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Rare 'strawberry moon' glows on the summer solstice Monday - CNET

This full-moon photo gives a preview of what you'll see on the solstice.
NASA/Goddard/Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

June 20, the longest day of 2016, happens on a Monday, which already feels like the longest day of the week. There's an extra special astronomical occurrence to go along with the summer solstice for the Northe Hemisphere this year. We're also getting a strawberry moon.

The name "strawberry moon" might lead you to envision a glowing red apocalyptic disk in the night sky, but NASA says it's actually named for strawberry-picking season and is sometimes known as a "rose moon" in Europe. This is the first time we've had a full moon on the June solstice since way back in 1967, so that should add some extra flair to your druidic celebrations.

We see the moon almost every clear night, but our lunar friend is still an object of fascination. Earlier this year, a rumor of a green moon spread around the inteet, but it was entirely fictional. Astrophotographers are tuing out some stunning images of our natural satellite, including this shot of the ISS in front of a full moon. Monday's strawberry moon could be a nice photo op for space fans looking to mark the rare occasion.

Memorable moon photos from NASA and beyond... See full gallery

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At last, the gross 'Game of Thrones' death we've been waiting for - CNET

Caution: so many spoilers ahead.

Until Sunday night's "Battle of the Bastards" episode of "Game of Thrones," whiny boy-king Joffrey Baratheon's blubbering death by poison was the most satisfying departure on the series. Then someone let the dogs out. Monday, the social-media world seems downright celebratory about the timely death of Ramsay Bolton.

The main story arc follows Stark bastard Jon Snow as his army faces off against bastard Ramsay Bolton and his icky flayed-man banners in a fight to regain the Stark home of Winterfell. You can nearly smell the stench of bodies, fear and blood during the tense battle scenes. But what we were really waiting for was the ultimate answer as to which bastard survives: Snow or Bolton.

It wasn't surprising Bolton ends up dead, but the way his passing is delivered is one of the most stomach-tuing and visceral moments ever delivered by a show that already revels in beheadings and blood spurts. It's not Jon Snow who ultimately presides over his exit. It's Snow's sister Sansa Stark, the woman who was wed to Bolton and horrifyingly mistreated by him.

Twitter users are especially vocal about the satisfaction they feel after Ramsay's face was graphically chewed off by his own hungry dogs as Sansa Stark watched. You see phrases like "nice," "poetic justice," "won't be missed" and "most satisfying scene ever."

What is it about a television character getting chewed on by large dogs that makes so many people so happy? Here's a quick reminder as to why Ramsay Bolton was the most hated man in Westeros: He raped Sansa. He stabbed his father. He murdered his half-brother. He castrated Theon Greyjoy. He killed young Rickon Stark with an arrow. His favorite hobby was feeding people to his starving dogs. And that's just part of his rap sheet.

"Game of Thrones" never shies away from taking beloved characters away from us. (We miss you, Hodor!) But George R.R. Martin and the TV series writers don't just taketh away, sometimes they give back. Ramsay's horrifying death is a gift to the fans, but it's also a gift to Sansa's character. She wears a hint of a smile as she walks away from her torturer's screams. What this means for her development remains to be seen, but this unblinking woman is a far cry from the flighty child we first met way back in season 1.

Now that Ramsay is not-so-dearly departed, fans will need to look elsewhere for the next great villain. Will it be the High Sparrow? The Night King? They're both plenty scary, but it will be hard to top the sheer hatred viewers had for Ramsay Bolton and the muddled mixture of relief, satisfaction and disgust we felt at his death.

Citrix's GoToMyPC user passwords compromised after hack attack - CNET

Users of Citrix's GoToMyPC are the latest victims of an online password hack.
CNET

Those of you who use Citrix's GoToMyPC are going to have to reset your passwords.

The service, which lets users remotely access PCs over the Inteet, was hit by a "very sophisticated password attack," Citrix said Sunday in a blog post. The company didn't provide details but advised users to reset their passwords using the "forgot password" link.

Cyberattacks against websites have jumped in recent years as hackers find new ways to exploit security flaws. Hackers often sell stolen customer credentials on the black market. Users typically are prompted to reset their passwords but still have to worry about their personal information winding up in the wrong hands.

To reset your GoToMyPC password, go to the site and click on the Log In link.

You may also want to enable two-step verification, a process that sends a code to your phone each time you want to sign in. If you've used the same password for GoToMyPC at other websites or for other accounts, you should change it at those places as well.

Citrix didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Fitbit wants to help you get a better night's sleep - CNET

A new feature inside of the Fitbit app looks to help improve the sleep habits of millions of Fitbit owners. While a majority of the company's products already offer sleep tracking and let users create custom sleep goals, a new Sleep Schedule will now allow for even more control.

The new feature, which will arrive today as part of an update to the Fitbit app, adds bedtime and wakeup targets to help establish consistency and bedtime reminders to push you stay on schedule. Sleep goals have also been revamped and will now be personalized based on your sleep data.

All of this is in addition to existing features, such as viewing how long you've slept, the efficiency of that sleep and how frequently you woke up.

The Sleep Schedule, which Fitbit has said is the first in a series of new sleep features coming to devices, was developed in collaboration sleep experts from the University of Arizona, Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University.

The new features are compatible with all Fitbit devices capable of tracking sleep. That includes the Fitbit Blaze, Alta, Charge HR, Surge, Charge, Flex and One.

The updated Fitbit app will be available today in Apple's App Store and Google Play.

Spotify music service passes 100 million active listeners - CNET

A lot of people listen to Spotify.

The music streaming service said its user base of active listeners has passed 100 million. The majority of those are "free" users who listen to streams with commercial breaks, but the company also claims the largest paid subscriber base in the music industry, with 30 million paid subscribers.

Although it might be the biggest, Spotify faces stiff competition. Less than a year after launch, Apple Music now has 15 million paid subscribers to go with a newly redesigned app.

Meanwhile Amazon Prime, which offers the Amazon Music service free to all subscribers, could technically have more than both services combined at an estimated 46 million subscribers, although Amazon doesn't officially release those numbers. Google Music doesn't officially provide paid subscriber numbers either.

In the "free" music space Pandora is Spotify's main rival, but growth in its 80-odd million user base has been flat recently.

Solar Impulse begins four-day Atlantic crossing - CNET

See ya, New York, I'm off to Spain
Solar Impulse

The Solar Impulse 2 soared back into the the air early this moing on the last oceanic hurdle of its global flight, the Atlantic. The pokey but tough solar-powered plane took off from New York's John F. Kennedy Inteational Airport at 2:30 a.m. local time and headed toward Seville, Spain, on a trip that should last four days.

Six hours later, Captain Bertrand Piccard guided the plane over Nantucket Island, his last sighting of North America. Not long before that, a tweet showed Piccard having his first breakfast on the Atlantic leg.

The goal of the Solar Impulse 2, which doesn't use fossil fuel or spew pollutants, is to demonstrate the potential of solar technology. The 5,500-pound plane, which travels about 47 miles per hour, is powered by 17,248 solar cells built on the wings. They convert sunlight into electricity to power the four electric engines and propellers.

"This is the first step of green aviation," Andre Borschberg, who alteates pilot duties with Piccard, told CNET during the plane's layover in Silicon Valley seven weeks ago. "Every leg is a challenge because every leg you discover something else."

Seville should be the penultimate stop on Solar Impulse 2's around-the-world flight, which will end in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. The record-breaking trip began in March 2015 from Abu Dhabi and proceeded relatively uneventfully until a battery problem forced Piccard to make a nine-month stopover in Hawaii.

Before departing New York, Solar Impulse had spent almost 390 hours in the air while flying 14 legs covering a distance of 18,540 miles (29,837km). You can follow the rest of the flight live online or get regular updates from the Solar Impulse Twitter feed.

Director of 'Independence Day' has a plan for when aliens really arrive: Hide - CNET

"Independence Day" director Roland Emmerich hopes our civilization won't take any cues from his films when extraterrestrial life makes contact.

"Talk, and don't shoot," he advised in an interview. "And I hope [aliens] will not mind that I portray them badly. Otherwise I have to hide."

Emmerich, whose "Independence Day: Resurgence" hits theaters Thursday, has enjoyed plenty of time to mull over the possibility of a close encounter of the third kind. Twenty years have passed since his 1996 blockbuster "Independence Day" wowed popco-gobbling movie-goers by pushing special effects to their limits, as the flick annihilated landmarks like the White House and the Empire State Building in a 4-minute spectacle of destruction.

In the present day, when computer-generated scenes make it easy to lay waste to entire city blocks, it's a challenge to remember that the cinematic disasters of the original film were stunning. The original "Independence Day" won an Oscar for best visual effects.

"In the first film already when I was writing it, I had scissors in my head because I knew what you can do and you cannot do" with the special-effects technology of the day, he said in an interview. "This time around, you don't even have the scissors...because everything is possible."

See more of my interview with Emmerich in the video above.

3D printing produces human hair-like bristles - CNET

Slowly but surely, researchers are stripping away the limitations of 3D printers. Until now, dense and finely-featured objects had been considered off-limits, simply because the computer-aided design (CAD) files required would be enormous and take hours to compute. But new software designed by researchers at MIT's Media Lab circumvents this problem.

Called Cilllia, it uses sliders to allow the users to create surfaces covered in thousands of hairs with a resolution of 50 microns, about the width of a human hair. Unlike CAD, where each hair has to be drawn individually, this process takes just a few minutes.

"[Hair] comes with a challenge that is not on the hardware, but on the software side," said first author Jifei Ou, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences, in a statement.

Cilllia uses sliders that allow the user to quickly change the parameters of the hair structure, with a real-time visual representation. The user can adjust height, thickness, profile and angle, as well as the quantity of hair on a structure. The software can even be used to create curved hairs in a spiral patte.

The result is a program that can be easily used to create brush structures in various forms using stereolithography 3D printing. The team made paintbrushes, Velcro-like pads that stick to each other, hair-based actuation, and a furred toy bunny that lights up green when you stroke it correctly.

It's the latest advancement in 3D printing, an industry that will be worth just over $20 billion by 2019, according to Canalys.

"The ability to fabricate customized hair-like structures not only expands the library of 3D-printable shapes, but also enables us to design alteative actuator and sensors," the team's paper, presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in May, concluded. "3D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects."

Cleveland Rocks: Fans erupt on social media as Cavs win NBA title - CNET

Next year is finally now for Cleveland Cavaliers fans.

Long-suffering Ohio basketball fans rejoiced Sunday as their team defeated the defending NBA champion Golden State Warriors 93-89. And they did so in a way they couldn't when the franchise was founded 52 years ago: social media.

In a blizzard of tweets, diehards, like Patrick Ward, celebrated the nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat Game 7 thriller. Ward lost his mind tweeting in the moments after LeBron James & Co. battled back to become the first NBA team facing a 3-1 deficit to win a NBA title:

"Cleveland, this is for you!," said Finals MVP James. "Our fans deserve it. They deserve it. I came back to our city to bring a championship."

The Cavs' improbable feat brought Cleveland its first pro sports championship since 1964, when the Cleveland Browns won the NFL title. Browns' great Jim Brown -- arguably the greatest football player ever -- was elegant in celebrating the end of the drought:

Meanwhile, the Warriors, who won an all-time NBA record 73 games during the regular season, also became the first NBA team to blow a commanding 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals.

"It's not a good feeling," NBA MVP and Warriors sharpshooter Steph Curry said postgame. "This isn't the last time you'll see us on this stage."

Maybe not, but that doesn't matter to "Mr. Cavalier" Austin Carr, the Cavs legend and TV color commentator, who cried on-air when James left for the Miami Heat six years ago. He joyously tweeted:

Cleveland should enjoy the celebration, because the next big event in town, the Republican National Convention, could prove to be a rumble. The convention, where Donald Trump will likely be named the party's presidential nominee, opens on July 18.

Dark side of the moon: The grim history of NASA's space race - CNET

Weher von Braun standing next to five Rocketdyne F-1 engines og the Satu V first stage.
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

The Satu V rocket was a remarkable achievement of human engineering. The man-rated rocket carried every Apollo mission into space, and won the Space Race for America.

It was also based on Nazi technology.

Weher von Braun was an aerospace engineer and member of the Nazi Party during World War II. As the chief engineer of the Third Reich, he created a long-range ballistic missile called the V-2 rocket.

June 20 is a key date in his story, popping up twice. The first time was June 20, 1944, when the V-2 rocket became the first man-made object to cross the Kármán line, which lies 100 kilometres above Earth's sea level. On that day, it reached a jaw-dropping altitude of 189 kilometres.

From September 1944, over 3,000 V-2 rockets were launched, killing 2,754 civilians and around 4,500 military personnel. But this doesn't even scratch the human cost of actually producing the rockets - they were constructed by concentration camp prisoners at the underground Mittelwork factory, and at least 13,000 (and as many as twice that number) of these slave workers were killed by beatings, starvation and execution.

In 1943, Von Braun attained the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major), and had found himself atop a US-Army list of scientists to be captured and interrogated.

Vintage space treasures from the Project...

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This plan was changed when the war was winding down, and the US realised it could use Germany's scientists and engineers. Operation Paperclip, as it came to be known, was a secret program of recruitment, spiriting the top scientists out of Germany and into the US. This would boost American expertise, and keep that expertise from the Soviet Union and the UK.

This brings us to the second June 20, this time in 1945. It's the day the transfer of von Braun and his team was approved by the US Army. He and Arthur Rudolph, operations director at the Mittelwerk factory where so many died, went on to develop the Satu V rocket, based on the work they had done on the V-2 ballistic missile.

In 1960, von Braun became the first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. An official NASA webpage declares him to be, "without a doubt, the greatest rocket scientist in history."

But it's worth remembering that these achievements came at a great cost of human lives, most of whom simply disappeared, remembered only as statistics.