Month: October 2018

Enlarge / The Essential Phone and 360 camera. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Things aren't looking good for Essential, Andy Rubin's smartphone startup. After announcing it was cancelling its next smartphone earlier this year, the company will now lay off 30 percent of its staff, according to a report from Bloomberg.

Essential produced a pretty good product for its first-ever smartphone. The Essential Phone had a unique ceramic body, pioneered the notch design trend, and shipped with stock Android. Essential's update support has also been great—besides consistent monthly security updates, it delivered an update to Android 9 Pie on day one, an unheard-of speed for most Android OEMs. Essential did all this while, in the news, it seemed like a dead company and was considering a sale.

The Essential Phone ultimately wasn't competitive, though. It had flagship pricing but couldn't keep up with the competition, lacking a good camera, screen, and water resistance. Essential was also a brand-new company, and it's hard to trust a company with no track record. The phone didn't sell well, and eventually, fire sales took the price from $700 all the way down to $250.

Enlarge / The recently restored oil painting Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo, shows evidence of exotropic eye alignment, a new paper claims. (credit: Christopher Tyler)

The great Italian Renaissance artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci may have suffered from an unusual visual tic: an intermittent outward turn of the eye, clinically known as strabismus. According to a new paper in JAMA Ophthalmology, that disorder may have helped this quintessential Renaissance man capture 3D space on a flat 2D canvas so brilliantly.

If so, Leonardo would be in very good company. Several other famous artists—including Rembrandt, Durer, Degas, and Picasso—likely also had some form of strabismus, based on analysis of eye alignment in their respective self-portraits. Because such a misalignment tends to suppress the deviating eye, this condition would have enabled Leonardo to shift between monocular vision and normal vision, giving him a distinct artistic advantage.

"Try shutting one eye," explains author Christopher Tyler, a visual neuroscientist at City University of London. "The world now looks flatter, so the spatial relations are easier to translate onto the flat canvas."

Enlarge / "Resting in contact," primatologist jargon for "getting a cuddle." (credit: Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund)

Cantsbee the gorilla was great with kids, which is why it struck gorilla researcher Stacy Rosenbaum as odd when he suddenly started grunting aggressively at his usual gaggle of baby gorilla sidekicks. Cantsbee seemed oddly annoyed by them tagging along behind.

“Cantsbee was always incredibly gentle,” says Rosenbaum. “He was never aggressive towards infants or humans. So the infants looked startled, not sure what to do.” Eventually they got the hint and moved off into the bushes to go around the grumpy Cantsbee, who then began displaying aggressively at Rosenbaum, too.

“I thought he was just having a really bad day,” she recalls. “But then I realized he was sitting next to a snare. It sent chills down my spine—I can’t say for sure, but it seems like he was protecting not just the infants, but me, too.”