Category: reader

Circular Beam of Electrons

Beam of electrons moving in a circle, due to the presence of a magnetic field. Purple light is emitted along the electron path, due to the electrons colliding with gas molecules in the bulb. (Photo: Marcin Bialek ) Oh, how I love you guys. In our recent post A Fiery Dance on the Sun , Neatoramanaut PlasmaGryphon kindly took the time to explain to us the physics behind solar flares. In the explanation , there was a link to Wikipedia article on Lorentz force , where I found this fascinating image of a circular beam of electrons in a Teltron tube . Neat, huh? ( Thanks PlasmaGryphon! )

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Circular Beam of Electrons

Facebook’s Providing Free (Or Cheap) Data Around the World—For Facebook Apps

Facebook has announced that, over the coming months, it will be partnering with 18 network operators in 14 countries to provide users with free or discounted data for some of its mobile apps. More »

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Facebook’s Providing Free (Or Cheap) Data Around the World—For Facebook Apps

Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

The Sony Xperia Tablet Z, one of the hardiest and most svelte tablets we’ve seen. Sony Sony is unveiling a new Android tablet, the Xperia Tablet Z, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Monday. Sony claims the tablet is not only the “world’s thinnest 10.1-inch tablet” at 6.9 millimeters, but it’s apparently waterproof in up to three feet of water for 30 minutes. Inside, the Xperia Tablet Z has a quad-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 1920×1200 display running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. (Sony has gone scouts-honor that the tablet will be updated to 4.2 “after launch.”) The tablet weighs 495 grams (1.05 pounds) and it has an 8-megapixel rear and 2-megapixel front camera, plus 16GB/32GB storage configurations with a microSD slot than can take up to a 64GB card. The tablet also contains an IR blaster that works with a special version of an app Sony has created called TV SideView. TV SideView integrates with a user’s cable provider and allows users to browse the program guide as well as currently airing content. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Sony unveils thinnest 10.1″ tablet ever—the Xperia Tablet Z

Huawei Claims It Has the World’s Fastest 4G Phone—But Who Really Cares?

Huawei could add a waffle-maker to its Ascend P2, and I doubt even that would be enough to pull people over to its side of the phone stores. Unlike the Ascend D2 unveiled at CES, there’s no 3,000mAh battery lurking here (you’ll have to “make do” with a 2420 one), but there’s a CAT 4LTE chipset, meaning 4G speeds can reach 150Mbps (the iPhone 5 and S3 LTE only have CAT 3, FYI). More »

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Huawei Claims It Has the World’s Fastest 4G Phone—But Who Really Cares?

Bees Can See the Electric Field of Flowers

Flowers are pretty and colorful to you and me, but to a bee, they’re downright electrifying. You see, bees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower: Dominic Clarke and Heather Whitney from the University of Bristol have shown that bumblebees can sense the electric field that surrounds a flower. They can even learn to distinguish between fields produced by different floral shapes, or use them to work out whether a flower has been recently visited by other bees. Flowers aren’t just visual spectacles and smelly beacons. They’re also electric billboards. Learn how a flower’s electric field is actually also useful for bees as it tells them whether other bees have visited it before. Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science explains: Link

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Bees Can See the Electric Field of Flowers

NVIDIA Tegra 4 benchmarked, breaks all sorts of speed records (video)

When NVIDIA unveiled Tegra 4 back at CES, we scrambled to get hands-on with a reference device. And though our initial performance impressions were positive — it runs 1080p video and games smoothly — there was only so much we could say to illustrate how fast the performance is. After all, Tegra 3 already does a fine job handling games and full HD movies. What we really needed were benchmarks, some quantitative data to help show the difference between Tegra 4 devices and whatever’s currently on the market. Fortunately for all of you, we just got our chance: here at Mobile World Congress, the company has reference tablets set up expressly for the purpose of running tests. So, we did just that… over and over and over until we had a long list of scores. Meet us after the break to see how it fared. Filed under: Tablets , Mobile , NVIDIA Comments

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NVIDIA Tegra 4 benchmarked, breaks all sorts of speed records (video)

The first cola wars began in the 1700s—long before Coke and Pepsi

Those who think of sodas as fizzy poison may be surprised that the first steps towards turning the world’s blood caramel-colored was officially meant to make the population healthier. Three different people fought to find a way to reproduce the healthful soda water to the public. Only one of their techniques survives. Welcome to the first iteration of the cola wars. More »

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The first cola wars began in the 1700s—long before Coke and Pepsi

Taking Notes Will Feel A Lot More Biblical On Paper Made Of Stone

Recycling is great, but it would nice if trees didn’t have to be involved at all in paper production. More oxygen, more animal hangouts, good stuff. The Italian notebook maker Ogami agrees, so they’ve developed a line of paper products made out of rocks . More »

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Taking Notes Will Feel A Lot More Biblical On Paper Made Of Stone

AMD Turbo Dock promises better performance and cooling for hybrids, we go hands-on (video)

Here’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves for a while: what if the dock for a hybrid tablet could offer not only a keyboard and battery, but also increased performance? Wouldn’t that provide the best of both worlds, with long battery life when you’re in tablet mode and true laptop productivity when you have a place to sit down? Turns out AMD is on the same wavelength. In fact, the company has already implemented the idea in a prototype device here at MWC , destined to appear in commercial products around the middle of this year. As you’ll see if you check out the video after the break, it’s built by Compal and includes a 13-inch 1080p display with a quad-core Temash chip, which when combined with its Turbo Dock delivers some serious power — going from 8 W to 15 W, with extra air flow delivered through the connector to keep it cool. AMD says that the docked tablet offers general computing performance broadly at the level of a full-fledged 17 W Intel Core i3 notebook. Judging from Microsoft’s Fish Bowl HTML5 benchmark, we’re looking at a gain of 50 percent — and yes, that’s pretty impressive. Next stop, a dock with an extra discrete GPU for CrossFire gaming? Who knows, but it’s the logical progression. Gallery: AMD Turbo Dock prototype hands-on Filed under: Laptops , Tablets , AMD Comments

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AMD Turbo Dock promises better performance and cooling for hybrids, we go hands-on (video)

Six of Hanford’s Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly

SchrodingerZ writes “A recent review of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state (where the bulk of Cold War nuclear material was created) has found that six of its underground storage tanks are leaking badly. Estimations say each tank is leaking ‘anywhere from a few gallons to a few hundred gallons of radioactive material a year.’ Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, said in a statement on Friday, ‘Energy officials recently figured out they had been inaccurately measuring the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford’s tanks.’ The Hanford cleanup project has been one of the most expensive American projects for nuclear cleanup. Plans are in place to create a treatment plant to turn the hazardous material into less hazardous glass (proposed to cost $13.4 billion), but for now officials are trying just to stop the leaking from the corroded tanks. Today the leaks do not have an immediate threat on the environment, but ‘there is [only] 150 to 200 feet of dry soil between the tanks and the groundwater,’ and they are just five miles from the Colombia River.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Six of Hanford’s Nuclear Waste Tanks Leaking Badly