Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

If you’re as protective of your gadgets as I am, you’ve probably got a screen protector ready to apply to your new phone as soon as you’ve taken it out of the box. But how do you protect all the other surfaces in your home you don’t want getting dinged and dented? You cover it with this perfectly clear screen protector paint.

Planets and robots lack hearts and minds, but they’re especially good at impacting ours. In its last days before ending itself, human-built Cassini turned around and snapped this farewell mosaic image of Saturn. Its title: “Farewell to Saturn.” I don’t have the words to accurately describe the photo’s sublimity. I suggest you take a minute to view it full screen—and you might be left speechless, too. Here’s a high-resolution shot.

For 25 seconds in 1987, in the middle of WGN-TV anchor Dan Roan’s sportscast, thousands of Chicagoans’ feeds were replaced with a low analog whine and the eery image of a masked man nodding over and over as if in a state of mania. “If you’re wondering what’s happened, so am I,” Roan said to his audience once WGN regained control of the signal. What he couldn’t have known is that the rest of the world would still be wondering to this day.

Imagine if someone came to your house to fix your pipes, then stumbled around your yard blindly with a pair of sticks. Now imagine if you called the company they worked for whose rep said “yep, sometimes that’s how we look for pipes.” The Guardian reports that ten of twelve United Kingdom water companies admit to using water dowsing rods to find leaks and pipes. Some angered folks are calling for regulatory oversight and penalties for practicing companies.

During sex, female praying mantises have a tendency to kill their partners with a decapitating cutting blow that would make a samurai proud. But as this shocking new video shows, just because a male doesn’t have a head doesn’t mean he still can’t get it on. The entirety of this gorgeous new Deep Look video about praying mantises is worth watching, but the nasty business starts around the 3:00 mark.

When MoviePass announced its Netflix-for-the-cinema service back in August, observers wondered how it could possibly maintain the low $10 monthly fee for unlimited movies. On Friday, the company announced that it will be making a change to the fee. For a limited time, it’s offering annual subscriptions at about $7 per month. According to a press release the company sent to Gizmodo, the offer costs $89.95 for the year. That math doesn’t seem to come out to $6.

For many years, I’ve found it pretty easy to just ignore the Magic Mouse—whose sleek design is strangely missing a few parts that Apple, an ergonomically-minded company, must’ve meant to include to support a user’s palm, thumb, and pinky finger. But now that I’m working at a real desk inside a real office at a company that hands out Magic Mice by default, I can no longer look the other way as Apple continues this charade.

Soon, Android will finally let you monitor which apps use the most battery life on your phone. If you’re confused and thought you already had this functionality, you might be right! Some Android skins, like the one on the Galaxy S8, and some apps, like Greenify, already make it possible to detect which applications are draining your phone’s battery. However, in the next release of Android Oreo, that feature will at long come standard on Google’s mobile OS.

When it acquired Whole Foods in August, Amazon said that Prime members would eventually get “special savings and in-store benefits” at the grocery stores, and the company just announced the first one: It’s for turkey! For Thanksgiving! A whole 20 percent off (non-organic) birds! If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, all you have to do is pull upa special coupon on Amazon’s website, go to Whole Foods before November 26th, select the specific type of turkey that’s on sale for Prime Members, take it to the cashier, present the coupon, and BOOM,...

Lyme disease is the most common vectorborne disease in the United States, but it’s also mostly confined to a small swath of the country running down the eastern seaboard to the Mid Atlantic and along the Great Lakes. But while it was once thought that Lyme disease rarely occurred outside of the Northeast, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control confirms that Lyme is slowly expanding its geographic footprint.