I went with the clamp since I knew it would be easy to hook onto my thin wooden side table or metal bed frame, and neither had a paint or finish that would be damaged by the clamp. Some folks also attach it to a headboard.
It was perfect for reading in bed or on the side of my couch. The Lamicall isn’t so long that I needed to add a loop to make it sit far enough away from my eye for comfortable reading, and usually I felt like I had just enough slack to perfectly place it within my preferred reading range. I could keep my Kindle’s text size tiny and put it right next to my face, or push it back farther if I wanted. It floated nicely above or near my head, whether I was lying in bed or sitting up on the couch while my son played nearby.
The base clamp is made of light plastic you secure with a screw top sitting on top of the clamp, which I liked instead of one that pinches on its own–especially since there are tiny grabby hands in my home. The clasp for the Kindle itself is also made of a light plastic, but was still stable and secure. Plus, you can rotate that upper clamp to get the perfect angle.
The neck of the arm is the most resistant part of it: It does take a little effort to move and angle the arm, but that strength and resistance are what keeps it from falling forward or out of place while you read. Even with the resistance, this Kindle holder is still plenty adjustable and goes in any direction you like.
To store it, I usually just push it out of the way toward the wall from wherever it’s clamped. It isn’t foldable, nor does it break down, so if you want it out of sight when you aren’t using it you’ll need a closet or long enough space to store its 3-foot form. It was a little weird to see it floating alone in the living room, but I didn’t find it obtrusive when I used it as a bed stand and simply pushed it against the wall when I was done using it.
It’s designed to be a universal tablet holder, so it’s big enough to hold tablets up to the 11-inch iPad Pro. It can hold a Nintendo Switch, too, along with other popular e-readers. (If only I had this in 2020!) It’s not the right dimensions to hold a bulky Steam Deck by itself, but I still used it to help me prop up a Steam Deck and take weight off my hands and wrists, though it’s not stable enough to float like a Kindle or iPad. It’s able to hold up smartphones, too, and it was similarly comfortable to read with either a Kindle or my iPhone on the Lamicall stand.
Not Quite Hands-Free
Photograph: Nena Farrell
While it won’t fall out of place, the stand is easy to jostle, and I wouldn’t call it hands-free reading—at least not on its own.
Before we were obsessed with AI, the world was mesmerized by Aibo, a robotic dog whose name was short for “artificial intelligence robot” and also had the same pronunciation in Japanese as the word “friend”.
Aibo was doing AI before it was cool, and it was a sophisticated consumer robot dog long before SPOT was a gleam in Boston Dynamics’ eyes. My history with the pint-size bot goes way back.
The history of Aibos (Image credit: Lance Ulanoff)
I’ve tested or tried virtually every Sony Aibo robot since its introduction 25 years ago. Somehow, I never owned one, perhaps because much in the way I’m allergic to real dogs, I’m allergic to the price of this mechanical one. Ignoring the robot pup’s early and continuing innovation is impossible, even as Sony sometimes denied it.
Apple may be late to the generative AI party but just don’t count it out yet. According to Bloomberg’s Marc Gurman and MacRumors’ Hartley Charlton, the company will use the M2 Ultra in its own servers – in its own data centres – to power its growing GAI ambitions. Launched in June 2023, the CPU – as used in the Mac Studio – remains the most complex piece of silicon ever released by Apple with 24 compute cores, up to 76 GPU cores and 32 AI accelerators.
The report neither mentions whether Apple plans to revive its defunct Xserve range of rack servers nor if it will bring back its Mac OS X serveroperating system. Both products have been mothballed for years as Apple moved its focus away from the enterprise market at the beginning of the last decade. A separate article from WSJ also adds that Apple is using the internal code name ACDC (Apple Chips in the Data Center).
Apple’s iPhone development roadmap runs several years into the future and the company is continually working with suppliers on several successive iPhone models concurrently, which is why we sometimes get rumored feature leaks so far ahead of launch. The iPhone 17 series is no different, and already we have some idea of what to expect from Apple’s 2025 smartphone lineup.
If you plan to skip this year’s iPhone 16, or if you’re just plain curious about what’s on the horizon, here are 10 rumored features that we are expecting to arrive in time for its successor, the iPhone 17 series, which is likely to be released in September 2025.
The iPhone 17 Pro is expected to be the first iPhone to feature under-panel Face ID technology. The only external indication of the under-display Face ID technology will likely be a circular cutout for the front-facing camera. This will probably be Apple’s last premium model to include a circular cutout for the front-facing camera. Apple is then expected adopt under-display cameras in 2027’s “Pro” iPhone models for a true “all-screen” appearance. 2. New Display Sizes
iPhone 17 & iPhone 17 Plus
This year’s iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max are rumored to be getting bigger display sizes, going from 6.12- and 6.69-inches to 6.27- and 6.86-inches, respectively. For 2025, Apple is also expected to bring the larger 6.27-inch display size to its standard iPhone model, while the equivalent “iPhone 17 Plus” model could adopt completely new display dimensions.
3. 120Hz ProMotion (Always-on Display)
iPhone 17 & iPhone 17 Plus
Apple intends to expand ProMotion to its standard models in 2025, allowing them to ramp up to a 120Hz refresh rate for smoother scrolling and video content when necessary. Notably, ProMotion would also enable the display on the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Plus to ramp down to a more power-efficient refresh rate as low as 1Hz, allowing for an always-on display that can show the Lock Screen’s clock, widgets, notifications, and wallpaper even when the device is locked.
4. Apple-Designed Wi-Fi 7 Chip
iPhone 17 Pro & iPhone 17 Pro Max
Apple’s premium 2025 models are expected to be equipped with an Apple-designed Wi-Fi 7 chip for the first time. Wi-Fi 7 support would allow the “Pro” models to send and receive data over the 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz bands simultaneously with a supported router, resulting in faster Wi-Fi speeds, lower latency, and more reliable connectivity. The Wi-Fi chip would also allow Apple to further reduce its dependance on external suppliers like Broadcom, which currently supplies Apple with a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip for iPhones.
5. 48MP Telephoto Lens
iPhone 17 Pro Max
An upgraded 48-megapixel Telephoto lens on Apple’s largest premium device is expected to be optimized for use with Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro headset, which launches on February 2, 2024. (The current iPhone 15 Pro models feature 48-megapixel main, 12-megapixel ultra wide, and 12-megapixel telephoto lenses.) That would make 2025’s “Pro Max” the first iPhone to have a rear camera system composed entirely of 48-megapixel lenses, making it capable of capturing even more photographic detail.
6. 24MP Selfie Camera
All iPhone 17 Models
The iPhone 17 lineup will feature a 24-megapixel front-facing camera with a six-element lens, according to one rumor. The iPhone 14 and 15 feature a 12-megapixel front-facing camera with five plastic lens elements, and this year’s iPhone 16 lineup is expected to feature the same hardware. The upgraded resolution to 24 megapixels on the iPhone 17 will allow photos to maintain their quality even when cropped or zoomed in, while the larger number of pixels will capture finer details. The upgrade to a six-element lens should also slightly enhance image quality.
7. Scratch Resistant Anti-Reflective Display
All iPhone 17 Models
The iPhone 17 will feature an anti-reflective display that is more scratch-resistant than Apple’s Ceramic Shield found on iPhone 15 models, according to one rumor. The outer glass on the iPhone 17 is said to have a “super-hard anti-reflective layer” that is “more scratch-resistant.” It’s not clear whether Apple is planning to adopt the Gorilla Glass Armor that Samsung uses in its Galaxy S24 Ultra, but the description of Corning’s latest technology matches the rumor.
8. More Memory
iPhone 17 Pro & iPhone 17 Pro Max
Apple’s Pro models next year will come with 12GB of RAM, claims Jeff Pu of investment firm Haitong. For comparison, the iPhone 15 Pro models have 8GB of RAM, while the iPhone 16 Pro models are also expected to have 8GB of RAM. Any such increase would allow for improved multitasking on the iPhone, as well as provide additional resources for any artificial intelligence features that require large-language models to be resident in memory.
Apple’s highest-end 2025 iPhone will feature a significantly narrower Dynamic Island, thanks to the device’s adoption of a smaller “metalens” for the Face ID system, claims Haitong’s Jeff Pu. Assuming that’s the case, it would be the first time that Apple has changed the Dynamic Island since it debuted on the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022.
10. iPhone 17 “Slim”
iPhone 17 Plus
Apple’s iPhone 17 Plus will feature a 6.55-inch display, according to analyst Ross Young of Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC). Responding to a claim by Jeff Pu that the iPhone 17 Plus will be replaced by an “iPhone 17 Slim,” Young said to expect a reduction of 2% over the previous, current, and next-generation models. Based on his logic, a smaller display would help differentiate the larger iPhone 17 model from the iPhone 17 Pro Max, while remaining larger than the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro.
Apple has lots of new products on the way and is officially discontinuing its ninth-generation iPad. But, before the curtain falls on this reliable device, you can pick it up for a steal. Our favorite budget iPad for comes with two years of AppleCare+ and is down to $298 from $398 — a 25 percent discount. This deal is for the 64GB model with Wi-Fi in either Silver or Space Gray.
Apple
If you’re looking for a more affordable entry point into the world of iPads or want to grab one as a gift then the ninth-gen model gives you a solid balance of quality and cost. We gave it an 86 in our review when it first debuted in 2021 thanks to updates like True Tone technology and color changing based on ambient light. It also has a 12-MP front camera, Apple’s A13 Bionic chip and up to 10 hours of battery life while in use.
Take the strain, and three, two, one, pull! No, I’m not in the gym lifting weights, but in the woods with my Nikon DSLR and raising its optical viewfinder to my eye to compose a picture. It’s my D800‘s first outing in years and it’s quickly reminding me why I was so happy to switch to mirrorless. At 31.7oz / 900g and combined with my Nikon 70-200mm AF-S f/2.8 VR lens (50.4oz / 1430g) it’s well over 80oz / 2300g, and being cumbersome isn’t even the worst part.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll come away from this walk in my local woods that’s bursting with fragrant bluebells and wild garlic with some pictures I’m super-excited about (see below), but boy do I have to work that much harder to get the results I want. And without wanting to lug a tripod around, I actually can’t get the same degree of sharpness in my pictures from this day in the dim conditions under a dense tree canopy.
Apex Legends will soon offer a Solos mode for the first time since 2019, even though developer Respawn Entertainment said earlier this year it had no plans to let players run amok in the battle by themselves again. When the next season starts, Solos will replace the Duos mode for six weeks.
The game is designed and tuned for squads of three, but Respawn recently told reporters that it “wanted to acknowledge the growing interest in Solos from our players,” many of whom were looking for new ways to play the game. Running the mode for half of season 21 will give the developers a chance to gain plenty of feedback from players. Perhaps that could help them figure out if Solos could become a more permanent fixture.
“With growing demand from players and a desire on the team to explore the concept again with everything we’ve learned since the mode’s last appearance in 2019, Upheaval felt like the right time to reintroduce a Solos experience to Apex,” events lead Mike Button said.
To compensate for the lack of support from teammates, the revived Solos mode will have three unique features. If you’re eliminated in the first four rounds, you’ll be able to use a one-time respawn token to rejoin the action. Any unused tokens after the fourth circle closes are converted to Evo, which is used for shields and ability upgrades. The idea behind this, according to the developers, is to encourage players to be more engaged in the early going.
Respawn has also created a mechanic for Solos called Battle Sense. This gives you an audio and visual cue whenever an enemy is within 50 meters. Last but not least, you’ll heal passively when you’re out of combat. It’ll take a moment for the gradual health regeneration to start, but you can skip that initial timer by securing a kill. You’ll still be able to use med kits and such to heal manually. Respawn is making some other tweaks for Solos, including adding fully kitted-out weapons, adjusting circle sizes and reducing the lobby size from 60 to 50 players.
Respawn Entertainment/EA
Alongside some map, cosmetic, balance and ranked changes, there’ll be a new legend for players to check out. Alter hails from another dimension and that plays into her kit. She can create portals through walls, ceilings and floors.
The Void Passage ability can be fired from some distance away and it has a maximum depth of 20 meters, so it can’t go through mountains. After going through a portal, you’ll have a few seconds of safety to assess your surroundings and prepare for a fight if need be. Allies and enemies can use the portals too, so Void Passage can open up all kinds of opportunities for flanking and rotations.
With her passive ability, Alter is able to see death boxes through walls and snatch an item from one. Alter’s ultimate is called Void Nexus. This drops a device that you and your teammates can interact with remotely, even while knocked down. Doing so will teleport you back to the regroup point. However, enemies have a short window to follow you. Alter’s upgrades include the ability to see enemy health bars while moving through a portal.
You’ll be able to check out the revived Apex Legends Solos mode and play as Alter when the Upheaval season starts on May 7.
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A bioluminescent octocoral, Iridogorgia magnispiralis.Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Deepwater Wonders of Wake
An ancient group of glowing corals pushes back the origin of bioluminescence in animals to more than half a billion years ago. “We had no idea it was going to be this old,” says evolutionary marine biologist and study co-author Danielle DeLeo. Tiny crustaceans that lived around 270 million years ago were previously thought to be the earliest glowing animals. Genetic analysis and computer modelling revealed that octocorals probably evolved the ability to make light much earlier, around the time when the first animals developed eyes.
A virulent strain of the monkeypox virus might have gained the ability to spread through sexual contact. The strain, called clade Ib, has caused a cluster of infections in a conflict-ridden region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). This isn’t the first time scientists have warned that the monkeypox virus could become sexually transmissible: similar warnings during a 2017 outbreak in Nigeria were largely ignored. The strain responsible, clade II, is less lethal than clade Ib, but ultimately caused an ongoing global outbreak that has infected more than 94,000 people and killed more than 180. “The DRC is surrounded by nine other countries — we’re playing with fire here,” says virologist Nicaise Ndembi.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has changed how it classifies airborne pathogens. It has removed the distinction between transmission by smaller virus-containing ‘aerosol’ particles and spread through larger ‘droplets’. The division, which some researchers argue was unscientific, justified WHO’s March 2020 assertion that SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, was not airborne. Under the new definition, SARS-CoV-2 would be recognized as spreading ‘through the air’ — although some scientists feel this term is less clear than ‘airborne’. “I’m not saying everybody is happy, and not everybody agrees on every word in the document, but at least people have agreed this is a baseline terminology,” says WHO chief scientist Jeremy Farrar.
The development of lethal autonomous weapons, such as AI-equipped drones, is on the rise. “The technical capability for a system to find a human being and kill them is much easier than to develop a self-driving car,” says computer scientist and campaigner against AI weapons Stuart Russell. Some argue that accurate AI weapons could reduce collateral damage while helping vulnerable nations to defend themselves. At the same time, observers are concerned that passing targeting decisions to an algorithm could lead to catastrophic mistakes. The United Nations will discuss AI weapons at a meeting later this year — potentially a first step towards controlling the new threat.
In early April, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of a group of more than 2,500 Swiss female activists aged 64 or over who argued that Switzerland was doing too little to protect them as a group particularly vulnerable to health effects stemming from climate change. “This marks the first time that an international human-rights court has linked protection of human rights with duties to mitigate global warming, clarifying once and for all that climate law and policy do not operate in a human-rights vacuum,” says legal scholar Charlotte Blattner, who advised the court. “The ruling is bound to alter the course of climate protection around the world.”
When US scientists needed a place to test the first birth-control pill, they looked to Puerto Rico. But many of the working-class women who took the pill were unaware that they were part of a clinical trial. Debilitating side effects were dismissed as psychosomatic. And when the final product came onto the market, it was too expensive for women like them to afford. The play Las Borinqueñas revisits this complicated history. “It’s a long-overdue tribute and, most importantly, a reminder to remain vigilant against abuse and disrespect in studies involving human participants,” writes Nature reporter Mariana Lenharo in her review.
Winning image: Glaciologist Richard Jones captured the moment a crew member on RV Polarstern prepared to rescue a measuring device trapped in ice.Credit: Richard Jones
This image, taken on top of the icebreaker research vessel Polarstern, shows the delicate process of retrieving an ocean-monitoring instrument called a CTD (short for conductivity, temperature, depth) that had become trapped under sea ice off the coast of northeastern Greenland. CTDs, which are anchored to the sea floor, measure how properties such as salinity and temperature vary with depth. The photo is the winner of Nature’s 2024 Working Scientist photography competition. See the rest of the winning images from the competition here.
Yesterday we told you that NASA had reconnected with its spacecraft Voyager 1, the first human-made object to leave the Solar System. But was it really the first? A reader question sparked a debate in the newsroom about whether that accolade should rightfully go to Pioneer 10.
A lot depends on how we define the edge of the Solar System, explains Nature reporter Sumeet Kulkarni. “But I think it’s safe to say Voyager 1 left it first,” he says. The craft overtook Pioneer 10 in 1998, and left the heliosphere — the reach of the Sun’s influence — in 2013, by which time it was travelling much faster than Pioneer 10.
Let us know how your journeys are progressing — and any other feedback on this newsletter — at briefing@nature.com.
With contributions by Katrina Krämer and Sarah Tomlin
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• Nature Briefing: Microbiology — the most abundant living entities on our planet — microorganisms — and the role they play in health, the environment and food systems.
Millions of devices are still connected to the PlugX malware, despite its creators abandoning it months ago, experts have warned.
Cybersecurity analysts Sekoia managed to obtain the IP address associated with the malware’s command & control (C2) server, and observed connection requests over a six-month period.
A bioluminescent octocoral, Iridogorgia magnispiralis.Credit: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Deepwater Wonders of Wake
Some 540 million years ago, an ancient group of corals developed the ability to make its own light1.
Scientists have previously found that bioluminescence is an ancient trait — with one group of tiny crustaceans first making their own light an estimated 267 million years ago. But this new finding pushes back the origins of bioluminescence even further by around 270 million years.
“We had no idea it was going to be this old,” says Danielle DeLeo, an evolutionary marine biologist at Florida International University in Miami, who led the study, which was published on 24 April in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “The fact that this trait has been retained for hundreds of millions of years really tells us that it is conferring some type of fitness advantage.”
Bioluminescence has evolved independently at least 100 times in animals and other organisms. Some glowing species, such as fireflies, use their light to communicate in the darkness. Other animals, including anglerfish, use it as a lure to attract prey, or to scare away predators.
However, it’s not always clear why bioluminescence evolved. Take octocorals. These soft-bodied organisms are found in both shallow water and the deep ocean, and produce an enzyme called luciferase to break down a chemical to make light. But whether glowing octocorals use their light to attract zooplankton as prey or for some other purpose is unclear.
First light
Searching for answers, DeLeo and her colleagues analysed a large data set of genetic sequences and the sparse octocoral fossil record to reconstruct the animals’ evolutionary history. They then used a computer model to determine how likely it was that ancestral species were bioluminescent.
The model revealed that the common ancestor of all octocorals — which lived around 540 million years ago — was probably bioluminescent. The finding suggests that luciferase-based biofluorescence evolved early and was lost by non-bioluminescent descendants of ancient glowing octocorals.
The study shows that bioluminescence has been around since at least the Cambrian period (around 540 million to 485 million years ago), when the first animal species developed eyes. That’s surprising, says evolutionary biologist Todd Oakley, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, because bioluminescence is a trait that “tends to blink on and off” across evolutionary time.
Luciferase is just one way animals make light. Other organisms use different chemistry to get their telltale glow. In the case of octocorals, the luciferase system could have evolved for the production of an antioxidant, says DeLeo. Later, the light-generating aspect of the reaction would have become useful for communication.
In any case, the deep origin of bioluminescence suggests that it could be one of the oldest forms of communication on Earth, she says. “If you’re producing light — whether or not it’s intentional — you are signalling other animals,” she says. “Like, ‘Hey! I’m over here!”
