Experience tech

ET deals: Save over $400 on a Dell Inspiron 3847 quad-core desktop By  Grant Brunner  on February 18, 2016 at 2:30 pm 1 Comment Share This article 26 5 13 Looking for a powerful desktop that won’t break the bank? Check out the Inspiron 3847 from Dell. With a quad-core CPU, plenty of RAM, and tons of potential for expansion, this PC is a great bargain — especially when you use today’s coupon code. Dell Inspiron 3847 quad-core desktop for $599  (List price: $1032.99 — Coupon code: DELLDT599 ) What kind of specs are we looking at, though? Inside, it has a fourth generation quad-core 3.6GHz Intel Core i7-4790 processor, integrated Intel HD Graphics 4600, 16GB of DDR3 RAM (1600MHz), a 2TB 7200RPM hard drive, a DVD burner, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n WiFi support. As a nice little bonus, a wired keyboard and mouse come along for free — all you’ll need to get started is a display. Since it has an HDMI port and a VGA port on the back, you can easily conn...

NASA’s chemical laptop is a self-contained laboratory for detecting alien life By Ryan Whitwam on December 3, 2015 at 7:30 am 0 Comments Share This article As NASA plans a new generation of robotic missions to explore the solar system, scientists are trying to figure out how to detect possible alien life. One of the most promising approaches is a so-called “chemical laptop” being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This self-contained instrument has roughly the same footprint as a conventional laptop, but inside is everything you need to detect life on another planet. NASA likens the chemical laptop to a Star Trek tricorder in that it’s a “miniaturized on-the-go laboratory.” One vital difference, though, is that the laptop needs to physically interact with a sample of water or ice. The team was conscious of how tough it might be to get a pure sample of water or ice on a planet like Mars (although it does have water), so the chemical laptop operates a bit l...

'MyShake' App Turns Your Smartphone into Earthquake Detector by Mindy Weisberger, Senior Writer Date:  12 February 2016 Time: 02:05 PM ET Smartphone earthquake detection will help seismologists study quakes and could inform early-warning system design. CREDIT: Narongsak Nagadhana Seismologists and app developers are shaking things up with a new app that transforms smartphones into personal earthquake detectors. By tapping into a smartphone's accelerometer — the motion-detection instrument — the free Android app, called MyShake, can pick up and interpret nearby quake activity, estimating the  earthquake's location and magnitude  in real-time, and then relaying the information to a central database for seismologists to analyze. In time, an established network of users could enable MyShake to be used as an early- warning system, the researchers said. [ The 10 Biggest Earthquakes in History ] Crowdsourcing quakes Seismic networks ...