Month: June 2016

(credit: UrbanOasis.org)

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Attorney General of the United States, asking the court to declare a section of a 1980s-era anti-hacking law as "unconstitutionally overbroad."

In the case, known as Sandvig v. Lynch, the ACLU argues on behalf of First Look Media Works and four professors who want to deploy bots and fake profiles to study possible racial discrimination in online advertising for housing and employment. The researchers haven't been able to proceed because they're afraid of being sued or prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA).

The ACLU's civil complaint points to examples in the media and in academia suggesting that such biases and unlawful practices may already be ongoing.

(credit: Samsung)

If you've been lusting after Samsung's Galaxy S7 Edge but leery about paying $800 for it, now's your chance to get it for less. One eBay vendor is selling black, gold, and silver models of the S7 Edge for $589, the lowest price we've seen on the new flagship.The sale was first spotted by Android Police.

Each 32GB device is unlocked so you can use it on any GSM carrier. It's also a dual-SIM handset, meaning you can have two SIM cards in the phone at once, or a SIM card and a microSD card. It's also worth noting that these models are not used or refurbished—they appear to be brand-new S7 Edge handsets, making the price even more tempting.

The eBay seller is based in Florida and ships to most areas of the United States, except for Alaska and Hawaii. International shipping is also available.

An IMAX Private Theatre (presumably a render). Prices start at around £300K.

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If you have about £300,000 ($400K) to spare, IMAX's Private Theatre division will now build an IMAX cinema setup in your own home.

The entry-level IMAX Private Theatre is the "Palais," which starts at about £300K for a screening room with up to 18 seats. For your money you get dual 4K 2D/3D projectors, a proprietary IMAX sound system, and a media playback system that supports everything you might want to throw at it (TV, games, Blu-ray, etc.) No word on the exact specifications of the projectors, but they're probably not IMAX-with-laser. Screen size will vary depending on the setup, but generally they will be 3 metres (10ft) tall or more.

Stepping up to the "Platinum" IMAX home theatre for about £750,000 ($1 million) gets you a much larger screening room with space for up to 40 people. The IMAX website doesn't break out the specs of the Platinum setup, but presumably it's similar to the Palais. Both the Palais and Platinum models come with automatic daily self-calibration to ensure optimal picture and audio setup, 24/7 remote monitoring (whatever that means in the context of home theatres), and, of course, the design and architecture of the room itself is so exquisite that your friends will think you have great taste (if that was ever in doubt).

The world is awash in our waste heat. Our computers, our motors, our electrical generating plants—all of them shed heat into the environment. That's in part because there's no easy way to capture its energy and put it to use. All the existing methods we have for harvesting waste heat are either inefficient or uneconomical.

Now, some researchers have come up with a new method of grabbing some of that waste heat and potentially putting it to work. Their system relies on nothing more complex than water and a polymer membrane and, even in its first test form, it's already capturing roughly half of the possible Carnot efficiency available to the system.

We already generate lots of electricity via heat differences. It's just that those differences are large—large enough to create the pressure differences needed to drive turbines. Waste heat often becomes waste simply because the temperature differences are small, on the order of dozens of degrees Celsius, rather than hundreds.

(credit: William Warby/Wikimedia Commons)

It might be the second most common element in the observable universe but until very recently, Earth, it was thought, was running out of helium. Aside from its obvious uses in balloons given out at children's parties by pizza restaurants, the noble gas actually has a number of vital medical and scientific applications—and in recent decades we've burned through most of our once-enormous reserves.

Helium is used mostly as a coolant, especially in MRI scanners, which use around one fifth of the world's reserves in liquid form to cool the machines' superconducting magnets. The semiconductor industry also uses it to grow crystals, while modern materials science also uses its high-yield cooling properties, as do certain advanced telescopes. Despite its uses, however, Earth was believed to be coming to an end of its reserves, having been allowed to squander what was once considered a fairly useless resource.

Researchers from Durham and Oxford universities, however, have surprised the scientific world by discovering a huge new reserve in Tanzania's Rift Valley in east Africa—using a new technique which could be used to find even more. It turns out that volcanic activity helps release the gas from the ancient rocks which usually hold it, allowing it to rise to shallower gas fields.