The unrelenting obsession with fair skin in India has been a subject of discussion for years. It has inspired campaigns, such Dark is Beautiful and #BinTheTube, which encouraged women to discard their fairness creams. And yet, the tendency to see fair people on television and in films, and to uphold them as the standard for beauty remains strong. Apart from popular culture, there is also a bias over skin colour in religious iconography. The myriad of Hindu gods and goddesses—Lakshmi, Ganesh, and Shiva—are often fair-skinned in their visual representations. A Facebook photo series, titled Dark is Divine, by photographer Naresh Nil is subverting this narrative by portraying gods and goddesses as dark-skinned. “Our idea was born out of this very notion of acceptance of fair as divine, which to me is more about normalisation of this concept in society,” said the Chennai-based photographer who worked on the project with creative director Bharadwaj Sundar. The two run a production house, Slingshot Creations, together. NARESH NIL Sita, with Luv and Kush. They started the project in September 2017 and, over two months, created almost seven portraits, including those of Bala Murugan, who is an avatar of Subramanya; Lakshmi, and Krishna as a child. “We invited models with a dark or dusky skin tone,” said Nil. “The most essential consideration was whether the models themselves were comfortable in presenting and associating themselves with the representation of their skin tone.” NARESH NIL Krishna. In Nil’s photographs, Durga is many shades darker than the one we meet during Durga Puja celebrations. A dark-skinned Shiva is depicted in deep meditation, while a dusky Sita is seen having a quiet moment with her sons, Luv and Kush. NARESH NIL Shiva. According to writer and mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, the love for the fair complexion could be a hangover of our past. In an article for Verve magazine, he wrote: “The nomadic tribes who came from the North West held the dark skinned settled communities of the subcontinent in disdain. Aryan gods like Indra were white. But this white supremacist flavor does not hold firm in the face of other evidence. Some say Shiva was a Dravidian god, a god of the settled communities—but he is described as Karpura-Goranga, he who is as fair as camphor. Some say that Vishnu and Ram are gods of the Aryan imperialists—but both are described as dark.” NARESH NIL Durga. The Dark is Divine photographic project was something that Nil and Sundar had talked about a few times and in September, they decided they would try and shoot it. “Of course we realised that this was related to more deep-rooted issues of preference for fair skin in our society and that we were challenging the common notions of purity and divinity. These additional thoughts were incorporated during implementation and the shoot.” In a 2015 paper, titled India and Colorism: The Finer Nuances, published in the Washington University Global Studies Law Review, the author Neha Mishra writes: “Most Indians show apparent ignorance about the practice of exclusion and discrimination based on the skin tone of a person although it is a deep-rooted problematic practice embraced by both the oppressor and the victim. This single practice has become so widespread in India, more so in the past four decades, that it has taken shape along the same lines as “colourism” of the Western world. However, the manifestation of the color discrimination in India differs as it hides behind various other variables…Caste, class, religion, region, gender and economics are a few of these variables.” Bala Murugan. The costumes and jewellery during the shoot of Dark is Divine were inspired to an extent by artist Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings. “Our focus was plain and simple, how are gods or divinity presented in common culture, and by common we mean our immediate surroundings, whatever we come across in our everyday life,” said Nil. While the reactions to the images on Nil’s Facebook page have been mostly positive, there are a few who have argued that the portrayal of goddess Kali and Kalratri as dark-skinned in popular culture makes his project a biased one. “The initiative is a creative endeavour based on our own observations in our everyday life—plain and simple,” said Nil. “We don’t intend to be biased, nor have we set out to interpret how literature portrays God. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but what would be fantastic is if we start seeing opinions materialising into new and varied work for people to see and understand. That is what we have done with our ideas.”

2018 was slated to be a sunshine year for solar energy in India. Power generation capacity touched 22 gigawatts (GW) in financial year 2018, a phenomenal growth of more than 75% over the previous year. A low base notwithstanding, India’s ambitious target of 100GW by 2022 under the National Solar Mission now seemed within reach. What’s more, prices were dipping. In 2017, reverse auctions by the government to develop large-scale solar projects had thrice attracted all-time low bids of Rs2.44 per unit of electricity. This made solar power even cheaper than coal-based power, which generally sells north of Rs3 per unit in the country. The boom, however, was powered by imports of cheap solar cells and panels from China, while Indian manufacturers raked in losses. Up to 85% of the solar panels used by Indian solar developers are made in China. Their prices have been falling rapidly as China has invested and taken the lead in mastering the technology. This, in turn, forced the government’s hand. In July 2018, authorities shocked the solar industry by imposing a 25% import duty on foreign-made solar cells and panels. Big chill In fact, an import tax had been looming since the beginning of 2018. On Jan. 05, the directorate general of safeguards (now the directorate general of trade remedies, or DGTR), the authority responsible for all trade remedial measures like anti-dumping duties and safeguard measures, said it was considering a 70% safeguard duty on imported solar cells and panels. Under the World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, a country can impose a temporary safeguard duty on a foreign product if a spurt in imports due to unforeseen developments threatens the domestic manufacturing industry. Chinese panels have for years faced anti-dumping duties in the US and in the European Union (the latter lifted its duties in August 2018). In January 2018, US president Donald Trump imposed new tariffs on Chinese solar imports. However, based on a petition filed by the US, the WTO’s appellate body in 2016 ordered a ban on the Indian government’s policy of favouring solar projects that use locally made panels. The DGTR said this order, restraining the Indian government’s support for local manufacturers, qualified as an “unforeseen development” to justify a safeguard duty. The government also cited rising imports due to India’s heightened renewable energy targets under the Paris climate agreement and increased production by Chinese manufacturers. It also noted that anti-dumping duties in the US and the EU have prompted Chinese companies to sell more aggressively in the Indian market, putting pressure on Indian manufacturers like Vikram Solar and Adani Solar, based in Kolkata and Ahmedabad, respectively. Indian solar power developers—unlike local panel makers, power firms benefit from cheap imports—and Chinese manufacturers, however, denied that these trends justified the import duties. The rise in import was only natural after India raised its solar energy goals, they said, adding that Indian panel makers have also raised supply and utilisation of existing production capacity. The share of imports in India’s total consumption of solar cells has been stable after spiking in 2015-16, industry body Solar Power Developers Association argued. Since 2014, Indian panel makers have nearly halved their prices in the export market, said the China Chamber of Commerce for Imports and Exports of Machinery and Electronic Products, an industry group based in Beijing. “The real cause of injury to the domestic industry is aggressive pricing practices of other Indian producers and not imports,” it said. The DGTR partially relented. Instead of the proposed 70%, it finalised a 25% safeguard duty that would ease out over two years. Year Safeguard duty First year 25% Next six months 20% Next six months 15% Before the duty was officially notified on July 30, Indian developers stepped up their cell and panel imports, and their demand dipped right when the duty came into effect. The safeguard duty has been at least partly responsible for the dampened activity in India’s solar market in 2018. The government has been cancelling auctions of solar development projects after bids quoted by developers have risen from the low levels of 2017. Additions of new solar power capacity have slowed down in 2018. “There will be an increase (in the cost of solar power) of close to 30 paise or 35 paise (per unit). While we are seeing tariffs of around Rs2.44 per unit, the lowest going forward should be around Rs2.75 per unit,” Ankur Agarwal, an analyst with India Ratings and Research, had told Quartz when the safeguard duty was imposed. Ripping off the band-aid Few believe that two years of safeguard duty will turn the tide for India’s solar panel makers. In June, to manage the state-run renewable energy fund’s $15.6 billion deficit, China unexpectedly suspended huge subsidies to its solar project developers. This cut the demand for cells and panels in its domestic market, intensifying their glut in foreign markets and further driving down prices. While the safeguard duty does add to the price tag of Chinese imports, they are still cheaper than domestic panels and cells, according to The Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), a New Delhi-based think tank. Further, in December, the government announced that Indian manufacturers such as Adani Solar, Vikram Solar, and Websol Energy System, which operate from special economic zones (SEZs), will also have to pay this safeguard duty. “The duty has not benefitted domestic manufacturers since most of the cell and panel manufacturing capacity is located in the SEZs,” said Manu Aggarwal, a programme associate at CEEW. While China marches ahead on its technology curve, the Indian government’s efforts to increase the scale of manufacturing have been fruitless. The ministry of new and renewable energy’s scheme of incentivising developers to set up manufacturing units is struggling to take off as the industry reels under the impact of the safeguard duty. CPSU, another scheme of public sector investment in manufacturing, has remained in limbo since it was proposed in 2017. Meanwhile, hope is dimming for India’s plans to keep making solar panels. “Safeguard is an artificial band-aid and will not help manufacturers’ competitiveness in the long run,” said Raj Prabhu, CEO of Mercom Capital Group, a US-based consulting firm. “We don’t see manufacturers investing in R&D or trying to come up with new technologies. Relying on price difference created by safeguard duty is not a strategy, it is just postponing the inevitable.”

At Quartzy, we’ve often advised against making New Year’s resolutions. But we’re breaking that rule this year to make something like a resolution ourselves: a new style note for 2019, aimed at ensuring that the way we cover food, health, dieting, and exercise aligns with our fundamental values. Those values: We seek to be inclusive in every way—including race, gender, sexuality, and age. In our coverage of health and dieting, we do not assume that everyone has, or wants to have, a particular body shape or size. We hold our reporting on health to the same high standards as the rest of Quartz’s coverage, meaning we cite only science and research that is credible, ideally published in peer-reviewed journals, from reputable scientists. While Quartzy often seeks to provide services to our readers, in the form of tips, guides, hacks, or recommendations, we are not here to tell you what to eat or avoid eating for good health, which diet is the best or the worst, or to ascribe morality to food or fitness choices. We may cover new research on particular foods or approaches to eating or exercise, and we may tell you about foods or recipes we find delicious, but we know there is no one perfect health system that works for every person. In all our coverage, we aspire to the ideal of a “spirit of generosity,” which is a foundational value of Quartz. We do not shame anyone’s food choices, fitness, or body shape. The goal of our lifestyle coverage is to help our readers feel good in a way that is tied to an internal state of being—energetic, informed, engaged, content, calm, and joyful. We are not the only ones reexamining our approach. (In particular, we found the excellent style guide that SELF released in June to be instructive.) A shift is underway in the way the world talks and thinks about these topics. Dieting is no longer aspirational; “wellness” is. But, as Rosie Spinks has written, “much of this modern wellness culture is simply diet culture 2.0.” Indeed, not enough has changed. Obesity is still widely misunderstood, and fat people are still discriminated against and mistreated by the health-care system. “Years from now, we will look back in horror at the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path,” Michael Hobbes wrote in an influential piece for Huffington Post’s Highline. As he argued, “It’s time for a new paradigm.” Quartzy recently published a guide to the language of diet culture, pointing out some of the problems with terms such as “detox” and “clean eating,” and what they really mean. We’ll be keeping those meanings in mind in our own reporting and writing. Here are some of the other ways we strive to put our values into practice: We don’t use weight or weight loss alone as a proxy for or direct measurement of health. We don’t assume our readers are all eager to lose weight, and we don’t assume smaller is better. We don’t equate youth with health or beauty. We don’t advocate “defying” age. We don’t suggest exercise as an atonement for eating or drinking, and we don’t describe rigorous forms of exercise as more admirable than moderate exercise or movement. We don’t describe food as a “miracle” or a “poison.” Most food is neither magic nor toxic, though there is evidence of some foods’ beneficial properties, and of the risks of eating too much of other foods. We don’t assume that just because a food is lower in calories, fat, sugar, or certain chemicals, it is better than other foods, nor do we assume that eating less is a worthy or aspirational goal. We don’t use the words “chemical” or “processed” as a blanket negative. When talking about maintaining health, we don’t limit the conversation to diet and exercise. There are many other indicators of health, including mental health, community ties, environmental factors, sleep, and stress levels. In other words, we understand that a lot goes into what makes a healthy human.

Netflix released a ridiculous amount of original programming in 2018. How ridiculous? By Quartz’s measure, the streaming-video giant put out nearly 90,000 minutes—close to 1,500 hours—of original series, movies, and other productions this year. That’s nearly nine consecutive weeks of binge-watching. It would have taken more than four hours of streaming per day, every day of 2018, to watch all of it. These are rough estimates based on a list published by Netflix of more than 850 titles that are streamed exclusively on Netflix, including originals and first-run titles that the company syndicates and premieres in some of its markets, as of Dec. 31, 2018. Quartz tallied up the titles for only the Netflix originals (not the first-run titles) with global premiere dates in 2018—about 345 of them—and checked those titles and dates against Netflix’s US site and the Internet Movie Database. The run times were pulled from the US version of Netflix. Overall, series made up the vast majority of the original content added to Netflix this year. There were more than 58,000 hours of original series added in 2018, including new seasons of shows like House of Cards and Fuller House, and new series The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Maniac. Netflix also stepped up its supply of international dramas, adding thousands of hours of telenovelas like La Reina del Flow and Korean dramas like Mr. Sunshine (as it is listed in English). Netflix also released more than 10,100 hours of original documentaries, about 8,500 hours of movies, 4,800 hours of kids programming, and 3,600 hours of stand-up comedy. The company did not confirm or deny Quartz’s estimates. The total only includes titles listed by Netflix as US “originals.” with run times listed on Netflix US. The streaming giant doesn’t produce all of its original programming, but rather licenses some series and movies from other studios. As such, some Netflix originals, like the anime series Lost Song, aren’t branded as originals in every market. That show is only licensed as a “Netflix original” outside of Japan. Not all of the titles counted by Quartz are available on Netflix everywhere in the world, either, as the company’s library varies globally. There was one title that appeared to be released in 2018, but was not included in the final count because Quartz could not obtain its run time through Netflix US. Netflix originals also earned the company a great deal of acclaim in 2018, including series Stranger Things, The Crown, Ozark, GLOW, and Queer Eye, and movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs from Joel and Ethan Coen. The company leaned into its originals, spending the much of its $8 billion content budget on them, just as studios like Disney began reserving their own movies and TV shows for proprietary streaming services. In 2018, Netflix also became the first network in 17 years to dethrone HBO in Emmy nominations, and matched the premium-TV network in wins. Netflix proved it is not just a platform for watching content, but a home for world-class creators, which in turn drove subscribers and the company’s stock. Back in May, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos estimated the platform would have more than 1,000 originals by the end of 2018. The goal was to make sure each of Netflix’s 130 million members found content that appealed to their unique tastes. Or to give you a reason to dump all your New Years resolution’s. Want a better understanding of Netflix and other streaming giants? Check out our guide to the streaming-TV wars.

An Alabama sheriff helped himself to at least $1.5 million in federal funds meant to feed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees housed in his jail, the Etowah County Detention Center, according to an investigation by AL.com. A Depression-era loophole in Alabama state law allows sheriffs to keep half of all leftover funds meant for feeding inmates, with the other half going to the county’s general fund. By serving ICE detainees spoiled, expired, and donated food, Etowah County sheriff Todd Entrekin was able to generate a $3 million surplus, taking 50% of that for himself. “This is a jail, this is not a bed and breakfast,” Entrekin said earlier this year. “Domino’s does not deliver here…but we do prepare a healthy meal that is served here three times a day. It is true that many of our people are not happy with the food they are served.” In March, Entrekin admitted to having pocketed more than $750,000 over three years in money meant to feed inmates entrusted to his care by the US government at the same detention center. However, he has long maintained that it’s all perfectly above board. “The law says it’s a personal account and that’s the way I’ve always done it and that’s the way the law reads and that’s the way I do business,” Entrekin said in an interview. “That’s the way the law’s written.” Even if Entrekin’s scheme is technically legal, Randall Eliason, a law professor and former chief of the public corruption and government fraud section at the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, told AL.com: “There’s pretty much no way that the federal government is OK with this.” Entrekin’s constituency has already spoken. In June, he lost his re-election campaign to a fellow Republican primary challenger. In July, the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation on charges that Entrekin allegedly had sex with underage girls multiple times during the 1990s, an allegation he denies. Entrekin has reportedly gone after those who got between him and his money. Last February, a 20-year-old was arrested for drug possession four days after criticizing Entrekin in an interview in which he said the sheriff had paid him to mow the lawn at his home in 2015 with checks that said “Sheriff Todd Entrekin Food Provision Account” on them. The following month, Entrekin held a news conference during which he claimed he and his wife had been the victims of “fake news stories,” and said he was there to “set the record straight.”

With a new year ahead, many people are resolved to do more and better, to get ahead, and to muster the willpower that until now has eluded them. The good news is you can forget about willpower. Many psychologists no longer believe in it. The notion, rooted in the Victorian era and Judeo-Christian thinking about resisting sinful impulses, implies that we have a limited amount of energy that people of strong character use to fight temptation. This concept is now being replaced with a more nuanced view of how the brain operates. Humans are complex creatures. Though we know some things are good for us—like getting exercise, or completing tasks on our to-do list—we can’t always do the right thing. Or rather, we can, but we need to use certain tricks, carrots and sticks, limits and lures, to create habits that get us results. According to New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, 40% of actions we take aren’t decisions. They’re part of the mental routines we create, which are basically shortcuts, helping us operate on automatic. To ensure that our automatic responses are positive ones, we can set up circumstances that cue us to do the right thing and eventually turn that thing into a habit. Duhigg argues that we aren’t destined to be any one way, but can completely rewire our brains by creating cues that associate positive experiences with activities we know we should do. His research leads him to believe it’s wiser to eat chocolate after a workout than kale chips, say, because soon enough your brain will fuse the chocolate cue and the exercise into one positive experience and start looking forward to workouts as much as it does cake. When it comes to getting to the gym, there’s no end to the trick tricks people use. For example, some sleep in their workout gear to ensure they exercise in the morning. Others pack their gym bags in advance and put them where they can’t be ignored. These little tricks eliminates the need to decide to exercise anew each time. You train your brain to make exercise a routine by eliminating silly little obstacles, like getting dressed or finding your sneakers. The same applies to all areas of life. We make to-do lists not just because we’ll forget what we have to do, but because writing down goals turns reaching them into a series of satisfying items we can cross off the list. Whether it’s a simple daily list or a bullet journal that encompasses a slew of goals and activities over the course of a year, the decision to commit an idea to writing makes it more likely that idea will become a reality. It’s a trick we play on our brains, which might otherwise be inclined to cheat by avoiding contemplating the very things that we should face to feel better about ourselves. Writers rely heavily on cognitive tricks to complete their work. Karl Ove Knausgaard, who wrote the six-volume epic memoir My Struggle in about two-and-half years, found that deadlines forced his creativity. Likewise, novelist Jessie Greengrass explains in LitHub that she gets her writing done by simply making it a daily morning habit. She does it whether or not she wants to and has gotten so used to the routine that she no longer struggles with sitting down. My own approach to writing is similarly tricky. Fundamentally, I’m a bit lazy and somewhat contrary, so I impose nonexistent deadlines on my stories in order to force myself to produce them. But I also often choose to give myself slightly more time than I might need. Then I start piecing together a tale without any pressure. In fact, I regularly tell myself I’m not really working at all, just preparing to write by looking for resources and images and scribbling a few sentences. Often, before I know it, a whole post is written without me even thinking I’m getting it done. What might have seemed like an onerous task turns out to be pretty fun. Your brain isn’t an enemy seeking to undermine you, but it does need some training, a little help to push it in the right direction. Whether it’s smiling when you’re sad to lift your mood, or eating off a smaller plate to be sated with less food, the games you play with your mind can help you make the right choices. Optimal lighting and temperature in an office can improve productivity (pdf), for example, and so can switching locations to a coffee shop where others are working (paywall) or playing motivating music. If you want to tackle your 2019 resolutions with gusto, don’t worry about cultivating willpower. Honesty is not always the best policy. When it comes to getting things done, some gentle deception will do the trick. Don’t convince yourself to do what you know is good for you. Pull a bait-and-switch on your brain and you could succeed without really feeling like you even tried.

In recent months, a yellow long-sleeved dress has stalked me in my wanderings around the internet. I must have clicked on it once. How could I resist? It’s the shade of a canary in noon-day sun, and dazzled with a flower garden of sequins and paillettes. It also costs just shy of $1500, which is not exactly my average budget for a garment that—well, for any garment really. But now, a virtual parade of floral dresses marches across my screen multiple times per day, whether I’m reading an article for research or checking my email—and now, everywhere, the prices are slashed. 30%, 40%, 70%, ONE DAY ONLY! The endless sales season But of course, we know these post-holiday sales are not one day only. They’ll last into January. Then we’ll be onto President’s Day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Prime Day, and throughout the year until we hit Black Friday, launching us into the holiday sales again. As Marc Bain has written, this cycle has turned shopping into “a form of cheap, endlessly available entertainment—one where the point isn’t what, or even whether, you buy, but the act of shopping itself.” This has resulted in an environmentally catastrophic pile-up of unwanted clothing, and a population of perpetually unsatisfied shoppers. But of course, as anyone who has scored the proverbial yellow sequined dress of their dreams at 80% off can tell you, once in a while, a seasonal sale can offer the opportunity to attain something highly desirable at the right price. The key is in approaching sales with a level head and clear intentions, so you don’t waste your money—and worse, your time—shopping for things you don’t really need. April Lane Benson, a psychologist who works with patients that suffer from compulsive buying, has some practical tips for taking a controlled approach to the sales onslaught: Define your terms “Certain conditions have to be met for it to be a good purchase,” says Benson. And the person who defines those conditions is you, by creating a plan. To create a plan is to throw a wrench into the endless shopping-as-entertainment vortex that Bain described, and allows you—not a blinking banner or a 70% off sticker—to determine whether or not a deal is a good one. Before you go shopping, Benson says, define what it is you’re shopping for, how much you’re comfortable spending, and how necessary the purchase is. That way, if you go shopping with $250 for new everyday winter boots and a pair of jeans, you don’t instead come home with a $300 fuzzy coat just because, Wow! This coat was originally $1,000! Another good reason to shop with intention: in addition to yielding better results, it can actually be more fun. The six questions Inevitably, that deeply discounted fuzzy coat will find us—whether it’s in a real-life shop window or a virtual one. Benson has six questions she refers her clients to when the impulse strikes and the pulse quickens: Why am I here? How do I feel? Do I need this? What if I wait? How will I pay for it? Where will I put it? “Why am I here?” may seem like a bit of an existential stretch when you’re in a crowded Nordstrom on a sunny Saturday—but it may be just the wakeup call to remind you you’ve got better places to be. The one that often gets me is: “Where will I put it?” Somehow, picturing an item in my already crowded closet—rather than in a beautiful boutique or on my iPhone screen—brings me back to the reality that I probably don’t need it, and what’s more, I barely have room for it. Your time has value too In June, Hayley Phelan wrote for the Wall Street Journal about her six-month shopping detox. “I’d often agonized over the monetary price of fashion,” she wrote. “It turns out I was worried about the wrong resource. During my self-imposed hiatus, I realized I was wasting something else: serious amounts of time.” Phelan wrote about finding herself on page 22 of the Net-a-Porter sale as a deadline rapidly approached—a feeling many a fashion enthusiast might find familiar. Again, Benson would point us to planning, and the old six questions starting with “Why am I here?” Additionally, she says, we can unsubscribe from promotional emails, opt out of targeted ads, and “just make a decision that that’s not how you’re going to do your shopping.” As Phelan pointed out, it’s possible that you may spend an extra few dollars by skipping the endless scrolling. But just think of the hours you’ll save.

Does Louis Vuitton’s catalog of goods, which includes a $5,700 trunk-shaped clutch, also feature a slime-filled poop-shaped toy purse? A new lawsuit says obviously not. In a complaint filed in federal court last week, Los Angeles-based MGA Entertainment, maker of the $59.99 toy purse known as “Pooey Puitton,” argued that the purse does not infringe on Louis Vuitton’s intellectual-property rights and should be protected as parody. “On or around December 7, 2018, Louis Vuitton claimed to one of MGA’s customers that the Pooey name and Pooey product infringed upon or diluted one or more of Louis Vuitton trademarks,” the complaint reads, going on to assert that “no reasonable consumer would mistake the Pooey product for a Louis Vuitton handbag.” View image on Twitter View image on Twitter Sehr Pirzada @SehrPirzada My daughters latest acquisition The Poopsie “Pooey Puitton” Unicorn Poop. Louis Vuitton are you ok with this? 11 8:35 PM - Dec 26, 2018 See Sehr Pirzada's other Tweets Twitter Ads info and privacy “The use of the Pooey name and Pooey product in association with a product line of ‘magical unicorn poop’ is intended to criticize or comment upon the rich and famous, the Louis Vuitton name, the LV marks, and on their conspicuous consumption,” MGA states. While Louis Vuitton, which does have copyright and trademark protections for its signature monogram pattern, did not initiate litigation against MGA, the toymaker justified its suit by citing Louis Vuitton’s “history of not respecting parody rights in the US and filing vexatious lawsuits against such protected parody.” Indeed, this is far from Louis Vuitton’s first trademark spat: In 2014, the company sued My Other Bag for the company’s depictions of Louis Vuitton designs on canvas tote bags (it ultimately lost). Nor is this MGA’s first foray into court. The toymaker is still mired in a legal battle with Mattel over the initial designs for MGA’s Bratz dolls, which Mattel claims it stole. MGA has also been involved in multiple suits against online retailers it accused of knowingly selling counterfeit versions of its wildly popular L.O.L. Surprise! products.

As Earth celebrated another rotation around the sun last night, millions of party-goers texted family and friends instantaneous New Year’s wishes. It wasn’t until 10:30am EST on Jan. 1 that NASA got its own festive greeting: a blurry picture from its most distant explorer, the New Horizons space probe. Twelve years ago, New Horizons left our planet. It passed Jupiter in just over a year, and took another seven to reach Pluto, where it snapped the crispest pictures yet of the on-again-off-again planet. This morning, the probe successful navigated itself to and around the celestial object 2014 MU69, a mysterious hunk of reddish rock whose nickname—the “Ultimate Thule,” translates to “beyond the known world.” The object is more than 4 billion miles away from Earth. Although the flyby occurred at 12:33am EST on Tuesday, the New Horizons is so far from Earth—more than 4 billion miles—that it took roughly 10 hours for the signal to make its way back. The spacecraft sent a picture of the rock taken from 500,000 miles out. Detecting this frozen rock was no small feat. At 10-15 miles wide, it’s roughly the size of Washington DC, and was discovered during the New Horizons’ journey to the Kuiper Belt. Previously, our best glimpse of this tiny rock was a two-pixel-wide image. NASA/JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY/SOUTHWEST RESEARCH INSTITUTE Enhance Over the next 20 months, the probe will transmit gigabytes of research data and imagery—one to two kilobytes per second—over a faint radio signal back to its home world.

Imagine trying to figure out how something works when that something takes place in a space smaller than a femtoliter: one quadrillionith of a liter. Now, two scientists with a nose for solving mysteries have used a combination of mathematical modeling, electrophysiology, and computer simulations to explain how cells communicate effectively in highly constricted spaces such as the olfactory cilia, where odor detection takes place. The findings will inform future studies of cellular signaling and communication in the olfactory system and also in other confined spaces of the nervous system. Study author Johannes Reisert, Ph.D., a Monell Center cell physiologist, comments, "Ion channels and how their currents change ion concentrations inside cells are notoriously difficult to study. Our modeling-based approach enables us to better understand not only how olfaction works, but also the function of small nerve endings such as dendrites, where pathology is associated with many neurodegenerative diseases." In the study, published online in advance of print in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists asked why olfactory receptor cells communicate with the brain using a fundamentally different series of electrical events than used by sensory cells in the visual or auditory systems. Olfaction begins when, in a process similar to a key fitting into a lock, an airborne chemical molecule travels through the nasal mucus to bind with an olfactory receptor embedded on the wall of a nerve cell within the nose. The olfactory receptors are located on cilia, elongated super-thin threadlike structures less than 0.000004 inches in diameter, which extend from the nerve cell into the mucus. The act of odorant-receptor binding initiates a complex molecular cascade inside the olfactory cell, known as transduction, which results in the nerve sending an electrical signal to inform the brain that an odor has been detected. The transduction process culminates with the opening of pores called ion channels, located in the nerve cell's wall. The open pores enable positive or negative electrically charged molecules (ions) to flow in and out of the cell. This ultimately changes the cell's overall electrical charge to a less negative state, which is what initiates the cell's signal to the brain. Most ion channels are selective for a specific ion, including positively charged sodium (Na+) ions or negatively charged chloride (Cl-). The flow of an ion through its channel in either direction generates an electric current. Receptor cells in both the visual and auditory systems depend on inward-flowing positive ion currents to elicit an electrical signal. In contrast, the olfactory system also relies on outward-flowing negative ion currents. By using multiple approaches to develop a testable model of olfactory transduction and ion currents, Reisert and his collaborator, computational neuroscientist Jürgen Reingruber, Ph.D., from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, were able to explain why the olfactory system functions differently. The researchers demonstrated that relying on Cl- rather than Na+ as part of the transduction cascade provides several advantages that enable olfactory cells to respond to odors more consistently. One constraint faced by the olfactory system is that the concentrations of Na+ and other positive ions in the mucus outside the olfactory cells vary dramatically as a function of the nose's external environment. This makes it difficult for olfactory cells to depend on externally-originating Na+ currents as a reliable component of the transduction response. The olfactory cells counteract this problem by using a Cl- current that originates inside the cell, where ion concentrations are more stable, making the Cl- current more dependable overall. "Imagine that you've been swimming in the ocean and your nose is bathed in salt water. That means that there's much more sodium outside the olfactory cells, but they need to be able to function reliably whether you've just been swimming in the ocean or are sitting in your kitchen," said Reisert. "Replacing the externally-originating Na+ current with Cl- ions that move from inside the cell to outside solves that problem." The models also showed that using the outward flowing Cl- ion currents enables the olfactory cells to protect the infinitesimal intracellular space of the cilia, which is where olfactory transduction occurs. This is because inward-flowing positive ions would encourage extra water to enter the space, potentially resulting in osmotic swelling and related structural damage to the cilia. The findings explain how the olfactory system is able to function dependably despite the challenging physical conditions of an unstable external environment and the small ciliary volume. An example of the powerful value of basic science, this modeling approach can now be used to investigate similar questions in other parts of the nervous system.

The NASA spacecraft that yielded the first close-up views of Pluto opened the new year at an even more distant world, a billion miles beyond. Flight controllers said everything looked good for New Horizons' flyby of the tiny, icy object at 12:33 a.m. Tuesday. Confirmation was not expected for hours, though, given the vast distance. The mysterious, ancient target nicknamed Ultima Thule is 4 billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) from Earth. Scientists wanted New Horizons observing Ultima Thule during the encounter, not phoning home. So they had to wait until late morning before learning whether the spacecraft survived. With New Horizons on autopilot, Mission Control was empty at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Instead, hundreds of team members and their guests gathered nearby on campus for back-to-back countdowns. The crowd ushered in 2019 at midnight, then cheered, blew party horns and jubilantly waved small U.S. flags again 33 minutes later, the appointed time for New Horizons' closest approach to Ultima Thule. A few black-and-white pictures of Ultima Thule might be available following Tuesday's official confirmation, but the highly anticipated close-ups won't be ready until Wednesday or Thursday, in color, it is hoped. "We set a record. Never before has a spacecraft explored anything so far away," said the project's lead scientist who led the countdown to the close encounter, Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute. "Think of it. We're a billion miles farther than Pluto." Stern called it an auspicious beginning to 2019, which will mark the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's footsteps on the moon in July 1969. NASA spacecraft opens new year at tiny, icy world past Pluto This illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft. NASA launched the probe in 2006; it's about the size of a baby grand piano. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to fly past the mysterious object nicknamed Ultima Thule …more "Ultima Thule is 17,000 times as far away as the 'giant leap' of Apollo's lunar missions," Stern noted in an opinion piece in The New York Times. New Horizons, which is the size of a baby grand piano and part of an $800 million mission, was expected to hurtle to within 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule, considerably closer than the Pluto encounter of 2015. Its seven science instruments were to continue collecting data for four hours after the flyby. Then the spacecraft was to turn briefly toward Earth to transmit word of its success. It takes over six hours for radio signals to reach Earth from that far away. Scientists believe there should be no rings or moons around Ultima Thule that might endanger New Horizons. Traveling at 31,500 mph (50,700 kph), the spacecraft could easily be knocked out by a rice-size particle. It's a tougher encounter than at Pluto because of the distance and the considerable unknowns, and because the spacecraft is older now. "I can't promise you success. We are straining the capabilities of this spacecraft," Stern said at a news conference Monday. "By tomorrow, we'll know how we did. So stay tuned. There are no second chances for New Horizons." The risk added to the excitement. Queen guitarist Brian May, who also happens to be an astrophysicist, joined the team at Johns Hopkins for a midnight premiere of the rock 'n' roll song he wrote for the big event. "We will never forget this moment," said May who led the New Year's countdown. "This is completely unknown territory." Despite the government shutdown, several NASA scientists and other employees showed up at Johns Hopkins as private citizens, unwilling to miss history in the making. NASA spacecraft opens new year at tiny, icy world past Pluto This composite image made available by NASA shows the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed "Ultima Thule," indicated by the crosshairs at center, with stars surrounding it on Aug. 16, 2018, made by the New Horizons spacecraft. The brightness of the …more Ultima Thule was unknown until 2014, eight years after New Horizons departed Earth. It was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope and added to New Horizons' itinerary. Deep inside the so-called Kuiper Belt, a frigid expanse beyond Neptune that is also known as the Twilight Zone, Ultima Thule is believed to date back 4.5 billion years to the formation of our solar system. As such, it is "probably the best time capsule we've ever had for understanding the birth of our solar system and the planets in it," Stern said. In classic and medieval literature, Thule was the most distant, northernmost place beyond the known world. Scientists suspect Ultima Thule is a single object no more than 20 miles (32 kilometers) long, though there's a chance it could prove to be two smaller bodies orbiting each other or connected by a slender neck. It is thought to be potato-shaped and dark-colored with a touch of red, possibly from being zapped by cosmic rays for eons. The exact shape and composition won't be known until Ultima Thule starts sending back data in a process expected to last almost two years. "Who knows what we might find? ... Anything's possible out there in this very unknown region," said John Spencer, a deputy project scientist from Southwest Research Institute. "We'll find out soon enough."

A law requiring internet companies in Vietnam to remove content communist authorities deem to be against the state came into effect Tuesday, in a move critics called "a totalitarian model of information control". The new cybersecurity law has received sharp criticism from the US, the EU and internet freedom advocates who say it mimics China's repressive censorship of the internet. The law requires internet companies to remove content the government regards as "toxic". Tech giants such as Facebook and Google will also have to hand over user data if asked by the government, and open representative offices in Vietnam. The communist country's powerful Ministry of Public Security (MPS) published a draft decree on how the law may be implemented in November, giving companies which offer internet service in Vietnam up to 12 months to comply. MPS has also said the bill was aimed at staving off cyber-attacks—and weeding out "hostile and reactionary forces" using the internet to stir up violence and dissent, according to a transcript of a question-and-answer session with lawmakers in October. In response to the law, which was approved by Vietnam's rubber-stamp parliament last June, Facebook said they are are committed to protecting the rights of its users and enabling people to express themselves freely and safely. "We will remove content that violates (Facebook's) standards when we are made aware of it," Facebook said in an emailed statement to AFP, adding that the social media giant has a clear process to manage requests from governments around the world. Hanoi has said Google is taking steps to open up an office in Vietnam to comply with the new law. In response to AFP's request for comment, the internet giant said it would not comment at this stage. The law also bans internet users in Vietnam from spreading information deemed to be anti-state, anti-government or use the internet to distort history and "post false information that could cause confusion and damage to socio-economic activities". Critics say online freedom is shrinking under a hardline administration that has been in charge since 2016. Dozens of activists have been jailed at a pace not seen in years. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on the communist authorities to revise the law and postpone its implementation. "This law is designed to further enable the Ministry of Public Security's pervasive surveillance to spot critics, and to deepen the Communist Party's monopoly on power," Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of HRW said. The law comes into force a week after Vietnam's Association of Journalists announced a new code of conduct on the use of social media by its members, forbidding reporters to post news, picture and comments that "run counter to" the state. Daniel Bastard of Reporters Without Borders decried the new requirements for journalists and the cybersecurity law, calling it "a totalitarian model of information control". Vietnam wants to build a reputation as a Southeast Asian hub for fintech. Critics warn the new internet law—particularly the data-sharing element—will make start-ups think twice about relocating to the country.

By enticing away the repressors dampening unexpressed, silent genes in Streptomyces bacteria, researchers at the University of Illinois have unlocked several large gene clusters for new natural products, according to a study published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology. Since many antibiotics, anti-cancer agents and other drugs have been derived from genes readily expressed in Streptomyces, the researchers hope that unsilencing genes that have not previously been expressed in the lab will yield additional candidates in the search for new antimicrobial drugs, says study leader and chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Huimin Zhao. "There are so many undiscovered natural products lying unexpressed in genomes. We think of them as the dark matter of the cell," Zhao said. "Anti-microbial resistance has become a global challenge, so clearly there's an urgent need for tools to aid the discovery of novel natural products. In this work, we found new compounds by activating silent gene clusters that have not been explored before." The researchers previously demonstrated a technique to activate small silent gene clusters using CRISPR technology. However, large silent gene clusters have remained difficult to unmute. Those larger genes are of great interest to Zhao's group, since a number of them have sequences similar to regions that code for existing classes of antibiotics, such as tetracycline. To unlock the large gene clusters of greatest interest, Zhao's group created clones of the DNA fragments they wanted to express and injected them into the bacteria in hopes of luring away the repressor molecules that were preventing gene expression. They called these clones transcription factor decoys. "Others have used this similar kind of decoys for therapeutic applications in mammalian cells, but we show here for the first time that it can be used for drug discovery by activating silent genes in bacteria," said Zhao, who is affiliated with the Carle Illinois College of Medicine, the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology and the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation at Illinois. To prove that the molecules they coded for were being expressed, researchers tested the decoy method first on two known gene clusters that synthesize natural products. Next, they created decoys for eight silent gene clusters that had been previously unexplored. In bacteria injected with the decoys, the targeted silent genes were expressed and the researchers harvested new products. "We saw that the method works well for these large clusters that are hard to target by other methods," Zhao said. "It also has the advantage that it does not disturb the genome; it's just pulling away the repressors. Then the genes are expressed naturally from the native DNA." In the search for drug candidates, each product needs to be isolated and then studied to determine what it does. Of the eight new molecules produced, the researchers purified and determined the structure of two molecules, and described one in detail in the study—a novel type of oxazole, a class of molecules often used in drugs. The researchers plan next to characterize the rest of the eight compounds and run various assays to find out whether they have any anti-microbial, anti-fungal, anti-cancer or other biological activities. Zhao's group also plans to apply the decoy technique to explore more silent biosynthetic gene clusters of interest in Streptomyces and in other bacteria and fungi to find more undiscovered natural products. Other research groups are welcome to use the technique for gene clusters they are exploring, Zhao said. "The principle is the same, assuming that gene expression is repressed by transcription factors and we just need to release that expression by using decoy DNA fragments," Zhao said.

A group of Florida Museum of Natural History scientists has issued a "call to action" to use big data to tackle longstanding questions about plant diversity and evolution and forecast how plant life will fare on an increasingly human-dominated planet. In a commentary published today in Nature Plants, the scientists urged their colleagues to take advantage of massive, open-access data resources in their research and help grow these resources by filling in remaining data gaps. "Using big data to address major biodiversity issues at the global scale has enormous practical implications, ranging from conservation efforts to predicting and buffering the impacts of climate change," said study author Doug Soltis, a Florida Museum curator and distinguished professor in the University of Florida department of biology. "The links between big data resources we see now were unimaginable just a decade ago. The time is ripe to leverage these tools and applications, not just for plants but for all groups of organisms." Over several centuries, natural history museums have built collections of billions of specimens and their associated data, much of which is now available online. New technologies such as remote sensors and drones allow scientists to monitor plants and animals and transmit data in real time. And citizen scientists are contributing biological data by recording and reporting their observations via digital tools such as iNaturalist. Together, these data resources provide scientists and conservationists with a wealth of information about the past, present and future of life on Earth. As these databases have grown, so have the computational tools needed not only to analyze but also link immense data sets. Studies that previously focused on a handful of species or a single plant community can now expand to a global level, thanks to the development of databases such as GenBank, which stores DNA sequences, iDigBio, a University of Florida-led effort to digitize U.S. natural history collections, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a repository of species' location information. These resources can be valuable to a wide range of users, from scientists in pursuit of fundamental insights into plant evolution and ecology to land managers and policymakers looking to identify the regions most in need of conservation, said Julie Allen, co-lead author and an assistant professor in the University of Nevada-Reno department of biology. If Earth's plant life were a medical patient, small-scale studies might examine the plant equivalent of a cold sore or an ingrown toenail. With big data, scientists can gain a clearer understanding of global plant health as a whole, make timely diagnoses and prescribe the right treatment plans. Such plans are urgently needed, Allen said. "We're in this exciting and terrifying time in which the unprecedented amount of data available to us intersects with global threats to biodiversity such as habitat loss and climate change," said Allen, a former Florida Museum postdoctoral researcher and UF doctoral graduate. "Understanding the processes that have shaped our world—how plants are doing, where they are now and why—can help us get a handle on how they might respond to future changes." Why is it so vital to track these regional and global changes? "We can't survive without plants," said co-lead author and museum research associate Ryan Folk. "A lot of groups evolved in the shadow of flowering plants. As these plants spread and diversified, so did ants, beetles, ferns and other organisms. They are the base layer to the diversity of life we see on the planet today." In addition to using and growing plant data resources, the authors hope the scientific community will address one of the toughest remaining obstacles to using biological big data: getting databases to work smoothly with each other. "This is still a huge limitation," Allen said. "The data in each system are often collected in completely different ways. Integrating these to connect in seamless ways is a major challenge."

A new NYU Abu Dhabi study suggests for the first time that actin, which is a cytoskeleton protein found in the cell, is critical to regulating the genome—the genetic material of an organism—during the formation of "neurons" or nerve cells. The study was published today in PLOS Genetics. Led by NYU Abu Dhabi Associate Professor of Biology Piergiorgio Percipalle, along with other researchers, this study involved converting "fibroblasts—cells that maintain connective tissues—with impaired actin expression into neurons in order to identify the role of Actin in neurogenesis. The implication of the methodology together with the availability of fibroblasts not expressing actin is far reaching. It will enable researchers to understand novel concepts in genome regulation and, in the long term, model diseases to identify druggable targets. "The technology we've applied in my lab has given us the opportunity to identify novel factors and pathways involved in the regulation of the mammalian genome during neurogenesis—the formation of neurons—and has a lot of potential for the development of personalized medicines," says Percipalle, the study's lead researcher.

NASA rang in the New Year on Tuesday with a historic flyby of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind—a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule—in the hopes of learning more about how planets took shape. "Go New Horizons!" said lead scientist Alan Stern as a crowd including kids dressed in space costumes blew party horns and cheered at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland to mark the moment at 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt. Offering scientists the first up-close look at an ancient building block of planets, the flyby took place about a billion miles beyond Pluto, which was until now the most faraway world ever visited up close by a spacecraft. Real-time video of the actual flyby was impossible, since it takes more than six hours for a signal sent from Earth to reach the spaceship, and another six hours for the response to arrive. The first signal back to Earth should come about 10 hours after the flyby, around 9:45 am (1445 GMT), letting NASA know if New Horizons survived the risky, high-speed encounter. Hurtling through space at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft aimed to make its closest approach within 2,200 miles of the surface of Ultima Thule. "This is a night none of us are going to forget," said Queen guitarist Brian May—who also holds an advanced degree in astrophysics—and who recorded a solo track to honor the spacecraft and its spirit of exploration. Stern said Ultima Thule is unique because it is a relic from the early days of the solar system and could provide answers about the origins of other planets. "The object is in such a deep freeze that it is perfectly preserved from its original formation," he said. "Everything we are going to learn about Ultima—from its composition to its geology to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere and those kinds of things—are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system." NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a January 1 flyby of Ultima Thule, an icy object in the Kuiper Belt on the outer l NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a January 1 flyby of Ultima Thule, an icy object in the Kuiper Belt on the outer limits of the solar system What does it look like? Scientists are not sure what Ultima Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) looks like—whether it is cratered or smooth, or even if it is a single object or a cluster. It was discovered in 2014 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, and is believed to be 12-20 miles in size. A blurred and pixelated image released Monday, taken from 1.2 million miles away, has intrigued scientists because it appears to show an elongated blob, not a round space rock. The spaceship was to collect 900 images over the course of a few seconds as it shaved by. Even clearer images should arrive over the next three days. "Now it is just a matter of time to see the data coming down," said deputy project scientist John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute. Scientists decided to study Ultima Thule with New Horizons after the spaceship, which launched in 2006, completed its main mission of flying by Pluto in 2015, returning the most detailed images ever taken of the dwarf planet. Stern said the goal is to take images of Ultima that are three times the resolution the team had for Pluto. Frontier of planetary science Ultima Thule is named for a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography, according to NASA. Project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said humans didn't even know the Kuiper Belt—a vast ring of relics from the formation days of the solar system—existed until the 1990s. "This is the frontier of planetary science," said Weaver. "We finally have reached the outskirts of the solar system, these things that have been there since the beginning and have hardly changed—we think. We will find out." Another NASA spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, also set a new record on Monday by entering orbit around the asteroid Bennu, the smallest cosmic object—about 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter—ever circled by a spacecraft. NASA said the orbit some 70 million miles (110 million kilometers) away marks "a leap for humankind" because no spacecraft has ever "circled so close to such a small space object—one with barely enough gravity to keep a vehicle in a stable orbit." The twin planetary feats coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first time humans ever explored another world, when US astronauts orbited the Moon aboard Apollo 8 in December, 1968. "As you celebrate New Year's Day, cast an eye upward and think for a moment about the amazing things our country and our species can do when we set our minds to it," Stern wrote in the New York Times on Monday.

NASA rang in the New Year on Tuesday with a historic flyby of the farthest, and quite possibly the oldest, cosmic body ever explored by humankind—a tiny, distant world called Ultima Thule—in the hopes of learning more about how planets took shape. A series of anxiously awaited "phone home" signals arrived after 10:30 am (1530 GMT), indicating that the spacecraft had made it, intact, through the risky, high-speed encounter. "We have a healthy spacecraft," said mission operations manager Alice Bowman, as cheers erupted in the control rooms at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. About 10 hours earlier, NASA celebrated the New Year's flyby, as mission managers—alongside kids dressed in space costumes—blew party horns to mark the moment at 12:33 am (0533 GMT) when the New Horizons spacecraft aimed its cameras at the space rock four billion miles (6.4 billion kilometers) away in a dark and frigid region of space known as the Kuiper Belt. More images and data will start arriving later Tuesday, offering scientists the first up-close look at an ancient building block of planets, Bowman said. The flyby took place about a billion miles beyond Pluto, which was until now the most faraway world ever visited up close by a spacecraft. Hurtling through space at a speed of 32,000 miles per hour, the spacecraft made its closest approach within 2,200 miles of the surface of Ultima Thule. "This is a night none of us are going to forget," said Queen guitarist Brian May—who also holds an advanced degree in astrophysics—and who recorded a solo track to honor the spacecraft and its spirit of exploration. Lead planetary scientist for New Horizons, Alan Stern, said Ultima Thule is unique because it is a relic from the early days of the solar system and could provide answers about the origins of other planets. "The object is in such a deep freeze that it is perfectly preserved from its original formation," he said. "Everything we are going to learn about Ultima—from its composition to its geology to how it was originally assembled, whether it has satellites and an atmosphere and those kinds of things—are going to teach us about the original formation conditions of objects in the solar system." Coming into focus Scientists are not sure exactly what Ultima Thule (pronounced TOO-lee) looks like—whether it is cratered or smooth, or even if it is a single object or a cluster. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a January 1 flyby of Ultima Thule, an icy object in the Kuiper Belt on the outer l NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is heading for a January 1 flyby of Ultima Thule, an icy object in the Kuiper Belt on the outer limits of the solar system But a new, though still blurry image released Tuesday showed its oblong shape resembles something like a bowling pin or a peanut, and its dimensions are about 22 miles long and nine miles wide (35 by 15 kilometers). Stern said his bet is that the object is a single body, not two pieces orbiting each other, but he would wait until more, clearer images arrive Wednesday to say for sure. The highest resolution images are expected in February, Stern said. Ultima Thule was discovered in 2014 with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists decided to study Ultima Thule with New Horizons after the spaceship, which launched in 2006, completed its main mission of flying by Pluto in 2015, returning the most detailed images ever taken of the dwarf planet. Stern said the goal was to take images of Ultima that are three times the resolution the team had for Pluto. Frontier of planetary science Ultima Thule is named for a mythical, far-northern island in medieval literature and cartography, according to NASA. Project scientist Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory said humans didn't even know the Kuiper Belt—a vast ring of relics from the formation days of the solar system—existed until the 1990s. "This is the frontier of planetary science," said Weaver. Another NASA spacecraft, OSIRIS-REx, also set a new record on Monday by entering orbit around the asteroid Bennu, the smallest cosmic object—about 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter—ever circled by a spacecraft. NASA said the orbit some 70 million miles (110 million kilometers) away marks "a leap for humankind" because no spacecraft has ever "circled so close to such a small space object—one with barely enough gravity to keep a vehicle in a stable orbit." The twin planetary feats coincided with the 50th anniversary of the first time humans ever explored another world, when US astronauts orbited the Moon aboard Apollo 8 in December, 1968. "As you celebrate New Year's Day, cast an eye upward and think for a moment about the amazing things our country and our species can do when we set our minds to it," Stern wrote in the New York Times on Monday.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has survived the most distant exploration of another world, a tiny, icy object 4 billion miles away that looks to be shaped like a peanut or bowling pin. Word of success came 10 hours after the middle-of-the-night encounter, once flight controllers in Maryland received word from the spacecraft late Tuesday morning. Cheers erupted at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, home to Mission Control, as mission operations manager Alice Bowman declared: "We have a healthy spacecraft." A huge spill-over crowd in a nearby auditorium joined in the loud celebration, cheering each green, or good, status update. Scientists and other team members embraced, while hundreds of others gave a standing ovation. "I don't know about all of you, but I'm really liking this 2019 thing so far," lead scientist Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute said to applause. "I'm here to tell you that last night, overnight, the United States spacecraft New Horizons conducted the farthest exploration in the history of humankind, and did so spectacularly." New Horizons zoomed past the small celestial object known as Ultima Thule 3 ½ years after its spectacular brush with Pluto. Scientists said it will take nearly two years for New Horizons to beam back all its observations of Ultima Thule, a full billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) beyond Pluto. At that distance, it takes six hours for the radio signals to reach Earth. NASA spacecraft opens new year 4 billion miles from Earth This illustration provided by NASA shows the New Horizons spacecraft. NASA launched the probe in 2006; it's about the size of a baby grand piano. NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is set to fly past the mysterious object nicknamed Ultima Thule …more Scientists did not want to interrupt observations as New Horizons swept past Ultima Thule—described as a bullet intersecting with another bullet—so they delayed radio transmissions. The spacecraft is believed to have come within 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule. Weary from dual countdowns late Monday and early Tuesday, the New Horizons team members were visibly anxious as they reassembled in late morning. "Happy New Year again," they bid one another. But the hundreds of spectators went wild nonetheless when the good news came in. New Horizons' 2015 encounter with Pluto was the most distant exploration until Tuesday. The Ultima Thule rendezvous was more complicated, given its 4 billion-mile (6.4 billion-kilometer) distance from Earth, the much closer gap between the spacecraft and its target, and all the unknowns surrounding Ultima Thule. Based on rudimentary pictures snapped just hundreds of thousands of miles (kilometers) before the 12:33 a.m. close approach, Ultima Thule is decidedly elongated—about 22 miles by 9 miles (35 kilometers by 15 kilometers). Scientists say there are two possibilities: Ultima Thule is either one object with two connected lobes, sort of like a spinning bowling pin or peanut still in the shell, or two objects orbiting surprisingly close to one another. A single body is more likely, they noted. An answer should be forthcoming Wednesday, once new and better pictures arrive. The best color close-ups, though, won't be available until later in January and February. The icy rock has been in a deep-freeze preservation state since the formation of our solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Scientists hope to learn about those origins through New Horizons' observations deep inside the so-called Kuiper Belt, or frozen Twilight Zone, on the fringes of the solar system. NASA spacecraft opens new year 4 billion miles from Earth This composite image made available by NASA shows the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed "Ultima Thule," indicated by the crosshairs at center, with stars surrounding it on Aug. 16, 2018, made by the New Horizons spacecraft. The brightness of the …more New Horizons will continue to zoom farther away. The hope is that the mission, now totaling $800 million, will be extended yet again and another target will be forthcoming sometime in the 2020s. Ultima Thule is the first destination to be reached that was not even known until after the spacecraft's launch. New Horizons rocketed from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2006.

Every unprofitable coal mine in the European Union must cease production by the first day of 2019, the date on which all public funds for the mines will come to an end. From a report: In Spain, that means that 26 coal mines are about to close up shop, according to Reuters. This move away from coal is a refreshing bit of bluntness -- letting the failed remnants of a fossil fuel industry fade away -- compared to how the federal government in the U.S. is grasping at anything to keep coal alive. But it remains to be seen how much of an impact the coal closures will have in the ongoing effort to curb climate change. The deadline was set back in 2010 as the EU sought to move away from fossil fuel dependence, according to Telesur. The EU wanted to end public aid to coal mines sooner, but groups from Germany -- which shuttered its last coal mine earlier this month -- and Spain are responsible for extending the deadline all the way to the end of 2018.

Some Firefox users yesterday started seeing an ad in the desktop version of the browser. It offers users a $20 Amazon gift card in return for booking your next hotel stay via Booking.com. VentureBeat reached out to Mozilla, which confirmed the ad was a Firefox experiment and that no user data was being shared with its partners. From a report: The ad appears at the bottom of Firefox's new tab page on the desktop version with a "Find a Hotel" button that takes the user to a Booking.com page. The text reads: "Ready to schedule that next family reunion? Here's a thank you from Firefox. Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply)." A second version reads: "For the holidays, we got you a little something just for using Firefox! Book your next hotel stay on Booking.com today and get a free $20 Amazon gift card. Happy Holidays from Firefox! (Restrictions apply.)"

The Federal Communications Commission will suspend most operations in the middle of the day January 3 if the partial government shutdown continues, the agency has announced [PDF]. In a statement, it said: In the event of a continued partial lapse in federal government funding, the Federal Communications Commission will suspend most operations in the middle of the day on Thursday, January 3. At that time, employees will have up to four hours to complete an orderly shutdown of operations. However, work required for the protection of life and property will continue, as will any work related to spectrum auctions, which is funded by auction proceeds. In addition, the Office of the Inspector General will continue operations until further notice. The Commission on Wednesday will release a Public Notice detailing the effects the suspension of operations will have, including on electronic filing and database systems, filing deadlines, regulatory and application fee payments, transaction shot clocks, and more. The Public Notice will be available on the Commission's website, www.fcc.gov.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chrome OS was originally a laptop platform, but slowly it's being reworked for tablet form factors. However, as that goes on, there have been some hiccups. Most recently, many have noted the poor performance of tablet mode especially on Chrome OS products like the Pixel Slate, but it seems a fix for that lag is incoming. If you tuned into any hands-on or review coverage of Google's Pixel Slate, you're likely familiar with the performance issues many have described. In tablet mode, Chrome OS has a lot of issues with lag. This is especially evident in the multitasking screen, and it seems that is the first thing Google is looking at to fix these problems. ChromeUnboxed notes a recent bug tracker which reveals how Google plans to start fixing Chrome OS tablet mode lag in the multitasking screen. Somewhat hilariously, it seems a big reason for the poor frame rates in the animations on this screen actually comes down to how the OS renders the rounded corners on this screen.

Over the weekend, China launched a satellite into low-earth orbit, the first step of a plan to provide global satellite internet to people who still don't have reliable access. From a report: Nearly 3.8 billion people are unconnected to the internet, and women and rural poor are particularly affected. The satellite, called Hongyun-1, took off at China's national launching site Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Saturday (Dec. 22). Hongyun-1, or "rainbow cloud," is the first of 156 satellites of the same name developed by state-owned spacecraft maker China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). CASIC intends to launch all the Hongyun satellites by around 2022 to form a constellation that will improve internet access in remote parts of China, and eventually in developing countries, a plan first announced in 2016. Most of the satellites will operate 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) above the earth, far lower than satellites are typically placed. The project is "moving the internet currently on the ground into the sky," said Hou Xiufeng, a spokesperson for CASIC, "It's China's first true low-orbit communication satellite... The launch will greatly boost commercial space."

A main route between England and Wales was closed after a man climbed a bridge and flew a drone from the top. An anonymous reader shares a report: Traffic was stopped on the M48 -- the older of two Severn crossings -- because of "concern for welfare," police said. The man, in his 20s, came down voluntarily from the 47m (154ft) bridge tower and was arrested on suspicion of causing a public nuisance. Highways England said it was deeply concerned and that "a person has put their life at serious risk". "The incident was quickly spotted on our security cameras and reported to police and thankfully there was no injury or worse on this occasion," it said. "Appropriate security is in place on the bridge, we are liaising with Avon and Somerset Police and will be undertaking investigations to determine if any damage was caused during the incident." Police said: "Officers attended the M48 Severn Bridge at 08:10 this morning after concerns were raised for a man who appeared to have climbed one of the towers and was flying a drone off it."

Sony, the biggest maker of camera chips used in smartphones, is boosting production of next-generation 3D sensors after getting interest from customers including Apple. From a report: The chips will power front- and rear-facing 3D cameras of models from several smartphone makers in 2019, with Sony kicking off mass production in late summer to meet demand, according to Satoshi Yoshihara, head of Sony's sensor division. Sony's bullish outlook for 3D cameras provides much needed optimism to the global smartphone industry, which is suffering a slowdown as consumers find fewer reasons to upgrade devices. The Tokyo-based company has started providing software toolkits to outside developers so they can experiment with the chips and create apps that generate models of faces for communication or virtual objects for online shopping. "Cameras revolutionized phones, and based on what I've seen, I have the same expectation for 3D," said Yoshihara, who has worked for more than a decade on wider industry adoption of cameras in smartphones. "The pace will vary by field, but we're definitely going to see adoption of 3D. I'm certain of it."