Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

By today’s standards it was ugly, it was slow, and it was primitive, but Windows 95 was the first operating system I mastered inside and out, and I’ll always have a soft spot for Microsoft’s most memorable PC OS. That can be the only explanation for why part of me would also love suffering through a mobile version of Windows 95 on a smartphone. Microsoft’s mobile operating systems will never be remembered as a runaway success story.

An unorthodox beauty treatment meant to rejuvenate the feet turned into a disturbing medical mystery for one young woman. According to a case report published by her doctorin JAMA Dermatology, the woman’s toenails stopped growing and started falling off soon after she received a so-called fish pedicure. Fish pedicures involve having small fish nibble at your feet while they’re soaked in a tub of warm or room temperature water.

Rivers in cities can easily fill with heaps full of trash, lost things, and industrial waste. But if the city has been around for a while, all of that garbage can tell an incredible story. Archaeologists had a unique opportunity to tell this story from the trash of Amsterdam. It began in 2003, when the city needed to drain and excavate one of its canal’s riverbeds for a new metro line.

The Hayabusa 2 spacecraft‘s latest photo of the Ryugu asteroid, taken from a distance of just 25 miles (40 km), shows for the first time surface features like boulders and craters, in addition to revealing the object’s unique dice-like appearance.

With the massive success of Apple’s AirPods, reports about a new pair of premium, wireless earbuds and over-the-ear headphones arriving in 2019 already seem like a forgone conclusion. However, if a report from the Nikkei is true, the future of Apple’s AirPods might not be as obvious as we thought.

For the past two weeks, a massive dust storm has churned on Mars, forcing NASA to put its Opportunity rover into hibernation mode. But Curiosity, a rover on the other side of the planet, is now feeling the effects of the storm as well, revealing the dramatic, planet-size scale of this dusty weather system. The extent of this dust storm is nearly incomprehensible—about the combined size of North America and Russia.

A woman’s selfies helped her monitor the movements of an unwelcome guest: a roving parasitic worm living in her face. Thankfully, doctors were able to get the pesky pest—which she likely caught overseas from a mosquito—out of her body without any problems. The woman’s unsettling story was detailed in a case report published by her doctors this month in the New England Journal of Medicine.

With fresh data breaches surfacing nearly every day, it’s impossible for one person to keep track of it all. Thankfully, there’s an app for that, and starting soon, it will be even more accessible for millions of users. Security researcher Troy Hunt on Tuesday announced that his data breach service, Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), will soon integrate with Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Unsatisfied with the sharpness in your new QHD monitor? Thanks to the power of economics, that display of yours might actually have a downscaled 4K panel, one that isn’t doing your image quality or refresh rate any favors. The worst part? You can’t even upscale them.

The public beta for the next big release of iOS, announced by Apple at WWDC earlier this month, is finally live. That means if you’re willing to turn your iPhone into a buggy mess, you can get a taste of what’s to come with iOS 12 a good four to five months ahead of everyone else. This year was pretty light for iOS, with most of Apple’s efforts seeming to be poured into iOS stability and macOS Mojave instead. Still, apps should launch faster and photos should be easier to find.