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Slide the pen in like this on older units, and it will get jammed. Removing it can break some S-Pen functionality.

Back in August during the launch of the Galaxy Note 5, an issue was discovered that could potentially break the device. If you stuck the S-Pen in backwards—pointy part first instead of flat part first—it would get stuck. From there, you'd have to forcefully remove the S-Pen, which could potentially break the top off the pen or damage the pen eject functionality.

Samsung's first response to the problem was to ship the Note 5 with a warning sticker on the screen, but now Phandroid has discovered that new Note 5s will offer a real, physical solution.

Pen detection on the Galaxy Note 5 was handled by an internal switch that the pen would hold down on when it was inserted. When put in backward, a void in the top of the pen would catch the spring-loaded switch, trapping the pen. Samsung has now put a flexible, plastic cover over the switch, which acts like a ramp. When the thinner part of the S-Pen passes over the switch in this setup, the ramped plastic allows the pen to press the switch down rather than catch it. (The cover also seems to be attached with adhesive tape.)

iPads. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

A woman whose husband died has spent months trying to gain access to his Apple account, according to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report today. Apple initially told the woman that she would have to provide a will and death certificate, but once she provided those documents the company reportedly asked for something else—a court order.

There are good privacy and security reasons for Apple to impose strict controls on account access, but in this case the company seems to have acknowledged it went too far by demanding a court order. After CBC got involved, Apple relented and will apparently allow the widow, 72-year-old Peggy Bush of Victoria, BC, to get access to her late husband's Apple ID.

"After [CBC News] contacted Apple, it did reach out to the Bush family and apologize for what it called a 'misunderstanding,' offering to help the family solve the problem—without a court order," the report said. "At the time of publication, it was working with Donna Bush to do that."

NASA's HL-20 in the fog at Langley Research Center in Virginia. (credit: NASA)

Last week when NASA awarded Sierra Nevada a contract to develop its Dream Chaser vehicle for cargo delivery to the International Space Station, it validated a design that dates back half a century. This particular winged vehicle concept marked the Soviet Union’s first attempt to develop a space plane and now, in an ironic twist of history, the Soviet design may help the United States to commercialize space.

The Dream Chaser traces its heritage to the BOR series "Беспилотный орбитальный ракетоплан," or uncrewed orbital rocket plane of lifting bodies, which themselves were derived from a 1965 space plane concept, the Soviet MiG-105. The BOR-1 was first tested in 1969, launching to an altitude of 100 km as the Soviets sought to study various heat shields for a winged vehicle.

A 1:2 scale mockup of the BOR-4 (Wikimedia).

The Soviets continued a series of test flights leading up to the BOR-4 vehicle, and it began flying in 1980. Although they had discarded the BOR concept for their space plane (choosing instead the shuttle-derived Buran orbiter), Soviet engineers continued to use the vehicle as a means to test the Buran’s thermal protection system.

The World Economic Forum warns about what robots and other advances may do to the worldwide job market by the year 2020. (credit: World Economic Forum)

Are the robots coming to take our jobs? Advances in any tech that aids in automation always come with questions about the jobs they take versus the jobs they create, but the World Economic Forum warned in a report published on Monday that advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and other modern technologies are currently likely to lead to a net loss of 5.1 million jobs worldwide by the year 2020.

"Without urgent and targeted action today to manage the near-term transition and build a workforce with futureproof skills, governments will have to cope with ever-growing unemployment and inequality—and businesses with a shrinking consumer base," the report states in its introduction.

The workforce number estimate, which is based on surveys and data provided by 371 companies' chief HR officers worldwide (whose combined workforces include over 13 million employees in 15 "major, developed, and emerging economies"), includes numbers for different industries' gains and losses. The biggest loser, according to the WEF, will be in the office and administrative job sector to the tune of 4.76 million jobs—due to "a perfect storm of technological trends that have the potential to make many of [the job roles] redundant," the report states. Other fields with major expected losses include manufacturing and production (1.61 million) and construction and extraction (497,000).

Timeline of the early Universe, showing the Dark Ages and the First Light, when reionization allows starlight to travel long distances. (credit: ESO)

Early in the Universe's history, something ionized most of the diffuse hydrogen gas that’s spread between galaxies. But until now, the source responsible for this ionization has been largely mysterious—a conundrum so persistent, the authors of a new paper call it “one of the key questions in observational cosmology.”

First, a little background: The Universe’s hydrogen started out ionized because the early Universe was too hot and energetic for electrons to settle down and pair with protons. This situation persisted for about 375,000 years after the Big Bang, at which time the Universe had cooled enough for neutral hydrogen to exist. Then, any light produced by interactions among these hydrogen atoms was at a wavelength where it was quickly re-absorbed by other hydrogen atoms—the Universe was opaque.

It wasn’t until a few hundred million years later that some of the hydrogen in the intergalactic medium (IGM) began to be ionized again by an unknown source of energy. This event is known as the epoch of reionization, and it’s the last major phase transition in the history of the Universe. It returned the Universe to a state where light could travel long distances.

Boston Dynamics robots, from left to right: Little Dog (on pedestal), Spot, BigDog, WildCat, and LS3. (credit: Boston Dynamics)

As we reported in our 2016 Google preview, Alphabet's robot division is in a bit of a mess. The division was started inside Google by Android cofounder Andy Rubin, who aimed to quickly get the project up and running via an acquisition spree. He picked up Boston Dynamics, the DARPA Robotics Challenge winner Schaft, and about seven other companies. Then Andy Rubin left Google, leaving the collection of companies to fend for themselves. With no leader and not much of a direction, the group needed help.

Google has been searching for someone to replace Rubin and lead the Robotics group, and it looks like the group is finally getting some leadership in the form of Alphabet's newly renamed "X" group. A report from The New York Times says that the robot team will be moving to the X division, and Alphabet's moonshot group will "review the various projects and refocus them toward solving specific problems that would be reframed as a particular moonshot effort."

Moving the robot division into the X group reportedly wasn't Alphabet's first choice. The Information claimed Alphabet earlier tried to get Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk, to run the division, but questions about the group's relationship with the rest of Alphabet apparently caused problems.