems. It's designed to allow developers to handle dozens or hundreds of both stateless and stateful microservices. Service Fabric is now in general availability, making it production ready and widely available.

The company did mention one new service: Azure Functions. This is designed to further abstract away the details of the platform. Users of Functions don't need to provision storage or compute resources or anything like that. They just write a function in C# or JavaScript (using node.js) and plumb that function into events or data sources. The resources for that function are provisioned automatically, and scaling is handled by the system. If the event volume goes up, causing the function to be triggered more often, more resources will be allocated; as volume drops, resources will be cut, possibly to zero. Functions are strictly pay-per-use, meaning that if a function isn't called, it costs nothing.

Enlarge (credit: Megan Geuss)

An Italian father has reportedly written to Apple CEO Tim Cook, pleading for help to unlock his dead 13-year-old son’s iPhone 6 so that he can retrieve the photos stored on it.

"I cannot give up. Having lost my [son] Dama, I will fight to have the last two months of photos, thoughts and words which are held hostage in his phone," Leonardo Fabbretti wrote in the March 21 letter, which was quoted Wednesday by Agence France Presse.

"I think what’s happened should make you think about the privacy policy adopted by your company. Although I share your philosophy in general, I think Apple should offer solutions for exceptional cases like mine," he said.