news.buyenne.com

Alien invasion might be a lot weirder than you think. That's the premise of Arrival, a first contact story told from the point of view of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) who is the first to translate the language of the mysterious "heptapods" whose ships arrive on Earth seemingly just to make conversation.

If this movie is even a quarter as good as the novella it's based on, we're in for a damn fine story. (For those who have not had the pleasure of reading it, Chiang's collection, Stories of Your Life and Others, has just been reissued as a handsome paperback.) Though the film is dramatizing the alien visitation with international politics and war threats, the original story explores a more personal crisis. Without giving away spoilers, the central idea is that the heptapods' written language allows the reader to know the ending of a sentence at the moment they start reading it. Based in part on the aliens' mathematics—and informed by the Earthly mathematics of Fermat's Principle—the heptapods' language changes the consciousness of humans who decipher it, essentially allowing them to remember the future.

So what happens when a conversation with an alien changes your perception of linear time? In Chiang's story, it raises questions about whether you will make the same life decisions despite knowing when people will die—indeed, knowing when you will die. The result is a moving, intense exploration of temporality, linguistics, and the human psyche. It's clear that some of these themes are going to come up in the movie, too, though with the added dramatics of some kind of standoff with Russia.

(credit: Joint Quantum Institute)

If you know me, you know that I tend to get obsessive about imaging. I usually stick to optical microscopes, but occasionally the folks who play with electrons and ions do something exciting, too. A recently published paper on ion microscopy has me pretty excited at the moment, which is about all the excuse I need to dig in.

Ion microscopy is similar to electron microscopy. In a typical electron microscope, you fire a beam of electrons at a sample and examine the angles at which the electrons scatter. These angles are directly related to the surface of the sample, so with a few optics (magnetic lenses, in the case of electrons), you get an image. Because electrons are heavy and energetic, they have a very short wavelength, so smaller features can be imaged.

After the development of the electron microscope, scientists realized that you can do similar things with ions—the nucleus of an atom with some or all of the electrons stripped off it. Hence, ion microscopy.

Always keeping your house tidy and spotless may earn you the label of “neat freak”—but “super happy” may be a more accurate tag.

When people voluntarily take on unpleasant tasks such as housework, they tend to be in particularly happy states, according to a new study on hedonism. The finding challenges an old prediction by some researchers that humans can be constant pleasure-seekers. Instead, the new study suggests we might seek out fun, uplifting activities mainly when we’re in bad or down moods. But when we’re on the up, we’re more likely to go for the dull and dreary assignments.

This finding of “flexible hedonism,” reported Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may seem counterintuitive because it suggests we sabotage our own high spirits. But it hints at the idea that humans tend to make sensible short-term trade-offs on happiness for long-term gains.

A federal appeals court says the maker of an online spying tool can be sued on accusations of wiretapping. The federal lawsuit was brought by a man whose e-mail and instant messages to a woman were captured by the husband of the woman. That husband used that data as a "battering ram" as part of his 2010 divorce proceedings.

It's the second time in a week that a federal court has ruled in a wiretapping case—in favor of a person whose online communications were intercepted without consent. The other ruling was against Google. A judge ruled that a person not using Gmail who sent e-mail to another person using Gmail had not consented to Gmail's automatic scanning of the e-mail for marketing purposes. Hence, Google could be sued (PDF) for alleged wiretapping violations.

For the moment, the two outcomes are a major victory for privacy. But the reasoning in the lawsuit against the makers of the WebWatcher spy program could have ramifications far beyond the privacy context—and it places liability on the producers of spyware tools.

(credit: Peter Kaminski / flickr)

SAN FRANCISCO—Oracle lawyers argued in federal court today that their copyright trial loss against Google should be thrown out because they were denied key evidence in discovery.

Oracle attorney Annette Hurst said that the launch of Google Play on Chrome OS, which happened in the middle of the trial, showed that Google was trying to break into the market for Java SE on desktops. In her view, that move dramatically changes the amount of market harm that Oracle experienced, and the evidence should have been shared with the jury.

"This is a game-changer," Hurst told US District Judge William Alsup, who oversaw the trial. "The whole foundation for their case is gone. [Android] isn't 'transformative'; it's on desktops and laptops."