This Week in Geekdom

Oooh boy. Convention exhaustion is such a bizarrely good feeling. Your feet are aching, but so is your face after so many hours of consecutive smiling. We also collectively have something of a soft spot for PAX, as it's partially the reason you're reading this now. This post might be a bit on the short side, as we're in the process of gathering up as much convention goodness as we can while the doors are still open. We'll have a formal, comprehensive PAX East 2015 round-up ready to go in the next few days but, for now, we'll just get down to the Week in Geekdom.

Movies/TV

Intrepid YouTuber ThomasHuntFilms compiled all of the Star Trek films into a single video featuring just the clips of the various Federation starships.

General Awesomeness

Last fall, Machinima brought us a Super Power Beat Down pitting Darth Vader against Batman. We now have an alternate ending to this epic matchup:

Games

It's one of the most anticipated games of the year. Here is the often odd and twisting evolution of Blizzard's Heroes of the Storm.

On Wednesday, Valve announced that their Source 2 game engine will be available to developers for free. 

Science/Technology

It's one of, if not the singularly most famous equation in existence. But what if you had to explain E=MC2 without the math? This very well written article not only does exactly that, but indicates that a qualitative exploration yields very interesting facets of Einstein's work.

Speaking of Mr. Einstein, physicists from Heidelberg University, with the help of the ESA's Planck satellite mission, are putting some of the famous theorist's conclusions regarding dark energy to the test.

NASA is also out exploring the cosmos with its own unmanned missions, including the Dawn probe which is now in orbit around the dwarf planet of Ceres. 

It was a big week for NASA. On Tuesday, the agency celebrated its 100th birthday! 

Why is gravity so completely different from all the other known forces in the universe?

The January edition of the journal Nature Physics details the detection of the Higgs boson in a superconductor entirely separate from the Large Hadron Collider. 

While scientists are keen on any and all new evidence of the Higgs, others are marveling at the fact that Homer Simpson correctly predicted the mass of the elusive particle over a decade ago.

It's a concept that often gets treated like a joke: that using smartphones actually makes us dumber. This study from the University of Waterloo in Ontario (published in the most recent edition of Computers in Human Behavior) may be the first proof that this phenomenon is indeed real.

We've talked a bit about capacitive fabrics and the many applications for this high tech cloth. Well, U.S. Naval Academy researchers are bringing this concept one step closer to reality.

Image Credit: PsyOrg.com

New York state is getting aggressive about how solar power will be produced and distributed. Their efforts thus far not only appear successful, but may just provide other states with a blueprint of how to integrate new power sources into their existing utility grid.

It's a tower, it's tentacles, it's...a wind farm?

The city of Stockholm is also keen to invest in alternative energy sources, though their ideas may prove to be a bit more offbeat than what New York has deployed. If city planners have their way, Stockholm may be home to an enormous vertical wind farm powered by colossal turbulence-capturing tentacles. 

Mercedes would like you to know that Google is not the only company out there trying to get self-driving cars on the road. Here is their insanely futuristic-looking autonomous prototype.

Drones: they deliver packages, take pictures, and serve in our armed forces. We can now add 'discoverers of lost civilizations' to that resume.

Smart watches may be getting all the buzz right now, but Monohm would like to introduce you to their alternative. Meet the Runcible, a smart pocket watch. 

Crowdfundables for Your Consideration

We mentioned it last week, but there's still plenty of time to get your own copy of extreme cuteness in the form of Adorable Pandaring by Asmadi Games. It's fast, engaging play with all the pandas you can handle (including red pandas!) The Kickstarter will be up and running until April 9th.

There's only three days left to lend your support to the very first Singaporean game to appear on the Care and Feeding of Nerds. Hitman Holiday, the hidden roles game of 'sunshine and death' is on the cusp of being fully funded. You have until March 12th to back the Kickstarter and snag your own copy.

There's a bit more time to explore the campaign to bring more chapters of Regeria Hope to life, but only a bit. The gavel will fall on the Kickstarter for this visual novel on March 25th.

As always, best wishes for an excellent week ahead!