Under Pressure, Hydrogen Becomes Graphene-Like
Hydrogen is the simplest and most common element in the Universe, as it consists of one proton surrounded by one electron. This simplicity has made it invaluable for testing theories that involve extreme situations. Now it has been discovered by researchers at the Carnegie Institution that under extreme pressure, hydrogen behaves unlike previous theories suggested.
At extreme pressures between 2 and 3.5 million times normal air pressure, it was believed that hydrogen would resemble a conductive metal, with atoms packed closely together. Instead, hydrogen has been observed to form layered sheets similar to graphene at these high pressures. Graphene is an atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms, where the atoms are arranged in a hexagonal structure, like chicken wire. This structure for hydrogen was actually theorized thirty years ago, but most were expecting the metal-like structure predict in the 1930s.
The hydrogen atoms bonded this way because the rings of hydrogen actually possess intrinsic stability. This indicates that chemical bonding still occurs under more conditions than most believed, though of course the effects of these bonds can be very different from what we normally observe.
Source: Carnegie Institution
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Ting Expands to Offer Gigabit Internet Access to Homes and Businesses
Ting, a mobile virtual network operator that uses the Sprint network to offer customers low cost pay for what you use plans, has announced that it is expanding to offer home and business Internet access through fiber. The announcement comes after Ting purchased a majority stake in Blue Ridge InternetWorks, an independent Internet service provider located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Blue Ridge InternetWorks already has a fiber network in place, and the merger of Ting allows the company to receive the technical and financial support needed to start the project of offering gigabit fiber optic Internet access to homes and business at a low price. According to Ting, both companies believe in providing hands-off quality Internet with remarkable customer service, a combination that not only facilitates fair pricing, but a shockingly human experience.
While Charlottesville, Virginia is the first location that Ting is offering gigabit Internet access speeds to homes and businesses, the company plans to continue its expansion to additional cities in the future.
Source: Ting Blog
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XFINITY My Account App Now Includes Call Back Feature
Comcast is looking to change the way that its customers interact with its customer service team by integrating a new call back feature within its XFINITY My Account mobile application. The feature, which is available after going through an interactive troubleshooting guide, allows Comcast customers to enter their phone number and select the time that they want a customer service representative to call them. For customers who wish to get their issue resolved without talking on the phone, the updated XFINITY My Account application also allows individuals to chat with a customer service representative through Twitter. A photograph of the issue can even be uploaded to the social networking service so that a Comcast representative can see the issue from the perspective of the customer. The Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Comcast, Charlie Herrin, stated that "We’re working hard to make sure we are serving our customers as quickly as possible across all our channels."
Source: Comcast Voices
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Magnetization of Spintronic Device Reversed at Room Temperature
It is possible that within our lifetimes we will see electronics replaced by another technology field, and one possible replacement is spintronics. Instead of using the charge of electrons, spintronics would utilize their innate magnetic properties, which is not simple. Researchers at Berkeley Lab and Cornell University however, have recently succeeded in flipping the magnetization of a spintronic device at room temperature, using an electric field.
While electrons do represent a single electrical pole, they still have two magnetic poles thanks to their spin. By manipulating the orientation of their spin, it should be possible to store and process information, which is the idea behind spintronics. Because spin is a characteristic of electrons, this could be done with far less energy than conventional electronics. Of course none of that will matter if spintronics cannot be brought out of laboratories. The researchers were working with a multiferroic material, which means it has a combination of electric and magnetic properties coexisting, and found they could switch its magnetism using an electric field, instead of an electric current. The field requires about a tenth the energy needed for a current to achieve the same.
The multiferroic material used was bismuth ferrite, which is the only one known to be thermodynamically at room temperature. It had been thought there were barriers to prevent the switching achieved, but the two-step process the researchers found made it possible.
Source: Berkeley Lab
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Samsung is Shutting Down ChatOn
Samsung has revealed that it is shutting down its instant messaging service known as ChatOn. The service, which launched in 2011 and is currently available in more than 200 countries, boasted late last year that it had 100 million users. Compared to competitors like WhatsApp, Viber, Kik, and even Facebook Messenger, however, ChatOn simply is not competing well in the mobile instant messaging market. According to Samsung, the service is being shut down globally on February 1, 2015 due to the company’s focus shifting towards its core services. Users of Samsung ChatOn within the United States will be able to use the service for an unknown amount of time after the global shutdown on February 1, 2015, as Samsung is obligated to keep the service available within the United States due to existing contractual obligations with various mobile carriers.
Source: CNET
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Google End-to-End Encryption Enters Alpha
Yahoo first announced that it was working on an end-to-end encryption service based on the Google PGP Plugin at Black Hat 2014. The PGP Plugin was initially unveiled by Google in June, and since the Yahoo announcement the two companies have been working together to move the project forward. As of today the Google project has been moved from its internal code repository to GitHub, allowing for better peer review among security researchers. Also revealed is that Yahoo chief security officer Alex Stamos is officially working on the project rather than simply making contributions. The two companies are currently attempting to make the End-to-End encryption service work between Yahoo mail and Gmail. Google plans to add the service to the Chrome Web Store after it becomes more stable.
Source: ZDNet
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Street Fighter V Will Use Unreal Engine 4
It was announced earlier this month that Capcom was working on Street Fighter V and that it would be available exclusively on PC and PlayStation 4. Capcom and Epic Games revealed earlier today that the game will be built using the Unreal Engine 4, joining other upcoming high profile games such as Dead Island 2 and Kingdom Hearts 3 in using the next gen engine. It will be interesting to see what graphical heights the game can reach with the advanced features of the Unreal Engine 4.
Source: IGN
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Lens-Free Microscope Developed for Medical Diagnostics
Right now, medical labs are very important because they can be the only places with the technology needed to identify a patient's disease. This can be problematic though, as it restricts access to these tests, which is why many are working on advanced devices to brings these tests out of labs. Now researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles have created a lens-free microscope that can be used to identify cell-level abnormalities, while being smaller and cheaper.
Traditional microscopes use occasionally large lenses and bright lights to enlarge images for examination. This lens-free microscope however, uses a sensor array, like those in digital cameras, with an LED or laser to record the specimen's patterns of shadows. These patterns are then processed as holograms, building a 3D image of the specimen, for a pathologist to study. This design matches the accuracy of traditional bright-field optical microscopes, but also provides a much larger field of view.
The researchers tested their lens-free microscope by imaging multiple specimens, and providing those images to a board-certified pathologist. The pathologist's diagnoses, based on those images, proved to be accurate 99% of the time.
Source: University of California, Los Angeles
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Netflix Has No Plans to Offer Offline Playback
While Amazon allows owners of Fire tablets to download content featured on Prime Instant Video for offline playback, Netflix has officially announced that it has no plans to offer the feature to its subscribers. According to Cliff Edwards, Netflix's director of corporate communications and technology, the ability to download content to view offline is simply never going to happen. Edwards also revealed that Netflix believes that by allowing its subscribers to have such functionality would just offer a short term fix for a long term problem, with that problem being quality Wi-Fi access. Netflix is expecting Wi-Fi coverage to significantly improve in the future, and Edwards himself believes that due to increased Wi-Fi coverage that is to come in the next five years alone, people will forget about the idea of downloading content for offline use.
Source: TechRadar
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AMD Details Dynamic Frame Rate Control
According to the Director of Public Relations for AMD, Chris Hook, the semiconductor company is working on Dynamic Frame Rate Control, a new software feature for its Radeon graphics cards. The feature, which users can control with a slider, works as a frame-rate limiter that likely reduces the clocks speeds of a GPU in order to keep it from rendering at frame-rates higher than the set limit. For example, if a user sets the limit at 60FPS but the GPU is capable of rendering the video game title at 100FPS, the software likely reduces the clock speeds the GPU in order to keep the frame-rate at the limit, instead of allowing the GPU to utilize its full power to provide as any frames per second as it can. Since Dynamic Frame Rate Control allows users to set their FPS within a game, and therefore adjust the clock speeds of their GPU, Hook states that the power savings observed with the software can be substantial, depending on the scenario, of course.
Source: TechPowerUp
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New Relationship Found Between Superconductors' Properties
Some day we will see superconductors being used to carry electricity with almost no loss. When that day will come though is hard to guess, because so much is still not known about superconductivity. Researchers at MIT have recently made a discovery that could enable a deeper understanding of superconductors than previously possible.
Superconductivity arises in certain materials at specific critical temperatures, depending on the behavior of the material's electrons. That temperature tends to decrease when working with thin films though, which are used to examine the superconducting-to-insulating transition. Exactly how the temperature changes has not been mathematically described though, so the researchers ran a series of experiments, controlling thin film thickness and resistance per unit area, or sheet resistance. Doing this they discovered that the product of thickness and critical temperature equaled a constant (A) divided by sheet resistance raised to a specific power (B). The researchers, now armed with this equation and its two constants, A and B, searched through superconductor literature, to see if it applied for more than the material they were working with, and found it did, though the values of A and B varied. Not liking that two constants are involved, the researchers plotted them against each other and found that they fell along a straight line. That means that only one constant is needed for the equation's general form.
The relationship between A and B is more interesting than that though, as the pairs at the bottom of the line came from more ordered superconductors, while those at the top had more disordered, amorphous structures. There is no theoretical explanation for this relationship currently, but the equation is still going to prove invaluable by predicting what films will make good superconductors, without having to actually make them.
Source: MIT
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Amazon Offers Free Two-Hour Delivery with Prime Now
Amazon has just launched Prime Now, a new benefit for Prime members that offers expedited shipping of tens of thousands of daily essentials such as paper towels, shampoo, books, toys, and batteries. The service, which is accessed on Android and iOS devices through the new Prime Now application, allows Prime members to order items from 6AM to midnight, seven days a week, and have them delivered in just hours. Prime members located where Prime Now is offered can have eligible items delivered in one-hour for $7.99, or two-hours for free. To make Prime Now a reality, Amazon is utilizing a portion of its building located on 34th Street in Manhattan as a hub for orders placed through Prime Now.
Prime Now is currently only available in select areas of Manhattan, but Amazon has revealed that the service will be expanding to additional cities in 2015.
Source: Business Wire
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Purch Acquires AnandTech
AnandTech has remained profitable since its inception and has experienced quite a growth curve over the past couple of years, thanks to its high-quality content and migration into the mobile world. Despite this, Ryan Smith, the current Editor-In-Chief for AnandTech, has revealed in an official site update that AnandTech has been acquired by Purch, the current owner of Tom’s Hardware. The move comes after years of realization that AnandTech simply could not compete with large corporate owned sites on the advertising front. Although Purch has now taken over AnandTech, the website will remain editorially independent from Tom’s Hardware. The current AnandTech team will continue to focus on existing areas of coverage and will not take on a new analytical approach or change its editorial policies.
Source: AnandTech
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