Like a modern Henri Becquerel , Washington State University doctoral student Marianne Tarun’s discovery came quite by accident. Her simple lab error has uncovered a new way to boost electrical conductivity of a crystal by 40, 000 percent, simply by exposing it to light. Read more…
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Student Finds Way to Boost Conductivity 400x Totally by Accident
Apple may not have had all of its own apps overhauled in time for iOS 7’s launch, but it’s slowly but surely bringing them up to speed. The latest to get a complete redesign are iBooks and iTunes U, which expectedly now look a fair bit like Apple’s Newsstand app and the App Store itself. What’s more, the company’s also pushed out the latest minor update to iOS 7, which now stands at 7.0.4 — it promises a fix to the FaceTime issue that has been plaguing some users, along with the usual range of other “bug fixes and improvements.” Not to be left out, iPod touch users unable to upgrade to iOS 7 can also download an update to iOS 6 that promises to remedy the same FaceTime problem. Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Mobile , Apple Comments Source: 9 to 5 Mac (1) , (2)
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Apple pushes out iOS 7.0.4 update alongside redesigned iBooks and iTunes U apps
Google Google and other tech companies have been actively fighting at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in an attempt to tell the public more about the types of US law enforcement orders that they must comply with. While that case continues, Google announced on Thursday that US government (local, state, federal) requests for data has reached 21,683 users between January through June 2013. By comparison, the company’s previous reporting period (July through December 2012) saw 8,438 user data requests from US authorities—a jump of about 32 percent. Again, the United States remains at the top of this list by a wide margin. India, Germany, France and the United Kingdom round out the next four positions, respectively. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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In 6 months, US law enforcement asked Google for data on 21,000 users
Moyan Brenn A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning was “fair use.” In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don’t break copyright, and it doesn’t need the authors’ permission to engage in the scanning and display of short bits of books. On the fair use factor that’s often the most important—whether or not the fair use of a work hurts the market for the original work—US District Judge Denny Chin seemed to find the plaintiffs’ ideas both nonsensical and ignorant of the limits on the Google Books software: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use
By unleashing a genetically modified virus onto microscopic electrode wires, researchers from MIT have shown that the performance of lithium-air batteries can be significantly improved — a remarkable breakthrough that could revolutionize the way our electric devices are powered. Read more…
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Scientists Use a Mutated Virus to Build a Better Battery
Google Wallet and iOS’s Passbook have helped reduce the number of loyalty, debit, and credit cards we need to carry around every day. But they haven’t eliminated them altogether. The creators of Coin want to further slim your wallet with a multi-function card designed to emulate and replace the debit and credit cards you still need to carry. Read more…
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This Single Card Wants To Replace Your Entire Wallet Full of Plastic
Using a powerful new software program called the Scientific Exoplanets Renderer (SER), astronomer Abel Mendez Torres has produced a stunning set of new images — including a global map — showing the distant dwarf planet of Pluto in unprecedented detail. Read more…
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The surface of Pluto like you’ve never seen it before
After three Jelly Bean releases in a row, Google has unleashed a major revision to the world’s most widely used operating system. With the Nexus 5 comes Android 4.4 “KitKat.” KitKat brings a ton of enhancements: support for hidden system and status bars, printer support, and lower memory usage. It also has a number of user-level improvements, including a new dialer, a Google-infused home screen, and a whole pile of UI refinements. The lower memory usage is particularly important because Google hopes this is the feature that will finally kill Gingerbread and other older versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich raised the system requirements for Android quite a bit, and to this day you still see lower-end phones shipping with Gingerbread because of the lower barrier to entry. Unfortunately, the only device that currently runs KitKat is the Nexus 5, which has a whopping 2GB of RAM, so there isn’t much memory testing that we can do right now. We’ll have to wait for actual low-memory hardware running KitKat to evaluate any of the low-memory requirement claims. We can take a look at just about everything else, though. We believe KitKat is the biggest Android release since Ice Cream Sandwich. Google has touched nearly every part of the OS in some way, so there’s a lot to cover. Read 47 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Android 4.4 KitKat, thoroughly reviewed
Whatever happened to AMD’s last tablet chip, Temash ? We had a great time playing DiRT Showdown on a Temash-powered Windows 8 tablet back at CES, but the graphics-focused processor has so far only appeared in a handful of low-profile devices from the likes of Acer , ASUS and Gigabyte . If this lack of impact was due to the chip’s relatively hungry four-watt power draw (hungry for a tablet, at least), then AMD might just have a solution in the form of Temash’s successor, this time named after a river called “Mullins.” Thanks to its new Puma cores and 28nm fabrication, Mullins brings the wattage down to just two watts. This puts it broadly on a par with most ARM and Intel Bay Trail consumer tablet chips, which is a first for AMD outside of its industrial G-Series range. Meanwhile, a claimed doubling of performance-per-watt means that frame rates shouldn’t take much of a hit. As with all of AMD’s latest processors, including its “Beema” range for low-power laptops which should launch around the same time as Mullins, the presence of a Graphics Core Next GPU should help to improve performance on Mantle-boosted games , including those brought across from next-gen consoles. So, although AMD is now extremely late to the tablet party, it may still get there — and we don’t have long to wait. Mullins is due to launch in the first half of next year, and we’re promised a turn on a Mullins-powered tablet at the upcoming CES 2014 in January. Filed under: Gaming , Tablets , AMD Comments Source: AMD
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AMD looks to boost Windows tablet gaming with its first true mobile chip
Everyone loves talking about 3D printing , but now it’s really hitting the big time: Rolls-Royce has decided that it’s going to use the technology to help make its airplane engines. Read more…
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Rolls-Royce Is Going to 3D Print Its Airplane Engine Parts