Flipboard Finally Ditches Its iPad Roots With a Smarter Phone App

The new Flipboard home screen (left) and topics picker (right). Flipboard

Flipboard may have been the original iPad magazine, but now, 70 percent of the company’s readers are flipping through its smartphone app. Between that and the recent acquisition of former competitor, Zite, it was clearly time for Flipboard version 3.0.

Flipboard is the archetype for digital media consumption, packaging stories from thousands of different sources into a personalized magazine you flip through with a finger. The app has expanded from an iPad-only offering to one available on Android and Windows Phone smartphones and tablets. It’s also changed from a passive consumption experience to one that lets you curate your own personal collections. Today’s update makes the smartphone app more navigation friendly, adding a daily digest, and opening straight into the content you’re interested in reading.

Previously, the app opened with a tiled interface of your Cover Stories and broad categories of interest, with other app functionalities like search, discovery, and account settings hidden inside a button in the upper right of the screen. Now, on iOS, the app home screen features the familiar five buttons across the bottom of the screen we see in apps like Instagram and the App Store. On Android, these buttons are positioned at the top of the screen. This change makes it easier to navigate to your personal feed, a topic picker of subjects to explore, search, notifications, and your profile. And by ditching the tiled interface of the old smartphone version, you’re one click closer to reading a story upon opening the app.

As for content, Flipboard previously relied on a mix of pieces shared on your social media channels and items curated by Flipboard staff. Now, the app adds Zite’s machine learning and topic extraction engine so readers can explore new content based on more niche subject areas. Rather than a high-level topic like cycling, for example, you can get updated articles on narrower topics like road racing or cyclocross. The content in these topics is fueled by a blend of algorithmic and human curation.

Flipboard’s smartphone experience also includes a new element called the Daily Edition, a once a day curated news summary of the day’s biggest headlines that arrives at 7am local time each morning. Flipboard’s certainly not the first to do this (Yahoo has a good-looking option called Yahoo News Digest), but it makes the app a more complete singular source for both important news you should read about, and the stuff you actually want to read about.

Flipboard will also begin suggesting magazines, topics, and people to follow based on your reading and discovery habits. As the app’s changes thus far have been both tasteful and useful in my opinion, I’m not worried that this suggestion feature will get too annoying or invasive.

While Flipboard is available internationally, these topic-based updates to its iOS and Android apps are first rolling out for English speakers in the U.S. and Canada. The Daily Edition will be available in six regions including the UK, Brazil, India, and Latin America.

Rocket Headed for Space Station Explodes After Liftoff

An unmanned Antares rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded just seconds after taking off this evening. The rocket, which launched from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia at 6:22 pm ET, was operated by the Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The cause of the “catastrophic anomaly” is not clear, and the team was not tracking any issues before the launch, according to NASA mission control. No injuries were reported, and all personnel have been accounted for. Orbital teams are now securing the crash site and telemetry data from the flight.

The rocket was carrying a Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft, which was to be boosted into orbit above Earth and rendezvous with the ISS on Nov. 2. It was carrying 5,050 pounds of cargo, including food, flight procedures books, crew equipment, and equipment for science experiments onboard.

Orbital has a contract with NASA for eight missions to resupply the ISS. This was the third of those missions. Orbital and NASA are determining when a press conference will be held, and if the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be involved in the investigation.

These Affordable 3-D Printers Are Impressive—And Plagued by Weak Software

Da Vinci 1.0. XYZ Printing

The original Da Vinci 1.0 3-D printer made its debut at CES in January, and a two-color Da Vinci 2.0 “Duo” was introduced two months later. Today, the Taiwanese-based company XYZ Printing behind the Da Vincis has announced yet another addition to the lineup: the Da Vinci “All-in-One,” which boasts a built-in scanner.

I’ve had the opportunity to test the 1.0 and the All-in-One. So far, I’m impressed with the print and build quality of both, but there is one hitch. A 3-D printer is more than just its extruder; unlike regular inkjet printers, 3-D printers are largely defined by the flexibility and utility of their software, which XYZ Printing seems to have forgotten in its rush to market.

Da Vinci 1.0: $500

The original da Vinci printer is a single-color, fused-filament machine. The device gets much closer to being something people might own at home than many other printers of its kind. It’s ready right out of the box: After the packing foam and tape has been removed and the filament inserted, it can immediately print its default test objects, or plug into a computer to receive new ones. Its enclosure—which admittedly looks like what the ’90s thought would be cool in “the future”—hides all the wires, hot metal, and moving bits, and cuts down on the sounds and scents. It’s also hard to beat the $500 price tag, which makes the Da Vinci 1.0 an option even for people who only want to dabble in 3-D printing.

Liana Bandziulis/WIRED

For more advanced users who have already printed a thing or 30 and want to tinker with the insides, the da Vinci 1.0′s hardware remains easily accessible. The extruder and moving heated bed are familiar fixtures, and, though the filament comes in proprietary “cartridges” of either PLA or ABS thermoplastic filament, there are ways of spoofing it to use filament spools of your choice.

The da Vinci is not breaking any ground in fused filament technology, but the little things, like the wiping tab that cleans the nozzle before and after the print and the large 7.8 x 7.8 x 7.8-inch print capacity, make it a good build of an established model.

Annoyingly, the attention to detail in the hardware fails to reach the accompanying software. XYZware, which takes files and pushes them to the printer, has minimal functionality and an infuriating user interface peppered with comically bad translations (“Take a minute to finish the registration, and enjoy the benefit with us!”). Editing an object is limited to resizing and rotating it—and even that is done by moving sliders, not the actual object. If the object isn’t well-formed, the slicing algorithms don’t have any healing options. When I tried to print a model of a waving cat, it included a glitch that morphed the cat’s middle into a cylinder. You are better off using open-source programs like Blender to create STL files and throwing them through Slic3r to produce the G Code, and using XYZware only as the final link to the printer. Or, for the advanced hacker, there’s been buzz about a Repetier firmware hack that might be the answer to bringing this printer up to its full potential.

Da Vinci All-in-One:$800

The All-in-One is almost identical to the original printer—same size, same enclosure, same hardware and software—with the added feature of a 3-D scanner. As of today, it’s available for pre-order on Newegg and Amazon for $800. To operate the scanner, a new XYZscan application lifts the heated bed out of the way, and prompts the you to place an object on the turntable hidden underneath. Using what looks to be a red-light scanner on the right and left, da Vinci attempts to recreate a 3-D model. According to the instruction manual, the scanner can’t detect items smaller than 2 x 2 x 2 inches; if the object is too small or too complex, strange voids or blobby fills can appear.

Understandably, this technology is still cutting-edge and hard to get right, but it’s difficult to justify $300 more than the original for something that’s still a bit half-baked. This experimental printer is certainly appropriate as a project in a hackerspace, but shouldn’t be branded as a turn-key consumer product.

Conclusions

If you’re looking to get a Da Vinci 3-D printer, I’d recommend the Da Vinci 1.0: it’s the best value of the three models, and holds its own against competing brands. Although the software isn’t great, I have yet to see a plug-n-play printer that has a well-integrated interface.

As the technology gets better, including a scanner will make more sense. After all, generating 3-D models is a huge challenge for the 3-D printing field, and being able to turn clay or cardboard prototypes into shareable, replicable objects via a scan will be a great stepping stone.

A quick note on the Da Vinci Duo ($650): Though I didn’t get a chance to try it out, generally speaking, dual-nozzle printers only make sense if you’re printing two types of materials, such as nylon interwoven with hard plastic. And, as the Da Vinci technically only takes proprietary ABS or PLA spools, its usefulness is dramatically reduced.

If XYZ Printing comes out with a better app, the Da Vinci line has great potential. The company has a running head start in the ready-made printer market, experimenting with some interesting business models in an uncertain field. The devices are surprisingly high quality for their price. For being barely a year old, XYZ printing is making some excellent advances in 3-D printing accessibility and affordability for enthusiasts, designers, and schools around the world.

The Amazon Fire Phone’s Worst Reviews Are From Angry Environmentalists

Amazon

Amazon’s first phone hasn’t been a hit. But it may not be quite the flop it appears, based on the Amazon Fire reviews on the online retailer’s own web site.

That’s because a good-sized chunk of the nearly 2,000 1-star pans of the device aren’t really reviews at all. They’re a form of protest, organized by the environmental group, Greenpeace.

Take Rachel Rubin’s October 24 review — the only one she’s ever penned using her Amazon.com account: “I can’t support a phone powered by dirty energy like coal and gas,” she writes.

In fact, Greenpeace says that the majority of Fire Phone’s dud reviews — more than 1,400 of them — are from environmentalists unhappy with the fact that Amazon’s massive cloud computing infrastructure is powered by coal and gas, rather than renewable energy sources.

In the data center industry, cheap power is king, and coal-and-gas-powered electricity is the cheapest. But over the past few years, Greenpeace has led a remarkably successful campaign, pressuring internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Apple to power their sprawling data centers with energy from solar arrays, biofuel, and wind-power.

The activists haven’t had much success with Amazon, however. About 15 percent of its data center requirements come from renewable energy. That’s enough to earn it an F grade in Greenpeace’s books.

So in late September, Greenpeace put a call out to its supporters, asking them to sign a petition calling for Amazon to use more renewable energy. “We also asked supporters who were Amazon.com customers with accounts if they would take an additional step, which was to review the Fire phone with a critique of the fact that its cloud-based technology is being powered primarily by dirty energy,” says David Pomerantz, a Greenpeace spokesman.

Investment Startup for Tech’s Young Millionaires Now Wants Your Money, Too

Getty Images

In 2011, Wealthfront started out with a no-brainer concept. A lot of really young people in Silicon Valley were making a lot of money quickly, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Wall Street-style brokerages and investment advisers were on the other side of the country, or at least on the other side of a generational and cultural divide. So Wealthfront came along with an alternative approach to help this newly minted class of hoodie-clad millionaires figure out where to put their many dollars.

Specifically, the company promised an automated approach to portfolio management, a system algorithmically tailored to clients’ financial goals and risk tolerance. With software to manage such esoteric services as tax-loss harvesting and single-stock diversification, Wealthfront portrays itself as a rational, commission-free alternative to high-fee money managers who always run the risk of allowing emotion to impact their trading decisions.

So far, the pitch seems to be working. In two-and-a-half years, Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash says the company has amassed more than $1 billion in client assets. Its service is now part of the benefits package for employees at Google, Palantir, and the San Francisco 49ers (another outfit with a lot of twentysomething millionaires). It has an exclusive program for Twitter and Facebook employees to manage their post-IPO equity.

Schwab for Millennials

But like the Silicon Valley companies it services, Wealthfront has bigger ambitions than this one niche market. On Tuesday, the company announced a new $64 million funding round to transform itself into what Nash describes as Charles Schwab for a new generation.

“The leading edge of this generation has now reached their early 30s, and they have a very different set of priorities than the Baby Boom generation,” Nash says. “While just beginning to earn, save and invest, they are projected to control $7 trillion in liquid assets in less than five years.”

Nash says Wealthfront has raised this new capital despite not spending a cent of the $35 million it raised in its previous round, bringing its total funding to around $100 million. At a time when venture capitalists are wringing their hands about startups spending too much money too quickly, this apparent temperance is unexpected. But the willingness of backers to pour more money into the company anyway also speaks to the hope and expectation of steroidal growth for Valley startups of a certain echelon. If Wealthfront can make good on its pitch and entice a much wider range of clients than the winners of the Silicon Valley startup lottery, the opportunity seems to be there. If the past decade of rising tech wealth has taught Millennials anything, it’s that you don’t need to trust someone wearing a tie to make a lot of money.

Rocket Headed for Space Station Explodes After Liftoff

An unmanned Antares rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded just seconds after taking off this evening. The rocket, which launched from the NASA Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia at 6:22 pm ET, was operated by the Orbital Sciences Corporation.

The cause of the “catastrophic anomaly” is not clear, and the team was not tracking any issues before the launch, according to NASA mission control. No injuries were reported, and all personnel have been accounted for. Orbital teams are now securing the crash site and telemetry data from the flight.

The rocket was carrying a Cygnus cargo logistics spacecraft, which was to be boosted into orbit above Earth and rendezvous with the ISS on Nov. 2. It was carrying 5,050 pounds of cargo, including food, flight procedures books, crew equipment, and equipment for science experiments onboard.

Orbital has a contract with NASA for eight missions to resupply the ISS. This was the third of those missions. Orbital and NASA are determining when a press conference will be held, and if the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will be involved in the investigation.

These Affordable 3-D Printers Are Impressive—And Plagued by Weak Software

XYZ Printing

The original Da Vinci 1.0 3-D printer made its debut at CES in January, and a two-color Da Vinci 2.0 “Duo” was introduced two months later. Today, the Taiwanese-based company XYZ Printing behind the Da Vincis has announced yet another addition to the lineup: the Da Vinci “All-in-One,” which boasts a built-in scanner.

I’ve had the opportunity to test the 1.0 and the All-in-One. So far, I’m impressed with the print and build quality of both, but there is one hitch. A 3-D printer is more than just its extruder; unlike regular inkjet printers, 3-D printers are largely defined by the flexibility and utility of their software, which XYZ Printing seems to have forgotten in its rush to market.

Da Vinci 1.0: $500

The original da Vinci printer is a single-color, fused-filament machine. The device gets much closer to being something people might own at home than many other printers of its kind. It’s ready right out of the box: After the packing foam and tape has been removed and the filament inserted, it can immediately print its default test objects, or plug into a computer to receive new ones. Its enclosure—which admittedly looks like what the ’90s thought would be cool in “the future”—hides all the wires, hot metal, and moving bits, and cuts down on the sounds and scents. It’s also hard to beat the $500 price tag, which makes the Da Vinci 1.0 an option even for people who only want to dabble in 3-D printing.

XYZ Printing

For more advanced users who have already printed a thing or 30 and want to tinker with the insides, the da Vinci 1.0′s hardware remains easily accessible. The extruder and moving heated bed are familiar fixtures, and, though the filament comes in proprietary “cartridges” of either PLA or ABS thermoplastic filament, there are ways of spoofing it to use filament spools of your choice.

The da Vinci is not breaking any ground in fused filament technology, but the little things, like the wiping tab that cleans the nozzle before and after the print and the large 7.8 x 7.8 x 7.8-inch print capacity, make it a good build of an established model.

Annoyingly, the attention to detail in the hardware fails to reach the accompanying software. XYZware, which takes files and pushes them to the printer, has minimal functionality and an infuriating user interface peppered with comically bad translations (“Take a minute to finish the registration, and enjoy the benefit with us!”). Editing an object is limited to resizing and rotating it—and even that is done by moving sliders, not the actual object. If the object isn’t well-formed, the slicing algorithms don’t have any healing options. When I tried to print a model of a waving cat, it included a glitch that morphed the cat’s middle into a cylinder. You are better off using open-source programs like Blender to create STL files and throwing them through Slic3r to produce the G Code, and using XYZware only as the final link to the printer. Or, for the advanced hacker, there’s been buzz about a Repetier firmware hack that might be the answer to bringing this printer up to its full potential.

Da Vinci All-in-One:$800

The All-in-One is almost identical to the original printer—same size, same enclosure, same hardware and software—with the added feature of a 3-D scanner. As of today, it’s available for pre-order on Newegg and Amazon for $800. To operate the scanner, a new XYZscan application lifts the heated bed out of the way, and prompts the you to place an object on the turntable hidden underneath. Using what looks to be a red-light scanner on the right and left, da Vinci attempts to recreate a 3-D model. According to the instruction manual, the scanner can’t detect items smaller than 2 x 2 x 2 inches; if the object is too small or too complex, strange voids or blobby fills can appear.

Understandably, this technology is still cutting-edge and hard to get right, but it’s difficult to justify $300 more than the original for something that’s still a bit half-baked. This experimental printer is certainly appropriate as a project in a hackerspace, but shouldn’t be branded as a turn-key consumer product.

Conclusions

If you’re looking to get a Da Vinci 3-D printer, I’d recommend the Da Vinci 1.0: it’s the best value of the three models, and holds its own against competing brands. Although the software isn’t great, I have yet to see a plug-n-play printer that has a well-integrated interface.

As the technology gets better, including a scanner will make more sense. After all, generating 3-D models is a huge challenge for the 3-D printing field, and being able to turn clay or cardboard prototypes into shareable, replicable objects via a scan will be a great stepping stone.

A quick note on the Da Vinci Duo ($650): Though I didn’t get a chance to try it out, generally speaking, dual-nozzle printers only make sense if you’re printing two types of materials, such as nylon interwoven with hard plastic. And, as the Da Vinci technically only takes proprietary ABS or PLA spools, its usefulness is dramatically reduced.

If XYZ Printing comes out with a better app, the Da Vinci line has great potential. The company has a running head start in the ready-made printer market, experimenting with some interesting business models in an uncertain field. The devices are surprisingly high quality for their price. For being barely a year old, XYZ printing is making some excellent advances in 3-D printing accessibility and affordability for enthusiasts, designers, and schools around the world.

The Amazon Fire Phone’s Worst Reviews Are From Angry Environmentalists

Amazon

Amazon’s first phone hasn’t been a hit. But it may not be quite the flop it appears, based on the Amazon Fire reviews on the online retailer’s own web site.

That’s because a good-sized chunk of the nearly 2,000 1-star pans of the device aren’t really reviews at all. They’re a form of protest, organized by the environmental group, Greenpeace.

Take Rachel Rubin’s October 24 review — the only one she’s ever penned using her Amazon.com account: “I can’t support a phone powered by dirty energy like coal and gas,” she writes.

In fact, Greenpeace says that the majority of Fire Phone’s dud reviews — more than 1,400 of them — are from environmentalists unhappy with the fact that Amazon’s massive cloud computing infrastructure is powered by coal and gas, rather than renewable energy sources.

In the data center industry, cheap power is king, and coal-and-gas-powered electricity is the cheapest. But over the past few years, Greenpeace has led a remarkably successful campaign, pressuring internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Apple to power their sprawling data centers with energy from solar arrays, biofuel, and wind-power.

The activists haven’t had much success with Amazon, however. About 15 percent of its data center requirements are come from renewable energy. That’s enough to earn it an F grade in Greenpeace’s books.

So in late September, Greenpeace put a call out to its supporters, asking them to sign a petition calling for Amazon to use more renewable energy. “We also asked supporters who were Amazon.com customers with accounts if they would take an additional step, which was to review the Fire phone with a critique of the fact that its cloud-based technology is being powered primarily by dirty energy,” says David Pomerantz, a Greenpeace spokesman.

Investment Startup for Tech’s Young Millionaires Now Wants Your Money, Too

Getty Images

In 2011, Wealthfront started out with a no-brainer concept. A lot of really young people in Silicon Valley were making a lot of money quickly, but they didn’t know what to do with it. Wall Street-style brokerages and investment advisers were on the other side of the country, or at least on the other side of a generational and cultural divide. So Wealthfront came along with an alternative approach to help this newly minted class of hoodie-clad millionaires figure out where to put their many dollars.

Specifically, the company promised an automated approach to portfolio management, a system algorithmically tailored to clients’ financial goals and risk tolerance. With software to manage such esoteric services as tax-loss harvesting and single-stock diversification, Wealthfront portrays itself as a rational, commission-free alternative to high-fee money managers who always run the risk of allowing emotion to impact their trading decisions.

So far, the pitch seems to be working. In two-and-a-half years, Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash says the company has amassed more than $1 billion in client assets. Its service is now part of the benefits package for employees at Google, Palantir, and the San Francisco 49ers (another outfit with a lot of twentysomething millionaires). It has an exclusive program for Twitter and Facebook employees to manage their post-IPO equity.

Schwab for Millennials

But like the Silicon Valley companies it services, Wealthfront has bigger ambitions than this one niche market. On Tuesday, the company announced a new $64 million funding round to transform itself into what Nash describes as Charles Schwab for a new generation.

“The leading edge of this generation has now reached their early 30s, and they have a very different set of priorities than the Baby Boom generation,” Nash says. “While just beginning to earn, save and invest, they are projected to control $7 trillion in liquid assets in less than five years.”

Nash says Wealthfront has raised this new capital despite not spending a cent of the $35 million it raised in its previous round, bringing its total funding to around $100 million. At a time when venture capitalists are wringing their hands about startups spending too much money too quickly, this apparent temperance is unexpected. But the willingness of backers to pour more money into the company anyway also speaks to the hope and expectation of steroidal growth for Valley startups of a certain echelon. If Wealthfront can make good on its pitch and entice a much wider range of clients than the winners of the Silicon Valley startup lottery, the opportunity seems to be there. If the past decade of rising tech wealth has taught Millennials anything, it’s that you don’t need to trust someone wearing a tie to make a lot of money.

Google Developing a Pill That Would Detect Cancer and Other Diseases

Nanoparticles circulate in the blood and can be built to attach to particular types of cells, such as circulating cancer cells. Google

LAGUNA BEACH, California — Google is attempting to develop a pill that would send microscopic particles into the bloodstream in an effort to identify cancers, imminent heart attacks, and other diseases.

Andrew Conrad, the head of life sciences inside the company’s Google X research lab, revealed the project on Tuesday morning at a conference here in Southern California. According to Conrad, the company is fashioning nanoparticles—particles about one billionth of a meter in width—that combine a magnetic material with antibodies or proteins that can attach to and detect other molecules inside the body. The idea is that patients will swallow a pill that contains these particles, and after they enter the bloodstream—attempting to identify molecules that would indicate certain health problems—a wearable device could use their magnetic cores to gather them back together and read what they’ve found.

Andrew Conrad, Head of Google[X] Life Sciences Google

“Because the core of these particles is magnetic, you can call them somewhere,” Conrad said, indicating that you could use a wearable device to gather them in the superficial veins on the inside of your wrist. “These little particles go out and mingle with the people, we call them back to one place, and we ask them: ‘Hey, what did you see? Did you find cancer? Did you see something that looks like a fragile plaque for a heart attack? Did you see too much sodium?”

Known as the “Nanoparticle Platform,” the project is part of a wider effort inside to Google to develop new technologies capable of improving healthcare. “Google X’s job is to take on big problems, to try to find clever solutions to big problems, and one of the problems we decided to tackle was healthcare,” Conrad said. “The way in which we envision doing this is inverting the paradigm in medicine—which is currently reactive and episodic—to a new paradigm that is proactive and cumulative.” As Conrad put it, this involves building “gizmos” that can monitor your health in new ways.

In January, for instance, the company unveiled a contact lens that would let diabetics monitor blood glucose levels through the tears in their eyes. As with this contact lens, Google does not intend to sell its nanoparticle pills and accompanying wearables. Instead, it will work with third party medical companies to bring the technology to market.

Conrad said “there is a lot of evidence” that these nanoparticles are safe and that similar nanonparitcles are already used in some medicines available today and in contrast agents used in magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, tests. These particles would be expelled from the body, he explained, through urine.

The wearable device that reads these particles, Conrad said, could be configured to send information, across the internet, back to a doctor. The idea, he explained, is that you or your doctor could monitor your health in a more consistent way. “So, you get a more continuous monitoring, rather than episodic monitoring,” he said.

According to Conrad, Google is actively looking for partners on the project. But he did not say when the technology might arrive to market, and it’s unclear how far along the company is in developing the technology.

A Slick New Interactive 3-D Poster for the Divergent Sequel Insurgent

Remember a while back when motion posters were all the rage? Those were cool. Then it was 3-D motion posters. (Looking at you, Jurassic Park 3-D.) Now, here to get you pumped for the upcoming 3-D release of the Divergent sequel Insurgent, we have an interactive 3-D character poster. The future is here. You’re welcome.

The poster above, of Insurgent‘s Peter (Miles Teller), is one of several interactive character posters being released today—one for each of the main characters in the upcoming adaptation of Veronica Roth’s young adult dystopian novel. Each of the posters, which are being released hourly throughout the day, lets fans watch an animation of the character assembling out of what look like glass shards and then lets them move the character around. (Mouse over the Peter poster above to play with it for yourself.) You can’t hang it in your bedroom, but it’s still pretty fly.

In Insurgent, directed by Robert Schwentke, Tris (Shailene Woodley) and Four (Theo James) are fugitives looking for allies after rebelling against the Erudite elite at the end of Divergent. (Tough-as-nails Erudite leader Jeanine Matthews/Kate Winslet is hunting them down.) These new posters don’t give away too much about what else is coming in the second film in the Divergent franchise, but judging by the weapons in the charaters’ hands, it’s not all hugs and handshakes.

Insurgent hits theaters March 20, 2015.

New Droid Turbo Charges to 8 Hours of Battery Life in Just 15 Minutes

Motorola/Verizon

With all the Nexuses and Galaxies and Motos and HTC Ones out there, the Droid lineup of phones can get lost in the shuffle. The new Droid Turbo, developed in a partnership between Verizon and Motorola, wants to steal back some of the spotlight with some enticing features.

First on the list is a fixed 3,900mAh battery that gets up to 48 hours of life on a single charge. Rather than having to wait around for that beefy battery to charge up, you can top it off quickly with a “Turbo Charging” feature that provides eight hours of battery life when you plug it in for 15 minutes.

The main camera is a 21-megapixel shooter, giving you plenty of room to crop and use digital zoom without making a pixellated mess. Those high-res photos look sharp on the Droid Turbo’s 5.2-inch AMOLED QHD display (2560 x 1440, 565ppi), and the phone also shoots 4K video at 24fps.

Durability is sure to be a strong suit, as the Droid Turbo comes with black backings made of ballistic nylon or metallic glass fiber or a red backing made of the metallic glass fiber. They feel good in the hand. And just in case the Gorilla Glass screen breaks, Verizon and Motorola are offering free “Turbo Screen Assurance” coverage good for one free screen replacement per two-year contract.

It’s well-specced under the hood, with a 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon system on a chip and 3GB RAM. Although the new phone runs Android 4.4 KitKat with the dramatically redesigned Android 5.0 Lollipop waiting in the wings, Verizon and Motorola say that the new phone is “guaranteed” to get a Lollipop upgrade once the new OS is available.

The new Droid Turbo will be available this Thursday, Oct. 30, on Verizon only. It’ll be $200 on contract ($25 per month) for a 32GB version with the black or red backing in both materials. The 64GB version is priced at $250 on contract ($27 per month) with the black ballistic nylon backing only. To grease the wheels of commerce, Verizon is offering a trade-in plan: Any phone you trade in will get you a minimum of $100 towards the new Turbo, and they’ll also waive all the activation fees.

A Stellar New Fantasy Novel and 4 Other Books We’re Reading This Month

It’s not easy, but in between the midnight screenings, Netflix binges, and multiplayer gaming marathons, we try to read. And sometimes, that even includes actual books. They’re the perfect escape in our hypercaffeinated, soundbite-dominated, attention-deficit-disordered digital age. But we still need motivation, just like everyone else. So, to keep our eyes open and the pages turning, we’re starting a (not very official) Underwire book club, and we want you to join. Every month, we’ll tell you what we’re reading, and maybe even gin up some discussion questions to animate our virtual dinner parties. We’re going for a range of experiences, so you’ll find nonfiction titles alongside our new genre faves, plus more “literary” stuff if we’re feeling it. This month, we’re balancing some quick reads—a Jonathan Franzen-blessed debut and a slim companion volume from one of our favorite new(-ish) fantasy writers—with Walter Isaacson’s latest blockbuster on the history of technological innovation, along with a few other selections. Attention, readers: book club starts now.

The Blockbuster: The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

Release: October 7

In the intro to his fat new tome on a topic no less ambitious than the history of digital-era innovation, Isaacson writes: “We talk so much about innovation these days that it has become a buzzword, drained of clear meaning.” Well, yes: that word, along with its related forms—innovate, innovative, innovator—should probably be banned from most self-respecting publications for a while. But if anyone can get away with it, it’s Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and institution unto himself. Also, not enough people appreciate Ada Lovelace’s contributions to computer science (Isaacson’s first chapter). She was an innovator of the truest kind.

For discussion: Is innovation the same thing as genius?

The Crowd-Pleaser: Yes Please by Amy Poehler

Release: October 28

It’s a good time to be a comedian-author: Neil Patrick Harris and Russell Brand both have books out this month (the former being framed, amusingly, as a “choose your own autobiography”). But the one we’re most excited about is Amy Poehler’s. Her bestie Tina Fey dominated this category in 2011; will Yes Please be this year’s Bossypants? The back cover mentions her “frequent turns as acting double for Meryl Streep,” so on the basis of that joke alone, we say yes.

For discussion: Once and for all: Tina Fey or Amy Poehler? (Hint: There’s no right answer.)

The Genre Pick: The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss

Release: October 28

If Patrick Rothfuss nails the third book in his Kingkiller Chronicle—and it’ll be tough—he’ll have written one of the great fantasy trilogies of our time. But that won’t come out for, we dunno, another couple of years. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with this companion volume about the sprite-like Auri, one of the series’ most beloved characters. We love Auri, but what’s the deal with fantasy writers dragging their feet with these side-story embellishments? George R. R. Martin, we’re also looking at you—we don’t need an untold history (also out this month). At least J. K. Rowling had the good sense to finish Harry Potter before she gave us Pottermore.

For discussion: Is Rothfuss already one of the great fantasy writers of our time?

The “Literary” Choice: The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

Release: October 1

Much has been made of Jonathan Franzen’s endorsement of this newcomer’s talents. Which, OK, great, we’re glad Franzen’s a fan (a…fanzen?). Zink’s debut novel doesn’t need a celebrity blurb. Its premise is so good it endorses itself: woman gets hitched to a birder, moves to Europe, and becomes an eco-terrorist. You had us at “eco-terrorist.” Wait, no, you had us at “birder.” (That’s probably where she had Franzen as well—he’s no stranger to ornithological pursuits.)

For discussion: Which matters more to you in literary fiction: premise or prose?

The Existentially Weighty One: The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson

Release: October 6

With a title like that, you might expect something encyclopedia-length. After all, this is the same Harvard biologist who once turned in 732 pages about ants. (The Ants, written with Bert Hölldobler, won Wilson his second Pulitzer Prize.) But no: apparently Wilson, now 85 years old, can answer the oldest question in a mere 187 pages. His The Social Conquest of Earth, the precursor to this book, overburdened us with facts and theories; this one, Wilson’s “most philosophical work to date,” promises to contextualize those insight, and fill us with wonder.

For discussion: What IS the meaning of human existence? Or, more seriously: How does Meaning advance the ideas Wilson put forth in The Social Conquest of Earth?

Best of the Rest

We can’t read everything, but if we could, Chuck Palahniuk (whose Fight Club means a lot to some people) came out with Beautiful You last week, and William Gibson is following up 2010’s Zero History with The Peripheral. There’s also As You Wish, in which actor Cary Elwes tells us (inconceivable!) tales from the making of The Princess Bride. Finally, vampire queen Anne Rice is resurrecting her beloved antihero in Prince Lestat, out today. That woman must be approaching immortality herself.

Angry Nerd: Horror Movie Clichés Must Die!

The latest crop of horror flicks are full of nothing but a bunch of recycled clichés. These oft-repeated tropes deserve to meet a bloody end. Do we really need Michael Bay bringing another Hasbro product to life with Ouija? And who asked for that new wannabe Blair Witch Project movie Exists? Angry Nerd explains why the only frightening thing this Halloween is the surplus of crappy horror flicks.​

How Utah’s Bryce Canyon Got Its Bizarre, Beautiful Sandstone Formations

Jiri Bruthans created this pillar with simulated salt weathering; in nature (like at Bryce Canyon, below), factors like frost and rain also shape the landscape. Courtesy of Jiri Bruthans

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Aa the story goes, the iconic spires in Utah's Bryce Canyon National Park once were human-animal “legend people,” until an angry coyote god turned them into rock. This is probably not how it actually happened, but scientists haven't been able to add much more than to say “it's a weathering thing.” So geoscientist Jiří Bruthans and his colleagues at Charles University in Prague tried mimicking the process in miniature: They took 4- by 12-inch blocks of “locked sand”—a material that's between loose sand and sandstone—and crammed decades of erosion into weeks or months by simulating rain and intensive salt weathering. What Bruthans discovered is a sort of geological beauty trick in which the key factor is weight. The massive load of rock, which he approximates by squeezing his blocks with clamps, actually stabilizes the structures: The stress locks the grains of sand into place. It's an elegant explanation and one that befits the sculptural formations. If Bruthans ever gets tired of geoscience, he can always sell his experiments as modern art.

What’s Up With That: People Feel the Weather in Their Bones

Wrists are a common place people claim to feel pain related to weather changes. Getty Images

When I was younger, my grandma would occasionally issue solemn prophesies for rain. These declarations would come after she’d spent a few minutes rubbing her arthritic wrists. With a pensive gaze, she’d credit the prediction to her aching joints.

I was reminded of this yesterday. I’d been working on my laptop when my ankle, titanium-braced from an old break, started throbbing. I thought nothing of it until I stepped outside, and into a surprise rainstorm. I’d always been skeptical of grandma’s arthritic omens, but limping down the sidewalk in the wake of my own revelation gave me reason to reconsider. Could science have an answer for why some people seem to feel the weather in their bones?

What's Up With That?

Each week, we'll explain the science behind a strange phenomenon that you may be wondering about, or may be hearing about for the first time right here. If you've seen or heard of something you'd like us to explain, send us an email. View the entire collection.

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Turns out, scientists have been studying this for several decades. The answer has been tricky to nail down, but most of the research seems to indicate that bones and joints, weakened by age or injury, seem to be sensitive to subtle changes in barometric pressure. This is a measurement of the atmosphere’s density, and sudden changes (especially drops) typically signal a change in the weather.

In one of the earliest studies (paywall) to establish this link, published in 1990, a pair of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania put four arthritic patients in a chamber where they had control of the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure. Three of the patients reported an increase in pain whenever the pressure dropped. This was too small a group to draw hard conclusions, but more studies in the following decades have supported the findings.

Rather than shove patients into artificial atmospheric bubbles, most of the later studies compared patients’ reports of their pain with data from weather stations. One of the most recent, published in 2007, matched up the reports of 200 arthritis sufferers from across the country with temperature, humidity, and pressure data from local stations (almost all of the weather stations were within a mile of a subject). They too found that joint pain often preceded a change in barometric pressure.

As the researchers point out, figuring out exactly what is happening inside a joint as barometric pressure rises or falls would require some fairly invasive procedures. So the definitive study hasn’t yet been done. Researchers have, however, used findings from physiological studies in people to come up with a hypothesis.

The air pressure, they believe, is messing with the fluid that keeps your joints lubricated. Not only does this fluid let your joints hinge, twist, and swivel, it helps stabilizes them so you can keep your balance. Your body’s squishy parts are susceptible to atmospheric pressure. They swell when the pressure drops. This is why your feet swell during air travel, and the fluid in your joints is probably no exception. In 1990, a group of researchers did tests on cadavers’ hips and found that the joint’s fluid pressure seemed to be regulated by the outside air pressure. From this, researchers in the 2007 paper speculated that as these fluids respond to barometric changes, they would irritate the inflamed, arthritic joints.

Of course, this hypothesis isn’t airtight. The body is a complicated system that is constantly surprising scientists. Besides, there are plenty of people with arthritis whose aching joints have no auspicious abilities. And it doesn’t help me understand whether my healed fracture—which is neither a joint nor arthritic—has become a bellwether.

But, it’s good to know that science is looking into this. In the event of a major storm, I think I could do pretty well for myself as an ersatz meteorologist. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on my pensive, thousand-yard stare.