Author: lisa nichols

Passionate about the power of words and their ability to inform, inspire, and ignite change, lisa Nichols is an accomplished article writer with a flair for crafting engaging and informative content. With a deep curiosity for various subjects and a dedication to thorough research, lisa Nichols brings a unique blend of creativity and accuracy to every piece

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Entertainment

Samsung’s midrange Galaxy A55 has a bigger screen and new security features

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Samsung has launched its 2024 midrange phone lineup, which combines weaker specs and feature sets with more alluring prices than its flagship handsets. The Galaxy A55 and A35 have 6.6-inch Super AMOLED displays. For the first time in its budget handsets, the company included Knox Vault, a walled-off security section that debuted in the Galaxy S21.

Both Android 14-running phones have FHD+ (2220×1080) displays (374 pixels per inch) and variable refresh rates up to 120Hz. Like last year’s Galaxy A54, both include Samsung’s Vision Booster feature, which adjusts the screen’s tone mapping based on ambient lighting conditions. Their 6.6-inch diagonal measurements (not accounting for rounded corners) are a slight bump up from the A54’s 6.4 inches.

Samsung’s official materials didn’t list the phones’ processors, but Android Police reports the A55 uses an Exynos 1480, while the A35 settles for a slower Exynos 1380. RAM comes in different configurations: 8GB or 12GB in the A55 and 6GB or 8GB in the cheaper A35. Your storage options are 128GB or 256GB in each handset, but only the A55 has a microSD card slot.

The Samsung Galaxy A35 against a plain white background. The phone has a pink wallpaper and back.

Galaxy A35 (Samsung)

In addition to performance, cameras will be one of the primary differences between the two phones. The pair has three rear cameras, each with a 50MP main camera and a 5MP macro lens. But the more expensive A55 uses a 12MP ultra-wide sensor, while the A35 has a more pedestrian 8MP ultra-wide lens. In addition, the A55 has a 32MP front-facing camera, compared to the A35’s 13MP front shooter. Both use optical image stabilization (OIS) and video digital image stabilization (VDIS) to offset camera shake.

Unsurprisingly, neither phone appears to include the generative AI features Samsung uses to differentiate the Galaxy S24 series (and older flagships, via software updates). The closest you may get in this price range is the company’s “advanced AI Image Signal Processing (ISP)” for better photography in low-light conditions, included only on the A55.

Samsung didn’t list the phones’ build material in its press release and official specs, but Android Police says the A55 is the company’s first midrange phone with a metal frame. (Last year’s Galaxy A54 used plastic.) Engadget reached out to Samsung to clarify, and we’ll update this article if we hear back.

The handsets each have a 5,000mAh battery. Samsung estimates two days of battery life, but this could vary greatly depending on usage.

US pricing and launch dates aren’t yet available. However, Samsung says the A55 will start at £439 (US$562) in the UK, while the A35 will begin at £339 ($434). Samsung lists a March 20 release date for both handsets in the UK.

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Featured

usmile Y10 Pro Sonic Electric Toothbrush

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usmile Y10 Pro Sonic Electric Toothbrush: One minute review

The usmile Y10 Pro Sonic Electric Toothbrush is smart brush that gets you some high-end features, in a model that is priced lower than you might expect. There are few other screen-toting brushes out there, and you’ll pay a premium for that. So does that help get the Y10 Pro in the list of best electric toothbrush options?

A screen alone won’t do that, but when combined with all the other features this is a very compelling option for your mouth indeed. The brush is adaptive meaning it’s able to change the power and style of brushing to suit the various parts of your mouth. All that should mean an ideal clean without damaging your gums in the process.

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Life Style

Blockbuster obesity drug leads to better health in people with HIV

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Light micrograph of white adipose tissue, or fat, stained with haematoxylin and eosin.

Long-term use of antiretroviral drugs can cause abnormal fat accumulation in people with HIV.Credit: Jose Calvo/SPL

People with HIV are the latest group to benefit from the new generation of anti-obesity drugs. If early data about the treatments’ effects are confirmed, the drugs could become key to controlling the metabolic problems often caused by anti-HIV medications.

Studies presented last week at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Denver, Colorado, suggest that the anti-obesity drug semaglutide not only helps people with HIV to lose weight but also reduces certain conditions associated with fat accumulation that are especially common in people infected with the virus.

The number of people who are overweight or have obesity is increasing among those with HIV, driving interest among both affected individuals and medical providers in medications such as semaglutide, says Daniel Lee, a physician at the University of California San Diego Medical Center. At his clinic, which treats people with metabolic complications of HIV therapies, around 20% of patients already receive semaglutide or other drugs of the same class.

“For the most part, we’ve had very good experiences with these medications,” Lee says. But, so far, few studies have looked at the effect of the blockbuster anti-obesity drugs on people with HIV.

Unwanted side effects

Although the increasing incidence of obesity in people with HIV is similar to the trend in the general population, certain antiretroviral medications used to suppress HIV could contribute further to weight gain and weight-related conditions in these individuals1,2.

Semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy for obesity and Ozempic for diabetes, mimics a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1, which helps to lower blood sugar levels and control appetite. In people who are overweight or have obesity, the drug promotes substantial weight loss3.

In a talk on 4 March, researchers at the Centers for AIDS Research Network of Integrated Clinical Systems, a group of HIV clinics across the United States, described their analysis of semaglutide use by 222 individuals receiving HIV care. The drug was associated with an average weight loss of 6.5 kilograms in around one year, or 5.7% of initial body weight.

Helping a fatty liver

Antiretroviral therapies have also been associated with abnormal fat accumulation. One condition affecting 30–40% of people with HIV is metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, which is characterized by the build-up of fat in the liver. As the condition progresses, it can result in liver failure and cardiovascular disease. “We do know that people with HIV have a more aggressive form of fatty liver disease,” says Jordan Lake, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. But there is currently no approved medication to treat the condition.

She and her colleagues evaluated the use of a weekly injection of semaglutide for around six months in people with both HIV and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease. The results, presented on 5 March, demonstrated that 29% of participants had a complete resolution of the liver disease. “What we saw were really great clinically significant reductions in liver fat even over that short period of time,” Lake said at the conference.

But data from the same study show that participants taking semaglutide lost muscle volume, an effect also observed in other people taking the drug. Individuals who were 60 years of age or older were affected the most. Lee notes that older individuals with HIV are especially vulnerable to semaglutide-linked muscle loss and should be followed closely by health-care providers.

Taming inflammation

Another talk at the conference examined the use of semaglutide for a condition called lipohypertrophy in people with HIV. Characterized by the accumulation of abdominal fat, it “is associated with increased inflammation and carries an increased cardiometabolic risk”, says Allison Eckard, an infectious-disease paediatrician at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. “We have currently few treatments and those treatments often show ineffective response rates.”

In an earlier clinical trial, Eckard and her colleagues scanned the bodies of people with HIV and lipohypertrophy and found that semaglutide helped to reduce abdominal fat. They had presented results from that study in October at IDWeek, a meeting of infectious-disease specialists and epidemiologists in Boston, Massachusetts. And at the conference in Denver, the team showed that a blood marker of inflammation called C-reactive protein fell by almost 40% in study participants who took semaglutide compared with those who did not.

That could be an important effect, because even well-controlled HIV leads to a chronic state of inflammation, Lee says. And, he says, “if there’s increased inflammation, it can lead to end-organ disease of all sorts, including certainly cardiovascular outcomes, but also liver, kidney, brain, cognitive function, you name it”.

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Entertainment

The Anova Precision Cooker Nano sous vide machine drops to a record low of $60

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The Anova Precision Cooker Nano sous vide machine which is a record low price for the cooking gadget. This amounts to a discount of 60 percent, as the MSRP for this thing is $150. In other words, there’s no better time to dip your toes into the temperature-controlled water bath

Anova

The Nano is an entry-level sous vide machine, so there aren’t too many bells and whistles. It does, however, feature a reliable and fairly portable heating mechanism. This heating element weighs just 1.7 pounds and is small enough to fit inside a utensil drawer.

It plugs right into a standard wall outlet and includes Bluetooth, so culinary wizards can monitor cooking progress from a smartphone. Don’t let the photos fool you. The Nano doesn’t come with a dedicated container or any resealable bags. The good news? It works with just about any pot and store-bought bags.

The Nano’s larger sibling, the Precision Cooker 3.0, topped our list of the on the market, so this is a well-regarded company. The Nano and the 3.0 share many similarities, from the overall design language to an easy-to-use temperature adjustment panel. The Nano lacks the adjustable clamp that accompanies the 3.0 and it swapped out Wi-Fi for Bluetooth, but is otherwise a capable stand-in. Thanks to this deal, it’s also a fraction of the price.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.



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Life Style

how WebAssembly is changing scientific computing

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In late 2021, midway through the COVID-19 pandemic, George Stagg was preparing to give exams to his mathematics and statistics students at the University of Newcastle, UK. Some would use laptops, others would opt for tablets or mobile phones. Not all of them could even use the programming language that was the subject of the test: the statistical language R. “We had no control, really, over what devices those students were using,” says Stagg.

Stagg and his colleagues set up a server so that students could log in, input their code and automatically test it. But with 150 students trying to connect at the same time, the homegrown system ground to a halt. “Things were a little shaky,” he recalls: “It was very, very slow.”

Frustrated, Stagg spent the Christmas holidays devising a solution. R code runs in a piece of software called an interpreter. Instead of having students install the interpreter on their own computers, or execute their code on a remote server, he would have the interpreter run in the students’ web browsers. To do that, Stagg used a tool that is rapidly gaining popularity in scientific computing: WebAssembly.

Code written in any of a few dozen languages, including C, C++ or Rust, can be compiled into the WebAssembly (or Wasm) instruction format, allowing it to run in a software-based environment inside a browser. No external servers are required. All modern browsers support WebAssembly, so code that works on one computer should produce the same result on any other. Best of all, no installation is needed, so scientists who are not authorized to install software — or lack the know-how or desire to do so — can use it.

WebAssembly allows developers to recycle their finely tuned code, so they don’t have to rewrite it in the language of the web: JavaScript. Google Earth, a 3D representation of Earth from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is built on WebAssembly. So are the web version of Adobe Photoshop and the design tool Figma. Stagg, who is based in Newcastle but is now a senior software engineer at Posit, a software company in Boston, Massachusetts, solved his exam server issues by porting the R interpreter to WebAssembly in the webR package.

Daniel Ji, an undergraduate computer-science student in Niema Moshiri’s laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, used WebAssembly to build browser interfaces for many of his group’s epidemiological resources, including one that identifies evolutionary relationships between viral genomes1. Moshiri has used those tools to run analyses on smartphones, game systems and low-powered Chromebook laptops. “You might be able to have people run these tools without even needing a standard desktop or laptop computer,” Moshiri says. “They could actually maybe run it on some low-energy or portable device.”

That being said, porting an application to WebAssembly can be a complicated process full of trial and error — and one that’s right for only select applications.

Reusability and restrictions

Robert Aboukhalil’s journey with WebAssembly began with an application that he created in 2017 for quality control of raw DNA-sequencing data. The necessary algorithms already existed in a tool called Seqtk, but they weren’t written in JavaScript. So Aboukhalil, a software engineer at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in Redwood City, California, rewrote them — but his implementations were relatively slow. Retooling his application to use WebAssembly improved performance 20-fold. “It was awesome, because it gave me more features that I didn’t have to write myself. And it happened to make the whole website a lot faster.”

C and C++ code can be ported to WebAssembly using the free Emscripten compiler; Rust programmers can use ‘wasm-pack’, an add-on to Rust’s package-manager and compilation utility, ‘cargo’. Python and R code cannot be compiled into WebAssembly, but there are WebAssembly ports of their interpreters called Pyodide and webR, which can run scripting code in these languages.

Quarto, a publishing system that allows researchers to embed and execute R, Python and Javascript code in documents and slide decks, is compatible with WebAssembly, too, using the quarto-webr extension (see our example at go.nature.com/4c1ex). WebAssembly can also be used in Observable computational notebooks, which have uses in data science and visualization and run JavaScript natively. There’s even a version of Jupyter, another computational-notebook platform, called JupyterLite that is built on WebAssembly.

Aboukhalil has ported more than 30 common computational-biology utilities to WebAssembly. His collection of ‘recipes’ — that is, code changes — that allow the underlying code to be compiled is available at biowasm.com. “Compiling things to WebAssembly, unfortunately, isn’t straightforward,” Aboukhalil explains. “You often have to modify the original code to get around things that WebAssembly doesn’t support.”

For instance, modern operating systems can handle 64-bit numbers. WebAssembly, however, is limited to 32 bits, and can access only 232 bytes (4 gigabytes) of memory. Furthermore, it cannot directly access a computer’s file system or its open network connections. And it’s not multithreaded; many algorithms depend on this form of parallelization, which allows different parts of a computation to be performed simultaneously. “A lot of older code won’t compile into WebAssembly, because it assumes that it can do things that can’t be done,” Stagg says.

Compounding these challenges, scientific software sits atop a tower of interconnected libraries, all of which must be ported to WebAssembly for the code to run. Jeroen Ooms, a software engineer in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has ported roughly 85% of the R-universe project’s 23,000 open-source R libraries to WebAssembly. But only about half of those actually work, he says, because some underlying libraries have not yet been converted.

Then, there’s the process of web development. Bioinformaticians don’t typically write code in JavaScript, but it is needed to create the web pages in which those tools will run. They also have to manually handle tasks such as shuttling data between the two language systems and freeing any memory they use – tasks that are handled automatically in pure JavaScript.

As a result, WebAssembly is often used to build relatively simple tools or applied to computationally intensive pieces of larger web applications. As a postdoc, bioinformatician Luiz Irber, then at the University of California, Davis, used WebAssembly to make a Rust language tool called Branchwater broadly accessible. Branchwater converts sequence data into numerical representations called hashes, which are used to search databases of microbial DNA sequences. Rather than having users install a conversion tool or upload their data to remote servers, Irber’s WebAssembly implementation allows researchers to convert their files locally.

Bioinformatician Aaron Lun and software engineer Jayaram Kancherla at Genentech in South San Francisco, California, used WebAssembly to implement kana, a browser-based analysis platform for single-cell RNA-sequencing data sets. The goal, Lun and Kancherla say, was to allow researchers to explore their data without a bioinformatician’s help. About 200 users now use kana each month.

The porting process took “six months, maybe a year’s worth of weekends”, Lun says, and was complicated by the fact that they were starting from C++ libraries glued together with R code. But that was nothing compared with the challenge of crafting a smooth, friendly user experience. “I can see why web developers get paid so much,” he laughs.

Powering up

Developers who need more computing power can supercharge their tools through a related project, WebGPU, which provides access to users’ graphics cards.

Will Usher, a scientific-visualization engineer at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and his team used WebGPU and WebAssembly to implement a data-visualization algorithm called ‘Marching Cubes’, with which they manipulated terabyte-scale data sets in a browser2. Computer scientist Johanna Beyer’s team at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a visualization tool for gigabyte-sized whole-slide microscopy data, using an algorithm called ‘Residency Octree’3. And developers at UK firm Oxford Nanopore Technologies built Bonito, a drag-and-drop basecalling tool that translates raw signals into nucleotide sequences, for the company’s sequencing platform.

Chris Seymour, Oxford Nanopore’s vice-president of platform development, says the company’s aim was to make its tools accessible to scientists who lack the skills to install software or are barred from doing so. Installation can be “a barrier to entry for certain users”, he explains. But WebAssembly is “a zero-install solution”: “They just hit the URL, and they’re good to go.”

There are other benefits, too. Data are never transferred to external servers, alleviating privacy concerns. And because the browser isolates the environment in which WebAssembly code can be executed, it is unlikely to harm the user’s system.

Perhaps most importantly, WebAssembly allows researchers to explore software and data with minimal friction, thus enabling development of educational applications. Aboukhalil has created a series of tutorials at sandbox.bio, with which users can test-drive bioinformatics tools in an in-browser text console. Statistician Eric Nantz at pharmaceuticals company Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, Indiana, is part of a pilot project to use webR to share clinical-trial data with the US Food and Drug Administration — a process that would otherwise require each scientist to install custom computational dashboards. Using WebAssembly, he says, “will minimize, from the reviewer’s perspective, many of the steps that they had to take to get the application running on their machines”.

WebAssembly, says Niema, “bridges that gap that we have in bioinformatics, where bio people are the users, computer-science people are the developers, and how do we translate [between them]?”

Still, brace yourself for complications. “WebAssembly is a great technology, but it’s also a niche technology,” Aboukhalil says. “There’s a small subset of applications where it makes sense to [use it], but when it does make sense it can be very powerful. It’s just a matter of figuring out which use cases those are.”

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Entertainment

How to find and cancel your unused subscriptions

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The subscription model is here to stay, and many of us have signed up for far more services than we actually use on a regular basis. If you’ve ever felt it’s somehow harder to cancel something than it is to sign up for it, you’re not wrong. The FTC wants to compel companies to make cancellation processes easier but, during a hearing on the matter in January, cable and other industry lobbyists argued that making things easier to cancel is bad for business. We put together this guide with a few tips to help you find exactly what you’re paying for and cancel the things you no longer use or need.

First things first: Find out what subscriptions you have

Before putting this post together, I had no idea how many subscriptions I was paying for. Surprises included a coding game for my kid (that he no longer plays) and a British streaming app I’d gotten for one show (that I finished nearly a year ago). You, too, may not know what subscriptions are quietly subtracting dollars from your accounts. One of the most comprehensive ways to see what you’re paying for is to look at your bank and credit card transactions, performing a search for every transaction in the previous full month. It may be a lot to scroll through, but each monthly subscription will appear at least once in that time frame.

Another approach is to search for welcome and thank you emails, since most services send out an initial message confirming your new subscription. Using the advanced search function in your email, enter the words “welcome” or “thank you” in the subject field, and variations on the words “annual” “subscribing” and “membership” in the general or keyword search fields. You should get a decent idea of the things you’ve signed up for, but may have to wade through lots of promotional emails before you find the services you actually subscribed to. This method isn’t as comprehensive as going through your banking statements, but it could help you find annual subscriptions that won’t show up in a month’s worth of transactions.

Sometimes it’s helpful to simply see a list of common subscriptions people pay for (and often forget about). Here are a few:

Entertainment
• YouTube Premium
• Amazon Prime Video (or Prime in general)
• Netflix
• Disney+
• Pandora Premium
• Twitch Subscriber
• Crunchyroll

Gaming
• PlayStation Plus
• Xbox Game Pass
• Nintendo Switch Online

Work/Productivity
• LinkedIn Premium
• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Microsoft 365
• ToDo
• Evernote

Dating
• Tinder
• Grindr
• Bumble
• Hinge
• Raya

Food
• Hello Fresh
• Green Chef
• Blue Apron
• Doordash DashPass
• Uber Eats Uber One
• Monthly coffee, hot sauce and jerky boxes

How to cancel subscriptions

For the most part, the way you sign up for a subscription is the way you’ll cancel it. If you signed up for Strava or Minecraft Realms from your iOS device, you’ll need to cancel it through your Apple account. If you signed up for Netflix through its website, you’ll cancel there. Sometimes even the device you use matters. For example, if you signed up for Paramount Plus via your Fire TV Stick, you’ll go through your TV to cancel instead of through the Amazon mobile app.

Once you’ve determined where to go, the cancellation processes will nearly always involve logging in to your account and navigating to your profile, then your account settings so you can view and end your subscription.

Here are steps to cancel a few of the most popular subs.

From the Apple App Store or Google Play Store

When you pay for a subscription through an app store, the transaction will likely be listed as a payment to either Apple or Google, so it’s harder to see what you’re paying for using the banking suggestion above. Here’s how to see what you’ve subscribed to using the two major app marketplaces, plus how to cancel.

How to cancel subscriptions through Apple’s App Store
1. Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad.
2. Tap your profile box at the top.
3. Tap on Subscriptions. Here, you’ll see your active and inactive subscriptions listed.
4. Tap the one you want to cancel and follow the prompts.

How to cancel subscriptions through Google’s Play Store
1. Open the Google Play app.
2. Tap your profile circle in the upper right.
3. Tap on Payments & Subscriptions.
4. Tap on Subscriptions.
4. You’ll see your active subscriptions and can decide which ones you no longer want.

How to cancel Amazon Prime

Blue Amazon Prime logo on a white background.

Amazon

Amazon raised the price of a Prime membership in 2022, bringing it to $15 per month or $139 per year. A membership gets you things like free shipping and access to Prime Video — but just this year the company decided to charge another $3 per month for those who want to watch the streaming service ad-free. If Prime just isn’t worth it for you any longer, here’s how to cancel.

Through the Amazon app:
1. Tap the person icon at the bottom of the screen.
2. Tap on the Your Account button at the top of the screen.
3. Scroll down to and tap Manage Prime Membership under the Account Settings section.
4. You’ll be taken to a Prime page; tap Manage Membership.
5. Select the Update, Cancel and More option, and tap End Membership. Here, you can also opt for a reminder to be sent three days before your next renewal if you don’t want to cancel right away.

Via a web browser:
1. Sign in to Amazon.
2. Hover over Accounts & Lists to the right of the search bar up top.
3. Click on Memberships & Subscriptions under Your Account.
4. You’ll see your Prime membership listed; click on the Prime Membership Settings button.
5. Click on Update, Cancel & More under Manage Memberships.
6. In the pop-up menu, click the End Membership button.

How to cancel Paramount Plus

Paramount Plus is one of the cheaper video streaming subscriptions out there, going for $6 per month for the ad-supported version or $12 for the ad-free version with Showtime. But if you just signed up to watch the Super Bowl and haven’t canceled yet, here’s how to stop your sub. Remember if you signed up for Paramount Plus through Prime Video or through the App Store, you’ll need to cancel through the same platform.

1. Log in to your Paramount Plus account on a web browser.
2. Select the username in the upper right corner.
3. Click on Account and scroll down to Cancel Subscription.
4. Click on Cancel Subscription.

How to cancel Apple TV+

Apple TV Plus logo in white on a black background

Apple

Apple TV+ is up to $10 per month, which gets you a front row seat in your own living room to Apple Studio’s Oscar-nominated Killers of the Flower Moon. But if you’ve watched that and are now just waiting for season two of Severance, there’s no penalty for canceling the service and signing back up later. Apple TV+ requires an Apple ID, so it’s easiest to cancel through the Settings app on your Apple device. If you didn’t sign up through a Mac, iPad or iPhone or don’t have an Apple TV box, follow the PC instructions.

On an iPhone or iPad:
1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap your profile box at the top.
3. Tap on Subscriptions.
4. Tap either Apple TV+ or Apple One membership, depending on how you first signed up.
5. Select which subscriptions you want to cancel and follow the prompts.

On a Mac:
1. Open the App Store app.
2. Click on your name and profile image at the bottom left.
3. Click on Account Settings at the top of the screen.
4. In the pop-up window, scroll down to the Manage section and click the Manage link to the right of the word Subscriptions.
5. Select the Edit link next to the subscription you want to cancel, then click the Cancel Subscription button.

On an Apple TV box:
1. Open the Settings app from the home page.
2. Click on Users & Accounts.
3. Click on Subscriptions.
4. Find the subscription you want to cancel and follow the prompts.

On a PC:
1. Go to tv.apple.com and sign in.
2. Click on the account icon at the top of the page.
3. Click on Settings and scroll down to Subscriptions, then click Manage
4. Choose Cancel Subscription.

How to cancel an Audible membership

If you downloaded Audible as part of a free trial or grabbed it for a 12-hour road trip but haven’t used it much since, here’s how to stop paying $8 per month. If you didn’t sign up via Amazon or Audible and instead went through Apple’s App Store or Google Play, follow the “From an app store” instructions above.

Through Amazon:
1. Sign in to your Amazon account.
2. Hover over Accounts & Lists to the right of the search bar.
3. Click on Memberships & Subscriptions under YourAccount.
4. You’ll see your Audible membership listed; click the Audible Settings button.
5. Scroll down to Membership Options & Help and click on Cancel Membership.

Through Audible:
1. Sign in to your Audible account.
2. Hover over the link that says Hi [your name] and select Account Details from the menu.
3. You’ll see a box with your membership details; click on Cancel Membership.
4. Answer the “reason for canceling” question and follow the prompts.

How to cancel Spotify Premium

Green Spotify logo on a white background

Spotify

Spotify has been testing out AI-generated playlists and may soon have a “Supremium” tier for $20 a month. But if you just want to go back to the free version, here’s how. Note that you’ll need to go through a web browser, as the only way you can cancel through the app involves deleting your account and all its data. If you want to preserve your playlists and just go to the free version, you can use either a mobile or desktop browser.

1. Head to Spotify on a web browser and log in.
2. If you haven’t logged in via the web before, you’ll see a button for Web Player or Account Overview; select Account Overview.
3. If you’re already in the Web Player, click either the gear icon (mobile browser) or your profile image (desktop browser) in the upper right corner and select Account.
4. Your subscription will appear in a box labeled Your Plan; click that box or scroll down to Manage Your Plan and click.
5. You’ll see your plan details, click the Change Plan button.
6. A list of subscription plans will appear; scroll to the bottom and select Cancel Premium under the Spotify Free plan.

How to cancel YouTube TV

YouTube TV recently hiked its price to $73. If you also call that outrageous, here’s how to stop paying. YouTube TV happens to be one of the few subscription services that allows you to cancel through the app itself, as long as you’re on an Android device. Non-Android users can cancel through a web browser.

On an Android device:
1. Open the YouTube TV app.
2. Tap your profile circle at the top right.
3. Tap on Settings, then tap on Membership.
4. Under your membership details, tap Manage.
5. Click on Cancel Membership and follow the prompts.

Via a web browser:
1. Head to YouTubeTV.
2. Log in and click your profile circle in the top right.
3. Tap on Settings, then tap on Membership.
4. Under your membership details, tap on Manage next to Base Plan.
5. Click on Cancel Membership and follow the prompts.

Apps that can help

Some finance apps will track and manage your subscriptions for you. We researched many and tried out a few to see how they can help. One of our previous recommendations, Mint, is closing down, which leaves Rocket Money. Just note that it costs money to handle subscription cancellation on your behalf, and adding another subscription to your life can feel counterproductive when you’re trying to do the opposite.

Rocket Money

Owned by the same company as Rocket Mortgages, Rocket Money is a finance app that connects with your bank account and offers to help you budget and track your overall spending, in addition to managing your subscriptions. You’ll pay for the app using a sliding scale from $3 to $12 per month for the premium version, which includes automated cancellation and other features. To access the free version at sign-up, move the slider to the left until you reach $0.

Once you’ve linked your account, navigating to the Recurring tab gives you an overview of your subscriptions. I liked that you can access this using either the mobile or desktop app. After linking my accounts, it reminded me of an upcoming renewal for a magazine I don’t read and hosting fees for a website I no longer need. Canceling both of those would save me nearly $200 in a year. Unfortunately, my monthly Apple One payment and the Max access that I pay for through my Samsung TV didn’t show up as recurring subscriptions. That could be due to how my bank lists the transaction, but I’d like to have seen those on the list, too.

Next to each transaction is a three dot menu, which includes an option to “cancel this for me” for Premium subscribers. Click and you’ll see contact methods to handle it yourself or a button to have Rocket Money do it. After you provide your username and password for the service, you’ll get an email confirmation that tells you the process could take up to ten days to complete. When I had Rocket Money cancel Paramount Plus for me, I got an email later that night saying the cancellation was complete.

While it’s not a magic program that zaps your subscriptions away, Rocket Money could save you a few steps. Seeing (most of) your recurring charges together is also helpful for staying on top of things. It’s up to you whether the Premium charge (and taking on another subscription) is worth the cancellation service.

Reminder apps

There are other apps, like Bobby (iOS) and Tilla (Android), that don’t connect with your bank account. Instead, you enter the details of the subscriptions you already have and add new ones as you go. The apps will remind you about upcoming renewals and let you quickly see what you’re paying for, all in one place. Both are free to use but limit the number of subscriptions you can track until you upgrade, which costs a flat $4 for Bobby and $2 for Tilla. I feel like if you possess the diligence to keep apps like these up to date, you could just as easily use a spreadsheet or native apps like Apple or Google’s Reminders, though these are more colorful.

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Can’t wait for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour on Disney Plus? Stream these 3 concert movies to get warmed up

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With just three days to go before Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour streams on Disney Plus, Swifties who didn’t grab tickets or make it to an IMAX – and Swifties who did but want even more of their idol – are getting ready to enjoy one of the best concert movies ever made. 

But what to do in the days before it premiers on Disney Plus? The good news is that there are plenty more great live shows available to stream, from unusually intimate performances to Swift-scale stadium spectaculars. Here are three amazing live performances you can stream while you wait for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

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Life Style

sign language brings benefits to the organic chemistry classroom

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Dr. Christina Goudreau Collison teaches and signs at a whiteboard

Christina Goudreau Collison signs the term ‘steric hindrance’ while teaching the hydroboration reaction in her organic chemistry class at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York.Credit: Olivia Schlichtkrull

Sign language in science

The lack of scientific terms and vocabulary in many of the world’s sign languages can make science education and research careers inaccessible for deaf people and those with hearing loss. Meet the scientists, sign-language specialists and students working to add scientific terms and concepts to sign languages. In the last of four articles showcasing their efforts, organic chemist Christina Goudreau Collison at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, which is also home to the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), describes how working with Deaf students to create clear signs for organic chemistry terms boosted the students’ academic outcomes and how sign-language could help other students with non-conventional learning needs.

This is my 20th year teaching undergraduate students at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in New York. I’ve always had somewhere between one and ten Deaf students in my classroom, but they’ve been in a sea of hearing students. The university provides sign-language interpreters for courses, but I recognized how exhausting it was for Deaf students to keep up in my classes with the time lag that comes with interpreting. Sometimes it felt like I could almost see them thinking, “I’m just going to figure this out later. I’ll try to read the book.” They were clearly not getting the same classroom experience as the hearing students.

I attributed the Deaf students’ academic struggles to the painstaking need to fingerspell the organic chemistry terms that lacked proper signs. Their performance was noticeably lower than that of their hearing peers. And we rarely had Deaf students conducting independent research in our laboratories. I thought, “What can be done about that?” I have always gestured with my hands and body a lot when teaching, and I used to make up little terms to prompt the interpreter, calling different reactions or transition states of molecules names such as the ‘spaceship model’, the ‘bridge’, or the ‘cha-cha’. I would categorize these terms to help the students, but also to let the interpreter know that I was using a sign or doing one of my dances, so that they could just point to me.

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when my colleague Jennifer Swartzenberg, a senior lecturer in chemistry who is fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and a former student of mine, told me that there were no signs for many scientific terms that I began to understand the depth of the problem. Working with Jenn, who was vocal with me about things that I could change in my teaching, along with a particularly big Deaf class that was keen to work with me, really helped. A lot of them said: “What you do with your hands is really helpful. Let’s make it work even better.”

Word building

We identified several challenges that our Deaf students were experiencing during the organic chemistry course. One issue is that interpreters don’t know the science. Most of them don’t even have a scientific background, let alone knowledge of general chemistry or organic chemistry. Another issue is the absence of chemistry vocabulary in ASL, which means that long names of reactions, such as the Grignard reaction or the Diels–Alder reaction, need to be fingerspelled.

What did help — and this is where it gets controversial — was taking away the names of the reactions and categorizing every reaction into its transition state. So, instead of memorizing what felt like 300 named reactions, the students and interpreters needed to learn only 10 transition states. And every reaction is either one or a combination of those states. I don’t totally discard named reactions. They’re in the book, but I don’t test the students on them.

From there, a group of us, including several Deaf students, started creating a sign-language lexicon specific to organic chemistry. We made videos of the signs so they could be used for interpreter training, as well as teaching the next class of students. We also had the signs added to the ASLCORE website, a free sign-language vocabulary resource curated by the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID), which is based at the RIT. The Deaf students and I have argued over some signs, but it’s their language, so they have final say. I’m the person who makes suggestions for scientific content.

It’s important to note that these are not official ASL terms. They are part of a sign-language lexicon for organic chemistry. It’s a very specific context, so we took some liberties. For example, the sign I use for ‘tetrahedral’, the 3D geometry of a carbon atom’s bonds in certain molecules, is like this: my hands are held flat with my thumbs pointed out, one hand is positioned in the x plane and one in the y plane. The hands then ‘click’ together to convey the 3D shape. This is so easy to do, and everyone in my class knows what it means. Everyone accepts it, and the Deaf students don’t even laugh at it, despite the fact that in ASL the sign has a sexual connotation. But, I’m not going to use that sign in a conversation about tetrahedral groups outside my classroom.

As we incorporated the signed vocabulary and the ASLCORE videos into the course, we found that students who relied solely on an interpreter started to outperform hearing students on the course. And this was consistent in a study1 we conducted from 2016 to 2019. Once our course culture changed to include more signing, the Deaf students not only improved in the classroom but also began to seek out research opportunities more often than they did previously.

We also started using sign language more for everyone, not just the Deaf students. I teach all my students signs for the most common answers to organic chemistry questions. When I ask the class, “Why do we get this product from this reaction?”, I ask the students to sign the answer back to me instead of saying it. It’s nice, because instead of someone shouting out the answer before the Deaf students can sign it and wait for the interpreter to voice their response, everyone signs it at the same time. It eliminates the interpreting time lag.

Broader benefits

We’ve created this organic chemistry lexicon with the Deaf community in mind, but we are starting to see its universal design advantages. What’s good for a Deaf person might also benefit someone else — similar to the way that a ramp into a restaurant that might have been built for people who use wheelchairs is also helpful for a person with a pram.

In a current study, we are tracking the progress of students who speak English as a second language and those who are neurodivergent. If there’s a visual sign that anchors the meaning of a scientific term, then it might help these students to keep up as the lectures move forwards.

This project has benefited more than just the Deaf community. I’ve heard from some of the Deaf students that they are proud that their language is helping others as well. Sign language has a beautiful way of saying a lot in very compact gestures.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Entertainment

A bundle with the PS5 and Spider-Man 2 is on sale for $400 right now

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Update 3/11/24: The PS5 bundle deal that we originally found at GameStop is now available at Amazon, Target and Walmart as well.

If you’ve been on the fence about snagging a PS5 and have been intrigued by Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, now’s a good time to considering picking up the console. You can get a bundle with either the digital or standard edition of the PS5 with the game for $50 off. That brings the bundle with the digital version of the console down to $400, while the standard-edition pairing will run you $450.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

You can snag a bundle of a PS5 and one of its best exclusive games for $50 off at the minute.

$400 at Amazon

Spider-Man 2 is an excellent way to get your PS5 games collection started, particularly for new PS5 owners. It’s one of our favorite games of last year and we felt it was both bigger and better than the first game in the series. If you’d prefer to play Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales before diving into the latest entry (both are great games too), you can check them out through the PlayStation Plus subscription service on the Extra and Premium tiers. However, some folks may now be joining the PlayStation club after already playing those two games on PC — I wouldn’t want to wait too long for Spider-Man 2 to arrive on PC after first playing the previous entries there either.

When it comes to a modern gaming system, you can’t go far wrong with the PS5. It’s our pick for the best high-end gaming console, alongside the Xbox Series X/S. It has a terrific library of exclusive games at this point and it can run pretty much any PS4 game too. Along with strong performance and excellent visuals, the PS5 has one killer feature that helps it stand out from the Xbox Series X/S: the DualSense controller. The haptic feedback and adaptive triggers (i.e. varying tension levels in the L2 and R2 buttons as you pull the string on a virtual bow or drag an object) help create a feeling of immersion Xbox consoles can’t quite match yet.

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After seven years in the making, this adorable hand-drawn indie game is now available in full

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After seven years of development, indie visual novel game The Hayseed Knight is now available in full for PC on both Steam and Itch.io.

Helmed by solo developer Maxi Molina, the game follows a one-eyed farm boy called Ader as he pursues his personal quest to become the most celebrated knight in Acazhor – a fictional kingdom inspired by the Muslim-ruled regions of medieval Spain.

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