Month: December 2015

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a few more deals to close out 2015. Our highlighted deal is great for anyone who wants to upgrade monitors but has space limitations to adhere to: now you can get a Dell 20-inch 1080p LED monitor with VA panel plus a $50 e-gift card for just $109. The list price for the monitor is $129, and considering small screens like this are hard to come by in full HD, this is a unique find.

Check out the rest of the deals below, including savings on bluetooth headphones, portable hard drives, range extenders, and more.

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On Tuesday, lawyers representing CBS and Paramount Studios sued Axanar Productions, a company formed by a group of fans attempting to make professional-quality Star Trek fan-fiction movies, for copyright infringement.

"The Axanar Works are intended to be professional quality productions that, by Defendants’ own admission, unabashedly take Paramount’s and CBS’s intellectual property and aim to 'look and feel like a true Star Trek movie,’” the complaint reads (PDF).

Axanar Productions released a short 20-minute film called Prelude to Axanar in 2014, in which retired Starfleet leaders talk about their experiences in the Four Years War, a war between the Federation and the Klingons that occurred in the Star Trek universe before The Original Series began. The feature-length Axanar is scheduled to premier in 2016 and follows the story of Captain Kirk's hero, Garth of Izar. Both productions were funded on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, raising more than $1.1 million from fans.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

When it comes to evolution, people tend to focus on the big driving force of natural selection, which latches on to helpful mutations while purging the harmful ones. But there are other processes that change the frequencies of mutations—everything from random drift to the founding of small isolated populations.

Looking at our own species' history, we would expect to see some of this in action. After modern humans established themselves in Africa, smaller populations branched out to establish footholds in Asia before spreading east, eventually reaching the Americas. At each step, a small group of migrants took a fraction of humanity's genetic diversity with it, creating a series of population bottlenecks.

This should be easy to see in our DNA, but so far it has turned out to be complicated. Different attempts using distinct populations and methods have come to mixed conclusions about whether a clear signal is there. Now, a large international team of researchers has gone and sequenced genomes from multiple populations along humanity's route out of Africa, and they found a signature of these bottlenecks both in terms of genetic variation and in terms of potentially harmful mutations.

(credit: Oak Ridge National Lab)

Most people think of batteries when they consider energy storage, but capacitors are an alternative in some use cases. Capacitors are used in almost all electronic devices, often to supply temporary power when batteries are being changed to prevent loss of information. In addition to everyday devices, they are also used in more obscure technologies, including certain types of weapons.

Understanding the supercapacitor

Unlike batteries, capacitors use static electricity to store energy. In their simplest form, they contain two conducting metallic plates with an insulating material (dielectric) placed in between. A typical capacitor charges instantly but usually cannot hold a great deal of charge.

Supercapacitors can at least partly overcome this shortcoming. They differ from the typical capacitor in that their "plates" provide significantly larger surface area and are much closer together. The surface area is increased by coating the metal plates with a porous substance. Instead of having a dielectric material between them, the plates of a supercapacitor are soaked in an electrolyte and separated by an extremely thin insulator.