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Nintendo hosted another of its YouTube-only press conferences on Thursday, but if you came expecting news about the forthcoming Nintendo NX console, too bad; that's coming later this year (possibly this month). This presentation instead focused on the Nintendo 3DS system, and its announcements of early-2017 software may mark the portable console's last hurrah before the launch of the NX, which is rumored to be a home/portable hybrid.

Leading off the news was a still-unnamed, side-scrolling version of Pikmin. The long-running "garden strategy" series has been reimagined as a puzzle-platformer with Lemming-like elements—meaning that your main character, Olimar, will throw different-colored Pikmin to solve small puzzles and progress through linear levels. The brief demo footage looked pretty rough, with simple puzzles, low-poly characters, and a rough frame rate, so we imagine there's a lot to be done on this game before its "spring 2017" launch. This may very well be the upcoming Pikmin game that series creator Shigeru Miyamoto has been teasing for some time—unless there's another Pikmin coming to NX, at any rate.

Also launching in that vague "spring" window is Mario Sports Superstars, which looks like a last-gasp mash-up of other Mario-branded "action sports" games. At least it won't be small, as the game appears set to feature full takes on the Mario Tennis, Mario Golf, and Mario Sluggers games—along with the first 11-on-11 Mario soccer mode and Mario's first-ever horse-racing game. Sadly, this release won't include a refresh of the three-on-three, arcade-minded Mario Strikers soccer game, but it will at least feature online multiplayer. Still, this looks mostly like a "greatest hits" bundle of older 3DS games to prolong the aging 3DS' lifespan a few more months.

Enlarge / Paul K. Martin, nominee for inspector general at NASA, answers questions during his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in 2009. (credit: NASA)

Lots of rumors have swirled about further delays to NASA's commercial crew program, and now the agency's own inspector general has confirmed these setbacks in a new, critical report on progress toward first flights of Boeing's Starliner and SpaceX's Dragon crew capsules.

In the new review, Inspector General Paul Martin writes, "The Commercial Crew Program continues to face multiple challenges that will likely delay the first routine flight carrying NASA astronauts to the ISS until late 2018—more than 3 years after NASA’s original 2015 goal."

Officially, NASA has maintained that it expects to have at least one test launch of a crew vehicle from US soil by the end of 2017 and regular flights by early 2018.

Enlarge / One of the extra-crispy Galaxy Note 7s after a charging accident. (credit: BusinessKorea )

Samsung's latest flagship, the Galaxy Note 7, recently began shipping out to carriers and countries around the world. Now Samsung's plans for the super-premium smartphone are being delayed after several reports from customers that the device "exploded" while charging.

The Galaxy Note 7 is the first Samsung phone to ship with USB Type-C connector. To ease the transition to the new standard, Samsung included a Micro-USB to USB Type C adapter in the box. This adapter could be to blame, or it could be faulty chargers—or the batteries themselves. Samsung SDI Co Ltd, one of the suppliers for the Note 7 battery, told Reuters that it had seen no evidence that its batteries were to blame.

Samsung has acknowledged the reports, with a representative telling The Korea Times, "We have acquired the handsets, which our customers say burst into flames while charging, to identify the reason. We will come up with a fix as soon as the investigation is finished. We suspended the supply of the phones earlier this week so as to double-check their safety." Another representative told the Yonhap News Agency that "[The] Results of the investigation and relevant countermeasures will be made public this weekend or early next week at the latest."

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel put most of its marketing and PR muscle for IFA this year behind Kaby Lake, the tweaked 4K-friendly version of its flagship Skylake architecture. But you'll only see those chips if you're buying midrange and high-end laptops—slower, lower-end stuff often comes with Celeron and Pentium chips derived from the lower-performance, lower-power Atom chips, and Intel has quietly announced some of those this week, too.

Anandtech has the details on the new 14nm CPUs, dubbed "Apollo Lake." These are a replacement for the Braswell architecture, and they include both the new "Goldmont" CPU architecture and new GPUs that use Intel's Gen 9 integrated GPU execution units (EUs). Gen 9 is the same GPU architecture used in Skylake.

There are a total of six chips, three J-series chips for desktops and three N-series chips for laptops. The key specs are outlined in the table below, but the most important takeaway is that the chips either consume more power or run at lower clock speeds than previous-generation Braswell chips. And at either 6 or 10W, it's worth noting that the chips' TDPs are all higher than the 4.5W Kaby Lake Y-series CPUs.

A new report published by the EOCD describes the world of 2050 sustaining 9.2 billion people. (credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring)

If you look at a graph of our instrumental temperature records (like this one) you’ll see that temperatures seem to bounce around idly until after 1900, at which point a sustained rise becomes apparent. As a result, the pre-industrial temperature is typically pegged at the value it had in the late 1800s.

But a recent study published in Nature uses paleoclimate records from the 1500s to show that industrial-era warming first became apparent in the Northern Hemisphere in the mid-1800s. This paper suggests that humanity’s climate influence can be seen earlier than previously thought, so current models may underestimate the magnitude of human-caused climate change.

Paleoclimate data is reconstructed by combining observed climate data with known geochemical or biological markers of temperature. This information is analyzed using a statistical model that allows scientists to estimate temperatures for unobserved time points. For example, scientists can combine information from tree rings for years that have temperature readings to learn about how the temperatures affect tree growth. They can then use tree rings to make inferences about the climate in time periods before we started recording climate data, based on the changes that they see in the rings.