Month: May 2016

(credit: Flickr user andrew and his family)

Male competitiveness is pretty engrained in our culture, with popular images of it encompassing everything from sports to business to the PlayStation. And there are some studies that have shown men to be more competitive than women, but this effect hasn’t been studied all that deeply. A new paper published in PNAS shows that gender’s effects on competitiveness go away when the stakes of the competition are related to children’s benefit, rather than personal gain. When children are at stake, women and men are equally competitive.

The study is based on the idea that women aren’t necessarily less competitive than men, but there are gender-specific spheres of competition. The authors hypothesized that one of those spheres involves offspring. To test this hypothesis, the researchers asked participants of both genders to perform tasks under two different reward schemes. In the first reward scheme, participants received cash, a standard incentive in psychology experiments. In the second reward scheme, participants received a scholastic bookstore voucher worth the same value. This voucher was a proxy for children’s benefit.

This study was conducted in China, and all participants were parents of school-aged students. The authors think that Chinese culture’s heavy emphasis on education makes it more likely that the participants would see a “scholastic bookstore voucher” as something that would benefit their child. This expectation was confirmed via interviews with local teachers and parents, who agreed that Chinese participants would likely use a scholastic bookstore voucher to buy educational books for their children.

The Blizzard campus that will soon host the team behind the "pirate server" Nostalrius. (credit: Blizzard)

The administrators behind the recently shut-down Nostalrius server—which ran a popular "vanilla" version of World of Warcraft as the game existed before its many expansions—are currently "scheduling a meeting at Blizzard campus" to discuss the status of what some call "legacy servers" but what Blizzard and others often refer to as "pirate servers."

In a post to the Nostalrius forums late Sunday night, the administrators seemed optimistic about serving as spokespeople for a group of players interested in preserving a playable history of the popular MMO— a group that has now grown to include over 250,000 signatories to an online petition.

"We are very excited to be able to help Blizzard understand the part of their community asking for legacy servers and many other related topics, in the hope that they will eventually make it possible to legally play previous game expansions," the team wrote. "After the answer from Blizzard and the amazing support we received, we feel we are now not only the admins of a private server: We are also the ambassadors of a larger movement for the entire World of Warcraft community that wants to see game history restored. It is a major responsibility. Our top priority and only focus now is to fulfill the needs of this community, by carrying your voice to Blizzard directly."

Astronomers have found three Earth-size worlds around a cool star just 40 light-years from the Sun. (credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)

The star is only about the size of Jupiter and much colder and redder than the Sun. Its luminosity is far less than 1 percent that of our star—so faint that, although the "ultracool" dwarf star called TRAPPIST-1 lies less than 40 light-years from Earth, it can only be seen via relatively powerful telescopes.

Yet it is a star worth looking for. Astronomers using a 60cm telescope designed especially to study such stars, and any planets around them, have found this system to contain some of the most habitable exoplanets discovered to date. As European astronomers looked at TRAPPIST-1 from September through December of last year, they discovered slight, periodic dimming that indicates the presence of three worlds which are close to or inside the system's habitable zone. All have radii of between 1.05 and 1.17 that of Earth's radius.

According to the observations published Monday in the journal Nature, the two inner planets orbit the star every 1.51 days and 2.42 days. The innermost planet, TRAPPIST-1b, likely receives about four times the solar radiation from its star than does Earth, and astronomers estimate its surface temperature is probably closer to the higher end of a range between 11 degrees and 127 degrees Celsius. The next planet, TRAPPIST-1c, receives a little more than two times the solar radiation as does Earth and has a surface temperature likely between -30 degrees and 69 degrees Celsius. The researchers speculate these worlds are likely tidally locked and, therefore, even if they have extreme average temperatures, they may have habitable regions along the terminator or poles.

LG's new fingerprint module integrated into smartphone display glass. (credit: LG Innnotek)

LG Innotek, LG's components subsidiary, has announced a new fingerprint reader component that can be integrated into the bezel area of a smartphone's display glass.

The latest round of phones have all shipped with fingerprint readers, but the design limitations imposed by the sensor component left most phones with similar design. Other than the 2015 Nexus phones, LG G5, and the Nextbit Robin, the latest phones all used a fingerprint sensor that is integrated into the front home button.

For this new design, LG cuts a small groove into the underside of the display glass and installs the fingerprint reader there. The result is a fingerprint reader that LG Innotek says "is not exposed to [the] outside of the device," making it invisible. In fact, LG Innotek recommends indicating the location of reader on the bezel of the phone so users can tell where it is.