Month: December 2018

Another year, another reason to take the promises of residential home batteries with a grain of salt.

This month, a group of researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) published a paper in Environmental Science and Technology reporting that there are very few cases in which operating a residential home battery reduces overall emissions—assuming that households are economically rational and trying to minimize costs.

Of course, if the battery is only discharged during periods of peak emissions and only charged when fossil fuel use is low, then a household might reduce emissions. But across 16 representative regions, operating a battery this way ended up being costly.

Netflix's latest Black Mirror "event," a film titled Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, launched on the streaming service on Friday. The film has garnered attention for its interactive elements, thus capitalizing on a decision-based system announced in June 2017, and fans of the dark-technology series may very well be excited to tap away and decide the film's fate.

One thing fans may be more confused about, however, is the series' murky fate in the wake of the film's launch. As conflicting reports began to circulate, we reached out to Netflix to confirm some good news: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is not the only Black Mirror episode in the series' "fifth season" order.

A lengthy New York Times feature about Bandersnatch's creation and production concludes with a particularly vague response to questions about future episodes: "'We're doing more optimistic episodes and stories, rather than just dystopian and negative ones,' Brooker said. 'We want to keep the show interesting for us.' He and Jones were, however, extremely hazy on when the next episodes would arrive. Bandersnatch consumed all their attention for a year."

If you want your New Year celebrations to be truly out of this world, then you might consider stopping by the New Horizons website. Following on from its phenomenally successful flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft will perform its closest flyby of a small Kuiper Belt object at just after midnight in the US Eastern time zone—the one where the operations center of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is located.

Indications that New Horizons survived the flyby—rather than running in to a small moon or ring—will have to wait for the roughly six hours it takes light to travel from the location of 2014 MU69, the target of its attentions. Nicknamed Ultima Thule, the object is a small ball of ice in the distant Kuiper Belt, which is a large collection of small bodies that froze out of a disk of gas and dust early in the Solar System's history.

The full extent of our knowledge of Ultima Thule's surface is that it's about 30 kilometers across and not perfectly spherical, based on its occultation of a background star. It only reflects about 10 percent of the sunlight that reaches it, but imparts a reddish tint to what little light escapes. Beyond that, everything New Horizons sees will be a completely new discovery. NASA was still scanning Ultima for moons and rings in mid-December before committing to a flyby that will take New Horizons three times closer than it came to Pluto.

Enlarge (credit: CCFoodTravel.com)

If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you follow them? For parents, it's meant to be a rhetorical question—a way of winning any argument that begins with "But all my friends are..." But behavioral science has been revealing that adults will do a long list of stupid things simply to maintain bonds within social groups they consider their peers.

In the latest sign of just how stupid we can get, researchers found that people are wiling to adopt an ethical standard after being told that people like them were assigned that position at random.

Normative

The new work was published by the University of Melbourne's Campbell Pryor, Amy Perfors, and Piers Howe. It's based on past research that looked at how social norms are established. This work has suggested two means that drive their adoption. One is simply practical: people will adopt social standards that are popular because it's likely those standard have some utility. An alternative explanation is only slightly less practical in that it posits adopting a social norm will ensure that you can avoid punishment by the rest of society for violating it.

Enlarge (credit: CCFoodTravel.com)

If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you follow them? For parents, it's meant to be a rhetorical question—a way of winning any argument that begins with "But all my friends are..." But behavioral science has been revealing that adults will do a long list of stupid things simply to maintain bonds within social groups they consider their peers.

In the latest sign of just how stupid we can get, researchers found that people are wiling to adopt an ethical standard after being told that people like them were assigned that position at random.

Normative

The new work was published by the University of Melbourne's Campbell Pryor, Amy Perfors, and Piers Howe. It's based on past research that looked at how social norms are established. This work has suggested two means that drive their adoption. One is simply practical: people will adopt social standards that are popular because it's likely those standard have some utility. An alternative explanation is only slightly less practical in that it posits adopting a social norm will ensure that you can avoid punishment by the rest of society for violating it.