If you work in a lab, you’ve probably used lab glass made from quartz. But you probably haven’t realized that the reason those test tubes are so durable is exactly what makes them so hard to mold. These beautiful GIFs, shot at GE’s Global Research in upstate New York, shows exactly what it takes to make those beakers. Read more…
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The Beautiful Process of Turning Quartz Into Lab Glass at 3,000 Degrees
Apple just released the Mavericks 10.9.4 update. The update fixes some WiFi issues, general reliability issues, and a quirk where some computers weren’t properly waking from sleep. Grab the update from Apple right now . Read more…
This little superconducting magnet may look serene, but it in fact it’s a record breaker, capable of creating three metric tons of force. Read more…
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This Golf Ball-Sized Magnet Creates Three Metric Tons of Force
Dropbox offers an excellent way of syncing files across computers and devices, sharing files with others and automatically backing up your photos. The more you dig into the app , the more features you uncover, and one tool you might not know about is the ability to recover deleted files. Read more…
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How To Recover Old Versions and Deleted Files in Dropbox
The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700, 000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves. This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion, ” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it. At least they showed their work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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In 2012, Facebook Altered Content To Tweak Readers’ Emotions
redletterdave (2493036) writes “Apple is one of the biggest headphone makers in the world thanks to those signature white earbuds that have shipped with every iPod, iPhone, and iPad since 2001. But even two years after earbuds became ‘EarPods, ‘ the design could still be improved — and competitors are taking notice. Amazon recently unveiled a new pair of in-ear headphones that are magnetic, tangle-free and $5 cheaper than Apple’s $30 EarPods, while smaller startups are promoting their own wireless and customizable 3D-printed earbuds. But Apple has an ace up its sleeve, in the form of patents for a set of headphones with ‘one or more integrated physiological sensors’ designed to help users keep track of their body stats.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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How Apple Can Take Its Headphones To the Next Level
LEGO bricks have a variety of great uses for kids of all ages. For many of us though, the real fun is the challenge of the build rather than owning of the finished project. Pley bridges the gap by letting you rent LEGO sets for a monthly subscription fee. Read more…
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Pley Is like Netflix for LEGO
You probably know that heat is bad for your computer, and you might even know how to monitor its temperatures . But how hot is too hot? Linus from Techquickie explains in this video. Read more…
Over at Smithsonian , Gregory Maguire reads through an early script of The Wizard of Oz by Noel Langley: Read the rest
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Early Wizard of Oz script
ygslash (893445) writes Astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced that they have discovered what appears to be the coolest white dwarf ever detected. The white dwarf is formerly a star similar to our own sun which, after expending all of its fuel, has cooled to less than a chilly 3000 degrees Kelvin and contracted to a size approximately the same as Earth. A white dwarf is composed mostly of carbon and oxygen, and the astronomers believe that at that temperature it would be mostly crystallized, forming something like a huge diamond. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Astronomers Discover Earth-Sized Diamond