Month: October 2023

Enlarge / 3D seismic image showing the crater of the Modgunn Vent and others like it. The cratered surface labelled "BVU" is the seabed of 56 million years ago, with the modern seabed shown at top left. White lines are boreholes into the vent. (credit: Berndt et al, Nature Geoscience 2023)

Fifty-six million years ago, trillions of tons of carbon found its way into the atmosphere, acidifying oceans and causing the already-warm global climate to heat up by another 5º C (9º F)—an episode known as the “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” or “PETM.”

Like today, the warming climate affected the environment on land and in the sea, with extreme downpours and heat-stressed plankton at the base of the food web. Land animals had a high rate of extinction and replacement by smaller species, and there was a mass extinction of tiny shell-making creatures that lived on the sea bed. The hotter climate supported alligators and swamp-cypress forests, like those in today’s southeastern United States, in Arctic latitudes that are covered by ice and tundra today.

Where did all that carbon come from?

The Pixel Watch 2, which looks identical to the Pixel Watch 1. (credit: Google)

The Pixel Watch 2 is launching alongside the Pixel 8 today. Google's second self-branded smartwatch is sporting a modest update, with the same design as the first version, a new SoC, and a skin temperature sensor.

As previously reported, the Pixel Watch 2 is jumping from the Exynos SoC of the first watch to Team Qualcomm, and now this is shipping the Qualcomm Snapdragon W5+. That's sort of an upgrade but not a huge one. Both the new and old chips run four Cortex A53 CPUs—the Exynos 9110 in the Pixel Watch 1 was built on a 10 nm while this is taking a big jump to 4nm. Any CPU upgrade is nice, but the Cortex A53 is 11 years old, so it still feels like Qualcomm is building these things in a cave.

The Qualcomm chip should bring a better modem if you're getting the LTE version, which is still $400, while the Wi-Fi only is $350. The rest of the spec sheet is mostly the same: 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage, and IP68 dust and water resistance.

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  The Pixel 8 Pro in a lovely blue. [credit: Google ]

Google's newest flagship phone is finally official. The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro were both unveiled today, with the headline changes being a whopping seven years of updates, flat screens across the board, new CPUs, and a $100 price increase. The Pixel 8 Pro is officially $999, while the Pixel 8 is $699.

The Pixel 8 Pro features a fair number of design changes. The front screen is flat now, dumping a trend started by Samsung (and its ability to make curved OLED displays). For years, Android flagships have curved the side edges of their displays, making the edges of the screen distorted and more prone to glare and accidental touches. The Pixel 8 Pro now looks just like the Pixel 8, with a normal, flat display.

The 8 Pro also gets a "soft touch matte glass back," which sounds like the same finish that was applied to the Pixel Fold. We loved the Pixel Fold back, as the satiny finish looked nice, seemed durable, provided a bit of grip if you were just carrying the phone around, and did a good job of hiding fingerprints. The aluminum on the Pro model is still polished to a mirror shine, which has the opposite of all those qualities listed above (that is, it's slippery, easy to scratch, and greasy), but at least the back is improved. The camera bump on the Pro model merges all three cameras together under a single cover, and of course there's a temperature sensor that we'll talk about later.