Best Tempered Glass Screen Protectors for Samsung Galaxy Tab S3

What’s the best screen protector for the Galaxy Tab S3?

If you’re going to bother getting a screen protector for your Galaxy Tab S3, then you’ll want to go with tempered glass. If it cracks or chips, it won’t turn into sharp, scratchy shards of death; it’ll become blunt bits, so your screen will stay pristine. That being said, tempered glass is very strong, so you’d be hard-pressed to mess it up without much force.

Here are the best tempered glass screen protectors for your Galaxy Tab S3.

• Pleson
• Supershieldz
• Yoozon
• Spigen
• IQ Shield
• Sparin

Pleson

Pleson’s $30 tempered glass screen protector for the Tab S3 is made to fit perfectly. Its precise laser cut means that your whole screen is protected — no more, no less. Pleson glass features an oleophobic (oil-resistant) and hydrophobic (water-resistant) coating, as well as a surface that repels dirt and dust, so you shouldn’t see fingerprints and if water hits your screen, it’ll just bead and roll off.

Pleson offers a lifetime warranty, so if anything goes wrong (within reason), you’ll receive a replacement.

See at Amazon

Supershieldz

Supershieldz is an old standby for tempered glass screen protectors. It makes quality protectors that are perfectly clear and maintain all the touch sensitivity you’d want and expect from a quality tempered glass screen protector. Like all great protectors, Supershieldz features and anti-scratch and anti-fingerprint coating, so you won’t have to constantly wipe your screen with your shirt.

Supershieldz Amazon ad says the protector fits the Tab S2, but it will also definitely fit your Galaxy Tab S3. For $8, I won’t complain.

See at Amazon

Yoozon

Yoozon’s tempered glass screen protector is Amazon’s current number one new release for the Galaxy Tab S3. It’s 0.33mm thick, which makes for optimal clarity and full touch sensitivity, and like any great tempered glass screen protector, it’s laser cut, so it fits your Tab S3 precisely.

Yoozon offers a two-pack for $12, and you get a lifetime replacement or refund warranty.

See at Amazon

Spigen

Spigen makes great phone cases and that has translated well to tempered glass screen protectors. This two-pack is only about $15 and it features a dust-resistant and oleophobic coating to prevent fingerprints and keep your Tab S3’s screen nice, clean, and pristine. This protector features rounded edges, which is perfect if you like to keep your Galaxy Tab S3 in a case.

See at Amazon

IQ Shield

IQ Shield is known for making excellent screen protectors, and this tempered glass protector for your Galaxy Tab S3 keep with tradition in reliable fashion. IQ Shield promises almost 100% clarity and perfect touch sensitivity, so once you install it, you shouldn’t even notice it’s there. IQ Shields are made from ballistic tempered glass, which is very resistant to impact, so it’s difficult to shatter, meaning your screen stays protected and in one piece. Check it out for about $9.

See at Amazon

Sparin

Sparin’s screen protector is only about $10 on Amazon and has a 4.3-star rating on 1,699 reviews. That ain’t too shabby. Sparin promises its protector won’t interfere with your S Pen, while offering excellent scratch protection and clarity.

In the package you’ll get three guide stickers, two cleaning wipes, a microfiber cloth, and a “dust absorber”.

See at Amazon

Do you use a screen protector?

Do you use a screen protector on your tablets? Which one are you using on your Tab S3? Let us know in the comments below.

Updated March 2018: Updated pricing and added Sparin’s well-reviewed protector.

Court axes FCC robocall rule for being too broad

The previous FCC leadership took some aggressive steps to fight robocalls, but they’ve just been scaled back. A DC Circuit appeals court has shot down an FCC rule for reportedly going far in its definition of an autodialer. The regulations defined an autodialer as any device that could dial numbers that were either stored or produced using a number generator, but Judge Sri Srinivasan saw that as far too generic. Some smartphone calls theoretically broke the law, he said. As an example, the judge noted that you technically faced a $500 fine if you called someone to invite them after obtaining their number through a friend.

The current, pro-deregulation FCC is mostly happy with the decision. Chairman Ajit Pai called the rule a “misguided decision” and said the agency needed to focus on “bad actors.” Banks and credit card providers were certainly eager to quash this particular rule — they were worried that they’d break the law through some calls to their customers.

Not everyone is happy, however. FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel has warned that robocalling is “already out of control,” and argued that the volume of spam calls would “continue to increase” unless the FCC offered a “serious response.”

The commission has taken some action against robocalls, such as measures that let telecoms block spoofed calls. However, the question is whether or not these efforts have any teeth. Critics have complained that the anti-spoofing rule doesn’t require blocking, and there are questions about the FCC’s definition of an autodialer in the wake of this latest ruling. Will it set up a narrower definition, or just leave the concept open to interpretation? While the ruling could prevent spurious lawsuits, it could also make it harder to pin down robocallers in some circumstances.

Via: CNET

Source: USCourts.gov (PDF), FCC (1), (2)

Bite-sized, black-and-white game ‘Minit’ lands April 3rd

A crew of indie veterans, including half of notable studio Vlambeer, will release Minit on April 3rd for Steam (PC), PS4 and Xbox One. In the monochromatic Lo-Fi title, players rushing out their front door to do as much adventuring as possible before the day ends in a real-life minute due to an evil curse that must be undone.

“Every pixel matters. It’s a big adventure, compressed into a tiny amount of time,”one of Minit’s developers Kitty Calis, previously a producer on Horizon: Zero Dawn, said in a press release. “No matter the direction you head in, countless challenges, shady secrets, and needy characters await.”

The team includes Jan Willem Nijman, half of the Dutch indie studio Vlambeer, which has released such celebrated titles as Ridiculous Fishing, Nuclear Throne and LUFTRAUSERS. Musician Jukio Kallio, who provided the soundtracks for the latter two games, will do the same for Minit. Graphic designer Dominik Johann lends his talents to the title; He’d previously worked on other indie games like Hotline Miami 2.

Source: Minit

The Infiniti QX80 is too pricey to have this little tech

I’m not kidding (okay, I’m sort of kidding) when I say that the Infiniti QX80 (starting at $64,750) is only slightly smaller than a studio apartment I used to live in. It’s a very large SUV that’s packed to the gills with luxury features. It’s certainly nicer than my old home. And, with room for eight, it has more seating, too.

But like my old abode, it’s not exactly on the cutting edge of technology. Sure, it’s filled with modern touches you would expect from a luxury SUV, but the QX80 is in a weird spot right now. With parent company Nissan introducing its impressive semi-autonomous driving system ProPilot Assist to the Infiniti Q50 sedan and CarPlay making its way into Nissans, the QX80 feels left behind.

As people generally opt for larger cars and SUVs, the luxury SUV is edging out the high-end sedan as the opulent vehicle of choice. Typically, these lavish cars are where the latest tech lands first. If you’re paying a premium, your entire experience should be premium — from the wood paneling and smooth-as-butter ride, to the latest semi-autonomous features and infotainment system. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

Sitting in the QX80, you lord over other passenger vehicles. It’s a comfortable throne with access to the vehicle’s 400 horsepower and 413 pounds of torque. All that power is derived from the 5.6-liter V8. It would be an impressively huge engine in a smaller SUV. In the case of the all-wheel drive model I tested, the engine pushes nearly six tons of car. It easily caught up with traffic, had no problems overtaking other vehicles and made quick work of hill climbs. But that power comes at a high price.

The QX80 is rated at just 13 miles per gallon in the city and 19 on the highway. During my drives, I averaged 16.4 miles per gallon. That’s with hundreds of miles of highway driving. Not that this should be a surprise for anyone in the market for an SUV this size.

Folks who actually buy large SUVs seem happy to trade efficiency for opulence, and the QX80 is indeed ready to pamper. All of the seats are unconditionally comfortable. The rear seats in particular are equipped with headrest displays and wireless headphones so that passengers can enjoy a show or movie while ignoring the driver (aka mom or dad). As those children grow, there’s plenty of legroom for rear passengers. If you’re a giant like myself, the third-row seating will suffice for quick jaunts. But for anything longer than a few minutes, the cramped accommodations will quickly wear on passengers.

If there’s any quibble with the luxury of the QX80’s interior it’s the lack of massage chairs. If you’re going after the Cadillac Escalade, you need to at least have the option of massaging seats. Nothing says extravagance like having your back rubbed by a car while you’re cruising down the freeway at 80 miles per hour.

Driving the SUV (without being massaged I might add), I was able to handle corners as well you would expect with a vehicle this large. The QX80 has Hydraulic Body Motion Control that’s supposed to reduce body lean and smooth out the ride. Frankly, it was tough to know how well that worked on corners, but the ride was floating on a cloud.

It wasn’t just on the freeway and paved roads where the QX80 felt like it was floating. I had the opportunity to actually take it off-road into mud and on back roads where the potholes outnumbered the flat areas. Sure, the QX80 is made for cruising in town, but it’s just as comfortable spitting mud out of the tires and navigating around ruts.

But, while it’s comfortable, luxurious and able to tackle actual off-road environments, the QX80 is still devoid of any truly cutting-edge tech. And some of the features it does offer have issues.

The adaptive cruise-control system on two occasions warned me that the front-facing radar was obstructed. That meant no more cruise control (which is a huge bummer when you’re super tense and could use a back massage). I would have understood if this happened in the mud, but both times it happened I was driving in rain.

The lack of Android Auto or CarPlay is also disappointing. It’s getting tougher to excuse cars — especially luxury vehicles — that don’t support these systems. Especially since Infiniti tweeted back in 2017 that CarPlay was coming. The standard infotainment system isn’t horrible, but it doesn’t live up to the rest of the vehicle.

Another feature that’s hopefully coming is Nissan’s ProPilot Assist. This impressive semi-autonomous system is available on the Leaf, Rogue and the 2019 QX50. Fingers crossed that the QX80 is on the shortlist of vehicles getting the technology during the next refresh. We’re also hoping the upcoming variable compression engine will eventually make its way to the QX80. Long story short, the technology adjusts how the engine runs and could lower consumption during highway driving while still offering low-end torque for overtaking other cars on the freeway.

In the meantime, the QX80 has made a nice place for itself in the very large luxury SUV market. It doesn’t have the latest tech (which is disappointing) and sometimes the tech it does have fails at weird times. But, if you just want to feel fancy while lording over the peons in their sedans and compact SUVs (scoff) and if you can deal with spending a large chunk of your paycheck on gas each week, you’ll feel at home. Just know you’ll have to get your back massage elsewhere.

Source: Infiniti

These white-hat Twitter bots collaborate to solve chemistry problems

Tek Image/Getty Images

For a lot of people, the term “Twitter bot” carries some negative connotations. But a fascinating research project coming out of the U.K.’s University of Glasgow is doing its bit to change that — by using algorithmic online communications not to tweet out controversial messages, but to carry out some cutting-edge chemistry.

Developed by chemistry professor Lee Cronin and his team, the #RealTimeChem project uses a pair of robots to perform chemical reactions in the lab, executing simple experiments involving mixing liquids and then recording the results. The Twitter part relates to the fact that the two robots aren’t physically in the same lab, but are in different ones, and are communicating with one another via Twitter.

Given simple chemical experiments (for example, finding a particular color liquid out of 117 possible combinations), the robots shared their findings with one another using the microblogging service. By performing experiments in this collaborative way, they were able to halve the time it took to answer specific questions because they were able to divide up the work between them.

Right now, this is a proof of concept in many ways, but Cronin told Digital Trends that it could be an exciting first step in a new means of doing chemistry. The idea of robots carrying out chemical experiments is not entirely new, but connecting them together like this is something we’ve not come across before. Furthermore, Cronin said that the concept is scalable beyond just two robots — so it would be possible to conceivably have hundreds of robots around the world working together and sharing their results.

“You could imagine that chemists could access the platform and send a message saying, ‘I’ve got a big problem I’m trying to solve. Can other people help me?’” Cronin said. He speculated that different laboratories could then help out by making different molecules and reporting back to one another.

“It allows you to delocalize, decentralize, and parallelize the making of molecules, to make it much faster,” he said. “It’s infinitely scalable. If you’ve got one robot doing 100 experiments in an hour, two robots could do 200 experiments, three could do 300 experiments, and so on. You’d have linear scaling, at least.”

It’s almost enough to make you love Twitter bots!

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You can control this robot as it trawls the Chicago River picking up trash

A lot of folks have Roomba vacuum cleaners in their homes. Heck, some of us have gone even further and incorporated similar robots into our yards for tasks like pulling weeds in the garden or cleaning our gutters. There aren’t too many such robots outside of individual homes, though. A new Kickstarter project aims to change that, with one specific cleanup mission in mind: removing the trash from the Chicago River.

The project is the work of Urban Rivers, a team that previously created a successful crowdfunding campaign to develop “floating gardens” to restore natural wildlife habitats in the Chicago River. Having completed that goal, they now want to further improve the waterway by building a trash robot that can “drive” around the river and collect trash before it is removed by a human volunteer.

“When we installed our floating garden last year, we had a problem with trash accumulation,” Nick Wesley, one of the brains behind the project, told Digital Trends. “Initially we just threw manpower at the issue, but the comings and goings of the torrent of garbage was unpredictable. People would get suited up to clean the trash, and by the time they arrived it would have moved to a different part of the river. We realized the best solution would be to have something there 24/7.”

Other than its watery setting, there’s one crucial difference between the 24/7 robot the team has built and the familiar Roomba vacuum cleaner: rather than being autonomous like the Roomba, this water-based trash-cleaning robot is controlled by people. More specifically, it’s controlled by people like you, since the idea is that users will be able to log in via a mobile app and drive the robot around, seeking out trash to herd.

You don’t have to be in the area, either. Thanks to an in-built camera and web controls, you should be able to control the robot from wherever you happen to be. To make this extra fun, the team plans to gamify the experience so that you’ll be able to rack up high scores by doing this.

Unlike your average Kickstarter campaign, with this project you’re not actually pledging money to place a pre-order for a product (although we guess the same rules about the risks of crowdfunding campaigns still apply). Instead, the team is offering various rewards — ranging from beta and alpha access to the platform, all the way through to a $1,000 reward to actually name the finished robot. Trashy McTrashface, anyone?

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Move over graphene! Gallenene is the latest 2D material on the block

Graphene is a form of carbon made up of 2D planar sheets one atom thick, in which the atoms are arranged in a honeycomb-shaped lattice. It’s one of the most remarkable and unique materials in the world, capable of doing everything from detecting cancer cells and creating incredibly strong body armor to acting as a kick-ass superconductor.

But while graphene is the star quarterback of the 2D material lineup, it’s not the only player in the game. In recent years, researchers have been able to develop 2D versions of a number of other materials, including borophene, germanene, silicene, stanene, phosphorene, bismuthene, and others. Now researchers from Rice University and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore have added one other atomically flat material to the list: a 2D form of the soft metal gallium, which they call “gallenene.”

While it’s not yet clear whether it will perform feats as remarkable as graphene, the researchers who developed it think that gallenene could have useful applications within nanoscale electronics.

The team who isolated the 2D gallenene had a challenging time doing so. Unlike graphene, which can be extracted from chunks of graphite using adhesive tape, gallium layers are too strong for this kind of simple approach. Instead, the researchers heated the gallium to around 85 degrees Fahrenheit, only slightly below its melting point. This allowed them to drip the material onto a glass slide. After it had cooled, they then pressed a flat piece of silicon dioxide on top of the gallium, after which they could remove a flat layer of gallenene.

They additionally found that gallenene binds very easily to other substrates, forming gallium nitride, gallium arsenide, silicone, and nickel. These various combinations all possess different electronic properties — hinting at plenty of further research and finely tuned applications down the road.

“The current work utilizes the weak interfaces of solids and liquids to separate thin 2-D sheets of gallium,” said Chandra Sekhar Tiwary, principal investigator on the project, in a statement. “The same method can be explored for other metals and compounds with low melting points.”

A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal Science Advances.

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In new breakthrough, CRISPR tools target RNA to tackle dementia

Since it was first demonstrated in 2007, the gene-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has been used to edit DNA in an attempt to make organisms like drought-resistant crops and disease-resistant cattle. In November, the technology was even used in an attempt to treat a man with a serious inherited disease.

Now a team of researchers from the Salk Institute have identified a new family of CRISPR enzymes that target RNA instead of DNA, and used the tool to address protein imbalance in cells isolated from a person suffering from dementia.

“RNA ‘messages’ are key mediators of many biological processes,” Patrick Hsu, a Salk biology fellow who led the study, told Digital Trends. “They are the dynamic counterpart to comparatively static DNA sequences. In many diseases these RNA messages are out of balance, so the ability to target them directly and modulate them in a robust and specific way will be a great complement to DNA editing.”

Hsu continued, “Our goal was to explore the natural diversity of CRISPR systems throughout microbial life to find an RNA-targeting enzyme that would be highly robust and specific in human cells.”

Hsu admitted that the success rate for a project with such a broad scope was “generally quite low,” and that a few additional requirements made their effort even more complex. For one, they were determined to find a small CRISPR variant that could deliver RNA virally to parts of the brain — a function inaccessible to tools like Cas9. And the tool needed to be more flexible and efficient than today’s gold-standard RNA targeting technology.

To find their desired tool, Hsu and his colleagues first created a computational program that combed bacterial DNA databases, looking for the patterns of repeating DNA that signal a CRISPR system, and identified a family of RNA-targeting enzymes that they named Cas13d. They then specified their search in the Cas13d family for the version most relevant for use in human cells and landed on a gut bacterium called Ruminococcus flavefaciens XPD3002, or CasRx.

The researchers engineered CasRx to function in human cells and address a form of dementia called neurodegenerative disorder FTD. To do so, they packaged the tool into a virus and delivered it to neurons that were cultured from stem cells of an FTD patient. In a study published this week in the journal Cell, CasRx showed 80 percent effectiveness in rebalancing tau proteins, which are implicated in variants of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease.

“This tool will be very useful for studying RNA biology in the near term and hopefully for treating RNA-related diseases in the future,” Hsu said. “Gene editing leads to changes in a genome sequence through DNA cuts and its effects are permanent in an edited cell … RNA-targeting with CasRx can be used to generate transient or graded changes without inducing DNA damage, such as to restore RNA levels to a healthy state.”

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The barbers of the future may offer a trim, shampoo, and graphene infusion

Jiaxing Huang / Northwestern University

Scientific advances take many forms, from the mundane to game-changing. There are those that make us marvel at the physical world and those that make us wonder what researchers will think of next. Consider this an example of the latter.

Scientists from Northwestern University have found yet another possible application for the atom-thick “wonder material” graphene — as a hair dye. But this isn’t just any old cuticle-stripping dye. According to a study published this week in the journal Chem, graphene can be used to develop a non-toxic and anti-static hair dye, capable of altering color without chemically affecting hair.

“​We demonstrated the use of graphene to solve a chemical problem,” Jiaxing Huang, a Northwestern materials engineer who led the study, told Digital Trends. “These black carbon sheets work very well as hair dyes.”

Graphene has a few properties that make it truly extraordinary. At just one atom thick, it’s both the thinnest and strongest material known to science. It’s also highly flexible, conductive, and transparent.

Huang and his colleagues wanted to leverage some of the material’s properties to circumvent the undesirable effects of conventional hair dyeing, which entails toxic chemicals like bleach and ammonia. However, rather than using the pure graphene, they turned to it’s cheaper relative, graphene oxide.

Graphene oxides’s thin and flexible geometry enabled the researchers to essentially wrap each hair with a sheet of the material, using a non-toxic polymer to make it stick. The new dye withstood 30 hair washes, the commercial standard for hair dye, and came with the added anti-static bonus, meaning it won’t frizz easily. Huang has created dyes in black and brown, and is experimenting with other colors.

Graphene has baffled and tantalized scientists since it was first discovered in 2004. It didn’t take long for researchers to theorize about the potential applications for such an unusual but promising material. It’s been projected that the material could enable improved water filtration systems, semiconductors, and solar cells, to name a few ideas. Most of graphene’s applications remain theoretical though — and when it is successfully used, it has so far rarely made it out of the lab — making graphene seem like little more than a headline buzzword.

Still, Huang and his colleagues are confident that their new hair dye will be different.

“I think making hair dye could become a killer application of graphene materials, because it uses very humble, basic properties of graphene, [such as] their black color and shape,” he said.

But if we’ve learned anything about graphene (and, for that matter, hair dyeing), we’ll need to wait and see before making any radical predictions.

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A.I. spots thousands of unidentified craters on the moon

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The moon is under constant bombardment by meteorites and asteroids that can leave massive craters on its surface. The Aitken basin, the largest impact crater on the lunar surface, has a diameter equivalent to the distance from London to Athens, Greece. But not all craters are so noticeable — most are relatively insignificant.

Thousands of previously unknown craters have been spotted on the moon thanks to an artificial intelligence program designed by researchers at the University of Toronto.

“We created an A.I. powered method that autocratically identifies craters on the surface of the moon, and possibly other bodies,” Mohamad Ali-Dib, a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Planetary Sciences who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. “It will allow scientists to find and measure craters down to scales smaller than ever, and on more solar system bodies than previously possible. In turn, this will allow us a deeper understanding of the history of the impactors that created the craters and hence the history of the solar system.”

Ali-Dib and his colleagues created a convolutional neural network — the same kind used to train self-driving cars — that could identify and count lunar craters. Though this has previously been attempted by other researchers, past examples have struggled when tasked with analyzing new patches of craters. The system developed by Ali-Dib and his team can both generalize from images of the moon and even spot craters on other bodies, such as Mercury.

In a paper that is currently under review in the journal Icarus, the researchers demonstrate that their A.I. performed twice as well as manual counting, spotting 6,000 previously unidentified craters.

Ali-Dib described how they trained the program: “As input, the model takes a digital elevation map of the moon. The convolutional neural network then transforms the input into a binary rings image, with zeros everywhere except ones at the craters rims. This is the output. Our post-processing pipeline then extracts the position and size of the craters from the output rings binary image.”

Crater size and distribution are the key features for scientists, who use this data to calculate the size and distribution of the objects that created these craters in the first place. Comparing this information to their models of the solar system gives them a better understanding of the history of our solar system.

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