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(credit: Valentina Palladino)

While CES offers a lot of new gadgets to consider and anticipate every year, it also brings a lot of updates to existing product lines. Dell announced a major update to its commercial line of notebooks, revealing a refreshed Latitude 7000 series along with a few new displays and accessories that aim to make the lives of all types of workers easier.

According to Dell representatives, the company wanted to not only improve the internals of its elite enterprise line but also incorporate some of the design aspects most loved in its XPS series. The members of the Latitude 7000 series (there are 12-, 13-, and 14-inch models) are made with woven carbon fiber and magnesium alloy, making them thinner and lighter than previous models. They're painted with a soft-touch finish as well, so even if they don't have the sleek, silvery look of the XPS series, they're still elegant. The display bezels have been slimmed, however, the north and south sides of each screen remain slightly thicker so you can pick up any touchscreen models without disturbing anything on the screen.

As with all of Dell's commercial notebooks, the 12- and 14-inch Latitude 7000 models can be customized to suit any business needs. Both can support up to Intel Core i7 processors, up to 16GB of RAM, 512GB SSDs, and up to 55 watt batteries. Intel HD Graphics 520 come standard, but the 14-inch can be upgraded to an Intel HD Graphics 540 GPU. Both have anti-glare HD display options, and you can upgrade the 12-inch model to an FHD touch display and the 14-inch notebook to a QHD touchscreen. Ports on each model are the same, including an SD card reader, SIM card slot, three USB 3.0 ports, and one HDMI port.

Netflix has decided that it's no longer interested in incremental expansion to reach new markets. Over the nine years since its 2007 launch, the service—once used to mail DVDs to you but now better known for online streaming of TV shows and films—has grown to cover 60 different countries, with North and South America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan all covered. At CES today, CEO Reed Hastings opened the floodgates: Netflix will now be available in almost every country on Earth.

The expansion includes Africa, Eastern Europe, and almost all of Asia and the Middle East in one fell swoop giving Netflix greater reach than any traditional broadcaster. The only exceptions will be China, though the company says that it is still investigating ways of selling there, and North Korea, Syria, and Crimea, because of US government restrictions. To support this new larger market, the company also added support for Arabic, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with further languages in development.

The selection of shows and films available in each country will continue to vary on a country-by-country basis. Netflix says that its own content, including such shows as Jessica Jones and Sense8 will be available everywhere at the same time, presumably without any kind of geographical restriction.

(credit: (stephan))

Just last week we had occasion to mention that seismometers are used to detect secret nuclear weapons tests as well as earthquakes. (That mention came in a story about seismometers detecting munitions explosions during fighting in Baghdad in 2006.) This week, we’ve seen this detection in action.

Around 8:30pm EST Tuesday, seismometers around the world detected what appears to be an underground detonation of an atomic bomb in North Korea. The event, which was equivalent to about a magnitude 5.1 earthquake, occurred at a shallow depth in the same location as previous tests in 2006, 2009, and 2013—a region that doesn’t see many earthquakes.

The #seismic signals of today's event in North Korea are similar to those detected on 12 Feb 2013 #CTBT pic.twitter.com/KeLT7G9t2V

— CTBTO (@ctbto_alerts) January 6, 2016

The seismic signals of these explosions differ from those produced by earthquakes. Earthquakes release compressional waves as well as shear waves produced by the sliding motion along a fault. Those waves travel through the body of the Earth, arriving at slightly different times. The real damage in an earthquake comes from waves that travel along the surface of the Earth and are the last to arrive.