How to Catch Tomorrow Morning’s Lunar Eclipse

Clear skies and geographical location permitting, Saturday will be your last chance to spy a total lunar eclipse until 2014. Here's what you need to know to catch a glimpse before it's gone.

First things first: if you live in South America or some of Africa's westernmost regions, we're sorry — it looks like you're going to have to wait a few more years to witness a total lunar eclipse in person. Fortunately, you can still watch the eclipse online via a live feed over on slooh.com. Everyone else, congratulations. You win.

For the majority of the Western Hemisphere, the eclipse will be most noticeable early Saturday morning in the hours right before dawn. The Moon will enter Earth's shadow at 3:33 PST, and the total eclipse phase will begin at 6:06 PST. This means that those of us on the East coast may have a hard time spotting the eclipse, as the Moon will be setting more or less right as it's entering Earth's shadow (the more dramatic, ruddy colors typically associated with a total lunar eclipse won't likely become noticeable until around 4:45 am PST). Views will improve, however, as you move north and west; in fact, Alaska should be able to catch the eclipse in its entirety, right up until the Moon leaves the Earth's shadow around 12:30 PST.

Nokia Lumia 710 now Shipping Worldwide

It's been a few months coming, but today, Nokia announced that its Lumia 710 handset has finally hit store shelves in Taiwan, ahead of its broader international release. Priced at around €270 (or about $332), the Mango-laced handset will arrive in stores across Singapore, Hong Kong, India and Russia over the next seven days, before expanding to other global markets "over the coming weeks." The 3.7-inch device joins the Lumia 800.

 

 

Knuckle Meat Pounder to Beat the Crap Out Of Your Steak

Knuckle Meat Tenderizer. I don't know how it is supposed to work (do I hang up the piece of meat first?) but $13 sounds fine to release your stress and get tender steak. Get it here.

 

 

The Pope Has Chosen Android

This, my friends, may be the end of the smartphone fanboy wars. I can give my two cents. The rest of the tech community can give theirs. But God Almighty himself, through his appointed papal mouthpiece, has picked a winner.

For this year's celebration of Christ's birth, Pope Benedict will remotely light a giant Christmas tree display attached to the side of a mountain, from 130 miles away.

But! Scandal! He's doing it with the Lord's fave new gadget, MSNBC reports, straight from the Vatican newswire:

Benedict XVI will activate the illumination from his apartments in the Vatican Apostolic Palace. He will touch the screen of a Sony "Tablet" with an "Android" operating system which, via the Internet, will transmit the command to switch on the electric current to the tree.

Will this alleged "Android" "Tablet" be a Sony S? It doesn't matter. The heavens have parted, and the choice is clear: The Pope Chooses Android.

 

 

HP’s $99 TouchPad Firesale Is Finally Back

The time's come, cheapasses: HP's $99 TouchPad firesale is about to make its triumphant return. Oh my god I've waited so long for this.

At 7:00 PM Eastern on December 11th, HP's eBay store is going to have the next and maybe last cache of cheap TouchPads. $99 16GB models and $150 32GB models will both be up for grabs. That's great! Here's the catch: The units are refurbished, not new—which isn't a bad thing, necessarily!—and all sales are final. But like, who's going to try to return a $99 TouchPad anyway?

Since the original cheapo stampede over the first TouchPad firesale, the Kindle Fire's shown up with its $200 pricepoint, and the PlayBook dropped to that price as well—and maybe even further soon. But the TouchPad is still the only full-sized tablet to get the here-take-it-please-oh-god prices, and webOS has gotten a few upgrades while HP shuffles its feet over what to do with the mobile OS. So basically, it's still a totally awesome deal and you should get one if you can.

 

 

Amazon Will give you $5 if you use its Price Check app This Weekend

No joke, it really will. All you have to do is walk into a retailer this Saturday, whip out your smartphone and use Amazon's Price Check app to collect price data on in-store items. In exchange, the company will offer you a discount of five percent (or up to $5) on "select items" in electronics, toys, music, and other product divisions, though you'll only be able to use it a maximum of three times. 

The campaign represents Amazon's latest attempt to creep into the brick and mortar sector on the back of barcode scanning technology, and seems like a pretty clever way to bolster its mobile presence, while gathering intel on its competitors' prices, as well. It all kicks off at 9 PM (PST) on Friday, and will draw to a close just before midnight on Saturday.

 

 

Windows Phones Starting to Receive Support for Twitter Images in Pictures Hub

The "What's New" feed in Windows Phone Mango's Picture Hub has done a great job offering thumbnail images for Facebook and Windows Live messages, but for some reason lovers of Twitter pictures have been shunned, with only a link to the image being provided. Not the worst thing on the planet, of course, but certainly it's been a minor thorn in the side of frequent users of the social networking service. Reports are beginning to come in, however, that this is all changing now -- it looks as though quite a few photos originating from Twitter are now showing up, which may be an indicator of some fix-it work going on behind the scenes.

 

 

Sony Ericsson to Become Sony in mid-2012

Sony and Ericsson's decade-long partnership may have humbled Kim Kardashian, but dwindling market share and an over-reliance on feature phones signaled the end of the affair. Ericsson will have until "mid 2012" to clear its things from the spare room before the electronics giant begins a new solo venture. The revitalized enterprise will leverage its parent company's brand strength, R&D and content (since it owns a massive chunk of the entertainment industry) and in comments made to Times of India, company Vice President Kristian Tear said there would be a "fierce" advertising push to restore the company's reputation as a major player worldwide -- before taking a Pilates class to try and fit back into its bachelor pad.

 

 

Samsung Teases Flexible, Transparent Display in Concept Video

Samsung's flexible display technology isn't slated to hit the market until 2012, but the Korean manufacturer is already giving us a glimpse of how it may transform our lives, with a freshly released concept video. Yes, it's just a concept ad, and a relatively brief one at that, but it still paints a pretty mouth-watering portrait -- one full of transparent, flexible screens, smartphone-tablet hybrids, and augmented reality.

Mammoths May Be Roaming the World In Five Years

Scientists have been trying to clone woolly mammoths for years, but now they're really close. So close that in five years you may see herds of this gigantic beast—one of the favorite extinct prehistoric animals of the all-time.

Scientists from Japan's Kinki University and the Sakha Republic's mammoth museum have discovered well preserved marrow in a thigh bone discovered in Siberia, buried under the permafrost. The marrow is in such good condition that its cells' DNA could be used to replace the nuclei of elephant egg cells. This will allow scientist to create mammoth embryos.

The team wants to plant these embryos inside the wombs of elephant mothers so they can grow until birth. Although bigger than elephants, both animals are similar enough for this to work. This is a similar technique used in current cloning processes. The key is that the DNA has to be intact in order for this process to work. This discovery is their chance to achieve their objective.

 

 

Samsung's mSATA PM830 is Eight Grams of Pure SSD

The newest member of Samsung's 6Gb/s PM830 family of SSDs is designed to sit inside the Ultrabooksof 2012, which means it's had go through some slimming down. The mSATA drive uses 20 nanometer NAND for face-melting speed, but is crammed into a 50.95 x 30 x 3.8mm package, weighing only eight grams. The drive will comfortably read 500MB/s and write 260MB/s on a clear day, six times faster than a comparable HDD. 

It'll allow Windows to boot in under ten seconds and transfer "five DVD files" (roughly 45GB) in around a minute. The drives also come with 256-bit AES for those moments when your Ultrabook gets stolen, or more likely, floats away in the wind. 64GB, 128GB and 256GB variants will roll out to OEMs shortly but we expect a consumer version to be announced shortly for everyone with some courage and a screwdriver.

 

 

If You Don’t Like the Names of These New Elements, Now’s the Time to Complain

Flerovium and livermorium have a nice ring, yeah? Chemistry's governing body thinks so and wants to name two new elements with them. If you disagree, you've only got five months to come up with something better.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, a union of chemists that maintains the periodic table and vets potential new additions to it, has proposed naming recently-discovered elements 114 and 116 flerovium and livermorium, respectively. Now, the names undergo a five month comment period wherein any member of the public can suggest alternatives—that includes you.

These super-heavy elements are so large and so unstable that they can only be manufactured in labs and rapidly degrade into other elements. Both were actually discovered a decade ago but their existence has been undergoing independent verification since then. They were created by a collaboration of researchers from Lawrence Livermore Labs and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

Livermorium is named after the Livermore lab where it was created while flerovium bears the name of Georgi N. Flerov, the founder of the Dubna lab. If the names pass muster by next May, flerovium and livermorium will join three other recently-named elements—darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn)—at the bottom of the elemental table.

 

 

Sony Reader WiFi officially drops to $129.99

Love 'em or hate 'em, one thing's for sure -- e-readers just keep getting cheaper. The latest to see a dip in price is the Sony Reader WiFi, which debuted at $149.99 just a couple of months back, but has now received a permanent drop to $129.99. What's more, Sony is also running a trade-in program through the end of December that will give you an additional $50 off if you turn in any old e-reader. Not quite the instant discount that an ad-supported Kindle gives you, but certainly not a bad deal if you're looking to upgrade from an older model.

Next-Gen Touchscreens Will Resist Your Greasy Little Fingermarks

For those with obsessive-compulsive tendencies, fingerprints over the screen of their tablet must be a living hell. But a team of German scientists think they can help with, of all things, a candle.

Making a surface that can repel water is easy. So why is it difficult to make one that repels oil? It's to do with oil's low surface tension: to make a surface that can repel it, you need a very particular kind of surface roughness. And while that sounds easy, nobody has yet managed to really work out how to achieve it.

But now a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, think they've found a solution. Using, um, a combination of candle soot and silica baked at just the right temperature. Look, I didn't say it was hi-tech, right?

They've trialled the idea with glass — which is notoriously bad for showing up finger prints. First they held the glass over the candle, which caused soot to be deposited on its surface. These little spheres of soot were 30 to 40 nanometers in diameter, and stacked fairly loosely. In fact, 80 per cent of the coating was empty space, giving just the right roughness required to shed oils.

To fix the soot in place, they coated it with a silica shell 25 nanometers thick. Finally, to get rid of the black color of the soot, they baked the glass at 600C, making it transparent.

The result? Grease-proof glass! They even managed to take high-speed photos of little drops of peanut oil bouncing up and down from the surface. Fortunately, the coating also sticks to other materials like aluminum, steel, and copper, too.

Now, they just need to think of a way of industrializing the process so that it doesn't involve holding huge sheets of glass over candles.

 

 

YouTube Goes Under the Knife, new Homepage and Social Integration Emerge

Falling into lockstep with Google's quest to redesign everything, YouTube officially unveiled a radical new look for its twenty billion strong video site. Now sporting a more somber look, the homepage is now dominated by a center feed hosting content, which is flanked on its left by a list of channels in a quasi-navigation bar. 

Besides hosting channels, that navbar also features Google+ and (opt-in) Facebook tabs, allowing you to peruse content friends are sharing and interacting with. Also tweaked are channels, which are now more easily customizable thanks to the addition of snazzy new templates.

 

 

ODDIO1 Straps an iPod Shuffle to Your Head, Makes you Inexplicably Cooler

Micro music players like the iPod shuffle are great when you're shredding the powder, but long cords can be a health hazard, even in the office -- if one wraps itself 'round your coffee mug, you risk having twelve ounces of hot liquid landing in your lap. Designers Jeremy Saxton & Jacob Hall have developed the ODDIO1, a pair of headphones that do away with all that unnecessary cabling -- holstering the shuffle on the right earpiece.

Let's be honest, this ain't exactly rocket science here, the ODDIO1 packs a pair of 30mm dynamic audio drivers, has an adjustable headband and comes in three colors -- grey / black, black / blue and black / pink (oddly, the coolest pair of the three). Because the headphone jack is still accessible, you can sync your shuffle with iTunes without having to tear it out of its holster.

Production tooling and further development of the device. The aim is that the 'phones will retail for $50 when they reach general sale, but only $35 if you pledge now (two pairs for $65 and three for $95). Throwing in $200 will get you the trifecta of regular headsets, a limited edition white version, t-shirt and iPod shuffle in the color of your choice. More here.

Acer's 27-inch HR274H Monitor Promises to do 2D-to-3D Conversion on the Fly

It likely won't win over anyone who isn't too fond of 3D to begin with, but those looking for some additional quasi-3D content beyond the standard fare now have a new option to consider in the form of Acer's 27-inch HR274H monitor. It not only includes a set of passive, polarized 3D glasses, but what Acer describes as its own "chip-based solution" that promises to convert all 2D content to 3D in real time (it can be switched on and off on the monitor itself).

Unfortunately, there's no word yet as to how well the effect works, and the monitor's specs are otherwise decidedly ordinary for the rather high $599 price tag -- you'll just get a TN panel with a standard 1920 x 1080 resolution.

 

 

TED Goes Mobile with New iPhone App

Sure the free TED app has been available on the iPad since last year but—gasp!—not everybody owns an iPad. Now, those of us without tablets can enjoy brilliant conversations on the go with the new TED iPhone app.

The iPhone version has the same access to TED's library of lectures as its large-screen brethren and allows users to bookmark and download—via Wi-Fi—videos for playback. They can even be streamed to a home television using Airplay or listened to through TEDRadio, an audio-only version of the discussions. Its available free from iTunes here.

 

 

YouTube Got Nearly 21 Billion Hits in a Month

The latest report from comScore makes for eye popping reading -- Google's video sites, of which YouTube is the most important, received 20,933,113,000 views in October. To put that into some context, that's roughly three videos watched by every person alive on the planet. According to the statistics, YouTubers spent an average of seven hours watching the month's hottest videos (such as Community's Beetlejuice easter egg and Naughty Fenton). Surprisingly, Facebook came second, but viewers spent an measly average of 18 minutes watching last night's karaoke. In other news, Hulu came top for online advertising and Vevo was the most watched partner site, you guys obviously love your Lady Gaga.

 

 

Seagate Outs Second-gen Momentus XT: a 750GB Hybrid Laptop Drive for $189

Seagate was quick to jump into the hybrid HDD/SSD fray last year, with the decently priced and capableMomentus XT. Now we have a successor with identical branding, but with the HDD upped to 742GB, NAND storage slightly increased to 8GB, plus a faster SATA III 6Gb/s interface. The 'flash-assisted drive' promises to cut boot-up and lag times compared to a standard laptop hard disk, by gradually learning which of your files are popular enough to deserve a spot in that solid state VIP lounge. We're looking at a price of $189, including a five-year warranty, and availability from today.