Warren.Smith

With Apple buying Beats and AT&T buying DirecTV, this seems to be the month of the blockbuster acquisition deal. And it looks like Google wants in on the action too—according to a report from Variety, the company is going to buy video game streaming site Twitch.tv for over $1 billion.

Google's YouTube division is heading up the acquisition, and that makes sense. Twitch is best thought of as a live streaming, gaming-focused version of YouTube. The streamer loads up his or her favorite game, and the audience watches and participates via an integrated chat room. Twitch recently made headlines as the host of Twitch Plays Pokémon, a social experiment where over 100,000 people simultaneously played a single instance of Pokémon. And the site is so popular that direct streaming has even been integrated into the PS4 and Xbox One.

While YouTube is indisputably the largest pre-recorded video site on the Internet, Twitch is undoubtedly among the Web's largest live-streaming video sites. Still, the scale between the two entities really isn't comparable: Twitch has 45 million monthly users, YouTube has one billion. A deal like this is sure to draw the ire of regulators, and the report says YouTube is gearing up to jump through the necessary approval hoops to get the deal done.

NASA

Today, NASA released images taken with the Hubble's Wide Field Camera showing that Jupiter's Great Red Spot has reached the smallest size yet recorded. At 16,500 km in diameter (10252.6 miles), the spot isn't likely to go away any time soon, but the shrinkage represents the continuation—and possibly acceleration—of a long-term trend.

Observations made from Earth in the 1800s suggest that the Red Spot was once over 40,000 km across. By the time the Voyagers visited and provided an accurate measure, the Spot was down to 23,000 km. Hubble has been taking images regularly, but NASA credits amateur astronomers for noticing that the rate of the storm's dissipation picked up in 2012, with the feature losing 900 km of diameter (559 miles) a year since then.

The storm is fed energy and material from Jupiter's fast-moving cloud belts, and the researchers who are studying the new image suggest that some of this supply is being choked off. NASA's Andy Simon pointed to the series of complex eddies, visible above, that may be controlling the flow of energy into the Great Red Spot. Further imaging is planned to study the behavior of these eddies in the hope that it will tell us what's behind the vanishing spot.

If you’ve worked in IT, you’re almost certainly familiar with your company’s "disaster preparedness plan"—every organization of appreciable size has some kind of formalized set of documents detailing what to do in the event of an emergency. Organizations on the Gulf Coast typically include hurricane scenarios in their disaster preparedness plans, and in this respect, NASA is no different from any other large company. Next week, NASA’s Houston-based Johnson Space Center (JSC) will kick off its annual Hurricane Exercise and run through its site’s disaster plan, but the mock storm the staff will be battling won’t be called "Jerry" or "Bob" or something pedestrian—no, JSC will find itself directly in the path of a far more awesomely named tropical cyclone.

"This year's storm is named 'Hurricane Daenerys,'" said JSC Center Operations Directorate Manager Joel Walker in an e-mail to JSC managers announcing the exercise. "Our exercise will feature a new interactive model which will require quick thinking, priority setting, and mitigation strategies from Senior Staff."

For the three or four Ars readers who aren't Game of Thrones fans, "Daenerys" is the name of one of the saga's primary characters—the last surviving child of a murdered king, who plans to return to the land her family once ruled and seize the throne by any means necessary. Also, she has a giant army and three enormous fire-breathing dragons. Due to the circumstances of her birth, she is frequently referred to as "Daenerys Stormborn," and she is not, as they say, a person with whom anyone should mess.

Vinoth Chandar

In a series of papers released yesterday, researchers showed that it's possible to reduce many of the problems with age, including declines in memory and loss of muscle strength, simply by supplying older mice with blood plasma from younger ones. The work even identified a specific protein, GDF11, that mediates many of the effects. The work suggests that some aspects of the aging brain aren't necessarily an internal feature of the neurons that comprise it, but a product of their interactions with their environment—an environment that could potentially be changed.

The work grew out of a rather unusual laboratory technique that creates what are termed "parabionts," genetically matched animals in which patches of skin are surgically fused. Eventually, their circulatory systems mesh, allowing factors from one animal to freely move through the body of the other.

Fresh blood

Assuming you're working with normal, healthy, age-matched mice, you won't see much of a difference. But researchers started experimenting with mice of different ages. In a paper published in 2011, researchers working with these parabionts showed that the blood of the older mice could impose some of the problems with age, including cognitive decline, when circulated through their younger peers. This effect was eventually ascribed in part to immune signaling molecules called chemokines.

Patent #: US008676045 for "Studio Arrangement."

USPTO

Thought the peanut butter sandwich patent was a joke? That one doesn't even register a chuckle compared to a patent recently granted to Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant now can claim a legal monopoly on the process of photographing people and things against a white backdrop.

The patent, issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office, is making some folks in the photography community do a double-take. Amazon’s patent, called Studio Arrangement, details a specific arrangement of elements in a photography studio that the company believes helps foster the production of the most aesthetically pleasing images.

USPTO

The white-backdropped photo and video studio layout, which looks and sounds similar to basically every other photo studio in existence, includes: "A front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background."

"I don't have the re-releases with me." (credit: Aurich Lawson / Lucasfilm)

On Monday, November 6, major media-acquisition news landed: 21st Century Fox has reportedly held talks to sell all of its assets to Disney. CNBC's unnamed sources say those talks have since stalled, but the mere possibility got nerd tongues wagging. What would happen if those two media giants joined in unholy matrimony? In addition to questions about Disney and Fox's shared rights to Marvel Comics properties, one franchise stood out: Star Wars. Our own Lee Hutchinson talked at length about how Fox figures into the future of Star Wars' past, so we're resurfacing this 2014 article, which looks at the logistical and legal hurdles that existed on the eve of the original trilogy's first major Blu-ray launch. Until we hear any firmer news about Fox and Disney, of course, this is all a bit of a pipe dream. But who knows?

Disney is doing all kinds of things with the Star Wars universe now that it has purchased the franchise away from George Lucas. In addition to the three sequel films, there will be "at least three" spin-off movies, which will likely be origin stories for some of the supporting cast of Star Wars characters. The House of Mouse is pouring a tremendous amount of time and money into Star Wars, and Disney could be the new arbiter of the Holy Grail of Star Wars requests: a remastered release of the unedited, non-special-edition original trilogy.

Unadulterated, "pure" versions of the original Star Wars films are difficult to come by. Except for one sad, low-resolution release on DVD in 2006 (which we'll discuss in a moment), the films have only been available in their modified "Special Edition" forms since 1997, when George Lucas re-released the films to theaters with a series of changes. Some of those changes aren't bad at all—the fancy new attack on the Death Star in Episode IV is perfectly cromulent—but others are absolutely terrible. In Return of the Jedi, Jabba's palace gains an asinine CGI-filled song-and-dance interlude. Dialogue is butchered in Empire Strikes Back. And in the first movie, perhaps most famously, Han no longer shoots first.

DEKA

On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the sale and marketing of a prosthetic arm called the DEKA Arm System, which uses electronic signals from the wearer's muscles to induce up to 10 different movements in the prosthetic.

Electrodes attached to the arm above the prosthesis detect muscle contractions and send those signals to a processor, which translates the contractions into movements that the arm should execute. The prosthetic weighs the same as an adult arm, and its design is modular so that it can be fitted to accommodate many different needs. Specifically, the FDA notes that the prosthetic can be used for “limb loss occurring at the shoulder joint, mid-upper arm, or mid-lower arm. It cannot be configured for limb loss at the elbow or wrist joint.”

The movements that the arm can execute use a “combination of mechanisms including switches, movement sensors, and force sensors that cause the prosthesis to move,” the FDA wrote. Bloomberg further reports that six grip patterns “allow wearers to drink a cup of water, hold a cordless drill, or pick up a credit card or a grape.” The FDA says that in clinical studies, “90 percent of study participants were able to perform activities with the DEKA Arm System that they were not able to perform with their current prosthesis, such as using keys and locks, preparing food, feeding oneself, using zippers, and brushing and combing hair.”

Lots of people are angry about FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler's Internet "fast lane" proposal that would let Internet service providers charge Web services for priority access to consumers. But one Web hosting service called NeoCities isn't just writing letters to the FCC. Instead, the company found the FCC's internal IP address range and throttled all connections to 28.8Kbps speeds.

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's internet slow and expensive forever' lobby," NeoCities creator Kyle Drake wrote yesterday.

NeoCities

NeoCities offers free and paid Web hosting. As Drake noted, FCC access to NeoCities is being throttled on the home page only, and not on websites created by NeoCities users.

Gas clusters around a nexus of dark matter filaments within the new simulation.

Illustris

To the best of our ability to tell, the Universe is being shaped by things we can't directly detect: dark matter and dark energy. That makes it somewhat challenging to determine if our understanding of these influences is roughly correct. It's simply hard to be confident that we haven't missed some other dark entity that's lurking beyond our abilities of detection.

One of the ways we can have some confidence that we're not missing anything major is to run models of the Universe. If we've got the basic physics right, then you should be able to set these models loose at an early point in the Universe's history and end up with something that looks like the Universe we're living in.

In general, these models have been remarkably successful, producing a cosmic web of dark matter with clusters of galaxies at the points where the web's filaments intersect. But enough of the details have been wrong in these models that they raise a difficult question: is there something wrong with our understanding, or have we simply run up against the computational limits on what we can simulate?

Maybe coming soon: The Adventures of Buboicullaar, Jabba's frog-dog.

LucasFilm

Curious about what Yoda was like as a boy (or whatever you call a young whatever-he-is)? Burning to know how Darth Maul came to be named after a giant hammer? Desperate to find out what Nien Nunb was like before he was Lando’s co-pilot? All these stories and more could be coming your way, according to Disney CEO Bob Iger. During Disney’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, the executive stated that at least three "spin-off" movies are in development for parallel release with the new Star Wars sequel trilogy.

News about companion movies accompanying the main sequel trilogy movies isn’t totally new—Disney has been saying for some time now that Episodes VII-IX won’t be their only dip into the Star Wars well. The spin-off movies could be released in the gaps between the sequel trilogy films. Disney CFO Jay Rasulo told Variety last September that "one Star Wars trilogy film or 'origin story film' would also appear on the release schedule each year," and LucasFilm President Kathleen Kennedy noted in January that the planned spin-off films won’t impinge on the mainline sequel saga plans.

Between Rasulo's and Kennedy’s quotes and Iger’s mention yesterday that there will be "at least three" of the spin-off films, it seems reasonably safe to guess that Disney will begin spinning its own Extended Universe-style set of backstories around recognizable but unexplored characters—at least, unexplored on the screen. The fact that everyone from Luke Skywalker all the way down to Jabba the Hutt’s guard frog has a detailed EU backstory is immaterial—the EU is dead and buried.

123pendejos

When Vic Gundotra, the head of Google+, suddenly announced his departure from Google today, many were left wondering "why" and what it meant for the future of Google+. He didn't give a reason for leaving, but according to a report from TechCrunch, the likely reason is a major shakeup for Google's social network.

In short, Google seems to be backing away from the original Google+ strategy. The report states that Google+ will no longer be considered a product that competes with Facebook and Twitter, and that Google's mission to force Google+ into every product will end. With this downgrade in importance comes a downgrade in resources. TechCrunch claims that 1000-1200 employees—many of which formed the core of Google+—will be moved to other divisions. Google Hangouts will supposedly be moved to Android, and the Google+ photos team is "likely" to follow. "Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform," the report said. The strange part is that both of these teams create cross-platform products. So if the report is true, there will be a group inside the Android team making iOS and Web apps, which doesn't seem like the best fit.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, host of both StarTalk Radio and COSMOS: A Spacetime Odyssey on FOX. Credit: FOX.

I knew that last week's fun little piece on the Ars staff's least-favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes was going to draw its share of negative comments because no matter how bad an episode is, there's always someone who loves it. But I didn't realize exactly how crazy things were going to get until Peter turned in his pick: "Darmok." Originally airing in 1991, the second episode of TNG's fifth season stars Star Trek II's Paul Winfield as the representative of a species that communicates only through metaphor. It's often cited as a fan favorite, but Peter jumped at the chance to take it down a peg or two.

"It's a terrible episode, made all the more terrible by the fact that some people actually like it. They're objectively wrong," he opined in the article. He was considerably less diplomatic (and legitimately hilarious) in the staff IRC channel as we were kibitzing our way though the article's planning, pasting "DARMOK = SHITMOK" into chat over and over again.

However, a fellow named Kevin Wu has already done all the legwork necessary to prove that "Darmok" is not terrible at all—at least, not according to IMDB's user-submitted ratings.