Brahmin Theo iPad/Tablet Bag review

Right after I wrote my recent news item about the Theo iPad Bag from Brahmin, I set about finding one for myself. ?I promptly ordered the bag in the crocodile-embossed leather in Pecan. ?The bag arrived recently. ?Is it everything I hoped? All images can be clicked for an enlarged view. The Theo bag is [...]

Source: http://the-gadgeteer.com/2013/06/30/brahmin-theo-ipadtablet-bag-review/

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Astronomer uncovers the hidden identity of an exoplanet

July 1, 2013 ? Hovering about 70 light-years from Earth -- that's "next door" by astronomical standards -- is a star astronomers call HD 97658, which is almost bright enough to see with the naked eye. But the real "star" is the planet HD 97658b, not much more than twice Earth's diameter and a little less than eight times its mass. HD 97658b is a super-Earth, a class of planet for which there is no example in our home solar system.

While the discovery of this particular exoplanet is not new, determining its true size and mass is, thanks to Diana Dragomir, a postdoctoral astronomer with UC Santa Barbara's Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope (LCOGT). As part of her research, Dragomir looked for transits of this exoplanet with Canada's Microvariability & Oscillations of Stars (MOST) space telescope. The telescope was launched in 2003 to a pole-over-pole orbit about 510 miles high. Dragomir analyzed the data using code written by LCOGT postdoctoral fellow Jason Eastman. The results were published online today in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A super-Earth is an exoplanet with a mass and radius between those of Earth and Neptune. Don't be fooled by the moniker though. Super-Earth refers to the planet's mass and does not imply similar temperature, composition, or environment to Earth. The brightness of HD 97658 means astronomers can study this star and planet in ways not possible for most of the exoplanet systems that have been discovered around fainter stars.

HD 97658b was discovered in 2011 by a team of astronomers using the Keck Observatory and a technique sometimes called Doppler wobble. But only a lower limit could be set on the planet's mass, and nothing was known about its size.

Transits, such as those observed by Dragomir, occur when a planet's orbit carries it in front of its parent star and reduces the amount of light we see from the star ever so slightly. Dips in brightness happen every orbit, if the orbit happens to be almost exactly aligned with our line of sight from Earth. For a planet not much bigger than our Earth around a star almost as big as our Sun, the dip in light is tiny but detectable by the ultraprecise MOST space telescope.

The first report of transits in the HD 97658 system in 2011 turned out to be a false alarm. That might have been the end of the story, but Dragomir knew that the ephemeris of the planet's orbit (a timetable to predict when the planet might pass in front of the star) was not exact. She convinced the MOST team to widen the search parameters, and during the last possible observing window for this star last year, the data showed tantalizing signs of a transit -- tantalizing, but not certain beyond doubt. A year later, MOST revisited HD 97658 and found clear evidence of the planet's transits, allowing Dragomir and the MOST team to estimate the planet's true size and mass for the first time.

"Measuring an exoplanet's size and mass leads to a determination of its density, which in turn allows astronomers to say something about its composition," Dragomir said. "Measuring the properties of super-Earths in particular tells us whether they are mainly rocky, water-rich, mini gas giants, or something entirely different."

The average density of HD 97658b is about four grams per cubic centimeter, a third of the density of lead but denser than most rocks. Astronomers see great significance in that value -- about 70 percent of the average density of Earth -- since the surface gravity of HD 97658b could hold onto a thick atmosphere. But there's unlikely to be alien life breathing those gases. The planet orbits its sun every 9.5 days, at a distance a dozen times closer than we are from our Sun, which is too close to be in the Habitable Zone, nicknamed The Goldilocks Zone. The Goldilocks nickname is apropos: If a planet is too close to its star, it's too hot; if it's too far away, it's too cold, but if it's in the zone, it's "just right" for liquid water oceans, one condition that was necessary for life here on Earth.

Over the past few years, systems with massive planets at very small orbital radii have proved to be quite common despite being generally unexpected. The current number of confirmed exoplanets exceeds 600, with the vast majority having been discovered by radial velocity surveys. These are severely biased toward the detection of systems with massive planets (roughly the mass of Jupiter) in small orbits. Bucking that trend is HD 97658b, which orbits its star at a distance farther than many of the currently known exoplanets. HD 97658b is only the second super-Earth known to transit a very bright star.

"This discovery adds to the still small sample of transiting super-Earths around bright stars," said Dragomir. "In addition, it has a longer period than many known transiting exoplanets around bright stars, including 55 Cnc e, the only other super-Earth in this category. The longer period means it is cooler than many closer-in exoplanets, so studying HD 97658b's properties is part of the progression toward understanding what exoplanets in the habitable zone might be like."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/7ljS5qLwOI0/130701163941.htm

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'Monsters University' Holds Off 'The Heat' For Box-Office #1

'World War Z' pulls in a surprising $30 million while 'White House Down' underperformed.
By Ryan J. Downey

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1709816/monsters-university-heat-weekend-summer-movies.jhtml

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Digg (for iPhone)

The latest update to the Digg iPhone app includes one huge new feature: Digg Reader. Digg Reader is the brand-new RSS feed reader from Digg that's still technically in beta, but shows a lot of early promise. The reader itself has a few limitations?you have to have a Google account, for example, and it doesn't support OPML uploads?but it's off to a decent start and looks great on the iPhone.

How to Get Digg Reader on iPhone
When you install the free Digg app from iTunes and launch it, tap the three horizontal lines in the upper left corner to open Digg Reader. You'll have to sign into a Google account to use Digg Reader. The app will request access to information from your Google account?a show-stopping privacy concern for some people?and you have to grant it access to use the RSS feed reader.

Digg then pulls in your Google Reader feeds and imports them pretty well, preserving folder organization in the process. Every time I launched the app, I had to sign into Google anew, which makes me worry about whether I will still be able to use Digg Reader after July 1 when Google Reader goes the way of the dodo.

In testing the Digg iPhone app and the included Digg Reader, Google Alerts did not actually work, appearing as empty feeds, even when I could see in Google Reader that my alerts were active. If you're in need of keeping your Google Alerts active, you can set them in Google to alert you via email after Google Reader closes. Or you can try Editors' Choice G2Reader, one of the only RSS feed readers I've tested that continued to update my Google Alerts, though more slowly than Google did.

Digg App Features
The main part of the Digg iPhone app doesn't contain much to write home about. In fact, it's very much downplayed the moment you start a Digg Reader account. In short, there's a home screen where popular Digg news stories display in a scrollable view. Stories appear with a headline and image, and a count showing how many "Diggs" (essentially "likes") a story received. You can open the story to read it, or swipe right to left across the story to access other functions, such as bookmarking it to read later, or sharing it via email, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth.

Left-to-right swipes, on the other hand, return you to Digg Reader, proving just how integral this feature is to the Digg now.

Design of Digg Reader
Digg Reader in the Digg iPhone app looks like most other RSS feed readers. You'll see a list of your feeds and folders in a column, with a few essential tools and features, such as "saved" stories, at the top.

Click a feed or folder from this panel, and it opens the list of items in that feed in the main window, hiding the RSS feed reading panel in the process. The display looks great, but you can't toggle between expanded versus minimal previews. Each entry has a headline in bold type with the name of the publication or blog below it, an image when available, and a time stamp showing how long ago the item appeared in your feed (e.g., "4h" indicates four hours ago). Often you'll see one to two lines of preview text from the post if it fits; when images are included, that preview text generally doesn't fit. Tap a post once, and it opens for further reading, which sometimes contains the complete text and other times only another preview. Tap again and you can open the full post in Digg's included browser.

Digg Reader definitely has a very functional look on the iPhone, and I think that's for the best due to the overwhelming amount of information you're probably subjecting yourself to through the feature. Simpler is definitely better here.

Some RSS fans will be thrilled to hear that Digg Reader also integrates with Pocket, Readability, and Instapaper, all services that make it easier to read long-form content in particular when offline. You can manage your connections to these services right from within the settings of the Digg iPhone app. It's totally appropriate, as those services are really designed to improve reading experiences on small devices, such as the iPhone.

Settings and More
When I explored Digg Reader's settings from the website digg.com/reader, I found a few instances of switches set to "public" rather than "private" by default, which pleases me none too much. There are two private/public switches for URLs that contain a feed of all the items from your account that you either save or digg. Ah ha. So, if you set these URLs to public, you can then let other RSS feed users get a stream of all the content you either "Digg" or save an item. That's kind of neat, but I wish there had been some explanation so I could determine whether and how I might use those capabilities?or whether I'd prefer to toggle them to private. iPhone users should be aware of these settings, too.

Other neat options in the settings didn't all seem to work just yet (remember, Digg Reader is technically in beta), but definitely piqued my interest. One lets you adjust the size of the text display (something that I presumed would be functional even during beta), and another section called "Experiments" that has an entry for "car mode." This feature wasn't functional at the time of my testing but purports to play any unplayed podcasts. I'm super curious, as I do a lot more audio "reading" of news and articles than visual reading.

Digg is Digg Reader
Let's not beat around the bush. The Digg iPhone appis the Digg Reader app for iPhone. The RSS feed reading component is so integral to the app that there's little reason to use it unless you sign into Digg Reader. If you're not one to give away access to your Google account so freely, this is not the app for you. Although it's in beta with some bugs expected for the time being, it's off to an interesting start. At present, Digg Reader is fully free, but the company has announced plans to rollout premium features for paying subscribers in the near future.

If you are not willing to use an RSS feed reading service that demands a connection to Google, pick G2Reader, one of our Editors' Choices. The other is Feedly, which also requires a Google account, and seems very similar to Digg Reader in many ways but has had more time to become truly stabile and reliable. That head-to-head comparison could change in the coming months, though, when Digg Reader rolls out its premium services. Stay tuned.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/S81BYUsQe6o/0,2817,2421196,00.asp

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