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For Android fans who like living on the bleeding edge, the last few months have been a whirlwind of activity. Android P made first contact back in March, and we were quick to fire up our Pixels and install that early Developer Preview. Not only did we see more and more features land through the next few DP releases, but also had unprecedented access to these early builds thanks to support from manufacturers like OnePlus and Essential.

Google serves up a hot slice of Android 9 Pie, as P-name finally goes official for today's public release was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Countrywide is the UK's largest property agents (they own estate agencies like Hamptons International, Bairstow Eves and Bridgfords), with 900 locations and 10,000 employees, and they're selling off shares at fire-sale prices in a desperate bid to raise £140 million to service their massive debts; the sum is 300% of the company's market cap, their shares are down 60% on the news, and the company blames plummeting London prices and Brexit jitters for their misfortunes. (more…)

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live on the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Today I have a fantastic premium city building sim, the return of Shaq Fu as a beat 'em up, and a re-release of a Sonic game that is now free-to-play. So without further ado, here are the most notable game releases from the last week.

22 best new (and 1 WTF) Android games released this week including Pocket City, Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, and Sonic The Hedgehog 4 Episode II was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. This week Google finally released a navigation app for Android GO, and if you are into theming, then you will want to check out Ava Lockscreen. Calroo Family Organizer is also a notable standout, and it is completely free to use, which is excellent for all you family planners out there.

21 new and notable Android apps from the last two weeks including Navigation for Google Maps Go, Ava Lockscreen, and Calroo Family Organizer (7/21/18 - 8/4/18) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

The American Academy of Facial and Reconstructive Plastic Surgery says that the majority of clinicians have now seen patients whose desire for plastic surgery is driven by selfies …  more…

We're pretty keen on Android news here, but some things outside our immediate purview are significant enough to be worth mentioning. Here's one: today, Apple became the first US company to surpass a total market capitalization of $1 trillion (trillion as in a thousand billions).

Market capitalization, or market cap, is the total combined value of all of a publicly traded company's outstanding shares. Apple's stock price climbed to a new high of $208.38 around 2 p.m., Eastern time today, pushing its market cap past that $1 trillion mark.

Apple has become America's first trillion-dollar company was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

A new processor, a new camera, a new screen, and better-faster-stronger everything are annual givens for our smartphones, and it seems people are starting to notice - and are increasingly becoming indifferent to it all. But are smartphones actually getting more boring? Or is it just that we have become so spoiled by mobile technology that its seemingly inevitable march forward is no longer interesting? It's a bit of a navel-gazing exercise, I must admit, but I think it's something worth talking about - especially with a look to the smartphone's larger history.

You're not wrong - smartphones aren't as exciting as they used to be was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

I can not read or understand very much of Hiroshi Unno's The Art of Fantasy, Sci-fi and Steampunk, but it is a visual treat!

This tome collects images and art from novels, early fantasy and romance to steampunk. Unno catalogs the incredible maturation of fantasy art work from the 19th century today.

I spent a couple hours leafing through this book, and it will live on my coffee table for quite a while.

The Art of Fantasy, Sci-fi and Steampunk by Hiroshi Unno via Amaozn

Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's largest model train set. It's so large—including airports, cityscapes and even seas—that to even call it a train set seems a good example of the German sense of humor. It covers 1,500 square meters, has 260,000 figurines in it , 9,250 cars, 1,040 trains, 42 planes, 385,000 LEDs, and cost 21 million Euros to construct.

Most people don't like to wake up to the grating whine of a regular alarm clock, and a lot of the "alarm" sounds on phones are scarcely better. Now, the Google Clock app offers an alternative. In the latest version, you can use music from Spotify for your alarms. Play Music and YouTube Music? Nope, because Google.

You can connect the Clock app to a free or premium Spotify account, and then search for songs, playlists, or access your recently played tracks.

Google Clock app now supports Spotify for alarms was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Last month, OnePlus formalized its software maintenance schedule. Like Google, the company promised customers two years of Android OS version upgrades, followed by an additional year of security maintenance updates. This new schedule applied to hardware starting immediately, which most of us had assumed meant that the last version of Android the OnePlus 3 and 3T would see was Android O via either 8.0 or 8.1. Well, Earlier today OnePlus promised owners of the 3 and 3T the unexpected: Both phones will be getting Android P, but at a cost.

OnePlus promises Android P for two-year-old 3 and 3T against all expectations was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Last March, YouTube officially announced a dark theme was coming to the Android and iOS app after first debuting on the revamped web version. It first rolled out to the iOS client and is now finally beginning to appear for Android users.

more…

Ambigrams are words or symbols styled so they still have meaning when viewed from another perspective. This video is a great overview of some of the best artists and books on the craft. (more…)

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android games that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous week or so. Talk about a loaded week. Alto's Odyssey is finally here after a five-month wait. On top of that, we also saw Asphalt 9: Legends, MapleStory M, Battleheart 2, Hello Neighbor, and Dr. Splorchy Presents Space Heroes release on the Play Store this week. It's almost too many good games for such a short timespan.

25 best new Android games released this week including Alto's Odyssey, Asphalt 9: Legends, and MapleStory M was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Six weeks after Bernie Sanders rallied Disneyland employees to call for a $15/hour minimum wage, the company has announced that the minimum wage will rise from $11/h to $13.25 today, and again to $15 on Jan 1, and again to $15.45/h in June 2020 -- homelessness is rampant among Disneyland employees, and Disney had engineered a longrunning complete takeover of the local government, raking in hundreds of millions in breaks and subsidies, until, finally, anti-Disney candidates attained a majority in 2018.

If it were up to us, every video would be 16:9, with some exceptions made for some more cinematic footage. But because there are older videos and people unaware of vertical video syndrome on YouTube, videos with inferior aspect ratios are an unfortunate reality. The team behind YouTube is making the best of this situation and has now forced its web player to adapt to different aspect ratios.

left: Old. right: New.

YouTube web player now adapts to different aspect ratios was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Need to relax for a couple of minutes? Don those headphones and head over to Sand Tagious for some very satisfying slicing and smooshing of kinetic sand. (more…)

Siberian roundworms frozen for millennia were thawed and are happily going about their business again, reports The Siberian Times.

One worm came from an ancient squirrel burrow in a permafrost wall of the Duvanny Yar outcrop in the lower reaches of the Kolyma River - close to the site of Pleistocene Park which is seeking to recreate the Arctic habitat of the extinct woolly mammoth, according to the scientific article published in Doklady Biological Sciences this week.

This is around 32,000 years old.

Another was found in permafrost near Alazeya River in 2015, and is around 41,700 years old.

The oldest living animals on the planet, and excellent candidates for a high-concept horror B-movie.

Ain't nothing keeping these two from playing together, not even a fence.

ABC News:

Two-year-old Conway loves throwing a ball over the fence of his yard, only to have his neighbor's dog, Dozer, stick his head over the fence to drop it back. Conway's dad, Chad Nelson, posted the video to Facebook, where it has gone viral, receiving over 3.8 million views.

Now at 12.6 million...!

Previously: Dog-sized holes in the fence so that pup can peep at her neighbors

The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal has ruled that GCHQ (the UK's domestic surveillance apparatus) illegally engaged in mass surveillance for more than a decade (starting after 9/11), during which time the foreign secretaries who were supposed to be overseeing their activities "delegated powers without oversight," allowing the spies to police their own activities. (Images: Defense Images, CC-BY-SA; Cryteria, CC-BY)

Police officers in King’s Lynn, Norfolk pulled over a car that was missing a bumper, a side panel, and headlights. It also had a flat tire. When they walked over to the car they noticed that the driver was using pliers as a steering wheel and was sitting on a partially collapsed plastic bucket in place of a seat. They told the gentleman to not do this any more. Oddity Central has more photos of the remarkable horseless carriage.

I think this is the most un-roadworthy car I've ever seen. Ridiculous that it was driven on a public road in this condition. https://t.co/G4aNS9zodO

— PC Jon Parker (@PCJonParker) July 13, 2018

Photographer Barry Kusuma shares this beautiful and relaxing footage of his visit to Thailand's Lake Nong Han, nicknamed the Red Lotus Sea. (more…)

Like most salt flats, Salinas Grande in Argentina has a short but glorious window where the skies open and deluge the desert with a thin layer of water. El Tribuno de Jujuy captured this lovely drone footage of the phenomenon. (more…)

HTTPS adoption has surged over the past few years, mostly thanks to the availability of free SSL/TLS certificates from Let's Encrypt. Browser vendors have also been encouraging sites to switch to HTTPS, and Google said earlier this year that Chrome would eventually mark all HTTP-only sites as 'Not Secure.'

Chrome 68 is due to be released tomorrow (at least on desktop platforms), and it's the first release that will display a 'Not secure' message in the address bar on HTTP pages.

Chrome will display all HTTP sites as 'not secure' starting July 24 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

When it gets too hot outside, make like Mako the Husky dog and climb into the ice machine to cool down. Chill out, the machine's owners now use ice from the fridge instead:

A few weeks after the original video was shot, Mako's human companions caught this footage of him getting into the ice machine: https://youtu.be/48UbhvYQvtY

Thanks, Steve!