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The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet didn't come about because of any discovery about Pluto itself. Rather, it was triggered by the discovery that Pluto was one of what's likely to be a large number of bodies that orbit well beyond Neptune. These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), some of which are larger than Pluto, tend to have unusual orbits, passing outside of the plane of the Solar System, with their ellipses stretched out on one side, while passing closer to the Sun on the other.

But in recent years, scientists have been noting some odd patterns in the orbits of KBOs. For many of them, their closest approach to the Sun comes as they cross the orbital plane of the inner planets. Now, the researcher who helped identify some of the first KBOs has published a paper in which he identifies a possible cause of these patterns: a distant, Neptune-sized body that would restore our Solar System's planetary total to nine.

Undiscovered planets have a long history, dating back to the prediction of Neptune's existence based on oddities in Uranus' orbit. That success, however, led to a couple of fruitless searches, one for an inner planet that could get Mercury's orbit to behave, and a second for something beyond Neptune. While the latter search turned up Pluto, it was too small to influence Neptune's orbit, which further observations indicated was just fine without any additional fixes.

Facebook has agreed to change some of its procedures around refunds to minors who made purchases without their parents' consent.

The changes are part of a proposed settlement (PDF) in Bohannon v. Facebook, a class-action lawsuit originally filed in 2012. The original complaint described how Glynnis Bohannon gave her child, identified as I.B., permission to spend $20 on his Facebook account using her Wells Fargo MasterCard.

But I.B. continued to play "Ninja Saga" and make in-game purchases, thinking he was spending "virtual, in-game currency." In fact, he had made "several hundred dollars" worth of real-money purchases, which were charged to his mother's MasterCard. The complaint says that Bohannon found a phone number to contact Facebook "after several hours of searching" and left a message describing her situation but received no reply. (Bohannon was later granted a "courtesy refund" after the class-action suit was filed.)

One of the reasons that most people don't use public key encryption to protect their e-mails is that the process is simply too arduous for everyday communications. Open-source projects like GNU Privacy Guard and GPGTools have made it easier for individuals to use PGP encryption, but managing the keys used in OpenPGP and other public-key encryption formats still requires effort. And it's even more of a challenge when you want to read encrypted messages on your phone. If you're a company that has concerns about things like compliance and data loss, doing crypto without having some sort of key management can also create all sorts of risks.

For many, a perfect world would be one where crypto tools would handle everything, data would be encrypted on every type of system with whatever encryption type was required, and no one would have to worry about crypto management when it's time for an audit or when lawyers need to do digital discovery.

That's the idea behind Pkware's just-announced Smartcrypt, a software platform that covers everything from mainframes to mobile devices. Smartcrypt lets organizations decide what kind of encryption and authentication they want to use, and it integrates into many common applications. And of course, it can also leverage the .ZIP format to compress encrypted data at rest and in attachments. Ars got an advance walkthrough of Smartcrypt from Matt Little, Pkware's vice president of product development, and we'll be conducting a full review in the near future.

Depending on your perspective, it was a war or just a violent encounter between two groups. Left in the shallow waters of a lagoon in Nataruk, Kenya, the victims' skeletons were preserved for 10,000 years in the positions they held in death. There were 21 adults and six children. Some still had stone weapons lodged in their bones. Their skulls were fractured by blunt force trauma. A pregnant woman appears to have been bound, her hands and feet tied together, and left to die. Another woman's knees were broken, one of her feet fractured, and her hands bound. Her skeleton was surrounded by fish, as if her attackers decided to cover her in garbage.

Due to a fluke of geology, the aftermath of this massacre was preserved in lagoon sediments until 2012, when several of the skeletons were exposed by winds on a long gravel bar running parallel to the dunes that now blanket the area. The victims were killed at the edge of Lake Turkana, whose shores have today shrunk by 30km. In the early Holocene, when these people were still alive, the region was full of hunter-fisher groups living on the bounty of the lake and its surrounding land.

Archaeologists have little evidence of war during this period in human history, when Homo sapiens was still largely a nomadic animal. Many would argue that war is an outgrowth of the settled life, when people began to stockpile foodstuffs in their homes, thus making themselves targets for groups who needed or wanted more. The famous historian Lewis Mumford once argued that cities were originally built as war machines. Conflicts that occurred before we raised city walls and armies, he believed, could not truly be called warfare. But the authors of a new paper in Nature call that assumption into question. They chronicle the violent deaths of these 27 people in ancient Kenya and ask whether it might not be one of the first records of human warfare in history.

Kickstarter has posted its post-mortem on how Europe’s most-crowdfunded project suddenly collapsed, marking the first time the company has hired a reporter to examine a failed project.

In a 13,000-word article first sent to backers of the Zano handheld drone and then re-posted on Medium, journalist Mark Harris concluded that Wales-based Torquing Group over-promised and under-delivered due to incompetence rather than malice.

"I don’t think any amount of time or money with those people would have resulted in a success," Harris told Ars. "I got the impression they were in over their head. They were out of their depth."

As soon as I saw optional star ratings being given for my performance on each mission in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, I was dubious about the campaign's length. The addition sent a small, clear signal: "Here's a thin excuse to play again on a higher difficulty." I'm not normally one to fetishize a game's length, as has been recorded on this very site numerous times. In the case of a Homeworld game, however, length can be a critical factor.

That’s truer than ever with Deserts of Kharak, because this new standalone game is actually a prequel to Homeworld, the original seminal space fleet strategy sim that Relic released back in 1999 (not to be confused with the recently Remastered re-release). That game began with the lost Hiigarans taking their first fledgling steps into space after millennia of grounding. Deserts of Kharak, as the name implies, takes place during their planetside exile. Here, tanks and mobile railguns take the place of interceptors and bombers, though the latter pair does make an in-atmosphere appearance here and there.

Homeworld, on-world

While the environment and style of strategy has changed, quite a lot of what makes Homeworld recognizable still remains. The music still swells with drums, strings, and the Armenian duduk (I'll admit I had to Google that last one). The technology is still flat, broad, and lifeless in a familiar way, just as the Battlestar Galactica reboot aped as much of the series' sense of style.

What carries over mechanically is... well, the way things carry over. Resources, vehicles, upgrades, and other elements developed in one mission can still be carried over to the next. The same goes for any losses that you incur, which makes every skirmish matter. Every loss—every second spent micromanaging conflict and harvesting—weaves a story of desperation.