Apple’s colorful line of iPhone XR phones could be in for a shift in the rainbow of options. The blog Macotakara cites “reliable information sources” in reporting a rumor that Apple will swap out the coral and blue iPhone XRs for green and lavender ones.
Lavender is a fairly specific shade of purple, but what can we expect of the more vague green hue? Are we talking a kelly green, a lime green, something in the family of a dusty Yoda green?
Beyond the coral and blue, the iPhone XR currently comes in black, white, yellow, and (PRODUCT) RED. When the iPhone XR debuted in September 2018, it was Apple’s first splash back into bright colors since the iPhone 5C launched in 2013 with blue, green, yellow, pink, and white color choices.
The green iPhone 5C was a fairly bright green shade (like a fluorescent spearmint), if that offers any clues to the rumored new iPhone XR color.
The former vice president is crushing the Democratic field in the nation’s third-largest state.
MIAMI — Florida, with its hordes of older voters and establishment-oriented Democratic Party, doesn’t just look like Biden Country. Judging from the initial reaction to his presidential bid in the nation’s third-largest state, it’s shaping up to be his firewall.
Joe Biden is crushing the Democratic field here, including Bernie Sanders, in the latest polling. More than one-third of Democratic state legislators endorsed him almost as soon as he announced his candidacy, a testament to state political ties that stretch back decades and span generations.
Story Continued Below
“Biden is in a class all on his own in Florida,” said pollster Ryan Tyson, who just completed a survey of Florida Democrats.
In prior Democratic presidential primaries, Florida didn’t matter nearly as much to the outcome as it figures to next year. The crowded 2020 field increases the likelihood of a drawn-out primary season that remains unsettled when the state votes in mid-March.
By then, the roster of 21 candidates will be considerably winnowed. And the remaining campaigns could be drained of resources since Florida’s March 17 primary comes two weeks after Super Tuesday — which will include California this time.
If Biden can generate momentum in the early-voting states and remain popular in Florida — which, with 10 major media markets, can be wildly expensive to advertise in — rival campaigns will have to make some hard decisions about the value of competing hard here.
Pollster Fernand Amandi, who surveyed the Florida primary in March, said that as long as Biden wins at least two of the first early states and holds his own in the other preceding states, Florida is poised to give him an outsized advantage.
“In that scenario Florida becomes the state where Biden clinches the nomination or where the anti-Biden candidate can really make a statement,” said Amandi, who worked for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign in Florida and President Obama’s general election campaigns in 2008 and 2012. “If Biden can win Florida, he becomes the presumptive nominee. Not only is Joe Biden the frontrunner in Florida. This is his to lose. Could he still lose it? Yes. But this will be a nomination he loses, not one that’s taken away from him.”
According to the new poll of 800 primary voters from Tyson’s firm, Tel Opinion Research, Biden leads Sanders by more than 2-to-1: 39 percent to 16 percent. Everyone else is in the low single digits.
Fueling Biden’s dominance: Biden is popular with older white voters, who tend to form the bulk of the state primary electorate. And he is running well among African-Americans, who could comprise about a quarter of the primary electorate — they back Biden with 46 percent of the vote.
Last year, Biden was one of the most sought-after endorsers for Democrats in the state, and he backed 15 candidates across the ballot, from a major mayoral race in St. Petersburg to the national watched contest for Florida governor.
“Vice President Biden no doubt holds a starting line advantage in Florida because we know him — that’s why I was thrilled to have him campaign for me,” said 2018 Democratic gubernatorial nominee Andrew Gillum. “But it’s early and I’m sure he knows he’s going to have to earn this nomination — with his policy ideas, his story, and by convincing Floridians he’s best equipped to lead us out of the darkness of Donald Trump’s presidency.”
One of Gillum’s closest allies, state Rep. Shevrin Jones, said he’s backing Biden because the former vice president is a “battle-tested leader … who can speak to every demographic and stand toe to toe” with Trump.
An African-American lawmaker, Jones said black voters he knows “equate him” with President Obama.
In the just-completed Tel Opinion Research survey, Tyson noted in an analysis that “Biden is demonstrating real strength with African-American voters,” with 85 percent holding a favorable view of him and only 7 percent having an unfavorable view.
“These strong image numbers are also translating to the open-ended ballot as he is pulling 46% of African-Americans in this sample,” Tyson wrote, pointing out that the two African-American senators in the race are barely registering with black voters. “What’s even more remarkable is Biden is pulling half of the African-American electorate even though Kamala Harris & Cory Booker both have 80% total name ID with this critical demographic.”
Among all Florida Democratic voters, Biden has an 81 percent favorability rating in the poll, with 50 percent holding a “very favorable” opinion — a sign of deep support. In contrast, Sanders has a 68 percent favorability rating, with 32 percent viewing him very favorably.
The numbers from Tyson, a Tallahassee-based Republican, are in line with what top Democrats are seeing on the ground and in their own private polling.
“Ryan Tyson does good polls, but I don’t need one of his polls to tell me Biden is dominating in Florida,” laughed one top Democrat who spoke anonymously because he’s officially neutral in the race and is involved with voter-registration and turnout efforts on behalf of other Democrats.
Robbie Mook, manager of Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, acknowledged Biden’s advantage but said there is a lot of time until the state’s March primary.
“It’s Biden’s to lose today but with 10 months left, any poll is worth about as much as a fortune cookie,” said Mook. “A former vice president is leading by a big margin in a big state ten months before Super Tuesday. It is neither surprising nor predictive of what will happen, just ask Rudy Giuliani,” who tried to make Florida his firewall in 2008 and didn’t win one contest in the GOP primary that year.
When the next car-sized rover lands on Mars in 2020, the ultimate head of this extraterrestrial endeavor will be physicist Lori Glaze. She’s leads NASA’s Planetary Science Division.
And she’s not alone. For the first time in history, three of NASA’s four science divisions are now run by women, a milestone announced by NASA on Friday.
“I am proud to say that for the 1st time in #NASA’s history, women are in charge of 3 out of 4 #NASAScience divisions. They are inspiring the next generation of women to become leaders in space exploration as we move forward to put the 1st woman on the Moon,” NASA’s associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen tweeted Friday.
If NASA is able to fulfill President Trump’s ambitious (and still not funded) directive that the U.S. return to the moon by 2024, NASA has committed that the first women will land on the moon.
In every instance, we hire based on excellence and merit, nothing else. These leaders are incredibly qualified in their fields.
This is not surprising. Women still have a stark minority representation in the most powerful positions of U.S. government. Of the 21 members of President Trump’s cabinet, four are women. Though females make up nearly 51% of the U.S. population, just 24 percent of Congress is represented by women.
NASA, though, is a clear leader in recognizing the leadership abilities and scientific savvy of the agency’s female researchers. What are these three women in charge of?
1. Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Heliophysics division
Nicola Fox
Image: nasa
Fox leads NASA’s efforts to understand the sun, a science known as heliophysics.
It’s a weighty task. NASA is in the midst of a mission that sent a heavily-armored solar probe into the sun’s outer atmosphere to gain a markedly improved idea of how our star behaves. This is critical to understanding how solar radiation — and solar storms — will impact our lives, communications, electrical grids, satellites, and astronauts in space.
“Ever since people first looked up, they’ve been looking at the bright light in the sky,” Fox said in a statement. “We are really the oldest science branch.”
2. Sandra Cauffman, acting director of NASA’s Earth Science Division
Sandra Cauffman
Image: nasa
Cauffman heads what many believe to be NASA’s most critical mission: understanding our home planet.
“What we do in observing Earth as a system gives us the additional benefit of helping humans here on Earth survive hurricanes, tornadoes, pollution, fires, and help public health,” Cauffman said. “Understanding the oceans, the algae blooms — all of those things help humans right here on Earth.”
The work of the Earth Science Division grows increasingly relevant as the planet experiences changes — stoked by human carbon emissions — that are unprecedented in both human and geologic history.
3. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science division.
Lori Glaze
Image: nasa
Glaze heads the NASA division that explores other worlds — like Mars, Jupiter, and beyond.
This is the NASA department that seeks one of humanity’s most pressing questions: Is there life in the solar system outside of our planet?
As of now, there’s zero evidence that life exists elsewhere.
But Glaze — and the team she oversees — are looking.
HTC is doubling down on its blockchain phone idea.
The company has announced a new blockchain phone called the Exodus 1s. Compared to its predecessor, the $699 Exodus 1, the Exodus 1s is a cheaper phone, but it also brings an important feature that was promised from the get-go: full Bitcoin node capability.
Launched on Saturday by HTC’s Decentralized Chief Officer Phil Chen (I just love that title) in New York, the HTC Exodus 1s will cost around $250 to $300 when it launches in the third quarter of 2019.
No specs were revealed, but the important news is that every Exodus 1s phone will have full Bitcoin node capabilities. This may sound somewhat arcane even for cryptocurrency users, the vast majority of whom don’t run a full node, but it has important implications for the Bitcoin ecosystem.
“Full nodes are the most important ingredient in the resilience of the Bitcoin network and we have lowered the barrier to entry for any person to run a node, which is simply a computer, mobile in our case, participating in a global bitcoin network that propagates transactions and blocks everywhere, which is the foundation and fundamental definition of a peer-to-peer cash system,” Chen said in a statement.
HTC’s first blockchain phone, Exodus 1, had a beautiful see-through design on the back. Hopefully, the Exodus 1s will follow suit.
Image: Stan Schroeder/Mashable
Running a full Bitcoin node means having a copy of Bitcoin’s entire blockchain history on the device, as well as running a Bitcoin client, meaning you can send transactions to the network. It’s not necessary to do this — to send and receive bitcoins, you can simply use wallet software — but it does make Bitcoin more decentralized if more people run their own node.
The issue with running a full node on your computer, let alone on your phone, is the fact that Bitcoin’s blockchain is quite big (more than 200GB at writing time) and syncing the blockchain can take a lot of time. You’d also need to have your phone connected to the internet all the time (and send/receive a lot of data) if you don’t want to fall behind because again, syncing the blockchain takes time. This will constantly suck both large amounts of data and battery life from your phone. These issues can be alleviated by various methods, but they are significant, so I’ve asked HTC to clarify.
I’ve got an answer from Chen himself, who acknowledged these hurdles, but hasn’t completely convinced me that the company will be able to overcome all of them. The size of Bitcoin’s blockchain can be drastically reduced with a technique called pruning, he said.
“The full ledger can also be pruned down to approximately 10GB. The phone itself can support the pruned version, but to support the full bitcoin blockchain, the user will have an extra SD card on board,” Chen said. Using a pruned version of the blockchain would also make syncing faster, he said.
So what about the data and the power demands? “You’ll definitely want to operate this over WiFi,” said Chen. “More specific details will come on spec nearer the launch time but yes, there are a number of different design elements that need to be taken into account to be able to handle this.”
(Note that mining bitcoin and running a node are two different things; you will not be able to mine bitcoins on this phone, and it wouldn’t make much sense anyway, as any phone’s computational power is far too weak to effectively mine bitcoins.)
HTC also announced partnership with European, privacy-mindful search engine Qwant, which will be available as a search bar widget on the Exodus 1 phone. The company also announced support for Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan, again through a widget.
Game of Thrones Season 8 has had no shortage of twists, good and bad. (Okay, mostly bad.) But the biggest one, in my book?
Bran Stark, he of Three-Eyed Raven nonsense, emerging as the most relatable character in all of Westeros.
No, really.
Up through Season 7, I was, like so many others, a Bran hater. I sighed theatrically whenever his scenes came up, I yelled at the TV as yet another kind-hearted Northerner sacrificed themselves for him, I took pleasure in dunking on him relentlessly.
Bran Stark became the one character I could depend on anymore.
But through that fog of smoke, ash, narrative confusion, and improperly tuned TVs emerged a new constant.
Bran Stark became the one character I could depend on anymore to react reasonably to any of this, the one person I could still understand, the only one I had anything in common with. Because Bran Stark is so totally f*cking unbelievably over it, and these days, so am I.
The switch happened, for me, very early in the Season 8 premiere. Jon gives Bran an enthusiastic embrace, only to be met with a dead-eyed gaze that chills him to the bone. Maybe it’s just because I enjoy any opportunity to needle at Jon’s unearned confidence, but I found it hilarious.
Bran may not be much of a talker these days, but when he does speak up, it’s usually to remind other characters that we’re working with a six-episode season here, people. “We don’t have time for all this!” he reminds Dany and Sansa when they’re making their tense introductions. “Now’s the time!” he prods when Sam hems and haws about revealing Jon’s true heritage.
Otherwise, he spends his time engaging in the same stuff we fans do: eavesdropping on conversations about Westerosi politics, gazing meaningfully at characters destined for big twists, and telegraphing, with every barely restrained eyeroll, that he cannot believe the bullsh*t he is seeing unfold before his eyes.
His deadpan tone suggests he can’t muster up the energy to get involved. His indifference to social cues smacks of someone who’s past even pretending to care. His droopy eyelids say he’d rather be sleeping, and also that he might be on something. Right there with you, bro.
Bran is the most relatable character because he’s just not really into Game of Thrones anymore
Bran’s single most relatable hour is the Battle of Winterfell. While everyone around him is down in the muck, screaming for their friends and fighting for their lives, coated in blood and snow and dragon poop, Bran takes a good long look at the confusingly shot, poorly lit mess around him, and decides to simply check the f*ck out.
“I’m going to go now,” he informs Theon, and the words are barely out of his mouth before he’s gone all milky-eyed. Our dude spends the rest of the episode flying around as a raven, knowing there’s not much he can do about any of it anyway. (Seriously, this is actor Isaac Hempstead-Wright’s explanation for Bran’s actions, or lack thereof, during the battle.)
He does come back for a few minutes to forgive Theon, which is very sweet of him. He also stares down the Night King, because not even Bran wants to miss Arya’s moment of glory.
Season 8 Bran is a far cry from the adorable moppet we met in Season 1, but that’s because, as he will remind anyone who’ll listen, he isn’t Bran at all anymore. He’s the Three-Eyed Raven, and the Three-Eyed Raven’s perspective is wide and deep enough that he knew to give up on this particular HBO series a long time ago.
For the past couple of seasons, Bran, as the Three-Eyed Raven, has projected an extreme aloofness that bordered on smugness: Look at all these people getting all worked up about stuff that doesn’t actually matter. At the time, it came across as pretentious. Now, it reads as prescient. He was wise to tune out when he did, right as the series was beginning what seems to be an irreversible decline.
The me of a few seasons ago could never have predicted I’d be sitting here in 2019, writing an ode to Bran, boring Bran, as an audience-identification character. But the Three-Eyed Raven probably saw it all along in his visions. Like the old Three-Eyed Raven with the real Bran, this Bran has just been waiting for the rest of us to catch up to his level of DGAFness. In Season 8, I think I finally have.
Sophie Turner, aka Sansa Stark from Game of Thrones, stopped by The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Friday to chat about her recent marriage to Joe Jonas, promote X-Men: Dark Phoenix — and firmly point the finger at Emilia Clarke, aka Daenerys Targaryen, for thatcoffee cup.
“I mean, look who it’s placed in front of,” Turner joked, after firmly denying accusations that it was in fact her who left the cup on set. “Emilia Clarke! She’s the culprit!”
Case closed? Not quite. Fans following the delightfully dumb investigation of so-called “cupgate” will recall Clarke providing her own seemingly exonerating evidence via Instagram on Thursday.
“Did I just stumble upon the truth here?!” Clarke captioned a behind-the-scenes photo of her carrying an unbranded coffee cup. “The cup bearer does not drinketh the Starbucks tea…”
At present, this complicated case is still wide open, the Westeros coffee/tea bandit is still at large, and both Sansa and Dany remain prime suspects.
After finding out it’s not so easy to win a championship on his own, Kyrie Irving may look to partner up with LeBron James once again.
On the Hoop Collective podcast (h/t HoopsHype’s Bryan Kalbrosky), ESPN’s Brian Windhorst stated the “possibility” of Irving and James playing for the Los Angeles Lakers has been talked about.
“And I say that just because I think it’s on Kyrie’s radar, it’s on Kyrie’s board,” Windhorst said. “He has had discussions with people about playing for the Lakers.”
This would represent a dramatic turn of events for Irving. Two years ago when he wanted to be traded by the Cleveland Cavaliers, Windhorst reported it was motivated in part by his desire to be the star on his own team.
Irving’s two seasons with the Boston Celtics were a mixed bag. They appeared to be a title contender last season, but the six-time All-Star missed the postseason after undergoing two procedures on his knee.
The 2018-19 campaign was notable as much for Irving’s off-court drama as it was for anything he did on the court. Boston was eliminated from the postseason by the Milwaukee Bucks in five games. Irving averaged 20.4 points per game on 35.2 percent shooting in the series.
If Irving opts out of his deal with the Celtics, the Lakers have come up as a potential landing spot. ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said on his radio show last month that Irving will take an interview with Los Angeles’ front office this offseason.
The Lakers are looking for another star player to pair with James after a disappointing 37-45 record last season. Irving has a built-in rapport with the four-time NBA MVP that wouldn’t require any adjustment period for either player if they decide to get the band back together.
Sudan‘s military rulers have invited organisers of anti-government demonstrations to hold new talks on handing over power to a civilian administration, the protest movement said, after weeks of deadlock over the make-up of an interim governing body.
The invitation on Saturday came days after Declaration of Freedom and Change Forces (DFCF), an umbrella group comprising several opposition parties and civil society groups, threatened to up the ante and launch a civil disobedience movement.
Talks on the protesters’ key demand for a civilian-led authority to oversee the country’s transition remain at a stalemate, a month after the military removed President Omar al-Bashir in the face of mass protests.
The DFCF wants a transitional body led by civilians to steer a four-year transition, while the ruling military council has indicated that it wants to retain overall control of any joint military and civilian sovereign body.
In a statement on Saturday, the group said it received a call from the military council to resume negotiations.
“We have identified the points of contention with the military and … decisive talks will revolve around them in each meeting,” it said, adding: “We want to hold the talks quickly and sort out all these points in 72 hours.”
Last month, the protest movement handed plans to the military for an interim government structure, which outlined the duties of a transitional council, a cabinet and a 120-member legislature.
The military council said it generally agreed with the proposal, but said it wants Islamic laws and local norms to guide the country’s new legal framework.
‘We will stay here forever’
Meanwhile, thousands of protesters remain encamped outside army headquarters in the capital, Khartoum, vowing to force the generals to cede power just as they forced al-Bashir from office.
Demonstrators began gathering at the army complex on April 6, seeking the military’s help in ending al-Bashir’s 30-year rule. The military toppled the president in a palace coup on April 11, but replaced him with a council formed entirely of generals, prompting protesters to accuse it of trying to hijack their “revolution”.
“We want civilian rule or we will stay here forever,” said protester Iman Hussein, a regular at the sit-in, which protesters have kept up through the daytime fasts observed by Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan.
The generals have offered several concessions to placate the protesters, including holding al-Bashir in Khartoum’s Kobar prison, arresting several of his lieutenants and promising to prosecute officers who killed protesters during the demonstrations against the former president’s government.
But they have dragged their heels on the demand for a civilian-led transition.
“They are pressuring us with time, but we are pressuring them with our presence here,” said protester Hussein.
“One of us has to win in the end, and it will be us.”
The United States and the African Union have called on the military to respect the will of the people and ensure a smooth transition of power.
On Wednesday, US Deputy Secretary of State John J Sullivan spoke with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who heads the military council, by telephone and backed “the Sudanese people’s aspirations for a free, democratic and prosperous future”.
The US Department of State said Sullivan encouraged Burhan to reach an agreement with the protest movement and “move expeditiously toward a civilian-led interim government”.
The military enjoys the support of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which have extended a $3bn credit line to shore up the Sudanese pound and fund imports of basic goods.
The aging Hubble Space Telescope looks back into deep time, billions of years ago, before our sun was even born.
At the very limits of Hubble’s viewing abilities lies a cluster of spiraling, disk-shaped galaxies, collectively called SPT0615. NASA posted an image of these ancient structures, one of which was born over 13 billion years ago, relatively soon after the Big Bang likely created the universe. Light left these faraway galaxies long ago, but Hubble can sleuth out this ancient luminosity.
“The light from distant objects travels to us from so far away that it takes an immensely long time to reach us, meaning that it carries information from the past — information about the time at which it was emitted,” NASA wrote.
Galaxy cluster SPT0615.
Image: ESA / Hubble NASA / I. Karachentsev et al., F. High et al.
Viewing these galaxy clusters is an eerie look at events that transpired long ago. But it’s something the space agency’s astronomers do every day.
“Just as ancient paintings can tell us about the period of history in which they were painted, so too can ancient galaxies tell us about the era of the universe in which they existed,” NASA wrote.
A closer look at galaxy SPT0615-JD, one of the most distant galaxies ever imaged.
Daily Trends Hunter 