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One of the biggest features promised for Microsoft's new Edge browser was support for extensions written in HTML and JavaScript. Google developed an API for such extensions for Chrome, and it is being substantially adopted by Firefox. Microsoft said that it too would adopt this API for Edge, but extensions didn't make the cut in the November Update.

Since the November Update, Microsoft has released a series of Insider Preview builds that so far didn't actually change a great deal that was visible. But the latest build, version 14291, changes all that, as it includes the first preview of the extension support in Edge. Microsoft has three extensions thus far: two it developed itself (one to perform automatic translation of foreign language pages, another to enable mouse gestures), and a ported version of the popular Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES).

Right now, installing extensions is rather clunky—when this is feature is released to end users, extensions will be included in the Windows Store and subject to some amount of vetting and oversight, but that's not plumbed in yet. Once installed, however, the extensions just seem to... work.

Enlarge / The dwarf planet Pluto (colors enhanced to show differences). (credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

When the New Horizons spacecraft sent back its first images of Pluto in July, the view was glorious and extraordinary. It’s not every day that we get to see a (dwarf) planet up close for the first time. As planetary scientists scrambled to put the pieces of their blown minds back together, we got some initial observations and hypotheses about Pluto’s surprising surface. But the bulk of the data from New Horizons’ brief encounter had yet to be transmitted back to Earth. As that data continues to stream in, more detailed science is being done.

This week in Science, a stack of five papers lays the foundation for that science by describing Pluto’s geology and atmosphere, as well as that of Charon and the smaller satellites orbiting the dwarf planet with the big heart.

That includes a basic description of the Plutonian landscape—at least the hemisphere that greeted the New Horizons spacecraft on approach. The lower quality data from the other side will eventually be analyzed as well.

You've probably heard the story about how Neanderthals were living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, when suddenly a bunch of Homo sapiens came pouring out of Africa about 70 thousand years ago. 30 thousand years later, pretty much all the Neanderthals were dead. Many anthropologists believe that Homo sapiens killed off our large-browed cousins in a quest to dominate the Eurasian continent. But over the past 10 years, that view has changed radically thanks to new techniques for sequencing ancient DNA.

Now, two new studies make it even less likely that modern humans killed off the Neanderthals. Instead, we interbred with them at least three separate times, and our ancestors were likely sharing tools with them half a million years ago.

A mysterious common ancestor

Writing in Nature, a team of scientists recount how they carefully sequenced the DNA from a mysterious group of 430 thousand-year-old humans found in Sima de los Huesos, a cavern in Spain's Atapuerca mountains. Thanks to careful preservation of the remains, they were able to extract both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA, allowing them to analyze genetic contributions from the group's mothers and fathers. What they discovered has upended the classic story of how Neanderthals got to Europe, and when. The Sima hominins are clearly early Neanderthals, living in Spain far earlier than expected.

An unredacted version of an appeal document. (credit: 4th Circuit Court of Appeals via Wired)

In the summer of 2013, secure e-mail service Lavabit was ordered by a federal judge to provide real-time e-mail monitoring of one of its users. Rather than comply with the order, Levison shut down his entire company. He said what the government was seeking would have endangered the privacy of all of his 410,000 users.

Later, he did provide the private key as a lengthy printout in tiny type.

In court papers related to the Lavabit controversy, the target of the investigation was redacted, but it was widely assumed to be Edward Snowden. He was known to have used the service, and the charges against the target were espionage and theft of government property, the same charges Snowden faced.