After 355 days aboard the International Space Station, astronaut Mark Vande Hei returns to Earth both a NASA record holder and a changed man. Though his run was not as long as Peggy Whitson’s 665 cumulative days spent in microgravity, Vande Hei’s accomplishment is still one of the longest single stints in human spaceflight — and makes him the subject of intensive research into the effects of zero-gravity on humans.

Though NASA’s Human Research Program has spent 50 years studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body, the full impact of long-duration space travel has yet to be exhaustively researched. As humanity’s expansion into space accelerates in the coming decades, more people will be going into orbit — and going much farther — and the medical needs obviously increase along with this. Andrew Tarantola outlines where the research is headed.

— Mat Smith

The biggest stories you might have missed

• What we bought: The perfect family plug-in hybrid, until it wasn't

• Android may get its own built-in Bluetooth tracker detection

• EV startup VinFast will build a $5 billion plant in North Carolina

• The Stanley Parable's rebuilt and expanded 'Ultra Deluxe' edition arrives April 27th

• Chrome OS version 100 rolls out today

• Apple will reportedly no longer fix iPhones flagged as stolen or missing

• Roli's redesigned Seaboard Rise keyboard offers more precise playing

• Traeger's redesigned Timberline is full of smart grilling tech

Canada will ban sales of combustion-engine passenger cars by 2035

It’ll demand "at least" 20 percent zero-emissions sales by 2026.

Canada has outlined its Emissions Reduction Plan, which will require all new passenger car sales to be zero-emissions models by 2035. The government will gradually put pressure on automakers, requiring "at least" 20 percent zero-emissions sales by 2026, pushing steeply to 60 percent by 2030. Officials didn't say whether this applied to a make's product mix or simply the volume of cars sold.

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Here’s why your iPhone auto-updates often arrive late

First, the early adopters test the waters.

Reuters

A Reddit user wrote to Craig Federighi, Apple's Vice President of Software Engineering, to ask how iOS auto-updates work. Federighi responded, revealing that Apple gradually releases "new iOS updates by first making them available for those that explicitly seek them out in Settings, and then 1-4 weeks later (after we've received feedback on the update) ramp up to rolling out devices with auto-update enabled." Generally, this means it takes a few weeks for iOS auto-updates to reach everyone’s iPhone and, in the case of iPadOS, iPad.

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YouTube TV finally supports picture-in-picture on iOS

It’s pretty late.

Google has begun rolling out a new update for its iOS YouTube TV app. Now both iPhone and iPad users have picture-in-picture functionality. To watch something in PiP mode, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. The video will automatically resize and move across your device’s display. You’ll need to be running iOS 15 or newer — and make sure your app is up to date.

It’s taken its time: Apple’s mobile operating system has supported picture-in-picture functionality on iPad since iOS 13 and iPhone since iOS 14. The feature has also been available on the company’s main YouTube app since last year.

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Intel teases first Arc A-series desktop GPU ahead of summer launch

This is the second delay in as many months.

Intel

Intel’s finally offered a glimpse of its Arc A-series Limited Edition video card, which is arriving sometime this summer — yes, that means another delay. There are no specs or prices, unfortunately, but the double-height design and twin-fan cooling make clear this aims directly at gamers. Early Arc desktop GPUs are expected to support a raft of modern features, including hardware-accelerated ray tracing and AI-based supersampling. It's still too soon to say if Arc desktop models will offer truly competitive performance. NVIDIA should deliver its first Ampere Next-based GPUs (likely the RTX 40 series) later this year, and AMD will follow suit with the Radeon RX 7000 series.

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TweetDeck — a version of Twitter beloved by journalists, social media pros and other power users — might soon become a paid app, The Verge has reported. A new version of the app redirects to the Twitter Blue subscription signup page, according to code discovered by security researcher Jane Manchun Wong. It promises "a powerful, real-time tool for people who live on Twitter" and would be an "ad-free experience," according to screenshots. 

TweetDeck is already an essentially ad-free experience, so the inclusion of that language strongly implies that it would become a paid service. The new version would be a "complete rebuild with the parts from the new Twitter app," Manchun noted in a reply. However, she also spotted a link for a "legacy version" which could still be free. 

Twitter launched its Twitter Blue subscription service last November for $2.99 per month. Some features like top articles were seen as positives, but users also criticized Twitter for hiding key features like an "undo" button behind a paywall. 

Twitter has been testing a new version of TweetDeck since last year, with significant changes like "a full Tweet composer, new advanced search features, new column types, and a new way to group columns into clean workspaces," the company wrote. Some power users haven't exactly embraced it, however, due to user interface and other issues. 

The company has also pondered a TweetDeck subscription service, asking users in 2017 if they'd be willing to pay up to $20 per month for a "more advanced TweetDeck experience." And last year, Bloomberg reported that Twitter was considering a subscription fee for the app. 

The move would make sense for Twitter internally, as TweetDeck has always been a black sheep product that lets users bypass ads. Adding it to Twitter Blue would finally allow the company to monetize it and offer a true ad-free experience — since Twitter Blue itself still includes ads.

Today is World Backup Day and to mark the occasion, retailers including Amazon and Best Buy are offering some solid deals on storage. Amazon's sale includes an all-time low price for SanDisk's 1TB Extreme microSDXC UHS-I memory card. It has dropped by $35 from $175 to $140 in a one-day-only deal. If you're looking to seriously upgrade the amount of storage available on your Nintendo Switch, that's not a bad option.

Also falling to an all-time-low price for today only is the 500GB version of Samsung's T7 Touch SSD. The external drive has a fingerprint sensor you can use to keep your data secure. It's currently $80, which is a temporary drop of $30. The deal only applies to the silver model, unfortunately, and not the black version. The larger-capacity models, which you can find on the same page, have been discounted too.

Elsewhere, SanDisk's 2TB Extreme Portable SSD has been reduced to its second-best price ever. The price of the rugged drive has dropped significantly from $460 to $200 — you'll save $260. Again, this deal is only available for today only.

Meanwhile, Best Buy's World Backup Day sale isn't quite as extensive, but there are still some good deals to be found, especially if you could do with adding a ton of storage to your backup process. Take, for instance, the 14TB version of WD's Easystore External USB 3.0 Hard Drive. The price has dropped by $163 to $200. As with the Amazon deals mentioned above, the offer is only available today.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

Netflix, Spotify and other similar services will now be able to add a link in their iOS apps that take users to their own websites for payment and account management. Apple now allows developers of "reader" apps to link to a website that they maintain. The tech giant defines reader apps as applications that "provide previously purchased content or content subscriptions for digital magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music and video." 

Apple first announced that it will allow certain media services to add in-app links last year as part of a settlement with the Japan Fair Trade Commission. The company agreed with the stipulation, because those apps "do not offer in-app digital goods and services for purchase" anyway. While the change was a result of JFTC's investigation, Apple will apply the new policy to all reader apps around the world. That said, developers will have to request access to the External Link Account Entitlement program first before they're allowed to add in-app links. Also, while the change gives developers a way to avoid giving Apple a 15 to 30 percent cut, the company will still collect commissions for purchases within the app itself if the service offers any. 

Google also recently launched a pilot program to test third-party billing systems in Android, allowing users to pay for services either via its own payment system or the developer's. Spotify, one of the apps piloting the feature, will show subscribers Google's and its own billing system side by side starting later this year. Google will still get a cut even if the user chooses the service's own billing system, but it will be smaller than the 15 percent commission the tech giant typically collects for subscriptions. 

Google has begun rolling out a new update to its iOS YouTube TV app that allows both iPhone and iPad users to take advantage of picture-in-picture functionality. To watch something in PiP mode, swipe up from the bottom of the screen. The video will then automatically resize and move across your device’s display.

Today’s update is long overdue, a fact Google acknowledged. “We really appreciate your patience while we worked on enabling this key feature for your iOS 15+ devices,” the company said on Twitter. To put the wait in perspective, Apple’s mobile operating system has supported picture-in-picture functionality on iPad since iOS 13 and iPhone since iOS 14. What’s more, the feature has been available through the company’s main YouTube app since last year.

It may look a lot like the redesigned iMac, but Apple’s new Studio Display is in many ways a more complicated device once you open it up. Next to the company’s all-in-one desktop, the monitor is about 50 percent thicker, and there’s an interesting reason for that.

Following its recent Mac Studio teardown, iFixit took apart the Studio Display to see the engineering that went into Apple’s first dedicated monitor since the Pro Display XDR. What ends up making the studio display thicker than the iMac is a complicated, multi-board power supply board that’s housed within the monitor. Unlike with the iMac, you don’t need an adapter to power the Studio Display. It's one of those features that might seem small on the surface, but it ultimately leads to a better user experience.  

“If [Apple] had gone with an external power supply, this could have been the same design as the iMac,” iFixit said. It notes Apple likely invested a significant amount of engineering effort and cost to design a power supply that is as slim as the one found in the Studio Display. 

In taking apart the Studio Display, iFixit also discovered a few other interesting tidbits about the monitor. Almost every review of the Studio Display has complained of poor web camera quality. Apple has said it will release a software update to address the problem. In the meantime, iFixit says the Studio Display’s camera module looks nearly identical to the one found in the iPhone 11. “Hardware-wise, a three-year-old sensor is perfectly capable of packing a better punch than all these reviewers are seeing,” the company said. That’s something to keep in mind if you’re thinking about purchasing the Studio Display.

Apple, Facebook and Discord turned over user data to hackers posing as law enforcement officials, according to a new report in Bloomberg. The demands, which were forged to look like authentic legal requests, reportedly came from legitimate email accounts that had been “compromised.”

According to Bloomberg, both Facebook and Apple turned over “basic subscriber details, such as a customer’s address, phone number and IP address.” Discord provided “the Internet address history of Discord accounts tied to a specific phone number,” according to Krebs on Security. The hackers also targeted Snap, though it’s not clear if the company actually turned over the requested data.

As Bloomberg points out, it’s not uncommon for companies like Apple and Facebook to turn over data to law enforcement, and these companies have dedicated teams to respond to such requests. Typically, these requests are accompanied by a court order, but there are “emergency” cases when law enforcement asks for data without one, like when someone’s life is believed to be in danger.

In this case, the hackers exploited this tactic in order to access personal information about specific targets in order to “facilitate financial fraud schemes.” Using hacked emails tied to legitimate law enforcement personnel, they were able to successfully fool the companies into handing over the data.

In a statement to Bloomberg, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the company has safeguards in place to verify legal requests and detect abuse. “We block known compromised accounts from making requests and work with law enforcement to respond to incidents involving suspected fraudulent requests, as we have done in this case,” Stone said.

Apple and Snap also pointed to company guidelines, saying they have policies to verify the legitimacy of requests for user data. But these safeguards can fall short if the requests appear to be from emails associated with legitimate law enforcement agencies. As Discord told Krebson Security:

“We can confirm that Discord received requests from a legitimate law enforcement domain and complied with the requests in accordance with our policies. We verify these requests by checking that they come from a genuine source, and did so in this instance. While our verification process confirmed that the law enforcement account itself was legitimate, we later learned that it had been compromised by a malicious actor. We have since conducted an investigation into this illegal activity and notified law enforcement about the compromised email account.”

Interestingly, security researchers have reportedly tied some of the people involved in this scheme to another high-profile hacking group: Lapsus$, whose members allegedly hacked Microsoft and Okta. According to Bloomberg, one person involved with forging the requests is also “believed to be the mastermind behind the cybercrime group Lapsus$.”

Apple is well-known for doing things in-house whenever possible, and that might even extend to financial services. Bloombergsources claim Apple is laying the groundwork for "future financial services" through a multi-year effort that would bring more financial procedures under the company's wing. The iPhone maker is reportedly developing its own payment processing system, and also wants to handle credit checks, risk assessment for loans and other behind-the-scenes tasks.

The initiatives are meant for future offerings, according to the sources. This wouldn't augment Apple Card, Apple Pay, contactless payments for stores or other known financial products. The first product to rely on the payment processing would supposedly be a service nicknamed "Apple Pay Later" that lets you pay off devices in either four interest-free instalments or monthly instalments with interest.

Apple has already declined comment. This isn't the first time in recent weeks that the company was said to be shaking up its business models, though. A previous rumor also suggested Apple was planning a hardware subscription service where you'd pay a monthly fee to use the latest devices. 

The greater responsibility could prove a challenge. Apple has "faced some hurdles" developing the payment processing tech, Bloomberg said. However, the company has multiple incentives to take more control of financial services. It could launch new features faster, and in countries where they wouldn't otherwise be viable. Apple might also take a larger slice of revenue in some cases. Simply put, Apple might not be held back by payment processors and banks like some of its peers.

Yesterday, Google officially released version 100 of its Chrome browser, and today it's following suit by releasing version 100 of Chrome OS. While there weren't a lot of big features for Chrome 100 besides a new icon, the update for Chrome OS brings a handful of changes worth noting. Probably the most significant is a redesigned app launcher experience. When you press the "everything" button (where caps lock is on most keyboards) or click the circle icon on the lower left side of the screen, the new launcher pulls up in a window on the left side of your display rather than covering all your open windows. Longtime Chrome OS users might remember that this was how the launcher behaved years ago.

Besides that visual change, Google has made it easier to organize the apps you have installed. You can choose to sort them alphabetically or by color, and new apps you add will stick to that organization scheme. From a functional perspective, Google has also improved search results that come up when you type in the launcher, automatically pulling up information for your query without having to open more details in a browser window. The search field also can look through all your open tabs if you're trying to find a specific site you had open.

The next new feature is purely for fun — the camera app can now create GIFs. When you pop open the camera, you can choose to record a five-second video that'll automatically be turned into a GIF. Once that's done, you can share it to pretty much any app on your Chromebook or send it to an Android phone using the nearby share feature.

Google also improved the dictation feature on Chromebooks. Previously, you could dictate text into any text field on your device, but today Google is adding some editing features. Chrome OS now recognizes commands like "delete" to remove the last letter or "move to the next character" to adjust where your cursor is. Asking for "help" will also pull up a list of commands that you can use if you're not sure how to accomplish a specific task with your voice.

As is usually the case with most Chrome OS updates, these aren't exactly earth-shattering updates. But as Google now updates Chrome OS and the Chrome browser every four weeks, they're not all going to bring big features. But there are still a few quality of life improvements worth checking out once the update hits your device — I've always found managing the apps in my launcher a bit cumbersome, so I'm hoping today's update makes things a bit better.

Way back in 2018 Intel announced plans to develop its own line of discrete GPUs back designed to compete with rival cards from AMD and NVIDIA. And despite several delays including missing its original 2020 launch window, this spring the first batch of Intel's new Arc graphics cards are finally ready for use in retail devices, starting with Samsung's Galaxy Book 2 Pro laptops.

As a quick recap, while Intel's Arc line will eventually cover both laptops and desktops, the first batch of A-series GPUs are lower-power cards intended mainly for ultraportables and thin-and-light notebooks. The company's graphics cards will use a naming scheme similar to its CPUs to help differentiate between various performance tiers, beginning with the new Arc A350M and A370M, before moving on to the more powerful Arc 5 and Arc 7 cards which are due out sometime later this summer. 

Intel

Across the entire family of Arc GPUs, Intel's graphics architecture is based on four main pillars: the company's XE cores, XE Media Engine, XE Display Engine, and the XE Graphics Pipeline. All Arc cards will also have the same basic feature set including support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, ray tracing, XE Super Sampling, AV1 hardware acceleration and more. 

The Arc's XE cores are based on Intel's XE HPG (High Performance Graphics) microarchitecture, with each core featuring 16 256-bit Vector Engines. 16 1,024-bit Matrix Engines and 192KB of shared memory. The XE Media Engine is designed to support popular video apps with hardware encoding at up to 8K 10-bit HDR and hardware acceleration for a number of popular standards (VP9, AVC, HEVC, AV1). Meanwhile, the XE Display Engine was built to handle video output for up to two 8K displays at 60Hz simultaneously, four 4K displays running at 120Hz, or a single 1440p screen at 360Hz.

Intel

As for the two new cards themselves, both the A350M and A370M are targeting 1080p gaming at 60fps to 90fps across a range of popular games. The A350M is designed to draw between 25 and 35 watts of power and will sport six XE cores, six ray tracing units, a graphics clock of 1,150 MHz (which Intel says is a conservative estimate of the card's typical clock speed) and 4GB of GDDR6 vRAM. Alternatively, the A370M is designed for slightly larger laptops with a power draw of between 35 and 50 watts, eight XE cores, 8 ray tracing units, a graphics clock of 1,550 MHz, and the same 4GB of vRAM. And as you can see in the image above, the upcoming Arc 5 and Arc 7 cards will be significantly more powerful. But again, they won't be out until sometime in early summer. 

Intel

Also, alongside its new GPUs, Intel created a software suite called Arc Control similar to NVIDIA's GeForce Experience and AMD's Radeon Software, designed to allow users to more easily monitor performance, install drivers and updates, record game highlights and even connect to live streaming apps like Xsplit. And thanks to a UI that uses a streamlined overlay, Intel's Arc Control should be easy to access in the middle of a battle. 

Intel even says it's working more with developers to provide faster and more responsive driver support for new titles, with featured games on the Arc cards including titles such as Elden Ring, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Dolmen and a whole lot more. And as one of the largest chip makers in the world, Intel also created its Deep Link tech which is designed to give its Arc cards an additional performance boost when working in tandem with Intel's onboard integrated graphics. 

Intel

So while we're only getting two new Arc cards right now (and relatively low-power ones at that), today marks an important moment as Intel finally becomes the true third horse in the discrete graphics space. The first retail device to feature one of Intel's A-series cards is Samsung's Galaxy Book 2 Pro, which goes on sale next month. However, Intel promises that there will be a slew of even more laptops featuring Arc GPUs coming soon from big names including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, MSI, Lenovo and others.