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Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a nifty discount on the iPad Mini, as 64GB models of Apple's 7.9-inch tablet are currently down to $350 on Amazon. That's $50 off Apple's MSRP and about $35-40 off the street price we've typically seen online over the past few months.

While we've seen the iPad Mini hit this price a few times in the past, this is the second-best deal we've tracked for the tablet in total, trailing only a brief drop to $330 in April. As of this writing, the discount only applies to the Space Gray variant. If you want more storage space, the 256GB model is $50 off as well, bringing it down to $500.

The iPad Mini is more or less exactly what its name suggests: a smaller iPad. It has the same benefits as most Apple tablets: sturdy hardware, a sharp (at 326 pixels per inch) and quality display with no air gap, well-supported software, and a rich app library. With its large bezels and lack of USB-C support, its design is decidedly more dated than the pricier iPad Pro, but its size makes it a more natural fit for ebook or magazine reading, with the occasional YouTube video or Apple Arcade game thrown in. The Mini is probably too cramped to be a reliable multitasking machine—and unlike the iPad Air, it doesn't support Apple's Smart Keyboard accessory—but iPadOS still tends to work better as a media-consumption platform than a productivity one. That said, the iPad Mini runs on Apple's A12 Bionic chip, which remains more than powerful enough for most of the tasks you'd do here. It also supports Apple's Pencil stylus.

Enlarge / Teacher in school classroom. (credit: Getty | Arne Dedert)

An updated guidance document from the Trump Administration now designates teachers and school staff as “essential critical infrastructure” workers, which would allow them to remain in classrooms and schools after being exposed to the pandemic coronavirus, rather than going into quarantine.

The guidance is not a directive—school districts can still decline to include educators in the designation. But some school districts have already made the designation and have signaled that they will keep teachers out of quarantines after exposures, as long as they remain symptom free. That includes school districts in Tennessee and Georgia, according to a report by the Associated Press.

Keeping exposed teachers in schools raises the risks that they could spread the infection to students and coworkers while showing no symptoms. Studies so far have suggested that infected people may be most infectious around the time they first develop symptoms. Researches have repeatedly found that levels of viral material in the upper respiratory tract are at their highest right around the time when people first notice symptoms. Additionally, some infected people do not develop symptoms but can still harbor similar levels of the virus as symptomatic people, according to several studies.

Enlarge / The African wave train has swung into motion for 2020. (credit: NOAA)

This Atlantic hurricane season has set all kinds of records. Most notably, we have already run through the "K" name, with Tropical Storm Kyle forming on August 14 off the coast of the Carolinas. This beat the earliest ever "K" storm, the highly memorable Katrina in 2005, by 10 days.

For all of the names being thrown about, however, most of these systems have been "fish storms," remaining out to sea. And only two have developed into hurricanes, Hanna and Isaias, and neither of these progressed beyond Category 1 status. Scientists use a metric called Accumulated Cyclone Energy to measure the overall activity of a season, factoring in duration and intensity of storms. By this standard, 2020 has been quite active, but not extremely so.

But now we're coming to the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season, which tends to ramp up in late August. This is when the tropical region between Africa and the Caribbean Sea typically reaches its most favorable for development with warm seas and fair winds. This allows for a "train" of storms to develop as atmospheric waves move off the western coast of Africa.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Cris Cantón)

AT&T and T-Mobile are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to require drive tests that would verify whether the mobile carriers' coverage claims are accurate.

The carriers' objections came in response to the FCC seeking comment on a plan to improve the nation's inadequate broadband maps. Besides submitting more accurate coverage maps, the FCC plan would require carriers to do a statistically significant amount of drive testing.

"In order to help verify the accuracy of mobile providers' submitted coverage maps, we propose that carriers submit evidence of network performance based on a sample of on-the-ground tests that is statistically appropriate for the area tested," the FCC proposal issued in July 2020 said.

Enlarge / Smog is bad. (credit: Steven Buss)

Common arguments about how electric vehicles cause more emissions than traditional vehicles when the electric grid is coal-powered are actually wrong. Still, it’s certainly true that a cleaner grid is needed to fully realize the benefits for climate change. Beyond the climate, part of the appeal of EVs is also the improved air quality, of course, and here the grid can be even more important. In the wrong situation, switching to an EV just moves the air pollution from the street to the power plant.

Building models

A team led by Northwestern’s Daniel Peters decided to have a particularly detailed look at this issue, examining several scenarios of grid generation and EV adoption in the US. The results show that even with today’s grid, switching to EVs produces significant benefits.

The researchers used simulated hourly air pollution data from vehicles around the country, along with emissions data for power plants. This went into a model of weather over the course of a year (2014, as it happens), which also simulated important chemical reactions and natural emissions of compounds that interact with pollutants. The resulting air quality simulations were applied to an EPA population health model to show the expected impact on human health.

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  OnwardMobility's teaser image. [credit: OnwardMobility ]

Like a bad zombie movie sequel, BlackBerry phones are coming back from the dead, a second time. After TCL tried and failed to make a business out of licensing the BlackBerry brand and selling Android phones, a new startup called OnwardMobility sounds like it will pick up essentially the same playbook in 2021.

There aren't too many details yet, but OnwardMobility put out a press release and website detailing the new BlackBerry phone plan. The company says it will make "a new 5G BlackBerry Android smartphone with physical keyboard, in the first half of 2021 in North America and Europe." The press release also mentions that "BlackBerry smartphones are known for protecting communications, privacy, and data," so expect lots of encryption. There are also several nods to enterprise customers—really, it all sounds like the same old BlackBerry.

BlackBerry-branded phones from BlackBerry died in 2016 when the company quit the handset manufacturing business. BlackBerry stuck with its own in-house OSes for too long while the Android and iOS duopoly took over the world, and the company's sales tanked. It wasn't until 2015 that BlackBerry made its first Android device, the BlackBerry Priv, but by then it was a "bet the company" situation and the Priv flopped. BlackBerry ended up licensing the brand to Chinese company TCL Communication, which went on to produce some shamelessly rebranded slab phones and a few faithful-but-expensive QWERTY bar phones like the BlackBerry KeyOne and the Key2. TCL wasn't any more successful than BlackBerry selling Android phones, and in February 2020, BlackBerry announced that TCL was walking away. The TCL licensing deal actually expires at the end of this month, and BlackBerry already has a new suitor lined up.