Sometimes a gift just falls in your lap. This month, it came in the form of an e-mail out of the blue from Jared Nielsen, one of two brothers (the other is J.R. Nielsen) who created The Hello World Program, "an educational web series making computer science fun and accessible to all". more>>

The same yeast used in your home brews is also deployed for industrial ethanol production. Flickr user Mike

When it comes to making ethanol from things like sugarcane and corn, we've turned to the method that has been used for ethanol production for millennia: give yeast some sugar, and take away their oxygen. Just as they do when making beer or wine, the yeast take the sugar and partially metabolize it, releasing ethanol as a waste product.

While the basics are easy to do, it's turned out to be hard to get yeast to operate well in the sorts of environments that lead to efficient production of biofuels. At some level, the ethanol the yeast produce becomes toxic (as it is for us). And brewer's yeast tends to grow best at moderate temperatures (30 degrees Celsius), while biofuel production works best at temperatures of around 40 degrees Celsius.

So far, the approach used for getting yeast to be a better biofuel producer has not exactly been carefully planned: we've just continued to grow them in the harsh environment of a biofuel reactor and wait for evolution to take its course. But two papers that appear in today's Science describe targeted changes that greatly enhance the ability of yeast to survive in a biofuel reactor.

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CyanogenMod.org

A report from The Information (subscription required) claims that Google tried to buy Cyanogen, Inc, the maker of the custom Android ROM CyanogenMod. According to the report, Cyanogen's chief executive told shareholders that Sundar Pichai, the head of Chrome and Android at Google, met with the company and "expressed interest in acquiring the firm." The report says Cyanogen Inc. declined the offer, saying that it was still growing.

It's unclear what Google would want to do with Cyanogen. The company basically does the same software work any other OEM does: it takes AOSP, customizes it, and ports it to devices. It doesn't have a ton of features that replicate Google services, so without a Google Play license, it's just as poor as any other AOSP-derived Android distribution. Buying Cyanogen would give Google an in-house Android distribution and a team of engineers, both of which it already has in abundance. We suppose the plan could be to buy it and shut it down, but we're not sure what that would accomplish, either.

The primary feature of CyanogenMod is that it's close to stock Android and ported to tons of devices. There's no special sauce there that Google would need, and CyanogenMod is "barely generating any revenue," according to the report.

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A screenshot from Pissedconsumer.com of a review that the vice president of Roca Labs claimed to have posted suggesting an endorsement that Alfonso Ribeiro's attorneys dispute.

On Wednesday, representatives of the actor Alfonso Ribeiro, who played Carlton Banks in Fresh Prince of Bel Air and who recently appeared on Dancing with the Stars, weighed in on an unlikely case involving a weight loss firm called Roca Labs and a website called pissedconsumer.com. Ribeiro says that Roca Labs has falsified his endorsement of its product.

Back in September, Roca Labs sued pissedconsumer.com, which is owned by a company called Opinion Corp., saying that the website was wrongly posting negative reviews from consumers who signed non-disparagement agreements with Roca. Roca asked a Florida federal court to award the company over $1 million and to compel pissedconusmer.com to "cease and desist their conduct against ROCA" and to "remove all negative content from their website and Twitter." Roca Labs went so far as to ask the court to make pissedconsumer.com provide the names and addresses "of all alleged ROCA customers who have helped in posting negative content on Defendants website."

The dispute is among the latest cases testing the limits of online speech, and the alleged falsification of Alfonso Ribeiro's endorsement adds a new wrinkle into the mix.

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals this week, and the top item is a Dell XPS 12 convertible touchscreen ultrabook.

For $749.99, you get a 1080p touchscreen, Core i5-3437U processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD. We actually did a full review of this bad boy earlier, so if you're on the fence, check it out. (Spoiler: it's nice.) That and a ton more deals are below.

Featured deal

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Meier holds forth with fans at last weekend's Firaxicon fan gathering.

BALTIMORE—Ask most game designers what in their childhood inspired them to get into the business, and they'll give you a list of their favorite early video game experiences. For Firaxis co-founder and Civilization creator Sid Meier, those youthful inspirations don't include any video games, because video games didn't actually exist when he was a child.

"I remember covering the living room floor with toy soldiers and bricks and whatever it was," Meier told a crowd of nearly 200 at last weekend's first ever Firaxicon fan gathering outside Baltimore, which Ars attended. "As I got a little older, [I was] getting into Avalon Hill, strategy games... [Designing games] is really reliving my youth in a lot of ways, the fantasy of pirates or trains or airplanes, things like that... the fun of the way a kid approaches a topic, exploring it. I think there's a sense of uncovering and exploration in a game, the same thing I'd experience as a kid..."

Meier wasn't fated to continue that childlike fun into his adult career, though. He started out studying physics and math in college, installing cash registers as his first job. "But computers were so empowering," he recalled. "The idea that you could write a program that would calculate pi to 10,000 digits, or just do cool things with just a few instructions was very exciting to me... I think game designers like to do new things, explore new frontiers, and it was really a new frontier at that time."

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British scientists are hoping robots will be able to give the most detailed picture yet of life deep below the waterline. The BBC's Science Editor David Shukman reports

A new Nexus phone is coming out soon. We've seen rumors, reports, mockups, and everything else flying around about the upcoming 5.9-inch device from Motorola. We've mostly spared you the excruciating play-by-play (someone made one out of wood!), but for the first time in a long time, there's a real news tidbit to report—there are pictures.

Android Police

2 more images in gallery

Android Police scored the above two pictures of someone using the upcoming Nexus device during their commute. The Motorola Nexus—codenamed "Shamu"—was expected to look a lot like the 2014 Moto X, just bigger. That appears to be the case based on the pictures above. And we know it's not just a Moto X, because the power and volume buttons are in a different spot. The 2014 Moto X has them toward the top of the device, and these are more toward the center.

For more evidence, the device is running a version of Android L that we haven't seen before. The navigation buttons are similar to the buttons on the preview build, but they're smaller. The status bar icons are also no longer segmented. For instance, the cell signal is normally a series of bars, but here it's just a triangle. Additionally, there's a heart icon on the left of the status bar, but the jury is still out on whether that's Google Fit in action or just some third-party app.

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Sen. John McCain threatened to take away the NFL's antitrust exemption if it doesn't stop blacking out TV broadcasts. Jim Greenhill

The National Football League must "end blackouts once and for all [or] Congress will be forced to act," two senators told the league yesterday.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell after the Federal Communications Commission eliminated rules that helped support the NFL's blackout policies. Commission members urged the NFL to stop blacking out games but acknowledged that the league still has the power to enforce blackouts through private contracts."[W]e write to urge the NFL to view this as an opportunity to recognize that unpopular blackouts are no longer justified in today’s environment," McCain and Blumenthal wrote to Goodell. "We ask that you capitalize on the FCC’s vote this week and voluntarily rescind your requirement that local television stations black out games that fail to sell out. The NFL has received substantial benefits from the public in the form of antitrust exemptions, a specialized tax status, and direct taxpayer dollars that subsidize football arenas and stadiums. These generous benefits were extended to leagues like the NFL in part based on recognition that sports leagues play a central role in our national culture, promote teamwork, and generate jobs and economic activity across the country. But, the provision of these substantial public benefits requires that the NFL meet basic obligations to the American public and loyal fans, and this includes abandoning rules that punish those same fans."

The NFL issued a statement after the FCC's vote on Tuesday, saying it would make no change to its policies. The NFL praised itself for being "the only sports league that televises every one of its games on free, over-the-air television." However, the NFL prevents games from being shown on local TV when tickets don't sell out. Teams are allowed to reduce the likelihood of a blackout by only requiring that 85 percent of tickets be sold, but the NFL has refused to end the blackouts entirely.

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Waleed Alzuhair

After announcing disappointing earnings earlier this year, Angry Birds maker Rovio has decided to cut 130 jobs, or approximately 16 percent of its workforce, according to a Thursday blog post by the company’s CEO.

"... We announced today that we plan to simplify our organization around our three key businesses with the highest growth potential: games, media, and consumer products," Mikael Hed wrote. "Unfortunately, we also need to consider possible employee reductions of a maximum of 130 people in Finland (approximately 16 percent of workforce). It is never easy to consider changes like this, but it is better to do them sooner rather than later, when we are in a good place to reignite growth."

In April 2014, Rovio announced 2013 annual profits of €26.9 million ($34 million), a notable drop from €55.5 million ($70.2 million) from the year before and €35.4 million ($44.7 million) in 2011.

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Steven Kreuzer

This summer, the Supreme Court made it easier for defendants to collect fees when they win patent cases. The decision is starting to have an effect—the nation's largest patent troll just got slapped with an order to pay $1.4 million in attorneys' fees to NetApp, which it sued in 2010.

The case brought by Summit Data Systems, a branch of Acacia Research Corp., hinged on an accusation that NetApp infringed when its server-based software interacted with an end user on a Microsoft operating system. The two patents-in-suit, 7,392,291 and 7,428,581, relate to "block-level storage access over a computer network."

But just two months before Summit filed its lawsuit, it sold licenses for those patents to 43 companies that were member companies of defensive patent aggregator RPX—including Microsoft.

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The new status page will let you use your device's serial number or IMEI to see its activation lock status. Andrew Cunningham

Apple introduced the Activation Lock feature in iOS 7 to help deter phone theft—if you've signed into iCloud and enabled Find My iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, you can't erase your phone without entering your account password first. Even if a thief put your phone into Recovery Mode and wiped its data manually, you need to enter the previous owner's Apple ID password as part of the first-time setup process before you can actually use it. Activation Lock renders a stolen iPhone much less useful to someone who intends to use it themselves or resell it.

The feature can be misused, though. If you sell your iPhone to a legitimate reseller and forget to wipe it first, you might leave that seller with an unsellable brick that's useful for parts but not much else. For buyers and sellers who want to check a device's Activation Lock status without having it in-hand, Apple has just introduced a new Activation Lock status page that will tell you whether any device is locked if you punch in its serial number or IMEI.

The page will tell you whether Activation Lock is enabled and what kind of device you're looking at. Andrew Cunningham

This page is strictly used to check the status of Activation Lock, and it has no other features aside from some links to Apple help pages. It can't be used to override Activation Lock, nor can it give you any information about the Apple ID that's been used to lock the device. If you're buying (or selling) a secondhand iPhone and want to check its lock status before you do, this is the way to do it, and that's all it does.

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Matt Wade

After a distinguished career in the Secret Service, Joseph Clancy left for a new job at Comcast in 2011 and has since overseen protection of the cable company's employees and property. But with Secret Service Director Julia Pierson having resigned after security failures, Clancy is going back to the Secret Service as acting director of the law enforcement agency.

“Joe Clancy is an exceptional security professional who served our country as a member of the US Secret Service and in the US Department of Homeland Security and who has distinguished himself throughout his career for his integrity and strong management skills," a Comcast spokesperson said in a statement sent to Ars yesterday. "During more than three years at Comcast, he was an integral part of our security team and we are sad to see him leave. We are highly confident he will be an outstanding interim leader for the Secret Service and we wish him the very best.”

Clancy personally led Obama's security before "he retired from the agency in July 2011 as special agent in charge of the Presidential Protective Division," NBC News wrote.

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A stray dog in India's Udaipur recovers after being found stuck in pool of hot tar.

Tesla founder Elon Musk made an ambiguous post on Twitter yesterday evening, announcing that the company will unveil something on October 9:

"About time to unveil the D and something else," the tweet stated. It was accompanied by a shadowy picture of what appears to be the nose of a Tesla Model S peeking out from a half-open garage. The garage has the letter "D" emblazoned on it. Beneath the car, the date "October 9, 2014" is written.

We know that the next vehicle due out from Tesla is an SUV known as the Model X; after that, the company has previously said that it will turn its focus to releasing a lower priced entry-level vehicle it’s calling the Model 3 (speculation prior to the Model 3’s announcement was that the entry-level car would be called the "Model E," but this was changed to avoid a trademark dispute—and possibly also to avoid Tesla’s line-up spelling out S-E-X). The headlights, fog lights, and nose cone in the poster do indeed look like those on the Model S. Compare them to this still from our Model S video review:

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Muslim pilgrims have gathered in Mecca for the annual Hajj pilgrimage.

Indians across the subcontinent pick up their buckets and brooms to join a nationwide campaign to clean streets and public spaces.

ASRock is quietly confident of its OC Formula range. We awarded the Z77 version because of its aggressive tactics at the $240 price point and while the Z87 model offered even more but at $330 it missed that sub-$250 market which cheaper overclocking builds are built on. The Z97 OC Formula ditches the Lamborghini on the box and comes back down to earth at $210, although the feature set becomes lighter as a result. The mainstream overclocking motherboard market is always hot at $200, so today we are putting the Z97 OC Formula through its paces.

People in Dallas, Texas, give their reaction to the news that the first man to be diagnosed with Ebola while in the US was admitted to hospital in their city.

Not pictured: a wealth of pizza, beer, and cupcakes. We were trying to be sly about our photo-snapping! Sam Machkovech

SEATTLE—On Friday night, I showed up at the predetermined location just a few blocks from a Seattle pier. I hopped some shrubs, showed up at the keypad-locked door, and waited for my insider, Dave, to grant me access, all the while remembering our agreed-upon story: I was a paralegal, and we had recently met playing pick-up basketball. "Let's keep it simple," he'd told me over the phone earlier that day.

This all seemed like overkill, just to sneak me into an apartment pizza party, but my anonymous source was a little nervous. The party was being hosted by Comcast. Was he overdue on his bill or something?

"My building is a little weird about these residents-only events," Dave explained as he let me in. Then he added, "I don't use Comcast, anyway."

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