Mashable Tech – Spoken Edition

A feature in the Jan. 30 issue of The New Yorker opens with a story from Reddit co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman, about Huffman's decision to undergo vision correction surgery: It's just one of the many juicy tidbits in the story, which dives into the world of doomsday preppers within the shadowy world of Silicon Valley bigwigs, many of which are completely inaccessible—like keeping a helicopter gassed up 24/7—to us normal, non-founder folks.

The U.S. space program lost another towering figure today as astronaut Gene Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last person to walk on the moon, died at the age of 82 on Monday. "Even at the age of 82, Gene was passionate about sharing his desire to see the continued human exploration of space and encouraged our nation's leaders and young people to not let him remain the last man to walk on the Moon," Cernan's family said in a statement. Cernan's history of space flight is extensive.

Opera, which released its first browser in 1995, has quietly been innovating its products over the last two decades with features like built in ad-blocking and VPN. Now, the company has launched Neon, a new concept browser. "Each Opera Neon feature is an alternate reality for the Opera browser," the company said in a blog post announcing Neon Thursday. Neon is a fun and fresh take on the browser. It pulls your desktop background as the browser’s home background, making it feel transparent.

LG's G5 — as interesting it may be with its modular design and host of accessories — was a flop. Now, the company is trying to redeem itself with a very different flagship phone, and it's likely to launch on Feb. 26, ahead of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona. We know this because we've just received an invite from the company. As is customary, the invite does not contain many details, except the place and the date.

Finding a message in a bottle is every romantic's dream and it recently happened IRL for one woman on a Scottish island. Rhoda Meek, who lives in Tiree in the inner Hebrides, was alerted by a friend that one of those special messages had came ashore. She went to investigate and discovered it was in fact a GPS-tracked scientific experiment that travelled all the way from Iceland.

Even if you own a Tesla, you should still carry your car keys at all times. Tesla owner, Las Vegas investor and entrepreneur Ryan Negri learned that the hard way as he got stranded with his Tesla six miles from home near Red Rock Canyon, Nevada. Negri used the Tesla mobile app to start the car at home, and didn't bring his keys; but when he had to stop and restart the car to adjust a dog seat, there was no cell service, so the start-with-phone method was useless.

Samsung's next flagship phone, the Galaxy S8, will be arriving very soon. The pressure is on for the Korean electronics giant to deliver a flagship phone that not only improves on the specs of last year's Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, but also kicks the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus' butt.

Big changes are headed for Snapchat — again. The company is set to roll out a major redesign of its app in the coming days, Snapchat confirmed Thursday. The new look, which is being previewed to the company's beta testers on Android now, adds a search bar, new navigation and a global live story that will feature snaps from all over the world. The new look is much more polished than previous versions of the app and the search bar makes content much easier to find.

The company formally known as Yahoo is becoming Altaba. But the Yahoo branding you're familiar with will stick around and become part of Verizon. News broke late Monday that once Yahoo is officially acquired by Verizon, the company will change its name to Altaba. That works because the company that remains will be a husk, stripped of its primary assets. Think of it this way: Years ago, someone planted a seed and called it "Yahoo Inc." It grew into a big ol' tree with some fruit hanging off of it.

If you haven't gotten over Apple removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7, then make it your New Year's resolution to do so because Android phones are almost certainly going to follow suit and gut the port. Word on the street is HTC's next flagship phone, expected to be unveiled on Thursday, will be the latest phone to kill the headphone jack. Images posted to Weibo (via Android Police) claiming to be HTC's unannounced phone reveal a device that borrows ideas from the LG V20.