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The Relentless Tinkering That Makes F1 Cars Look So Funky   Editor’s Note: As the 2016 Formula One season in Melbourne kicks off this weekend, check out our behind-the-scenes look at why the sport’s cars look so funky, and how they change over time. Modern Formula One cars are a bit like those wonderfully weird birds-of-paradise : utterly bizarre, but born of relentless evolution and perfectly adapted to their environment. Every feature is a result of endless evolution and relentless pursuit of a goal. With the 2016 F1 season set to begin next month, the public just got its first good look at the latest in that unending, not quite natural selection process. The teams have revealed their cars and started testing them in earnest. The cars are but the first iteration, and will almost certainly change—perhaps radically—between now and the start of the season on March 18 at the Australian GP. That process will continue throug...

Security News This Week: The NSA Denied Hillary a Secure BlackBerry   The US government’s war on crypto took the spotlight again this week. Beyond the bureau’s ongoing standoff with Apple over the encrypted iPhone of San Bernadino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, new documents were unsealed in the case of Lavabit , an email provider that stood up to the FBI’s decryption demands in 2013. Whatsapp also received its own wiretap order to hand over a user’s communications, which it denied, arguing that it didn’t possess the necessary decryption keys. In two out of three of those cases, the government made significant slip-ups. When Apple responded to the FBI in its latest brief , it hit the agency’s lawyers with an embarrassing fact-check that pointed out the feds’ technical errors and legal misinterpretations in their last brief. And a redaction error in the Lavabit documents confirmed for the first time the long-suspected target of the government investigation into the comp...

Apple Needs a New Reason for You to Buy an iPad   If the rumors are true, which they always are, Apple is about to announce a new 9.7-inch iPad. Woo boy, you’re saying—Another iPad, just like the ones that come out every year, whose sales are sinking like a horse in quicksand ? Well, yes and no. Mostly yes. But a little bit no. The new iPad, which will either be called “the smaller iPad Pro” or “the iPad Air 3,” unless Jony Ive heeds my advice and calls it “the Goldilocks iPad,” will reportedly take most of its design cues from the 12.9-inch iPad Pro. It’ll have the same four speakers, the same high-end performance, the same nifty magnetic accessory connector and keyboard case. It’ll have a camera flash, for those of you who like taking pictures with a massive, 9.7-inch device. It’ll even reportedly support the Apple Pencil, which will presumably look equally funny sticking out of the Lightning port while it’s charging. It’ll be the iPad Pro in every way excep...

We’ll Take One Microwave-Powered Starship, Please   Author Allen Steele is best known for his Coyote series, which describes mankind’s first interstellar voyage. He returns to that theme in his new novel Arkwright , about a famous science fiction writer who establishes a generation-spanning project to build the world’s first starship. The story was inspired by the Starship Century conference, which discussed plans to achieve interstellar travel by the end of the century. “They basically threw away the idea that interstellar travel is something where we have to wait until some exotic technology becomes available to us in the 23rd century,” Steele says in Episode 194 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “The conference was talking about near-term prospects for this.” The starship in Arkwright is propelled by microwave beams sent from an Earth-based satellite, an idea dreamed up by science fiction author Gregory Benford and his brother Jim. “This particular...

Space Photos of the Week: Monster Stars Show the Sun Who’s Boss   Astronomers using the unique ultraviolet capabilities of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have identified nine monster stars with masses over 100 times the mass of the Sun in the star cluster R136. This makes it the largest sample of very massive stars identified to date. The results, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, raise many new questions about the formation of massive stars.

Google’s AI Wins First Game in Historic Match With Go Champion   SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — After an extraordinarily close contest, Google’s artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has beaten Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, in the first game of their historic five-game match at Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. Known as AlphaGo, this Google creation not only proved it can compete with the game’s best, but also showed off its remarkable ability to learn the game on its own. A group of Google researchers spent the last two years building AlphaGo at an AI lab in London called DeepMind. Until recently, experts assumed that another ten years would pass before a machine could beat one of the top human players at Go, a game that is exponentially more complex than chess and requires, at least among the top humans, a certain degree of intuition. But DeepMind accelerated the progress of computer Go using two complimentary forms of machine learning—techniques ...

Tech Giants Back Immigrants In Upcoming Supreme Court Fight   More than 60 tech leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, have told the US Supreme Court they support President Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration. The group, which also includes PayPal co-founder Max Levchin and venture capitalist Ron Conway, co-signed a friend-of-the-court brief filed today, roughly a month before the Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in United States v. Texas. The case will decide the fate of two so-called “deferred action” programs the President proposed in late November 2014, which would prevent undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children from being deported, as well as adults whose children are lawful residents of the United States. Candidates have argued that immigrants are a drain on the US economy. Zuckerberg and his crew are arguing just the opposite. “Instead of inviting the economic contributions of immigrants, ...