news.buyenne.com

Hands on with the HTC 10 (video link)

HTC has taken the wraps off its latest and greatest flagship, the HTC 10 (yup, the company has dropped both the "One" and the "M"). But it isn't some grand reinvention of the smartphone—it isn't even a reinvention of an HTC smartphone. Instead, what we have here is the result of years of refinement from a company that's in sore need of a win. The HTC 10 is a phone that focuses on nailing the basics: the screen, the camera, and the battery life. And while that might not make for the most exciting of product launches, perhaps that's exactly what the company needs right now: a solid, well-designed smartphone with mainstream appeal.

Inside, there are few surprises. The HTC 10, like nearly every other 2016 flagship, sports a Snapdragon 820 SoC with 4GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB of storage. There's an SD card slot that supports Android 6.01 Marshmallow's adoptable storage feature. There's NFC support, too. Wireless charging isn't available, but Qualcomm's Quick Charge 3.0 is, and a quick charger is bundled in the box. HTC says the charger can charge the phone's pleasingly large 3000mAh battery to 50 percent in under 30 minutes. Promised battery life is up to two days thanks in part to the larger battery and improvements like a screen that dynamically changes its refresh rate based on the kind of app that you're using.

Even by 1991, the National Weather Service's all-caps requirement felt dated. We're still waiting, but mixed-case change will finally appear in May of this year. (credit: National Weather Service)

After upgrading its supercomputing core in 2015, the National Weather Service is continuing its lumbering slog toward modern systems in a far different way: by saying goodbye to teletype.

After more than two decades of trying, the NWS has finally made every upgrade needed in both the hardware and software chain to remove an all-caps requirement from forecasts and other warnings. The service's Monday announcement kicked off the 30-day transition period that is being given so that customers and subscribers can prepare for the change to mixed-case lettering in all NWS announcements, meaning we'll see the change begin to propagate on May 11.

All-caps messaging was previously required due to the NWS' reliance on teletype machines, which broadcast their text over phone lines and weren't built to recognize upper or lower cases of letters. In addition to removing teletype machines from the information chain, the NWS also had to upgrade its AWIPS 2 software system across the board to recognize mixed-type submissions.

In the densest patch of crabs, there were over 77 of the creatures per square meter. This picture was taken by the UAV camera. (credit: Pineda et. al.)

When three scientists descended over a thousand feet underwater in an exploration vessel off the coast of Panama, they expected to see many kinds of life. They'd chosen to explore the Hannibal Seamount, a flat-topped undersea mountain that's the ocean equivalent of a tropical jungle, rich with a diversity of animals and plants found nowhere else. Their submersible, the Deep Rover 2, has the look of a giant, transparent bubble; with the help of spotlights, they could peer out from every angle. But as they approached the northwest flank of the seamount, they saw something inexplicable on the ocean floor.

Submarine footage of the crab swarm. (video link)

It looked like an underwater dust storm. As they got closer, the researchers realized it was an enormous swarm of crabs, kicking up sediment from the seafloor. They had never seen anything like it.