iPhone 4S Test Notes: No More Death Grip [Video]

By Casey Chan Oct 14, 2011 1:57 PM 29,523 62

Apple improved the antenna design in the iPhone 4S in an attempt to kill the notorious Death Grip problem in the old iPhone 4. Did it work? Yes. OH YES. There is no death grip in the iPhone 4S.

We pitted an AT&T iPhone 4S vs an AT&T iPhone 4 to compare the death grip attenuation and when we tried to choke the 4S, it didn't budge. The 5 bars stayed steady throughout our entire test. The old iPhone 4? When gripped, the signal slowly dropped from 5 bars to 3 (and then re-gained those lost bars when we opened it up).

So if you were worried about the Death Grip still existing in the iPhone 4S, worry no more. It's gone. Sayonara. Killed. Buh-byed. Dead dead dead. You can't "hold it wrong" anymore. Finally?

Related Stories

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

The Dead Live Forever On The Internet [Death]

Sorry folks, this story is not about the hippie band from San Francisco. It's about dead people and the websites that let you memorialize them.

It sounds macabre, but we live our lives on the internet, shouldn't our death have a place online, too?

Two online destinations dedicated to the dead are I-Tomb and I-Memorial. I-Tomb is a place for people to honor someone who has passed away, while I-Memorial,is a place for the dying to leave their last wishes.

And there's the other social networks, too. We've already covered what happens to your Facebook profile or Twitter account (hint: they can live on long after you're gone). And, of course, you can always create your own blog like Derek Miller, who chronicled his struggle and eventual death from colorectal cancer. It's one of the most touching collections of online writing I've ever read. [I-Tomb and I-Memorial via ChipChick; Image from Robert Hoetink and Pavels Hotulevs/Shutterstock]

Related Stories

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

1 in 10 Dead Bosses Are Murdered [Death]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has its fascinatingly morbid fatality census report out! Are you a manager of some sort? Watch your back, because the study says if you die on the job, there's a 10% chance it's murder.

That's correct. Out of the 4,547 workplace deaths in 2010, 10% of the kaput management was a direct result of homicide. Gulp. We know it's an American tradition to despise your bosses (except at Gizmodo! Hey guys!), but 10% seems quite high! But maybe it's better to get offed than to die as a boss from falling (9%) or being "struck by an object" (12%). What kind of places are these people managing? Insane asylums? Explosion factories?

Now, we'll break down the rest of the ways you might soon die if you're not management:

Overall, "Transportation and material moving occupations"—people who work operating vehicles—dominated the death list, with 1,115 killed on the job. Only seven percent of them were murdered.

The 45-54 year-old bracket made up the plurality of deaths, with a full quarter. 16% of them plummeted to their demises.

The deadliest state to work in? Texas, with 456 fatalities. The safest? New Hampshire, with only 5. West Virginia won the explosion death contest, with 34—likely from all that coal mining, which is extremely dangerous and explosion-prone.

The most likely way to die? An old fashioned car accident—968 on the job deaths. 45 workers died from "contact with temperature extremes," which sounds particularly awful. 93 died from simply falling down on the ground. 224 died after being "caught in or compressed by equipment or objects," which to me sounds like easily the most gruesome and terrible. Wait, scratch that—the fact that 258 people killed themselves at work is simply horrendous. Ugh.

There aren't any figures for online tech writers, but I suspect the leading cause of death would be overly-bruised elbows sustained during MacBook charger maneuvering, or over-excited touchpad click-induced insta-death from over-exposure to cat videos. [BLS via Consumerist]

Photo: prodakszyn/Shutterstock

You can keep up with Sam Biddle, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Related Stories

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Black Death DNA ID'd by Scientists and What It Means For the Next Zombie Plague [Disease]

The source of Black Death, a plague that devastated Europe in the 14th century, has finally been pinpointed thanks to an analysis of rotting bones and teeth extracted a mass burial site in London.

Until this study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some scientists were skeptical that the incredibly deadly plague came from the Yersinia pestis bacterium, despite a fair amount of evidence that it did. The latest research is proof positive that Y pestis is to blame. Scientists took DNA from 53 bones and 43 teeth that had been buried in East Smithfield, a cemetery build preemptively in 1348 in expectation of much death.

The effort wasn't wasted: two years after the cemetery was in place, the bubonic plague had killed one-third of London's population. East Smithfield holds 2,400 of the victims stacked five deep.

The plague still exists, but it behaves much differently than it did back then. For example, today the plague is carried by rats and is contracted directly from them (or their fleas). In the 14th century, the Black Death passed from person to person, which is what made its destruction so swift. That difference among others made some scientists doubt that the same bacterium caused the disease back then and today.

Knowing that it's one and the same is important because scientists fear the bacterium could morph to become the evil satan of a pathogen it was during medieval times. But they still don't know what made the old Y Pestis so much more deadly than the modern version. If they can figure that out, they'll have a better idea of how to combat the next zombie plague.

"It's probably exceptionally important to find out what made this bug so deadly in the past," Hendrik Polinar, one of the authors of the study, told The New York Times.

Makes sense to me—someone give these scientists more money to figure it out, STAT! Look at those plague researchers. If they're willing to do that for the greater good, I'm happy for my tax money to help make their work happen. And a giant thank you to the (mostly Canadian) organizations who funded (scroll down to acknowledgements) this study.

If you are disease (or DNA) obsessed, you can also see all the DNA sequences for free online.

[PNAS; Image: National Geographic]

You can keep up with Kristen Philipkoski, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, and occasionally Google+ Related Stories

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Yesterday's Earthquake Caused More Twitter Traffic than Bin Laden's Death [Factoid]

What happens when you mix a relatively mild seismic event with an extremely dense population of the tech-savvy and self-centered east coast? Twitter-splosion! Yesterday's quake let loose 5,500 tweets per second, beating Dead Osama and tying Fukushima's 9.0. Priorities!

Between the marble and brick federal egocentrism of DC and the media self-fellation of New York, it's no wonder there were 40,000 tweets regarding the 5.8 tremor within one minute of it happening—and that they reached us in New York before the ground started to shake. People love talking about themselves, especially when they are shaking because of an earthquake.

But for many soft, sensitive east coasters like me, it was also our first earthquake. And that's kind of a big deal! And a particularly rare one for this side of the continent. But still—the fact that yesterday trumped the surprise killing of the most wanted, most heinous terrorist in the history of the world and a unfathomably powerful earthquake that triggered an ongoing nuclear disaster says something about Twitter. It's at its most popular when it gives us a mirror to look into. And next to that mirror is a megaphone to scream at everyone about it. And nothing makes for a good ego screamin' like a non-dangerous earthquake. [Twitter]

You can keep up with Sam Biddle, the author of this post, on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Related Stories

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.