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At the Boeing booth on the Air & Space exposition floor in September 2015, a rack of once and future smart bombs—JDAM and JDAM Extended Range. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

If you're wondering how much the war against the Islamic State is costing the US and why the Obama administration isn't ramping up its bombing campaign even more, consider this fact: from August 2014 to December 2015, the US military dropped $1.3 billion in smart bombs and other guided munitions on ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria, with air operations costing an average of about $11.2 million per day.

So many smart bombs have been dropped during the roughly 9,000 missions flown by US Air Force and Navy aircraft that the Department of Defense is running out of the guided weapons—and the Pentagon wants to stock up for ramped-up attacks. The military also wants to accelerate updates to the aging B-52 fleet to convert them into "arsenal ships" that can hang around for long periods of time and deliver bigger loads of guided bombs against targets such as ISIS.

Defense One reports that the Obama administration will send a request to Congress next week to approve an additional $1.8 billion for the DOD in order to purchase 45,000 new Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) smart bombs and other air-dropped ordnance. The $1.8 billion bomb request is part of a total of $7.5 billion the Pentagon will seek to cover Operation Inherent Resolve, the ongoing operation against ISIS.

An eleventh hour data transfer "political agreement" has been reached between US and European Union officials, just as privacy watchdogs in the 28-member-state bloc were circling tech giants with the threat of enforcement action.

The European Commission's vice president Andrus Ansip—perhaps mindful of keeping national data regulators from the Article 29 Working Group at bay—said during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon that a framework agreement was now in place.

What that means, in practice, is that the Commission has negotiated some breathing space to strike a deal with the US.

(credit: Clever Cupcakes)

A new lawsuit (PDF) filed against flailing tech giant Yahoo claims that company managers governing the "Media Org" were biased against men. It also claims that the company's Quarterly Performance Review (QPR) process favored female employees and that the company engaged in mass layoffs without proper warnings.

Gregory Anderson was editorial director of Yahoo's Autos, Homes, Shopping, Small Business, and Travel sections until he was terminated in 2014.

In his complaint, Anderson says that between 2012 and 2015, Yahoo reduced its work force by more than 30 percent to fewer than 11,000 employees. That constitutes a mass-layoff, which requires 60-day notice under state and federal law, he says.

Artist's conception of Nintendo's new VR-focused NX console (not really).

Two decades after the flop of the Virtual Boy and after years of saying that virtual reality isn't a good fit for its company philosophy, Nintendo has joined the swelling ranks of tech companies interested in VR. The news comes from a Nintendo earnings call out of Japan last night, during which Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima reportedly said the company is "looking into" VR.

Nintendo didn't provide any other details about any potential VR plans, but the tidbit is especially interesting considering Nintendo's work on the still shadowy NX console, first mentioned last March. Since that announcement, we've been left guessing about a project Nintendo has only said is "the new hardware system with a brand-new concept." With the Wii U seemingly not powerful enough to drive a really convincing, high-res VR headset, it's not ridiculous to think that Nintendo has been "looking into" VR as an integral part of its new NX hardware.

If Nintendo has been working on a VR system this whole time, though, it has done a good job of hiding it. Until today, the company has been consistently bearish on the kind of VR technology that has excited much of the gaming industry. When asked about VR plans back in 2014, Nintendo Senior Director of Corporate Communications Charlie Scibetta told Ars that the company "[tries] to innovate on our own and not necessarily follow what others have done just for the sake of doing that."

(credit: Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Most of the mutations associated with autism spectrum disorder affect genes involved in brain development, as you’d expect. But there’s also a link between the immune system and ASD: viral infection during pregnancy may lead to more cases of ASD in children. A new study published in Science links a specific immune signaling molecule known as interleukin-17a to this phenomenon.

Studies of humans show that viral infection during pregnancy is correlated with an increase in ASD in the ensuing children, though this connection is not yet fully understood. A fundamental tenet of epidemiology is that correlation is not causation, which means that the association between viral infection and ASD doesn’t necessarily mean that catching a virus during pregnancy causes ASD in the baby.

Controlled experiments of pregnancy-related exposures can’t ethically be conducted in humans, so the authors of this paper use mouse models instead. In these mice, when pregnant females are infected with a dsRNA sequence that mimics a viral infection, their offspring show behavioral symptoms typical of ASD. In rodents, ASD-like symptoms include a lack of interest in social interaction, stereotyped repetitive behaviors, abnormal communication behaviors, and other social deficits, all of which can be examined using behavioral tests.

Morgan Motor Company

The Aero 8 is a no-nonsense modern sports car powered by a BMW V8. You used to have to wait five or six years between ordering a Morgan and delivery. That's now down to six to 12 months, the company says.

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The Morgan Motor Company—best known for still using postwar styling and wooden body frames for some of its cars—will have a full hybrid and electric range within the next three years. The British car maker is going to invest $8.6 million (£6 million) to develop hybrid and electric powertrains for all the models in its range by 2019, working in conjunction with Delta Motorsport and Potenza technology.

Despite the retro image of Morgan's cars—the company does still use ash wood as a structural material, even in 2016—the company has actually been quite forward-looking over the past decade. The Aero 8 (introduced in 2007) has an up-to-date aluminum chassis and modern aerodynamics, even if it looks like it stepped out of the pages of an alternative history novel.

"We have been involved in the research and development of new propulsion technology since the inception of the LifeCar project almost ten years ago. We are now ready to develop the best hybrid and electric drive-train solutions for production implementation before the end of the decade," said Steve Morris, Morgan's boss.

Artist's impression of W2246-0526, a galaxy shining in infrared with the luminosity of 350 trillion suns. (credit: ESO)

Brightness can mean different things. A nearby candle is brighter than an identical one in the distance. To avoid confusion, astronomers use the word "luminosity" rather than brightness to indicate the total amount of light that an object puts out. By that measure, W2246-0526 is the brightest—the most luminous—galaxy in the observable Universe.

A group of researchers has now taken advantage of the abilities of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) to take a look inside W2246-0526 and see what’s going on there.

The cause of the brightness is not mysterious. The galaxy’s incredibly bright core, which outshines the rest of its stars by a factor of over 100, is home to a very active supermassive black hole (SMBH). While nearly every galaxy houses a SMBH, only the most active ones earn the title of quasar. ("Active" in this context means that the black hole is rapidly consuming a lot of matter, producing its incredible light output through friction as it does.)