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If you are ready to jump feet-first into triple-A virtual reality gaming as soon as humanly possible, you have three main choices: the Oculus Rift, the HTC Vive, and Sony's PS VR. None of these devices is actually in the hands of the general public yet—we’ll have to wait until next week for the Oculus Rift to start its first round of shipping—but all three are available for preorder right now. The Vive is the most expensive option at $799, but it comes with 3D controllers. The Rift costs less at $599, but it doesn’t come with 3D controllers. And the PS VR is the cheapest at $399, but then you’re locked to a console and don’t get to play any computer-based VR games.

There is no way to prove yet which of the three front-runners is best. Indeed, "best" is a hard word to define in context—best based on what? Best resolution? The Rift and Vive seem to be the winners there—but they use a Pentile subpixel arrangement, and the Sony kit doesn’t, so the resolution numbers don’t tell the entire story. Best VR experience? Well, that depends on what "experience" means to you—are you primarily going to be playing cockpit-based flight or racing sims where seated play is the main point, or do you want to run around your room playing virtual golf or tennis or shooting virtual guns?

Because how and what you play is a massively subjective experience—and because there’s still so much we don’t know about the final retail versions of all of these VR solutions—it’s hard to make blanket recommendations at this point. The absolute best answer right now to the question of "Which one of these things should I buy?!" is "You should probably wait until this summer when they’ve been in everybody’s hands for a few months and then decide."

When a virus jumps from wildlife to humans, it could either cause a few infections and fizzle out—or it could spark an explosive outbreak. For instance, health experts feared that H5N1 bird flu would lead to a massive and deadly pandemic in humans in the early 2000s, but with its current limited ability to jump from human to human, it has yet to kick off such a large-scale plague. Zika, Ebola, and HIV/AIDS, on the other hand, have.

Figuring out beforehand the type of viral scenario that will unfold with a new, emerging germ would be vital to protecting public health, allowing health officials to anticipate and thwart the spread of infections before they get out of hand. But researchers have largely struggled with how to make those predictions.

To try to break down the molecular recipe for a pandemic, researchers analyzed a range of biological features from 203 human-infecting viruses—a mix of those that have and have not caused big outbreaks. The researchers aimed to find predictors of infectious potential among each virus’ characteristics, including its family tree; genome’s make-up (DNA or RNA), length, and segmentation; outer structure of its viral particle; tendency to recombine with relative viruses and create variation in its genetics; time spent in a victim; deadliness; and whether or not it spreads via a vector, such as mosquitoes and ticks. The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of our highlights at CES this year was an opportunity to get behind the wheel of Chevrolet's Bolt electric vehicle. Priced at under $30,000 after a $7,500 IRS tax credit, it's set to be the first mass-market EV on sale in the US with a battery big enough to take you 200 miles (321km) between charges.

Chevrolet promised that the Bolt would go on sale later this year, and the company looks set to meet that goal—pre-production vehicles are already working their way through the production line in Orion Township, Michigan.

"We’re at another critical and important point in the development of the Bolt EV,” said Josh Tavel, Bolt EV chief engineer. "We’ve moved from working in math and building cars by hand to building Bolt EVs on the line. We’re now testing the tooling used in the plant so that we deliver high-quality, 200-plus-mile EVs that our customers are eagerly anticipating."

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a bunch of new deals this week. The featured deal includes the best price we've seen for a high-end TV since last year's Black Friday. Now you can get a 55-inch Samsung SUHD 4K Smart 3D HDTV for just $1,250. This model features Samsung's Nano Crystal technology which offers beautifully vibrant colors, optimized contrast for extreme crispness, and a quad-core processor. There's also a 65-inch version on our list for just $1,799.

Check out the rest of the deals below, including where you can preorder Playstation VR bundles.

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Facebook and its WhatsApp messaging subsidiary have both announced plans to end support for BlackBerry OS 10 by the end of 2016 despite pleas from BlackBerry's executives. In a blog post, BlackBerry's senior manager in charge of the company's App Ecosystem and Developer Outreach team, Lou Gazzola, expressed disappointment over the decision and urged customers to protest it. "We fought back to work with WhatsApp and Facebook to change their minds, but at this time, their decision stands (but let them know how you feel on social media, using the hashtag #ILoveBB10Apps)," he wrote.

The decision comes as BlackBerry has started to look at paths beyond its own operating system. In late 2015, the company introduced its own Android-based phone, the Priv. And with the introduction of the Passport, BlackBerry began supporting some Android applications on BB OS itself. But the company's executives have continuously tried to attract and keep developers for their native operating system's ecosystem.

Gazzola wrote that despite the Facebook decision, "we have worked hard to ensure our end users have the best experience in light of this decision and are continuing to search for alternate solutions." In an attempt to convince users of the company's commitment and to highlight the efforts of the BlackBerry developer community—which Gazzola said is "creating thousands of apps every month"—Blackberry is launching a featured list of 20 of applications on BlackBerry World called Great Apps on BlackBerry.