Month: June 2016

(credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

When it comes to cats and physics, most people don't get much further than Erwin Schrödinger and his gedankenexperiment involving a feline locked in a box. But research from Saho Takagi and her colleagues at Kyoto University in Japan suggests that cats don't just star in physics thought experiments, they may also have an innate understanding of (some of) the physics, too.

We're not suggesting that SpaceX or Blue Origin is looking to hire feline rocket scientists any time soon or that the cats know what to do with Schrödinger's wave function. But Takagi's study provides evidence that our furry little friends might have a better understanding of causal relationships than previously thought, and they may also have a "rudimentary understanding of gravity."

The study involved 30 Japanese cats—eight house pets and 22 residents of cat cafes. The researchers tested the cats using a plastic box containing some iron balls. Normally the balls were free to rattle around in the container, falling out when the box was inverted. But on the opposite side to the box's open end, they added an electromagnet. When turned on, the magnet stopped the balls from rattling or falling out.

New emoji are typically proposed by the Unicode Consortium and approved for the next version of the spec without much fuss, but a rifle emoji proposed for Unicode 9.0 apparently ran into opposition from two major members of the consortium: Apple and Microsoft.

According to a report from Buzzfeed, Apple objected to the idea of introducing a second gun emoji on its platforms, and Microsoft joined in. The decision to remove the rifle emoji, as well as a second "pentathlon" emoji depicting a man holding a pistol among other athletes, was apparently unanimous.

“Nobody in the room seemed to mind not encoding the rifle,” said a Unicode Consortium member present during the discussion.

(credit: Maggie Bartlett, NHGRI)

When making up your mind, going with your gut can be a safe bet. And according to a new study, leaving your gut in charge all the time might not be a bad idea—it may actually help dodge neurodevelopmental disorders.

While microbial mind control might sound far-fetched, one common gut microbe can singlehandedly reverse autism-like social behaviors in mice, researchers report in the journal Cell. Though the study is not yet applicable to human health, it highlights the strength of connections that can build between the gut and the brain—known as the gut-brain axis.

If the findings do hold up in more animal studies and human trials, it could mean that treatments as simple and unfussy as probiotic foods could relieve some symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism spectrum disorder, the authors conclude.

There's nerding out, and then there's playing Star Trek: Bridge Crew. But oh man is four-player VR co-op fun. (video link)

When you've spent the best part of your day playing collectible card games with a man cosplaying as Geralt from The Witcher, it takes a special something to make you feel like maybe, just maybe, you're a bit too nerdy. That special something is Ubisoft's Star Trek: Bridge Crew, a four-player VR co-op game for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR that lets you live the dream of captaining a Federation starship through deep space. Even the most hardened of Star Trek haters are going to love this.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew puts you in one of four roles: Captain, Helm, Tactical, or Engineering. If you're playing on your own, AI fills in for the other roles, but ideally you want to find a group of well-heeled friends with enough disposable income to buy both a great gaming PC and a VR headset (at least until PS VR comes out). From there, invite everyone over to your place and have one big nerdy Star Trek: Bridge Crew LAN party. That, not so coincidentally, is the exact setup on show at E3 2016.

There are all kinds of problems associated with the console real-time strategy (RTS) game, as the original Halo Wars demonstrated with aplomb back in 2009. The limitations of a control pad compared to a mouse and keyboard make camera movement and unit selection difficult. RTS games are typically more reliant on the CPU than GPU, so processing power is limited. And because RTS games have never really had much success on console, there's far more hand-holding required to relay the basics to players. Despite its problems, though, Halo Wars was workable enough to be a somewhat fun entry into what is a fiendishly difficult genus to crack.

Now Halo Wars 2 will opt for an even more difficult task: a simultaneous release across Xbox One and PC. No longer can the design team overlook mouse and keyboard users in favour of the pad player. In theory, both sets must be catered for equally; in practice, as I sat down to play a beta version on an Xbox One, that's not the case yet.

For the most part, this is a game that—eight months before launch, at least—has the same wider feel as its predecessor. Simplicity is the priority. Radial menus are still used to expand your base, construct vehicles, and train troops, while the units themselves have a wide footprint in order to make them easier to select using the analogue stick. There's also the returning Halo visual style, of course—a mishmash of sci-fi military and alien tech. Base management here is considerably more limited than other games in the genre.

A dam with a pumped hydro storage reservoir in Pennsylvania. (credit: Army Corps of Engineers)

The two fastest growing sources of renewable energy, wind and solar, are intermittent—they don't always generate power when you need them to. The obvious solution is to add storage, like batteries, to shift some of the electricity to when demand is highest. Elon Musk is betting a Gigafactory that consumers are going to be interested in doing this, while California has mandated that 1.3 gigawatts of storage be added to the power grid before the decade is out.

But there are a number of different types of storage, each of which has distinctive properties: how fast electrons can be shuffled in and out, how easy it is to expand the storage capacity, and so on. All of these have different costs, and figuring out what storage is most economically viable is a serious challenge.

Three academics from MIT have decided to take up that challenge. They've tried to calculate when it makes economic sense to add storage to renewable projects in three different locations in the US. Their analysis indicates the finances among options are similar right now, but only for options other than batteries.

(credit: Diliff)

In 1836, Anthony Panizzi, who later became principal librarian of the British Museum, gave evidence before a parliamentary select committee. At that time, he was only first assistant librarian, but even then he had an ambitious vision for what would one day became the British Library. He told the committee:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

He went some way to achieving that goal of providing general access to human knowledge. In 1856, after 20 years of labor as Keeper of Printed Books, he had helped boost the British Museum's collection to over half a million books, making it the largest library in the world at the time. But there was a serious problem: to enjoy the benefits of those volumes, visitors needed to go to the British Museum in London.

Imagine, for a moment, if it were possible to provide access not just to those books, but to all knowledge for everyone, everywhere—the ultimate realisation of Panizzi's dream. In fact, we don't have to imagine: it is possible today, thanks to the combined technologies of digital texts and the Internet. The former means that we can make as many copies of a work as we want for vanishingly small cost; the latter provides a way to distribute those copies to anyone with an Internet connection. The global rise of low-cost smartphones means that "anyone with an Internet connection" will soon include even the poorest members of society in every country.