NASA should consider getting into the cheesy disaster movie business. It already has an elevator pitch for a low-budget film. “You’ve heard of sharknado, now get ready for sharkcano,” NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center tweeted on Sunday. NASA hasn’t lost its mind. Goddard shared an image from the Earth-observing Landsat 9 satellite showing a disturbance in the ocean. “The Kavachi Volcano in the Solomon Islands is home to two species of sharks,” Goddard explained. “It’s also one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the Pacific, seen here erupting underwater by Landsat 9.” According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, Kavachi started erupting in October last year and satellite images showed the change in water color in April and May of this year. The volcano’s summit is about 65 feet (20 meters) below the waves. High up in the canopy of the California redwood forests, the wandering salamander lives, eats and soars. Scientists are marveling at the skydiving amphibians and their ability to effortlessly glide and pull off complex aerial maneuvers. A study led by researchers at the University of South Florida (USF) and the University of California at Berkeley investigated Aneides vagrans’ gliding skills using a wind tunnel to capture slow-motion footage of the amphibians in action. The wind tunnel simulated the conditions of falling through the air. The paper appeared in the journal Current Biology on Monday.

A successor to SteelSeries’ beloved flagship Arctis Pro gaming headset line, which turned four this year, the new SteelSeries Arctis Nova Pro keeps some of the best aspects of its predecessor and other Arctis kin, like the hot-swappable battery, dual 2.4GHz and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, speaker drivers designed for high-res audio and signature Arctis design and comfort. For the Nova Pros, SteelSeries upgraded aspects of the design and mic, increased battery life, switched connection types to match modern ports and consoles, swapped its spatial audio to a proprietary system, upgraded the GameDAC 2 (still only for the wired model) and more. The result is a fresh flagship headset that’s lost none of its gaming cred, but still feels a bit pricey. There are five models in the Nova Pro line: $250 for the wired Nova Pro and its Xbox-specific sibling and $350 for the wireless models for PC, Xbox and PlayStation. There isn’t a ton of variation among them. The Xbox models swap a USB connection and the second USB-C port on the base station for the necessary Xbox-compatible USB connector but are otherwise identical to their respective linemates. All the headsets are PS5-compatible: The PS5 model simply has different packaging for sale at retail. I tested the Nova Pro Wireless, which means I didn’t get to evaluate the new GameDAC.  In addition to connecting to a PC or Mac via USB, you can output to the headset from a PS5 or Android phone equipped with a USB-C port via the base station (which is essentially the dongle), a Nintendo Switch (in TV mode) or anything that has a 3.5mm analog jack. The base station accepts an analog input as well, for mixing a stream on your PC. Among other things, SteelSeries removed the optical connections, which means if you’ve got an older console this isn’t a great choice. Sounds great SteelSeries updated the acoustic pipeline (all the hardware between the incoming audio and your ear) and it sounds excellent, with clear lows, midrange and highs. My admittedly sub-audiophile ears couldn’t make out any unintended distortion with Doom Eternal’s heavy metal pounding as loud as my ears could stand. The earcups deliver solid noise isolation, and a transparency toggle decreases isolation so you can sort of hear outside noises like the air conditioner and someone talking too loudly on a conference call.  The base station is capable of high-res audio up to 48kHz/24-bit and the serious parametric equalizer in SteelSeries’ new Sonar software (which lives within the company’s GG utility software) is excellent. (Compared with a graphic equalizer, which adjusts based on groups of frequencies, a parametric equalizer takes into account continuous transitions between the key frequencies. Besides, like magnets, Beziers make everything better.)  So, for instance, you can narrow the frequency of the output of a specific voice, footstep, vehicle and so on in a game to make it easier to hear and track them based on your own hearing characteristics. It comes with presets for a handful of popular multiplayer games as well as a generic “FPS Footsteps,” but you can tweak and save custom presets to your ears’ desire.  You can use the individual 10-step graphic equalizers for chat and the mic, so you can optimize one for clarity and the other for your best broadcast voice. The updated ClearCast 2 mic definitely hits SteelSeries’ goal for optimum clarity, though for plain old voice it lacks some of the warmth that some other mics provide.  Sonar also provides ClearCast AI noise cancellation, which seems to work really well without making your voice sound tinny or overprocessed. It lets you separately adjust the amount of NR for background noise (low, continuous sounds like fans) and impact noise, like keyboard pounding. It does a really good job on the latter, significantly muffling the sound of my seriously loud mechanical keyboard (tactile clicky FTW!). SteelSeries switches from standard DTS surround sound to its own Sonar Spatial Audio, which translates position data within games into its own directional system. It works pretty well, but that’s partly because of how effective its tuning is. It has two sliders, a scale of performance to immersion and distance. Performance narrows the directionality of the sound, so you can better isolate (for example) footsteps, while immersion expands it for a more continuous 360-degree sound, like the voices in Senua’s head in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice that seem to come from everywhere.  It doesn’t let you adjust individual speaker locations, like Razer’s THX does, but I don’t miss that here: The left and right rear channels, which I frequently hear too close to left and right, were correctly positioned. Using spatial also seems the best way to listen to music. Without it, music sounds kind of flat, even with equalizer tweaks. The headset seems to consider movies an afterthought and music an after-afterthought, with only a couple of movie presets and no music presets. There are also separate configuration settings as part of the main GG Engine, which can get confusing where they overlap; for instance, there’s also a graphic equalizer in settings, which is disabled if you have the Sonar equalizer active. It does have a toggle between optimizing the wireless signal for performance (lowest latency) or range. That didn’t seem to make much of a difference to me, though — at about 30 feet (through a couple of walls) it started to get a bit wonky. It’s pretty typical, though. Battery life seems middle of the road. For instance, extrapolating from my current experience it should hit about 18 hours or so just from listening to music with no mic use. There are a lot of variables to consider here, though, such as the number of devices connected. SteelSeries mitigates it a bit with the battery swappability. In theory, you could buy more batteries and keep going forever. New design The Nova Pro headset and the wireless base station have gotten a makeover from the Arctis Pro, and the headset looks a lot cleaner, with smaller outer earcups, a mic that retracts completely into the earcup and redesigned

A massive asteroid is heading our way, and it’ll make its closest pass by our planet in centuries on May 27. Called 1989 JA (or sometimes just asteroid 7335), it’s 1.2 miles (1.8 kilometers) in diameter, which helps earn it the classification of a “potentially hazardous” object according to astronomers, even though it poses no real risk to our planet. At that size, it’s about twice the size of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa or the same size as Plum Island in New York. When the distance between this space rock and us is shortest, at 7:26 a.m. PT Friday morning, it will still be 10 times farther away than the moon. So there’s clearly no reason for any asteroid anxiety with 1989 JA, but still it’s expected to be the largest asteroid to make a close pass by Earth during 2022, according to NASA’s database of near-earth objects. Because it’s so big, astronomers have already been able to observe it. The object isn’t quite big enough or close enough to see with the naked eye, but it might be possible to see with a powerful telescope and the help of an app like Stellarium. As its label indicates, the asteroid was discovered in 1989, and it’s not expected to fly this close to us again between now and the end of the 22nd century. If you don’t have the equipment or ability to check this monster out for yourself, the Virtual Telescope Project based in Italy will be streaming an online watch party that you can attend via the feed above. Or if you’re more interested in much smaller space rocks that might actually be possible to see with the naked eye, don’t forget to add Monday’s potential meteor storm to your agenda.

Rumours about the next iPhone continue to grow. It seems as though we’ve barely got used to the current one before a new model is being teased. The iPhone 14 is expected to be the next release in Apple’s 2022 Flagship line. There are rumours buzzing around regarding the design, price, and features, but these should all be handled with caution. Plenty of the iPhone 13 rumours turned out to be false, so we can expect to see similar with the iPhone 14. We have not seen specific rumours regarding the iPhone 14’s suspected release date. But what we do know is that Apple is hosting WWDC 2022 starting June 6 and it is likely that iOS 16 will be announced, the next major software version for the iPhone. There has been no date announced from Apple for an Autumn event, which is typically when the next iPhone is announced. Generally, the Autumn event in the US is sometime in September, with releases coming shortly after. The latest buzz points to the iPhone 14 receiving a better front-facing camera, thanks to a potential new lens supplier. We’ve also heard that the iPhone 14 series may have an under-display Touch ID, a more durable titanium alloy body, a hole-and-pill shaped display, and a bigger camera bump. A shakeup of the lineup also seems likely as Apple is expected to say goodbye to the Mini. We may also finally see the rumoured satellite communication connectivity in the iPhone 14 series. Whilst the feature was expected to debut with the iPhone 13 series, it’s been rumoured that Apple has been working on enabling users to make calls and send texts in areas without cellular coverage. This could be a huge gamechanger, and a significant safety feature if true.  New iPhones always include camera improvements, and the iPhone 14 is no exception. There are rumoured improvements to the Ultra Wide camera, and a possibility that Apple will introduce a periscope zoom lens that allows for much greater optical zoom, but it’s still not yet clear if this will come in 2022 or 2023.  There are conflicting rumours regarding the iPhone 14’s rear camera bump. Some reports have stated that a redesign for the upcoming phones would remove the chunky camera bump, whilst Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that the bump will actually be expanded to accommodate a wider camera with a 48-mega pixel camera system. Starting in 2022, high-end iPhone models are likely to adopt a vapour chamber thermal system, which Apple is rumoured to be “aggressively testing.” The VC thermal system will be required for the high-end iPhones due to their stronger computing power and faster 5G connection speeds. There are already smartphones from companies like Samsung, Razer, and LG that use vapour chamber cooling technology, which is used to keep a device cooler when it is under heavy stress. There have been rumours that Apple is aiming to remove the Lightning port from the iPhone for a portless design with charging done over MagSafe, but it’s not clear if that technology will be introduced with the 2022 iPhone models. Apple is working on a car crash detection feature for the iPhone and the Apple Watch, which could come out in 2022. It would use sensors like the accelerometer to detect car accidents when they occur by measuring a spike in gravitational force. When a car crash is detected, the iPhone or the Apple Watch would automatically dial emergency services to get help. Since it’s planned for 2022, this could be a feature designed for the iPhone 14 models and the Apple Watch Series 8, though it’s not likely to be limited to those devices. It would be an expansion of the Fall Detection feature that’s in existing Apple Watch and iPhone models. The iPhone 14 is expected to feature WiFi 6E connectivity, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Kuo says that WiFi 6E will offer the high-speed wireless transmissions necessary for AR and VR experiences, and it is also expected to be used in the mixed reality headset that could come out in 2022. The iPhone 14 models may launch without a physical SIM slot, with Apple transitioning to an eSIM-only design. Apple is allegedly advising major U.S. carriers to prepare for the launch of eSIM-only smartphones by 2022, which suggests some iPhone 14 models may be the first to come without a SIM slot. As always, new rumours and leaks are being reported every day, but all should be handled with a grain of salt until legitimate verification can be acquired.

Lawmakers argue Android phone data could be “weaponized against women” if the US Supreme Court officially overturns abortion protections. MORE THAN 40 Democratic members of Congress called on Google to stop collecting and retaining customer location data that prosecutors could use to identify women who obtain abortions. “We are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care. That’s because Google stores historical location information about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies,” Democrats wrote May 24 in a letter led by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.). The letter was sent to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Specifically, Google should stop collecting “unnecessary customer location data” or “any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against women,” lawmakers wrote. They also told Google that people who use iPhones “have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions of Americans using Android devices.” The draft Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade could be followed by strict limits or bans on abortion in many states, and Democrats wrote that “Republicans in Congress are already discussing passing a law criminalizing abortion in all 50 states, putting the government in control of women’s bodies.”  Location Data From Android Phones In their letter, Democrats told Pichai: While Google deserves credit for being one of the first companies in America to insist on a warrant before disclosing location data to law enforcement, that is not enough. If abortion is made illegal by the far-right Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers, it is inevitable that right-wing prosecutors will obtain legal warrants to hunt down, prosecute, and jail women for obtaining critical reproductive health care. The only way to protect your customers’ location data from such outrageous government surveillance is to not keep it in the first place. Google obtains detailed information “from Android smartphones, which collect and transmit location information to Google, regardless of whether the phone is being used or which app a user has open,” they wrote. While Android users have to opt into this data collection, “Google has designed its Android operating system so that consumers can only enable third party apps to access location data if they also allow Google to receive their location data too. In contrast, Google is only able to collect location data from users of iPhones when they are using the Google Maps app,” the lawmakers wrote. We contacted Google about the letter yesterday and will update this article if we get a response. Exactly how Google’s location privacy settings work has been a matter of confusion, even for some Google employees. As we wrote in August 2020, documents from a consumer fraud suit the state of Arizona filed against Google “show that company employees knew and discussed among themselves that the company’s location privacy settings were confusing and potentially misleading.” Democrats Say iPhone Users Have More Privacy Because many of the cheaper smartphones use Android, the lawmakers warned of a “digital divide” affecting the privacy of people with low incomes: No law requires Google to collect and keep records of its customers’ every movement. Apple has shown that it is not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers’ locations. Google’s intentional choice to do so is creating a new digital divide, in which privacy and security are made a luxury. Americans who can afford an iPhone have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions of Americans using Android devices. While Google uses location data to target online ads, the company often turns over the data to law enforcement officials who obtain court orders, the Democrats wrote. “This includes dragnet ‘geofence’ orders demanding data about everyone who was near a particular location at a given time,” they wrote, adding that “Google received 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020.” iPhones also use location services, though the lawmakers seem to be satisfied with Apple’s privacy promises. Among other things, Apple says that if location services are turned on, geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers are sent “in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple” to augment a “crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower locations.” With the Find My feature that can locate lost devices, Apple says it “retains location information and makes it accessible to you for 24 hours, after which it is deleted” and that “device location services information is stored on each individual device and Apple cannot retrieve this information from any specific device.” Post-Roe State Abortion Laws Assuming the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, there could be more state laws like the recently enacted Texas Heartbeat Act that bans abortions after it’s possible to detect a “fetal heartbeat.” The law defines that as “cardiac activity or the steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac.” This effectively bans abortions after six weeks, and the state law lets private citizens file lawsuits to obtain injunctions and damages of at least $10,000 per abortion. These lawsuits could be filed against anyone who “performs or induces an abortion” that violates the Texas Heartbeat Act or anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets” an abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected. Aiding or abetting includes “paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise, if the abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.” Civil suits can also be filed against anyone who “intends to engage in the conduct” described in the law. The Texas law doesn’t allow the exact scenario Democrats warned of in their letter, that prosecutors could jail women who obtain

The ancient flying terrors were as large as school buses. The ‘Dragon of Death’ feasted on birds over 80 million years ago. Imagine a winged dinosaur the size of a school bus casting a massive shadow over you as it swoops down to Earth. Fossils of such a beast, dubbed the “dragon of death,” have been unearthed by scientists in the Andes mountains region of Argentina, according to a report by Reuters. The ancient flying reptiles roamed the skies 86 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, at around the same time as dinosaurs. The creature had a huge wingspan, measuring up to about 30-feet long. This new species is now one of the largest flying reptiles discovered worldwide, and the largest found in South America. “Dragon of death” is a catchy moniker stemming from the newly discovered creature’s official scientific name: Thanatosdrakon amaru. The name is a combination of the ancient Greek words for death (thanatos) and dragon (drakon). “It seemed appropriate to name it that way,” project leader Leonardo Ortiz told Reuters. “It’s the dragon of death.” The research was published in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research in April.

Netflix and Disney Plus stream their big hitters May 27. CNET staffers make the case for Stranger Things or Star Wars. Are you Team Hawkins or Team Tatooine? The next Star Wars TV show pits Obi-Wan Kenobi against his darkest enemy, Darth Vader. But that isn’t the only clash of titans on your screens right now. Rival streaming services Disney Plus and Netflix go head to head as the Obi-Wan Kenobi show and Stranger Things season 4 premiere on the very same day — today, Friday May 27. Disney Plus hadn’t even debuted when Stranger Things launched on Netflix in July 2016. We’ve watched the kids from Hawkins, Indiana, tackle teen angst and Upside Down monsters in this ’80s-influenced monster hit. By contrast, Obi-Wan Kenobi sees Star Wars star Ewan McGregor pick up his lightsaber for the first time in 17 years. And it turns out both are pretty good — CNET’s Richard Trenholm calls Obi-Wan “assured, pacey and … most importantly, character-driven”, while CNET’s Gael Cooper says season 4 of Stranger Things is “the best one yet.” Decisions, decisions! We asked CNET’s staffers which of these two sci-fi epics they’re most psyched to see. Which will you choose? Hello there Much as I love spending time in the neon glow of Stranger Things, I’m extremely eager to follow old Obi-Wan Kenobi on some damned-fool idealistic crusade. Star Wars is irresistible, McGregor has only gotten better in the years since Revenge of the Sith, and director Deborah Chow helmed some of The Mandalorian’s finest episodes. I’d happily watch Obi-Wan just wander around Tatooine for six episodes, but it sure looks like he’ll have to show some Imperials who’s boss. It’s going to be epic. Turn me upside down… again I love Star Wars, but I’m more excited about Stranger Things. And before you boo me, let me explain. We know Obi-Wan will be fine. There’s no tension, danger or mystery about what’s going to happen to him. We already know he falls to Darth Vader aboard the Death Star so Luke and the crew can escape. Any tension or sense of danger within Obi-Wan’s show is undercut by the fact that we know how his story plays out. The story of Eleven and the rest of our Hawkins gang, on the other hand, is a mystery. We can guess and speculate, but we don’t know. I want to be at least a little surprised about what happens. That’s what’s pulling me to Stranger Things. A tough choice That’s a tough choice. Both appeal to my Gen-X DNA. Modern Star Wars products feel so overwarmed and designed-by-committee that I can’t imagine anything surprising. From the trailers, Obi-Wan (the show) looks like The Book of Boba Fett, which looked like The Mandalorian, etc. Apparently space is… mostly desert. Stranger Things does feel like it ran out of ideas after the first two seasons. Sometimes it’s OK to say: “We’ve done enough, we’ve told our story, let’s go out on top.” I did go to the in-person Stranger Things Experience in NYC a few weeks ago, however, so maybe I’m all talk. Complaining and overanalyzing is a pivotal part of fandom, so that’s just my way of saying I’ll be watching both. A celebration I am really excited to watch both of these shows at some point, but Obi-Wan will absolutely be coming first, and really for me it comes down to timing. Stranger Things was one of the first horror-adjacent things I could watch with my kids, one of which is now deeply happy to sit and enjoy anything spooky. And the recent teases that this next season is going to lean darker really has me curious. But as I write this, I’m double-checking the pieces of my Jedi robes I’ve spent the last month assembling for the Star Wars Celebration convention happening on the same day as the release of Obi-Wan. So, obviously, that’s going to be something I’ll need to watch first to avoid any spoilers at the con. Help me, Obi-Wan This is probably sacrilege, but Stranger Things has never really done anything for me. Right from the start, I didn’t have much emotional connection to those 1980s retro touchstones like The Goonies or Dungeons & Dragons. Maybe I’m missing out, but I haven’t watched it since the first season. But Ewan McGregor with a lightsaber? That is extremely my jam. Star Wars TV shows have been a mix after the excellent Mandalorian and the plodding Book of Boba Fett, but Obi-Wan is a character who just exudes that big-screen Star Wars magic. In my mind, the franchise is crying out for some of that energy. And if the first episodes aren’t so great? Top Gun: Maverick is in theaters this weekend, and that’s a lot of fun. It’s pulling us in! Given the history, I am 100% sure that Stranger Things will be a better season of television. Besides a few dud episodes, the Duffer brothers have barely put a foot wrong with what has ultimately become one of the most influential TV shows in the short history of streaming television. I’ve loved Stranger Things with every fiber of my being. But unfortunately, Star Wars is Star Wars. Like a decaying draugr, ambling awkwardly in the direction of brains, fate has decreed I must flay myself once more at the altar of George Lucas. Like most long-term Star Wars obsessives, I’m duty bound to watch this show the second it drops. Also like most Star Wars fans, I’m duty bound to complain about it online. I fully expect that Obi-Wan will be disappointing and underwhelming, but I will be there from day one, desperately hoping to be “whelmed.”