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The 19th century U.K. landscape painter J. M. W. Turner is known as “the painter of light,” as the layered colors and texture of his paintings helped him convey sunshine cascading through his scenes. Prior to Turner, oil painters had a difficult time conveying such layered colors, partly because of their paint. Early oil paints—a combination of oils, pigments, and resins—took weeks, if not years, to fully dry, making it impractical to layer additional colors on top. But Turner and others added paint matrix, called “gumtion” or “megilp,” a mixture of lead acetate, linseed oil, turpentine, and dried resin from mastic trees. The butter-colored, jellylike concoction enabled oil paints to dry within days, allowing painters to layer on extra colors. Now, researchers have figured out why the mixture works. The lead in the mix generates a highly reactive form of oxygen that reacts with the oils, speeding their drying time. It also catalyzes the formation of an elastic organic-inorganic gel that holds pigments in place when additional paint layers are added, the researchers report today in Angewandte Chemie. Turner and others at the time took advantage, adding new layers of paint on top to give their paintings a vibrancy not seen before.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation on Monday launched a brand new version of its Compute Module for industrial-type applications. The Compute Module 3 (CM3) is based on the latest Raspberry Pi 3 and thus, affords a much higher level of performance. On the small SODIMM-layout module, you’ll find a 64-bit Broadcom BCM2837 quad-core processor clocked at up to 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM and 4GB of eMMC on-module flash storage. There’s also a new Compute Module 3 Lite (CM3L) that packs the same quad-core processor and 1GB of memory but drops the eMMC storage in favor of letting users wire up their own eMMC or SD card using the module’s pins. It’s worth noting that the new modules are 1mm taller than the original. What’s more, the processor core supply (VBAT) can draw a lot more current which unfortunately means the chip can run a lot hotter under heavy CPU loads. Depending on the application, this could present thermal-related issues. The original Compute Module arrived in April 2014 but because the new modules are based on the latest Raspberry Pi 3, the foundation has skipped over the “2” naming convention entirely (there was no “middle” module based on the Raspberry Pi 2 generation). Pricing for the CM3 and CM3L is set at $30 and $25, respectively (minus tax and shipping) and applies to orders of all sizes (in other words, no bulk order discounts). The foundation is keeping the original Compute Module around as well, slashing its price down to $25. There’s also a full development kit that foundation partners RS and Premier Farnell are offering, we’re told, which should include everything you’d need to get started designing on the new modules.

People have tried to explain Namibia’s fairy circles for centuries. Locals call these patches of bare ground surrounded by rings of tall grass “god’s footprints” or the mark of a fire-breathing, underground dragon. Over the past 16 years, scientists have also gotten in on the game, attributing the rings to intense competition between termite colonies or even water-thirsty plants. Now, mathematical ecologists say that both termites and plants might be behind the rings—thanks to shortages of food and moisture. The edge of the Namib Desert, where the rings form, is a dry, sandy place that sees less than 100 millimeters of rainfall each year. That’s likely enough moisture to support the growth of some grass, but not enough to make possible a continuous grassland. The rings are also found in the outback of western Australia. But scientists still don’t know the exact conditions that lead to the circles. Corina Tarnita didn’t start out to resolve this debate. A theoretical biologist at Princeton University, she wanted to understand how nature creates patterns on different spatial scales—from tigers’ stripes to landscape-level phenomena such as fairy circles. To do so, she creates mathematical models that predict what patterns will look like given the different factors involved. She and her husband, Princeton ecologist Rob Pringle, thought that fairy circles might be a good way to test the model. With fellow theoretical ecologist Juan A. Bonachela from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, U.K., they first predicted how termites might transform the landscape, given available vegetation. In the simulation, they found that over decades colonies would appear and disappear (much like observations of actual fairy circles) and that they would eventually self-organize into regularly spaced honeycomb patterns, with each colony surrounded by six others. To find out how plants might contribute, the researchers turned to already published work, which suggests that plants also self-organize based on available moisture. “There is not enough water to sustain a complete coverage with continuous grass vegetation, which leads to the gap pattern,” explains Stephan Getzin, an ecologist at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved with the new work. Combining these two models, Bonachela and Tarnita came to a mixed solution: Termites may create the large-scale pattern, whereas plants may establish a small-scale pattern, they report today in Nature. With their mound building, the termites reshape the water flow that leads to barren patches surrounded by a ring of tall grasses. But the model also predicted there would be regularly spaced clumps of grass between the fairy circles that should create a pattern within a pattern. When the team photographed fairy circles in Namibia, it found these clumps of grass, suggesting the model was on target. Others have overlooked these clumps, Tarnita says. The conclusion makes sense to some. “To me the paper shows that multiscale patterns in Namibia can be explained by a coupled termite-vegetation model,” says M. G. “Max” Rietkerk, an ecologist at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He says this new study could help explain patterns found in other systems and fields. But for others, the answer is already clear. “There is absolutely no doubt that fairy circles are a product of ecosystem engineering achieved by soil-living termites,” says Norbert Jürgens, an ecologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany, who first proposed in 2013 termites were responsible and thinks this paper fully supports that idea. On the other side, physicist Cristián Fernández-Oto, soon to be at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel, says the paper does not change his thinking that plants are the “main ingredient.” So the jury is still out: Scientists simply don’t have enough observations of real termites to match them to the model. “We need experiments to establish causes,” says Walter Tschinkel, an emeritus entomologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has studied fairy circles, but not with this group. “[We also need] a whole lot more knowledge of the biology of the termites and … of the grasses involved.” Tarnita’s group agrees that experiments altering termite mounds, soil moisture, and local plants there still need to be done. Who will do this work is up in the air. Until then, says Rietkerk, “the ecological riddle still remains.”

Google has announced a new update to Google Maps that brings deeper integration with ride hailing service Uber. While it was already possible to see a pickup ETA and price estimate for Uber, Lyft and others within Google Maps, now you can also book an Uber without leaving the app. As part of the update you can now get an overview of where the cars are by looking at the map, just as if you were using the dedicated Uber application. The bottom half of the screen will show tabs for different services that you have linked your account to and a carousel with circular icons below that where users can pick their preferred ride type. Once you’ve booked a ride you’ll see a small card across the bottom with your driver’s details along with help, call and cancel buttons. You don’t even need to have the Uber app installed on your smartphone in order to hail a ride, though you will need an active account of course. You can take a look at information about your destination while en route. So menus, hours and other helpful details are only a swipe away. It’s unclear if you can hail rides from Lyft and competing services in-app, or if it’s only showing ETA and price estimates for the time being, since Google’s announcement only mentions its integration with Uber. The update is starting to roll out today and will be available globally for Google Maps on Android and iOS.

Many decades ago, electrical products such as TVs and audio systems often contained large amounts of wood in their construction. Metal and plastic builds eventually became more po[CENSORED]r, but Computer Direct Outlet has taken inspiration from that retro wood style with the Volta V, a PC that comes in a handcrafted wooden case. Modders have been putting PCs into all sorts of weird and wonderful cases over the years, but the Volta V is the first of its kind to be commercially available. And don’t be fooled into thinking the stylish chassis means Computer Direct has ignored the hardware; this PC can be customized with high-end components like the Titan X Pascal and Nvidia’s Quadro P6000, as well as a Skylake, Broadwell E, or Xeon CPU. Each case comes in either Bamboo or, for $41 more, walnut. The material is sustainable and eco-friendly, designed to last a very long time. Moreover, Computer Direct Outlet says a percentage of the profits from each Volta V will go to Upstate Forever, a nonprofit that “Promotes Clean Air & Water, Sustainable Communities, and Land Trust” in South Carolina. As with other similarly small PC cases, the Volta looks as if heat could be an issue. But the company says it has been designed with airflow in mind. It comes with an Asetek 545LC compact liquid CPU cooler, uses only blower style GPUs, and pulls cool air from below the case, which is then pushed out of the sides. There are also two large, easily removable magnetic dust filters for easy cleaning, and even a hideaway underneath for storing your keyboard when not in use. Computer Direct Outlet considers the Volta V to be a piece of classic furniture as much as it is a PC. And the fact it’s made from domestically-sourced, selectively cut trees is reflected in the price. You can reserve one now for $399, with shipping set for this March.

An SS-520 rocket in an undated file photo from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. Japan's troubled space efforts suffered another setback today with the aborted launch of a tiny rocket intended to put a microsatellite into orbit. The rocket lifted off successfully at 8:33 am Japan time and was on a normal flight path. But ground controllers for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) canceled ignition of the rocket's second stage because the craft stopped sending telemetry data shortly after liftoff, according to an agency press release. The craft then plunged into the ocean southeast of JAXA's Uchinoura Space Center, on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's 4 main islands. JAXA's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) built the SS-520 launch vehicle-which was 10 meters long, had a diameter of 52 centimeters, and weighed 2600 kilogram-using off-the-shelf electronics and a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer body tube to minimize costs. Primarily a sounding rocket, designed to perform observations during a suborbital flight, the SS-520 could also loft small satellites. This was the rocket's third mission; it was carrying a 3-kilogram microsatellite, developed by a University of Tokyo team to conduct Earth observations for just one month before falling back into the atmosphere. At a press conference today, JAXA officials told local reporters that the mission budget was $4.4 million. This is the latest in a lengthening list of ISAS rocket and satellite failures. Last February, the institute successfully launched the $300 million ASTRO-H x-ray satellite, jointly developed with NASA, only to have the craft break up 5 weeks later. Investigators concluded that ASTRO-H, renamed Hitomi after launch, had suffered multiple spacecraft control malfunctions that they traced back to “insufficient project management oversight of safety, reliability, and satellite safety and system design.” ISAS is currently overhauling mission management to minimize the risk of future failures. The cause of the SS-520 failure will be investigated, JAXA officials said today's press conference.

Looking to boost the graphics horsepower of your HTPC, small-form-factor machine or pre-built system but don’t have room for a full-size graphics cards? Perhaps Gigabyte’s latest GTX 1050 or GTX 1050 Ti may fit the bill. The hardware maker’s new GeForce GTX 1050 OC Low Profile 2G and Low Profile 4G aren’t nearly as large as their bigger brothers yet still pack in plenty of punch. The 2G model features a base clock of 1,366 MHz in game mode and 1,392 MHz in OC mode while the 4G Ti model is good for 1,303 MHz and 1,328 MHz in gaming and OC modes, respectively. As the names suggest, the standard card comes with 2GB of GDDR5 memory with the Ti variant doubling the capacity to 4GB. Both also support up to four displays (via two HDMI connectors, a DVI connector and a DisplayPort connector) and consume two expansion slots. What’s more, they don’t require auxiliary power via 6-pin PCIe cable meaning you won’t need a beefy PSU to run them. Plus, that’s one less cable restricting airflow and junking up what may otherwise be a tidy installation. Gigabyte hasn’t yet pinned a price tag to these cards although as The Tech Report correctly highlights, half-height cards like these usually command a few bucks more than their standard-size variants. MSI, who launched similar slim 1050 cards late last year, priced theirs around the $155 mark.

AMD's Ryzen will launch during GDC 2017, according to a set of notes for an AMD presentation at the upcoming Game Developer Conference (GDC). This little tidbit, which was discovered by several websites, gives Ryzen a more narrow launch window than AMD's vague "Q1 2017" statements. The most interesting line from AMD's presentation notes was as follows: "Join AMD Game Engineering team members for an introduction to the recently-launched AMD Ryzen CPU followed by advanced optimization topics." The presentation notes have since been updated to remove the words "recently-launched". Before the slight changes, AMD was saying that Ryzen will be "recently-launched" by the time they give this presentation at GDC, which suggests the line of CPUs will launch no later than the end of GDC on March 3rd. There is no firm date for when AMD will give this presentation, but GDC itself runs from February 27th to March 3rd. The most likely scenario is AMD will launch Ryzen towards the start of GDC 2017, and give this presentation later in the conference. Of course, this hasn't been confirmed by AMD, and it appears as though several Ryzen details including clock speeds and launch prices may still be up in the air. The good news is PC hardware fans may only have to wait a month and a half to get their hands on Ryzen CPUs. We're eager to get these chips in our labs for testing, and see how AMD's biggest update to their CPU platform in years performs against Intel competition.

On its way to collapsing directly into a black hole, primordial gas pools in areas of higher gravity in this supercomputer simulation of the newborn universe. Here's a thought experiment that has unsettled astrophysicists: Start the clock at the beginning of time. Form a black hole in the usual way, through the collapse of a massive star. To make it grow, force-feed it with gas, which will resist being devoured by heating up and dispersing as it nears the black hole's maw. Try to grow a black hole fast enough to explain the ones that existed in the real universe when it was just a billion years old: monsters a billion times the mass of the sun that drive the powerful beacons called quasars. "It's very difficult," says Amy Reines, an observational astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Astronomer Nico Cappelluti of Yale University is more definitive. "There is no way to grow such a massive black hole from an ordinary stellar black hole," he says. But he and others see hints of a faster route involving primordial gas clouds, as they described last week at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Grapevine, Texas. Some theorists had already suggested that, instead of coming from collapsed stars, the behemoth black holes in the early universe could have gotten a head start. Huge gas clouds left by the big bang might have quickly shrunk under their own gravity and, instead of splintering into many stars, condensed into black hole seeds 10 thousand to 100 thousand times heavier than the sun. Those seeds would have grown further, to billions of solar masses, by sucking in stars and gas. But although a few candidates for such objects have been timidly proposed, these "direct collapse" black holes would be hard to spot and harder to confirm with current technology. A new clue to their possible existence, which Cappelluti's team presented at the meeting, is an eerie concordance found in views of the distant universe that rely on different wavelengths. Along with the familiar cosmic microwave background—the afterglow of the big bang—the distant universe is suffused with an infrared background, thought to come from galaxies and stars too faint and far away to see. With all known galaxies and stars scrubbed away, the infrared background is about 20 times splotchier than expected. Similarly splotchy is the cosmic x-ray background, emitted by matter falling into black holes in the distant universe. And in work Cappelluti and his colleagues are now preparing for publication, they show that some of the infrared and x-ray patchiness matches, across a swath of sky about three times larger than previously tested. "The more we look at it, the more confirmation we find," Cappelluti says. As to the cause, "you need to have sources that are very powerful in the x-ray, very powerful in the infrared, and do not emit anything in any other band." Direct collapse black holes, gobbling up dense gas clouds in the early universe, could fit the bill. Another lead comes from the Chandra Deep Field South, an image created by a space-based x-ray telescope that observed the same patch of sky for a cumulative 81 days. Released at the meeting, the image shows more than 2000 black holes glowing brightly as they swallow up matter. These probably aren't newborn direct collapse black holes—they are too close and recent. But just as important is what can't be seen: the fainter glows from smaller black holes, slowly putting on weight, as expected if supermassive black holes were born star-sized and grew gradually. "I think it's a hint" that monster black holes might have sprung into existence quickly, through direct collapse, says Niel Brandt, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in State College who led the team interpreting the data. Neither clue is definitive, and theorists' models don't give clear guidance about what observers should look for next to confirm that direct collapse black holes exist. "The model predictions," says Brandt, "are a bit squishy." And although astronomer Asantha Cooray of the University of California, Irvine, thinks the correlation between the infrared and x-ray sky is real, there might be an easier way to explain it: loose halos of stars around galaxies. "We confirm the measurement, but we cannot confirm the interpretation," Cooray says. Astronomers plan other assaults on the question—for example, surveys of dwarf galaxies, among the universe's most pristine. They may offer "some insight into how the first seeds were formed, and have a memory of the seeding scenario," Reines says. If black hole seeds come from stars, the process should have given every dwarf galaxy its own supermassive black hole. But if seeds are born big, under special conditions, they should be rarer, and many dwarf galaxies would lack a black hole. Directly detecting a direct collapse black hole, though, may require future instruments. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, for example, might see one condensing in infrared light, whereas the proposed Lynx x-ray telescope might spot a newborn black hole, fresh from a collapsing cloud, snacking on its first meals

CES 2017 is officially in the books although one company, gaming peripheral maker Razer, will be dealing with the show’s repercussions for months to come. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan said in a Facebook post this morning that two of their prototypes were stolen from their booth at CES. Tan didn’t specify which specific items were missing although most seem to believe it may have been the tripe monitor gaming laptop and its gaming projector – Project Valerie and Project Ariana, respectively. Razer has filed the necessary reports and is working with show management as well as law enforcement on the matter. Tan said they treat theft / larceny, and if relevant to this case, industrial espionage, very seriously. It’s cheating, he said, and cheating doesn’t sit well with them. Penalties for such crimes are grievous, he noted, adding that anyone who would do this clearly isn’t very smart. Tan said they’ve worked months on end to conceptualize and develop the missing units and that they pride themselves in pushing the envelope to deliver the latest and greatest. Given the sheer size of the show floor and the number of people that flood into it each day, I’m honestly surprised that theft isn’t a bigger problem. Security guards are great for keeping things out of the show that don’t belong but there’s no easy way to determine if you leave with something that doesn’t belong to you. Then again, it’s entirely possible that the prototypes were nabbed after the show concluded which would suggest that either a set builder or competitor may be to blame but I digress. Anyone with information regarding the theft is asked to reach out to Razer with information via e-mail. All information provided, the company says, will be kept in the strictest of confidence. Update: Razer provided the following statement to Polygon: “This note is to confirm that two Razer Project Valerie laptop prototypes were stolen from the Razer booth at CES. The product was taken from the Razer press room at approximately 4 p.m. on Sunday, January 8, 2017. A $25,000 reward is being offered for original information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of a criminal suspect. Razer, in its sole discretion, will decide who is entitled to a reward and in what amount. Razer may pay only a portion of the maximum reward offered. The decision will be based primarily upon law enforcement's evaluation of the value of the information provided. When there are multiple claimants, the reward will be shared in amounts determined by Razer. Razer associates are not eligible for the reward. This reward offer is good for one year from the date it is first offered, unless extended by Razer. Information about the theft can be sent to legal@razerzone.com. Razer will not publicly disclose material that it receives or details about respondents, except to those persons with whom Razer is directly working to resolve this matter or as may be required by law.”

Back at CES 2016 more than a year ago, Dell showed off the UP3017Q, an impressive 30-inch 4K OLED monitor for professionals. The display was first expected to go on sale in March of 2016, but the end of March came and went without any official release. In July, Dell was reportedly still "tuning" the monitor and claimed it would be available "soon". Since the middle of last year, there have been no further updates from Dell on the status of the UP3017Q. However, according to French publication Les Numeriques (via The Tech Report), Dell officials at CES 2017 confirmed the monitor was canceled. The reason behind this cancellation revolves around image quality issues, specifically color drift when the monitor was viewed off-center. Dell worked to resolve these issues over several months, but ultimately couldn't come up with a suitable solution. In the end, the monitor didn't meet Dell's standards and was cancelled. Considering the monitor's exorbitant $5,000 price tag, it was probably a good move on Dell's part not to release the display in a less-than-ideal state. On the other hand, the UP3017Q would have been a very unique monitor, packing a 10-bit 4K 120 Hz OLED panel with a 400,000:1 contrast ratio, and support for 97.8% of the DCI-P3 color space.

Modular hardware hasn’t exactly resonated with consumers. PC-on-a-stick devices like Intel’s Compute Stick and the sea of me-too devices that followed seemingly vanished overnight. Similarly, modular smartphone concepts like Project Ara never made it off the ground while companies like LG that did make it to market with modular products no doubt regret the decision. Nevertheless, the industry isn’t willing to give up on the idea just yet as Intel has demonstrated at CES with a new modular compute platform calling the Intel Compute Card. The idea is pretty straightforward. Intel’s Compute Card is essentially a full-blown computer with an Intel SoC, memory, storage and wireless connectivity that fits on a card roughly as thick as a few credit cards. Said card then gets plugged into the Compute Card slot of devices like interactive refrigerators, security cameras or IoT gateways. The lure here is the ability to easily upgrade the performance of a connected device without having to replace it entirely. Intel said it is already working with several large partners on the endeavor including HP, Dell, Lenovo and Sharp as well as multiple regional partners. The Compute Card seems like a great idea in theory although I’m not certain it’ll take off. Samsung tried essentially this exact same thing – albeit on a much smaller scale – with its HDTVs a few years back through a product called the Smart Evolution upgrade kit. Samsung seemingly discontinued that product line in early 2016. Intel says its Compute Card will be available by mid-2017 in a range of processor options including seventh-gen Intel Core chips.

Nvidia's G-Sync HDR technology was first hinted at in the early launch of Asus' impressive PG27UQ gaming monitor, and now the company has officially unveiled what is essentially the next evolution in G-Sync displays. The idea behind G-Sync HDR is similar to AMD's FreeSync 2 technology: it provides gamers with a zero input lag HDR gaming experience on a new collection of top-end monitors. These monitors have been created in partnership with AU Optronics, who have created a brand new panel that will be seen in a range of displays, including the Asus PG27UQ. All of the PG27UQ's features will be seen in first-generation G-Sync HDR displays. You'll be getting a 4K 144 Hz panel, complete with G-Sync's existing variable refresh technology for a tear- and stutter-free experience. There will also be 384-zone backlights for the highest contrast between bright and dark areas, along with Quantum Dot technology. Initial G-Sync HDR displays will feature a color space 25% larger than sRGB, which Nvidia says is "close" to the DCI-P3 standard. G-Sync HDR itself, however, supports HDR10, so in the future we can expect G-Sync HDR monitors with even wider color gamuts. Like FreeSync 2, it appears as though PC games will need to integrate specific support for G-Sync HDR if they want to utilize the full capabilities of G-Sync HDR monitors. Mass Effect: Andromeda and Shadow Warrior 2 are two games set to support G-Sync HDR at its launch, and we can expect more titles to support HDR on PC in the future. G-Sync HDR monitors from Asus and Acer will be available later this year, although Nvidia didn't state specifically when.

Scientists have identified the source of mysterious flashes of cosmic radio waves known as fast radio bursts (FRBs): a surprisingly small galaxy more than 3 billion light-years away. The discovery may help researchers understand one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. ”It’s an observational breakthrough,” says Neil Gehrels, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the new discovery. ”We now have definitive proof” of their extragalactic nature, adds team member Jason Hessels of ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy in Dwingeloo. FRBs have been a hot subject since 2007. That year, a team led by radio astronomer Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University in Morgantown accidentally found the first FRB by analyzing old observations of the 64-meter radio telescope in Parkes, Australia. Since then, astronomers have stumbled upon 17 more FRBs, which usually last for at most a few milliseconds. Fortunately, one discovered in 2012 with the 305-meter radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, turned out to repeat at irregular intervals. Known as FRB 121102, its location on the sky has now been monitored for many tens of hours by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in Socorro, New Mexico (an array of 27 radio dishes), and the European VLBI Network (EVN)—a continent-wide collaboration of radio telescopes. Between 23 August and 18 September 2016, the VLA detected nine bursts. Those observations, published today in Nature, reveal that the location of the bursts coincides with a faint, remote galaxy that also hosts a faint, persistent source of radio waves. Four additional bursts from the same source were found on 20 September 2016 by the EVN, which, along with data from the Arecibo dish, helped provide an even more precise localization within the galaxy, according to a paper published today in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Using the optical 8.1-meter Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, astronomers then managed to determine the galaxy’s distance: more than 3 billion light-years, as reported in a second paper in the same issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Surprisingly, the host galaxy [of FRB 121102] is a puny, star-forming dwarf system,” says ASTRON’s Cees Bassa, who led the optical observations together with Shriharsh Tendulkar of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Because dwarf galaxies contain so few stars, this suggests that whatever is responsible for FRB 121102 has a better chance of forming in tiny galaxies than large, spiral ones. Astronomers had thought that FRBs come from one-off, cataclysmic events—for instance the formation of a black hole by the merger of two neutron stars, the compact remains of supernova explosions. But the repeating nature of FRB 121102 reveals that whatever is producing the bursts cannot be destroyed in the process. Hessels thinks the culprit may be occasional explosions from extremely rapidly spinning, highly magnetized neutron stars. But given the energies involved, he admits, those would need to have spin and magnetic properties beyond anything seen in the Milky Way so far. FRBs are probably not directly related to long gamma ray bursts (another type of explosive event that preferentially occurs in dwarf galaxies), because there are just too few gamma ray bursts and too many FRBs. Alternative explanations, like matter falling into black holes, cannot yet be ruled out. Rapid follow-up studies of FRBs with NASA’s Swift and Fermi spacecraft could help solve the mystery by finding x-ray or gamma ray light accompanying the radio bursts, Gehrels says. Another riddle is why FRB 121102 appears to be the only repeater. Hessels suspects that all FRBs observed to date are from the same type of source. But Lorimer is not so sure. “My guess at the moment is that [FRB 121102] is not representative of all FRBs, and that there are multiple classes.”

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Though U.S. President Barack Obama is leaving office soon, he will be forever immortalized in taxonomy thanks to scientists who have named species after him. Nine different species from extinct lizards to trapdoor spiders got their names from the 44th U.S. president, which is more than any of his predecessors. (Theodore Roosevelt comes in as a close second with seven.) Here are the creatures that are saying “Thanks, Obama,” for their presidential names. Aptostichus barackobamai (trapdoor spider) In 2012, biologist Jason Bond of Auburn University in Alabama declared the existence of 33 new trapdoor spider species in the journal ZooKeys. He named many of them after celebrities like Stephen Colbert (Aptostichus stephencolberti) and even one after the aggressive desert-burrowing menace from Star Wars called the sarlacc (A. sarlacc). But Bond named one spider A. barackobamai in appreciation for Obama. “I feel like his presidency is noteworthy,” Bond told Wired. “He’s been a true statesman in the face of ridiculous opposition.” You can find A. barackobamai among the redwoods in north-central California, ambushing countless dim-witted insects, frogs, and even snakes that venture past its hidden trapdoors. Etheostoma Obama (spangled darter) The longest river in Tennessee is home to the darter, a tiny fish named for its tendency to zip around cold, clear waters. When examining color variation in the common speckled darter, biologists Steve Layman from Geosyntec Consultants, an environmental consulting and engineering firm based in Atlanta, and Richard Mayden at Saint Louis University in Missouri realized they weren’t looking at just one species, but five. As they describe in their November 2012 paper in the Bulletin of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, the duo named one Etheostoma obama, or the spangled darter. Only about 45 millimeters long, the fish is wonderfully colored with iridescent blue and orange spots and stripes. The biologists say they decided to name the darter after Obama because of his focus on clean energy and environmental protection. Obamadon gracillis (extinct insectivorous lizard) Five million years ago, a fearsome lizard roamed the land … well, fearsome to insects, anyway. The now extinct Obamadon gracilis, or just Obamadon, was only a third of a meter long and devoured insects using a set of impressively tall and straight teeth. Paleontologists discovered an Obamadon fossil in Hell Creek Formation in Montana and published their finding in the December 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They were fascinated by the lizard’s impeccable choppers, which they say reminded them of President Obama’s smile. Paragordius obamai (hairworm) Hairworms are gruesome parasites that grow up to 30 centimeters long inside the bodies of their hosts. Lucky for you, they only infect crickets. One particular hairworm species, the African hairworm, was discovered in Kenya in 2012. Biologist Ben Hanelt of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque was splitting open some crickets to check out their parasites, but was baffled when an entire po[CENSORED]tion turned out to be female. Turns out he found the first species of parthenogenic hairworms—meaning the female parasites can reproduce without any male assistance, as noted in his PLOS ONE study published in April 2012. Hanelt named the parasite Paragordius obamai in honor of Obama, as the president’s father and stepgrandmother are from a Kenyan town just 19 kilometers away from where he found the parasites. Baracktrema obamai (turtle blood fluke) Earlier this year, Obama had the honor of being named after a second parasite, this time one that lives in the blood of Malaysian freshwater turtles. As described in the August issue of the Journal of Parasitology, Baracktrema obamai are as thin as human hair and reside in the turtles’ lungs, where they lay their eggs. Thomas Platt, a biologist who retired from Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Indiana, this year, assures the public this is meant as a compliment to Obama, not an insult. He told the Associated Press B. obamai reminded him of the sitting president of the United States (POTUS) because of its resilience throughout its life cycle, in addition to the fact that “it’s long. It’s thin. And it’s cool as hell.” Nystalus obamai (western striolated puffbird) In 2008, biologist Bret Whitney at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge was doing field work in the Amazon when he heard a bird sing a song he’d never heard before. After analyzing its DNA, Whitney realized he’d found a new species of puffbird: stout, fluffy birds with exceptionally large heads that live mostly solitary lives in the Amazonian treetops. Whitney named it Nystalus obamai in a June 2013 Handbook of the Birds of the World paper in honor of Obama’s impact on the development of green technology—particularly solar energy—that could help preserve ecosystems like N. obamai’s. Teleogramma obamaorum (African cichlid species) Along just 40 kilometers in a stream in the African Congo swims another Obama-monikered fish: Teleogramma obamaorum. The cichlid was discovered in 2011 when a drought caused water levels to dip down low, exposing the po[CENSORED]tions to researchers who were sampling the area. As noted in her April 2015 study in American Museum Novitates, Melanie Stiassny, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, chose to name the fish the plural obamaorum in reference to both Michelle and Barack as a nod to their commitment to science education and environmental conservation in Africa. Caloplaca obamae (firedot lichen) One species of orange-red lichen grows only on Santa Rosa Island off the coast of California: firedot lichen. Discovered during an ecological survey in 2007, Caloplaca obamae was the first organism to be named after the 44th president. Researchers made their final collections of the lichen for research at the suspenseful tail end of Obama’s presidential campaign, so they chose C. obamae in support of Obama’s appreciation for science and science education. They reported their discovery in the March 2009 issue of the journal Opuscula Philolichenum. Tosanoides obama (coral reef basslet) The newest organism to bear Obama’s name is a pink, blue, and yellow coral reef fish. Tosanoides obama was discovered in June of this year, and given its name in the journal ZooKeys. Obama is the only fish to live exclusively in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a protected reserve that President Obama expanded to 1,508,870 square kilometers this year in August. That decree made it the largest ecologically protected place on the planet, and it prohibits any commercial extraction like fishing or deep-sea mining within the monument. Richard Pyle, a marine biologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, discovered and named the fish, and insists, like other biologists before him, that it’s meant as a compliment to honor POTUS’s respect and protection of the natural world.

“Don’t be evil” may be Google’s corporate motto, but one of its product managers doesn’t believe it’s practicing what it preaches. The employee in question filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this week, alleging that it runs an “internal spying program” and its confidentiality policies are a violation of California labor laws. The Information reports that the suit was filed on Tuesday in California Superior Court in San Francisco by the anonymous worker, identified only as “John Doe.” He claims Google personnel are prohibited from talking internally about any illegal conduct they may have witnessed or “dangerous product defects,” so it can’t be used against the company in legal discovery. Doe also alleges that the policies stops whistleblowing by prohibiting employees from speaking to reporters or government officials. He says they can’t even talk to spouses or friends about whether their boss could do a better job. Additionally, the company won’t allow employees to discuss pay and the Google work experience with potential new employers. The lawsuit states that Google encourages people to spy on each other through a program called “Stop Leaks,” which advises employees to report co-workers who they believe are acting in a suspicious manner, such as asking detailed questions about work projects. Bizarrely, another part of the suit claims Google prevents employees from writing works of creative fiction about working for a large Silicon Valley company without its prior approval. The Information estimates that if Google is found guilty of violating the state’s labor laws, it could face fines totaling as much as $3.8 billion. A company spokesman called the allegations “baseless,” adding that the lawsuit is without merit. “We're very committed to an open internal culture, which means we frequently share with employees details of product launches and confidential business information,” he said in a statement. “Transparency is a huge part of our culture. Our employee confidentiality requirements are designed to protect proprietary business information, while not preventing employees from disclosing information about terms and conditions of employment, or workplace concerns."

Nintendo is waiting until the livestream event on January 12 to reveal more details about its upcoming Switch console, but a recent FCC filing has given us some clues about the machine’s battery. Engadget reports that the hybrid console is unlikely to come with a removable battery. If true, this will mean no swapping it over when the juice runs low, and no installing high-capacity battery packs such as the one released for the Wii U. It’s important to note, however, that the model the FCC reviewed was a production prototype, so Nintendo may have decided to go with a removable battery for the final product. But with the majority of mobile devices such as smartphones now opting for non-removable batteries, it’s likely that the Switch will go down the same route. We still don’t know how long the Switch will last when in handheld mode; it could boast an extra-long battery life that doesn’t necessitate the component be removable. Additionally, the Switch is rumored to feature a USB Type-C port, which means external battery packs could make charging on the move a possibility. One of the few things we do know about the Switch is that it is powered by a custom Tegra chip from Nvidia. Earlier this month, it was reported that the mobile processor will use the last-gen Maxwell graphics architecture rather than the newer Pascal technology. It was later revealed the Switch will run significantly slower when undocked from its TV-tethered base station.

Intel has been seeding samples of its upcoming Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake desktop CPU to reviewers and professional hardware enthusiasts ahead of what’ll likely be an official unveiling at CES 2017. One such recipient, Allen “Splave” Golibersuch, recently shared good news on the overclocking front. TechPowerUp reports that Splave managed to cross the 7GHz barrier using the aforementioned i7-7700K. Specifically, he was able to hit a benchmark-stable 7,022.96MHz (multiplier of 69x and a bus speed of 101.78MHz) using an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard. That said, some concessions were made in order to achieve the milestone. Splave had to disable HyperThreading as well as two of the processor’s four physical cores. The Vcore voltage, meanwhile, was pushed all the way up to 2.00V which meant liquid nitrogen had to be used for cooling. That said, the chip reportedly completed PiFast in 9.02 seconds and zipped through SuperPi 32M in roughly four minutes and 20 seconds. When paired with an Asus GTX 1080 STRIX OC video card, the combo turned in a score of 643,316 in Aquamark and 86,798 in 3DMark 05. Some will no doubt discredit the feat due to the fact that two cores were disabled and / or liquid nitrogen had to be used and that’s a fair argument. With NDAs set to lift any day now, most will be more interested in how the chip performs in an everyday setup with either air or basic liquid cooling.

It’s not uncommon for online retailers to offer barebones PC packages for those putting together a new system. What you won’t see all that often, however, is a purpose-built bundle like the PC Gaming Revival Kit that recently cropped up from Nvidia. First spotted by Videocardz.com in Spanish-speaking countries, Nvidia’s curious kit includes an MSI GTX 1060 3GT OC graphics card, a 240GB Corsair Force Series LE 240 solid state drive and a Corsair CX450M 80 PLUS Bronze power supply (450W) as well as a code for a digital copy of Gears of War 4 and a t-shirt. The kit is reportedly priced at €399, or around $415. Tallying up the individual components on Newegg comes up to $472.13 before shipping which makes this a decent deal assuming that you were already planning on purchasing similar hardware. It’s unclear if Nvidia is planning on offering the kit in other markets or if there will be multiple offerings with varying levels of hardware. The timing is also of interest as it might not be a coincidence that this is just now surfacing in the holiday timeframe. It’s entirely plausible that Nvidia may be going after less tech-savvy shoppers looking to upgrade aging manufactured PCs that likely lack a discrete graphics card and flash-based storage.

Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo is the world’s hot spot for lightning. If you don’t want to get struck by lightning, avoid open areas and tall objects, as the experts suggest. But if you want to be extra safe, stay the heck away from the middle of Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. Satellite data suggest that one particular square kilometer there—on the northern tip of South America—gets zapped more than 200 times per year. “Lake Maracaibo is one of the largest lightning generators on the globe,” says Robert Holzworth, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved in the new study. The find comes from instruments on a satellite called the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, which operated from 1997 to 2015. Circling the planet on a path that covered every spot between 38°N (about the latitude of Athens) and 38°S (just south of Melbourne, Australia), it could view a square about 600 kilometers on a side (an area almost the size of Montana) at once, says Rachel Albrecht, a meteorologist at the University of São Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil. The craft passed over each spot in that broad swath between three and six times per day, viewing it for about 90 seconds each time, she notes. Albrecht and her colleagues divvied up all lightning flashes spotted between January 1998 and December 2013 into areas roughly 10 kilometers on a side or smaller. Then, they tallied the planet’s top 500 hot spots for lightning, based on flashes observed per square kilometer per year. (Because the satellite could observe each spot only 10 minutes or so each day, the hottest of the hot zones are likely struck by lightning tens of thousands of times each year, data suggest.) The hard data gathered by this space-based survey confirm many of the general trends that meteorologists have long noted, the researchers say. The world’s top 100 hot spots for lightning (including the top one on each continent, labeled) at latitudes below 38°N, as measured by satellite between January 1998 and December 2013. In general, lightning occurs more frequently over land than over the oceans, in summer more than in winter, and most often between noon and 6 p.m. local time. Each of these factors tends to increase the temperature difference between the air at ground level and layers at higher altitude, which in turn increases the amount of humid air rising to fuel thunderstorms. Yet exceptions to these general rules abound, and the Lake Maracaibo hot spot bucks all three trends: Most of its lightning occurs over the lake, between the hours of midnight and 5 a.m., and in late spring and autumn. All told, the satellite spotted about 233 flashes of lightning per square kilometer per year over one portion of the nearly Connecticut-sized lake, the researchers report this month in the Bulletin of the American Meteorology Society. Many of the world’s lightning hot spots are associated with steep terrain, which helps set up the clash between warm and cool air masses that can drive thunderstorm development, Albrecht says. The top hot spots on each continent, with one exception, are near steep mountains, the researchers note. That’s certainly true of Lake Maracaibo, which is rimmed by lofty peaks; the clash between the cool winds flowing off those mountains at night and the lake’s warm tropical waters creates thunderstorms over the lake about 297 nights each year. Indeed, the researchers note, lightning over the lake at night is so reliably persistent that early explorers sailing the Caribbean used its flickering as a navigational aid. At least 14 other large lakes worldwide, including lakes Victoria and Tanganyika in Africa, are also lightning hot spots, says Steven J. Goodman, an atmospheric physicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Greenbelt, Maryland, and co-author of the new study. Though Lake Maracaibo is the hottest spot of all, central Africa is still home to the broadest area afflicted by lightning, with 283 of the world’s top 500 locales. Although many sites with latitudes above 38°N experience thunderstorms, they do so far less often than low-latitude regions and typically only during half the year, unlike tropical areas where they can strike year-round, Goodman says. So, it’s not likely that the team’s new study missed any of the world’s top lightning hot spots. *Update, 29 December, 9:53 a.m.: This article has been updated with a corrected map.