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martyb writes:

For those who may have missed it, one of the April 1st stories contained a set of encoded puzzles for the community to decipher.

As the day went on, additional puzzles were added.

Unfortunately, the instructions were not clear. The intent was to have people reply in the comments with just their answers to the encoded questions. This generated some confusion when comments were posted with just the translation. This may have spoiled it for those who wanted to solve the puzzles on their own. I apologize for the confusion — I should have provided an example puzzle, decoding, and expected answer.

If you would like to play along without any spoilers, please refer to the original story with comments suppressed.

Today being another day, you now have your chance to show off your puzzle solving skills! Feel free to provide your translation, and more importantly, explain how you went about solving each puzzle. Command pipelines and/or programs are welcome!

I had a blast coming up with these puzzles, and thoroughly enjoyed following the discussions in the comments. I am looking forward to seeing how many different paths were taken to solving each of them! What challenges did you struggle with? Where did you get blocked? What was your 'aha!' moments in your attempts at solutions?

For your convenience, all nine puzzles are reproduced here after the break.

takyon writes:

The development of next-generation airships continues, but Hybrid Air Vehicles is struggling to get its Airlander 10 craft off the ground.

It could be the future of aviation, British eccentric genius on a grand scale, or possibly a bit of both. Secreted in a hangar a few miles south of Bedford sits the world’s largest aircraft: a hybrid of plane, balloon and hovercraft, an airship that the company modestly says will change the world. The Airlander 10 can fly for weeks, land virtually anywhere that’s flat, and burns just a fifth of the fuel of a conventional aircraft.

The Airlander is filled with helium, kept from leaking using a "super-tough skin" made of Vectran, Kevlar, and Mylar, but can also take off using aerodynamic lift like a conventional airplane. An earlier version was selected by the United States Army for the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle program, intended to provide surveillance for ground troops using unmanned blimps, but LEMV was cancelled in 2013.

Could this be the future of Airships? As one of the main investors, Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson believes so:

I’m not expecting to get my money back any time soon, I just want to be part of it. Being a rock person, I could put it up my nose, or buy a million Rolls Royces and drive them into swimming pools, or I could do something useful. ... There are very few times in your life when you’re going to be part of something big.

AnonTechie writes:

In 1980, Walter Alvarez and his group at the University of California, Berkeley, discovered a thin layer of clay in the geologic record, which contained an unexpected amount of the rare element iridium. ( http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/03/09/alvarez-theory-on-dinosaur/ )

They proposed that the iridium-rich layer was evidence of a massive comet hitting the Earth 66 million years ago, at the time of the extinction of the dinosaurs. The Alvarez group suggested that the global iridium-rich layer formed as fallout from an intense dust cloud caused by the impact. The cloud of dust covered the Earth, producing darkness and cold. In 1990, the large 100-mile diameter crater from the impact was found in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.

The timing of this impact, together with the fossil record, have led most researchers to conclude that this collision caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and many other forms of life. Subsequent studies found evidence of other mass extinctions in the geologic past, which seem to have happened at the same time as pulses of impacts, determined from the record of impact craters on the Earth. And these co-incidences occurred every 30 million years.

Why do these extinctions and impacts appear to happen within an underlying cycle? The answer may lie in our position in the Milky Way Galaxy.

http://theconversation.com/how-can-dark-matter-cause-chaos-on-earth-every-30-million-years-38075

AnonTechie writes about a novel development in the field of optical gyroscopes:

A pair of light waves - one zipping clockwise the other counterclockwise around a microscopic track - may hold the key to creating the world's smallest gyroscope: one a fraction of the width of a human hair. By bringing this essential technology down to an entirely new scale, a team of applied physicists hopes to enable a new generation of phenomenally compact gyroscope-based navigation systems, among other intriguing applications.

"We have found a new detection scheme that may lead to the world's smallest gyroscope," said Li Ge, a physicist at the Graduate Center and Staten Island College, City University of New York. "Though these so-called optical gyroscopes are not new, our approach is remarkable both in its super-small size and potential sensitivity."

[Abstract]: http://www.opticsinfobase.org/optica/abstract.cfm?uri=optica-2-4-323

An Anonymous Coward writes:

TAILS - The Amnesic Incognito Live System - is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.

It is a complete operating system designed to be used from a DVD, USB stick, or SDcard independently of the computer's original operating system. It is Free Software and based on Debian GNU/Linux. Tails comes with several built-in applications pre-configured with security in mind: web browser, instant messaging client, email client, office suite, image and sound editor, etc.

An emergency release was made a little over one week ago, and we covered that release then. As mentioned, the next scheduled release was due on Mar 31st and has, in fact, taken place. The announcement was delayed on this site so that it didn't become mixed up in any April 1st stories that were on the site yesterday.

TAILS version 1.3.2, is now available for download here: https://tails.boum.org/download/index.en.html

For full details of TAILS, please refer to the homepage, or for specific information relating to this release, please look here.

As always, we ask that if you download via torrent, please seed afterwards to help others obtain the software.

nitehawk214 writes:

According to Spaceflight Now. The NASA/USAF X-37B will be launching again on May 6.

The Orbital Test Vehicle will be the primary payload aboard the next United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, the 54th Atlas 5 and ULA’s 96th mission overall. The launch has a codename AFSPC 5 for the Air Force Space Command Flight No. 5.

Lift-off is targeted some time between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. EDT (1300-1700 GMT).

As always, you can track when this covert mission will be flying over your location on Heavens Above once it launches and its orbit is known. It is often visible to the naked-eye.

tonyPick writes in with an article from TouchArcade.

The article tells the story of Crashlands, a 2D action-RPG game from Butterscotch Shenanigans, a small game studio, and developer Sam Costa. In it, Mr. Costa details the effect his diagnosis of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma had on his family and goals for the game:

Cancer is a great clarifier. It stripped out all the petty, superfluous aspects of life and demanded just three things when it struck me in 2013: survive, find meaning, and figure out how to look good bald.

This is the story of Crashlands, a massive 2D action-RPG crafting game I've been working on with my two brothers since I was diagnosed at the ripe age of 23 with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma.

Prelude to Crashlands

It was June of 2013, less than a year from the time my brother Seth and I quit our jobs and started Butterscotch Shenanigans. In those first 8 months we created a critically acclaimed financial disaster (Towelfight 2) and found our first bit of success with Quadropus Rampage. The game didn’t get much attention on iTunes, but developed a sturdy enough following through Google Play that we saw our first ounce of income.

Head over to TouchArcade for more on this heartwarming story.

AnonTechie writes in with an article from Popular Science about a new analysis of satellite data, collected using passive microwave sensing, which identified increased biomass in specific areas around the globe.

Popular Science reports on the research [full paper] results, in part:

It isn't often that environmental scientists get good news. But a new study in Nature Climate Change found that for the past few years, the earth has been getting a little bit greener, accumulating an additional 4 tons of biomass (vegetation) between 2003 and 2012. That's a good thing, because plants take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, locking harmful greenhouse gas away in the new growth.

Now to burst your carbonated bubble; this study wasn't looking at a direct connection between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and plant growth. Even if the extra plants make a difference, the fact is carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been rising steadily for decades.

The additional green came from a few places: In former Soviet countries, forest started to grow back over farmland, while in China, massive tree planting campaigns seemed to do the trick. The researchers also found that more arid areas had a lot of vegetation as well, including shrubs in savannas in Africa, Australia, and South America.

tt0780607 writes:

Thurman, N.Y.’s public-private “white space” (locally unused radio frequencies) wireless network survived months of political wrangling, debate, and even intentional signal interference created by someone intent on disrupting the project. For a community that some maps depict with zero residents, the 1,200 people of Thurman are now more known than ever, winning national attention for one of the first next generation rural wireless networks to use unused space on the UHF dial to provide Internet access.

AnonTechie writes in with an astronomical conundrum. Scientists from Hawaii and Germany have characterized [Abstract;Full paper] a series of radio signals known as Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) and theorize that they may originate from a group of objects within the Milky Way. The New Scientist discusses the phenomenon and addresses some of the group's findings:

BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology.

Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No one knows what causes them, but the brevity of the bursts means their source has to be small – hundreds of kilometers across at most – so they can't be from ordinary stars. And they seem to come from far outside the galaxy.

The weird part is that they all fit a pattern that doesn't match what we know about cosmic physics.

Phoenix666 writes:

A Weather Underground reporting station at Argentina’s Esperanza Base on the Antarctic Penninsula recorded a temperature of 63.5 deg. F (17 deg. C) last Tuesday (24 Mar 2015):

Weather Underground bloggers Jeff Masters and Bob Henson write Tuesday’s 63.5F reading bests the previous record mark of 63.3F set just the day before [March 23] at Argentina’s Marambio Base (a small islet off the Antarctic Peninsula) and a prior reading of 62.8F (also from Esperanza Base) from April 24, 1961.

Tuesday’s new record is not yet official. Argentina’s Esperanza Base, the site of the record, may not be considered part of Antarctica for the purposes of weather records according to Weather Underground historian Christopher Burt. He explains four different ways Antarctica can be defined in a blog post. Ultimately, for the record to be official, the World Meteorological Organization will need to validate the temperature reading and determine it is, in fact, Antarctic.
...
This week’s possible temperature record was setup by a large, warm ridge of high pressure – or heat dome – originating from southern South America that extended over the Antarctic Peninsula. The intensity of this weather system was almost off-the-charts, judging by the purple shades on the map below, portraying the difference from normal conditions:

Perhaps those tired of winter in the Northern Hemisphere ought to consider a vacation in the balmy Antarctic Penninsula.

This story has also been covered by National Geographic and Science Recorder .

AnonTechie writes:

Search engines like Google or Yahoo make people think they are smarter than they actually are because they have the world's knowledge at their fingertips, psychologists at Yale University have found.

Browsing the internet for information gives people a ‘widely inaccurate’ view of their own intelligence and could lead to over-confidence when making decisions, experts warn.

In a series of experiments, participants who had searched for information on the internet believed they were far more knowledgeable about a subject that those who had learned by normal routes, such as reading a book or talking to a tutor. Internet users also believed their brains were sharper.

"The Internet is such a powerful environment, where you can enter any question, and you basically have access to the world's knowledge at your fingertips," said lead researcher Matthew Fisher, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in psychology at Yale University.

"It becomes easier to confuse your own knowledge with this external source. When people are truly on their own, they may be wildly inaccurate about how much they know and how dependent they are on the Internet."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11507200/Google-makes-people-think-they-are-smarter-than-they-are.html

[Paper]: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000070.pdf

To say that today (or yesterday, depending on your perspective) has been an interesting day for our community would be something of an understatement. While we understand that some people do dislike that 4/1 does not mean business as usual on the site, I think it provides us an important opportunity to remind everyone we are a single community, and just once in awhile, it's all right for us to have a bit of fun together and perhaps enjoy being a little bit silly.

For what it's worth, we understood that you didn't want a bunch of fake stories, so we tried to do something a little different, and hopefully catch you off guard at the same time.

I'd love to hear your feedback on what you liked and didn't like this year, and for those who wish to continue using it, the VT100 theme shall remain available as it was before. And with that note, so long, and thanks for all the fish :)

- NCommander

(P.S: You may need to do a force reload (Ctrl-F5) to get your theme back)

tonyPick writes:

John Sullivan over at phys.org is reporting on research [Abstract; free access to full paper, but registration is required], published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A on March 13, 2015 (online), which clarifies the accuracy of the Battery Bounce Test. The test purports to determine the charge left on a battery.

From the article:

The battery bounce test, popularized in online videos, shows that fully charged batteries bounce very little when dropped, while those that have been used for a while bounce higher. The height of the bounce increases as the batteries discharge, and that has led to the common conclusion that internal changes related to the reduction in charge are the cause of the higher bounce.

"A year ago a buddy of mine who knows I work on this sent me this video and said 'did you know this happens?'" Steingart said. "I didn't. But I had a bunch of batteries on my desk and I was able to verify it."

The article goes on to discuss the physics behind the bouncing battery test:

"The zinc starts out as a packed bed of particles that all move very nicely past each other," Steingart said. "When you oxidize the zinc, it makes bridges between the particles and makes it more like a network of springs. That is what gives the battery its bounce. "

Steingart said that is not too surprising, as zinc oxide is listed as a component to add bounce to golf balls in many patents.

But the formation of the bridges reaches a maximum "bounce level" well before the oxidation of the zinc is complete. That means that the bounce will reach a peak and level off well before the battery is dead.

So don't throw away those battery testers, folks.

Hugh Pickens writes:

When you become an actor, landing a role in a movie as big as Star Wars may seem like a dream come true. But Tatiana Siegel and Borys Kit report at The Hollywood Reporter that six movies in, the Star Wars franchise has only spawned one megastar: Harrison Ford, unusual for a series of this magnitude. Neither Ewan McGregor nor Liam Neeson was helped by the franchise and the list of acting careers that never took off is even longer, from original stars Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher to Jake Lloyd (young Anakin Skywalker) and most notably Hayden Christensen, whose star was on the rise when he nabbed 2002's Attack of the Clones. Even Natalie Portman who already had a hot career before Episodes I-III, admitted she struggled after the exposure. "Everyone thought I was a horrible actress," says Portman. "I was in the biggest-grossing movie of the decade, and no director wanted to work with me."

So what is the problem? "When you sign up for this, you're signing your life away, and you're keeping yourself from any other franchises out there," says an agent whose client is one of the stars of Episode VII. "They will not let you be in another franchise. They're going to be cranking out a new movie every year. These actors never get to read the script before signing on. They don't even know which [subsequent] one they are in. And then they become known for that role, and it's hard to see them in [another] kind of movie." Still, agents keep pursuing roles in the upcoming films even though newcomers can only command a meagar $65,000 to $125,000 for Episode VII. "It secures all involved a place in film history," says agent Sarah Fargo, "and guarantees a huge global audience, enhancing an actor's marketability."