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European antitrust regulators are set to order Google’s parent company Alphabet to stop incentivizing Android phone makers to pre-install Google Search on their phones, according to Reuters and are are also considering imposing a substantial fines on the company.

Last year, European Union regulators lodged a formal antitrust complaint against Google for how the company prominently installed search and other proprietary apps on Android phones. Reuters cited a document that was sent to the company earlier this year, which listed off the specific concerns that regulators had, and which also states that regulators intend “to set the fine at a level which will be sufficient to ensure deterrence.”

This appears to be separate from massive…

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Elon Musk doesn’t want to simply send humans to Mars. The SpaceX CEO has bigger ambitions. He wants us to be an “interplanetary species,” which means creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, which means living and dying on Mars — which at some point might mean sex and pregnancy on Mars.

So how would that work?

Given that Musk hasn’t figured out how to keep people alive on the trip to the Red Planet, it’s unlikely he has details on how people will make more people once they’re there. We don’t have any data on how human bodies will work on Mars specifically, but we have enough information to know that sex in space could be a real hassle.

No one has had sex in space yet (as far as we know), though there are astronauts married to…

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Android 7.1 is expected to come with some new Launcher features, including Launcher Shortcuts and a sliding All Apps drawer as soon as next week. If you don’t want to wait until then, or you don’t have a device that will get a quick update to the latest version of Android, you can check them out now through a third-party app called Action Launcher. Chris Lacy, the developer of Action Launcher, was inspired by Android Police’s breakdown of the Launcher update and integrated the features the website previewed into his own app.

In addition to a new Google search and date widget, Action Launcher 3 has “Launcher Shortcuts”, which function similarly to the 3D touch shortcuts in iOS. It also has the circular icon design Google is rumored to…

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It’s October, which means that it’s time to take a look at the next crop of books that are slated to hit your favorite local bookstore in the days ahead.

Here’s 19 books to pick up this month:

October 4th

Rise of Io, Wesley Chu

Wesley Chu is returning to the world where he started his career: Tao. Rise of Io is the start of a new trilogy that will follow Ella Patel, a thief, con-artist, and smuggler. She comes across an assault late at night and is soon inhabited by Io, an alien trying to complete a mission on Earth. She’s to help him out, and the fate of the world depends on her success.

Feedback, Mira Grant

Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series was a fast-paced horror thriller that took place decades after a zombie outbreak that was caused…

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Hi everyone, I’m back to writing about trailers again after taking a couple days off last week. I haven’t been watching all that many things lately — I’m trying to watch Atlanta, but my (parents’) cable account won’t authenticate… — but over the weekend I caught up on Gone Girl, which I’d missed despite how insanely buzzy it was two years ago.

And, um, I have a lot of thoughts that probably cannot be contained in the brief paragraph or so I allot myself here. Searching around, I see there’s been plenty of back–and–forth on the “cool girl” monologue, which talks at length about how men demand that women act like impossibly “cool” and completely fictional people, at the midpoint of the movie. And rightfully so, it’s probably the most…

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The Electric GT World Series is an all-Tesla racing series that was announced back in March. But the announcement was accompanied by very little detail: the series was being started by a new company called Electric GT Holdings, it was supposedly going to run its races on famous circuits like the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya and the Nürburgring, and the entire field would be made up of Tesla Model S sedans. That was it.

The series’ creators have remained mostly mum since then. Pirelli was announced as a title sponsor in August, and the first two drivers — Vittoria Piria and Stefan Wilson — were unveiled earlier this month. This week, though, the series finally revealed one of its race-ready P85+ Teslas at an event in Spain, offering the…

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The Moto Z Play from Lenovo has the best battery life of any smartphone I’ve ever used. It’s so good and so superior to the competition that this — the third member of the Moto Z family — just became my top recommendation if battery life is your most important criteria in choosing a smartphone. Smartphone makers have claimed again and again that their devices can last for “up to two days” on a single charge. It’s almost always braggadocio and overpromising. Inevitably you find yourself reaching for a charger by 6PM or, in the case of phablets, at the end of the night. But not this time.

Lenovo found an approach that allowed the company to make a phone you can charge up overnight, unplug the next morning, and use for two days straight….

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Call it Human Civilization 101 — a record that contains sounds, music, and images from Earth to teach extraterrestrials everything they needed to know about us. That’s NASA’s Golden Record, a precious album that was printed onto gold-plated copper disks and launched into space aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977.

The two original records are still attached to the probes, which are traveling through space billions of miles from our planet. Only a dozen copies were made by NASA back then, but not even Carl Sagan, the Cornell astrophysicist who led the creation of the record, was able to get one. (NASA refused, saying that no record had been given to an individual who could resell it for big profit. President Jimmy Carter was the…

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