BitTorrent Live lets you watch TV broadcasts for free, and features programming curated by the company. It includes livestreams of "alternative voices in news," as well as sports and cultural content. Since Live is a peer-to-peer system, the quality of its streams will depend on the number of users tuning in. Based on the Play Store reviews, it appears the Android app lacks Chromecast support, and needs to work on improving its interface and library.
Meanwhile, BitTorrent recently lost one of its CEOs who was involved with its ad-supported video and music-streaming service Now, causing speculation that the service was in trouble. BitTorrent later said it "remains focused on the media space." Bringing BitTorrent Live to Android is a good follow-through on that commitment, but given the turmoil reportedly going on at the company, the future of BitTorrent Live is uncertain.
We’ve been dealing with USB for about two decades now, and to be honest, we’re not usually asking that much from it. Plug in an adapter, microphone or game controller, then keep it moving. All of that changes, however, when it comes to virtual reality. As Oculus explains, plugging in a bunch of room scale sensors sends enough data through the ports to potentially overwhelm the 400MB/s capacity of the controller chip on your motherboard.
Because of this, the answer isn’t to simply plug in a hub and get more high-speed USB 3.0 ports, in fact, Oculus says you should probably get good results by using two USB 3.0 connections, plus one older USB 2.0 port if you need to go beyond two sensors to get some more mobility in your VR experiences. The blog is currently helping gamers get through the setup process, so go ahead and check out all of the posts to make sure everything is positioned and working correctly.
How can NASA make sure its rockets are ready to handle the intense buffeting produced during launch? Scientists have recently started using pressure-sensitive paint (PSP) that reacts with oxygen to produce light. That way, scientists can actually visualize where the changing forces act on the rocket as it simulates acceleration during testing. The traditional method uses tiny microphones to measure buffeting, while this "unsteady" PSP is sprayed on in a thin layer, and contains pores so air can contact a greater surface area of the paint. Among other applications, it can be used to speed up and lower the cost of testing on projects like the Space Launch System.
Ireland just took a big step toward cutting coal and oil out of the picture. Its Parliament has passed a bill that stops the country from investing in fossil fuels as part of an €8 billion ($8.6 billion) government fund. The measure still has to clear a review before it becomes law, but it would make Ireland the first nation to completely eliminate public funding for fossil fuel sources. Even countries that have committed to ditching non-renewable energy, like Iceland, can’t quite make that claim. The closest is Norway, which ditched some of its investments back in 2015.
The bill was put forward by Deputy Thomas Pringle, who sees this as a matter of "ethical financing." It’s a message to energy companies that both deny human-made climate change and lobby politicians to look the other way, he says.
Ireland’s decision won’t have the greatest environmental impact given its relative size, but this is still an aggressive move when many other countries aren’t ready or willing to drop their support for conventional energy. It’s a particularly sharp contrast to the US, whose new leadership is already going to great lengths to suppress climate change science and protect the fossil fuel industry.
According to the New York Times, President Donald Trump still uses an “old, unsecured Android phone†regularly. While we don’t necessarily have on-the-record proof of this happening, we do know that all of the Tweets you’ve seen from him since being sworn into office all appear to have come from the official Android Twitter app, hence the “Twitter for Android†we see attached to those pictured below.Â
Why do we care? Well, the President of the United States should probably not be carrying around an unsecured phone. In this position, you are one of the biggest targets in the world. An older phone without current patches leaves itself open to being compromised. A compromised phone could be used to monitor his position, record audio of conversations, or access imagery or video taken with the device, just to name a few of the bad things that he is welcoming in.
Edit: As some have pointed out in the comments, the President was supposedly given a new “secure, encrypted device†that was approved by the Secret Service last week. We don’t know if that phone was given Twitter access or if it was indeed an Android phone. Today’s report, from the same outlet that reported his secure phone is under the impression that he is back to using an “old, unsecured Android phone.†All clear?
But hey, it’s not like there are any hackers around who like to mess with politicians and their aides by releasing their private emails and other goods. I’m sure he’ll be fine.
Sure.
For f*ck’s sake, can someone take his god damn phone away already.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized computer that is adored by educators and children for its great capabilities to allowing kids to learn programming and digital making skills.
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If you don’t go far enough in chemistry, it’s easy to get the impression that metallicity is an innate property of certain elements. But “metallic” is simply defined as substances with electrons that can move around easily. These electrons give metals properties like good conductivity and an opaque, shiny appearance. But these traits are not exclusive to specific elements; carbon nanotubes can be metallic, and elements like sulfur become metallic under sufficient pressure.
In 1935, scientists predicted that the simplest element, hydrogen, could also become metallic under pressure, and they calculated that it would take 25 GigaPascals to force this transition (each Gigapascal is about 10,000 atmospheres of pressure). That estimate, in the words of the people who have finally made metallic hydrogen, “was way off.” It took until last year for us to reach pressures where the normal form of hydrogen started breaking down into individual atoms—at 380 GigaPascals. Now, a pair of Harvard researchers have upped the pressure quite a bit more, and they have finally made hydrogen into a metal.
All of these high-pressure studies rely on what are called diamond anvils. This hardware places small samples between two diamonds, which are hard enough to stand up to extreme pressure. As the diamonds are forced together, the pressure keeps going up.
Current calculations suggested that metallic hydrogen might require just a slight boost in pressure from the earlier work, at pressures as low as 400 GigaPascals. But the researchers behind the new work, Ranga Dias and Isaac Silvera, discovered it needed quite a bit more than that. In making that discovery, they also came to a separate realization: normal diamonds weren’t up to the task. “Diamond failure,” they note, “is the principal limitation for achieving the required pressures to observe SMH,” where SMH means “solid metallic hydrogen” rather than “shaking my head.”
The team came up with some ideas about what might be causing the diamonds to fail and corrected them. One possibility was surface defects, so they etched all diamonds down by five microns to eliminate these. Another problem may be that hydrogen under pressure could be forced into the diamond itself, weakening it. So they cooled the hydrogen to slow diffusion and added material to the anvil that absorbed free hydrogen. Shining lasers through the diamond seemed to trigger failures, so they switched to other sources of light to probe the sample.
After loading the sample and cranking up the pressure (literally—they turned a handcrank), they witnessed hydrogen’s breakdown at high pressure, which converted it from a clear sample to a black substance, as had been described previously. But then, somewhere between 465 and 495 GigaPascals, the sample turned reflective, a key feature of metals.
The authors have no way of telling whether the metallic substance is a solid or liquid. They expect solid based on theoretical considerations, but all they know for sure is that it’s 15 times denser than hydrogen chilled to 15K, which is what they put into the diamond anvil.
One result they do have is that there was no change in appearance even as they allowed the sample to warm up to 83K. That’s intriguing, because some theoretical work has suggested that metallic hydrogen could be metastable, meaning it will remain metallic even as the pressure and temperature that forced it there is released. That will definitely be something worth checking into in more detail. Other calculations suggest it will be superconducting, but that hasn’t been looked at at all yet.
These sorts of details will probably have to wait until we’ve overcome what the authors term a “looming challenge”—producing metallic hydrogen in sufficient quantities to study it in detail. Still, we’ve waited 80 years just to see the stuff. We can probably afford to be patient for a bit more.
