With Firefox 8 out the door Mozilla’s Beta, Aurora and Nightly channels have now been updated with the next three work-in-progress versions of Firefox.

If you’d like an early look at what’s coming in the next three Firefox cycles, you can download a copy of the Beta channel, the Aurora channel, or, for those that live on the edge, the Nightly channel.

You may notice a speed boost in the beta channel thanks to the new support for JavaScript type inference. Type inference is a new feature in Firefox’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine. Official support should, if all goes according to plan, arrive ...

1930: Albert Einstein and fellow nuclear scientist Leo Szilard receive an American patent for a new kind of refrigerator that requires no electricity.

The most famous physicist of the 20th century wasn’t a Thomas Edison: The fridge would prove to be one of Einstein’s few forays into the world of commonplace engineering.

The refrigerator uses chemical reactions of ammonia, butane and water to turn a heat input into a cold output.

Ammonia gas is released into a chamber with liquid butane in it. This reduces the boiling point of the butane, causing it to evaporate, and draw in energy from the...