Month: January 2017

Google recently updated its Android market share charts, and Nougat (both 7.0 and 7.1) is sitting pretty at 0.7 percent of the total active Android installed base. Considering Nougat launched on August 22, 2016, a less-than-one-percent update rate is pretty pathetic. We should see that number jump up a bit soon, because after almost five months, Samsung is finally ready to join the ranks of Nougat. Today Nougat starts shipping out to the legions of Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge owners.

The update, which was first spotted by SamMobile, seems to be arriving first on unlocked European models of the device. Samsung doesn't sell an unlocked Galaxy S7 in the US—the phones are sold exclusively through carriers—so US customers have to wait for their carriers to get their acts together.

Nougat brings a ton of new features to Android, like a split-screen mode, a revamped notification panel, user-adjustable UI scale, better power saving, new emojis, and many other changes. Samsung is, of course, going to apply its Touchwiz skin to all this, so not every feature is guaranteed to make it.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Drew Angerer )

Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack—a dramatic cut from Mylan’s Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as a generic.

The lower-cost auto-injector, a generic form of Adrenaclick, is available starting today nationwide in the company’s more than 9,600 pharmacies. Its price resembles that of EpiPen’s before Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving devices back in 2007 and raised the price repeatedly, sparking outcry.

Helena Foulkes, president of CVS Pharmacy, said the company felt compelled to respond to the urgent need for a more affordable alternative. “Over the past year, nearly 150,000 people signed on to a petition asking for a lower-cost epinephrine auto-injector option and millions more were active in social media searching for a solution,” she said in a statement.

Jonathan Gitlin

If you believe voices in certain corners of the Internet, there's a dearth of affordable rear-wheel drive sedans on the market. Well, it's time for those corners to put up or shut up, because Kia has been listening, and the result is called the Stinger. The vehicle began life as a concept car at the 2011 Frankfurt Motor Show, and with much made of its Nürburgring-honed handling, it's clear that Kia wants to attract drivers who would normally look at offerings from BMW and Jaguar.

Underneath that grill-covered (we counted 12!) fastback body is a longitudinally mounted engine—either a 2.0L turbocharged inline four (255hp/190kW) or a 3.3L twin-turbo V6 (365hp/272kW) in the Stinger GT—with options for rear- or all-wheel drive. Opt for the former and you get a mechanical limited slip differential; choose the latter and benefit from Kia's new dynamic torque vectoring system.

Enlarge / CHELSEA - FEBRUARY 15: Burgers and beers at Bill's Bar on February 15, 2016 in Downtown New York, NY. (Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Waring Abbott)

It’s well documented that a night of drinking will bring on the munchies. In fact, greasy spoons in college towns nationwide have built their businesses around this phenomenon, staying open late just to serve up fried, cheesy treats to the fresh-from-the-bar crowd.

Yet, smashed feasting is a bit of a paradox. Alcohol is, after all, a calorie-packed substance, and consuming a lot of such things usually squashes our bodies’ signals for snacking. Over the years, researchers have come up with theories to explain drunken gorging. For instance, alcohol lowers self-control, which may unleash our wild food desires. But in a new study on drunk mice, British researchers may have found the real reason.

In boozy mouse brains, alcohol specifically turned on hunger-signaling neurons that are usually only activated by starvation. With the neurons activated, the tipsy rodents ate like party animals. When researchers deactivated them, the mice stuck with their normal diets.

Enlarge / Viruses latch on to a cell, setting off a competition for a successful infection. (credit: Graham Beards/Wikimedia Commons)

Darwin's theory of evolution was formulated based on the competition he saw among animals and plants. But his insights turned out to apply with organisms he couldn't see. At the microbial level, organisms compete fiercely with each other for resources, and often devote a fair bit of energy to trying to kill off the competition (and, in some cases, eat it).

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this sort of competition extends to the smallest biological realms possible: the viruses. A new paper takes a look at viruses that infect just a single species of bacteria, and finds that many of them carry genes that allow them to block the competition from infecting their hosts.

Many of the viruses that infect bacteria are brutal killers, exploding their hosts shortly after infection in order to spread their progeny to new victims. But others are quite a bit more devious in their infections. They'll integrate themselves into their host's genome, lying low for many generations before undergoing the normal explosive infection cycle. This lets them infect more hosts each time their current one divides, and allows their victims to grow and spread, rather than wiping them out at once.

Enlarge / GREAT BRITAIN - JUNE 16: Cows feeding in a cattle pen, Dorset, United Kingdom. (Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images) (credit: Getty | Tim Graham)

There are loads of interesting things to ask about the vast array of species that share this planet with us. But, needless to say, the most pressing one is: can they fire stink torpedoes out of their bums???

Finally, scientists on Twitter have heeded the call and are now compiling a database of the world's gas-blasting species. They’ve catalogued the wind-breaking ways of more than 60 species and have the hashtag #DoesitFart to clear the air about additional critters.

Rats, bats, zebras, bearded dragons, seals, pupfish, bobcats, gray foxes, orangutans, and millipedes are all among those that can crop dust a room. Birds, on the other hand, only tweet out the front. And salamanders and marine invertebrates, like oysters, are toot-less.