Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending …

  HTC has struggled to remain relevant in smartphones, but it’s still hanging on in virtual reality. While Oculus has seen massive success with the Quest, HTC is planning for the future with the Vive “Project Proton” concepts. The company showed off Project Proton alongside the updated Cosmos VR headset …

A team of professional and citizen scientists has discovered a new species of caenogastropod snail living in tropical lowland rainforests of Borneo and named it after climate activist Greta Thunberg. An individual of Craspedotropis gretathunbergae. Image credit: Pierre Escoubas. “The newly-described snail belongs to the so-called caenogastropods, a group of …

In a new study published today in the journal Communications Biology, an international team of researchers radiocarbon-dated an exceptionally well-preserved carcass of an ancient bird found in the Siberian permafrost and identified the species through reconstruction of its mitogenome. Horned larks (Eremophila alpestris). Permafrost deposits containing both animal and plant …

SAN JOSE – With more advertisers and bigger budgets crowding onto Facebook and Instagram, acquisition costs are climbing. Advertisers can make their social ad dollars go further by re-thinking campaign fundamentals. “You need to make sure you’re scaling your available inventory for click-through rates, mirroring your audience, and being dynamic,” 3Q …

Dan Brown is well known as the author of The Da Vinci Code series of books. The hero of those novels is Robert Langdon, who uses a series of skills to solve ancient mysteries. The novels have been a huge hit over the years, but for the moment Brown is …

  Microsoft has started rolling the new Edge browser out to users, leaving the old EdgeHTML engine in the past. The new Edge uses a Chromium base just like Google Chrome, and that means it can run many existing Chrome extensions. Attempting to use Google’s Web Store could be a …

  Quibi, the mobile-only streaming service from Jeffrey Katzenberg, is now open for pre-orders. The company declined to fully show off its app only a month ago during demos of its “TurnStyle” technology at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it appears the app is ready nonetheless. Quibi …

A researcher collects gas samples at Soda Springs in the Philippines. Credit: University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences Diving 200 feet under the ocean surface to conduct scientific research can lead to some interesting places. For University of Texas at Austin Professor Bayani Cardenas, it placed him …

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Volcanic activity did not play a direct role in the mass extinction event that killed the dinosaurs, according to an international, Yale-led team of researchers. It was all about the asteroid.   In a break from a number of other recent studies, Yale assistant professor of …