Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

A famous work of art has captured more than just van Gogh’s impressions—it’s preserving a hundred-year-old grasshopper corpse, too. Researchers spotted the critter while taking a closer look at over a hundred paintings at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. This probably beats burial or burning at a pyre, as far as funeral rites go. Van Gogh painted outdoors, but the practice came with some intruders.

Hey! You know that that awful Twitter account run by the president? Yeah, the incredibly ominous one that’s managed to overshadow even the day-to-day chaos of his administration and might one day lead us to nuclear war? The one he used to thirstily neg North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un this weekend, for some reason? Right, that one. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly just ignores it, he told reporters on Sunday.

Hindsight is 20/20. Maybe you’d be more productive if you didn’t stay up until 3 am binge watching Stranger Things. Maybe you’d be a Nobel-winning scientist if you didn’t smoke too much pot during undergrad and sleep through your lectures. Maybe the dinosaurs wouldn’t have gone extinct if the giant meteor hit...somewhere else. That’s what these Japanese researchers are saying.

Tomorrow Apple will lift the veil off its long-awaited, very expensive new iPhone. But earlier today, three reportedly “husky” dudes made off with as many as 313 iPhone X devices. The phones were apparently sitting inside a UPS truck outside of a San Francisco Apple store when they were stolen earlier this afternoon.

Humans like naming things. We named a boat Boaty McBoatface. We named a bunch of animals after dicks. But some things already have perfectly good names. Like a distant rock NASA is tasking us with nicknaming. New Horizons, the mission that showed us Pluto’s icy heart, is whizzing into the outer reaches of the Solar System. On New Year’s Day 2019, it will approach a small body (or pair of bodies). NASA needs help nicknaming this rock (or these rocks).

“I love the dumb notch! And the face-scanning thing I don’t want! The iPhone X is exactly the kind of absurd luxury good I crave,” you say, having not even scratched the diamond-encrusted surface of true decadence. Sit right there like the tiny, foolish baby you are and I’ll tell you about an even newer, more exciting bauble, the likes of which have not been seen since Nordstrom’s leather-wrapped stone.

Osama bin Laden had a lot of weird stuff on his computer when he was killed by US forces in 2011. The terrorist mastermind had NSFW anime, Hollywood movies, and even a 9-11 truther movie called Loose Change. And yes, that screenshot above from the video game X-Men vs Street Fighter is really from bin Laden’s computer. But now you can follow along with the weirdness from the comfort of your home, without having to download anything from the CIA’s archive.

The iPhone X costs more than any phone Apple has ever sold, starting at $1,000 a pop. But Apple expects people will buy truckloads of them anyways, according to the company’s earnings release today, and CEO Tim Cook seems to believe you can afford one, too, because if you break a monthly payment plan down, it’s “less than a coffee a day at one of those expensive coffee places.” And Cook is right.

Chrome OS is getting there. What started out as a way to make an OS that runs well on inexpensive laptop components is slowly marching to a point where it may actually be a real competitor to Windows, macOS, and Linux. And based on a some code found in the developer preview for Android 8.1, Google’s next addition to its desktop OS could enable Chromebooks to send and receive texts.

Amazon announced a new service today that will let the tech giant right inside your front door. The service, Amazon Key, is for Prime members, and comes with a kit that includes the company’s Cloud Cam security camera and a compatible smart lock. Here’s how it works: Once Amazon authorizes a delivery, the company will turn on the Cloud Cam and unlock your door, allowing the courier to drop off your package.