Thomson Reuters bases its predictions on which scientific studies had the greatest number of citations, or mentions by other studies.Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna were selected as potential chemistry winners for developing a method to edit genes known as CRISPR/Cas9 (illustrated above). The technique holds potential to cure deadly genetic diseases, but it's also raised some major ethical concerns.
John B. Goodenough and M. Stanley Whittingham were highlighted as possible chemistry winners for laying the foundations for the development of the lithium-ion battery, the same battery that powers your laptop.
Carolyn R. Bertozzi was selected for a possible Nobel in chemistry for making major contributions to bioorthogonal chemistry — the study of chemical reactions that can happen inside cells without disturbing what goes on naturally inside them.
Deborah S. Jin might win a physics Nobel for pioneering work on atomic gases at super-cold temperatures.
They created the first zero-viscosity fluid, or superfluid (like the helium superfluid above), formed by subatomic particles called fermions at low temperatures.
Paul B. Corkum and Ferenc Krausz might win a physics Nobel for helping us understand the physics that happens at the scale of one quintillionth of a second, known as attosecond physics.
Zhong Lin Wang was chosen as a potential Nobel winner in physics for inventing tiny generators that produce electricity from pressure (known as piezotronic generators). These nanogenerators could be used to power sensors, or wearable devices powered by the human body.
Jeffrey I. Gordon was selected as a possible Nobel winner for medicine for demonstrating how the microbes that live in our gut (such as the E. coli shown above) have major impacts on our overall health, from our metabolisms to our physiology.
Kazutoshi Mori and Peter Walter were selected as potential medicine Nobel winners for independently figuring out how our cells find and fix "unfolded" proteins in a part of the cell called the endoplasmic reticulum, a network of membranes that can be found throughout the cell and are connected to its powerhouse, the nucleus.
Alexander Y. Rudensky, Shimon Sakaguchi, and Ethan M. Shevach could win Nobels in medicine for discovering how immune cells called regulatory T cells and a protein called Foxp3 work.
It's common lore that if your phone doesn't turn on after getting dunked in water, you put it in rice. The logic here is that the rice will soak up the water, and your phone will work again.
But rice can take up to three days to fully dry your phone, and even then it's not guaranteed that it'll work again.A company called TekDry is setting up electronics-drying locations around the United States, where customers with wet gadgets come to dry them for $70 in special machines that literally pull the water out of them in a vacuum chamber. But if your phone doesn't work because the water damage went too far, you won't be charged anything. So far, you'll only find TekDry locations in Colorado, Michigan, and New Hampshire, but they're adding 82 more locations in California, New York, Philadelphia, and the greater Boston area in mid-October. In New York, two locations will be in Brooklyn, two in Manhattan, and two in Bronx.It's actually quite satisfying to watch water ooze out of the sim port and the cracks around this old iPhone:
TekDry's machines can dry phones in 30 minutes with an 80 percent success rate if you bring it under 48 hours of getting your phone wet.Recently, it was discovered that Apple's latest iPhones are much more resistant to water than previous generations. It turns out that Apple added gaskets around the edges and seals around important components into the latest iPhone 6s and 6s Plus to keep water out.
The new iPhones survived a test where they were dunked in a shallow bowl of water for an hour, with only the 6s suffering from a diagonal line across its screen. So you might not need to worry if you drop a new iPhone into, say, a toilet bowl.However, another put the iPhone 6s under four feet of water for a couple minutes, which broke the iPhone from water damage. So if you jump into a pool with your iPhone, you still have a chance of saving it if you bring it to TekDry. (Still: don't do that.)Other phones boast water-resistance, like Sony' flagship line of Xperia phones. But others are doing away with the feature. Samsung, for example, recently did away with the water-resistance in its line of Galaxy smartphones. TekDry also dries other devices, like tablets, laptops up to 13-inches, cameras, and basically anything battery-powered portable device.Luckily, Product Chart has an extensive smartphone comparison chart that tosses all the most recent smartphones into one place. It lets you filter the results by important features such as screen size, price, resolution, RAM, and storage, giving you a great way to see what all your options are.
If you have a specific smartphone line in mind, you can also pare down the results by selecting the brand. If you really want to get technical, you can also change up what the X and Y axis measure, swapping out price for resolution, screen size, pixels per inch (PPI), weight, and storage.Each smartphone links to an Amazon product listing for the device, showing how much it would cost to buy the phone unlocked and off contract.Unfortunately, there are no toggles for battery life, carrier, or operating system, and it's always a good idea to see what deals are best for your specific carrier contract. But if you want a good overview of the current smartphone market, Product Chart is an easy way to digest all the options while focusing on the features that matter to you.Nobody needs a tablet. The best of them get close to blending the productivity of a laptop with the portability of a smartphone, but unless you splurge on something like a Surface Pro, they usually end up being weird approximations of the two. If you want to get work done, you’re usually better off with a laptop. If you want to read things on the go, you’re usually better off with a smartphone. (Or at least a big smartphone.)
Instead, most tablets are still best for luxury. They're something for your in-between time, when you’re sitting around and you want a more convenient way of throwing on a Netflix stream, opening up an e-book, or playing a game of Plants vs. Zombies. They’re simpler to start up than laptops, and fitted with bigger screens than smartphones. They don’t replace the two, but they can be convenient sidekicks to both.Still, because a tablet isn’t essential to most people’s lives, it’s totally understandable if you don’t want to overpay for one. Luckily, you don’t have to. Although the highest-quality iPad Airs and Galaxy Tabs cost $400 or more, there are still a handful of worthwhile options in the $200 range. So, per usual, we scoured the web and did some hands-on testing to find them. (With one minor yet worthwhile exception, which we'll explain below.) We also gave them our usual BI Rating.In doing so, we looked for the obvious. You won’t find strong enough performance to get a ton of work done, but in this range, you’re looking for a media machine anyway. The build doesn’t have to be made of high-end metals, but it should feel comfortable and well put-together. You want enough storage space, along with software that, at the very least, doesn’t get between you and your stuff. And of course, you want a good screen — colorful, bright, and, ideally, sharp. With few exceptions, that screen will be around 7 or 8 inches.
With all that out of the way, here are our favorite affordable tablets you can buy today.Update (2/11/16): We've completed our first major refresh of this guide. The Nvidia Shield Tablet K1 is our new top pick among budget Android tablets, while the Amazon Fire gets a mention as an ultra-cheap option. We've also updated our Apple iPad mini 2 entry to further explain why it's been included here.First, we’re going to cheat a bit. If you can pony up an extra $70 to get Apple’s entry-level iPad, it’s the only almost-budget slate that's worth the plunge. The iPad mini 2 is technically the weakest of Apple’s current crop of tablets, but two years into its existence it’s held up well. Its metal-and-glass build is still refined, tightly constructed, and pleasant-feeling in the hand. Its 7.9-inch, 2048x1536 IPS display isn’t as vivid or deep as the world-beating (among non-OLED options) panels of the newer iPad mini 4 or iPad Air 2 — mostly because of its lower maximum color gamut — but it’s still impressively sharp, and it’s still miles more fine-tuned than the vast majority of tablets in the budget range. Compared to those slates, it still comes off like a notably higher-end product.
The main reason we’re breaking our $200 guideline, though, is because the mini 2 runs iOS 9. As we’ve said before, Apple’s mobile OS is far and away the best operating system for tablets. It’s constantly easy to navigate, it doesn’t force the risk of delayed updates, and it recently added split-screen support, giving the mini 2 a measure of multitasking ability in the process.Most importantly, it’s still something of the default among app developers — if a major app (or game) launches or makes a major update, you’re almost guaranteed to see it as soon as it hits, if at all, on an iPad. Android has closed the gap in terms of app quantity over the years, but it still presents that risk, especially when it comes to new games. iOS also has decidedly more apps that are optimized for larger displays. Explore Android far enough and you’ll still see a few too many apps that are either awkwardly laid out or presented like they’re on a blown-up smartphone. That sort of annoyance is rare here.
The only major downsides are that paid apps tend to cost a dollar or two more, and that Apple’s first-party apps are routinely less inviting their counterparts from Google, Microsoft, and the like. Otherwise, we’d say the added convenience is worth a premium. All of this means that, display discrepancy aside, the iPad mini 2 isn’t that far off from the iPad mini 4. The primary concern is that its specs are aging. But while its two-year old A7 chip and 1GB of RAM will never be as robust as Apple’s latest hardware, iOS is still light enough for them to get you through a YouTube binging session or most modern games without much issue. For the general entertainment purposes a small tablet is meant for, it’s fine. Likewise, the mini 2’s battery can’t power up iOS 9 for as long as its successors, but the 8 or so hours of juice it gets per charge is passable.When it comes down to it, the iPad’s position atop the tablet food chain is deserved. Whichever one you pick, you get the most complete user experience, with an excellent display, in a design that looks and feels great. You don’t have to deal with as many compromises.