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Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Zoombombers today disrupted a court hearing involving the Florida teen accused of masterminding a takeover of high-profile Twitter accounts, forcing the judge to stop the hearing. "During the hearing, the judge and attorneys were interrupted several times with people shouting racial slurs, playing music, and showing pornographic images," ABC Action News in Tampa Bay wrote. A Pornhub video forced the judge to temporarily shut down the hearing.

The Zoombombing occurred today when the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court of Florida in Tampa held a bail hearing for Graham Clark, who previously pleaded not guilty and is reportedly being held on $725,000 bail. Clark faces 30 felony charges related to the July 15 Twitter attack in which accounts of famous people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden were hijacked and used to push cryptocurrency scams. Hackers also accessed direct messages for 36 high-profile account holders.

Today, Judge Christopher Nash ruled against a request to lower Clark's bail amount. But before that, the judge "shut down the hearing for a short time" when arguments were interrupted by "pornography... foul language and rap music," Fox 13 reporter Gloria Gomez wrote on Twitter.

Enlarge / Examples of different types of valleys on Mars. (credit: Galofre et al./Nature Geoscience)

The further back into Earth’s history your mind wanders, the more work your imagination has to put in. That’s even more true for Mars. None of us have physically stepped foot on the present-day version of the planet, and its past was clearly very different from its present, with evidence pointing to flowing and standing water.

Among the relics of the watery past are networks of valleys incised into Mars’ surface. The Red Planet’s southern hemisphere highlands host many valleys, which have largely been interpreted as formed by rivers and groundwater springs. The source of water in rivers—whether rainfall in a warm climate or just melt from glacial ice—has been a question mark.

It’s thought that Mars’ past was generally quite cold, so a connection between the valleys and glacial ice is quite plausible. But how direct is that connection? We can identify the drainages in which water flows beneath ice sheets based on physical characteristics of the valleys left behind. So a team led by Anna Grau Galofre at Arizona State set out to analyze the valleys on Mars to see if any would better match a sub-glacial origin.

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  The Galaxy Z Fold 2. [credit: Samsung ]

Samsung Unpacked 2020 is happening today, but the star of the show, the Galaxy Z Fold 2, only got a light teasing. We got official press pictures, one or two specs, and a promise of more info on September 1. The good news is that there was also a full spec sheet leak today from XDA's Max Weinbach, and it fills in most of the blanks.

Samsung's second-generation foldable is officially the "Galaxy Z Fold 2," a slight name change from "Samsung Galaxy Fold" that puts it in the same class as Samsung's other foldable, the Galaxy Z Flip. The smartphone/tablet hybrid is very much in the mold of the Galaxy Fold 1 from last year, but it has a ton of iterative yearly upgrades and refinements.

The most noticeable upgrade is that the outer screen now fills the front of the phone. XDA's specs list the display as a 6.2-inch, 2260×816 OLED display with a crazy 25:9 aspect ratio. This is dramatically bigger than the 4.6-inch display that shipped on the Fold 1, which looked really out of place, with somewhere around a 50-percent body-to-display ratio. The new display is still very tall and skinny, but the "phone" part of the Fold 2 now looks more like a smartphone.

Enlarge / Ensigns Tendi (Noël Wells), Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), Boimler (Jack Quaid), and Mariner (Tawny Newsome) reporting for duty. (credit: YouTube/CBS All Access)

Star Trek has been many things in the past 54 years: eight television series, 13 films, the better part of a thousand total novels, and the beating heart that arguably created modern fandom as it now stands. But for all the humor—both intentional and not—scattered throughout its storied history, there is one frontier it has not yet explored: the half-hour comedy.

The ninth and newest Star Trek series aims to change all that. Lower Decks is a half-hour animated series set in the timeline two years after the conclusion of Star Trek: Voyager. The half-hour comedy cartoon format is a definite change of pace from ViacomCBS' other recent Star Trek offerings, the heavily serialized dramas Picard and Discovery. The question any fan might have then, is simple: does it hold up?

And the answer is yes, mostly—but don't set your expectations to "stunned."

Enlarge (credit: b k)

In February, BP announced a pledge to (mostly) reach net-zero CO­₂­ emissions by 2050, a noteworthy change of course steered by new CEO Bernard Looney. BP had long dabbled in promoting an interest in greener pursuits, but these promises pointed toward a more serious shift.

On Monday, the company released some specifics for the coming decade, describing “a new strategy that will reshape [BP’s] business as it pivots from being an international oil company focused on producing resources to an integrated energy company focused on delivering solutions for customers.” The new details are focused on investors, as the plan involves about a 50-percent reduction in dividends for shareholders. That money will instead go to paying down debts—partly a response to the economic consequences of COVID-19—as well as funding some of the planned investments.

BP says it will increase investment in “low carbon energy” from $500 million to around $5 billion per year by 2030. That includes building renewable electricity generation reaching 50 gigawatts in capacity, as well as pushing into the nascent hydrogen, biofuel, and carbon capture industries. It also includes betting on the electric vehicle charging business, with a goal of expanding from the current 7,500 charging points to over 70,000.

Enlarge / In still-image form, Horizon Zero Dawn sure is a looker on PC. But it's a video game, not a slideshow, and that brings us to some bad news. (credit: Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Horizon Zero Dawn was an easy Ars pick for one of 2017's top five video games, but a certain subset of our readers disagreed. This was due almost entirely to the game's PS4 exclusivity. Nevermind that its developers, Guerrilla Games, are a wholly owned Sony subsidiary; we want it on PC, our readers declared.

Historically, Sony Interactive Entertainment (not to be confused with other Sony publishing arms) has been cagey about letting its PlayStation exclusives land elsewhere, but the past couple of years has seen that stance shift, with games like Heavy Rain and Death Stranding making their PC debuts. Death Stranding stands out as a particularly impressive example of a console game's PC port gone right.

I remarked at the time that DS's PC version was good news for HZD, mostly because they share the same underlying tech, Guerrilla's Decima Engine. But today, two days before HZD's "complete" edition lands on Steam for $50, I'm here to report that their shared tech hasn't been paid forward with identical PC-version results.