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The new warm welcome screens.

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My favorite new addition is the fine cursor control. Just drag your finger along the spacebar to move the cursor between letters. There's a similar "delete word" gesture that works by dragging a finger from the backspace key to the left. Each letter crossed over will highlight the previous word, and releasing your finger will delete the selection.

There's also a new "one-handed mode" that shrinks the keyboard to the left or right side of the screen—a welcome feature for users with large screened devices. A few buttons have been redesigned, and now there's an easy way to bring up a number keypad layout. Words can be deleted from the dictionary via a slick drag and drop interface—just long press on a suggestion and drag it to the new trashcan icon to toss the word (or erroneously-saved typo) down the memory hole.

(credit: Pete Thomas)

After successfully dropping pounds, dieters often see their weight bounce back. But they may not see the same rebound in their sluggish metabolisms.

Researchers followed 14 contestants from the TV weight-loss competition The Biggest Loser, and they found that the dramatic weight loss significantly slowed the rate at which the contestants’ burned calories while resting. Those metabolic slow-downs, which make it more difficult to keep off pounds, lingered six years after the competition—even after nearly all of the contestants regained much of the weight they lost.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Obesity, suggests that the body may purposefully slow down its metabolism to regain lost pounds and maintain a weight “set point.” If the finding holds true in larger studies of dieters, it may explain why it’s so difficult to keep off weight once its lost.

The complex pattern left behind by liquid water flowing through sand under Martian atmospheric pressures. (credit: M. Massé)

We now know that there is liquid water on the surface of Mars. Streaks of dark material flow down crater walls, appearing and disappearing with the seasons. Imaging from orbit has confirmed that these features contain hydrated salts, leading researchers to conclude that the water took the form of a salty brine, which would prevent it from immediately evaporating into Mars' cold, thin atmosphere.

But a new paper released today argues that we might want to rethink the role of brine. The international team behind it tested what would happen if pure water were flowing through sand under Mars-like conditions. Some of the water boiled off quickly, but it managed to spread a bit further than expected and produced features similar to some that have been imaged from orbit.

There are a number of challenges with figuring out what's happening on Mars. The first is that we've got no hardware anywhere near where the watery features form; all our direct exploration has to take place from orbit. Another challenge is that we don't know the nature of the water. At Martian pressures, pure water could boil at temperatures reached in the daytime and freeze at night, while salts could keep it liquid at the prevalent temperatures.

(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

A Southern California woman was recently ordered to provide her fingerprint to unlock a seized iPhone, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.

The case highlights the ongoing balancing act between security and convenience and how the law treats something you know (a passcode) as being quite different than something you are (a biometric). Under the Constitution, criminal defendants have the right not to testify against themselves—and providing a passcode could be considered testimonial. However, being compelled to give up something physiological or biometric (such as blood, DNA sample, fingerprint or otherwise), is not.

As the Times reports, Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan was ordered by a federal judge to provide her fingerprint on February 25, and the warrant was executed and unsealed on March 15.