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Sony announced a new research and development group called the Future Lab Program, and a curious video gives us a glimpse of the initiative's first project. Referred to as "N," the prototype is a hands-free wearable that provides "a new way of experiencing audio such as music and sound, allowing the user to receive audio information without having to insert any object into his or her ear."

The video is pretty mysterious, featuring a women floating in water with earbuds falling off of her and disappearing into the black water. She's then transported to the top of a cliff overlooking a city, and we hear a voice talking about the weather and giving positive sentiments about the day ahead.

Only if you look closely can you see the woman is wearing a Sony-branded device around her neck. It's a shiny white gadget that curves over her shoulders, but there's not much else we can deduce about it from this video. N is apparently a product that untethers you from the wired hassle of traditional earbuds. It doesn't fit into your ears either, instead transmitting audio for you to hear. The woman in the video seems to respond to the voice, saying "ready," so it's possible that N has some voice recognition features as well.

Charles Elachi has been director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 15 years. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The fact that Charles Elachi is retiring after 15 years of directing NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in June may have him willing to speak freely. During a hearing Thursday before a Congressional committee, Elachi apparently had no qualms about contradicting NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden.

Bolden has said NASA should fully explore Europa with a flyby mission before building and flying a lander to Jupiter's ice-covered moon, which contains a vast, subsurface ocean. "Our belief is that that is imprudent from a scientific perspective," NASA's administrator told Ars late last year.

During the Congressional hearing, however, Elachi said his engineers could design both a flyby spacecraft and lander that could fly to Europa in tandem. Moreover, Elachi said, to really begin addressing the question of life existing on Europa, such a mission must have the capability to reach the surface. "In order to make sure we have confirmation, we really need to make direct measurements on the surface, to take samples," he said. "Clearly a lander, in my mind, is a necessity to understand the oceans on Europa."

In a scathing editorial in the Guardian, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney has spoken out about Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, calling it a "fiasco" and "the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made."

"With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem," says Sweeney. "Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem."

"PC UWP can, should, must and will, die as a result of industry backlash."

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

Managing civil war, excruciating heat, and a ton of GoPro cameras—these were just a few of the challenges of shooting a virtual reality documentary in South Sudan.

When we first spoke to Marcelle Hopkins about her film, On the Brink of Famine, in July 2015, she and her team were in a furious pre-production scramble of choosing gear, finalizing plans, and tweaking budgets. Ultimately, the team decided to shoot on GoPro 3+ cameras, using two special rigs (Hero 360 & Freedom 360) to hold multiple GoPros in the correct orientations needed for immersive coverage.

(credit: cyclonebill/Flickr)

Chowing down on a high-fat diet may not only grow your waistline. It may also plump stem cell populations in your gut—cells that are prone to producing tumors.

After about a year of feeding mice a diet of 60 percent fat, researchers found that the rodents had an unusually hefty population of cancer-susceptible intestinal stem cells and cells that act like stem cells. Those cells were supercharged by a protein called PPAR-δ, which can be switched on by the presence of fatty acids in the gut, the researchers reported.

The findings, published in Nature, may explain why epidemiological data in humans has repeatedly linked obesity to boosted risks of cancer, particularly colon cancer. And, it may offer researchers a new target for knocking back the risks of cancer in the obese.