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Space-time curvature

An artist's conception of the way the mass of Earth warps space-time. Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in this fabric of space-time.

Johnstone via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists announced today (March 17) that they had found the first direct evidence of the dramatic expansion that created the known universe, known as cosmic inflation, or the "bang" in the Big Bang. This dramatic expansion is thought to have occurred in the first instants of existence, nearly 14 billion years ago, causing the universe to expand beyond the reach of the most powerful telescopes. 

In 1979, a physicist named Alan Guth came up with the theory of cosmic inflation, and theorized that such an event would create ripples in space-time called gravitational waves. But their existence remained hypothetical. Today, a team of researchers said that they had detected these gravitational waves, using a telescope near the South Pole. 

"This is huge," Marc Kamionkowski, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the discovery but who predicted how these gravitational wave imprints could be found, told Scientific American. “It’s not every day that you wake up and find out something completely new about the early universe." He added that the results looked good, although they would need to be verified by others to hold up. 

The finding seems to support the idea that the observable universe is only one of many, as the New York Times reports: 

Confirming inflation would mean that the universe we see... is only an infinitesimal patch in a larger cosmos whose extent, architecture and fate are unknowable. Moreover, beyond our own universe there might be an endless number of other universes bubbling into frothy eternity, like a pot of pasta water boiling over.

As the Times tells it, Andrei Linde, who first described the most popular variant of inflation, known as chaotic inflation, in 1983, was about to go on vacation in the Caribbean last week when a colleague named Chao-Lin Kuo knocked on his door with a bottle of Champagne to tell him the news. 

Hear Linde and Kuo tell the story themselves in this video: 

Cloud storage is something ever more useful and ever more popular, but there's also a ton to choose from.

Updated June 2017: Added current plans and pricing for the various online storage providers.

Fortunately, most also have free trials, and any storage provider worth its salt is going to give you a few gigabytes of space for free anyway to try to get you to stick around.

Let's take a look at a few of the major cloud storage providers and see how pricing stacks up. We'll leave it up to you to pick your favorite, but this should give a good idea of what you'll pay, as of today.

It's worth noting, of course, that most cloud storage providers also give the opportunity to earn free space, either by spamming your friends with referral requests or as part of a promotion with another company. Dropbox is a great example and you can get plenty of free space through various activities, including getting your buddies to sign up.

It's very much possible still to get enough cloud storage to suit your needs without spending a penny. So long as your needs are within certain boundaries.

Also, there are usually corporate pricing options, which may get you a buttload of space at your boss' expense, so it's worth asking about that, too. And services like Box have options for multiple users.

What follows here, however, is a breakdown of what it costs across each of the big players to get yourself a personal account.

Google Drive

Your Google Drive storage is actually split across three different Google products so it's important to take that into consideration. Gmail, Photos, and Drive stored files all go towards whatever your limit may be. But, if you're a user of Google Docs, Sheets or Slides, anything you create in these apps won't count towards your limit.

Part of the strength of Google Drive is that it doesn't promise "unlimited" storage, instead offering some massive tiers to satisfy the hardest of users. However high you go, the price per TB remains the same.

• 15 GB - Free
• 100 GB - $1.99/month
• 1 TB - $9.99/month
• 10 TB - $99.99/month
• 20 TB - $199.99/month
• 30 TB - $299.99/month

• Find out more on Google Drive pricing and sign up for an account
• Download Google Drive for Android

Dropbox

Dropbox is one of the staples of the cloud storage game and a name that most will be familiar with. Sadly it has one of the poorest free tiers you'll find anywhere, but you can bump that without charge by referring other people to sign up. One of the added bonuses to Dropbox is that many apps hook into it, meaning it's more than just your files that can live there. But be prepared for the fact you'll probably have to pay to get the most from it. But at 1TB for $9.99 it's no more expensive than Google Drive and you're getting decent value from it.

• 2GB - Free
• 1TB - $9.99/month

• Find out more on Dropbox pricing and sign up for an account
• Download Dropbox for Android

Microsoft OneDrive

Microsoft may have recently slashed its OneDrive plans to ribbons but it still offers a compelling product at a decent price. In paying for 1TB you also get an Office 365 personal subscription. This allows you one install of Microsoft Office on a Mac or PC, use on a tablet or phone and some bundled Skype minutes. Not everyone will want or need this, but it does offer something the competition does not. And at a very reasonable price.

While Microsoft eventually did a U-turn and gave its existing customers chance to retain their free 15GB allowance, the details below reflect the current state of affairs for new customers.

• 5GB - Free
• 50GB - $1.99/month
• 1TB - $6.99/month (Office 365 personal, includes Office apps for one computer)
• 5TB - $9.99/month (Office 365 home, includes Office apps for five computers)

• Find out more on OneDrive pricing and sign up for an account
• Download OneDrive for Android

Box

Box is probably more of a business tool than something you'll entrust your personal cloud files to, but it does offer a reasonable free tier along with mobile apps available across platforms. But when you start paying the value for money goes down substantially. 10 bucks a month for 100GB just isn't good enough.

• 10GB - Free
• 100GB - $10/month

• Find out more on Box pricing and sign up for an account
• Download Box for Android

Amazon Cloud Drive

Amazon has changed from a simple "everything" plan to a long list of tiered packages that cover just about anyone's needs. Amazon Prime members get unlimited space for photos and 5GB of space for other files for free and pricing scales up from there.

• 100GB - $11.99/year
• 1TB - $59.99/year
• 2TB - $119.98/year
• 3TB - $179.97/year
• 4TB - $239.96/year
• 5TB - $299.95/year
• 6TB - $359.94/year
• 7TB - $419.93/year
• 8TB - $479.92/year
• 9TB - $539.91/year
• 10TB - $599.90/year
• 20TB - $1,199.80/year
• 30TB - $1,799.70/year

• Find out more on Amazon Cloud Drive pricing and sign up for an account
• Download Amazon Cloud Drive for Android

Mega

If ever there was a red headed step child of the cloud storage world, Mega would be it. What it promises is ultimate security with end-to-end encryption for your files and a whopping 50GB of free space to fill up when you set up an account.

It also offers a range of "Pro" paid up accounts with varying levels of storage and bandwidth allowances. But when it comes to free storage, nothing else comes close in terms of quantity.

• 50GB - Free
• 200GB - €4.99/month
• 500GB - €9.99/month
• 2TB - €19.99/month
• 4TB - €29.99/month

• Find out more on Mega pricing and sign up for an account
• Download Mega for Android

The bottom line

There's more to consider than just pricing. But, how much you get for how little is probably the first thing you're going to consider. And this should at least help you down that road.

So, what would we recommend? If you're looking at spending absolutely no money then you get more than most for that none-outlay with Google Drive right out of the gate. Google Drive doesn't offer a referral program though, so there's no set way to earn more free storage. Promotions aren't uncommon though, but you have to be eligible. You also can't ignore Mega. It won't suit everyone, but if you want the most you can get for absolutely nothing, it's currently untouchable.

When it comes to paying up for more, Microsoft is still offering the best all round value proposition. 1TB for $6.99 a month is as cheap as you can get from these choices. But throw in the Microsoft Office apps as well and you've got a superb package. Aside from that, Box is really the only one we can't recommend. The price per GB isn't competitive enough.

Watson's Apple Kebab

Colin Lecher

You've probably heard of Watson, IBM's super-intelligent supercomputer that dominated on Jeopardy! not too long ago. Turns out he's not a bad cook, either.

At South By Southwest, IBM has set up a food truck staffed with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education, who are whipping up (strange, uncanny, surprisingly tasty) daily recipes dreamed up by the machine.

Here's the background. For about two years, IBM has been working on a way to harness Watson's data-driven computing into more creative fields--the kinds of things where, unlike a game show, there's no one right answer. The first experiment with that has been in the kitchen. By mining a database of freely available online recipes (as well as recipes from professional chefs and a molecular textbook) and estimating which ingredients might combine for a dish pleasing to a human palate, Watson has been creating unlikely culinary works. The quintillion possibilites--seriously, quintillion--are narrowed down and ranked by presumed tastiness and novelty.

With that data uploaded and organized by type of food, regional origin, and tastiness, the company designed an app that can make logical decisions on what might make for a good dish.

A person piloting the app starts with an ingredient; I chose bacon during a demo from IBM Watson Group researcher Patrick Wagstrom. (Because I am in Austin, I have been walking, and I am hungering for grease.) After that, I selected a region, opting for something English with influences from another country. Watson spit out a list of potential dishes it could make with those restrictions--it seems to be some kind of Michelin-star-worthy soup auteur--and I went with a quiche. Following a second of number-crunching, it showed me a list of ingredients it was planning on using. (Wagstrom admits it's bugged out a few times in this section, forgetting dough, etc.) A few tweaks later, I had a recipe for a respectable-sounding quiche made with comte cheese.

The IBM Food Truck

IBM Research

Well, "recipe" might be a stretch. There's an option where Watson can compute some vague thoughts on how one might cook a quiche ("cook the butter," "add the cheese") but nothing you'd feel comfortable taking as gospel. Instead, Watson turns cooking into a game of artificially-intelligent Chopped, giving you the ingredients and letting you mix, combine, and remix to taste. "Watson doesn't have a mouth," Wagstrom says.

If you have some talented chefs, though, that could lead to a spark of constraint-induced creativity. At the food truck in Austin, ICE chef Michael Laiskonis, a pastry chef by training, had Watson select a Vietnamese-themed kebab dish that included apple, as determined by an online poll from IBM. Apple isn't exactly your typical kebab ingredient--and neither are strawberries, which were also included in the recipe--but the result was subtly sweet, and surprisingly pleasant next to a bit of ground pork.

Laiskoni's been working with Watson for about two years now. "My experience with it has already changed my approach to creativity," he says. One time, he tells me, Watson requested a dish created by cottage cheese and pork belly. And the result wasn't bad.

But, Wagstrom says, there's still the occasional hiccup when you're dealing with (literally) 1 quintillion potential recipes: "Every once in a while it might recommend lemon juice and cream." Tweaks are being made.

You can read the recipe and instructions for the apple kebabs below, or check it out at IBM's site.

Ingredients

ground pork: 8 ounces

scallion: 1 tablespoon of white portion, finely minced. green portion thinly sliced and held in ice water

Granny Smith apple: 1 tablespoon, brunoise, additional for garnish

ginger: 3 1/s teaspoon, divided

lime zest: 1 teaspoon, divided

lemon zest: 1 teaspoon, divided

mint: 1/2 teaspoon, finely chopped

Vietnamese curry powder: 1 teaspoon, divided

vanilla bean: one split and scraped, pod discarded, divided

lard: as needed

vegetable oil : 2 teaspoons, more as needed

lime juice: 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon, divided

lemon juice: 2 teaspoons

chicken breast: 8 ounces

pineapple: 1/2, trimmed, sliced and juiced

shiitake mushrooms: 2 ounces, thinly sliced

carrot: 1/4 cup, sliced into fine julienne

cucumber: cut into fine dice

Instructions

1) First, make the pork meatballs. Thoroughly mix ground pork, scallion, 1 Tbsp apple, ½ tsp grated ginger, 1 pinch lime zest, 1 pinch lemon zest, ½ tsp mint, ½ tsp Vietnamese curry powder, pinch white pepper, ½ vanilla bean, split and scraped, until combined. Season with salt and add lard as needed. Portion and roll the mass into 24 meatballs, weighing approximately 10g each.

2) Arrange the meatballs in a single layer into lightly greased roasting pans and place in a 160˚C/320˚F convection oven for approximately 20 minutes, or until thoroughly cooked. Remove from the oven and season with salt. Reserve.

3) To prepare the curry chicken whisk together the water, oil, 1 tsp lime juice, 1 tsp lemon juice, and ½ tsp curry powder. Marinate the chicken in the curry mixture for about 30 minutes. Transfer the chicken and remaining marinade into a shallow saucepan over low heat, stirring, until chicken is thoroughly cooked, about 10 minutes. Allow the chicken to cool in the marinade. Remove the chicken and cool.

4) To prepare pineapple broth, combine the pineapple juice, 1 vanilla bean, split and scraped, 2 tsp grated ginger, 1 tsp lemon juice, 1 tsp lime juice, and 1 pinch each lemon and lime zest. Gently heat to 60˚C/140˚F. Cover and allow to infuse one hour. Strain and season with salt and white pepper; reserve warm.

5) Next, make the flash pickled shiitake mushrooms. Sauté the mushrooms in a shallow pan with vegetable oil and season to taste. Add the carrot, ginger, lemon juice, and lime juice. Slowly reduce until liquid has absorbed. Remove from heat. Allow to cool and remove sliced ginger. Adjust seasoning and acidity as desired.

6) To assemble, into each dish place two of the warmed pork meatballs and portioned chicken. Top with a small amount of the diced, apple, cucumber, and strawberry, followed by the pickled shiitake and carrot mixture. Pour a small amount of the pineapple broth into the dish and finish with the scallion, mint, chive, and 1 pinch lime zest. Season with Maldon salt and an additional grind of white pepper

MRI machine

A woman (not the study participant) getting prepared for an MRI.

National Cancer Institute via Wikimedia Commons

After a class on out-of-body experiences, a psychology graduate student at the University of Ottawa came forward to researchers to say that she could have these voluntarily, usually before sleep. "She appeared surprised that not everyone could experience this," wrote the scientists in a study describing the case, published in February in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 

Pretty crazy, right? One would think that if you could leave your own body and float above it, you'd be a little more... vocal about it. But since it was a common experience for her--one she "began performing as a child when bored with 'sleep time' at preschool... moving above her body" instead of napping--it may have appeared unremarkable. This is way more interesting than what I did, which was indeed napping. 

The most exciting thing about this case, to me, is "the possibility that this phenomenon may have a significant incidence but [is] unreported because people do not think this is exceptional," as the authors wrote. "Alternatively," they continued, "the ability might be present in infancy but is lost without regular practice. This would be reminiscent of the discovery and eventual study of synesthesia that some researchers now hypothesized is more prevalent in young people or can be developed."

Those are fascinating suggestions--both that these out-of-body experiences may be more common than previously thought, or could be learned during a critical window early in life. 

But back to the case study. The 24-year-old "continued to perform this experience as she grew up assuming, as mentioned, that 'everyone could do it.'" This is how she described her out-of-body experiences: "She was able to see herself rotating in the air above her body, lying flat, and rolling along with the horizontal plane. She reported sometimes watching herself move from above but remained aware of her unmoving “real” body. The participant reported no particular emotions linked to the experience." 

An unusual find, wrote the scientists, University of Ottawa researchers Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier--this is the first person to be studied able to have this type of experience on demand, and without any brain abnormalities. Instead of an "out-of-body" experience, however, the researchers termed it a "extra-corporeal experience" (ECE), in part because it lacks the strong emotions that often go hand-in-hand (such as shock & awe, for example). 

To better understand what was going on, the researchers conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of her brain. They found that it surprisingly involved a "strong deactivation of the visual cortex." Instead, the experience "activated the left side of several areas associated with kinesthetic imagery," such as mental representations of bodily movement. 

Her experience, the scientists wrote, "really was a novel one." But just maybe, not as novel as previously thought. If you are capable of floating out of your body, don't keep it to yourself!

Update: Unpopular Science blogger Rebecca Watson wrote a critical response to this article. You can read it here.