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  Samsung's new Galaxy S20 phones. [credit: Samsung ]

Flagship phones like the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S20 or the iPhone 11 Pro get a lot of the marketing and press hype, but most people aren't buying. The small percentage of consumers who are buying face a difficult choice that's about much more than just benchmarks, specs, or camera features.

A recent NPD report claimed that fewer than 10 percent of Americans buy flagship smartphones (in this case, defined as phones costing more than $1,000). After a year of smartphone shipments and revenues gradually sliding down a hill, global smartphone shipments finally grew in the fourth quarter of 2019—but only by one percent. Of the market's 369 million units in Q4, Apple shipped 78 million iPhone 11 models, and Samsung shipped 71 million. In other words, Samsung and Apple together accounted for 40 percent of the smartphones hitting the market. Looking at what they're doing tells us a lot about what today's priorities are.

When you look across the whole product lineups of these two companies, you see very different strategies. But at the top of each line, the phones are mostly similar. The latest flagship smartphones from these market behemoths focus on cameras and screens above all else, and on those counts, the Samsung Galaxy S20 and the iPhone 11 Pro aren't actually that radically different from one another.

Enlarge / Juul went with a fashionable, "cool" marketing strategy. (credit: Mass.gov)

Popular e-cigarette maker Juul intentionally and egregiously tailored its marketing to appeal to underage youth, according to a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey on February 12.

The company’s early marketing in 2015 and 2016 purposefully used young, “cool” models in its launch campaign, recruited teen “influencers” on social media, and bought banner and video advertisements on numerous websites aimed at teens and children, including Cartoon Network’s cartoonnetwork.com and Nickelodeon’s sites Nick.com and NickJr.com. Juul even went so far as to give advice to underage consumers over email on how to get around age restrictions to make online purchases of the company's e-cigarettes.

The lawsuit lands as public health officials across the nation are still grappling with an explosion in e-cigarette use by youth, which the Food and Drug Administration has referred to as an “epidemic.” Between 2011 and 2019, recent use of e-cigarettes by middle schoolers increased from 0.6 percent to 10.5 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For high schoolers, use increased from 1.5 percent to 27.5 percent in that timeframe. That means that by 2019, more than 1 in every 4 high school students said they had used e-cigarettes within the last 30-days from the time of the survey.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2015. (credit: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

Tesla will raise $2 billion in a new stock offering, the company announced on Thursday morning.

Tesla's shares are worth about $780 on Thursday morning—up 2 percent over Wednesday's closing price. That's still down from the record high of the more than $940 the stock reached last week.

CNBC notes that as recently as two weeks ago, Musk was saying that Tesla wasn't planning to raise more cash. But the spectacular performance of Tesla's stock over the last two weeks may have made this an opportunity too good to pass up.

Enlarge / Phages on the surface of a bacterial cell. (credit: Dr. Graham Beards )

In many cases, viruses manage to spread so readily because they're so compact, allowing hundreds of thousands of viral particles to explode from a single sneeze. That compact size comes in part from their limited needs. Since viruses use parts of their host cells for much of what they need to do, even the more complicated viruses tend to only need a few dozen specialized genes to do things like evade the immune system or remain dormant in cells. In fact, complexity would seem to go against one of virus' evolutionary advantages: the ability to make lots of copies of itself very quickly.

So it was a bit of a surprise to find that there are giant viruses that carry far more genetic material than they seemingly need. All cells carry the machinery needed to make proteins so, at most, viruses typically carry just a few genes that direct the machinery to focus on the virus' needs. But the giant viruses seemed to carry replacements for much of the basic machinery itself. Those viruses were attacking complicated cells, with a lot of internal structures and many complex biological processes going on in different locations. Maybe carrying all those seemingly superfluous parts was advantageous in that context.

Or possibly not. In a study released today, researchers describe a large collection of giant viruses that target bacteria. While smaller than some of the largest eukaryotic viruses, they're not that much smaller. And given that they infect bacteria, the genomes of the newly described viruses may be a substantial fraction of the size of their host's genome.