Sea lions are getting sick from toxic algae blooms

Sea lions off of the coast of California are getting very sick and it’s because of increased blooms of toxic algae. The algae release a chemical called domoic acid and when sea lions eat fish that feed on the algae, it causes seizures, gastrointestinal issues and can lead to brain damage. For many sea lions, the poisoning is a death sentence. “It’s hard. It’s really hard to watch these animals suffer, especially if there’s not something we can do to stop these blooms from happening,” Cara Field a veterinarian with the Marine Mammal Center told CBS News.

Algal blooms are affected by things like temperature and nutrients introduced into the ocean from industrial and agricultural runoff. And as climate change ramps up, these blooms stand to get a lot bigger. Warmer temperatures will boost growth and likely push it farther north while more storms and heavier rainfall wash more of those nutrients — like nitrogen — into rivers and streams.

So far, the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, California has taken in 70 sea lions since the beginning of July. That’s how many the center took in during the entirety of 2016. “August and September are peak times for us as well,” said Field, so it’s likely more animals will be affected. “[It’s] more pronounced than we’ve seen in the past few years,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson told the Associated Press. And the bad news isn’t limited to sea lions. They eat a lot of the same seafood we do. “So if they are getting these seizures and these gastro issues, we can as well,” Field said.

Source: CBS News, AP

Razer Lancehead review

There’s no question that PC gamers are passionate about their hardware. From the components inside desktops and laptops, to the peripherals in their hands, each piece of the PC gaming puzzle is important for optimal performance and precision, no matter the cost. Feeding this frenzy is Intel, AMD, and Nvidia on the hardware side, and Logitech, SteelSeries, Razer, and several others on the peripheral side. The latest entry from Razer is the Razer Lancehead PC gaming mouse, which the company tossed our way. We grabbed the mouse by its tail to see if its hefty $140 pricetag bites our wallet in all the right places.

Welcome to the cult

The Razer Lancehead is an extremely comfortable peripheral in the palm of your hand. We actually loved the SteelSeries Rival 700, but compared to Razer’s new mouse, it’s bulky. The SteelSeries is also designed only for right-handed gamers.

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

By contrast, Razer’s Lancehead accommodates both left and right-handed gamers. It’s a sleek, slim device that – surprisingly – is heavier than the SteelSeries mouse, though the Lancehead is visually slimmer, and shorter in height. Despite feeling compact in your hand, Razer’s mouse doesn’t feel too light in movement, and that’s a good thing.

It accommodates left and right-handed gamers, so the south-paw crowd won’t feel excluded from Razer’s so-called cult.

Overall, the Lancehead’s exterior is smooth and gorgeous, sporting an attractive “space silver” body enhanced by black accents. There are nine physical buttons for your programming pleasure — left click and right click buttons built with Razer’s in-house mechanical switches, a clickable tactile scroll wheel, two sensitivity buttons, and an additional two buttons on each side. All buttons can be customized through the company’s free Razer Synapse software.

On each side of the mouse, you’ll find a black rubberized area residing under the two buttons, enabling a better grip for your thumb and ring finger (or whatever digit you use when fondling a mouse). Both sides also include an elegantly thin LED strip that is complemented by an illuminated Razer logo on the palm rest area, and strips running along both sides of the mouse wheel.

Turn the mouse over, and you’ll find a nifty covered compartment for temporarily stashing away the included wireless USB dongle. To the left of the compartment, but still residing under the compartment’s hood, are two buttons and an LED: one button for switching the mouse off and on, and one for physically cycling through four stored profiles. The handy LED assigns each profile with its own color — red, green, blue, and cyan.

Customizable for your favorite games

Because the mouse has on-board storage, you can locally save four sets of configurations containing different button assignments, sensitivity levels, acceleration rates (zero to ten), polling rates, and illumination. The lighting aspect consists of five effects that support 16.8 million colors — Breathing, Reactive, Spectrum Cycling, Static, and Wave. These colors and effects can be synchronized with Razer’s other Chroma-branded devices.

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

Lancehead owners can assign profiles to specific games, too. For instance, we created a special DOOM profile using specific sensitivity settings, button configurations, and a red “Reactive” lighting effect. Every time we fired a weapon, all lighting zones would light up in red and slowly fade away. The lighting duration can be switched between three settings, as well – short, medium, and long.

You can also program macros using Synapse, and then assign those macros to specific buttons. There’s even an option in Synapse to install special Chroma apps, such as Chroma for Outlook, which lights up the mouse when you receive an Outlook-based notification.

Running like its tail is on fire

On a performance level, Lancehead owners can jump into Synapse and switch the polling rate between three levels: 125Hz, 500Hz, and 1,000Hz. The number correlates to how many times the mouse updates the processor with its location each second. Thus, by default, the mouse provides a report 500 times per second. When testing the wireless connection, we saw an average of around 482Hz using swift motions, and the same results after connecting the peripheral’s included seven-foot braided USB cable.

We could keep talking about how we love the Lancehead, but what you need to know is this – you should buy one.

As for the sensitivity, the Lancehead’s 5G laser sensor is capable of up to 16,000 dots per inch. That’s an insane amount, meaning you can cross three connected high-resolution screens by physically moving the mouse around 0.375 inches horizontally across a desktop surface. That’s where the five on-the-fly sensitivity stages come in, which are fully customizable in the Razer Synapse software.

Honestly, we couldn’t see a difference in gameplay whether the mouse was wired or wireless, and our software test showed that there doesn’t appear to a loss in connectivity quality just because the mouse is on a 2.4GHz wireless connection. Aiming in first-person shooters like Quake Champions and DOOM felt spot-on and tight, although all of our play testing relied on the wireless dongle mounted roughly 14 inches away from the mouse.

You can’t go wrong with Lancehead

We could probably keep talking about all the goodness stemming from the Razer Lancehead mouse, but we’d rather you go purchase the device instead. The only notable drawback with this peripheral is that it took a while to fully recharge, but you could simply plug it into their parent PC overnight to have it at full capacity the next morning. When wireless, the mouse goes into sleep mode at idle, so a single charge should go a long way.

Kyle Wiggers/Digital Trends

Of course, Synapse will show the battery’s current capacity, but the software is not always front and center on the PC’s screen. This prompted Razer to include a neat trick where the mouse will shut off all illumination save for the mouse wheel. At that point, the wheel’s strips will continuously flash in a red, two-burst loop until the mouse is plugged into a USB port. The loop then stops, and your original illumination returns as the battery begins to recharge.

Ultimately, the cost of Razer’s new mouse is like a lance to the head. Its $140 price tag isn’t cheap, it’s justified by solid quality, performance, and Razer’s stable, proprietary wireless technology. Razer isn’t known for cheaply made products, hence its “cult” following in the PC gaming community. So yes — bite the bullet, and spend an uncomfortable amount of money on this awesome mouse.

Maze Alpha 4G hands-on review

Research Center:
Maze Alpha 4G

The Maze Alpha is a smartphone you have likely never heard of, but it brings together technology you normally have to spend $600 or more to get, into a sub-$225 device. That’s right, like the Samsung Galaxy S8, LG G6, or Xiaomi Mi Mix, it has a massive, almost edge-to-edge screen for a futuristic look that’s achingly cool right now, at a price that’s shockingly good value. Throw in a dual-lens camera and it ticks all the must-have boxes for a smartphone this year.

A budget Mi Mix

At first glance, the Maze Alpha looks almost identical to the Xiaomi Mi Mix; but get closer and there are several differences, all of which enable Maze to charge a lot less for the Alpha. What do you miss out on? There’s no piezoelectric speaker behind the screen, the display is smaller, the bezels slightly larger, and the base section much deeper. The fingerprint sensor is on the front too — it’s not made of ceramic, and doesn’t have any 18k gold finishing touches either.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

The great thing is, not all of these features detract from the Maze Alpha, and none turn it into a bad phone. There is a real speaker above the screen, but it’s so tiny you have to look for it. The Maze Alpha’s glass and metal combination also has more grip than Xiaomi’s phone.

You need it. This is a big phone. The Alpha is even larger than an iPhone 7 Plus, and is slab-like in shape, therefore you need to hang on tight unless you want it clattering on the floor. The front fingerprint sensor should be on the back though, as it’s awkward to use with one hand in its current position. It’s sometimes slow to respond, and we often needed a couple of tries before it unlocked the phone. The low price means corners have certainly been cut. Still, the overall construction of the Alpha is excellent. There are no sharp edges, no poorly-fitted panels, and the whole phone feels very high quality.

It ticks all the must-have boxes for a smartphone this year.

The screen is the reason to buy the Maze Alpha. It’s 6-inches with a 1,920 x 1,080 pixel resolution, and covered in a 2.5D piece of curved Gorilla Glass 4, resulting in an 83 percent screen-to-body ratio. It looks fantastic, with strong colors, high contrast, and plenty of brightness. Even with the brightness set halfway, it’s easily visible in sunlight. Videos looks superb, and when played through YouTube, they fit the screen well. It’s an immersive viewing experience, which is unlike most other phones, particularly at this price. It’s the same browsing the web, where more information is visible at one time, resulting in fewer swipes.

Android 7.0 Nougat is installed and our review model it had the August 2017 Android security patch already. Maze has left Android almost completely alone, but has opted to remove the app drawer. The icons used aren’t always the most up to date, leaving the user interface looking a little messy. Otherwise, it operates smoothly and without fuss, and is free of bloatware. There are some annoyances, such as swiping up the Android software keys only for them to readjust the screen size rather than overlaying the display, and pressing a button to make them disappear instead of swiping them away.

Speedy and good battery life, poor camera

A MediaTek Helio P25 processor with 4GB of RAM powers the phone, with a large 4,000mAh battery to keep it going. Standby time is exceptional, and the phone happily lasted for a couple of days without a recharge. It has a USB Type-C connector and fast-charging, although it still takes a good while to top up a cell that big. Performance is good. The Alpha played simple games like Happy Hop without a problem, and Reckless Racing 3 with the graphics turned up was free of jitter. The Maze Alpha is a good gaming phone due to the large screen too.

Sadly, the camera lets the Maze Alpha down. The dual-camera setup features a 13-megapixel main camera and a secondary 5-megapixel lens — it doesn’t replicate the Portrait Mode effect on the iPhone, but instead it’s used for increasing quality and contrast, a monochrome mode, plus a 2x optical zoom. In the right conditions it takes pleasant photos, but it’s never outstanding. The f/2.2 aperture makes low-light and overcast day shots a real challenge. The Maze Alpha’s camera is what we’d expect a phone costing this amount to be like, but that’s not really a good thing.

The app has modes for monochrome shots, video, and a Pro mode, plus a comprehensive editing suite. To use the selfie camera, you have to spin the phone round, as it’s under the screen, unless you like pictures of your neck. It’s worth mentioning Maze has pushed at least one software update to our phone since we’ve been using it, and that did improve the camera performance and responsiveness. We hope it continues to refine the camera more.

We like the Maze Alpha. Phones priced at around $200 tend to all look the same, and while the Maze Alpha looks a lot like the Xiaomi Mi Mix, at least it doesn’t look like the iPhone. The screen’s a beauty, the battery lasts ages, and the performance is strong. The camera is just acceptable, and can’t match more expensive devices for low light shots. The major downside is the lack of 4G LTE support in the U.S. We tested the Maze Alpha in the U.K., and it connected to O2’s 4G network without a problem.

Maze Alpha 4G Compared To

ZTE Blade Z Max

Moto Z2 Force

Asus Zenfone 3 Zoom

Moto Z2 Play

Motorola Moto E4

Huawei Nova 2 Plus

ZTE Max XL

Huawei Honor 8 Pro

Lenovo Moto G5 Plus

Meizu M3 Max

ZTE ZMax Pro

Blu Pure XL

Huawei Mate 8

ZTE Grand X Max+

LG G Flex

It’s an import phone, so don’t go looking for it at Best Buy. Chinese electronics specialist GearBest sells the Maze Alpha for $225 at the time of writing, and has good after sales support and warranties. It’s available elsewhere too, and if you’re lucky it can be found for under $190. If you’re prepared to go without super fast data, and only have a few hundred dollars to spend on a phone, the Maze Alpha stands out from the crowd. It certainly won’t get mistaken it for many other phones when you put it down on a table.

Google adds adds 30 languages and ‘voice-to-emoji’ transcription to Voice Typing

Why it matters to you

If Google Translate didn’t support your language before, chances are it does now. The latest update covers more than a billion people.

More than 500 million people around the world use Google to translate words and phrases, but the Mountain View company is nothing if not ambitious. On Monday, it announced the addition of 30 languages and locales to its suite of web- and phone-based translation apps, bringing the total number of supported languages to 119.

Google says the expanded support covers more than one billion speakers.

The additions include Georgian, African dialects of Swahili and Amharic, and Indian languages like Urdu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Gujarati. Google said it worked with native speakers to collect speech samples, training machine learning models to understand the languages’ nuances.

“[We asked] them to read common phrases,” Daan van Esch, a technical program manager at Google’s Speech division, said in a blog post. “This process trained our machine learning models to understand the sounds and words of the new languages and to improve their accuracy when exposed to more examples over time.”

The languages are available across Google’s range of translation apps, including Translate and Gboard. In the case of the latter keyboard app, though, users have to manually enable the language via the apps’ Voice Typing and Voice Search settings.

Here’s how:

• Install Gboard from the Play Store. Head over to Settings > Languages and Input > Virtual Keyboard > Gboard. You can also access these settings from the keyboard by pressing on the G icon, and selecting the Settings wheel.
• Tap on Voice Typing > Languages to add more languages.
• To voice type in Gboard, tap the mic icon on the upper right when the keyboard is open.
• Next, open the Google app.
• Tap the three lines on the top left and go to Settings. Tap Voice > Languages and add the ones you want.

New languages aren’t the only thing heading to Google’s speech recognition. Starting Monday, Gboard is gaining support for “emoji-to-text” — you can say something like “winky face emoji,” and it’ll paste the relevant emoji for you. Google is also upgrading its Cloud Speech API, its voice transcription developer toolkit, with expanded support for audio timestamps and files up to three hours in length.

“[The] new expanded language support […] enables users in more countries to use speech to access products and services that up until now have never been available to them,” Dan Aharon, product manager at Google’s Cloud Platform, said in a blog post.

Quiet, please! Learn how to turn off the camera sound on an iPhone

They say the best camera is the one you have with you, and for most people, that camera is the one on their smartphones. iPhone photography keeps getting better every year, and the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are no exception. The iPhone 7 Plus brings what is one of the most versatile dual camera setups around as it combines a wide-angle lens, with a telephoto lens you can use for portraits. This combination gives you a lot more room when it comes to composing your pictures just the way you want them.

If we are using our smartphones to take pictures everywhere, then having it make loud noises when you take a picture may not be ideal in all situations. Sometimes it isn’t appropriate to have a loud shutter sound when you are trying to take a picture. In this article, we will show you how to turn off the camera sound on an iPhone quickly and easily so that you can silence your camera, and take pictures without disturbing anyone.

Use the mute switch

The easiest way to mute the camera sound is to use the ring/silent switch on the upper left-hand side. When you turn on the silent switch, you will feel the iPhone vibrate, and the button will show an orange stripe. You should be aware that this will mute all notifications, incoming calls, and other alerts.

Turn down the volume

What do you do if the silent switch isn’t working? If your silent switch broke or isn’t working for some reason, turning down the volume may seem like an obvious way to do it, but if you do this while in the camera app, you will start taking pictures in burst mode.

If you know that you are going to use the camera app and want to mute the sounds, you can turn down the volume before you open the app using the volume down button on the left-hand side of your iPhone below the silent switch.

You can also turn down the volume while on the camera app by swiping up from the bottom to reveal Control Center, and then swipe left to reveal the volume control. You can turn down the volume from here.

Country restrictions

Did you know that in some countries it is mandatory to have the camera shutter sound on at all times? It’s not law, but wireless carriers have imposed it and phone manufacturers have followed suit. In countries like Japan and Korea, all smartphones must make a sound when using the camera app to take a picture. If you’re in these countries, we are sorry to say that even if you mute the iPhone, your camera app will still make a sound.

How would Mozart play ‘Hotline Bling?’ AI will soon help us find out

Why it matters to you

Ever wanted to know what an earlier artist’s take on a modern hit would sound like? Artificial intelligence may soon help us find out.

Remember wannabe pop star Rebecca Black’s much-maligned song Friday from a few years back? As poor as the song itself was, it did give us one brilliant spinoff: The enterprising work of YouTuber HeyMikeBauer, who performed a cover of the song in the style of legendary folk singer Bob Dylan.

If you liked that (and, based on its YouTube views, a whole lot of you did), a new artificial intelligence project may be exactly what the doctor ordered. What researchers at the U.K.’s Birmingham City University are working on is a neural network project they hope will one day predict how a piece of music might have sounded had it been created by an earlier artist — and then generate it for you. Looking for a Pink Floyd cover of Jay-Z? How about a Beethoven symphony re-creating (or, well, pre-creating) The Beatles’ seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? You’ve come to the right place!

“The idea is that we could train a neural network with the work of a musician,” Islah Ali-MacLachlan, senior lecturer in sound engineering, told Digital Trends. “We would use a range of tracks as an input, and the network would automatically detect the start and end of each individual note, the harmonic content, and other important classification data. Based on this we would then input your playing — perhaps a melody or guitar solo — and the system would change your audio. Imagine the phone apps that turn your photo into a Monet or Van Gogh — this would do the same for recordings.”

Ali-MacLachlan says that the project is still in its early stages, with the focus right now being on traditional Irish flute music. “It is difficult for a computer to determine when a note changes when there may not be a pronounced attack like a plectrum hitting a string or a stick hitting a drum head, but we have a system that can deliver 90 percent accuracy in some contexts,” he said. “We have also developed some techniques for classifying timbre and looking at key differences between players. At present, we are working on being able to automatically define different notes to train the neural networks and from there we will start to look at how we can influence the outputs.”

The overall goal is enormously ambitious, but, hey, wouldn’t we have said the same thing about self-driving cars or computers that can beat humans at Go just a few years back? With AI increasingly capable of learning to impersonate voices based on training data, this may be closer than we think.

How would Mozart play ‘Hotline Bling?’ AI will soon help us find out

Why it matters to you

Ever wanted to know what an earlier artist’s take on a modern hit would sound like? Artificial intelligence may soon help us find out.

Remember wannabe pop star Rebecca Black’s much-maligned song Friday from a few years back? As poor as the song itself was, it did give us one brilliant spinoff: The enterprising work of YouTuber HeyMikeBauer, who performed a cover of the song in the style of legendary folk singer Bob Dylan.

If you liked that (and, based on its YouTube views, a whole lot of you did), a new artificial intelligence project may be exactly what the doctor ordered. What researchers at the U.K.’s Birmingham City University are working on is a neural network project they hope will one day predict how a piece of music might have sounded had it been created by an earlier artist — and then generate it for you. Looking for a Pink Floyd cover of Jay-Z? How about a Beethoven symphony re-creating (or, well, pre-creating) The Beatles’ seminal Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? You’ve come to the right place!

“The idea is that we could train a neural network with the work of a musician,” Islah Ali-MacLachlan, senior lecturer in sound engineering, told Digital Trends. “We would use a range of tracks as an input, and the network would automatically detect the start and end of each individual note, the harmonic content, and other important classification data. Based on this we would then input your playing — perhaps a melody or guitar solo — and the system would change your audio. Imagine the phone apps that turn your photo into a Monet or Van Gogh — this would do the same for recordings.”

Ali-MacLachlan says that the project is still in its early stages, with the focus right now being on traditional Irish flute music. “It is difficult for a computer to determine when a note changes when there may not be a pronounced attack like a plectrum hitting a string or a stick hitting a drum head, but we have a system that can deliver 90 percent accuracy in some contexts,” he said. “We have also developed some techniques for classifying timbre and looking at key differences between players. At present, we are working on being able to automatically define different notes to train the neural networks and from there we will start to look at how we can influence the outputs.”

The overall goal is enormously ambitious, but, hey, wouldn’t we have said the same thing about self-driving cars or computers that can beat humans at Go just a few years back? With AI increasingly capable of learning to impersonate voices based on training data, this may be closer than we think.

O6 smart bluetooth remote review

Picture this: You’re lounging at home, streaming tunes from your smartphone to a Bluetooth speaker. You start to nod off, but there’s a problem — your phone’s sitting on a table across the room. Fingertips Labs thinks it has the solution: A remote control for iPhones and iPads. Here’s our O6 smart bluetooth remote review.

The O6 isn’t anything like your TV or stereo system’s remote. The lightweight, all-metal puck consists of a textured center button, an outer ring button, a rotating dial, and a tactile button that supports single-click, double-click, triple-click, and press-and-hold gestures. A rechargeable battery supplies the O6 with up to 10 days of power, and embedded magnets on the back stick to magnetized surfaces like refrigerators and car dashboards.

The O6’s real magic are its channels.

It isn’t meant to replace voice controls, hand gestures, or touchscreens, but to keep you focused on tasks at hand.

“The world has changed drastically in the last 10 years,” the O6 team wrote in a statement provided to Digital Trends. “With ubiquitous Wi-Fi and robust cellular plans, we have gone from ‘work phones’ and desktop computers to being always connected. We can’t stop people from feeling the need to check their mail and social media, but the O6 […] allows them to do it without taking their phone off the [sidewalk or] road.”

Whether or not it achieves that goal is subject for debate, but the O6 worked as advertised in our testing — though it will depend on which apps you use most often.

Channel surfing

We were impressed with the simplicity of the O6 remote’s setup process. Once you install the O6 companion app on your iPhone or iPad, pair it via Bluetooth, and grant it access to your device’s notifications and contacts list, you’re ready to start controlling apps with dials and buttons.

The O6 ships with a couple of controls pre-configured. By default, a single click of the center button plays/pauses music and selects items in the O6’s companion app. A double-click brings up programmable actions in the O6 app (more on these later), and a single-click of the ring button takes you back to the O6 app’s main menu.

The O6’s real magic, though, are its channels, or native app integrations. A channel for read-it-later service Pocket reads aloud articles you’ve saved with the Pocket browser extension, and a channel for National Public Radio‘s One app lets you like, skip, and rewind podcasts with the O6 remote’s dial and center button.

We tried activating Twitter, one of the suggested channels, first. We logged into a Twitter account via the O6 app, and our iPhone 6S Plus started reading the newest tweets in our timeline. Rotating the O6’s dial clockwise skipped to the next tweet, and rotating it counter-clockwise went to a previous one.

The second channel we took for a spin, Gmail, worked just as well. We scrolled through unread emails in our inbox using the O6’s rotary dial, and selected the Reply button with a combination of single- and double-taps of the center ring. You’ll have to pick up your phone to actually reply, though, or use O6’s smart replies.

But by far the most useful channel is the notifications channel, which reads aloud alerts from apps like Messages, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Facebook Messenger. Incoming alerts populate the notifications channel automatically, where they can be dismissed with a tap of the O6’s center button.

The notifications channel tends to fill up quickly when you have lots of apps installed, and that’s where the O6’s haptic feedback comes in. The remote’s vibrating motors can play over 200 different haptic effects that can be assigned however you choose. You can program a triple buzz to iMessage notifications, for example, or a long single vibration to Facebook Messenger chats.

You can also use the O6’s haptics to tell the time, though we don’t recommend it. A Morse Code-like series of long and short buzzes indicate the time, but it’s not a particularly intuitive system — one long haptic buzz indicates the number five, and one short buzz indicates the number one.

The O6’s also supports actions, or shortcuts to in-app settings, buttons, and options. One lets you respond to texts with predetermined responses. Another, an action for phone calls, worked particularly well in our testing — when we got a message containing a phone number, the O6 app extracted it automatically and let us place a call with a click of the center button.

Other apps and settings

As smooth as the O6’s channels and actions were, though, we found ourselves using the remote’s system-level controls more often.

When a call or interactive alert (like an alarm) comes in, the O6 vibrates and switches to Smart Response Mode, which lets you accept or decline notifications by clicking the O6’s ring and bezel buttons. During an incoming call, for instance, tapping the center button accepts the call, and tapping the ring button declines it.

When the O6 isn’t launching channels or dismissing notifications, it acts like a Bluetooth volume knob, mapping volume to the remote control’s dial and playback to the center and ring button in Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, Pandora, Sonos, Apple Music, and other apps. But there’s a big caveat: You have to start those apps manually, either from the iPhone’s touchscreen or Siri. That seems like a bit of an oversight for what’s ostensibly a remote control.

Using the O6 to control other apps gets complicated. The remote’s Advanced Mode, which lets you perform actions in apps that weren’t designed with the O6’s controls in mind, uses Apple’s VoiceOver accessibility API to work around iOS’s control limitations. In the YouTube app, for example, you can scroll through a list of videos by rotating the remote’s dial, click the center button to select a video (double-clicking the center button plays/pauses it), and use the O6’s ring button to return to the home screen.

In our testing, Advanced Mode tended to be a little unpredictable — it wasn’t always clear which of the remote’s buttons would trigger the desired button/action/option. And switching it on, which requires triple-clicking the iPhone’s home button and launching the O6 app, was a pain.

So just how useful is the O6, really? That depends on which apps you use on a daily basis, and how much you’re willing to compromise on the O6’s hands-free vision. It doesn’t replace a touchscreen — you’ll spend a good deal of time tapping touchscreen shortcuts and pecking out messages with your fingertips. But it’s certainly useful when your phone’s out of reach and you just want to turn down the volume, or when you’re cooking and can’t be bothered to wash your hands. It could be a helpful assistant when driving too.

But the O6 will live and die by its developer support. The remote ships with an open API, but channel support is rather limited right now. As it stands, the O6 is great for acting on notifications, adjusting your phone’s volume, and skipping through articles, tweets, and emails. Sadly, all of that is not worth the $100 asking price.

The O6 comes in orange, blue, and grey. It’s available now, and ships with accessories including a steering wheel mount ($20) and pocket clip mount ($20).

New CRISPR technique could accelerate a cure for Huntington’s disease and ALS

Why it matters to you

While gene editing has been a historically contentious practice, the possibility of curing diseases like Huntington’s disease and ALS help highlight the practice’s benefits.

Just a few weeks ago, we marveled at the first instance of human embryo editing with CRISPR in the United States. Now, the gene editing technique has been used for yet another impressive purpose. Scientists at the University of California San Diego believe that a modified version of the CRISPR/Cas9 tool could be used to track RNA in live cells using a method known as RNA-targeting Cas9. But more importantly, this methodology could allow doctors to fix molecular mistakes that result in diseases like myotonic dystrophy types 1 and 2, which are the most common form of hereditary ALS and Huntington’s disease.

These types of diseases occur when errors in RNA sequences prevent the production of key proteins. However, with RNA-targeting Cas9, researchers were able to get rid of the RNA errors, particularly those linked to ALS and Huntington’s. In fact, so effective was this new methodology that scientists were able to remove more than 95 percent of the problematic RNA.

“This is exciting because we’re not only targeting the root cause of diseases for which there are no current therapies to delay progression, but we’ve re-engineered the CRISPR-Cas9 system in a way that’s feasible to deliver it to specific tissues via a viral vector,” said senior author Gene Yeo, professor of cellular and molecular medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.

Yeo’s team also found that applying RNA-targeting Cas9 managed to reverse 93 percent of dysfunctional RNA targets in muscle cells, ultimately turning those cells back into what appeared to be healthy control cells. But while these are all promising results, for the time being, the technique has only been tested in lab settings.

“The main thing we don’t know yet is whether or not the viral vectors that deliver RCas9 to cells would illicit an immune response,” Yeo said. “Before this could be tested in humans, we would need to test it in animal models, determine potential toxicities and evaluate long-term exposure.”

Still, the new methodologies could be groundbreaking in the medicine field.

As David Nelles, co-first author of the study said, “We are really excited about this work because we not only defined a new potential therapeutic mechanism for CRISPR-Cas9, we demonstrated how it could be used to treat an entire class of conditions for which there are no successful treatment options.”

Aukey’s magnetic Bluetooth headphones are down to $17 at Amazon

Our friends at Thrifter are back again, this time with a great deal on a popular set of Bluetooth headphones.

Bluetooth headphones are quickly becoming more popular, but not everyone wants to drop hundreds of dollars on a pair of headphones. Luckily, you don’t have to. Right now, you can pick up Aukey’s magnetic Bluetooth headphones for just $16.99 at Amazon when you use the coupon code IZJM7G4Q at checkout. The earbuds are magnetic, so when you have them around your neck they can clasp together so you don’t have to worry about them falling off.

• Comfortable and secure noise-isolating in-ear headphones that deliver rich, robust sound with punchy bass. Featuring aptX technology for purer wireless audio
• Magnetically clip together for convenient and secure carry around your neck. Great for use on-the-go; walking, commuting, traveling, and more
• Connect quickly with Bluetooth 4.1, to two devices simultaneously, and effortlessly manage audio playback & calls with volume controls, multi-function button, and built-in 6th generation cVc noise-cancelling microphone
• Comfortable ear-tips (in three sizes) provide a smooth seal for your ears, isolating you from external noise. IPX4-certified water-resistance ensures sweat and rain on your run don’t mess with your music

These may not compare to Bose or Beats headphones when it comes to the quality of the music coming out of them, but at a tenth of the price, you’ll likely be impressed. Grab a pair today to try out.

See at Amazon

More from Thrifter:

• How to get the most out of your Amazon Prime membership
• How to save money when driving

For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!