Last week we posted our Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored 2014, where the battery run down times of Firefox 31, IE11 Desktop, IE11 Modern, Chrome 36, and Chrome 37 beta were tested on Windows. We used GUI automation to open browsers, tabs, and visit websites to simulate a real user in a light reading pattern. The article answered a lot of questions about popular browser battery life on Windows, but it raised additional questions as well.

Chrome 36 tested with the best battery life, but was the only browser that did not render correctly at 3200x1800 due to lack of HiDPI support. In the Chrome 37 beta, HiDPI support improved rendering but also took a 25% dive in battery life tying it for last place. However, the Chrome 37 beta includes more changes than just HiDPI support (along with some debugging code), so was the battery life penalty from the now-native 3200x1800 rendering or was it something else? After a few more days of testing at 1600x900 with 100% DPI scaling, we can narrow in on an answer.

When both Chrome 36 and Chrome 37 beta natively render at 1600x900 there is less than 3% difference in battery life. Two tests of each browser were performed and the results averaged. The variation between runs was only 1%. Looking at our previous numbers of Chome 36 and 37 beta on the HiDPI setting of 3200x1800 and 200% scaling, the situation is entirely different.

I've added an asterisk here (and clarified the same text on the original article) to indicate Chrome 36 isn't actually rendering at 3200x1800, but rather at 1600x900 and relying on Windows DPI Virtualization to scale up to 3200x1800.

Looking at the numbers, there's some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Chrome 37's new features likely won't hurt the battery life of current users. If you are using Chrome now, you are probably not using a HiDPI display due to the existing blurry rendering. For these users, the pending Chrome 37 upgrade has no significant impact on battery life. The bad news is that if you have been avoiding Chrome due to its HiDPI rending issues, Chrome 37 resolves those issues but also appears to provide worse battery efficiency compared to Internet Explorer. On our XPS 15 that equated to about an hour less of mobility.

Given that this is the first version of Chrome to properly support HiDPI, it's entirely possible – even likely – that there are many opportunities to further optimize the algorithms and hopefully return battery life at least close to Chome 36 levels. A slight dip in battery life is expected as it takes more work to render a 3200x1800 image compared to a 1600x900 image, but a 20% drop seems rather extreme. We'll have to see what future updates bring, but hopefully by noting the discrepancy it will encourage developers to better tune performance.

The US state of Missouri is deploying the National Guard to Ferguson as protests escalate over the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager.

Kurdish officials say that their Peshmerga fighters have broadly taken control of a strategically important dam in northern Iraq from Islamist militants.

Ali Moore reports from the Singapore Garden Festival, where designers, horticulturists and thousands of orchids have created new ideas for Asia's gardens.

Thirteen more foreign tourists and Indonesian crew have been rescued after a boat sank off the coast of eastern Indonesia.

Finally, the KDE project has released KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment.

Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways, and both attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much-anticipated, tablet-based future (which may or may not ever arrive).

Linux desktops like KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Mate, and even Cinnamon are the other side of the fence. None has re-invented itself too much. They continue to offer users a traditional desktop experience, which is not to say these projects aren't growing and refining. All of them continue to turn out incremental releases that fine tune what is a well-proven desktop model.

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Version:next-20140818 (linux-next) Released:2014-08-17

We've all had this first-world problem, but USB is still leagues better than what came before. Sheepfilms

Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a “Universal” Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables.

The USB Implementers Forum, the group of companies that oversees the standard, is fully cognizant of this problem, which it wants to solve with a new type of cable dubbed Type-C. This plug is designed to replace USB Type-A and Type-B ports of all sizes on phones, tablets, computers, and other peripherals. Type-C will support the new, faster USB 3.1 spec with room to grow beyond that as bandwidth increases.

It's possible that in a few years, USB Type-C will have become the norm, totally replacing the tangled nest of different cables that we all have balled up in our desk drawers. For now, it’s just another excuse to pass around that dog-eared XKCD comic about the proliferation of standards. While we wait to see whether Type-C will save us from cable hell or just contribute to it, let’s take a quick look at where USB has been over the years, what competing standards it has fought against, and what technologies it will continue to grapple with in the future.

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On Friday, Microsoft recommended uninstalling a recent security update following reports that it caused Blue Screens of Death.

ComputerWorld reports that the patch—MS 14-045—was first announced on August 12 before it received further attention on Friday. The patch intended to fix three issues including one in the Windows kernel. But soon after it was initially released, a Microsoft support forum thread sprung up with tales of "Stop 0x50 errors," aka blue screens. (ComputerWorld notes the thread has surpassed 50,000 views within the week.)

Microsoft's updated information page for the patch includes an official, relatively detail-free explanation:

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The BBC's Paul Wood has travelled through northern Syria and northern Iraq and has met with civilians who have had their lives destroyed by the crisis in the region.

US police fired smoke bombs and tear gas at a crowd which defied an overnight curfew in Ferguson, where a black teenager was shot dead by police last week.

Yousuf Fahimuddin

The former chief executive officer of Redflex, a major red light camera (RLC) vendor, has been indicted on federal corruption charges stemming from a contract with the City of Chicago.

On Wednesday, in addition to former CEO Karen Finley, government prosecutors also indicted John Bills, former managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, and Bills’ friend Martin O’Malley, who was hired as a contractor by Redflex.

According to the indictment, O’Malley himself was paid $2 million for his services as a contractor, effectively making him one of the company’s highest paid workers. Much of that money was then funneled to Bills, who used it for personal gain. Via Redflex employees, Bills also acquired a Mercedes and a condominium in Arizona. In December 2013, Ars reported on red light cameras nationwide, and in particular, Redflex's four cameras in the central California town of Modesto.

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The new Nomiku is circulating chilled water to cool down the bubbly. Temperature is listed in Celsius. Megan Geuss

Nomiku, a small company founded by culinarily-inclined couple Lisa and Abe Fetterman, launched a Kickstarter this week to raise money for their second retail-ready sous-vide machine. The new machine, which will have a Wi-Fi connection and the ability to integrate with a companion app, was funded in under 12 hours. That’s impressive for a Kickstarter, but even more impressive considering how relatively obscure sous-vide still is outside of fine-dining and high-tech circles.

Sous-vide is a method of cooking food in a vacuum-sealed bag in precisely temperature-controlled water. Preparation usually requires a very long cook time, but it allows food to cook at a much lower temperature, which many people find makes meat more tender and vegetables better-flavored because they’re all cooked evenly throughout. Although the method was discovered hundreds of years ago, it has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the last decade thanks to “the scientific cooking movement,” as the New York Times called it in 2005: “Cryovacking, which is more often called sous vide (French for ''under vacuum''), is poised to change the way restaurant chefs cook—and like the Wolf stove and the immersion blender, it will probably trickle down to the home kitchen someday.”

If Nomiku and its gaggle of competitors have their way, “someday” is today. The original Nomiku, which went on sale last year, was one of the first sous-vide appliances that was affordable to regular households at $300. Today, competing companies Anova and Sansaire both have sous-vide cookers that look similar design-wise and cost about $100 less than Nomiku’s first-generation sous-vide appliance, which you can find on Amazon. A company called Mellow is also taking pre-orders for a device that is Wi-Fi connected, but it comes with its own tub, which is either a turn-off for people with smaller kitchens or a huge boon for people who do have the space and want something that looks more elegant. (Our senior reviews editor Lee Hutchinson just put his name on the list for a Mellow—look for a sous-vide cook-off later in the year!)

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The 2014 Pokémon World Championships are happening this weekend, and the finals are underway right now on Twitch.

The Junior division championship already took place, with Kota Yamamoto (Japan) securing victory in game three when his Aegislash and Zapdos took down London Swan's (US) Rotom. (Yamamoto's brother Shota won the same division back in 2010.) The Senior division is now happening with the Master division to follow. Every finals is a best of three match, where players compete in Double Battles using Pokémon X/Y on any device from the Nintendo 3DS family (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS XL, or Nintendo 2DS). If you're newish to the game, play-by-play announcers are on hand to analyze the action. So far, they've noted things like Garchomp being the most popular selection in the field and the resurgence of Red/Blue Pokémon overall (particularly a Lapdos in play for the Senior division match).

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On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state authorities in Missouri reached an agreement that members of the public and journalists are within their rights to record on-duty police officers. Protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, MO have continued throughout the weekend, sparked by the police shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

The outrage was flamed by the authorities' tone-deaf response in the first few days of the protests, when police wearing riot gear used tear gas and military-style vehicles to force protesters to disperse. During that time, several protesters were told to cease videotaping police activity and arrests were made including Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly.

Politico was given a copy of the agreement by the ACLU. The news site reports, “The St. Louis county government, the city of Ferguson, and the superintendent of the Missouri State Highway Patrol all acknowledged in a Friday agreement that both members of the media and the public at large are permitted to record events so long as they are not interfering with the duties of the police.”

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Matt Grainger explains how he has managed to turn his passion for surfing into a profitable business.

The larval form of the midge (left) and the adult. Denlinger Lab, Ohio State

When the term "extremophiles" gets thrown around, it's usually in reference to single-celled organisms that thrive in high salt or near-boiling water. But there are a few animals that also manage to make do in rather extreme conditions.

Perhaps the top example is a wingless midge that goes by Belgica antarctica. As its name implies, it's native to the frozen continent—in fact, it's the only insect that's native. (A few others have more recently introduced themselves from South America in recent years, and cockroaches undoubtedly ride in shipments to research bases.) Now, to try to help understand how anything can survive in such inhospitable conditions, researchers sequenced the genome of the midge and discovered it's gotten rid of a lot of the DNA that's frequently termed junk.

The researchers describe just how difficult the insect's living conditions are in detail: "The larvae, encased in ice for most of the year, require two years to complete their development and then pupate and emerge as adults at the beginning of their third austral summer. The [wingless] adults crawl over surfaces of rocks and other substrates, mate, lay eggs and die within 7–10 days after emergence."

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A group of 35 men, women and children found inside a shipping container at a port are understood to be Sikhs from Afghanistan, Essex Police say.

Cheuk-Man Kong

I consider myself pretty lucky, overall, for how rarely I've broken my phone in the number of times it has flown out of my hands three, four, or even five feet in the air. These are times I've misjudged a throw onto a bed or couch and had it bounce off onto the floor; times I thought I had it perfectly balanced on that uneven surface; times I thought my grip was firm and true only for that grip to give out unexpectedly; and times I went to reach for it but didn't so much reach for it as Falcon-punch it off the surface where it rested. My phone seems to spend almost as much time in the air or on the ground, face down, in a quantum superposition of shattered and intact, as it does safely in my hands.

One recent and unusually fun Tuesday, in my happy-hour two-drink overconfidence, I attempted a bold maneuver. I put my phone back in my crowded purse. Rather than pulling it off, the phone went rogue and flew out of my hands, landing on its bottom-right corner on the pavement. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the screen. I'd done it again.

Cracked screens are a little-studied phenomenon in smartphone ownership, presumably because researchers have much better things to do. One survey from 2013 by a "mobile insurance" company with an obvious vested interest in reminding everyone how fragile their phones are suggested that as many as 23 percent of iPhone owners (of the 2,471 surveyed) have cracked their screens.

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Jamaican sprinter and world record holder Usain Bolt dances samba with children on Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach ahead of a 100m race to promote the Rio 2016 Games.