5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Call Facebook Home

t’s not a ‘Facebook Phone,’ it’s not a Facebook operating system—it’sFacebook Home. On Thursday Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team laid to rest the persistent ‘Facebook Phone’ rumors  and unveiled its new app family for Android. The app launcher, which is essentially a Facebook overlay for select Android Jelly Bean devices, brings Facebook to your lock screen, Home screen, messenger, and well, your entire phone. But is Facebook’s Home on Android the solution for staying connected to your favorite people, or is it more trouble than it’s worth? Here are five things to look out for before installing Facebook Home on April 12.

Other Social Networks Locked Out

Being connected to people rather than apps means integrating all of your social networks, not just Facebook. With Facebook Home, all of your other social networks are likely to be pushed into the background. During its press event on Thursday, the company made it clear that you would seamlessly receive Facebook notifications, messages, and texts directly to your Home screen. However, this could downplay (or eliminate) alerts from Google Services, Twitter, or any other networks you care about.

More: 7 Twitter Tips to Step Your Tweet Up

Creepy Floating Heads That Follow You

With Facebook’s new chat head feature, both your SMS and Facebook messages pop up on your screen no matter what you’re doing. But rather than displaying a message or notification, tiny round photos of your friends pop up and essentially follow you until you acknowledge the message. This also means that you’ll be receiving Facebook messages all the time, essentially giving all of your Facebook friends the power to text you without obtaining your phone number. Hopefully, there will be an option to go invisible.

Ads Coming to Your Home Screen

Facebook emphasized how convenient it would be to see all your social activity right on your lock screen, but left out that you’ll eventually need to navigate through ads. “There are no ads in this yet, I’m sure that one day there will be,” Zuckerberg said to The Verge when asked about the monetization strategy for Facebook Home. Another team member reportedly confirmed that these ads would be coming to cover feed specifically, but won’t be included when Facebook Home launches.

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Privacy Concerns

Facebook Home brings your newsfeed to your phone’s lock screen, which means that theoretically anyone who grabs your phone can access your Facebook account. Facebook hasn’t clarified how this feature would work if you have a lock pattern protecting your screen, but exposing your news feed makes it that much easier for others to obtain personal information about you. If your phone is left unprotected, some else could browse through posts in your feed, comment on stories, and “Like” items in a few quick seconds.

Reliance on Profile Pictures

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Facebook Home comes with a slew of features that make it easier to stay connected with friends, but others could also add to the confusion. Remember last week when everyone changed their profile photo to an equal sign in support of gay marriage? Good luck identifying that chat head when it pops up on your screen.

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Teenager Designs Safer Nuclear Power Plants

Do nuclear power plants need a redesign? Critics of nuclear energy seem to think so, and so does nuclear energy advocate, Taylor Wilson. A physics wunderkind, Wilson became the youngest person to ever create fusion at age 14. And since graduating from high school last year, he's devoted himself to finding innovative solutions to the world's biggest problems.

The now nineteen-year-old Wilson recently spoke to a TED audience about his design for a small, modular fission reactor that is both less expensive and much safer to operate than today's nuclear reactors.

Its assembly-line construction, 30-year fuel life and low usage cost make Wilson's reactor an ideal source of electricity for both developing nations and space explorers, according to the young scientist.

To get an idea of how today's nuclear reactors work, Wilson first explained to his listeners at TED how electricity is produced using a steam turbine. In a steam turbine system, water boils and turns to steam, which turns the turbine and creates electricity.

Nuclear fission, Wilson said, is really just a fancy tool for getting the water in a steam turbine system to boil quickly and steadily.

Today's nuclear power plants produce steam for their turbines using pressurized-water reactors — or big pots of water under high pressure — which are heated up with help from uranium dioxide fuel rods encased in zirconium. These rods control and maintain the nuclear fission reaction.

When nuclear power was first used to heat water in a turbine system, it was a big advancement in existing technology. But Wilson said his idea for a redesign stemmed from the suspicion that it wasn't really the best way to do it.

"Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here?" Wilson said he asked himself. "And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world."

Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up.

Wilson's fission reactor operates at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius. And because the laws of thermodynamics say that high temperatures lead to high efficiencies, this reactor is 45 to 50 percent efficient.

Traditional steam turbine systems are only 30 to 35 percent efficient because their reactors run at low temperatures of about 200 to 300 degrees Celsius.

And Wilson's reactor isn't just hot, it's also powerful. Despite its small size, the reactor generates between 50 and 100 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 homes, according to Wilson.

Another innovative component of Wilson's take on nuclear fission is its source of fuel. The molten salt reactor runs off of "down-blended weapons pits." In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes.

And unlike traditional nuclear power plants, Wilson's miniature power plants would be buried below ground, making them a boon for security advocates.

According to Wilson, his reactor only needs to be refueled every 30 years, compared to the 18-month fuel cycle of most power plants. This means they can be sealed up underground for a long time, decreasing the risk of proliferation.

Wilson's reactor is also less prone to proliferation because it doesn't operate at high pressure like today's pressurized-water reactors or use ceramic control rods, which release hydrogen when heated and lead to explosions during nuclear power plant accidents, like the one at Fukushima in 2011.

In the event of an accident in one of Wilson's reactors, the fuel from the core would drain into a "sub-critical" setting- or tank- underneath the reactor, which neutralizes the reaction. The worst that could happen, according to Wilson, is that the reactor is destroyed.

"But we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land," said Wilson. "So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity."

Wilson said his idea could help combat climate change, bring affordable power to the developing world and power rockets to explore space.

"There's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars," Wilson said, "Because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky ... there's something poetic about perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy."

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New Camera Sensor Eliminates Need for Flash

No flash? No problem. A new imaging sensor could soon make it possible for photographers to take clear, sharp photos, even in dim lighting.

Created by a team of researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore, the new sensor is highly sensitive to both visible and infrared light, which means it could be used in everything from the family Nikon to surveillance and satellite cameras. 

The sensor, which is 1,000 times more sensitive to light than the imaging sensors of most of today's cameras, gets this high photoresponse from its innovative structure.

It's made of graphene, a super strong carbon compound with a honeycomb structure that is as flexible as rubber, more conductive than silicon and which resists heat better than a diamond.

Graphene, which is a one atom-thick layer of the mineral graphite, has already earned a reputation as the building material of the future. Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov took home the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for their work with the compound.

The inventor of the new sensor, Wang Qijie, an assistant professor at NTU's School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, said this is the first time that a broad-spectrum, high photosensitive sensor has been made using pure graphene.

"We have shown that it is now possible to create cheap, sensitive and flexile sensors from graphene alone," said Wang. "We expect our innovation will have great impact not only on the consumer imaging industry, but also in satellite imaging and communication industries, as well as the mid-infrared applications."

Wang said the key to his new sensor is the use of "light-trapping" nanostructures that use graphene as a base. The nanostructures hold onto light-generated electron particles for much longer than conventional sensors.

This results in a stronger than usual electric signal, which can be processed into an image, like a photograph captured by a digital camera.

Most of today's camera sensors use a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor as a base. But Wang said that his graphene base is far more effective, producing clearer, sharper photos.

And, according to Wang, he even took current manufacturing practices into account when designing this new sensor. In principle, the camera industry will be able to keep using the same process to make its sensors, but simply switch out the base materials for graphene.

If the industry chooses to adopt his design, Wang said it could lead to cheaper, lighter cameras with longer battery lives for all.

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Barely There? Chinese Company Debuts World's Thinnest Condom

It's so thin it set records. A Chinese company has created the world's thinnest latex condom, snagging the Guinness World Record for the barely-there rubber.

The so-called Aoni condom measures just 0.0014 inches (0.036 millimeters) thick, beating the previous record-holder, Okamoto of Japan, reported The Province. The ultra-thin condom was manufactured by Guangzhou Daming United Rubber Products, a China-based company that produces roughly 200 million condoms annually.

Currently, the Aoni is available only in Asia, but Victor Chan, who led the project, is eventually hoping to introduce the product to North American markets. He said the design process for the thin but durable Aoni condom was challenging. 

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