NASA locates coldest place on Earth

If you like the cold (really, really like the cold), then you might see if your travel agent can book you a ticket to visit the East Antarctic Plateau ice sheet. NASA announced that a particular high ridge located there is the coldest place on Earth. Temperatures in the hollows on the ridge drop to minus 133.6 degrees Fahrenheit on some winter nights.

Pinpointing the coldest place on Earth wasn't the simplest task. A team of scientists dug through data delivered by the Landsat 8 satellite, a shared project with the US Geological Survey, along with data from other satellites. All in all, they had 32 years of data from multiple satellites to study before declaring the ridge the coldest spot on the planet.

It was previously thought that perhaps the Russian Vostok Research Station in East Antarctica was the coldest spot, with its minus 128.6 Fahrenheit record low temperature set in 1983.

"We had a suspicion this Antarctic ridge was likely to be extremely cold, and colder than Vostok because it's higher up the hill. With the launch of Landsat 8, we finally had a sensor capable of really investigating this area in more detail," said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., in a statement.

The Landsat 8 satellite has scientists excited. Not only has it delivered the location of the coldest place on Earth, but it will continue to generate accurate data on climate change and help scientists monitor remote icy spots on the planet where humans wouldn't want to set foot.

Ubuntu Touch OS wins its first smartphone partner

Canonical has just signed its first deal to supply a smartphone with its mobile operating system, Canonical founder and product strategy leader Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview at the LeWeb conference. He wouldn't say which company has agreed to use the Linux-based OS, but said it will be offered on high-end phones in 2014.

"We have concluded our first set of agreements to ship Ubuntu on mobile phones," Shuttleworth said. "We've shifted gears from 'making a concept' to 'it's going to ship.' That has a big impact on the team."
And, he said, Canonical is in board-level discussions with several others: "We are now pretty much at the board level on four household brands. They sell a lot of phones all over the world, in emerging and fully emerged markets, to businesses and consumers."

It's significant progress for a nine-year-old company that has specialized in the Ubuntu version of Linux. But it's a very long way to making even a small dent in the dominance of Google's Android and Apple's iOS.

Apple wins patent for curved touch-screen design

Apple seems to have its eye on the curved display market, at least as evidenced by a newly awarded patent.
Granted Tuesday by the US Patent and Trademark Office, a patent dubbed simply "Curved touch sensor" outlines a technical process to achieve higher-quality curved displays. Current sensor displays are typically very thin, so thin that their components can sometimes be damaged during the fabrication process. Apple has a way around that.
The patent suggests placing a thin film over a flexible substrate while the substrate is flat. This new pattern is then joined to a flexible substrate. A high level of heat is applied, allowing the substrate to be manipulated into a curved state without warping or other defects.

The resulting sensor display can be thinner than the traditional flat-substrate design and offer a higher degree of sensitivity. The technology would fit most naturally into a smartphone, but Apple also sees its use in touch-pads, mice, and other devices.