Month: July 2016

The building that houses the IceCube servers. (credit: USAP.gov)

Neutrinos have precious little mass and no charge, meaning the usual ways of accelerating particles won't work on them. Yet something, somewhere out in space pushed one to energies a thousand times higher than we can reach in the Large Hadron Collider. And we only know that because we finally built a detector that could spot high-energy neutrinos when they travel through the Earth.

In a recent paper in the journal Nature Physics, Francis Halzen, the principal investigator for the IceCube detector, discussed current efforts to learn about the Universe using neutrinos. As it turns out, neutrinos are surprisingly informative about the origins of cosmic rays and potentially about dark matter as well.

Neutrinos are a fantastic tool for astronomy. Their properties—no charge and very little mass—mean that they can arrive here on Earth unobstructed by almost anything in between their source and Earth. Neutrinos generated inside the Sun, for instance, can travel right out far faster than photons, which spend time interacting with the Sun's matter.

Retired US Astronaut Eileen Collins arrives speak on the third day of the Republican National Convention on Wednesday. (credit: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

In the week or so since it became known that Eileen Collins would appear at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday night, the space community has buzzed with questions and concerns. A brilliant astronaut and the first woman to command a space shuttle, Collins has a sterling reputation among the flight directors, astronauts and engineers at NASA who worked with her. Why would she jump into the political fray, many asked? And for Donald Trump, of all people?

I felt the answer was pretty simple. Like a lot of astronauts Collins comes from a military background (she's a colonel in the U.S. Air Force), and therefore more likely to be conservative politically. Perhaps she had had discussions with the Trump people, and they endorsed her view that NASA should return to the Moon before going to Mars. In any case, it's not like she's the first former astronaut to take on politics (Hello, John Glenn and Harrison Schmitt).

So on a night when Ted Cruz stole the show at the convention for political observers, the four-minute speech given by Collins garnered the most interest among the space industry. Her remarks were largely a fairly standard call to restore some glory to America's space program, and she touched on how it has been unacceptable to rely on Russia for transport to the International Space Program for the last five years. America can, and must do better than that, Collins said.

Salt water, a sheet of molybdenum disulfide, and a pore is all you need to produce current. (credit: Mohammad Heiranian, U of Illinois )

It's possible to generate energy using nothing but the difference between fresh and salt water. When fresh and salt water are separated by a membrane that blocks the passage of certain ions, there is a force that drives the freshwater into the salt water to even out the salt concentration. That force can be harvested to produce energy, an approach termed osmotic power.

But the generation of osmotic power is highly dependent on how quickly ions can cross the membrane—the thicker (and more robust) the membrane, the slower the ions will flow. Theoretically, the most efficient osmotic power generation would come from an atomically thin membrane layer. But can this theoretical system be achieved here in reality?

Recently, scientists answered that question using atomically-thin membranes composed of molybdenum-disulfide (MoS₂). In the paper that resulted, they describe a two-dimensional MoS₂ membrane containing a single nanopore, which was used to separate reservoirs containing two solutions with different concentrations of salt in order to generate osmotic power.

(credit: Square Enix)

The Apple Watch will soon get its first true RPG, developed by Final Fantasy creator Square Enix. The company released a teaser website that simply shows what is presumably the name of the game—Cosmos Rings.

Aside from some psychedelic blue-and-purple artwork, the site simply shows a wrist with an Apple Watch on it and details that the game will indeed be an RPG available for the Apple Watch through the Watch App Store. While there's no detail of actual gameplay, the Japanese website Gamer appears to have some screenshots of what the game may look like on the device. However, there's no way to know how credible those screenshots are, and Square Enix could still be finalizing Cosmos Rings, so the actual look and feel of the game could change significantly. Also noticeably absent is any mention of Android Wear or other smartwatches—the game appears to be exclusively for the Apple Watch.

Apple's smartwatch isn't necessarily built to support an intense RPG, though. Its screen is quite small and aside from tapping and maybe some gestures, controlling actions in the game might be difficult. There's also battery life to consider—currently the Apple Watch only lasts a full day on a single charge, so putting the system under stress from this game will only make the battery run out faster.

For many developers, Stack Overflow has become the go-to place on the Internet for getting programming questions answered. The site's community-based question-and-answer model, combined with extensive gamification, has made it not just an essential resource for programmers of all kinds, but one of the most visited sites on the Internet. Today, the company announced a new product that aims to tackle another long-standing developer bugbear: documentation.

With this new product, named Documentation, Stack Overflow is hoping to bring the same influences that made Stack Overflow a success to the world of creating developer documentation that is rich with sample code to meet the needs of developers. As with the Q&A site, the intent is to develop a community that is rewarded for its contributions through upvotes and badges, giving a way to thank people for adding value and to offer recognition to those who consistently improve the content.

The first focus of Documentation is the development of code samples. Stack Overflow has worked with a handful of companies including PayPal, Dropbox, and Twitch in a closed beta. These companies all offer APIs that are already documented. The value that Documentation adds is the ability to extend those references describing the names of functions and the meanings of the parameters to include much richer content showing how to use those APIs in ways that the user community finds useful. Useful sample code is often missing from API documentation, and even when it exists, it's often narrowly tailored to do the bare minimum to demonstrate how a particular API or APIs are used. The hope with Documentation is to go far beyond this, creating a system where developers can offer a much wider range of examples.