Hurricane Joaquin and storm activity on Oct. 2

NASA GOES

The latest satellite imagery of Hurricane Joaquin and associated tropical weather in the Atlantic was captured the morning of October 2, 2015, by the NASA network of three Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES).

For the past several days, people along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard have been nervously tracking the path of Hurricane Joaquin. But the latest data gathered by the network of sensors, satellites, and "Hurricane Hunter" planes and published online this morning by the U.S. National Hurricane Center indicate that the storm is likely to miss the populated coastal region by several hundred miles East, although it continues to batter the Bahamas. Heavy rains and flooding are nonetheless still occurring and expected to continue for several days along the U.S. East Coast, namely in parts of Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina.

Two people have reportedly already been killed in the Carolinas due to flooding and falling trees, according to Weather.com.

Hurricane Joaquin track forecast as of Friday, October 2 at 8 a.m. ET

National Hurricane Center/National Weather Service

The latest forecast model for Hurricane Joaquin shows the storm heading several hundred miles East of the populous East Coast, though heavy rains, high winds, and flooding are still likely in several major areas.

Other updated models all point to the hurricane sweeping past the coast as it weakens over the weekend:

Earlier forecast models varied widely, but initially appeared to show the Category 4 (out of 5) storm heading from somewhere between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

And given the storm's then-growing strength and 130-mile-per-hour winds, government officials in the area were quick to begin preparations for Hurricane Joaquin's possible landfall, with the governors of North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Virginia preemptively declaring States of Emergency in their respective states.

The worst of the storm, however, is tracking to pass by the areas without making landfall, and the storm is likely to weaken in the coming days. As the National Hurricane Center notes in its latest update: "There is a high chance this system will develop into a tropical cyclone in the next 48 hours." A tropical cyclone is less intense than a hurricane in terms of wind speeds, but is still dangerous for those out at sea and in its path.

A sea turtle hatchling in a stylish suit

Owen Coffee

It's no secret that sea turtles around the world can't stop eating the plastic we keep depositing into the ocean. But a lot of these studies were conducted on turtles after they've washed up on shores, dead.

Researchers from the University of Queensland's School of Biological Science have devised a way to study sea turtle diets in the wild, while they're still alive. Owen Coffee, a PhD student, is studying the turtles' eating habits to determine where they're foraging, to better protect those areas. To do so, they made sea turtle swimsuits.

The swimsuits are perhaps a bit closer to full-body diapers, as they are designed especially to capture the turtle's fecal matter in the open ocean—not an easy task. They tried a few methods, such as attaching a funnel to the turtles' shells, which was difficult to keep in place.

So borrowing a method previously used on hatchlings to study their vision, the team got to making fashionable little swimsuits for their research subjects. The suits, made from secondhand rash guards, have a special detachable compartment to collect the turtle poop.

"The suits were easy to put on, comfortable for the sea turtles to wear, looked great, and Owen was able to collect the entire fecal sample,” Kathy Towsend, the University of Queensland's Moreton Bay Research Station education coordinator said in the release.

Jeff Bezos

Wikimedia Commons

Amazon is pulling Apple TVs and Google Chromecasts from its digital marketplace, effectively waging a war with Apple and Google when it comes to devices that can play streaming video. What this means practically is that from now on, when customers search for streaming video set-top boxes on Amazon, all they'll get to choose from are Amazon's Fire TV products, plus a handful of preferred devices that also carry Amazon's Prime Instant streaming service. In one sense, this is the biggest move yet in the battle to control the future of TV.

Amazon said in an email to its sellers earlier this week that it will no longer list Apple TV and Chromecast products because they don’t “interact well” with Amazon Prime Video. (Roku stays, because Amazon Prime is available on the company's various TV streaming devices.)

However, in doing this, Amazon has massively reduced competition on the most popular online store in America at a very critical time, following the announcement of a new Apple TV, new Chromecast, and new Amazon Fire TV products last month.

This move stings more for Google than Apple. Remember, Amazon's Fire TV operating system (and every Amazon OS) is actually just a forked version of Android. For the non-nerds, since Android is open-source, any person or company can come along and use that code. Amazon did just that—it took the code, made it work with its platform, and is now trying to force Google out of the Amazon marketplace.

Open-source software is a wonderful thing. It’s what made Android the most popular mobile operating system, and is why Linux quietly powers the internet. Programmers with limited experience (like the copy/paste "script kiddies") and experienced software engineers alike can toy with functioning code to create new services, which are sometimes open-sourced in turn. But for Google, the second edge of the open-source sword is starting to cut, and on a product that actually makes some cash. Google announced it's sold 17 million Chromecast units as of May, a significant milestone for a software company.

On the bright side, both Chromecast and Apple TV have some momentum, as each have launched new products in the past month. Apple announced the new Apple TV, the first refresh to the line since early 2012, and Google launched the new Chromecast this week, as well as a device with the ability to make any speaker with a 3.5mm input Wi-Fi enabled. (The Nexus Q is still dead.)

Google has also worked to make its online Google Store a standalone marketplace for its products. During its Nexus event Tuesday, Google execs stressed time and time again that their products were available untethered from any carrier or retailer on the Google Store, which admittedly looks better than it has in the past.

The Apple TV uses its own tvOS, carries name recognition, and held a 17 percent market share in 2014 despite not releasing a new model in nearly 3 years. Chromecast performed slightly better with a 19 percent share, but a mid-2013 release.

Bloomberg reports that the change to Amazon's store will take effect on October 29.

So what does this mean for each company? Probably not a lot in the short term. Die-hard Chromecast and Apple TV fans will probably buy their devices on each company's respective online stores. But Amazon is betting that its search engine optimization, and its customers' lack of research into the market, will trump its competitors' brand recognition in the long term. One thing seems certain—if Apple and Google were ever poised to allow Amazon's Prime Instant Video app on their own streaming TV devices, they almost certainly aren’t anymore.

SolarCity array at Meteor Vineyard

Steve Jurvetson via Flickr

Solar panel company SolarCity today announced what it calls the "most efficient rooftop solar panels". The company claims it "generates more power per square foot and harvests more energy over a year than any other rooftop panel in production, and will be the highest volume solar panel manufactured in the Western Hemisphere."

While there have certainly been solar cells that have achieved a higher efficiency than the 22.5 percent SolarCity offers, the highest-efficiency solar cells, and the panels that incorporate them are not used in residential or commercial applications because they're far too expensive.

SolarCity acquired Silevo, another solar technology company, last year, and are using the solar cell architecture developed there. They continued to work on the solar cell to bring it to an efficiency of 22.5 percent.

"Think of the solar cell as the engine that powers the solar panel," says Ben Heng, senior vice president for product engineering at SolarCity. "There was a couple of people at a conference last year that said, 'Ben, you know you have the engine of a Tesla, but how come you put it in a China-made car?' So with that comment, this past year, we've been working on the correct so-called "car" or packaging and came up with this new [panel] design."

The new panel configuration allows a cell-to-panel conversion efficiency loss of just 0.5 percent, which Heng says is best in class. That means the cell's 22.5 percent efficiency translates to a 22.04-percent efficient panel. He says their closest competitor has about 1.5 percent loss, and others range around 2.5 percent.

The modules will eventually will be produced in Buffalo, N.Y., where they expect to manufacture 9,000 to 10,000 solar panels per day.

While efficiency is important, the cost is also a significant part of this equation. As Green Tech Media reports, the new panels will have a per-watt cost of around 55 cents.

To reduce the cost of manufacturing, SolarCity was able to employ Silevo's methods of reducing the steps it takes to produce the panels. "It allows us to manufacture a high efficiency technology at costs more comparable to standard efficiency manufacturing," says Jonathan Bass, SolarCity's VP of communication.

And SolarCity claims that panels will produce 30 to 40 percent more power than other standard solar panels of the same size, while performing better in high temperatures.

SolarCity's panels stand to unseat SunPower's X Series panels, which have a 21.5 percent efficiency.

The Ebola Virus

Wikimedia Commons

In order for a doctor to treat a patient, the exact cause of that patient’s illness must be found first. If a virus is the cause, current diagnostic tests are often not sensitive enough to detect the virus, or the doctor must already suspect which virus in particular is causing the symptoms before they can order the appropriate test to confirm it. But a new test developed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis may have solved this problem. “ViroCap” is a new diagnostic test that can detect any virus that infects people and animals. Their work was published in the journal Genome Research.

“With this test, you don’t have to know what you’re looking for,” said the study’s senior author, Gregory Storch, in the press release.

To develop the test, the researchers collected unique sequences of DNA and RNA from every group of viruses known to infect humans and animals—thus far, they have included up to 2 million unique pieces of genetic material. For the test, these unique sequences are compared against the genetic material found in a patient’s blood, stool, or sputum. If there’s a match, that material is then analyzed with high-throughput genetic sequencing to make the diagnosis.

Researchers hope to use the new technique to detect outbreaks of deadly viruses such as Ebola, Marburg, and SARS, as well as viruses causing severe gastrointestinal infections, such as the rotavirus and norovirus, according to the press release.

In preliminary testing done on two groups of children at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, researchers using the new technique found a 52 percent increase in the number of viruses detected versus traditional methods. The test is also capable of detecting very slight genetic variations within the same type of virus, which the scientists think could be useful in determining what type of flu virus a patient has such as H3N2, a particular harsh subtype of the seasonal virus.

While the test won’t be available for clinical use for several years (additional research is needed to validate its accuracy, the researchers say), the technology itself can immediately be applied to research that studies the “virome”— a collective term for all the viruses that live on or in the human body. To do so, the researchers are planning to make the technology publicly available. In addition, the researchers hope to use the test’s mechanisms to study other pathogens like bacteria and fungi.

"Home Free"

Home Free

"Home Free" is the open-world survival game where you’re a homeless dog, roaming the streets.

No guns, no swords, no armor: just a lost dog running around a sprawling city, trying to survive. No, it’s not an upcoming Disney film, it’s a proposed video game to work on both Mac and PC systems and is currently raising money on Kickstarter. The game's creator, Kevin Cancienne, hopes to reach $50,000 by the end of this month, and with about $38.00 raised so far, he's well on his way.

"Home Free" is the open-world survival game where you’re a homeless dog, roaming the streets. You’ll search for food, avoid cruel humans, and evade meaner, territorial dogs as you try and make it from night to night.

Cancienne wants you to feel many things, but most of all empathy. Here’s how he describes the game world on the Kickstarter page:

“The city is noisy, crowded and surprising, built for two-legged creatures whose ways are hard to understand. Some seem friendly. Can you get them to share their food? Others run screaming when they see you. Maybe they want you to chase them? Some attack on sight, with hands and sticks and boots. What’s your best escape route? Noisy metal boxes fly by in unpredictable patterns. Are you fast enough to dodge them? It’s their city, but you can still master its streets.”

And those things will be different every time you play. "Home Free" promises unique experiences in each new game: “Every street, alleyway, building, nook and cranny was generated just for your game. No one has been here before, so you better start marking your territory.”

Territory isn’t the only thing that can change every time you play. Based on the choices you make (steal food, beg for it, befriend other dogs?) you’ll have a different experience each time as well.

Home Free

Sandbox games of course have some existential problems: At some point you need to know when you’ve won, or when it’s time to quit. We’re not sure from the Kicktstarter page whether the game has an ending, or a goal other than survival.

But if sandbox games aren’t necessarily unexplored territory, dog-as-main character certainly is a refreshing divergence. And stray dog in the big city already comes with a wash of emotions for animal lovers (while it’s typically something you have to build for human characters in a game). It’s already going to be much harder to watch a dog get struck by oncoming traffic than, say, any of the characters to ever have appeared in "Grand Theft Auto".

It’s also impressive what the creator is accomplishing with gestures: You can tell plenty of the dog’s mood and emotions just from well-captured tail movements and posture. You can check it out for yourself:

We’ve got a while to wait to get to play "Home Free" (it’s expected for 2016), but here’s hoping it delivers on its promises. Maybe there’s a (less exciting) sequel to be found, where you’re a cat tasked with knocking things off counters, seeking out beams of light to nap in, and spending day after day searching for the mysterious red dot.

Nuclear weapons test in 1952

U.S. Department of Energy

Surviving on Mars is hard, as we’ve learned in The Martian and pretty much every other sci-fi movie that takes place on Mars. One way to make the Red Planet more livable is to make it more like home--by firing off nuclear warheads there. Or at least that’s what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seemed to suggest when he went on Stephen Colbert’s show last month.

Well, today, during an event about solar panels (designed by a different Musk-run company), the billionaire supervillain clarified his idea to terraform Mars. He doesn’t want to bomb Mars. He just wants to bomb the sky above Mars every few seconds. Mashable reports:

"What I was talking about," said Musk, "was having a series of very large, by our standards, but very small by calamity standards--essentially having two tiny pulsing suns over the poles.”

Is that what all the solar panels are for, Elon Musk?

Musk says that the two “tiny suns,” formed by fusion bombs, would warm up Mars’ frozen carbon dioxide so that it turns into gas that could help capture heat, creating a greenhouse effect on Mars.

How long that newly minted atmosphere would survive is anyone’s guess. Mars’ low gravity means it has a hard time holding onto the thin atmosphere that it already has. Plus, because Mars doesn’t have a protective magnetosphere, charged particles from the sun are constantly breaking down its atmosphere. Sounds like we’re gonna need some more bombs.

[Via Mashable]

To the naked eye, sand looks pretty uniform. Tiny beige specks of varying shades, collectively covering beaches and shores and deserts. But when you peek at it through a microscope, all of that changes. Gary Greenburg, a research affiliate at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, created a 3D high-definition light microscope in the 1990s, and he's been capturing fascinating sand close-ups since then.

The Secrets Of The Sand: A Journey Into the Amazing Microscopic World of Sand

Courtesy Quarto Publishing

Now he's put out a book of sand imagery, along with colleagues Carol Kiely, an adjunct professor at Lehigh University, and Kate Clover, a gallery program manager at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul. Kiely worked with NASA in 2008 to examine lunar dust particles collected during the Apollo missions, and ended up using Greenburg's technique to capture some spectacular images. Clover grew up on white sand beaches and formed a love for geology.

The book, titled The Secrets of Sand: A Journey into the Amazing Microscopic World of Sand, details the surprisingly complexity of sand and where it comes from. That includes sand from pure white beaches to colorful gem-like sand made up of tiny fragments of garnet and agate, which look like rock candy under a microscope. And of course, there are plenty of images of moon dust, which comes in colors ranging from bright green to deep orange. You can get a taste of the authors' fascinating imagery and captions in the gallery excerpt above.

Green Car Reports

2015 Chevy Volt, first drive in California, July 2015

Beginning in late fall 2016, if you’re lucky enough to visit the Warren Technical Center campus of General Motors, in Michigan, you might your shuttle quite intriguing: a 2017 Chevrolet Volt, driving itself.

The automaker plans to deploy a fleet of Volt extended range electric cars to drive people autonomously within the campus.

To use the service, employees would use a smartphone application, reserving the vehicle and then selecting a destination. Using autonomous technology under development, the vehicle would then pick up the employee, bring them to the destination, and then park the vehicle.

“The program will serve as a rapid-development laboratory to provide data and lessons to accelerate the company’s technical capabilities in autonomous vehicles,” said the automaker yesterday, in a press release accompanying a Global Business Conference Call.

Green Car Reports

Cadillac's Super Cruise system undergoing testing.

For the rest of us who aren’t GM insiders, we’ll need to wait many years—likely more than a decade—for the sort of technology demonstrated there, unrestricted for real-world driving. In the meantime, GM’s so-called Super Cruise autonomous-driving technology is an interim step, and the automaker confirms that it will first be offered in the 2017 Cadillac CTS.

Will any of those autonomous technologies make it into the regular-production 2017 Volt? We'd say that's highly unlikely, yet in the 2016 Volt you can already get blind-spot alert, rear cross-traffic alert, lane-keeping assist with lane-departure warning, forward collision alert, and automatic braking, plus an optional advanced parking assist function. 

The completely new, second-generation Chevrolet Volt makes its debut for the 2016 model year and will be arriving to dealerships very soon. In the 2016 Chevy Volt, which we've found a lot more refined as well as somewhat sportier and pleasant-driving, Chevy has boosted its all-electric range to 53 miles, while it gets 42 mpg when running solely on power from the 1.5-liter four-cylinder engine.

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Fogo volcano

NASA

Geologists think that the eastern slope of Fogo volcano crashed into the sea some 65,000 to 124,000 years ago, leaving a giant scar where a new volcano can be seen growing in this satellite image.

Some 73,000 years ago, in the Cape Verde islands off the west coast of Africa, a large piece of an erupting volcano collapsed upon itself and slid into the sea. Scientists studying the eruption believe the resulting influx of debris triggered a mega tsunami that engulfed a neighboring island 30 miles away with a wave of water as high as 800 feet. In a paper published today in Science Advances, researchers say that this type of volcanic event is catastrophic enough that, although exceedingly rare, should be considered by island communities when preparing for the potential hazards posed by nearby volcanoes.

Ricardo Ramalho, lead author of the study and adjunct scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, had been doing research in Cape Verde when he began to notice giant boulders strewn about the island of Santiago where he was working. These boulders are enormous, truck-sized hunks of striated limestone and submarine basalts that form near or under water around the island’s coasts. Some were located as high as 650 feet above sea level and as far as 2,000 feet inland.

“At the time I was puzzled by their origin, but it never occurred to me that they could be related to a megatsunami impact,” said Ramalho. However, after seeing a report of tsunami deposits close to sea level in a nearby bay, a massive tsunami event seemed to be the only realistic explanation. Rigorous field work and cutting-edge rock-dating techniques at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory confirmed the boulders were carried there by a giant tsunami caused by the volcano collapse 34 miles away.

Ricardo Ramalho

The tsunami generated by Fogo's collapse apparently swept boulders like this one from the shoreline up into the highlands of Santiago island. Here, a researcher chisels out a sample.

The tsunami was caused by the island volcano Fogo. At 9,300 feet high, it is one of the largest of its kind and remains one of the most active, erupting every 20 years or so. It erupted as recently as last year, displacing some 1,200 people and destroying buildings and houses.

Our understanding of volcanic flank collapse and the mechanisms that trigger it is still very crude, says Ramalho, but it’s believed that large eruptions are the cause. Looking at the Mount St. Helens eruption that happened in Washington State in 1980—which also experienced a flank collapse (though it’s not an oceanic volcano)—it’s possible to get a picture of what might have occurred during Fogo’s eruption 73,000 years ago. Before its flank caved in, it likely started to deform weeks or months before the actual event, with its flank slowly starting to slide, before a giant eruption caused the whole side to cascade down into the ocean. Again, drawing from Mount St. Helens, “the main tsunami-generating collapse possibly happened in a few minutes,” says Ramalho.

Kim Martineau/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

On a clear day, from these cliffs in northern Santiago island, it is possible to see a silhouette of Fogo, nearly 40 miles away. The geologists on this ridge believe that a tsunami generated by Fogo's sudden collapse generated a wave that swept the spot where they are standing.

Evidence suggests that the giant wave surged over the nearby island of Santiago and inundated the island up to 900 feet above sea level. “It is highly probable that any (or at least most) of the flora and fauna within this zone were completely wiped out,” says Ramalho.

Trying to imagine the type of damage that could cause to Santiago now, home to 250,000 people, is not difficult. One needs just to look back to the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and 128-foot tsunami in Japan that killed almost 16,000 people and left an ongoing nuclear disaster, or to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and 100-foot tsunami in Southeast Asia that killed 230,000 people across 14 countries and left 1.7 million homeless. However, it must be noted that these are different scenarios, caused by undersea earthquakes instead of collapsing volcanoes. There is some disagreement over whether a giant landslide of rock and earth could cause a wave powerful enough to travel long distances in the open ocean.

There have been a few instances of volcanic flank collapses or landslides triggering powerful tsunamis in the past hundred years. In 1792, Mount Unzen in Japan collapsed into nearby bays, causing 300-foot-high waves, and in 1958, an earthquake loosed 90 million tons of rock and earth into the isolated inlet of Lituya Bay, Alaska, shooting water up in a wave 1,724 feet high. Both of these instances, however, were in tightly confined bays, not open ocean.

The important thing to remember in all this is that the type of event that happened at Fogo is what Ramalho and other scientists call “very low frequency, very high impact events.” While the damage they can wreak is vast, they are incredibly rare occurrences that happen on an estimated scale of 1 every 100,000 years. Ramalho cautions that this study by no means indicates that another big collapse is imminent in Cape Verde or elsewhere, but notes that “since the possible impacts of such events can be absolutely devastating to our society, we need to be vigilant and we should improve our society’s resilience to their possible occurrence.”

The microbes in your gut depend on you to feed them well. A steady diet of complex fibers keeps them happy—and by extension, may keep you healthier. The microbiota have been linked to weight, gut health, allergies and even mood. Studies have shown that when the host (you) fails to supply the hungry hordes of beneficial microbes with what they want, the populations can change, and can even start to threaten the gut's thin lining. But we have been unable to see exactly whether—and how—these shifts were happening.

Now a team at Stanford University has created an elegant method of peering inside the gut—at cell-level resolution—to see what is going on. The research is in the October issue of Cell Host & Microbe.

Most of our understanding about gut microbes—and any impact diet has on them—has come from poop. Researchers can run a quick genetic scan on a smudge of a fecal sample, assessing which microbes are there, and in what abundances. But from this mixed-up pile, there is no way to know where in the gut the microbes are living—or how they are interacting with one another or with you. "Mapping the spatial organization of this microbial community is a fundamental aspect of understanding its biology," says Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at Stanford and coauthor of the new paper. "Without this information, we will struggle to make sense of how these microbes are contributing to our health or why interactions go awry and cause disease."

"This is a huge advance," says Eric Martens, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, who also studies the impact of fiber on gut microbes and the gut's mucus layer and was not involved in the new research. "Since we are just beginning to understand the mechanisms and functions of the hundreds of species of bacteria that inhabit the gut, understanding how these organisms pack together, organize, and reproduce in such a dense and tightly confined space provides enormous insight," he says.

Sonnenburg and his colleagues fed mice (colonized with human gut microbes) standard and fiber-deficient diets. They then carefully preserved thin slices of the mouse intestines and added special dyes to mark different microbes, undigested food, the essential mucus layer and the gut wall. With so many minute sample slices to analyze, they also developed software to help compute the spatial relationships.

In being able to actually see what was happening on these different diets, the researchers found that when the fiber was reduced, the mucus layer shrank—likely due to starved microbes eating it—from approximately 51 micrometers to just 31, allowing the microbes closer to the sensitive wall of the intestine. And as Sonnenburg notes, "we know that part of maintaining harmony between our resident microbes and our intestinal tissue is separation of the two"—namely by the mucus layer.

As this mucus layer shrank, mice missing the fiber in their diet also had more markers of inflammation. This can be triggered by the immune system attempting to keep bugs where they belong—in the gut. "Over long periods of time, low levels of inflammation can lead to many different types of problems, including colitis or even cancer," Sonnenburg says. (But, he cautions, the experiments have only been in mice—and over a short time period—so how the findings translate to us and our long-term health remain to be seen.)

In addition to the shrinking mucus layer, the researchers were also able to see that changing the diet altered the way bacteria were organized in the gut. On a standard diet, two categories of bacteria were usually found in clumps of similar cells. But without fiber, these groupings vanished, and the microbes were more evenly distributed.

Ronan O'Connell, of University College Dublin's Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, has been using laser microscopy to parse the structure of the gut microbiota in healthy people as well as those with diseases of the intestinal tract. He notes that the new imaging technique "beautifully illustrates the complexity of the host-microbiome interface," adding that it might some day be able to be used to study the differences in healthy and diseased guts in humans. Sonnenburg and his group are, in fact, already looking to expand the work to humans.

In the meantime, the new software used for this work (called BacSpace) is available to other groups, and, Sonneburg notes, he hopes sharing it will "propel this field forward rapidly." Martens, for one, is enthusiastic about the potential for this visual approach. "One can imagine turning up the resolution to the species level, instead of just phyla."

Katherine Harmon Courage is a freelance journalist; her next book Cultured (2016) is about the gut microbiota and diet. @KHCourage

Powerwall

Tesla

It sounds like a scene from an action movie. Two reporters scale a fence and sneak into a major construction project, taking photographs. Security confronts them and calls the police. Instead of sticking around for the authorities to show up, the reporters jump into their Jeep, hitting security personnel and causing injuries in their attempt to flee.

But this isn't some Hollywood fantasy. This is real life, at least according to the electric car company Tesla. In a statement released by the company today, they assert that two employees of the Reno Gazette-Journal trespassed onto the company's property, and assaulted two Tesla employees, injuring at least one.

The Tesla statement said that two newspaper employees have been arrested and are both facing charges of trespassing, while one also faces charges of assault with a deadly weapon (presumably, the Jeep, which reportedly bore the Reno Gazette-Journal's logo).

An article by the Reno Gazette-Journal said that only one employee, a photographer, had been arrested and charged with "battery with a deadly weapon." The paper also reported that the newspaper's Jeep was damaged during the altercation, with a window smashed and a seatbelt cut.

Apparently, this isn't the first time that Tesla has dealt with journalist trespassers. From the statement released by Tesla:

We appreciate the interest in the Gigafactory, but the repeated acts of trespassing, including by those working for the RGJ, is illegal, dangerous and needs to stop. In particular, we will not stand for assaults on our employees and are working with law enforcement to investigate this incident and ensure that those responsible are brought to justice.

The Gigafactory is a massive battery factory still under construction. It is the site where Tesla's highly-anticipated Powerwall batteries will be produced. The Reno Gazette-Journal has been covering the construction of the factory in Sparks, Nevada since building began last year.

Apple iMac 2015

Apple

Cupertino's latest iMac comes equipped with 4K and 5K displays

Apple has updated its desktop iMac computer for 2015, and everything that comes with it. Along with the wireless keyboard and Magic Mouse, Apple’s Magic Trackpad—sold separately—gained new abilities today too.

Apple’s recent fall event was packed tight with new iPhones, iPads and even a stylus, but no new announcements regarding the traditional computer. While many computer users opt for the laptop nowadays, desktops still remain the machine of preference among professional users. Here are the changes iMac buyers can expect.

iMac 2015

Apple

Here's what's changed from last year's iMac

The New iMac

Some Apple prosumers have already been tempted by the sleek, black, trashcan-like Mac Pro unveiled last year. But for those looking for a cheaper desktop option now have the upgraded iMac. Cupertino has added an optional 4K display to the 21.5-inch model, and a 5K screen to every version of the 27-inch model. Apple has applied the name tag “Retina” to its 4K and 5K options, its marketing term meaning pixels can’t be seen from the user's average viewing distance.

The iMac ships with a similar physical design to last year, that is, a slim, tapered monitor that contains all the computer's guts, perched on a thin, elegant base stand. All the new iMacs come with at least 1TB of storage standard and continue to offer the option of Apple’s Fusion Drive: a combined hard-disk and solid-state drive for supposedly quicker data access (oft-used data is stored on the speedier-to-access SSD). Intel i5 processors can be found throughout the entire lineup of iMacs with varying clock speeds and RAM configurations. Graphics are handled by Intel’s Iris Pro Graphics 6200 and AMD’s Radeon R9 M380 on the high end. The cheapest iMac has to settle for Intel’s HD Graphics 6000 chip.

The iMacs bring the usual range of ports: USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, SD Card reader and more. Though interestingly, Apple isn't yet offering built-in USB type C support, which is the only option on the new Macbook laptop. The full range of customization options can be found here.

The new iMac starts at $1,099 and goes up to $2,299.

Apple Magic Mouse 2

Apple

The new Magic Mouse is now rechargeable

Magic Mouse 2

Apple’s gesture-enabled laser mouse is finally getting rid of replaceable alkaline batteries. While Cupertino sells its own brand of rechargeable AA batteries for use in the first Magic Mouse, the built-in lithium-ion battery found in the Magic Mouse 2 is much potentially more useful for many desktop users. The Magic Mouse 2 will use the company’s Lightning port to transfer power and comes with an extra Lightning cable by default, meaning you don't have to run out to the store if you're out of batteries. This wireless mouse connects to your machine via Bluetooth and can be used with any Apple computer, not just the new iMacs. Though if you plan on using it while charging, we've got bad news for you...

The Magic Mouse 2 will go for $79 when purchased separately, although it is included with every new iMac.

Magic Trackpad 2

Apple

The next Magic Trackpad will also bring rechargeable battery support

Magic Trackpad 2

Apple has also improved their external trackpad. The touch-sensitive device will still offer a glass surface to users, allowing them to click, tap and swipe to their heart’s content, but the device's profile has been slimmed down, losing the cylindrical balancing end found on older models. This iteration of the Magic Trackpad packs in a rechargeable battery

Most importantly, feature-wise, it will allow for Force Touch. Like the latest 12-inch MacBook, pressure sensitivity in the trackpad allow users to push harder for new interactivity not available on older models. In this case: quick word definitions, and more accurate rewinding/fast-forwarding in videos. Multi-finger gestures to navigate back and forward in the browser or to access Mission Control also remain part of Apple’s trackpad experience. Unlike the new Magic Mouse, the updated trackpad is only sold separately, and for a heftier $129 (compared to the older model's opening price at $69 or less).

Apple Magic Keyboard

Apple

Apple's rechargeable keyboard comes with a slightly altered design

Magic Keyboard

Apple is also adding some magic to its wireless keyboard offering as well. Like the trackpad and mouse, Apple’s new keyboard ditches the double As for power, and makes use of the Lightning cable charging solution instead. This alone makes the keyboard a worthwhile upgrade for those who prefer direct power connections.

Apple also claims it has improved key stability by 33 percent. Ditching the thin design, Cupertino’s newest keyboard fills out the body—presumably to fill the device with more battery now that it relies on a rechargeable lithium-ion. The keyboard will lighten your wallet, costing $99 when purchased separately, though it also ships included with new iMacs.

Bottom Line: Built-In Batteries For All

The iMac’s 4K and 5K displays will be the most striking feature for Mac OS X desktop users. But rechargeable batteries on the new keyboard and mice will affect many Apple users day-to-day. Instead of stealing a pair of batteries from the remote or paying an extra $30 for Apple’s rechargeable AAs, all the energy you need will be a two-hour charge away. That's made more convenient when considering many iPhone-using iMac owners have a Lightning cable sticking out of their computer right now. While $80-130 could be considered expensive when compared to the competition, some may opt for the Lightning-compatible accessories based on the virtue of this powering method alone.

Every year, the Hubble Space Telescope snaps a family portrait of the Solar System. It images each planet in detail, giving scientists a chance to spot any changes over time.

Jupiter is the first to get its new close-up, and the new ultra-HD 4K images have revealed some interesting new features, including a rare wave just above the planet's equator, and a stringy feature in its Great Red Spot.

“Every time we look at Jupiter, we get tantalizing hints that something really exciting is going on,” said NASA planetary scientist Amy Simon in a press release. “This time is no exception.”

Jupiter's wave

NASA/ESA/Goddard/UCBerkeley/JPL-Caltech/STScI

The vertical lines point to the wave, while the arrows indicate cyclones.

Scientists haven't seen anything like Jupiter's wave since Voyager 2 flew past the gas giant in 1979. At the time, scientists thought it might have been a fluke, but the new observations suggests it's just rare. Similar waves can be seen in Earth's atmosphere when cyclones are forming.

During the 10-hour observation period, scientists could see the new filament that threads through the Great Red Spot (a storm larger than the entire Earth) twist and rotate.

Jupiter's filament

NASA/ESA/Goddard/UCBerkeley/JPL-Caltech/STScI

Before and after images show the movements of a filament that threads through Jupiter's red spot.

Jupiter's red spot is 150 miles shorter than it was last year, confirming that the giant storm continues to shrink.

Courtesy of Facebook

Facebook is continuing their push to make video a central part of the platform. Back in August, the company announced that public figures could share live video with fans and last month, it integrated 360-degree video.

VP of Product Management Will Cathcart announced today that Facebook has been testing several new video features for iPhones, including the ability to watch a Facebook video while scrolling through your newsfeed or messaging a friend, the option to save videos to watch later, and suggestions of additional videos to watch based on your viewing history.

The social network is also trying out a video-exclusive platform, which, according to the release, will include videos that Facebook users saved for later, and ones from friends, pages they follow, or other video publishers on Facebook. For now only "a small number of people" have access to the feature (it hasn't been announced who those users are yet), but if you're one of them, it can be accessed by tapping the “Videos” icon at the bottom of the Facebook iPhone app or in the left-hand menu under the “Favorites” section on the web.

Publishers will also find new tools are being tested for their benefit. Facebook is testing a “video matching technology” like that of YouTube’s Content ID, which would ensure that a video's creator gets credit and potential monetization if their video was re-uploaded by another user. Facebook also made updates to Page Insights and better control and customization in the video uploading tool.

“The last few years have been exciting for video,” writes Cathcart in the release, “and we look forward to seeing more people discover the videos that matter to them on Facebook.”

Oculus Toybox Demo

Oculus on Youtube

The Oculus Toybox demo hints at why Facebook acquired Oculus

Just a day after Google released Street View for its budget virtual reality headset Cardboard, Facebook-owned Oculus is showing what’s capable of on the Oculus Rift VR platform. The official Oculus account on YouTube has added a video showcasing a new demo of a system called "Toybox."

In the past we’ve seen some prototype games and full-fledged counterparts on the Oculus, but few simple time wasters, and even fewer with simultaneous multiplayer capabilities. With the latest Oculus demonstration, we see two VR users playing ping pong, fighting with toys, and setting off fireworks—all in virtual reality. It's the simultaneous nature of the multiplayer that's really special here, showing how virtual reality can potentially connect people around the world and let them inhabit the same immersive digital world, more closely replicating actually being together in real life.

Many people still associate the the primary purpose of VR with video games, and the plethora of VR games like the Unreal Engine 4-equipped game Bullet Train or HTC Vive’s immersive Portal demo show how well VR can be applied to a gaming context. But Facebook will likely focus on the social implications of virtual reality as well, and demos like Toybox by Oculus start to get at why Facebook spent $2 billion on the startup company in the first place.

BattleView360 Helmet On Author

Kelsey D. Atherton

I wasn’t expecting holograms when I woke up this morning. Several hours later, seated on a chair at the Association of the United States Army exhibition hall, I was looking through the people standing right in front of me, the environment behind them projected onto a hologram lens hanging off my helmet. I looked ridiculous, but felt omniscient.

The holographic screen is an updated version of BAE's Q-Sight, a holographic display that's been used by the military of the United Kingdom since 2007. This version is in full color, and was hooked up to a tower behind me, where three 120-degree cameras scanned the crowd. Their images were then stitched together by a computer into a panorama, and fed into both the lens in front of my face and a laptop on a counter nearby. There was also video shot by a Swedish armored personnel carrier using the same system, and as I turned my head, the camera angle of the video feed moved too -- a more combat-ready use of the camera than the crowds of a convention hall.

The other system BAE demonstrated, with a name that sounds like a G.I. Joe playset, “BattleView 360” is billed in official press materials a way to make “see-through armor." That’s a clever phrase, but a bit of a misnomer. The images in the headset all come from external cameras. In one imagined use, the cameras are on top of a tank or troop transport, giving the crew inside a view of the outside world without exposing themselves to gunfire. Useful enough, but BattleView 360 can do far more interesting things.

A tablet hooked into the system displays maps updated in real time, showing not just the terrain but ranges of known enemy weapons in the theater, allowing drivers to steer clear of artillery. Troops sitting in the crew compartment of an armored vehicle could use tablets on patrol, scanning the map for information the driver and navigator may have missed. Most interesting to me was the option to toggle on a feed from a drone camera. If set up, the navigator inside could switch into hologram vision from a drone’s gimballed camera, looking at the area from above as they travelled.

So far, the system has been tested with a Swedish CV-90, and demonstrated on an American Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle. There are no plans yet for a military to adopt the BattleView 360 system.

As I scanned the crowd during the demonstration, vehicles normally obscured by the people in front of me lit up with little red triangles. For half a second, I felt like Luke Skywalker, targeting-camera ready.

Dragonfly Eyes

Cecil Sanders/FlickrCC by 2.0

Ever wonder what life would look like if you were literally a fly on the wall? Or, better yet, a dragonfly in the forest? Actually seeing the world through another's eyes is still very much science fiction, but thanks to advances in virtual reality, you can come close.

At the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Grizedale Forest last month, visitors were invited to put on Oculus Rift virtual reality helmets and backpacks, and experience a 360-degree view of the forest, as seen by dragonflies, frogs, and other local creatures. The helmets let participants see an imagined perspective of what the animals see, while vibrations from the backpack immersed them further in the experience.

A creative collective called Marshmallow Laser Feast put the project together. While they weren't able to precisely recreate the vision of animals (dragonflies see more colors than humans can, something that even the highest-tech VR can't fix) they could give an impression of what the world looks like through the eyes of other species.

To get the basis for their footage, the team used drones and special 360-degree cameras to capture footage. They also recorded the sounds of the forest, incorporating them into the final product.

The inaugural exhibit in has ended, but the project's organizers plan on having another exhibition in Hamsterly Forest in the UK next May, and will be announcing tour dates to other locations in Europe soon. In the meantime, watch the teaser for the project here:

Illustration of an asteroid belt around a star

NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Kepler space telescope's job is to find faraway planets that could potentially support life. But as The Atlantic reports, scientists are exploring the possibility that the telescope may have detected something even more exciting.

For four years, the telescope stared at a patch of sky, waiting for each star to darken, which would indicate an exoplanet passing in front of it. The telescope monitored more than 150,000 stars, but one star in particular stood out to citizen scientists who were helping to analyze the Kepler data: KIC 8462852, located 1480 light-years away.

When a planet passes in front of a star, the star dims only for a few hours or days, and on a regular basis-- every 365 days, for example. But, at irregular intervals, the star KIC 8462852 darkens by as much as 80 percent, and it stays dark for anywhere between 5 and 80 days.

What could cause the weird light fluctuations? The researchers who discovered the behavior call it "bizarre."

"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider."

In a recent paper, researchers have ruled out the possibility of faulty data or telescope jostling. Something appears to be blocking out the light, but it's not a planet, and the star is too old to be surrounded by the rings of debris that tend to circle around younger stars. Neither do the scientists think it could be caused by a recent collision.

That leaves just a few hypotheses. One is a cloud of comets that got pulled into orbit by a migrating star--if the comets are breaking up as they revolve around the star, that could cause the irregular pattern of dimming. The paper notes that this is the most promising explanation.

There is one other hypothesis, however.

“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider," Penn State astronomer Jason Wright told The Atlantic, "but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Wright, and many other astronomers, have postulated that we could detect advanced civilizations through their technology. The idea is that as alien civilizations become highly advanced, they'll need more and more energy to fuel their high-tech lifestyles. Perhaps the aliens would position solar collectors directly around a star, filling the star's orbit until some or all of its light is blocked. These hypothetical alien megastructures are called Dyson swarms or spheres.

To find out what's behind the star's mysterious dimming behavior, Wright and his colleagues want to listen in with a big radio telescope, to see if it's giving off the same types of radio waves that typify technology here on Earth.

[ArXiv via The Atlantic]