Month: February 2020

Enlarge / The almost-bezel-free Samsung Q950. (credit: Samsung)

Most people in the United States and other markets are still on the precipice of making the jump from high-definition TVs to 4K ones, but Samsung is already de-emphasizing 4K in its 2020 lineup in favor of 8K TVs. Reports on the European product lineup show that Samsung will this year only offer top features and specs on 8K TVs, not their 4K counterparts.

Recently, Samsung’s most attractive high-end TVs have been its 4K QLED models. And those TVs have arguably been some of the highest-quality LCD TVs out there, bested in many tests only by LG’s OLED lineup (and besting the OLEDs in some others).

But we were a little concerned when Samsung failed to announce specific, mainstream 4K models from its 2020 lineup at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, even as it announced a plethora of 8K sets. It turns out there was a reason: the company’s high-end QLED lineup will be 8K only, and 4K TVs will be relegated to the more affordable TU line.

Enlarge / SAN ANTONIO, TX - FEBRUARY 17: American evacuees from the Diamond Princess cruise ship arrive at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland on February 17, 2020, in San Antonio, Texas. The Diamond Princess cruise ship where the passengers were evacuated from, docked at the Japanese city of Yokohama, is believed to be the highest concentration of novel coronavirus cases outside of China, where the outbreak began. (credit: Getty | Edward Ornelas)

Fourteen Americans tested positive for carrying the new coronavirus just as they began their return to the United States from Yokohama, Japan, where they had been trapped aboard the luxury cruise ship Diamond Princess in a quarantine that began February 3.

As of today, February 17, Japanese health officials have confirmed 454 cases of COVID-19 on the ship, including 99 cases reported since yesterday. The cluster is, by far, the largest of any COVID-19 flare ups outside of China, where the outbreak began and has caused the vast majority of infections and deaths.

The new cases in the returning Americans will nearly double the current number of COVID-19 cases in the US, bringing the total from the current 15 to 29.

Enlarge / The structure of some of the protein wires used by bacteria. (credit: Pacific Northwest National Lab)

There's a huge variety of ways that we can potentially generate all the power we need for tiny medical sensors or other devices with minimal power needs. But there's often a big gap between those sorts of use cases and something that could, say, charge your phone as you walk around wearing a sweater. The electricity-producing devices either don't scale up or start off at such low power levels that you'd need a couple of tents to power a phone.

But today, Nature released a paper that describes a device that the authors say should be able to scale up, providing power for medical sensors on the low end and scaling up to compete with solar panels on the high end. And all the device needs to produce power is ambient humidity. Best yet, the potential for developing the device was accidentally discovered by a grad student who was looking to do something else entirely.

A jolt of low-voltage serendipity

A surprising amount of scientific discovery is driven by annoyance. The Cosmic Microwave Background was famously discovered by people working on a microwave receiver who couldn't get rid of an irritating source of noise—even after trying to clean out all the pigeon guano from the hardware. In the case of the recent work, a graduate student named Xiaomeng Liu was trying to work with some fiber-like proteins made by bacteria. In many species, these sub-microscopic fibers are good conductors, and a number of labs study their properties and those of the bacteria that produce them.