Author: John Timmer

A lot of the science we cover at Ars focuses on technology development, where the risks involved mean that the early success represented by a publication doesn't typically mean an actual product will follow. So it's nice to be able to report on an exception to this rule. IBM's experimental neural processor, True North, has found a home at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

True North is a radically energy-efficient design with a circuitry designed to mimic the structure of the neural connections within an animal's brain. Each chip is a big cluster of small cores that can potentially communicate with any other core on the chip. Each of these cores has its own memory and communication hardware; the memory holds information on the other cores it communicates with and how strong those connections are. The communications then take the form of a series of "spikes," bursts of activity that carry information based on their frequency and strength.

The radically different design allows the chip to get work done despite a ludicrously low clock rate: just one kiloHertz. The trade-off is that it can only host neural network software—it was designed to be compatible with any networks developed for the popular Compass neural network software package. And compared to running Compass on a traditional processor, True North used 176,000-fold less energy.

Saturn's moon Enceladus is a relatively small body, only a bit over 500km across. That's not big enough to have retained much heat from its formation, nor to have a huge cache of radioactive material that can provide heat. Yet all indications are that the moon has an extensive under-surface ocean, which fuels geysers near the moon's south pole. Thermal imaging suggests that there are Gigawatts worth of heat being released in the area around the geysers.

All of which should be unsustainable. Most of the heat inside Enceladus must be produced by tidal forces, which deform the moon over the course of its orbit, creating internal friction. And there's no indication that these can generate sufficient heat. This implies that the geysers, and the E-ring of Saturn that they create, are a very temporary phenomenon, and we're lucky to have sent Cassini there while the geysers were active. But that may not be the case. Some scientists are now suggesting that Enceladus may be relatively young, and a separate study is saying that the geysers may be stable for up to a million years.

The new study is based on an attempt to create a physical model of Enceladus' plumes. These originate in a series of fissures known as the tiger stripes, shown on the left side of the moon in the image above. Together, these fissures add up to roughly 500km of active venting.

The Tribeca Film Institute, founded by actor Robert De Niro, is generally supportive of science. It partners with the Sloan Foundation to provide grants for filmmakers who are looking to create "a fresh take on scientific, mathematic, and technological themes." Each year, some of the results are shown as part of the Tribeca Film Festival.

But this year, it appeared that the film festival had decided to balance its support of science with some false claims by putting the film Vaxxed: From Coverup to Catastrophe on the schedule. The film is the latest attempt by former doctor Andrew Wakefield to support his bogus claim that vaccines can trigger autism. Wakefield's original publication in this area has been retracted, and he has since lost his medical license due to unethical behavior regarding his patients and rampant conflicts of interest. An investigative reporter found that at the time that the research was conducted, Wakefield was receiving payments from lawyers planning on suing vaccine makers, and he was also working on his own alternative vaccine.

Meanwhile, the movie's basic premise has been thoroughly debunked. Although the film purports to provide information from a whistleblower that suggests the US Centers for Disease Control fraudulently manipulated data on vaccine safety, the issue has been studied in a number of countries, and the conclusions are all consistent: there is no connection between vaccination and autism.

Life is a rather difficult thing to define, but there are a few aspects that most biologists would agree on: it has to maintain genetic material and be able to make copies of itself. Both of these require energy, so it also must host some sort of minimal metabolism.

In large complex cells, each of these requirements takes hundreds of genes. Even in the simplified genomes of some bacteria, the numbers are still over a hundred. But does this represent the minimum number of genes that life can get away with? About a decade ago, researchers started to develop the technology to synthesize a genome from scratch and then put it in charge of a living cell. Now, five years after their initial successes, researchers used this model to try to figure out the genetic minimum for life itself.

At first, the project seemed to be progressing well. In 2008, the team described the tools it had developed that could build the entire genome of a bacterium. (The team used a parasitic bacteria called Mycoplasma genitalium that started with only 525 genes.) Two years after that, they managed to get a genome synthesized using this method to boot up bacteria, taking the place of the normal genome.

In general, astronomy is reactive—we spot something unusual by chance and point as many telescopes as we can manage to try to figure out what's going on. It's rare that we have something pointing in the right direction to catch an event right as it starts.

But the Kepler observatory was designed to point at the same spot and stare for years, capturing a constant stream of images. It's how the telescope was able to catch planets as they moved in front of their host stars. But interesting things went on behind the stars, and Kepler captured that data, too. Yesterday, astronomers announced that an analysis of the Kepler data captured the moments when a supernova burst through the surface of its host star—not once, but twice.

Most people think of supernovae as explosions that destroy a star. But type II supernovae are really the collapse and explosion of the core of the star. In cases where the star is a giant, this collapse and explosion happens so quickly that the outer layers of the star are unaffected by it and continue to look normal for nearly an hour even as catastrophic events are occurring behind the star. That seeming normalcy ends when the shockwave of the explosion reaches the surface and breaks out in a brilliant flash of light. This type of explosion is called a type II-P supernova.

For most of us, the only way we judge a battery is by how long it can deliver electrons to our favorite devices. But many applications require more than that. They need batteries that operate across a large temperature range, are compact or flexible, and can manage a fast charge/discharge rate. Plus, we'd all like them not to explode or fail suddenly.

Most energy storage tech involves balancing a trade-off among these various properties. But a new report from a collaboration between academic researchers and Toyota seems to promise it all: a battery more compact than lithium-ion, a better energy density, the charge speed of a supercapacitor, and improved safety. How is this all possible? They got rid of the liquid electrolyte typical of most lithium-ion batteries.

In principle, batteries are structurally very simple: two electrodes where ions exchange electrons, separated by an electrolyte that allows the ions to shuffle between the two. These electrolytes are almost always liquids, since they can easily dissolve the ions, allowing their free movement between the electrodes. Unfortunately, leaking electrolytes are often a cause of failure in these batteries. Fixing this is a challenge—you can't just shove ions through a solid, right?

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When I was a kid, it seemed simple: T. rex, the ultimate dinosaur, was just as it later appeared in Jurassic Park, covered in teeth, claws, and reptilian skin. It and all of its kin were also dead.

But even back then, it wasn't that simple. Thomas Henry Huxley, one of Darwin's earliest supporters, had a good look at Archaeopteryx and concluded that birds must have evolved from dinosaurs. Today, we know that's simply an understatement. Birds are dinosaurs, and when we talk about the great extinction that eliminated so many species in that group, we have to be careful to specify that it was the non-avian dinosaurs doing the dying.

We're rightly proud of the Large Hadron Collider, which accelerates protons up to 7 Tera-electron Volts before smashing them together. But the Milky Way regularly hurls protons towards Earth that have energies a thousand times higher than that, in the Peta-electron Volt (PeV) range. Astrophysicists refer to the mysterious sources of PeV particles as “PeVatrons."

What can possibly be boosting particles to these levels? A new paper figures out how many of the high-energy protons are being produced and finds one plausible source: the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center.

Rather than looking for high-energy protons, the authors track them indirectly. Depending on their interactions with the environment, the accelerated protons can produce gamma rays, which are high-energy photons. The energy of these photons are related to the energy of the initial particles.

Last year set a rather notable record for the warmest global temperatures, as a strong El Niño bumped up a steady trend of greenhouse warming to push the temperatures well above the previous record. Our report on the temperature record, however, noted that it was likely to be short lived. The El Niño that drove it wasn't going to switch off at the end of the calendar year, and additional time would allow the heat it was pushing into the atmosphere to spread more widely across the globe. As a result, some observers were predicting that 2016 would be even hotter.

So far, those predictions seem to be spot on. Over the weekend, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies released its figures for the month of February, which registered as a startling 1.35°C above the baseline period (1951-1980). The previous monthly record had been 1.14°C; last year's annual record was a paltry 0.84°C.

The graph above shows data from a period that contains all of the 15 warmest years in the instrumental record. The February reading, at the far right, provides some indication on how much of a radical departure this warming is.

The story of the US' energy economy has become simple: natural gas has gotten incredibly cheap, wind is catching up, and solar will be competitive before the decade is out. All of this is driving a boom in renewable energy and pushing coal out of its dominant spot on the market.

But the US isn't the world—it's not even the largest carbon emitter anymore—and its experience doesn't always reflect what's happening in other countries. At the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (or AAAS), speakers had the chance to review what's happening with renewable energy in a number of other critical countries: Germany, India, and China.

Combined, these countries cover a broad spectrum of experiences. Germany's a mature industrial economy that's pushed renewables hard; China's binged on fossil fuels, but is now trying to change its trajectory; and India is the nation most likely to follow in China's footsteps.