A new article at Motherboard remembers when the MIDI file format became the main way music was shared on the internet "for an incredibly short but memorable period of time..." [I]n the hunt for additional features, the two primary developers of web browsers during the era -- Microsoft and Netscape -- added functionality that made audio files accessible when loading websites, whether as background music or as embedded files with a dedicated player. Either way, it was one of the earliest examples of a plug-in that much of the public ran into -- even before Flash. In particular, Microsoft's Internet Explorer supported it as far back as version 1.0, while Netscape Navigator supported it with the use of a plug-in and added native support starting in version 3.0. There was a period, during the peak of the Geocities era, where loading a website with a MIDI file was a common occurrence.

When Geocities was shut down in 2019, the MIDI files found on various websites during that time were collected by The Archive Team. The Internet Archive includes more than 51,000 files in The Geocities MIDI Collection. The list of songs, which can be seen here, is very much a time capsule to a specific era. Have a favorite song from 1998? Search for it in here, sans spaces, and you'll probably find it...! They sound like a musical time capsule, and evoke memories of a specific time for many web surfers of the era. "Even in an age of high-quality MP3s, the chintzy sounds of MIDI files resonate on the Web," writer Douglas Wolk wrote for Spin in 2000, immediately adding the reason: "They play on just about anything smarter than a Tupperware bowl, and they're also very small...." The thing that often gets lost with these compositions of popular songs done in MIDI format is that they're often done by people, either for purposes of running a sound bank (which might come in handy, for example, with karaoke), or by amateurs trying to recreate the songs they enjoy or heard on the radio.... [I]ts moment in the sun reflected its utility during a period of time when the demand for multimedia content from the internet was growing -- but the ability for computers to offer it up in a full-fat format was limited. (Stupid modems....) MIDI is very much not dead -- far from it. Its great strength is the fact that a MIDI-supporting iPad can communicate with some of the earliest MIDI-supporting devices, such as the Commodore 64.
Using a browser plugin called Jazz-Plugin, their writer even re-discovered John Roache's Ragtime MIDI Library. "[I]t occurred to me that I should spend more time writing about one of the things that makes the Web so special -- labors of love. Unlike any medium before it, the Web gives people with unusual talents and interests a chance to share their passions with fellow enthusiasts -- and with folks like me who just happen to drop by."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg have figured out how to harness the energy and keep it in reserve so it can be released on demand in the form of heat -- even decades after it was captured. The innovations include an energy-trapping molecule, a storage system that promises to outperform traditional batteries, at least when it comes to heating, and an energy-storing laminate coating that can be applied to windows and textiles. The breakthroughs, from a team led by researcher Kasper Moth-Poulsen, have garnered praise within the scientific community. Now comes the real test: whether Moth-Poulsen can get investors to back his technology and take it to market.

The system starts with a liquid molecule made up of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. When hit by sunlight, the molecule draws in the sun's energy and holds it until a catalyst triggers its release as heat. The researchers spent almost a decade and $2.5 million to create a specialized storage unit, which Moth-Poulsen, a 40-year-old professor in the department of chemistry and chemical engineering, says has the stability to outlast the 5-to 10-year life span of typical lithium-ion batteries on the market today. The most advanced potential commercial use the team developed is a transparent coating that can be applied to home windows, a moving vehicle, or even clothing. The coating collects solar energy and releases heat, reducing electricity required for heating spaces and curbing carbon emissions. Moth-Poulsen is coating an entire building on campus to showcase the technology. The ideal use in the early going, he says, is in relatively small spaces. "This could be heating of electrical vehicles or in houses." Moth-Poulsen believes there's potential for the system to produce electricity, but his team is focused for now on heating.

"Moth-Poulsen plans to spin off a company that would advance the technology and says he's in talks with venture capital investors," adds Bloomberg. "The storage unit could be commercially available in as little as six years and the coating in three, pending the $5 million of additional funding he estimates will be needed to bring the coating to market."

"Police in Hallandale Beach believe there may have been a witness to the July murder of Silvia Galva, and 'her' name was Alexa," reports the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Slashdot reader PolygamousRanchKid tipped us off to the story: According to a search warrant, investigators want to know what the popular voice-controlled smart speakers overheard during a fatal altercation between Galva, 32, and her boyfriend, Adam Reechard Crespo, 43, on July 12.. A month after Galva's death, police obtained a search warrant for anything recorded by the two devices that were found in the apartment between July 11 at 12 a.m. and July 12 at 11:59 p.m.

"It is believed that evidence of crimes, audio recordings capturing the attack on victim Silvia Crespo that occurred in the main bedroom... may be found on the server maintained by or for Amazon," police wrote in their probable cause statement seeking the warrant. Whether police stumbled across a silent witness or are overestimating the eavesdropping capacity of smart technology remains to be seen. Amazon turned over multiple recordings, but neither the company, police, nor the State Attorney's Office will say at this point what was on them. "We did receive recordings, and we are in the process of analyzing the information that was sent to us," said Hallandale Beach Police Department spokesman Sgt. Pedro Abut...

"Amazon does not disclose customer information in response to government demands unless we're required to do so to comply with a legally valid and blinding order," Amazon spokesman Leigh Nakanishi said.

"Amazon objects to overbroad or otherwise inappropriate demands as a matter of course."

In the latest swirl of T-Mobile-Sprint merger drama, Colorado is exiting a lawsuit challenging the deal after Dish Network agreed to house its new wireless headquarters in the state. The Verge reports: The Colorado Attorney General's Office announced its decision on Monday after Dish promised that the state would be one of the first in the nation to receive 5G services and become the home of its new wireless headquarters, creating thousands of jobs. The DOJ approved the T-Mobile-Sprint merger back in July after it was able to piece together a new wireless competitor by allocating some of Sprint's spectrum to Dish. The Federal Communications Commission formally voted to approve the merger late last week. Dish is positioned to become the third largest wireless competitor after negotiations with the Justice Department to approve the merger.

Dish won't be building out a new headquarters, however. The company already houses its call center employees at the "Riverfront" facility in Littleton, Colorado and any new wireless HQ employees will work in that building (which looks eerily like a Cabela's location) as well. Colorado was formerly part of a multistate lawsuit spearheaded by the New York State Attorney General's office aimed at blocking the merger. Colorado is now the second state to drop out of the suit along with Mississippi. A trial date is set for December 9th. In a press release, Dish said that it "expects to employ 2,000 full-time employees" at the Colorado headquarters over the next three years. "The agreements we are announcing today address those concerns by guaranteeing jobs in Colorado, a statewide buildout of a fast 5G network that will especially benefit rural communities, and low-cost mobile plans," Chief Deputy Attorney General Natalie Hanlon Leh said in a statement to The Colorado Sun. "Our announcement today ensures Coloradans will benefit from Dish's success as a nationwide wireless competitor."

Scientists have directly observed the rocky guts of exoplanets, which are worlds from different star systems, by watching the fallout of these objects crashing into the corpses of dead stars. From a report: This mind-boggling technique has revealed that exoplanets are similar in composition to planets in our own solar system, implying that worlds like Earth may be plentiful in our galaxy, according to a study published on Thursday in Science. "It's pretty cool because this is really the only way to measure the geochemistry of exoplanetary bodies directly," said lead author Alexandra Doyle, a graduate student of geochemistry and astrochemistry at UCLA, in a phone call. Co-author Edward Young, a professor of geochemistry and cosmochemistry at UCLA, added that the study represents "the first time such an advanced way of looking at the geochemistry of these bodies has been used," in the same call.

We are living through a golden age of exoplanet discoveries. Thousands of exoplanets have been detected, including an Earth-sized world orbiting the closest star to the Sun. But it is still extremely difficult to capture details about the interior composition and dynamics of these worlds. Unlike other planetary properties such as mass or atmospheric composition, a planet's geochemistry cannot be deduced just by looking at an object passing in front of its host star. White dwarfs, as it turns out, can help plug this information gap. These objects are the remains of stars that have blown up and collapsed into tiny, dense spheres about the size of Earth (our own Sun will embark on this transition in about five billion years). The pyrotechnic deaths of these stars scramble the orbits of many objects in our solar system, such as asteroids and planets. Some of these worlds may end up hurtling toward the star's posthumous white dwarf, which tears them apart over the course of about 100,000 to one million years.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their best look yet at an interstellar visitor -- comet 2I/Borisov -- whose speed and trajectory indicate it has come from beyond our solar system. In a press release, the space agency said: This Hubble image, taken on Oct. 12, 2019, is the sharpest view of the comet to date. Hubble reveals a central concentration of dust around the nucleus (which is too small to be seen by Hubble). Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second such interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system. In 2017, the first identified interstellar visitor, an object officially named 'Oumuamua, swung within 24 million miles of the Sun before racing out of the solar system. "Whereas 'Oumuamua appeared to be a rock, Borisov is really active, more like a normal comet. It's a puzzle why these two are so different," said David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), leader of the Hubble team who observed the comet.

NASA engineer David Burns posted a paper describing the concept of his "helical engine," which could take humans to the stars by exploiting mass-altering effects known to occur at near-light speed. Unfortunately, it's been met with skepticism from those who say it violates the conservation of momentum, a core physical law. New Scientist explains: To get to grips with the principle of Burns's engine, picture a box on a frictionless surface. Inside that box is a rod, along which a ring can slide. If a spring inside the box gives the ring a push, the ring will slide along the rod one way while the box will recoil in the other. When the ring reaches the end of the box, it will bounce backwards, and the box's recoil direction will switch too. This is action-reaction -- also known as Newton's third law of motion -- and in normal circumstances, it restricts the box to wiggling back and forth. But, Burns asks, what if the ring's mass is much greater when it slides in one direction than the other? Then it would give the box a greater kick at one end than the other. Action would exceed reaction and the box would accelerate forwards.

Martin Tajmar at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany, who has performed tests on the EM Drive, believes the helical engine will probably suffer the same problem. "All inertial propulsion systems -- to my knowledge -- never worked in a friction-free environment," he says. This machine makes use of special relativity, unlike the others, which complicates the picture, he says, but "unfortunately there is always action-reaction." Burns has worked on his design in private, without any sponsorship from NASA, and he admits his concept is massively inefficient. However, he says there is potential to harvest much of the energy that the accelerator loses in heat and radiation. He also suggests ways that momentum could be conserved, such as in the spin of the accelerated ions. "I know that it risks being right up there with the EM drive and cold fusion," he says. "But you have to be prepared to be embarrassed. It is very difficult to invent something that is new under the sun and actually works."

Over 100 published studies may have incorrect results thanks to a glitchy piece of Python code discovered by researchers at the University of Hawaii.

An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard: The glitch caused results of a common chemistry computation to vary depending on the operating system used, causing discrepancies among Mac, Windows, and Linux systems. The researchers published the revelation and a debugged version of the script, which amounts to roughly 1,000 lines of code, on Tuesday in the journal Organic Letters.

"This simple glitch in the original script calls into question the conclusions of a significant number of papers on a wide range of topics in a way that cannot be easily resolved from published information because the operating system is rarely mentioned," the new paper reads. "Authors who used these scripts should certainly double-check their results and any relevant conclusions using the modified scripts in the [supplementary information]."

Yuheng Luo, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, discovered the glitch this summer when he was verifying the results of research conducted by chemistry professor Philip Williams on cyanobacteria... Under supervision of University of Hawaii at Manoa assistant chemistry professor Rui Sun, Luo used a script written in Python that was published as part of a 2014 paper by Patrick Willoughby, Matthew Jansma, and Thomas Hoye in the journal Nature Protocols . The code computes chemical shift values for NMR, or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a common technique used by chemists to determine the molecular make-up of a sample. Luo's results did not match up with the NMR values that Williams' group had previously calculated, and according to Sun, when his students ran the code on their computers, they realized that different operating systems were producing different results.

Sun then adjusted the code to fix the glitch, which had to do with how different operating systems sort files.
The researcher who wrote the flawed script told Motherboard that the new study was "a beautiful example of science working to advance the work we reported in 2014. They did a tremendous service to the community in figuring this out."

Sun described the original authors as "very gracious," saying they encouraged the publication of the findings.

Last week Infoworld reported on a reunion of more than 1,000 former employees of Sun Microsystems including all four founders of the company -- Andreas Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, and Bill Joy -- at just their second reunion since the 2010 Oracle acquisition. Prior to the formal festivities, the company founders met with a small group of press persons. Pondering recent developments in computing, Bill Joy, who is now concentrating on climate change solutions, recalled that Sun tried to do natural language processing, but the hardware was not fast enough. Regarding the emergence of the iPhone, Joy said the advent of mobility and data networks has been transformational for society. He noted that Sun had that kind of vision with Java ME, with Sun trying to do programmable smartphones. "But the hardware was just really nascent at the time," Joy said. Machine learning, though, will be as transformational as the smartphone, he added.

McNealy emphasized Sun's willingness to share technology, such as the Network File System (NFS), which helped to bring about the open source software movement now prevalent today. "We didn't invent open source but we [made it] happen. We were the leader of that parade." Asked if Sun should have moved from Sparc Risc processors and Solaris Unix to Intel processors and Linux, McNealy said he did not want to talk about mistakes he had made as Sun CEO but such a switch was not what Sun should have done....

Among those proudest of Sun's achievements was Sun founder and CEO Scott McNealy, who, taking the stage, had some sharp words for Facebook, which now occupies one of Sun's former Silicon Valley campuses, without mentioning Facebook by name. "I remember some company moved into one of our old headquarters buildings," McNealy said. "And the CEO said, we're going to leave the [Sun Microsystems] logos up because we want everybody in our company to remember what can happen to you if you don't pay attention. This company could do well to do one-one-hundredth of what we did."

dryriver shared this article from NBC News' science blog Mach: Picture this: A hundred million years ago, an advanced civilization detects strange signatures of life on a blue-green planet not so far away from their home in the Milky Way. They try sending signals, but whatever's marching around on that unknown world isn't responding. So, the curious galactic explorers try something different. They send a robotic probe to a small, quiet space rock orbiting near the life-rich planet, just to keep an eye on things.

If a story like this played out at any moment in Earth's 4.5 billion-year history, it just might have left an archaeological record. At least, that's the hope behind a new proposal to check Earth's so-called co-orbitals for signs of advanced alien technology. Co-orbitals are space objects that orbit the sun at about the same distance that Earth does. "They're basically going around the sun at the same rate the Earth is, and they're very nearby," said James Benford, a physicist and independent SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher who dreamed up the idea that aliens might have bugged Earth via these co-orbitals while he was at a conference in Houston last year. If he's right, the co-orbitals could be a way to detect alien activity that occurred before humans even evolved, much less turned their attention toward the stars.

To be clear, even SETI researchers who like the idea of checking out Earth's co-orbitals acknowledge that it's a long shot... "How likely is it that alien probe would be on one of these co-orbitals, obviously extremely unlikely," said Paul Davies, a physicist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University who was not involved in Benford's new paper on the idea, published Sept. 20 in The Astronomical Journal. "But if it costs very little to go take a look, why not? Even if we don't find E.T., we might find something of interest...." Seeking signs of intelligent extraterrestrials close to Earth is informative even if the search comes up empty, Benford said. That no one's heard or seen any extraterrestrial signals in 50 years or so doesn't mean much, given the mind-boggling time span of Earth's history. A lack of evidence spanning hundreds, millions or even billions of years would be much more convincing.

"If we don't find anything, that means no one has come to look at the life of Earth for over billions of years," Benford said. "That is a big surprise, a stunning thing."
The search has already begun. In April China's space agency announced plans to send a probe to Earth's nearest co-orbital.

A powerful disaster-inducing geomagnetic storm is an inevitability in the near future, likely causing blackouts, satellite failures, and more. From a report: Unlike other threats to our planet, such as supervolcanoes or asteroids, the time frame for a cataclysmic geomagnetic storm -- caused by eruptions from our sun playing havoc with Earth's magnetic field -- is comparatively short. It could happen in the next decade -- or in the next century. All we know is, based on previous events, our planet will almost definitely be hit relatively soon, probably within 100 years. Geomagnetic storms are caused by sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections, resulting in calamities to which our modern technological society is becoming ever more susceptible.

Most experts regard the Carrington Event, a so-called superstorm that occurred in September 1859, as the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record. But new data suggest that a later storm in May 1921 may have equaled or even eclipsed the Carrington Event in intensity, causing at least three major fires in the U.S., Canada and Sweden -- and highlighting the damaging effects these storms can have on Earth today. In a paper published in the journal Space Weather, Jeffrey Love of the U.S. Geological Survey and his colleagues reexamined the intensity of the 1921 event, known as the New York Railroad Storm, in greater detail than ever before.

Although different measures of intensity exist, geomagnetic storms are often rated on an index called disturbance storm time (Dst) -- a way of gauging global magnetic activity by averaging out values for the strength of Earth's magnetic field measured at multiple locations. Our planet's baseline Dst level is about -20 nanoteslas (nT), with a "superstorm" condition defined as occurring when levels fall below -250 nT. Studies of the very limited magnetic data from the Carrington Event peg its intensity at anywhere from -850 to -1,050 nT. According to Love's study, the 1921 storm, however, came in at about -907 nT. "The 1921 storm could have been more intense than the 1859 storm," Love says. "Prior to our paper, [the 1921 storm] was understood to be intense, but how intense wasn't really clear."

Thelasko quotes the BBC: Astronomers have discovered a giant planet that, they say, should not exist, according to current theories. The Jupiter-like world is unusually large compared with its host star, contradicting a widely held idea about the way planets form.

The star, which lies 284 trillion km away, is an M-type red dwarf - the most common type in our galaxy. An international team of astronomers has reported its findings in the journal Science.... The distant star has a mass that's, at most, 270 times larger than the planet. For comparison, the Sun is about 1,050 times more massive than Jupiter.

The finding challenges the widely held idea of planet formation known as core accretion. "Usually we think of giant planets starting life as an icy-core, orbiting far out in a disc of gas surrounding the young star, and then growing rapidly by attracting gas on to itself," said Prof Peter Wheatley, from the University of Warwick, UK, who was not involved with the latest study.. "But the authors argue that the discs around small stars don't provide enough material for this to work. Instead, they consider it more likely that the planet formed suddenly when part of the disc collapsed due to its own gravity."

Slashdot reader dryriver writes: Most "solutions" to climate change center on reducing greenhouse gas emissions on Earth and using renewable energy where possible. What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem, by thinking about the problem as an excess number of photons traveling from the Sun to the Earth?

Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons -- which are energy packets -- that pass through it? What if you could make say 2% of photons that would normally hit the Earth miss the Earth, or at the very least enter Earth's atmosphere at an altered angle?

Given that the fight against climate change will likely swallow hundreds of billions of dollars over the next years, is it completely unfeasible to spend a few billion dollars on figuring out how to manipulate the flight paths of photons out in Space?
Here's a recent news report along those lines: A group of Swedish researchers believe that a cataclysmic asteroid collision from hundreds of millions of years ago could have the answers to solving climate change... Researchers have been discussing different artificial methods of recreating post-collision asteroid dust, such as placing asteroids in orbits around Earth like satellites and having them "liberate fine dust" to block warming sunlight, thus hypothetically cooling our warming planet. "Our results show for the first time that such dust at times has cooled Earth dramatically," said Birger Schmitz, professor of geology at Lund University and the leader of the study. "Our studies can give a more detailed, empirical based understanding of how this works, and this in turn can be used to evaluate if model simulations are realistic."

The research is still a ways out from practical use, however. Scientists are understandably wary about recreating a prehistoric dust storm. Speaking to Science Magazine, Seth Finnegan, a paleontologist at the University of California, Berkeley said that the results of the study "shows that the consequences of messing around in that way could be pretty severe."
The university's press release does say their research "could be relevant for tackling global warming if we fail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions." But what do Slashdot's readers think of these ideas?

Leave your own thoughts in the comments. Could climate change be solved by manipulating photons in space?

For years, wind and solar power were derided as boondoggles. They were too expensive, the argument went, to build without government handouts. Today, renewable energy is so cheap that the handouts they once needed are disappearing. From a report: On sun-drenched fields across Spain and Italy, developers are building solar farms without subsidies or tax-breaks, betting they can profit without them. In China, the government plans to stop financially supporting new wind farms. And in the U.S., developers are signing shorter sales contracts, opting to depend on competitive markets for revenue once the agreements expire. The developments have profound implications for the push to phase out fossil fuels and slow the onset of climate change. Electricity generation and heating account for 25% of global greenhouse gases. As wind and solar demonstrate they can compete on their own against coal- and natural gas-fired plants, the economic and political arguments in favor of carbon-free power become harder and harder to refute. "The training wheels are off," said Joe Osha, an equity analyst at JMP Securities. "Prices have declined enough for both solar and wind that there's a path toward continued deployment in a post-subsidy world."

Astronomers have almost certainly detected a second interstellar comet zooming through our Solar System, but there's still quite a lot of work to be done to find out more about this alien space rock. In the weeks and months to come, astronomers will continue to observe this visitor with as many ground and space-based telescopes as possible to determine if it is, indeed, interstellar and figure out where it came from. From a report: An amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisov, first spotted this object on August 30th with his own telescope in Crimea. At the time, it wasn't immediately clear that the object -- named C/2019 Q4 -- wasn't from around here. As time has passed and more people looked at this thing, they've realized that the path that C/2019 Q4 is on does not loop around the Sun. Additionally, it's going super fast: about 93,000 miles per hour (150,000 kilometers per hour), which is faster than any object from the outer fringes of our neighborhood would be traveling. As NASA and an international team of experts announced last week, the signs all point to it passing through our Solar System on its way from some distant origin.

The astronomy community hasn't officially confirmed that C/2019 Q4 is interstellar yet, though everyone is nearly certain about its status. "After getting enough data, I suspect we'll be assigning a permanent designation to say this object is interstellar," Davide Farnocchia, who is studying the comet at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, tells The Verge. "But basically, there's no doubt from the trajectory that it is interstellar." The good news is that if this comet is truly from outside our Solar System, we caught it at a great time -- when it was moving on its way in toward us, rather than on its way out. That means astronomers will have more than a year to continue observing this thing, allowing them to potentially refine its trajectory or even tell us what this mysterious rock is made of.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: While Sun open-sourced some of Java as long ago as November 2006, actually using Java in an open-source way was... troublesome. Just ask Google about Android and Java. But for Java in the enterprise things have changed. On September 10, The Eclipse Foundation announced the full open-source release of the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform and Web Profile specifications and related Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs).

This comes after Oracle let go of most of Java Enterprise Edition's (JEE) intellectual property. Oracle retains Java's trademarks though -- thus Java EE's naming convention has been changed to Jakarta EE. But for practical programming and production purposes Jakarta EE 8 is the next generation of enterprise Java.... Jakarta EE 8 also includes the same APIs and Javadoc using the same programming model Java developers have always used. The Jakarta EE 8 TCKs are based on and fully compatible with Java EE 8 TCKs. All of this means enterprise customers will be able to migrate to Jakarta EE 8 without any changes to Java EE 8 applications.

Eclipse hasn't been doing this in a vacuum. Fujitsu, IBM, Oracle, Payara, Red Hat, Tomitribe, and other members of what was once the Java community have been working on Jakarta EE... All of the Jakarta EE Working Group vendors intend to certify their Java EE 8 compatible implementations as Jakarta EE 8 compatible. In other words, Jakarta is the future for Java EE.
Oracle is now working on delivering a Java EE 8 and Jakarta EE 8 compatible implementation of their WebLogic Server.

The Eclipse Foundation says Jakarta EE 8's release "provides a new baseline for the evolution and innovation of enterprise Java technologies under an open, vendor-neutral, community-driven process."

Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever. From a report: That's the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor, Sharp and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation. "The solar car's advantage is that -- while it can't drive for a long range -- it's really independent of charging facilities," said Koji Makino, a project manager at Toyota. Even if fully electric cars overtake petroleum-powered vehicles in sales, they still need to be plugged in, which means building a network of charging stations across the globe. The sun, on the other hand, shines everywhere for free, and when that energy is paired with enough battery capacity to propel automobiles at night, solar-powered cars could leapfrog all the new-energy technologies being developed, from plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, in one fell swoop.

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed water vapor in the atmosphere of an Earth-size planet. "Although this exoplanet orbits a star that is smaller than our sun, it falls within what's known as the star's habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where it would be warm enough for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface," reports National Geographic. From the report: The discovery, announced this week in two independent studies, comes from years of observations of the exoplanet K2-18b, a super-Earth that's about 111 light-years from our solar system. Discovered in 2015 by NASA's Kepler spacecraft, K2-18b is very unlike our home world: It's more than eight times the mass of Earth, which means it's either an icy giant like Neptune or a rocky world with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere. K2-18b's orbit also takes it seven times closer to its star than Earth gets to the sun. But because it circles a type of dim red star known as an M dwarf, that orbit places it in the star's potentially life-friendly zone. Crude models predict that K2-18b's effective temperature falls somewhere between -100 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit, and if it is about as reflective as Earth, its equilibrium temperature would be roughly the same as our home planet's. "This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has the correct temperature to support water, it has an atmosphere, and it has water in it -- making this planet the best candidate for habitability that we know right now," University College London astronomer Angelos Tsiaras, a coauthor of one of the two studies, said during a press conference.

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is the fact that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. CNET reports: The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. From the start, the orbit of the comet seemed unusual: It appeared to follow a so-called hyperbolic trajectory, which means it does not orbit the sun and probably originates from far beyond our solar system. This comet is still inbound, and will not reach perihelion (its closest pass by the sun) until Dec. 10. Hopefully that will give scientists ample time to study it, a luxury we didn't have with Oumuamua. And no, there doesn't appear to be any risk that the comet will collide with Earth.

Zimbabweans are relying on Tesla to help them pay their bills. From a report: Amid power outages of as long as 18 hours a day, Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe's biggest mobile-phone operator, is turning to the Palo Alto, California-based automaker and storable-energy company for batteries that can keep its base stations running. The southern African country faces chronic shortages of physical cash, so almost all transactions are done digitally, and many via mobile phones. "Telecommunications have become the lifeblood of the economy," said Norman Moyo, the chief executive officer of Distributed Power Africa, which installs the batteries for Econet. "If the telecom network is down in Zimbabwe, you can't do any transactions."

The installation of 520 Powerwall batteries, with two going into each base station, is the largest telecommunications project in which Tesla has participated to date, Moyo said. With Econet having about 1,300 base stations in the country and two other mobile-phone companies operating there, Distributed Power intends to install more batteries and could eventually roll the project out to other power-starved countries in Africa, such as Zambia, Lesotho and the Democratic Republic of Congo, he said. Base stations in Zimbabwe often use diesel-fired generators as backup, but fuel is also scarce in the country. The Powerwalls, which cost $6,500 each, will step in when solar panels aren't generating enough electricity because it's night or when heavily overcast. The lithium-ion batteries can power a station for as long as 10 hours, according to Econet. They are charged by the sun.