If You Aren't Reading Goblins, It's A Lot Like This

Click for bigness.

Also, you should totally be reading Goblins

For Those Unfortunates Who Haven't See Pacific Rim Yet

No giant robot ass kicking awesomeness, well see if this can tide you over.

Pacific Rim Movie Review

Recommendation: Simple story & grand spectacle. Go see it.

To say that Pacific Rim is about style over substance would grossly unfair to a great action movie. It would also be technically true, but that doesn't automatically make it bad. While the substance is light it is well used and well presented, and where that may fall short, the style more than makes up for it. This is a damn stylish movie. In short, Pacific Rim is a spectacle film in much the same vein as Independence Day, though in my opinion quite a bit better.

SpaceX Grasshopper Test Vehicle Vehicle Reaches 325 Meters, Then Lands Safely

Worms regrow their decapitated heads, along with the memories inside

From The Verge:

The researchers tested the memory of planarians by measuring how long it took for them to reach food in a controlled setting. The small worms dislike open spaces and bright lights — but they had been trained to ignore it so that they could find their meals. Even after decapitation, worms that had gone through training were able to overcome their fears and start eating much faster than worms that hadn't been trained. However, the memories didn't come back immediately. Each worm still had to be reminded of its earlier knowledge, though it only took a single lesson for it to all come back.

Why this happens is still unclear. Planarians' brains control their behavior, but the researchers suggest that some of their memories might be stored elsewhere in their body. Alternatively, they suggest that the worms' original brain may have modified their nervous systems, and their nervous systems may have then altered how the new brains formed during regrowth.

New material holds big energy hope

To quote Neal Stephenson in Cryptonomicon: "As has always been the case, and as will continue to be the case for at least another half century, batteries suck."

Chemical batteries have always been a limiting factor in technological advancement. They are are heavy, expensive, slow to charge & discharge, sensitive to temperature, and have a very finite lifespan. This makes them impractical for storing excess power generated by our our infrastructure. This is why it's taken so long to develop commercially viable electrical cars. And it's why a modern mp3 player needs to be replaced on a regular basis, regardless of it's mechanical condition.

Unfortunately, there's never been much of an alternative available. But that may soon change.
 
From Phys Org

The new metal oxide dielectric material outperforms current capacitors in many aspects, storing large amounts of energy and working reliably from -190°C to 180°C, and is cheaper to manufacture than current components.

"Our material performs significantly better than existing high dielectric constant materials so it has huge potential. With further development, the material could be used in 'supercapacitors' which store enormous amounts of energy, removing current energy storage limitations and throwing the door wide open for innovation in the areas of renewable energy, electric cars, even space and defence technologies," said Associate Professor Liu.

The material could be particularly transformative for wind and solar power, which can cause problems when fed into the power grid at low demand times.

Supercomputers Approach Ability to Understand Human Language

from Science World Report

"In the past, people have tried to hand code all of this knowledge," explains Katrin Erk, a professor of linguistics (specializing in lexical semantics) at The University of Texas at Austin, US. "I think it's fair to say that this hasn't been successful. There are just too many little things that humans know."

Watching annotators struggle to make sense of conflicting definitions led Erk to try something new. Instead of hard-coding human logic or deciphering dictionaries, her approach mines vast bodies of text (which are a reflection of human knowledge) and uses the implicit connections between words to create a weighted map of relationships.

(Photo : Katrin Erk and TACC)
A sentence is translated to logic for inference with the Markov Logic Network, and words are translated to points in space. Here

 

Construction of New Antimatter Factory at CERN

Homo-Sapiens (being the insane and awesome apes that we are) are now working to ramp up our production of antimatter. More antimatter, more experiments. More experiments, more knowledge.

What could possibly go wrong?


from Science World Report:

In the antimatter hall, four collaborations – ATRAP, ALPHA, ASACUSA and AEGIS – trap antiprotons using Penning traps, to make antihydrogen for experiments. But in most of today’s set-ups, more than 99% of the antiprotons from the AD are lost through the degrader foils that decelerate the particles from their ejection energy down to the energy suitable for trapping (around 5 keV).

(Photo : CERN)
The Antiproton Decelerator provides beams of low-energy antiprotons to experiments, mainly for studies of antimatter