Month: September 2020

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  The new Moto Razr. It's got updated specs and a slightly different design. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola is taking a second swing at a foldable reboot of the Moto Razr with what it's calling the "new Razr." It's slightly faster, slightly cheaper, slightly different looking, and no longer a Verizon exclusive. We're also hoping it's a little more sturdy and viable than the original Razr reboot, which had atrocious build quality and was constantly out of stock, probably due to production issues. The original Moto Razr reboot hit stores February 6, 2020 so this sequel is pretty early.

First up: specs. The Razr 2 (we're calling it that, deal with it) is $1,400 and has a Snapdragon 765G, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, and a tiny 2800mAh battery. That's better than the Razr 1, which was $1,500 and had a Snapdragon 710 SoC, 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and an even smaller 2510 mAh battery. As usual, you get two screens that are pretty much the same as the Razr 1: the outside screen is a 2.7-inch, 792×600 OLED, while the inside screen is a foldable 6.2 inch, 2142×876 OLED. There's also NFC on this version, so you can finally use tap-to-pay.

A major disappointment is that the Razr 2 screen is still 100 percent plastic. There's no ultra-thin glass like you'd get on the Galaxy Z Flip. Samsung's foldable displays are a plastic and glass sandwich, with the outside layer being plastic. While that's nowhere near as nice as a normal glass display, the underlying layer of glass does help stiffen up the display surface and stop the squishy feel of other flexible displays. The old Razr display also had a ton of issues, which hopefully Motorola has worked out by now. On our store-purchased unit, the Razr 1 touchscreen stopped working after a single day, and numerous other display units and review units experienced failures.

Enlarge / These clams are fighting an uphill battle. (credit: Kyle Hartshorn)

As the world warms and climate zones shift, species that are able may alter their range to try to keep themselves at a comfortable temperature. Although the oceans are generally warming more slowly than the land, migrations of marine species are well documented already. For organisms like fish, mobile adults can dynamically track suitable conditions. But many seafloor-dwelling critters primarily move in their wandering youth—as larvae that (mostly) passively ride the currents. Changing your destination isn’t so easy when you’re not in the driver’s seat.

Unfortunately, some of those species have been seen migrating the wrong way, toward even higher-temperature waters rather than away from them. We’ve seen this happen in the coastal northwest Atlantic, including in some commercially harvested species like clams. Seeing these species shift requires something unusual, since they're adapted to their current-catching lifestyle. So what gives?

A team led by Heidi Fuchs at Rutgers University wanted to test the hypothesis that earlier spring warmth could explain things. These organisms take their spawning cue from warm temperatures, so long-term warming can push that springtime cue earlier and earlier. If the currents are different in early spring, that could lead to larvae drifting toward new locations simply because they’re ahead of schedule.

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  Maserati has high hopes for its new supercar, the MC20. [credit: Maserati ]

Lucid wasn't the only car maker to whip the sheets off a new car on Wednesday night. Maserati got in on the action, too, unveiling its new MC20 supercar to a socially distanced audience in Modena, Italy. It's the brand's first supercar since the MC12, a mid-2000s car that was derived from the Ferrari Enzo. But unlike that car, the MC20 won't be restricted to a mere 50 units but will be a regular production model, with a number of different variants that in time will even include a battery-electric option.

Details of the electric MC20 will have to wait for another day, but that doesn't mean the gasoline-powered car should be overlooked. In fact, it's powered by a rather interesting 621hp (463kW), 538lb-ft (730Nm) Nettuno 3.0L twin-turbo V6 that incorporates some clever new technology that until now has only been found in Formula 1 cars.

In those highly specialized racing cars, Ferrari and Mahle called their new tech "turbulent jet ignition"; for this production engine, Maserati is calling it "Maserati Twin Combustion," which is a pretty good description. The Nettuno engine can operate like a normal internal combustion gasoline engine, igniting fuel within the cylinder. But it also has the ability to divert a small amount of fuel to a pre-chamber, sending the rest of it to be better-dispersed into the cylinder through small holes along its wall. By combusting this small amount of fuel first, the bulk of the gas can be more efficiently burned because it's more evenly distributed, thereby boosting thermal efficiency. (In its F1 application, it was allowing the internal combustion engines to reach a thermal efficiency of 47 percent, which you can read about in our previous coverage.)

Enlarge / Seems like an extreme reaction to buying a console without a disc drive, but OK...

The latest quarterly earnings report from GameStop doesn't show much sign of a turnaround for the long-troubled game retailer. Sales were down 26.7 percent year over year for the April through June quarter. Even accounting for permanent store closures and COVID-related reduced operating hours, so-called comparable "same-store" sales were still down 12.7 percent year over year. GameStop's already depressed stock is down nearly 8 percent on the news, as of this writing.

GameStop still publicly sees an "opportunity to capitalize" on the upcoming release of new Sony and Microsoft consoles, which could help turn its business around in the short term. But there's some reason to believe the coming generation of consoles could actually make GameStop's long-term prospects worse, thanks to console options that get rid of disc drives entirely.

Putting on a brave face

In an earnings call, GameStop CEO George Sherman acknowledged that "there has been growth in digitally downloaded games" and said GameStop is "not debating the growth of digital gaming." But he also tried to put a positive spin on the fate of GameStop's physical game sales going into the next generation of consoles.