Author: Annalee Newitz

The latest news about CBS's new Star Trek series Discovery says the show will be set ten years before the events of the original Star Trek adventures with Captain Kirk and the Enterprise. Like the J.J. Abrams movie trilogy and the most recent Trek series Enterprise, Discovery will be a return to the origins of the franchise. This is a departure from the 1987-2001 period, when Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager drove the story forward into the 24th century. For the past 15 years, Trek has been stuck in the past of the franchise itself. What do we gain by endlessly returning to the origins of this interstellar tale?

Obviously, we get to go back to a fan favorite period of adventure and strife. Back in the crazy days of the 23rd century, humanity didn't have replicators or positronic brains, and there was no peace with the Klingon Empire. That affords more opportunities for the kinds of problems that make for good drama. This period also offers narrative comfort food for fans, reminding them of the "good old days" of the show before everybody got so uptight about the Prime Directive and started worrying about post-colonial politics on Bajor and other developing worlds.

24th century Trek

As Manu Saadia points out in his excellent book Trekonomics, there's a huge gulf between the civilization of TOS and TNG for one reason: the replicator. As a result of this one piece of technology, humans can basically turn energy into matter (with a few exceptions, like the dilithium crystals needed for warp drive and the valuable material latinum). The replicator means pretty much all problems with scarcity are technically solved. Nobody needs to work for a living, because all our material needs can be met as fast as you can say "tea, Earl Grey, hot." Work itself as a concept is radically transformed. People only work because they choose to work; everyone enjoys (or at least gets satisfaction from) their job.

This movie has everything that a nerd could possibly desire: spaceships, astronauts, and a group of brilliant mathematicians who made NASA's Apollo mission possible.

Hidden Figures focuses on the achievements of Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji Henson from Person of Interest and Empire), winner of the 2015 National Medal of Freedom. Johnson is a retired mathematician at NASA whose work helped plot the trajectories of orbiting spacecraft. It's your classic "nerd genius makes good" tale, as teachers helped discover the young Johnson's incredible math skills that eventually led to her meteoric rise (and college at the age of 15). She was so brilliant that NASA hired her out of graduate school in the 1950s—even though she lived at a time when black women were rarely welcomed into the science and engineering professions.

What I love about this story is how it celebrates the minds behind the space program. Based on a book that comes out next month, Hidden Figures is also a personal story about Johnson's struggles and her friendships with two other black women working at NASA, engineer Mary Jackson (the incredible Janelle Monáe) and mathematician Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer). But most of all, this is just one of those feel-good geek stories about how math can actually change the world. Hidden Figures should make for a fascinating companion piece to movies like Apollo 13 and Gravity, which celebrate astronauts while putting scientists mostly into the background. Possibly only The Martian has thus far successfully shown the drama of science unfolding alongside the drama of being an astronaut (and that was science fiction, of course, rather than a retelling of actual events).

(credit: Tom Campbell)

I battled the ants for about a year before I started noticing interesting patterns in their behavior.

My military tactics against the invaders were those of a typical San Francisco eco-nerd. I used non-toxic spray made with orange peels to repel them (it actually works pretty well) and placed low-toxin poison sugar bait traps close to cracks they used to enter the house. But these tiny, brown insects seemed unstoppable. They would swarm onto their targets seemingly out of nowhere. I’d put out my cats’ food and come back in 45 minutes to find a thick, wriggling line of ants moving between a crack in the wall and their kibble target. If I blocked their trail with poison, they'd pour out of a different crack next to the kitchen counter. Or at the base of the stairs. Or in my bathroom.

By necessity, I spent a lot of time watching these tireless insects overcoming every obstacle. And during all that reconnaissance, I started to see things that made me wonder who these ants really were.

The standard story of how humans arrived in the Americas is that they marched 1,500km across the Bering Land Bridge, a now-vanished landmass between Siberia and Northern Canada that emerged roughly 15,000 years ago in the wake of the last ice age. But for the past decade, evidence has been piling up that humans arrived in the Americas by traveling in boats along the Pacific coast. Some 14,000-year-old campsites like Oregon's Paisley Caves have been found near rivers that meet the Pacific, suggesting that early humans came inland from the coast along these waterways. Now, a new study published in Nature provides more solid evidence the first humans to reach the Americas could not have come via the Bering Land Bridge.

A group of geoscientists, anthropologists, and biologists led a massive effort to study the environment on the Bering Land Bridge when humans were supposedly crossing it 15,000 years ago. They used a common method for sampling ancient environments called coring. Using hollow tubes, they drilled deep into the sediment at the bottom of two frozen lakes in British Columbia, looking for fossils of plant and animal life from the era when humans could have crossed the Land Bridge. They picked these two specific lakes—Charlie Lake and Spring Lake, to be exact—because they were in a region where the last remaining ice sheets melted. The very first humans to pass into the Americas would have had to cross through this area.

Carefully analyzing the layers of sediment, the researchers were able to determine what kind of life inhabited the region. Radiocarbon dating allowed them to recreate a timeline for the ancient ecosystem there, too. In their paper, the researchers write:

The fifth episode of Ars Technica Live is coming up tonight, August 17, in Oakland, California, at Longitude! Join Ars Technica editors Cyrus Farivar and Annalee Newitz, with guest Leslie Miley, for a conversation about Silicon Valley's problems with diversity. In 2015, Miley was the only black engineer at Twitter in a leadership position, and he wrote a widely circulated article about his experiences. Now a director of engineering at Slack, Miley has continued to be an advocate for diversity in tech. Miley formerly worked in leadership roles at Apple and Google and serves as an adviser to several startups founded by women and minorities. He is an investor in a fund dedicated to diverse entrepreneurs.

Filmed before a live audience at Oakland tiki bar Longitude, each episode of Ars Technica Live is a speculative, informal conversation between Ars Technica hosts and an invited guest. The audience, drawn from Ars Technica’s readers, is also invited to join the conversation and ask questions. These aren’t soundbyte setups; they are deep cuts from the frontiers of research and creativity.

Doors are at 7pm, and the live filming is from 7:30 to 8:20-ish pm (be sure to get there early if you want a seat). You can stick around afterward for informal discussion at the bar, along with delicious tiki drinks and snacks. Can't make it out to Oakland? Never fear! Episodes will be posted to Ars Technica the week after the live events.

Why are we here? To make money for Warner Bros? Oh OK. (credit: Warner Bros)

Suicide Squad, a candy-colored tale of supervillains saving Gotham, is the latest "metahuman" adventure brought to you by the world of DC Comics. After the abysmal performance of Batman v. Superman earlier this summer, a lot is riding on Suicide Squad for DC. But this ramshackle exploitation flick clearly was never meant to be a tentpole. Slapdash, uneven, and unintentionally silly, the movie is a cynical froth of dumb cliches. Which is no surprise, given the studio's last-minute editing to punch up the pace and humor. All that said, I'm not going to lie. It was still kind of fun.

The main problem with Suicide Squad comes down to one, basic error. It has the premise of a cheap exploitation movie, with the production and marketing budget of a blockbuster. Set in the days after Superman's supposed death in Batman v. Superman, it's about a world that is so bereft of hope and so politically cynical that the government is willing to use criminal supervillains to fight "terrorists." Viola Davis is incredible as Amanda Waller, a heartless covert ops manager who puts together the "suicide squad" out of the jail/sewer where Deadshot (Will Smith), Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), and various other baddies are kept. A frenetic opening sequence introduces us to our band of bad guys, whose superpowers include things like "shoots well," "sexy in shorts," "secretly an Aztec god," "weird teeth," and "climbs fast." If Robert Rodriguez were directing this in a condemned nightclub, I would be all in. It's the perfect premise for a bloody, sexy, fire-soaked brawl.

But DC Films, owned by Warner Bros, wants Suicide Squad to be something more. And can you blame them? Batman v. Superman underperformed, the latest in a string of expensive misses that go all the way back to Green Lantern. Marvel Studios, for all its flaws (and we can chant them together later if you want), has had a string of hits like Deadpool, Avengers, and Guardians of the Galaxy that makes DC look like they're standing still. As Hollywood Reporter's Kim Masters reported in a fascinating article this week, Warners studio head Kevin Tsujihara worries that the DC brand is "damaged." The studio needs Suicide Squad to be a hit, to prove that they can get back to the heights of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy.

Ancient Chinese legends tell of a catastrophic flood along the Yellow River that led to the founding of the Xia dynasty, roughly 4,000 years ago. A legendary hero named Yu is said to have established the Xia dynasty after figuring out how to stop the flood waters by dredging, thus marking the dawn of Chinese civilization with a feat of landscape engineering. Now, a group of geoscientists and archaeologists in China has discovered that this flood actually happened.

The group's recently published findings in Science magazine explain how they found traces of this historic deluge. For more than a century, archaeologists have looked for evidence that could shed light on historical accounts of early Chinese civilization, such as those in first century BCE book Shiji (史記, traditionally translated as Records of the Grand Historian). Many accounts in the Shiji have turned out to be fairly accurate, especially when it came to the Shang dynasty that followed the Xia. Because the Shang dynasty civilization had writing, scientists have been able to verify the Shiji's accuracy from written records as well as material remains.

Reconstructing a flood

Much about the Xia dynasty, however, remains mysterious. Although this Bronze Age civilization was highly sophisticated, it did not use writing, and the only accounts we have of it come from stories of the great flood that Yu controlled. Now, scientists are certain there was a megaflood on the Yellow River in roughly 1900 BCE. Ancient Chinese historiographers placed the rise of the Xia dynasty during the 2200s BCE, so their dates were about 300 years off. But whenever it happened, the flood was so devastating and enormous that the archaeologists who discovered it have no doubt that it would have left a lasting impression on any civilization that experienced it.

At Ars Technica Live #4, Hannu Rajaniemi talks to Annalee Newitz and Tiffany Kelly about his double life as a scientist and a science fiction writer. (video link)

Last week at Oakland's legendary Longitude tiki bar, we filmed our fourth episode of Ars Technica Live, with special guest Hannu Rajaniemi. Born in a small town in Finland, Rajaniemi has had a fascinating career at the nexus of science, tech, and science fiction. He earned a degree in physics in Scotland and then founded a research consulting firm that worked with groups like the European Space Agency to solve what Rajaniemi called "math-related problems." And then he got inspired by sci-fi author (and neighbor) Charles Stross to start writing fiction. In 2010, he published the first book in his critically acclaimed Quantum Thief trilogy.

Ars contributor Tiffany Kelly and I asked him about his double career in science and sci-fi. He said it all started with a Jules Verne obsession. He wanted to build a vessel like Captain Nemo's Nautilus, so he decided to become a physicist. At the same time, he became fascinated by role-playing games and LARPing (live-action role-playing), which is treated like an art form in Finland and other Nordic countries. He told us some terrifying tales about gaming and then discussed his transition into a fiction writer and entrepreneur in Scotland. Along the way, he regaled us with stories about how his work in science and fiction have fed into each other in some surprising ways (he once got a gig because the hiring manager had read one of Rajaniemi's novels and wanted to develop some of the sci-fi tech in the book). We asked whether there's any science fiction that he's excited about, and Rajaniemi said he loved the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 anthology, edited by John Joseph Adams and Joe Hill (he also liked Hill's new novel, The Fireman). As for TV, he recommended that everyone watch Person of Interest, the recently concluded CBS series about the emergence of AI.

Bouncy house ... of danger?! (credit: Mom's Party Rental)

The bouncy house seems like an innocuous childhood delight. What's not to love about a giant, inflatable room where kids can jump and scream in one safely contained location? The problem, recounted in a dubious study by a team of geographers and doctors, is that bouncy houses can cause heat stroke, especially this summer during our hottest year on record.

Researchers from the University of Georgia and the Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas knew that bouncy castles caused an enormous number of injuries. But over the past 20 years, the numbers have skyrocketed. As the researchers write in a paper out today in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, "One of the most staggering findings is that during the period of 1995 to 2010, a 15-fold increase was observed in the rate and number of bounce house injuries (roughly 5.28 injuries per 100 000 children in the United States annually)." Staggering, indeed. Mostly these were fractures, strains, and "other injuries to the upper and lower extremities."

The researchers decided to find out whether heat stroke was another, hidden danger to be found in these funhouses of pain. Though they could find only one reported instance of heat stroke from a bouncy castle, they forged ahead with their quest. Last summer, they spent a single afternoon measuring the "air temperature, humidity, wind speed, and computed heat index values" inside a typical bouncy castle, which they inflated in a grassy plaza on the University of Georgia campus. What they discovered is that these puffy joy rooms are actually heat-trapping danger chambers:

Sometimes you need to escape from the news by plunging into a fictionalized version of it. Malka Older's second novel Infomocracy is a sci-fi thriller about the third election cycle in the world's first global government, a data-driven "microdemocracy." The first in a trilogy, Infomocracy manages to be incredibly action packed while also exploring plausible political futures you may never have imagined.

Election integrity in the world of Infomocracy is guaranteed by a techno-political organization called "The Information" (think Google merged with Facebook). Committed to non-partisan transparency, The Information is supposed to give citizens the data they need to vote wisely. Its real mission, of course, is more ambiguous. The action reaches a fever pitch and stays there, as our protagonists race to find out who is behind a series of bombings aimed at shutting down the election.

Life in a global democracy

From page one, Older plunges us into a bewildering global election season with only two semi-trustworthy guides to the madness. Ken is an idealistic campaigner for the progressive Policy1st party, which is devoted to openness and free exchange. Mishima is an operative for The Information with ninja powers and a mysterious "narrative disorder" that helps her find patterns in vast quantities of data. After hooking up randomly at a drunken party in Tokyo, the two discover they are the only people who seem to care that Liberty, a political party that's one of the top contenders for the next Supermajority, is quietly spreading propaganda about the need to start a war.