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Submission + - Scientists Find a Means to Boil Water More Efficiently (mit.edu)

joshuark writes: MIT engineers design surfaces that boil more efficiently.

The improved efficiency comes from a combination of three different kinds of surface modifications, at different size scales. The new findings are described in the journal Advanced Materials in a research paper.

The potential impact of the improved efficiency; boiling water is an energy-intensive step at the heart of a wide range of industrial processes, including most electricity generating plants, many chemical production systems, and even cooling systems for electronics.

Perhaps this discovery will give new meaning to the old adage, "A watched pot never boils..."

Josh K.

Comment IIS is out of reach for China (Score 4, Insightful) 42

According to Wikipedia: "China's incentive to build its own space station was amplified after NASA refused Chinese participation in the International Space Station in 2011".

Clearly the Chinese are now eager to compete for the superpower throne and are working hard on getting there own presence in space and some firsts of their own.

Submission + - Virginia police routinely use secret GPS pings to track people's cell phones (insidenova.com) 1

Beerismydad writes: A Virginia man was secretly tracked by Chester County Police detectives using a warrant, which ordered Verizon to regularly ping the man's location and report it to police. The catch? The man was not named as a suspect in the warrant and has not been charged with a crime since the investigation began.

According to InsideNova, a local online news source for Northern Virginia, "The case offers a glimpse into a surveillance technique that’s become commonplace for police but is mostly unknown among the general public: cell phone location tracking."

Submission + - Why Gamers Are Adopting Windows 11 More Slowly Than Windows 10 (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers—nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers—about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements—many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good.

Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users—and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users—were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller.

In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021—even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.

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