Month: November 2018

Enlarge / The bad guys of Hell's Kitchen won't have Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), aka Daredevil, to beat to a pulp anymore. (credit: Netflix)

The hits just keep coming for the various Defenders series. Per Deadline Hollywood, Netflix announced this evening that it has canceled Daredevil, just weeks after the show concluded its critically acclaimed third season. This news shouldn't be too surprising, but this one is a particularly tough blow for fans.

Clearly Netflix is cleaning house, since this follows surprise cancellations in October of Iron Fist and Luke Cage. That just leaves Jessica Jones and The Punisher on Netflex's roster of Defenders. Both have new seasons in the pipeline that are currently slated to air on Netflix as planned, according to Deadline's sources. But they will, in all likelihood, be on the chopping block eventually as well.

All this further fuels speculation that Disney/Marvel may resurrect all the cancelled series when it launches its new streaming service. Indeed, the Netflix statement hints as much.

Enlarge / Smoke rises from the cooling towers of the nuclear plant of Dampierre-en-Burly near Orleans, central France, on October 23, 2018. (credit: GUILLAUME SOUVANT/AFP/Getty Images)

In a speech this week, French President Emmanuel Macron talked about the country's future plans for nuclear power, saying France would retire 14 nuclear reactors but on a slower timeline than had been suggested previously.

France is a major player in the nuclear industry: in 2012, about 75 percent of its electricity came from nuclear reactors. But since the Fukushima disaster that same year, the country has been pushing to retire some of its older reactors (although not as aggressively as Germany did). According to Power Magazine, in 2014 France's lower house of parliament passed a bill that would have capped nuclear power at 50 percent of the country's energy mix by 2025. Since then, the cap has been removed and reinstated by legislative bodies, and while reducing nuclear reliance to 50 percent of the country's energy mix seemed to be certain, the timeline to do it was far from certain.

On Tuesday, President Macron said the cap on nuclear energy would be fulfilled by taking 14 older reactors offline by 2035, a more distant goal than the earlier 2025 goal.

Enlarge / Floyd Mayweather Jr. in 2014. (credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

One of the strangest episodes in last year's massive cryptocurrency boom was when boxer Floyd Mayweather posted an Instagram endorsement for a little-known cryptocurrency called Centra. In April, Centra's founders were indicted for fraud, with the SEC saying that many of their claims were "simply false."

In the summer of 2017, Mayweather wrote in an Instagram post that he was "spending bitcoins and ethereum and other types of cryptocurrency in Beverly Hills with my Titanium Centra Card." He urged his millions of followers to "join Centra's ICO on Sept. 19th."

Another Mayweather post promoting a different cryptocurrency said "You can call me Floyd Crypto Mayweather from now on."

Enlarge / NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, left, and Associate Administrator Thomas Zurbuchen, right, are shown with the representatives of the nine US companies that are eligible to bid on NASA delivery services to the lunar surface. (credit: NASA)

NASA announced Thursday that it has partnered with nine companies to enable the delivery of small scientific payloads to the lunar surface. No money was exchanged up front, but the space agency said these companies would now be eligible to "bid" for contracts to deliver select experiments to the Moon.

The space agency made the lunar announcement with considerable fanfare, devoting an hour-long ceremony to questions from children, an astronaut in Houston bouncing on a wire to simulate lunar gravity, and other activities.

Beneath the pomp and circumstance, however, two factors stood out. One is that the science arm of NASA, the Science Mission Directorate, is getting more involved in funding lunar science experiments through this program. "The Moon is full of secrets that we don't know yet," Thomas Zurbuchen, who oversees scientific activities for NASA, said Thursday. And secondly, the government is taking a concrete step toward funding commercial activities on the Moon.

Enlarge / I mean, maybe, right? Maybe? Probably not, though. Almost certainly not. (credit: Columbia Pictures)

Shortly before Halloween, the chairman of Harvard's astronomy department openly declared that an interstellar object hurtling through our Solar System might just be part of an extraterrestrial craft. And then…crickets.

The astrophysics blog Centauri Dreams broke the story to the cognoscenti three days later. It presented an informed survey of the academic paper which raised this brash possibility, bolstered with quotes and commentary from the paper's co-author (and noted department chair), Avi Loeb. It was well into November before outlets like CNN, Time, and The Washington Post picked up the story, replete with the inevitable sarcastic quotation marks and snarky headlines. The object, named 'Oumuamua, had a number of weird and seemingly contradictory properties; it could be that those properties appear the way they do because our observations weren't all that great. There are also other possibilities.

I read Loeb's paper—which by then had been speedily accepted for publication by the respected Astrophysical Journal. A few days later, Loeb and I sat down for the longest and—by Loeb's own account—the most serious and in-depth interview he's given on this subject. The embedded audio player following the colon at the end of this very sentence features an hour-ish edit of it, including all the highlights:

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, in May 2018. (credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Seven members of the House of Representatives and one United States senator have now sent a second letter to Amazon's CEO, asking for more clarification about the company's use of facial-recognition technology.

Although two House members in the group sent a similar letter to CEO Jeff Bezos back in July, the larger group now says that Amazon "failed to provide sufficient answers" about its commercial facial-recognition program, known as Rekognition. Prior to the July letter, the American Civil Liberties Union used the service in a demonstration of its inadequacy—the service falsely matched 28 members of Congress with mugshots.

The new letter, issued on Thursday, was signed by Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.), among others. The document states that the legislators have "serious concerns that this type of product has significant accuracy issues, places disproportionate burdens on communities of color, and could stifle Americans' willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights in public."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

The US government killed off its net neutrality rules in June of this year, but that doesn't mean no one is monitoring whether carriers are blocking or throttling online services.

Northeastern University researchers led by computer science professor David Choffnes recently determined that Sprint was throttling Skype. Their finding was based on an analysis of user-initiated tests conducted with Wehe, an app for Android and iPhone that the researchers developed to detect throttling. About one-third of the tests detected Sprint's throttling of Skype, Choffnes said.

If the findings are correct, Sprint would be violating a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring Internet providers to disclose throttling. Even though the FCC no longer bans throttling itself, the agency requires ISPs to publicly disclose any blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization.

Enlarge / DCI John Luther (Idris Elba) is tracking yet another elusive serial killer in the long-awaited fifth season of BBC's award-winning crime drama, Luther. (credit: YouTube/BBC)

It's been a long three years without our favorite brooding London detective, but the BBC just dropped its first trailer for the highly anticipated return of its award-winning detective series, Luther. Our hero, DCI John Luther (Idris Elba), seems as on edge and broody as ever, and that can only be good news for diehard fans.

(Some spoilers for first four seasons below.)

Luther has earned critical raves and built up a solid following since it first debuted on BBC One in 2010, and it has been one of the top-rated shows on BBC America, along with Doctor Who and Top Gear. Much of that is due to Elba's powerhouse performance in the title role—easily his best work since he played Stringer Bell on The Wire.

Enlarge / DCI John Luther (Idris Elba) is tracking yet another elusive serial killer in the long-awaited fifth season of BBC's award-winning crime drama, Luther. (credit: YouTube/BBC)

It's been a long three years without our favorite brooding London detective, but the BBC just dropped its first trailer for the highly anticipated return of its award-winning detective series, Luther. Our hero, DCI John Luther (Idris Elba), seems as on edge and broody as ever, and that can only be good news for diehard fans.

(Some spoilers for first four seasons below.)

Luther has earned critical raves and built up a solid following since it first debuted on BBC One in 2010, and it has been one of the top-rated shows on BBC America, along with Doctor Who and Top Gear. Much of that is due to Elba's powerhouse performance in the title role—easily his best work since he played Stringer Bell on The Wire.