news.buyenne.com

Tim Peake prepares for his Dec. 15th launch to the International Space Station. (credit: NASA)

Almost from the moment they are accepted as candidates, NASA's astronauts receive extensive media training. Don't speak out of school in public. Promote the program. Stay on message. And invariably, when talking with reporters, NASA astronauts will talk about all the wonderful things the space agency is doing. It's no surprise: many of them are from the military, so they're good at following orders. But more important than this, they want to fly. And flights don't go to off-message astronauts.

That is not to say NASA's astronauts don't have a variety of opinions about what the space agency is actually doing. And when you talk to many of them, they are deeply skeptical about NASA's Journey to Mars. They prefer a return to the Moon first, where the space agency can test out deep-space habitation systems before sending humans far deeper into the solar system.

Just as importantly, a lot of veteran astronauts do not have confidence in successive presidential administrations, Congress, and NASA's own leadership to work together to craft a cohesive, visionary exploration plan. In other words, there's a greater likelihood of sticking to a 10-year plan to put astronauts on the Moon rather than a 20-plus year plan to put humans on Mars.

A cluster of True North chips. (credit: IBM)

A lot of the science we cover at Ars focuses on technology development, where the risks involved mean that the early success represented by a publication doesn't typically mean an actual product will follow. So it's nice to be able to report on an exception to this rule. IBM's experimental neural processor, True North, has found a home at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

True North is a radically energy-efficient design with a circuitry designed to mimic the structure of the neural connections within an animal's brain. Each chip is a big cluster of small cores that can potentially communicate with any other core on the chip. Each of these cores has its own memory and communication hardware; the memory holds information on the other cores it communicates with and how strong those connections are. The communications then take the form of a series of "spikes," bursts of activity that carry information based on their frequency and strength.

The radically different design allows the chip to get work done despite a ludicrously low clock rate: just one kiloHertz. The trade-off is that it can only host neural network software—it was designed to be compatible with any networks developed for the popular Compass neural network software package. And compared to running Compass on a traditional processor, True North used 176,000-fold less energy.

Spotify AB has raised £695 million (~$1 billion) in convertible debt, and reportedly promised its investors that they would get a tasty equity return if the Sweden-based music streaming service goes public in the next year.

Private equity outfit TPG, and hedge fund Dragoneer Investment Group, along with an unknown number of Goldman Sachs' clients, agreed to sink cash into Spotify, according to the Wall Street Journal. The deal was later confirmed by Spotify, with an agreement expected to close by the end of this week, Reuters reported.

Financial terms were kept secret. The WSJ earlier reported, however—citing sources familiar with the deal—that Spotify's new investors would be able to convert the debt into equity at a 20 percent discount if the company holds an IPO (initial public offering) within the next 12 months.

An autonomous monitoring transponder of the type used in the Coordinated Canyon Experiment.

All Daniel Sherer has ever wanted was for the government to pay him for a few days of lost work as a commercial fisherman after a scientific buoy suddenly popped into the path of his fishing boat in Monterey Bay on Saturday, January 15, 2016. As he tells it, his aim isn't to bilk the United States; he simply wants to be paid a fair amount for his lost earnings after the buoy took his boat out of commission. "I don't need a million dollars—I just want to be compensated for my days lost," he told Ars. "I want to be compensated for a diver going under the boat, I want to be compensated for cleaning the whole thing up, that's it."

As Ars reported on Monday, Sherer is the first named defendant in a lawsuit filed last week by federal prosecutors in California. The way the government sees it, Sherer and his fishing business partner are essentially hostage-takers, as they recovered a loose United States Geological Survey buoy, claimed ownership of it, and now demand $13,000 for its return.

Department of Justice lawyers have still not responded to Ars' request for comment.