Lots of animals choose their mates based on exaggerated features—think of the enormous antlers of moose or the elaborate plumage of many bird species. The explanation for this is what's sometimes termed "honest signaling"—if an animal has the health and metabolic resources to devote to growing these sorts of sex-specific features, then they've probably got the genetic wherewithal to produce healthy offspring. As long as nobody cheats—makes something that just looks like it took a lot of effort—the system works well from an evolutionary perspective.

Do humans engage in honest signaling? Clearly, there are features we associate with one or the other sex, and researchers have looked in to whether they might act as signals, feeding in to evolutionary selection. For example, some research has suggested that feminine faces on females act as a signal for fertility, as they're associated with estrogen levels. A masculine appearance, which is linked to testosterone levels, has been suggested to reflect health and disease resistance. And various studies have shown that the opposite sex appreciates faces that are strongly masculine or feminine.

So, in a neat and tidy package, we have an evolutionary explanation for both our appearances and our preferences for them. Or so a lot of people have argued. But a new study in PNAS argues that this is all an artifact of who we're asking. Do some studies in pre-industrial societies, and you get a very different answer.

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Dave Toussaint

For the first time, black bears at Yosemite National Park are being outfitted with GPS devices that will provide rangers with the ability to track their movements in real time.

The National Park Service said Tuesday that the trackers will help protect bears and the public from encroaching danger. And during park programs, rangers will now discuss the bears' movements with visitors. Previously, bears at the California-based national park were being tracked via radio telemetry, but that technology only provided readings in what the park service called the "developed" areas of the 1,190-square-mile park.

"This project will expand the park's understanding of Yosemite's black bear population and help to keep bears wild and visitors safe," Yosemite superintendent Don Neubacher said in a statement.

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BlackBerry

BlackBerry's Passport phone caught our eye when it was announced this summer, mostly because of its odd screen and marketing pitch. It has some vague similarities to last year's BlackBerry Q10, but with a larger 4.5-inch square screen that's meant to show you more horizontal content at once. The self-described "IMAX of productivity" is being released today at a price of $599 unlocked ($249 on-contract).

The Passport is named for the thing it is shaped like—it's roughly the same size as a US or Canadian passport. The keyboard underneath its square screen isn't quite a full traditional BlackBerry keyboard. It has all the letters, the spacebar, and a couple of other keys, but for numbers or Shift or any others, you'll need to switch between physical and onscreen buttons. We enjoyed BlackBerry 10's software keyboard quite a bit when we reviewed the Z10 last year, but this hybrid seems potentially awkward.

Early reviews for the device have been mixed but generally negative. Most praise the phone's solid construction and the quality of the 1400×1400 display. The Wall Street Journal criticized its 13MP camera and its lack of apps (despite the addition of Amazon's app store to BlackBerry's own), saying that the position of the physical keyboard made the phone feel top-heavy and lopsided to type on. Engadget likewise complained about the lack of apps, while complimenting the keyboard's ability to act as a trackpad in landscape mode.

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Comcast Executive VP David Cohen. Comcast

Comcast today submitted a 324-page response to critics of its purchase of Time Warner Cable, telling the Federal Communications Commission that there is no reason for people to be concerned about the merger.

In an accompanying blog post, Comcast Executive VP David Cohen claimed that “virtually all” people who submitted comments to the FCC support the merger whether they know it or not.

“Virtually all commenters recognize and concede—either explicitly or through their silence—that the transaction will deliver substantial consumer welfare and public interest benefits to residential and business customers and in the advertising marketplace,” Cohen wrote.

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ISRO

Mars has become the destination of choice for ambitious space agencies and nations, and now India is among that group. After a successful maneuver, the Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) has entered an orbit about 420 km above the surface of Mars (MOM is informally called Mangalyaan, which is Hindi for Mars vehicle). It will soon begin to photograph the planet’s surface and analyze the atmospheric composition.

(Disclosure: As a member of two previous missions to Mars, I understand the excitement and challenges of landing, or in the case of Mangalyaan, orbital insertion. Waiting for a signal telling the ground staff about the mission’s fate must have been a nerve-wracking time for staff of the Indian Space Research Organization [ISRO].)

Attraction of the red planet

Ever since the earliest telescopic observations in the 17th and 18th centuries, Mars has shown tantalizing hints of seasons, water, and active geological processes. Over the centuries, our understanding about Mars has changed as the resolution of telescopes and spacecraft cameras and spectrometers has greatly improved.

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BTC Keychain

Since the beginning of last year, angry customers have filed dozens of formal complaints with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against two embattled Bitcoin miner manufacturers.

According to data Ars recently obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, 80 people complained about orders made at CoinTerra and HashFast between January 2013 and July 2014. These orders are collectively worth over $1.2 million spread between the two companies.

The complaints come from all over the globe, including Italy, Australia, India, Taiwan, Belgium, and mostly, the United States. The complaints are all very similar: they detail orders that were never fulfilled, refunds that were never issued, and/or e-mails that went unanswered.

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The rise of USB 3.0 as a high speed interface for PCs and the increasing affordability of flash memory has led to some very interesting products. USB flash drives are a dime a dozen, but there is scope for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. Corsair's Flash Voyager GTX series brings SSD controllers to the flash drive market. Coupling it with a SATA - USB 3.0 bridge allows them to set benchmark records for their product line. More importantly, it brings some unique features. The rest of the review will present the DAS (direct-attached storage) benchmark numbers from our evaluation of the 256GB version, along with a few observations.

Benchmarking with HD Tune Pro

The unit was benchmarked in our DAS testbed (running Windows 8.1 Pro x64) after formatting it in NTFS. Prior to formatting, we ran HD Tune Pro's artificial benchmarks on the drive. Note that the sequential read / writes do not make a lot of sense for SSDs or flash drives, as they are more for determining how bandwidth varies as we go further away from the spindle in hard drives.

Gallery: Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 256GB Flash Drive - HD Tune Pro Benchmarks

From the gallery above, we have around 336 MBps reads and around 178 MBps writes for random accesses. For large (8 MB) accesses, this improves to 395 MBps reads and 231 MBps writes.

TRIM Support

HD Tune Pro's information page shows that the flash drive supports all the S.M.A.R.T features as well as a multitude of other SATA features. Importantly, TRIM is supported. Using CyberShadow's TrimCheck utility, we confirmed that TRIM does indeed work on the Flash Voyager GTX.

Benchmark Numbers

Moving on to real-life benchmarks, we first have the robocopy benchmarks with various queue depths (as made visible to end users through robocopy's multi-threaded option)

Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 256 GB robocopy Benchmarks (MBps)   Write to DAS Read from DAS   8 16 32 64 8 16 32 64 Photos 122.72 116.11 118.37 119.59 279.94 313.99 303.84 295.13 Videos 122.40 118.19 118.90 118.81 298.63 292.18 289.24 288.14 BR 117.35 118.09 114.84 117.06 297.71 291.59 289.20 285.51

The robocopy benchmarks represent the typical use-case for high-speed flash drives. However, we also processed PC Mark 8's storage bench. Out of the various available workloads, we chose a few multimedia processing traces.

Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 256 GB PCMark8 Storage Benchmarks (MBps)   Write Bandwidth Read Bandwidth Adobe Photoshop (Light) 140.46 105.57 Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) 153.69 107.60 Adobe After Effects 123.47 120.05 Adobe Illustrator 138.09 114.13   Corsair SSD Toolbox

The Flash Voyager GTX is also recognized by Corsair's SSD Toolbox. One of the interesting facts revealed by the toolbox is the firmware version, S9FM01.7. A cursory search of the version number on the Internet reveals that the controller in the flash drive is the Phison S9. Readers might remember the previous generation Phison S8 controller being used in the Corsair Force Series LS SSD. It is heartening to see that the SSD controller along with the flash chips and the SATA - USB 3.0 bridge can be packed in such a small form factor.

The SSD Toolbox also allows for upgrading the firmware and configuring the overprovisioning (i.e, X GB out of 256 GB can be set aside, invisible to the OS, for use by the SSD controller to prolong the life of the flash).

Concluding Remarks

Coming to the business end of the review, the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX USB 3.0 flash drive continues Corsair's tradition of improving the performance of their USB 3.0 flash drive every year. As icing on the cake, we have a real SSD controller in the form of the Phison S9 inside.

The performance of the drive leaves us with no doubt that it would be a great Windows-to-Go drive. Unfortunately, Corsair has not decided to pursue the certification process. As far as non-enterprise consumers go, this is perfectly acceptable - the performance for Windows-to-Go is there without the extra cost associated with obtaining the certification that eventually gets passed on to them.

Minor points of concern include Corsair's refusal to divulge the flash memory configuration / SATA - USB 3.0 bridge model being used (as these could potentially change in future production runs) and the inability to configure overprovisioning for non-NTFS file systems.

Pretty much the only downside is the premium that one needs to pay for the form factor. The 256GB version currently retails for $220 on Amazon, which is at least $70 more than what one would pay for a 2.5" SSD and a bus-powered USB 3.0 enclosure. There are definitely use-cases where the form factor (and absence of hanging cables) plays an important role. In those roles, the Corsair Flash Voyager GTX is one of the top performers.

Information from "citizen scientists" is becoming more and more vital for some research projects, scientists say.

It's been a long time in coming, but PayPal announced in a blog post today that they have partnered with BitPay, Coinbase, and GoCoin to allow merchants to accept Bitcoin. This comes just a few weeks after the announcement that businesses working with Braintree would be able to accept Bitcoin, and this is a more direct use of Bitcoin. The support will come via integration in the PayPal Payments Hub, and there is one significant catch: for now this is only supported for merchants in North America. Still, it's at least one small step towards further acceptance of virtual currencies. There are other qualifications to using Bitcoin with PayPal as well.

The blog notes, "To be clear, today’s news does not mean that PayPal has added Bitcoin as a currency in our digital wallet or that Bitcoin payments will be processed on our secure payments platform. PayPal has always embraced innovation, but always in ways that make payments safer and more reliable for our customers. Our approach to Bitcoin is no different. That’s why we’re proceeding gradually, supporting Bitcoin in some ways today and holding off on other ways until we see how things develop."

Interestingly, this comes at a time when the mining phase of Bitcoins and other virtual currencies has largely moved beyond GPUs and onto dedicated SHA256 and Scrypt ASICs. That's good news for gamers and graphics gurus like our own Ryan Smith, as it means we hopefully won't see quite as many GPUs that should be playing games sacrificed in pursuit of cryptocurrency mining. (And yes, I know there are many alt-coins that use other Proof of Work algorithms that haven't been ported to ASICs, but few if any are actually profitable to mine with GPUs at this point.) Scott Ellison of PayPal also notes that PayPal has worked with many merchants selling cryptocurrency mining hardware, but they do not work with pre-orders/pre-sales (i.e. early funding of hardware that has not yet shipped).

Today's announcement and the earlier Braintree announcement mark a clear change in tone from PayPal regarding Bitcoin, as the history of PayPal and Bitcoin has been a bit rocky up until now. Going back a few years, in the early days of Bitcoin PayPal actively took steps to prevent people from using their service to purchase Bitcoins. Others have reported bans from PayPal and closed accounts for dealing in Bitcoins. Obviously the inability to roll back purchases made via Bitcoin is a risk, and companies like Coinbase and BitPay now have services in place to mitigate some of the risks. Regardless, with sites like Newegg.com, TigerDirect.com, Overstock.com, and others all beginning to accept Bitcoin as a viable method of payment, it looks like PayPal has decided to join the club.

While there are still plenty of naysayers when it comes to Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies in general, this is great news for Bitcoin proponents as integration with PayPal opens the doors for thousands of small shops to begin working with Bitcoin.

Never officially announced, Blizzard has been talking about an MMO project, codenamed "Project Titan," for the last seven years. The project has had problems, and the company said in 2013 that it was delayed until 2016 at the earliest.

Those problems appear to have proven fatal. The company told Polygon that it has been cancelled entirely. The problem? Even with as much MMO experience as Blizzard had, it struggled to make the game fun.

In the interview, Blizzard senior vice president of story and franchise development Chris Metzen also suggests that the company has changed the way it views itself. Smaller games such as Hearthstone and Heroes of the Storm have enabled the company to step back from "colossal, summer blockbuster-type products."

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World leaders are being asked to make bold pledges to address climate change at a one day summit in New York.

Last week, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting ARM’s Austin Texas campus for a meeting with Vice President of CPU Product Marketing Nandan Nayampally. The topic of discussion: ARM’s next Cortex-M processor, codename Pelican, is officially launching today as the Cortex-M7.

US economist and UN adviser Jeffrey Sachs has told the BBC he thinks governments are still not working hard enough to take care of climate change.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of US Army Private Chelsea Manning. The lawsuit asks for treatment for Manning's gender dysphoria, which she was diagnosed with in 2010 while she was stationed in Iraq.

Gender dysphoria refers to a condition in which a person's gender identity is different from that which they were assigned at birth. The condition is recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, as well as the American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association.

Manning was court-martialed last year for handing a cache of classified documents over to Wikileaks, which most famously resulted in the notorious “Collateral Murder” video. She was convicted in July 2013 of espionage, theft, and computer fraud, but she was acquitted of “aiding the enemy,” which was one of the most serious charges. Manning is currently serving 35 years in prison and resides at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

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Microsoft

Microsoft today announced the Wireless Display Adaptor, which will enable Windows and Android systems to wirelessly send their screens to any display with an HDMI input.

One of the new features that Windows 8.1 added, and that most people overlooked, was built-in Miracast support. With the right combination of wireless drivers and video drivers, Windows 8.1 machines can beam their screen over Wi-Fi to Miracast receivers, enabling wire-free, configuration-free connections between PCs and Miracast-enabled TVs and projectors. Windows Phone 8.1 also includes Miracast support; Android has supported the technology since version 4.2.

What has consistently been rare is Miracast hardware on the receiver end. Most TVs and projectors don't support it, so while hardware that supports Miracast broadcasting is becoming quite common (all Microsoft's Surface-branded tablets, except the first generation ARM Surface RT, Samsung smartphones with AllShare Cast or Samsung Link software, new Windows Phones), that hardware has had nowhere to broadcast to.

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A rare skeleton of a woolly mammoth is set to be sold at auction in the UK in November with a guide price of £150,000 to £250,000

An iPhone 6 Plus displaying a subtle bend after a weekend of use. MacRumors forum poster Hanzoh

Early buyers have now had a few days with their new iPhones, but some of them are running into a problem: in some cases the thin, flat phones are bending or warping slightly in users' pockets.

The earliest reports came from MacRumors, where forum posters reported bending in the iPhone 6 Plus after a weekend of use. Later, Geek.com writer Russell Holly posted photos of the smaller iPhone 6 exhibiting some of the same behavior. When placed on its (normally flat) front face, Holly's iPhone 6 rocks back and forth slightly on its face, a behavior we haven't noticed in any of our iPhone 6es or iPhone 6 Pluses. Based on the reports that we've read so far, it appears that some combination of body heat and pressure from the carrier's pocket is responsible for the warping.

We've reached out to Apple for a comment on the situation and will update this article if the company responds. It's worth noting that many phones, including the older iPhone 5 and 5S, have been known to bend occasionally—Cult of Mac has a nice roundup with plenty of examples. The question at this point is whether these reports of bending and warping iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus units are isolated incidents or if, like the iPhone 4's antenna problems, the issue is endemic to the new design. We'll keep an eye on this one as more people begin receiving the phones and as we spend more time with them ourselves.

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The curators have spoken, but do they really help Steam shoppers sort intelligently through thousands of games?

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});Valve's online video game shop, Steam, once took flak for being too difficult to penetrate as a game creator. Unless you were a big-time publisher or were invited to sell games on Steam because of particular critical buzz, you weren't likely to snag a sales spot alongside the Fallouts and Civilizations of the PC gaming world.

These days, it's customers who've struggled to penetrate a rapidly expanding, indie-friendly Steam, as initiatives like Greenlight and Early Access have helped the storefront explode with content—including a staggering 1,300 new games in the past 9 months. To deal with this problem, rather than introduce a slow drip of search and filtering tools, Valve unveiled a massive "discovery" update to Steam on Tuesday. It's possibly the service's biggest visual update in years, and it combines ideas like third-party curation and more intense filters to push new content onto gamers.

The overhaul, by default, is an improvement, but we took the features for a spin with a bigger question: has Steam positioned itself as an all-in-one walled garden of computer game discovery?

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The Apple A8 die shot as mapped out by Chipworks. Chipworks

Now that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been released, the usual suspects have started to take them apart to get more information about the things Apple doesn't talk about. Last week, iFixit took the phones apart and identified many of the internal components and the battery capacities. Today, Chipworks picked up where it left off on Friday, taking up-close photos of the Apple A8 chip and trying to deduce what exactly is going on in there.

As was previously rumored, Chipworks has confirmed that the A8 is built on Taiwan Semiconductor's (TSMC) 20nm process rather than the 28nm Samsung process used for the A7. This is the first time one of Apple's chips has been produced by anyone other than Samsung—many of the previous reports also suggest that Apple has been looking for ways to reduce its reliance on one of its chief competitors, though a report from Re/code indicates that Apple may still be using Samsung to produce around 40 percent of the chips. Moving to a 20nm process has allowed Apple to cram roughly two billion transistors into a chip that is 13 percent smaller than the A7.

Chipworks confirms that Apple is still using a dual-core CPU, as we reported in our review yesterday. While Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia have all built four, six, and even eight-core chips in an effort to boost performance, Apple has chosen to stick with fewer, more powerful cores instead. Chipworks (together with AnandTech) has also surmised that Apple is using a quad-core Imagination Technologies GX6450 to boost the A8's graphics scores by 50 percent relative to the A7. Previously, it was thought that Apple had moved to a six-core GX6550, but it looks like the quad-core version's GPU cores are bigger (and thus, more powerful) than expected.

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NBC

Martha Stewart, America’s home design and craft queen, took to late night television on Monday to gush about her latest obsession: drones.

On Late Night with Seth Meyers, Stewart proudly talked about how she now owns "three drones."

"These are not army drones! They're not dangerous!" she reassured Meyers.

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