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Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot (S2E7)

If it wasn't already obvious, the people behind Mr. Robot keep tabs on the news. But unlike some of the ripped-from-the-headlines shows syndicated elsewhere on USA, reality serves as background tapestry—and not necessarily direct plot inspiration—for the series. As NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told us ahead of this season, such a strategy “gives viewers the feeling everything is grounded in reality… Because they get the details right, the average viewer—and 80 percent of the viewers may not know the computer stuff—can watch it and it feels right. And when the show has to do something that’s unrealistic, this makes it that much easier to buy it.”

Last week, Mr. Robot put this idea to the ultimate test. S2's big reveal has viewers confused about what reality means within the show's universe, but that question largely applies to main character Elliot Alderson's perception and not the show at large. Within the same hour, for instance, Elliot takes a very real-world approach to torpedoing the series' stand-in for the Silk Road, Midland City. When invited to handle some sysadmin duties by the site's operator, he subtly opens Midland City up to non-Tor traffic, indexes it on some top search engines, purchases a few banner ads elsewhere, and then tips the FBI about the whole thing. Simple and truthful.

Enlarge / This small sculpture of a rabbit was found in the early 1990s at the bunny apartment complex in the Oztoyahualco neighborhood of Teotihuacan. It is likely over 1,500 years old.

In the first century BCE, right around the time when Julius Caesar was dismantling the Roman Republic, the great city of Teotihuacan dominated the region now known as Mexico. The sixth largest city in the world at the time, it was known for massive pyramids and sprawling neighborhoods. Centuries later, the Aztecs claimed the famous city as part of their own heritage. At its peak, Teotihuacan was home to more than 100,000 people. Residents were living in such close quarters that architects invented multi-story apartment buildings to house them. In one neighborhood, urban farmers kept rabbits to feed the hungry Teotihuacan masses.

A group of anthropologists describe their discovery in PLoS One, filling in details of what appears to be a rabbit farm and butcher shop in a Teotihuacan neighborhood called Oztoyahualco. From roughly the 4th through 6th centuries, this neighborhood was home to an apartment compound that immediately stood out for a few reasons. Several rooms contained an enormous number of cottontail and jackrabbit remains, as well as soil with high phosphate levels that would indicate a lot of blood or fecal matter on the ground. One room had low stone walls "suggestive of a pen for domestic animal management," the researchers write. Other rooms were full of obsidian blades and rabbit limbs, as if they were part of a butcher shop.

Add all those findings together and you've got what appears to be an apartment complex devoted to raising and slaughtering rabbits. One more piece of evidence strengthened the hypothesis: a previous excavation had uncovered an unusual rabbit sculpture (pictured above) on the site. Bunnies were obviously important to the people in this place.

Enlarge / The solar sail used to accelerate the craft provides a large target for dust grains. (credit: Breakthrough Starshot)

Breakthrough Starshot is one of the more exciting scientific ideas that has popped up in the past decade, with its promise to deliver hardware to the nearest star in time for many people currently alive to see it. While the idea would work on paper as an extrapolation of existing technology, there are a lot of details that need to be thoroughly checked out, because it's possible that one of them could present a show-stopper.

There's a bit of good news there: Breakthrough Starshot is apparently funding the needed research to give its concept a thorough vetting. A recent posting to the arXiv describes a careful look at the odds of a spacecraft surviving an extended journey at the speeds planned for the trip. Overall, things look good, but a bit of shielding will be needed, and there's the potential for a catastrophic collision with a speck of dust.

The work, done by a team of four astronomers, focuses on one of the most basic issues: spacecraft survival. The goal of Breakthrough Starshot is to accelerate its craft to about 20 percent the speed of light. At that speed, even individual atoms can damage the vehicle, and a collision with a bit of dust could be catastrophic. So the team set out to quantify just how risky these collisions could be.

Enlarge / Jeff Williams works aboard the Space Station in April. (credit: NASA)

During his nearly year-long mission aboard the International Space Station, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly garnered a large measure of attention for his Ironman feats, including setting a US record for the cumulative amount of time in space—520 days. Jeff Williams may be less well-known, but he will quietly become NASA’s new spaceflight Ironman on Wednesday morning.

Williams has reached 520 days after a Space Shuttle mission in 2000, two previous increments on the Space Station in 2006 and 2009, and he’s now nearing the end of his third mission to the Space Station. When he lands on September 6, Williams will have spent a cumulative 534 days in space, two weeks longer than Kelly’s total. (No NASA astronaut can equal the duration records of Russian cosmonauts. The all-time leader, Gennady Padalka, has spent 879 days in space over five missions).

In many ways, Williams' tenure at NASA has paralleled the development of the Space Station. After a decorated career as a test pilot, Williams was selected to become an astronaut in 1996, a time when the United States and Russia were in the formative stages of planning and developing the station as an international project. His first spaceflight, in May 2000, was just the third shuttle flight devoted to station construction. It helped pave the way for the first crews to live aboard the station, beginning in November, 2000. Williams is also the first NASA astronaut to spend three separate increments aboard the orbiting laboratory.

When Comcast brought its gigabit download cable service to Chicago last week, there was plenty of confusion about the price. Comcast initially said it would cost $140 a month, even though a $70 monthly price is available in other cities where Comcast has to compete against Google Fiber.

But after we published a story Friday, a Comcast spokesperson said the $70 offer was available in Chicago after all, contrary to what the company had said earlier that day. But there’s a difference between Comcast telling the media that a great deal is available and customers actually being able to sign up for it.

Comcast told us that customers interested in the offer should sign up at xfinity.com/gig. But when you follow the links, the only pricing listed is $300 a month for 2Gbps fiber Internet and $140 a month for 1Gbps download speeds (with 35Mbps uploads).

Samsung is apparently working on an Amazon Echo clone. A circular Bluetooth-speaker-and-microphone combo called the "Samsung Scoop" was spotted in the FCC database by Android fan site Ausdroid.

The Scoop looks a lot like a mini Amazon Echo—it's a squat little cylinder about 80mm in diameter. There's a speaker on top with Play/Pause and volume controls around the perimeter. On the side is a power button and a flap hiding a USB plug (it looks like Type C?) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Scoop is so compact that it's apparently going to be portable. Samsung gave it a big leathery carrying handle and—if the circuit board labeled "battery board" is any indication—a rechargeable battery.

What Samsung plans to do with the software on the Scoop is a bit of a mystery. The majority of the functionality in Samsung's smartphones comes from Android, but there's no established operating system for these Bluetooth voice command speakers. Will the Scoop run Samsung's Tizen OS? Like "S-Voice" on a Galaxy smartphone, we'll expect a Nuance-powered voice command system, but with Samsung shutting down its Milk Music service, we aren't expecting too many home-grown services on the Scoop. It will be starting from scratch in the app ecosystem, too. There's also the possibility that the Scoop is a "dumb" device and would rely on a tethered smartphone for the voice commands to work.

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Recently released code that exploits Cisco System firewalls and has been linked to the National Security Agency can work against a much larger number of models than many security experts previously thought.

An exploit dubbed ExtraBacon contains code that prevents it from working on newer versions of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), a line of firewalls that's widely used by corporations, government agencies, and other large organizations. When the exploit encounters 8.4(5) or newer versions of ASA, it returns an error message that prevents it from working. Now researchers say that with a nominal amount of work, they were able to modify ExtraBacon to make it work on a much newer version. The finding means that ExtraBacon poses a bigger threat than many security experts may have believed.

The newly modified exploit is the work of SilentSignal, a penetration testing firm located in Budapest, Hungary. In an e-mail, SilentSignal researcher Balint Varga-Perke wrote: