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Enlarge / This small flake of silcrete bears the oldest drawing ever discovered, (credit: Craig Foster)

The world’s oldest drawing might be easy for a casual observer to miss: a 38.6mm (1.52 inch) long flake of silcrete (a fine-grained cement of sand and gravel) with a few faint reddish lines drawn on one smooth, curved face using an iron-rich pigment called ocher. The lines would have been bolder and brighter when the drawing was new, according to University of Bergen archaeologist Christopher Henshilwood and his colleagues, but over time they’ve lost pigment to rinsing and wear, leaving them faint and patchy. But an archaeologist working at Blombos Cave, about 300km (186 miles) east of Cape Town, South Africa, noticed the markings while analyzing stone flakes and debris excavated from a 73,000-year-old layer of the site.

The design features six nearly parallel lines, with three curved lines cutting across them at an oblique angle, but it hints at a more complex piece of work. All the lines cut off abruptly at the edges of the flake, which suggests that the pattern archaeologists see today is just a fragment of something originally drawn on a larger surface and later broken.

“The pattern was probably more complex and structured in its entirety than in this truncated form,” wrote Henshilwood and his colleague. Modern viewers will likely never know what the rest of the drawing looked like—or what it meant to people 73,000 years ago.

Enlarge / You'll need to collect a few gold coins to pay for online gameplay on the Switch very soon. (credit: Nintendo)

From the days of the Gamecube online adapter to Switch titles like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon 2, Nintendo has been the only current console maker to never charge its customers an additional fee for access to online multiplayer gameplay. That's set to change on September 18, when the paid version of Nintendo's Switch Online service will finally launch worldwide.

The paid subscription service, which was originally slated to launch in the fall of 2017, replaces the current free online gameplay trial that has been available to all Switch owners since last year. After September 18, users will get an additional seven-day trial of the paid service to ease the transition into the new subscription.

Following that, though, Switch users will have to pay the previously revealed prices of $4 a month or $20 a year for online play in games including Splatoon 2, Arms, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Mario Tennis Aces, and Sushi Striker: The Way of Sushido. Some other Switch titles, including free-to-play games, will be playable online without a subscription, and Nintendo has promised more details will be revealed in a Nintendo Direct presentation tomorrow.

(credit: Diliff)

The European Parliament has approved a package of dramatic changes to copyright law that will have big implications for the future of the Internet.

"We're enormously disappointed that MEPs [Members of European Parliament] failed to listen to the concerns of their constituents and the wider Internet," said Danny O'Brien, an analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The legislation makes online platforms like Google and Facebook directly liable for content uploaded by their users and mandates greater "cooperation" with copyright holders to police the uploading of infringing works. It also gives news publishers a new, special right to restrict how their stories are featured by news aggregators such as Google News. And it creates a new right for sports teams that could limit the ability of fans to share images and videos online.

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Every version of Windows 10 has included some amount of built-in promotion for Microsoft's Edge browser. The forthcoming major update, due to ship some time in October, includes a new screen, shown above, that will appear if you run the installers for Chrome or Firefox. The advertisement is on by default (though it can be disabled by following the "Open settings" link) and exists in addition to the smaller messages that appear when you actually run third-party browsers for the first time.

Most people will not see this message (if they're upgrading an existing Windows 10 machine and, hence, already have the non-Microsoft browser of their choosing installed) or may see it once (if they're installing a non-Microsoft browser on a fresh installation), and then, clicking "install anyway" does what you'd expect; the third-party browsers install, can be configured as the default browser, and run normally just as they always did.

Microsoft's decision to promote Edge within the operating system has prompted some amount of outrage and anger among certain kinds of Windows users and certain segments of the tech press. I struggle to believe that this is a problem that regular Windows users are suffering—it seems more likely to me that they either don't notice the promotions at all or just click through them to dismiss them without ever really considering what they say—but some users do notice and aren't impressed. Because, of course these users know Edge exists; they're explicitly choosing not to use it. Why is Microsoft being so invasive and telling them something that they already know and don't care about?

Enlarge / NASA's Drew Feustel strongly denied the Russian theory of deliberate sabotage. (credit: NASA)

As you may recall, a low-pressure leak occurred aboard the International Space Station in late August. Eventually the crews traced the leak to the orbital module of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft that had arrived at the station in June. After the problem was traced to what appears to be a manufacturing defect, the head of Russia's space program essentially called for the head of whoever made the error.

Now, however, something entirely new is afoot in Russia. A growing number of Russian publications have been putting forth an absurd new theory—that a NASA astronaut deliberately caused the leak on board the station in order to force the evacuation of a sick crew member. The story has spread like wildfire during the last 24 hours, according to Robinson Mitchell, who translates Russian space stories for Ars.

One of the most prominent articles was published Wednesday in Kommersant, which says Russian investigators are vigorously pursuing the claim that Americans may have damaged the Soyuz deliberately. Publicly, Roscosmos leader Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying about Russia's investigation into the leak, “Results we have received do not give us an objective picture. The situation is much more complex than we earlier thought.”