Enlarge (credit: Vithun Khamsong )

With the plunging price of photovoltaics, the construction of solar plants has boomed in the US. Last year, for example, the US's Energy Information Agency expected that over half of the new generating capacity would be solar , with a lot of it coming online at the very end of the year for tax reasons. Yesterday, the EIA released electricity generation numbers for the first five months of 2024, and that construction boom has seemingly made itself felt: generation by solar power has shot up by 25 percent compared to just one year earlier.

The EIA breaks down solar production according to the size of the plant. Large grid-scale facilities have their production tracked, giving the EIA hard numbers. For smaller installations, like rooftop solar on residential and commercial buildings, the agency has to estimate the amount produced, since the hardware often resides behind the metering equipment, so only shows up via lower-than-expected consumption.

In terms of utility-scale production, the first five months of 2024 saw it rise by 29 percent compared to the same period in the year prior. Small-scale solar was "only" up by 18 percent, with the combined number rising by 25.3 percent.

Enlarge / Rembrandt's The Night Watch underwent many chemical and mechanical alterations over the last 400 years. (credit: Public domain)

Since 2019, researchers have been analyzing the chemical composition of the materials used to create Rembrandt's masterpiece, The Night Watch, as part of the Rijksmuseum's ongoing Operation Night Watch , devoted to its long-term preservation. Chemists at the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam have now detected unusual arsenic-based yellow and orange/red pigments used to paint the duff coat of one of the central figures in the painting, according to a recent paper in the journal Heritage Science. It's a new addition to Rembrandt's known pigment palette that further adds to our growing body of knowledge about the materials he used.

As previously reported , past analyses of Rembrandt's paintings identified many pigments the Dutch master used in his work, including lead white, multiple ochres, bone black, vermilion, madder lake, azurite, ultramarine, yellow lake, and lead-tin yellow, among others. The artist rarely used pure blue or green pigments, with Belshazzar's Feast being a notable exception. (The Rembrandt Database is the best resource for a comprehensive chronicling of the many different investigative reports.)

Early last year, the researchers at Operation Night Watch found rare traces of a compound called lead formate in the painting—surprising in itself, but the team also identified those formates in areas where there was no lead pigment, white or yellow. It's possible that lead formates disappear fairly quickly, which could explain why they have not been detected in paintings by the Dutch Masters until now. But if that is the case, why didn't the lead formate disappear in The Night Watch ? And where did it come from in the first place?

Enlarge / NASA’s Perseverance rover discovered “leopard spots” on a reddish rock nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” in Mars’ Jezero Crater in July 2024. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

NASA's Perseverance rover has found a very intriguing rock on the surface of Mars.

An arrowhead-shaped rock observed by the rover has chemical signatures and structures that could have been formed by ancient microbial life. To be absolutely clear, this is not irrefutable evidence of past life on Mars, when the red planet was more amenable to water-based life billions of years ago. But discovering these colored spots on this rock is darn intriguing and has Mars scientists bubbling with excitement.

"These spots are a big surprise," said David Flannery, an astrobiologist and member of the Perseverance science team from the Queensland University of Technology in Australia, in a NASA news release . "On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface."

Enlarge (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates)

In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted up. From there, it could remain immune to detection and removal and could load even before the OS and security apps did.

The threat of such BIOS-dwelling malware was largely theoretical and fueled in large part by the creation of ICLord Bioskit by a Chinese researcher in 2007. ICLord was a rootkit , a class of malware that gains and maintains stealthy root access by subverting key protections built into the operating system. The proof of concept demonstrated that such BIOS rootkits weren't only feasible; they were also powerful. In 2011, the threat became a reality with the discovery of Mebromi , the first-known BIOS rootkit to be used in the wild.

Keenly aware of Mebromi and its potential for a devastating new class of attack, the Secure Boot architects hashed out a complex new way to shore up security in the pre-boot environment. Built into UEFI—the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that would become the successor to BIOS—Secure Boot used public-key cryptography to block the loading of any code that wasn’t signed with a pre-approved digital signature. To this day, key players in security—among them Microsoft and the US National Security Agency —regard Secure Boot as an important, if not essential, foundation of trust in securing devices in some of the most critical environments, including in industrial control and enterprise networks.

Enlarge / The VW ID.4 has a new drive motor and infotainment system for model-year 2024. It's not the sportiest EV you can buy, but it remains one of our favorites to drive. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volkswagen didn't wait the traditional four model years before giving its ID.4 electric crossover something of a spiff-up. The tweaks to the model-year 2024 ID.4 are mostly under the skin or inside the cabin— like the recent refresh of the Polestar 2 , this update was more about making the ID.4 an easier EV to live with, with more range and more power.

Volkswagen was one of the first automakers to react to Tesla finally making the electric vehicle viable. After the company-wide bet on diesel went up in a cloud of nitrogen oxides and black smoke , VW threw itself headlong into electrification as a way to meet ever-stricter carbon emissions regulations. Already an industry pioneer for the use of highly flexible vehicle architectures that let it build vehicles in a wide range of sizes and shapes with a common set of components and tools, it applied that approach to a line of electric vehicles, all branded under the Intelligent Design, or ID, name.

VW is a global automaker, but automobile tastes are often not global. For Europe, VW designed the ID.3 , an electric hatchback that Americans who want forbidden fruit keep asking for, but which generated less than enthusiastic reviews from the people who actually got to buy them. Other models are optimized for China. But for America, with its adoration of the SUV and crossover, VW designed the ID.4.

During our second Ars Live event earlier this month, screenwriter/producer Ed Solomon (Bill & Ted franchise) joined physicists Sean Carroll (Johns Hopkins University) and Jim Kakalios (University of Minnesota) and Ars Senior Reporter Jennifer Ouellette for a rousing discussion on the science and logic of time-travel movies. The discussion was inspired by last fall's Ars Guide to Time Travel in the Movies , written with the objective of helping us all make better, more informed decisions when it comes to choosing our time-travel movie fare—and having a bit of fun while doing so. You'll find the entire discussion in the video above, complete with a transcript.

Not all time-travel movies are created equal. Some make for fantastic entertainment, but the time travel makes no scientific or logical sense, while others might err in the opposite direction, sacrificing good storytelling in the interest of technical accuracy. The best strike a good balance between those two extremes.

We started off by letting Carroll recap his fundamental rules for time travel in the movies: (1) You can't go back earlier than whenever the time machine you're using was built; (2) it's easy to travel to the future, and special and general relativity give us ways to get to the future faster; (3) it may or may not be possible to travel to the past BUT.... (4) if you do, you can't change the past. Whatever happened, happened.

Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel testifies during a House hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

A US appeals court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission's Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional, finding Universal Service fees on phone bills to be a "misbegotten tax." If not overturned, the ruling would upend the $8 billion-a-year system that is used to expand telecom networks and make access more affordable through programs such as Lifeline discounts and deployment grants for Internet service providers.

But the FCC program could survive in the end as the case appears ripe for Supreme Court review, with yesterday's ruling creating a circuit split. The ruling against the FCC was issued by the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is generally considered one of the most conservative appeals courts.

The FCC previously prevailed in the 6th and 11th circuit appeals courts, which both rejected claims that the Universal Service Fund is unconstitutional. All three cases against the FCC were filed by Consumers' Research , a nonprofit that fights "woke corporations," and a mobile virtual network operator called Cause Based Commerce , which offers wireless service to "values-based consumers who want alternatives to the many companies and providers that support causes and positions contrary to their beliefs."

Enlarge / Chris Kemp is CEO of Astra. He has a colorful personality. (credit: Courtesy of HBO)

Early on in the new documentary film Wild Wild Space , Astra rocket company chief executive Chris Kemp offers this bit of snide commentary on his launch competitor, Rocket Lab: “I’m someone who wants to actually succeed from a business perspective, versus just make big toys.”

For better or worse—and it's better for viewers and ultimately worse for Kemp—he is the star of the documentary film now showing on the streaming network Max. The main narrative involves the race between Rocket Lab and Astra to develop, test, and fly small and commercially viable rockets. And what a compelling narrative it is, especially as the story unfolds toward its inexorable conclusion. Anyone who has paid a bit of attention to the space industry knows where this is headed: the ascent of Rocket Lab and failure of Astra. But it's a fun ride anyway.

The film is based directly on the book When the Heavens Went on Sale , by Ashlee Vance. He is the most prominent talking head in the movie, and he does a fine job contextualizing the story. But what really makes the movie sing is the narcissistic monologues by Kemp, the access to his company, and interviews with Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck, who seems mostly bemused at Kemp’s aspirations to challenge him. It all offers a rare, revealing, and intimate look into startup culture.

Enlarge (credit: Getty )

Recent discussions on Reddit are no longer showing up in non-Google search engine results. The absence is the result of updates to Reddit’s Content Policy that ban crawling its site without agreeing to Reddit’s rules, which bar using Reddit content for AI training without Reddit’s explicit consent.

As reported by 404 Media , using "site:reddit.com" on non-Google search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Mojeek, brings up minimal or no Reddit results from the past week. Ars Technica made searches on these and other search engines and can confirm the findings. Brave, for example, brings up a few Reddit results sometimes (examples here and here ) but not nearly as many as what appears on Google when using identical queries. A standout is Kagi, which is a paid-for engine that pays Google for some of its search index and still shows recent Reddit results.

As 404 Media noted, Reddit's Robots Exclusion Protocol ( robots.txt file ) blocks bots from scraping the site. The protocol also states, "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content." Reddit has approved scrapers from the Internet Archive and some research-focused entities.