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While still a primarily online store, Amazon isn't turning its back on physical retail establishments. After opening its first brick-and-mortar store in Seattle last year, the company's CEO Jeff Bezos confirmed at Amazon's shareholder meeting that more stores are coming.

"We’re definitely going to open additional stores; how many we don’t know yet,” Bezos said at the meeting according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. “In these early days, it’s all about learning rather than trying to earn a lot of revenue."

Currently Amazon's Seattle location is mostly a bookstore, and the company is already building another location in San Diego. Amazon has also said it would build smaller kiosks in cities like San Francisco and Sacramento, but there's no indication if those locations will sell only books or other items as well. Back in February, General Growth Properties, Inc. CEO Sandeep Mathrani said in an earnings call that he estimated 400 more Amazon Books locations to open in the future.

Nokia phones are making a comeback thanks to a licensing deal struck between Microsoft, FIH Mobile—a subsidiary of Foxconn—and HMD global Oy.

Microsoft is selling its feature phone business to the two companies for £242 million (~$350 million), and will include some 4,500 employees, as well brands, software and services, care network, and its Vietnam-based manufacturing facility Microsoft Mobile Vietnam.

Those facilities, as well as Microsoft's feature phone technology, will be used to create new Nokia phones as part of an "exclusive global" licensing agreement between HMD global Oy and Nokia Technologies. The deal will allow HMD to produce phones and tablets bearing the Nokia brand name for the next 10 years. While no devices have been announced just yet, HMD plans to invest $500 million into the venture.

Jupiter's moon Io is notable for being the most volcanically active body in our Solar System. But Io also has some of the highest mountains we've seen yet, as well, the tallest rising about 17km above the surrounding terrain—Boösaule Montes is roughly twice the height of Mount Everest. And, unlike Mars' Olympus Mons, it isn't volcanic. In fact, many of the moon's tallest peaks aren't associated with volcanoes. They don't form in chains, either, instead rising as isolated blocks roughly 100km across.

Since Io doesn't seem to have plate tectonics, it's not obvious what could build these sorts of peaks. But a new study suggests they're created as a result of volcanism, but only very indirectly. Io's volcanism, it seems, is emptying its interior out fast enough to create intense stresses on its crust.

The researchers involved (Michael Bland and William McKinnon) suggest that Io's mountains do have some earthly analogs. "Their morphology, which varies from peaks and ridges to massifs, plateaux and mesas, is consistent with thrusted or tilted fault blocks," they suggest. These are cases where pieces of the crust are fractured and pushed up relative to their surroundings (though obviously not to the same extent as on Io). So what could be creating the excessive strain that pushes them so high?

One of the iconic weapons of the Paleolithic is the fire-hardened spear, its wooden tip carbonized by fire to a wicked point. Unfortunately, it turns out that our hunter ancestors were wrong about fire-hardening. Yes, the charring can make wood slightly harder, but it becomes so much more brittle and weak that there's little overall improvement of the weapon. After experimenting with their own fire-hardened spears, a group of British biomechanics researchers now believe our ancestors used fire not so much to make a more deadly weapon but to speed up the process of cutting wood into a point.

The oldest spear ever discovered, the Clacton spear (named after the region in England where it was discovered), dates back 450,000 years. Made by some unidentified ancestors of modern humans, its sharp wooden point was snapped off and buried in soil. There it was sealed away from the elements and preserved far longer than wood ordinarily can be. When the Clacton spear was discovered in the early twentieth century, archaeologists noticed that its tip had been fire-hardened, using a technique that some hunter gatherer groups still use. It has long been believed that the practice of heating a pointed spear tip in the fire was a way of making it sharper and harder. But a new paper published in Royal Society Biology Letters suggests otherwise.

Two bioscientists at the University of Hull, Roland Ennos and Tak Lok Chan, decided to find out for themselves whether fire really makes spears harder. So they harvested 20 rods from local hazel trees and spent weeks abusing them inside machines of very precise, codified destruction. First, each rod was divided in half. One half dried naturally over two weeks in the laboratory, and the other half were given a simulated fire-hardening treatment with an experimental rig known technically as a "disposable barbecue."