Month: April 2016

The reentry capsule for the SJ-10 research mission is shown after landing in inner Mongolia on Monday. (credit: Xinhua)

Over the next couple of decades, NASA wants to extend the human presence into the Solar System, including onto the surface of Mars. Elon Musk founded SpaceX expressly to colonize the red planet by the 2020s or 2030s. For now, both the government and private sector have focused on “hardware”: the rockets, spacecraft, and technology needed to keep humans alive en route to Mars and on its surface. And these are not simple or inexpensive problems to solve.

One could argue, however, that the “software” problems may prove even more challenging. That is, can an embryo mature in space, be born, and grow into a healthy human being?

After a 12-day experiment in space this month, Chinese scientists claim they have done so. On April 6, the SJ-10 spacecraft launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu province carrying about 20 different experiments in a retrievable satellite module. It returned to Earth on Monday, landing in inner Mongolia.

(credit: Flickr user FreddieBrown)

Unemployment obviously has economic effects on people, but it can also have psychological impacts, sometimes triggering depressive episodes. However, until now, there has been no quantitative research evaluating consequences of unemployment on people’s feelings about money. A study published in PNAS finds that unemployment changes how people think about entitlement.

The study defines entitlement as the acknowledgement that someone has a right to keep, consume, or dispose of things that they have earned, including their salary. The idea of entitlement is important for understanding the labor market and workers’ self-interest. Generally, people who earn a higher income tend to be more self-interested, with minimal preference for wealth redistribution, whereas lower-income individuals tend to think that wealthier people should pay more taxes and poorer people should be eligible for social support.

The study examined participants’ attitudes on wealth redistribution and wealth entitlement twice, with a year-long gap between experiments. This setup allowed the researchers to study people who transitioned between various states of employment in the interim. The study was conducted in Spain, which has the third highest unemployment rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The attrition rate was 48 percent between the two experiments, and this paper focuses on 151 participants who were either employed or students for both experiments, or employed/students for the first experiment and unemployed for the second.

(credit: Mark Walton)

Part of the reason, if not the reason people buy mechanical keyboards from the likes of Corsair and Das Keyboard is for that sweet, sweet extended key travel. The mushy membrane keyboards included with most desktops and the cursory chicklet keyboards of laptops simply don't have the depth of key travel and tactile feedback that rapid fire typists and gamers demand. If you fall into either of those camps, I'd urge you to give a mechanical keyboard a try—it really does make a world of difference.

Weirdly, though, Corsair thinks that the key travel of a good mechanical switch is a little too high for the most l33t of gamers—they might even be losing precious e-sports dollars because of it. Enter the K70 and K65 Rapidfire keyboards, which are kitted out with the all-new mechanical Cherry MX Speed switch. The MX Speed boasts an actuation distance—that is, the point at which its switch is activated—of just 1.2mm and a light 45g actuation force. By contrast, my mechanical switch of choice, the Cherry MX Brown, has a much larger 2mm actuation distance and 55g actuation force. The idea is to give an advantage to e-sports players by shaving off precious milliseconds (microseconds?) from each keystroke.

Now, I know what you're thinking, and no, if you're not into your mechanical keyboards, it's doubtful you'll be able to tell the difference between an actuation distance of 2mm and 1.2mm. Hell, even if you are, the difference is subtle. But, there is a difference, and I'm not so sure it's one I like. Side-by-side with a Cherry MX Brown keyboard, the Rapidfire's keys aren't as comfortable to type on. There's no discernible bump or click—one of the key selling points of many mechanical switches that helps identify when a key has been pressed—and the shallower travel makes it far easier to bottom out when typing.