Month: April 2016

Video shot/edited by Nathan Finch. (video link)

If you saw a USB dongle sticking out of the wall of your building, what would you do? That's part of the premise of dead drops, a media arts project started by Germany's Aram Bartholl in 2010. Dead drops consist of USB sticks that people place in the world—in any public place—to encourage anonymous file sharing between strangers.

Bartholl was staying in New York as artist in residence when he began leaving dead drops in the Big Apple; they were eventually featured as part of the "Talk to Me" exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. While dead drops appear to focus on information sharing, it's not the first GPS-based discovery system of its kind. Geocaching has been around much longer than dead drops, and it even has an app that records where the hidden objects—geocaches—are located.

(credit: Oona Räisänen)

We use many words to describe groups of trees: forest, wood, grove, stand, copse… But what about “guild”? (Don’t worry, neither druids nor dryads are about to be invoked.) Woven into the roots of forest trees are mycorrhizae, fungi that are close partners with the trees. The fungi help free up nutrients from the soil, and the trees hook the fungi up with some sugar for their trouble.

Researchers have found that mycorrhizae can actually bind trees into a community by facilitating the transfer of nutrients among them. And experiments with saplings have even shown that sugar can be traded via the “myconet.” Individual trees have always been viewed as separate organisms that compete for light and water, but now it appears that real forests may collaborate in secret ways below ground.

A group of researchers including Tamir Klein, Rolf Siegwolf, and Christian Körner took advantage of a unique experimental setup In a Swiss forest. There, a construction crane houses a carbon dioxide source that runs to five 40-meter-tall Norway spruce trees, where thin porous tubes tied to the branches slowly leak CO₂ for the trees to breathe in.

(credit: Netflix)

Netflix is bumping up the video quality of one of its original shows in an effort to get ahead of the high dynamic range (HDR) streaming game. According to a report by FlatPanelsHD, Netflix released the first season of Marco Polo in HDR as well as 4K, and more HDR-capable shows will come soon. Season two of the show has been confirmed for release in June 2016.

Netflix's corporate communications manager Yann Lafargue confirmed that certain programs will support HDR streaming now but was cryptic about shows to come in the future. "We are indeed live with HDR. It works with compatible TVs, both in HDR10 and Dolby Vision," Lafargue told FlatPanelsHD. "We have season one of Marco Polo for now, but much more content should be available shortly, so stay tuned."

HDR improves picture quality by making blacks darker and whites brighter, resulting in an image sharper and crisper than that of regular HD. Netflix appears to be embracing HDR more than 4K at the moment, although the company has been streaming some 4K content since 2014. At that time, Netflix's 4K content was limited not only by the number of shows available but also by the few TVs that could support the resolution.

Two B330s are shown in low-Earth orbit, with a Boeing CST-100 and SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked. (credit: Bigelow Aerospace)

Throughout our planet’s space-faring history, there have been two major impediments to putting a lot of private citizens into orbit. Only governments have had spacecraft, and there have been only a few government-controlled space stations to visit.  But now that may finally changing in a big way. Within less than two years, both Boeing and SpaceX should complete development of private capsules that will carry people into space. Two other companies, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada, are also developing orbital spacecraft.

The second part of the problem may soon be addressed as well. Less than a week after the launch of Bigelow Aerospace’s experimental 13-foot habitat to the International Space Station, the company has announced an agreement with United Launch Alliance to deliver two much larger B330 habitats into orbit by 2020. Each of these habitats, which will be fully self-sufficient, has 330 cubic meters of habitable volume—about one-third that of the space station.

Financial details of the agreement were not released, but the move is significant because of its potential to become the first truly commercial human activity in space—people launching aboard private spacecraft and staying in a privately developed habitat. “We are standing on the very threshold of an expanded and permanent human presence beyond our planet, and the foundation for that future will be the commercialization of low-Earth orbit,” said Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of United Launch Alliance, at a news conference this week.