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Enlarge (credit: Lockheed Martin)

At a breakfast with defense reporters this week, Marine Corps Lt. General Robert Walsh, the commanding general of the Corps' Combat Development Command, said that directed energy weapons are "where we want to go." That includes eventually mounting lasers on the F-35B fighter—and virtually everything else in the Marine Corps' inventory.

"As soon as we could miniaturize them, we would put them on F-35s, Cobra [attack helicopters]… any of those kind of attack aircraft," Walsh said, according to a report from National Defense. But given how much difficulty Defense Department researchers have had reducing the size and power required for directed energy weapons, that day is still a long way off—and the objective right now is to get a system that could be flown on a C-130.

The advantage of directed energy weapons, from the Marine Corps' perspective, is that they don't require ammunition (other than their energy source) and could be used defensively against missiles and even other aircraft at a much lower cost per shot than the $300,000 to $400,000 AIM-120 missiles carried by the F-35—or even the 25 millimeter rounds of its GAU-22/A cannon.

Enlarge / Gosh, I love that planet pin. (credit: billnye.com)

Bill Nye's social capital has been on the rise in recent years, as he has transitioned from a kid-friendly science show host to a no-nonsense defender of hard science (and bow ties). His polite aggression has appeared on talk shows, lecture halls, and comedy series, but none of his enjoyable bluster has come in his own series in some time.

Netflix has announced plans to change that with the introduction of Bill Nye Saves the World, a new Netflix-exclusive talk show series launching in spring 2017. In a Wednesday press release, Netflix described the show's aspirations to "refute anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders, or titans of industry"—so the show is clearly aiming to maintain the junk-science battle that Nye has loudly fought in recent years.

Like his '90s TV series, the new Netflix show looks like it will provide equal parts comedy and hard science, as head writers have been hired for those elements (with comedian Mike Drucker and astronomer Phil Plait filling those respective roles). Though the press release didn't indicate how vulgar or extreme the humor may go, Nye's hilarious, frustrated-cursing turn on a 2015 episode of Inside Amy Schumer makes us hopeful that he'll veer a little blue when taking on topics like "vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change."

With a name or just a general description of some generic event, researchers were able to "spear-phish" half of their test subjects. (credit: Wikipedia)

Security experts often talk about the importance of educating people about the risks of "phishing" e-mails containing links to malicious websites. But sometimes, even awareness isn't enough. A study by researchers at a university in Germany found that about half of the subjects in a recent experiment clicked on links from strangers in e-mails and Facebook messages—even though most of them claimed to be aware of the risks.

The researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, led by FAU Computer Science Department Chair Dr Zinaida Benenson, revealed the initial results of the study at this month's Black Hat security conference. Simulated "spear phishing" attacks were sent to 1,700 test subjects—university students—from fake accounts.

The e-mail and Facebook accounts were set up with the ten most common names in the age group of the targets. The Facebook profiles had varying levels of publicly accessible profile and timeline data—some with public photos and profile photos, and others with minimal data. The messages claimed the links were to photos taken at a New Year's Eve party held a week before the study. Two sets of messages were sent out: in the first, the targets were addressed by their first name; in the second, they were not addressed by name, but more general information about the event allegedly photographed was given. Links sent resolved to a webpage with the message "access denied," but the site logged the clicks by each student.

One of the most famous fossils in human evolutionary history is at the center of a new scientific debate. The fossilized skeleton dubbed "Lucy" was part of an extinct species called Australopithecus afarensis, an early relative of Homo sapiens who was among the first hominins to walk upright. She died 3.18 million years ago, and her remains were discovered in the early 1970s in Ethiopia. Her skeleton is complete enough to give us a good picture of her anatomy, which is part of what led to the current controversy. A study published in Nature this week suggests that a careful analysis of her bones reveals how she died—by falling to her death from a very tall tree. But other scientists say the evidence is thin at best.

University of Texas-Austin anthropologist John Kappelman and his team did a complete X-ray CT scan on Lucy's bones, allowing them to create high-resolution 3-D renders as well as 3-D printouts of her skeleton. By comparing the way her bones had fragmented with contemporary X-rays from people who fell, they came to the conclusion that the fragmentation of her leg bone was "green," that is, it took place right before she died.

Kappelman and his colleagues write, "Although the fractures in Lucy’s humeri provide evidence that she was conscious when she stretched out her arms in an attempt to break her fall, the severity of the numerous compressive fractures and presumed organ damage suggest that death followed swiftly." It appears that the joint in her leg suffered from extreme compression of the type you'd expect in somebody who fell on their feet from a great height, out of a local tree where nests might be as many as 23 meters off the ground. (They estimated this height based on the typical heights of chimpanzee nests today.)