Hasta La Gadget!

The representative reportedly shared her plans to run for Senate in 2024 during a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus on Wednesday.

The Duke of Sussex details an unlikely remedy for a bout of frostbite in the nether regions – or what he calls “Frostnipistan.”

Google has broken out some Android accessibility features into a separate app. Switch Access has graduated from the Android Accessibility Suite and it’s now available through the Play Store. Offering Switch Access features via a separate app could allow Google to roll out more frequent updates instead of having to do so at the OS level. 

The move could also let Google offer Switch Access features on older devices too. The app is available on 2017’s Android 8 (aka Android Oreo) and later. 

Switch Access enables users to operate their phone or tablet using means other than the touchscreen, as Android Police notes. They can use the front-facing camera to control the phone with face gestures or external devices such as a keyboard or buttons connected via USB or Bluetooth. The on-board volume buttons can be used to control other aspects of your phone too.

Users can set up one or more switches (i.e. the front-facing camera and/or other devices) through the app. They’ll be able to define how the app scans their screen for actions they’re able to carry out. The app can move between all items one at a time, scan a single row at a time or select a location on the screen using moving lines.

Switch Access can also assign groups of actions to different switches. Press the corresponding switch for the color around the action you want to access, then keep narrowing things down until you get to the correct element. As 9To5 Google points out, once you select an item, several interaction options will be available, such as select, scroll, copy and paste. A menu at the top of the screen provides access to system-wide settings, notifications, the home screen and a way to record shortcuts for frequent and more complex actions.

To get started with Switch Access, go to the titular menu in the device’s accessibility settings. The Switch Access app is free to download from the Play Store too.

Having already returned visually stunning and scientifically spectacular results from its first six months in operation, the James Webb Space Telescope has recorded another inaugural milestone: its first exoplanet discovery confirmation. It peered 41 light years into the cosmos and found a planet in the Octans constellation with a diameter 99 percent that of Earth itself — say hello to LHS 475 b.

Specifically a team of astronomers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, first spotted evidence of the candidate exoplanet while digging through data generated from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). However it was Webb’s Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) that confirmed the planets existence by observing two transits in front of its parent star. “There is no question that the planet is there. Webb’s pristine data validate it,” Lustig-Yaeger declared in a NASA press release. 

As the space agency notes, among telescopes in operation today (both terrestrial and orbital), only the JWST possesses the resolving capabilities to accurately characterize the atmospheres of Earth-sized exoplanets. The research team is still working to determine what, if any, sort of atmosphere is sitting atop the rocky mass using by analyzing its transmission spectrum. 

There is a chance that the planet will be devoid of its critical gaseous insulation but at these distances, it could simply be hiding a very small atmo close to the surface. “Counterintuitively, a 100% carbon dioxide atmosphere is so much more compact that it becomes very challenging to detect,” said Lustig-Yaeger. 

They are confident that it does not possess an oppressive atmosphere similar to that of Saturn’s moon Titan, however. “There are some terrestrial-type atmospheres that we can rule out,” he said. “It can’t have a thick methane-dominated atmosphere.” 

That said, the surface of the planet does appear to be around 300 Celsius, several hundred degrees warmer than here on Earth. If cloud cover is discovered in subsequent studies, it could suggest a greenhouse world climate closer to Venus. The researchers have also confirmed that LHS 475 b maintains a tidal-locked orbit with its star of just two days — far too close to attempt with Sol but, because LHS circles a red dwarf that’s producing less than half of our sun’s energy, can theoretically maintain an atmosphere.

“I never thought she liked me,” Kendrick told the “Armchair Expert” host after he explained why his wife is envious of the “Alice, Darling” star.