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Enlarge / Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is a co-creator of ARPANET, the direct ancestor of the Internet. (credit: Magnolia Pictures)

Hackers? Check. Driverless cars? Check. SpaceX? Check. Robots? Check. Elon Musk? Check. ARPANET? Check. Video game addicts? Check. Brainscans? Check. Internet of Things? Check. All we’re missing is a Fitbit review. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is practically Ars Technica: The Movie, with Werner Herzog as our guide.

You know about filmmaker Werner Herzog, right? He’s famous not just for making movies but for being a lunatic. Starting in the ‘60s, our mad Bavarian genius crazied his way into our hearts by stealing equipment, forging permits, getting shot during an interview, regularly endangering his cast and crew, and dragging a 19th-century riverboat over a mountain. Even if you’ve never seen any of Herzog’s films, chances are you’ve heard someone parody him by calmly and precisely intoning how the universe is chaos, penguins go insane, and forests are full of misery. And Herzog’s not above making fun of his own image, as his appearances on The Simpsons, American Dad, Rick and Morty (NSFW), and The Boondocks (NSFW) can attest.

Herzog tends to make documentaries about weirdos that he views with equal parts admiration and bafflement. The title character of Grizzly Man thought he could live with bears, while My Best Fiend is about actor Klaus Kinski, who starred in five of Herzog’s most critically-acclaimed films, even though Herzog thought he was a “pestilence” who should have been murdered. Through interviews and archival footage, Lo and Behold sticks to this template, and it confronts the weirdest weirdo of them all: the Internet. Herzog never anthropomorphizes the Internet, but sees it instead as capable of one day becoming... well, something. I can’t seem to finish that sentence without trivializing the thing that is the Internet’s potential.

Enlarge / USGS map showing the epicenter of Saturday's earthquake (star) and contours of estimated shaking intensity. (credit: USGS)

Update: Saturday's earthquake was initially estimated at a magnitude 5.6, tying it with a 2011 earthquake near Prague for the largest seen in Oklahoma in recent years. After further analysis to compare the two events, the USGS has upped the estimated magnitude for Saturday's earthquake from 5.6 to 5.8. They also ended up revising the estimate for the 2011 earthquake upward to 5.7. In a press release, USGS geophysicist Gavin Hayes explained, “While the difference in size between the two events is less than 0.1 magnitude units, rounding magnitudes to one decimal place means that the magnitude of the Prague earthquake is Mw 5.7, and the Pawnee earthquake is Mw 5.8.”

So by a slim margin, the Pawnee earthquake sets a new record for Oklahoma—although the limited data recorded during earthquakes in 1952 and 1882 prevents precise estimates of their magnitude, which are believed to have been between 4.8 and 5.7.

Original story: Oklahoma has suddenly become a seismic state over the last decade, as an abundance of small earthquakes has accompanied the expanded use of deep injection wells. The wells are used to dispose of wastewater that would be expensive and difficult to treat. Instead, it gets pumped into salty aquifers that are already unsuitable sources of drinking water. Most of the wastewater is separated from oil and gas produced from wells in the region—some of which involve fracking, but many of which are older, “conventional” wells.

Although we usually cover our own travel costs, in this case that was not an option; flights and accommodation on this trip to Munich was paid for by Audi.

MUNICH—During some downtime on a recent visit to Munich—the reasons for which you'll be able to read about shortly—we got a chance to check out BMW's excellent museum. Located next to the company's iconic "Four Cylinder" office building (which will be familiar to those of you who remember the original Rollerball movie), the museum is currently celebrating BMW's centenary.

Although the Vision Next 100 concept wasn't on display, the museum was full of significant production cars, concepts, and racing machines, along with plenty of motorbikes, engines, and other goodies. Space constraints preclude us from showing you everything on display, but the gallery above contains the highlights.

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On Thursday, Science released a half-dozen papers that analyzed data the Dawn mission sent home from the largest body in the asteroid belt, a dwarf planet called Ceres. Headlines will focus on signs of water ice and a possible ice-powered volcano, but the reports themselves really end up emphasizing how much we still don't know about the strange world. Despite all of Dawn's imaging, many features don't add up to a coherent picture of the body as a whole.

Before Dawn got there, our impression of Ceres was dominated by what we'd measured of its density. Those measurements suggested the dwarf planet has a substantial amount of water and is large enough to have differentiated, allowing rocky material to sink to the core. So we expected Dawn to find an icy world where viscous ice has gradually wiped away many of the indications of the impacts every Solar System body has suffered.

That's not at all what Dawn found. Instead, only the largest impact craters on Ceres seem to show any sign of viscous changes. This lack of viscous change suggests that Ceres' crust is much more rigid than it would be if it were comprised of water ice.

Enlarge (credit: Detail from the cover of Underground Airlines)

Most alternate histories reverse just a few big historical events. They show us how bad things would be if the Nazis won World War II or the South won the Civil War. Though Ben H. Winters’ new novel Underground Airlines treads familiar territory in this respect, few alt histories are as complex and horrifying as it is.

Underground Airlines is set in a 2016 where slavery is still legal in part of the United States. In this reality, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1861, and the Civil War never happened. Instead, a compromise was struck. To this day, four Southern states (the “Hard Four”) still keep human beings as property.

The book’s main character, who mostly goes by Victor, is an African-American who works as a “soul-stealer”—basically, he’s a bounty hunter who returns escaped slaves to the Hard Four. He works for the Federal Marshals, and he’s the kind of manipulative, coldly efficient monster that often populates films noir. But as he remembers his own experiences as a slave in the South, he starts to question what he does.

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While the opioid epidemic continues kill more than 40 American every day, researchers and health experts are frantically searching for ways to curtail use of the highly addictive, pain-quenching drugs. In March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even released new guidelines directing doctors to simply refrain from prescribing opioids. But if a new study holds up, the health agency may be able to reverse course.

According to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an opioid drug referred to as BU08028 was able to alleviate pain in a dozen monkeys just as well as other opioid painkillers, such as morphine. Yet, unlike every other opioid drug, BU08028 showed no signs of being addictive. Even at high dose—at which other opioid drugs inhibit the respiratory and cardiovascular system, which can be fatal—BU08028 was harmless.

"Based on our research, this compound has almost zero abuse potential and provides safe and effective pain relief," Mei-Chuan Ko, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and lead author of the study, said in a statement. "This is a breakthrough for opioid medicinal chemistry that we hope in the future will translate into new and safer, non-addictive pain medications."