Physical sciences

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the year’s premiere showcase for everything smart. While there are sure to be some big headline grabbers, some of the most exciting announcements from this massive show aren’t the phones and other devices, but the more subtle reveals. That’s exactly what’s going on with these concept materials from Tecno Mobile. Tecno Mobile is one of the largest phone manufacturers in emerging markets like India, Africa, and the Middle East, and while Western audiences…

Prakhar Khanna / Digital Trends The world of consumer electronics has its own share of urban myths. Some of them are actually so mainstream that no one even dares question their efficacy. Burying a wet phone in rice is one of them. Research has repeatedly proved that it’s a futile trick, but for folks that need to hear it from the source itself, well, Apple has also made it clear that the rice-drying trick doesn’t work. Whether you have an iPhone 15 Pro or a model that’s a few years old, it’s time to stop this…

Laptop screens get dirty — that’s just a fact of life. Whether you’re using one of the best 2-in-1 laptops and want to clean off your fingerprints from the touchscreen or you use a notebook laptop and have somehow gotten food or dirt on it, the cleaning process isn’t something that’s exactly easy to understand. Do you need a special cleaning fluid? How hard should you rub? What do you rub the screen with? Even using water to clean a laptop screen isn’t necessarily completely safe, due to minerals. Device…

The Samsung Galaxy S24 may not be a seismic shift, but it has allowed Samsung to make some strong improvements to an already solid formula. One of the biggest comes to the display, which has increased in size to 6.2 inches, but crucially, now comes with a dynamic refresh rate that shifts between 1-120Hz. While not a tangible change on the level of the new Galaxy AI features, this improvement brings the phone up to the level of the ultra-flagship Galaxy S24 Ultra, and makes it a very tasty morsel indeed. But a…

Joe Maring / Digital Trends Following the release of the iPhone 15 Pro series, several early adopters reported overheating issues. Apple later confirmed that the problem was caused by a software bug in iOS 17, which affected some owners of the phones. The company quickly resolved the issue with the release of iOS 17.0.3 and never acknowledged that hardware played a role in the overheating. Fast-forward to the present, and it now looks like Apple plans to make hardware changes on the iPhone 16 that would make the 2024…

If you're building a computer, you need thermal paste, or heat paste, to ensure that your computer's processor doesn't overheat. It's a gloopy, silvery material that you squirt between the processor and the cooler to fill in all the micro cavities in their surfaces, enabling a more efficient transfer of heat from the processor to the cooler. The best heatpastes work so well they let your processor run harder and faster, at lower temperatures, making your PC quieter in turn. You need to replace the thermal interface…

Chemical manufacturer 3M is set to pay $10.3 billion in settlements over forever chemical contamination of U.S. drinking water, the company announced on Thursday.What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | Techmodo“This is an important step forward for 3M, which builds on our actions that include our announced exit of PFOA and PFOS manufacturing more than 20 years ago,” 3M CEO Mike Roman said via a statement.This deal would compensate water providers throughout the country for the chemical pollution. PFAS, which…

Device makers have struggled to incorporate temperature sensors into smartphones and smartwatches to turn them into medically accurate body thermometers, but researchers at the University of Washington claim they’ve come up with a way to turn an off-the-shelf smartphone into exactly that–with nothing but a new app. They’re calling itFeverPhone.Is This the End of Apple’s Lightning Cable?Although smart wearables like the Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra can measure a user’s body temperature through newly added…

Since the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein were first detected in 2015, astrophysicists have been pondering the gravitational wave background—the cumulative undulations of these spacetime ripples as they cross the cosmos.First Full-Color Images From Webb Space TelescopeNow, one astrophysicist associated with the background hunt developed a model to sniff out ancient supermassive black holes, which could help explain how black holes form and evolve. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal…

In arid southeastern California, just across the border from Nevada, sits the only large-scale rare-earth element mine in the Western Hemisphere. Here at Mountain Pass, rocks are dug out of a 600-foot pit in the ground, crushed, and liquified into a concentrated soup of metals that are essential for the magnets inside consumer electronics, wind turbines, and electric vehicles, or EVs.What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | TechmodoToday, that metallic soup is shipped to China, where individual rare earths are…