Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People now spend three hours and 40 minutes per …

A team of paleontologists from Australia and the United Kingdom has found that ancient deep-sea creatures called radiodonts developed sophisticated eyes over 500 million years ago (Cambrian period), with some specially adapted to the dim light of deep water. An artist’s reconstruction of ‘Anomalocaris’ briggsi. Image credit: Katrina Kenny. Radiodonts …

A new genus and species of probainognathian cynodont that roamed our planet during the Triassic period has been identified from two fossilized specimens found in southern Brazil. Life reconstruction of Agudotherium gassenae. Image credit: Márcio L. Castro. The new cynodont species lived approximately 218 million years ago (Late Triassic epoch). …

Marine biologists from the United States and the United Kingdom have recorded over 100 deep water-dwelling cutthroat eels, identified as Ilyophis arx, at a 1 kg bait package deployed on an abyssal seamount summit in the southwestern Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the central Pacific Ocean. This is the highest number of …

An international team of researchers has discovered microbial life, in particular bacterial vegetative cells, in up to 1.2-km-deep and up to 120 degrees Celsius hot sediments in the Nankai Trough subduction zone off Cape Muroto, Japan. A microbial cell (center of the picture) detected from a sediment core sample at …

Archaeologists on the ERC project LASTJOURNEY have discovered spectacular rock pictographs in three separate rock shelters in the Guaviare Department of Colombia. The drawings, made around 12,600 and 11,800 years ago, provide proof the Amazon rainforest’s earliest inhabitants lived alongside now-extinct Ice Age animals such as giant sloths and mastodons. …

Obesity is rare in hunter-gatherer cultures. Nevertheless, dozens of handheld ‘Venus’ figurines — the oldest art sculptures of humans known and tend to be of women who have obesity or are pregnant — have been identified that date to Ice Age European hunter-gatherers from 38,000 to 14,000 years ago. In …

  NASA launched the Voyager probes more than 40 years ago, and the fact we’re still talking about the impact of these spacecraft is a testament to how well-planned these missions were. Both Voyager 1 and 2 are outside the solar system now, but there’s plenty to see out there …

  Most of the premium Android phones that launch in 2021 will have the latest Snapdragon 888 inside. Qualcomm teased the name of the chip at its Snapdragon Summit yesterday, and now we have all the details. The 888 comes with a new CPU design, integrated 5G, and a massive …

  Google released Android 11 a few months ago, but the software has only been available on a small number of phones thus far. That’s changing with news that Samsung has started the Android 11 rollout with the Verizon Galaxy S20 family. Not only does this include the Googley Android …