Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Android Oreo hasn’t even landed on one percent of Android Phones yet, but Google is already looking ahead to the next big update for the world’s most popular mobile OS. And if a report from Bloomberg is true, Android P could make it easier for phone makers to design devices with unusual displays.

When it comes to breakthrough therapies, sometimes it seems as though each new potentially life-saving drug comes with a price tag more expensive than the last. Novartis’ Kymriah, which became the first to win FDA approval for a groundbreaking new type of cancer treatment called CAR-T last year, priced its therapy at $475,000. A gene therapy from Spark Therepeutics approved in December to treat a rare, inherited form of blindness became the expensive medicine in the U.S.

The photos from most smartphones have gotten so good nowadays, they have basically killed the market for point-and-shoot cameras. That said sometimes you need a zoom. For people wanting to push image quality a little higher, there’s still value in a small, compact camera with a (relatively) big sensor and a long reach. That’s exactly where Panasonic’s new $800 Lumix ZS200 comes in. It features a 20.

Facebook is reportedly trying to be more than just the landing page for conspiracy theories and election propaganda—it wants you to come for the videos, baby. It’s a play to rival YouTube, but its CEO, Susan Wojcicki, doesn’t seem too threatened.

Facebook is not a privacy company; it’s Big Brother on PCP. It does not want to anonymize and protect you; it wants to drain you of your privacy, sucking up every bit of personal data. You should resist the urge to let it, at every turn. There’s a new menu item in the Facebook app, first reported by TechCrunch on Monday, labeled “Protect.” Clicking it will send you to the App Store and prompt you to download a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Onavo.

Praying mantises see the world in three dimensions in a way that’s completely different from how vertebrates (including birds, humans, and other mammals) do, according to a new paper in Current Biology. Also, studying this required putting tiny glasses on mantises. Birds and mammals can see in 3D using the differences between the images observed by each eye. But, the researchers at Newcastle University found, praying mantises have evolved a system that’s based on how each image changes.

Zurich-based designer Florian Schulz has reimagined Twitter not as a mind-numbing torrent of breaking news, gifs, and nazis, but as something else he calls a “social network.” We’re not too sure about this “social network” idea, but the results are pretty intriguing, at least in an experimental way. Services like Facebook and Twitter show you stuff based on newness, relevance, and popularity. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but there are side effects.

Humanity, man. We’ve had a good run, and have come up with some really neat stuff, but I think we could all use a bit of a breather. Nothing permanent, just a short break where we stop for a moment and maybe reconsider our priorities. I’m not saying all of our priorities are bad. Some of them are quite good! But it’s hard to escape the feeling that somewhere, at some point, things started going terribly, terribly wrong. Was it the election? In part, perhaps.

Belen Aldecosea used to have a dwarf hamster that served as her emotional support animal. Then she tried to fly Spirit, which would not let her hamster on the plane. Then she claims a Spirit employee told her to flush the rodent down the toilet. Then Aldecosea—for reasons privy only to her—flushed that hamster down the toilet. The story, first reported by the Miami Herald, is the latest chapter in the ongoing war between passengers and the airlines that ostensibly exist to serve them.

Great news: On Wednesday, the Unicode Consortium released the final version of its 11.0 emoji set, with approximately 77 new emojis being added to the list. There’s a lot of new content, including a few new faces, various organs or body parts, animals, foodstuffs, and science equipment including petri dishes and lab coats.