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iRobot

The iRobot 710 Kobra. This is the company's biggest military bot. With a gripper arm attachment like this, it can lift 330 pounds.

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iRobot is most famous for its Roomba robotic vacuum line, but the company also has a sizable "Defense and Security" division, which makes robots for the US Armed Forces and various police forces. Or at least it used to—iRobot has announced that the military division will be sold off and formed into a separate company.

The press release says that Arlington Capital Partners will buy the division for "up to $45 million in total consideration." The new company will be fully dedicated to military and police robots, and it will be led by the existing Defense and Security management team. There's no name for the new company yet—that will be saved for when the transaction closes in the next 90 days.

iRobot's military robots all followed the same basic formula. They're driven by a pair of continuous tracks with a second set of tracks attached to the front. The front tracks could be actuated, lifting up off the ground and allowing the robot to climb obstacles like stairs and rocks. The body of the robots were platforms that iRobot outfitted with various capabilities, usually robotic arms with cameras or gripper arms. That basic design came in a few different sizes, ranging from something you could throw through a window to a robot that would fit in a backpack or a heavy-duty bot weighing as much as 500 pounds.

(credit: flickr user Nick)

In places like California, researchers have been working to understand how climate change is affecting droughts. But in the UK, it’s unusually wet weather making headlines of late. Southern England and Wales got soaked over the winter that ran into January 2014, leading to near-historic flooding. This led to a natural question: did climate change have a hand in it?

Climate is basically the statistics of weather, so the way we answer this is to use climate models to look for a change in those statistics. We can’t necessarily convict climate change for any particular weather disaster, but we can learn whether we should expect to see that disaster more often than we would in the absence of climate change. A home run hitter on steroids is a common analogy—they'd clearly hit some out of the park anyway, but not with the same frequency.

Good statistics require a lot of samples, so to look at the English flooding, a climate model was used to generate over 130,000 simulations of weather in the region. To do the computational heavy lifting, the team (led by University of Oxford researcher Nathalie Schaller) relied on weather@home running on volunteers’ computers. Some of the simulations were run with greenhouse gas concentrations, Arctic sea ice extent, and sea surface temperatures to match the 2013/2014 winter. The other simulations were run under approximated pre-industrial conditions: lower greenhouse gas concentrations, cooler sea surface temperatures, and the largest sea ice extent available from the satellite era (1986/1987).

(credit: Wally Gobetz)

A man using a drone to take pictures of the Manhattan skyline accidentally crashed the device into the Empire State Building. He then went in to ask security for his drone back. Instead of helping, they called the cops.

27-year-old Sean Riddle, of Jersey City, NJ, was arrested yesterday sometime before 8:00pm, according to the New York City Police Department.

Riddle was charged with reckless endangerment, misdemeanor criminal mischief, and illegally navigating an aircraft over the city.

(credit: Sam Machkovech)

The good news is that XCOM 2 actually does support the use of a handheld gamepad for today's launch, despite early promises to the contrary. The bad news is that the support is limited to Valve's decidedly non-standard Steam Controller for the time being.

Backing up a bit, Firaxis announced back in June that the PC-exclusive XCOM 2 would not bring along its predecessor's surprisingly competent support for standard console controllers (which was a necessity for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game). At the time, Creative Director Jake Solomon told IGN that the team tweaked XCOM 2's on-screen user interface to be mouse-and-keyboard friendly. Though there were vague nods toward supporting gamepads "in the future," such support was not supposed to be ready at launch.

Then, last night, Firaxis took to the XCOM 2 Steam page to explain that the game was getting launch-day controller support... as long as you have a Steam Controller. The "early access" native integration for the Steam Controller, being developed in conjunction with Valve, reportedly lets players:

Tarter speaks after a screening of Contact, in 2014, at the Qualcomm Institute. (credit: Qualcomm Institute)

When Jill Tarter first began to look for aliens, she drew looks askance from her friends and colleagues. The perception was “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a subject like this?” she recalled in an interview with Ars. Tarter, now 72, would go on to rise above that perception, becoming a leading figure at the SETI Institute. And the astronomer played by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact, which was largely based on Tarter, would further bolster her reputation.

She and her fellow searchers haven’t found E.T. yet, but they have become respected members of the scientific community. These days, when NASA plots future explorations of Mars or ice-covered moons in the outer solar system, they’re driven by the search for microbial life. And with the discovery of billions of planets in the Milky Way, no one snickers any more at the idea of sniffing atmospheres around other worlds for biosignatures.

The search for aliens has become respectable because it no longer is a philosophical or religious matter to ask if we are alone. During Tarter’s lifetime, scientists and engineers have developed the tools and technology to finally probe this question in a meaningful way.