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After baking in an ad blocker and VPN client, Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has added a power saving mode to its desktop Web browser. The feature is currently only available in the latest "developer" version of the desktop browser—which should be available on Thursday morning.

Opera's SVP of engineering Krystian Kolondra said that the new feature "can increase the battery life by as much as 50 percent." The company claimed that such huge gains are possible through a number of additional optimisations, including "reducing activity from background tabs, adapting page-redrawing frequency, and tuning video-playback parameters."

Citing the results of its own testing, Opera has claimed that a laptop running Windows 10 64-bit with the power saving feature enabled lasts 49 percent longer than one with Chrome put under equal stress. One caveat is that the testing was made with ad blocking turned on as well, which can account for a significant part of the battery life improvement.

(credit: Wikimedia)

In cartoon worlds, squiggly lines over characters are reserved for the exceptionally smelly. But, in reality, everyone deserves those little squiggles: each of us is constantly emitting a steady stream of gases and microbes, as well as smells. And those gases may be able to reveal more about us than what we last ate (and whether it agreed with us). Our gases may also divulge what we think about movies.

In a study involving 9,500 moviegoers, researchers found that the chemicals that audience members off-gas while viewing a film reproducibly vary depending on the type of scene they’re watching. Specifically, the researchers noted synchronized changes in the amounts of specific gases during funny and thrilling bits of movies. The finding, published in the journal Scientific Reports, provides a whiff of evidence that humans may use volatile chemicals as signals. While much more data is needed to support that hypothesis, the authors speculate that audience emissions may be useful for evaluating whether movies are truly funny or thrilling.

For the study, researchers hooked up a proton transfer reaction mass spectrometer (PTR-MS) to the out-going air vents of a theater during 108 showings of 16 different films, including Buddy, The Hobbit, and Carrie. The PRT-MS measured 100 of the 872 volatile chemicals humans are known to emit, with a detection limit of sub-parts per billion.

Hope Jahren and Bill Hagopian in their lab, where they created many one-of-a-kind instruments to study plants and the deep geological history of Earth's atmosphere. (credit: Jahren Lab)

Hope Jahren's memoir about becoming a biogeoscientist—someone who studies the deep geological history of plant life on Earth—is the year's biggest surprise bestseller. Humbly titled Lab Girl, it's the story of how Jahren escaped a working class town she not-so-fondly calls a "shithole" to become a young scientist in the high-tech labs of UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech. It's also a fascinating introduction to the ways plants survive, even though they can never flee from danger. But most of all, it's a crazy adventure about two broke geeks, Jahren and her lab technician Bill Hagopian, who somehow scrape together enough cash and spare parts to build lab instruments unlike anything the scientific world had ever seen. You won't be able to put this book down, and that's a quality one rarely finds in a nonfiction book about science.

Radio Shack lab

Jahren and Hagopian met when she was a graduate student helping to run a class where he was an undergrad learning about field work. Out of all the students in the class, Hagopian's work was the most meticulous—but he also sprinkled his lab notes with weird jokes that only Jahren found amusing. They became fast friends, and when she got her first job as an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, she offered him a job as lab technician. Paying Hagopian a near-poverty-level salary took up most of her grant money from the National Science Foundation. So the two spent several years living on cheap pizza, Ensure, and candy bars, saving all their money to build up the Jahren Lab. Their goal is to simulate atmospheres from Earth's past, and then grow plants inside those atmospheres to understand how life forms survive dramatic changes in the molecular composition of the air they breathe. This is obviously relevant to the current carbon loading in our atmosphere, but it also helps scientists understand what our planet was like hundreds of millions of years ago, when carbon and oxygen levels were quite different from those today.

In Lab Girl, Jahren describes her early years perfecting a technique to blow glass bubbles full of alien atmospheres, while Hagopian lives out of his van and designs sophisticated growth chambers. Without much money, the two are left scrounging up parts to use in their lab from the recycling bins of other labs—and from Radio Shack, of course. Speaking to Ars by phone from her current lab at the University of Hawaii, Jahren said, "When we can't get a controller from a catalogue, we go to Radio Shack. We love Radio Shack. Being able to jerryrig things is super satisfying." Getting to scientific conferences to present their work was even more challenging. In one memorable scene, Jahren and Hagopian "borrow" the lab van from Georgia Tech and drive across the country to San Francisco for the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. They had so little money that all their meals for several days came from an icebox full of lunch meat. It all backfired when one of their graduate students crashed the van and the slightly rancid contents of the icebox flew everywhere. Still, Jahren managed to clean up and make it to San Francisco in time—only to be yelled at by one of her colleagues that her hypotheses are just plain wrong.

(credit: Howard Lake)

The same lawyer who successfully sued Gawker Media over Hulk Hogan’s sex tape has now sued the online publisher again, this time representing the Massachusetts man who claims that he invented e-mail in 1978 at the age of 14.

On Tuesday, Charles Harder brought a libel suit on behalf of Shiva Ayyadurai, a man who has gone on a years-long campaign (seriously, his website is inventorofemail.com) trying to convince the world that he, and he alone, invented e-mail.

Ayyadurai now demands $35 million from Gawker, Gizmodo’s parent company, and a public retraction to Gizmodo’s 2012 articles that convincingly reported: "Corruption, Lies, and Death Threats: The Crazy Story of the Man Who Pretended to Invent Email," and "The Inventor of Email Did Not Invent Email?"