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(credit: meesh)

A former US Embassy staffer was sentenced Monday to four years and nine months in prison after pleading guilty last year to stalking, extortion, and computer fraud.

According to prosecutors, Michael C. Ford primarily conducted his sextortion activities from his desk at the United States Embassy in London despite his heavily monitored, government-owned work computer. Even though Ford ran his scheme for at least two years, the State Department’s own network security protocol apparently failed to flag the man’s behavior.

In a sentencing memorandum filed by prosecutors prior to the Monday hearing, they expressed shock at the scale of Ford's scheme. "The sheer number of phishing e-mails that Ford sent is astounding," the memorandum stated. As an example, prosecutors noted that on one day in April 2015 alone, Ford sent approximately 800 e-mails to potential victims.

The Atlas V rocket and the S.S. Rick Husband spacecraft are rolled out to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. (credit: NASA)

Like Matt Damon in The Martian, NASA is getting ready to science the @$!# out of the International Space Station. Late on Tuesday night, pending last-minute weather or technical issues, a spacecraft named for the late space shuttle Columbia commander Rick Husband will launch from Kennedy Space Center. Liftoff of the science-laden spacecraft is set for 11:05pm EDT (3:05am GMT Wednesday).

The launch of the Orbital ATK spacecraft is NASA’s second resupply mission to the International Space Station after two critical supply ship failures: an Orbital launch in late 2014, and a SpaceX flight in June 2015. After NASA’s commercial fleet was grounded for half a year, the space agency is now trying to settle into a more regular resupply schedule. The first SpaceX resupply flight since its accident is scheduled for April 8.

A variety of scientific payloads highlight Tuesday’s launch. Among its 3.5-ton cargo of food, water and other supplies, the S.S. Rick Husband will ferry 777kg of scientific experiments into space, including an upgraded version of a 3D printer, gecko-like grippers for moving around in microgravity, the first component of an ambitious Spacecraft Fire Experiment, and an experiment to that will allow scientists to better understand the behavior of regolith on asteroids and other small bodies with near-zero gravity.

The more money that is spent on recovery efforts for an endangered or threatened species, the more likely that species is to recover. It’s an intuitive link, although intuitive links aren’t always borne out by reality. But in the US, where a large amount of funding for endangered species recovery efforts comes from the government, the money being spent often falls well short of what's needed, leaving many species to flounder.

Arizona State University researcher Leah Gerber has analyzed government spending on endangered species, finding ways to make the process more efficient. She found that some species are declining despite receiving more funding than they request, making them “costly yet futile,” she writes in a PNAS paper. Redirecting this extra funding could help us to save many more species.

There are currently around 1,500 species listed as endangered or threatened in the US, half of which are at high risk for extinction. The US Fish and Wildlife Service is set to assess approximately 800 more species for inclusion in the list within the next two years. The recovery plans for these species require $1.21 billion/year, but in reality, only a quarter of this budget is actually spent. It’s a “capacity challenge”, Gerber writes—the funding that's made available for recovery efforts is just not sufficient to meet the flood of demand.

A few weeks before the launch of the Planet Coaster closed alpha—a perk for those who bought the "Early Bird Edition" of the game—Frontier Developments' Jonny Watts is scolding his team. Rather then work on squashing bugs in the game's complex path-finding system, or making sure that the tiny details on flat (pre-made) rides were correct, they were making roller coasters and theme parks. Some of them had been at it for days, obsessively chipping away at their creations using tools like environmental deformation and coaster editing that wouldn't even be in the alpha.

"We still have jobs to do," he told them.

Deadlines or not, how better to show a game works than a group of people who can't stop playing it? At the very least, there was plenty to show on press day. There are wonderfully complex roller coasters that slide effortlessly through the sides of hills and across other rides, and parks with a slick pirate theme made up of carefully placed wooden barrels and caged skeletons. Most impressive is a coaster that twirls around a huge tree in the middle of a park, a product of careful track placement and the game's pre-production environmental deformation tools.

The ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived.

One palatial residence in Herculaneum contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas. It was long believed that these scrolls would never be readable. But now, a massive X-ray microscope at the European Radiation Synchrotron Facility has allowed researchers to see what was written on these ruined documents.

The trick was discovering that the ink used by scribes over 2,000 years ago actually contained fairly large traces of metals, including lead. This came as a surprise to a group of researchers experimenting with the scrolls at the synchrotron, and they subsequently published their discovery in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. These papyri contain the oldest examples of metallic ink in the Greco-Roman world; previously, archaeologists dated the Roman use of metallic ink to the fifth century, though the Egyptians had been known to use it long before. This is a welcome discovery for students of ancient Greco-Roman scrolls, because it means that other scientists can use a technique called scanning X-ray fluorescence (XRF) to see wisps of lead in the outlines of letters.