Solar cell efficiency milestone, solar fire outside of Vegas, near Paradise, praise for CGP Grey, lovely video of Mercury transiting the sun and more Week in Geek news.
Australian engineers have edged closer to the theoretical limits of sunlight-to-electricity conversion by photovoltaic cells with a device that sets a new world efficiency record.
A small fire shut down a generating tower at the world’s largest solar-thermal power plant, leaving the sprawling facility on the California-Nevada border operating at only a third of its capacity, authorities said.
Thierry Legault is a genius when it comes to solar and lunar transits. He’s caught just about everything that orbits the Earth crossing the Sun, including the space station, Hubble, space shuttles, and more. So I knew he’d have something cool for the Mercury transit on Monday … and he does.
The International Space Station, the space laboratory that showcases cooperation between Russia and the United States, on Monday orbited Earth for the 100,000th time, Russian mission control said.
A US federal judge in Tacoma, Washington has put himself in a Catch 22: ruling a man charged with possessing child pornography has the right to review malware source code while also acknowledging that the government has a right to keep it secret.
The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Generally, the right is to have a face-to-face confrontation with witnesses who are offering testimonial evidence against the accused in the form of cross-examination during a trial. The Fourteenth Amendment makes the right to confrontation applicable to the states and not just the federal government.1 The right only applies to criminal prosecutions, not civil cases or other proceedings.
J.J. Abrams announced that Paramount Pictures’ lawsuit against Axanar Productions was “going away.”
The USA Network show Mr. Robot has drawn a good deal of praise for its accurate (relative to other TV shows) portrayal of hacking and computer security. So, naturally, the site for the show has drawn a slightly different sort of adoring fan—"white hat" hackers looking for security holes
We can quibble about where it stands in the TV canon, but “Sex and the City” has seven Emmys and a suite of Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards. It ran 94 episodes through six seasons on a premium cable network. Any reasonable person should concede that “Sex and the City” was an above-average television program (at minimum). You don’t need to think it was a perfect show, or even an outstanding one, but I think most people would agree it was better than average.
Americans are so committed to their smartphones and tablets that they used nearly 10 billion gigabytes of mobile data last year, according to a new study published by a top industry trade group.
Writing a bad review online has always run a small risk of opening yourself up to a defamation claim. But few would expect to be told that they had to delete their review or face a lawsuit over another part of the law: copyright infringement.
Yet that’s what happened to Annabelle Narey after she posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet.
This week’s episode of Family Guy included a clip from 1980s Nintendo video game Double Dribble showing a glitch to get a free 3-point goal. Fox obtained the clip from YouTube where it had been sitting since it was first uploaded in 2009. Shortly after, Fox told YouTube the game footage infringed its copyrights. YouTube took it down.
