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We picked the CyberPower CP685AVR as our winner. (credit: Michael Hession)

This post was done in partnership with The Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best things for your home. Read the full article with more details and background information here.

After researching more than two dozen models, interviewing experts, and having an electrical engineer test our top candidates, we found that the CyberPower CP685AVR is the best uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for people who want to keep a home network running during a blackout of an hour or less. It’s easy to set up, it has some of the most positive user reviews in its class, and it’s the most affordable unit we found. We also like the APC BE650G1 Back-UPS, if it’s available for less. But if you need to power more than a modem and a Wi-Fi router or if you need to stay online longer, the APC BR1000G Back-UPS Pro is a better choice, with more than twice the power for less than twice the price.

The CyberPower CP685AVR will cover the basics for most people during short blackouts. In our tests it provided enough power to keep the average cable or DSL modem and Wi-Fi router running for an hour, which means you can stay online to pass the time while the lights are off—or, in a real emergency, keep your digital phone service powered so you can reach the outside world. The size of an overgrown surge protector, the CP685AVR is small enough to hide in the same corner as your networking gear, and because it has surge protection built in, you’ll have one less thing to buy. Although you could easily spend more on a UPS, you really have no reason to if you need only basic, non-critical protection and a limited amount of power.

Enlarge / The octobot, with some of its reaction system highlighted in color. (credit: Ryan Truby, Michael Wehner, and Lori Sanders, Harvard University.)

While the current generation of industrial robots is primarily made of metal, the research community has been getting interested in the potential for soft-bodied robots. These have a number of advantages, such as being easy to customize via 3D printing and providing a flexibility that lets them squeeze through tight spaces.

Many of the research demonstrations created so far, however, have required some compromises. For some iterations, this has meant the control hardware and power sources have been kept separate, connected to the robot via a tether. For other attempts, this has meant the final product is a mixture of hard and soft pieces.

In today's issue of Nature, however, researchers are reporting the creation of a soft-bodied robot that carries its own fuel supply, which powers the robot through an on-board chemical reaction. Soft, flexible on-board logic then directs the reaction products to control the movement of the robot. While the result is pretty limited in what it can do, its creators make up for that with a certain cool factor, making their creation look a lot like an octopus.

(credit: Persistent Surveillance Systems)

A company that sends Cessna aircraft to surveil cities from 25,000 feet up in an effort to fight crime has been watching Baltimore for months now with zero public notification, according to a new report from Bloomberg Businessweek.

The firm, Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS), has been actively trying to get new contracts with large cities nationwide. When Ars profiled the company in 2014, company CEO Ross McNutt said PSS was trying to work with Chicago after having controversially flown for nine days over Compton, California—adjacent to Los Angeles—in 2012.

PSS has evidently now succeeded in Baltimore. As Businessweek reported, the Baltimore project was funded by two Texan philanthropists, John and Laura Arnold, who said that if the company could find a city to partner with, they would fund it.

The virtual reality market is still new enough that we're seeing plenty of experimentation and iterative design work on the hardware itself. So it's not a huge surprise that Samsung and Oculus are out with a new, redesigned version of the Gear VR, even though it has been less than a year since the device was officially launched as a consumer product (and less than two years since the early "Innovator Edition" hit stores).

For the most part, the new Gear VR works like the old Gear VR. You still use certain Samsung Galaxy phones (anything since the Galaxy Note 5 will work) to provide the display and processing guts. The Gear VR headset itself still provides some crucial extra processing for tracking the angle of your head and a touchpad on the side for basic in-app controls (you can also use bluetooth controllers for more complex games). The Gear VR still can't track your head's position in space, though, so when you lean forward in a Gear VR app, the whole world comes with you in a nauseating fashion.

The main reason for the redesign is the launch of Samsung's Galaxy Note 7, which sports a USB Type-C connection that isn't compatible with last year's Gear VR model. The new Gear VR sports a Type-C docking dongle on the front by default, but that can be slid out and easily replaced with an older USB micro dock for compatibility with older Galaxy phones. The pass-through charging slot on the underside of the Gear VR is also USB Type-C now, though the headset comes with a tiny adapter to take a charge through older cables.

After weeks of rumors and unconfirmed reports, European scientists have officially announced the discovery of an Earth-sized world around the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri. Although the planet theoretically orbits its star in a region where water could exist as a liquid on its surface, no direct information can be gleaned about whether Proxima b has an atmosphere, water, or other characteristics that would increase its habitability. Nonetheless, it is tantalizing to imagine a habitable world so close to home.

The existence of a likely terrestrial world orbiting Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years from the Sun and part of a three-star system that includes two distant members, Alpha Centauri A and B, has been speculated about for some time. That's because Guillem Anglada-Escudé, an astronomer at the Queen Mary University of London, and colleagues used spectrograph data from the European Southern Observatory in Chile during the 2000s to discern a wobble in the star’s movement.

Then, earlier this year, with a concerted observing program over 60 nights at the observatory, they gathered additional data to rule out other explanations for Proxima Centauri's wobbling, such as flares or other stellar activity. It had to be the gravitational effect of a nearby planet. “Statistically, there can be no doubt now,” Anglada-Escudé said during a telephone news briefing about the findings, published Wednesday in Nature.

Airlander 10's second test flight, which took place this morning, ended with the giant airship nosediving into the ground. The cockpit was damaged, but Hybrid Air Vehicles says the crew members are "safe and well."

HAV told Ars that the flight lasted for 100 minutes and that it "completed all the planned tasks." HAV said the incident was not an unplanned dealtitudinal craft-terrafirma conflict, but rather "a heavy landing" as the craft returned to Cardington Airfield.

HAV said it will now run through a "robust set of procedures for flight test activities and investigation of issues" to work out what went wrong. We'll update this story when the company releases more info.