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Madeline Ashby's new novel, Company Town, starts out like your average futuristic novel about a ninja bodyguard hired to protect unionized sex workers on a city-sized oil drilling platform off the coast of Canada. Then it starts getting weird. I'm talking time-hopping, artificial superintelligence weird; serial killers with invisibility suits weird. And I haven't even gotten to the part about the traumatized children of K-pop stars. If you like your science fiction kaleidoscopically strange yet infused with astute observations about where current technology might take us, you need to pick up a copy of Company Town right now.

Our hero, Hwa, is a martial arts expert with a weakness that turns out to be her greatest strength. A neurological disease has left her face disfigured, which means that she is rendered virtually invisible on the ubiquitous augmented reality systems that everyone wears. She uses this to her advantage, becoming a kind of ghost in the surveillance machine as she protects women in the sex workers union. As long as the oil keeps flowing, business is good for the ladies, and all Hwa has to worry about are drunk johns who refuse to pay. But when a mysterious fire destroys one of the oil rigs, Hwa loses her brother—and a new company called Lynch, Ltd. steps in to buy out the struggling city. Things get complicated.

Ashby's novel isn't just a simple tale of good guys and bad guys. Almost immediately, Hwa's loyalties are divided and it's never clear whether she's on the right side of justice. Because of her unique skills, the Lynch security team wants to hire Hwa to protect the company heir, Joel. It will mean a considerable boost in salary and room to move up, but she'll have to leave her working-class community behind. Plus, the sex workers need her more than ever, because a terrifying serial killer has been picking them off one by one. But Hwa is torn, especially when she discovers that Joel is actually a good kid who wants to help his family get into the alternative energy business. It's not Joel's fault that the family is being targeted for destruction by AIs from the future. To top it off, she kind of has the hots for Lynch Security Chief Daniel.

(credit: National Farm Worker Ministry )

A new lawsuit filed by an American woman alleges that she was subjected to an unconstitutional search by border agents and then an extensive cavity search by a male doctor acting on their orders.

The civil complaint, which was filed last week in federal court in Tucson and seeks unspecified damages, targets the government, Customs and Border Protection, the CBP agent, and the doctor who searched her, among others.

The court filing describes 18-year-old Ashley Cervantes’ harrowing experience over the course of seven hours in October 2014. She had just returned from Nogales, Sonora (Mexico) back into Nogales, Arizona—she had come back from eating breakfast at one of her favorite spots.

Your other option for an electric Microbus is to wait for VW to finally build a production version of this, the BUDD-e. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Thursday, Volkswagen Group CEO Matthias Müller put forth his vision for the company's future into 2025. The plan is an aggressive one coming out of almost a year of intense public scrutiny and regulatory concerns following VW Group's involvement in a high-profile emissions scandal.

The company's new strategy, which was approved by VW Group's board of supervisors, calls for the German automaker to deliver 30 new electric vehicles across Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, and its other brands by 2025. "The Volkswagen Group forecasts that its own BEV [battery-powered electric vehicle] sales will be between two and three million units in 2025, equivalent to some 20 to 25 percent of the total unit sales expected at that time," the company wrote in a press release.

The press release didn't specifically mention the BUDD-e, Volkswagen's electric concept van, which was built to show off the company's Modular Electric Toolkit (abbreviated MEB in German). In January, Volkswagen's head of electronic development, Dr. Volkmar Tanneberger, told Car Magazine that a car very much like the BUDD-e would hit production in 2020.

(credit: sparkle-motion)

On Thursday, the Supreme Court provided nuanced guidance to lower courts in determining whether the prevailing party in a copyright lawsuit should be awarded attorney fees. The decision by the unanimous eight-member court revives a $2 million fee dispute in one of the court's most important copyright cases in the digital era.

The issue is significant because attorneys fees play a huge role in US litigation, and they are among the top considerations of whether a lawsuit would be brought or even defended.

The case the justices decided Thursday (PDF) concerns the fallout from Kirtsaeng v. Wiley, the court's 2013 decision involving the rights of those who buy copyrighted works. In that closely watched case, the justices had ruled that the first-sale doctrine allowed a US university student to buy textbooks overseas and resell them on eBay while undercutting textbook publisher John Wiley & Sons. The publisher sued on copyright infringement allegations and lost in a case in which the justices certified the reselling rights of those who buy copyrighted works. At the same time, the ruling put companies on notice that they don't have unlimited control of their products once they hit the stream of commerce.

(credit: Pauleon Tan)

For decades, avid runners and casual joggers have had their ups and downs with the running shoe. Some argue that the shoes’ spongy soles help us bound comfortably across our unforgiving urban landscapes covered in concrete and asphalt. Others, however, think the shoes simply run off with our body’s natural spring-like steps. During the last 40 years, skeptics are quick to point out that the rate of running injuries hasn’t stumbled.

Now, with a new study on the mechanics of running, researchers suggest that running shoes actually do a little of both—cushioning and altering our innate bounce. It just doesn't happen the way we may have expected, the researchers report in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

To track down the impact of running shoes, researchers at the University of Queensland outfitted 16 healthy volunteers with intramuscular electrodes that recorded the muscle activity in their feet. Then they had those wired volunteers run—both barefoot and shod—on a treadmill rigged with force sensors. The researchers paid particular attention to the muscles in their longitudinal arches, which have a natural spring-like action, bending as the foot lands and recoiling on the lift.

The most adorable giant bird-dog-horse hybrid ever.

I had to wait about 30 minutes to play the E3 demo of The Last Guardian on one of the few behind-closed-doors demo stations available at this year's show. In another sense, though, I've been waiting to play Fumito Ueda's next game for seven years now, ever since its 2009 E3 debut as a PlayStation 3 game. I've been waiting even longer since Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus dazzled the gaming world in 2005.

Playing a game that has been in development that long, and with such a distinguished pedigree, it's hard to separate out the experience itself from the almost crushing weight of expectations layered on top of it. I spent a good deal of the half hour or so with The Last Guardian just in a base state of wonder that the game I was playing was actually real.

The basic gameplay in The Last Guardian demo will feel familiar to anyone who fell in love with Ueda's Ico in 2001. At its core, the game is about finding paths through intricately detailed 3D environments with light puzzle solving and navigation. In an era of sprawling, 100-hour open worlds, it's a pleasantly dated design. The Last Guardian brings an old-school focus on architectural world-building rather than endless busywork quests.