Enlarge (credit: Lockheed Martin)

“As soon as we could miniaturize them, we would put them on F-35s, Cobra [attack helicopters]… any of those kind of attack aircraft,” Walsh said, according to a report from National Defense. But given how much difficulty Defense Department researchers have had reducing the size and power required for directed energy weapons, that day is still a long way off—and the objective right now is to get a system that could be flown on a C-130.

The advantage of directed energy weapons, from the Marine Corps’ perspective, is that they don’t require ammunition (other than their energy source) and could be used defensively against missiles and even other aircraft at a much lower cost per shot than the $300,000 to $400,000 AIM-120 missiles carried by the F-35—or even the 25 millimeter rounds of its GAU-22/A cannon.

Enlarge / Gosh, I love that planet pin. (credit: billnye.com)

Bill Nye’s social capital has been on the rise in recent years, as he has transitioned from a kid-friendly science show host to a no-nonsense defender of hard science (and bow ties). His polite aggression has appeared on talk shows, lecture halls, and comedy series, but none of his enjoyable bluster has come in his own series in some time.

Netflix has announced plans to change that with the introduction of Bill Nye Saves the World, a new Netflix-exclusive talk show series launching in spring 2017. In a Wednesday press release, Netflix described the show’s aspirations to “refute anti-scientific claims that may be espoused by politicians, religious leaders, or titans of industry”—so the show is clearly aiming to maintain the junk-science battle that Nye has loudly fought in recent years.

Like his ’90s TV series, the new Netflix show looks like it will provide equal parts comedy and hard science, as head writers have been hired for those elements (with comedian Mike Drucker and astronomer Phil Plait filling those respective roles). Though the press release didn’t indicate how vulgar or extreme the humor may go, Nye’s hilarious, frustrated-cursing turn on a 2015 episode of Inside Amy Schumer makes us hopeful that he’ll veer a little blue when taking on topics like “vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change.”

With a name or just a general description of some generic event, researchers were able to “spear-phish” half of their test subjects. (credit: Wikipedia)

The researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, led by FAU Computer Science Department Chair Dr Zinaida Benenson, revealed the initial results of the study at this month’s Black Hat security conference. Simulated “spear phishing” attacks were sent to 1,700 test subjects—university students—from fake accounts.

The e-mail and Facebook accounts were set up with the ten most common names in the age group of the targets. The Facebook profiles had varying levels of publicly accessible profile and timeline data—some with public photos and profile photos, and others with minimal data. The messages claimed the links were to photos taken at a New Year’s Eve party held a week before the study. Two sets of messages were sent out: in the first, the targets were addressed by their first name; in the second, they were not addressed by name, but more general information about the event allegedly photographed was given. Links sent resolved to a webpage with the message “access denied,” but the site logged the clicks by each student.