Chromebox

The Asus Chromebox is a very small fanless, headless box that will go on sale in March for just $180. There’s a 1.4GHz Celeron 2955U (Haswell) CPU, paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of flash storage. On the connectivity side of things, there’s Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, 4x USB 3.0, DisplayPort, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, and an SD card slot. Graphics-wise, the HDMI and DisplayPort are powered by the Celeron 2955U’s integrated GPU — which won’t be playing any high-res games, but it should be more than enough for full-screen HD-video playback. AnandTech reports that there will be Core i3 and Core i7 Chromeboxes as well, which will presumably push the pricing up.

Can sound kill you? The short answer is “yes”

150 decibels is usually considered enough to burst your eardrums. The threshold for death is usually pegged at around 185-200 dB

A passenger car driving by at 25 feet is about 60 dB, being next to a jackhammer or lawn mower is around 100 dB, a nearby chainsaw is 120 dB. Generally, 150 dB (eardrum rupture) is only achieved if you stand really close to a jet aircraft during take-off or you’re near an explosive blast.

If you actually wanted to intentionally kill someone with a sonic weapon, there isn’t a whole lot of research on how you would actually go about doing it. The general consensus is that a loud enough sound could cause an air embolism in your lungs, which then travels to your heart and kills you. Alternatively, your lungs might simply burst from the increased air pressure. (Acoustic energy is just waves of varying sound pressure; the higher the energy, the higher the pressure, the louder the sound.) In some cases, where there’s some kind of underlying physical weakness, loud sounds might cause a seizure or heart attack — but there’s very little evidence to suggest this.

So, there you have it: Sound can kill you, but not in the standing-in-front-of-a-giant-speaker-stack-at-a-gig.

New top-level domains could change how we surf the internet

A big name start-up called Donuts Inc. is finally getting a chance to test its great theory of the internet: URLs matter, and if Donuts just happens to get rich along the way, so be it. That’s the sales pitch, as the company rolls out the first seven of potentially hundreds of new top-level domains (TLDs), insisting that the new approach will change the way we use the internet. The new TLDs (sometimes called generic TLDs or gTLDs), which became available this week through dozens of domain sales companies, are: .bike, .clothing, .guru, .holdings, .plumbing, .singles, and .ventures. That .com of yours seems a little dull now, eh?

Carbon fiber 3D printer

Carbon fiber is one of the most prized construction materials available to a parts designer. It is also among the most expensive due to the painstakingly tedious process of molding or winding it. If, somehow, carbon fiber could just be printed it would be quite miraculous. To the delight of makers everywhere, the first 3D printer for carbon fiber was unveiled this week at the SolidWorks World 2014 conference in San Diego.

The company that makes the printer, MarkForged, claims its machine can produce parts with higher a strength-to-weight ratio than 6061-T6 aluminum. 6061 with a T6 temper is certainly not the strongest aluminum flavor going — and probably not the material chosen for the bulk of Ford’s new all-aluminum truck — but it’s the most commonly used aluminum, and still pretty tough stuff. In a rather surprising move, MarkForged’s founder, Gregory Marks, has named his new creation the “Mark One.” The machine runs either a 1.75mm fused carbon filament (FFF), or a 4mm composite filament (CFF), using quick-change extruder heads, and users also have the choice of printing with fiberglass, PLA (Poly lactic acid), or nylon.