Commentary: Verizon is Google's exclusive partner for the Pixel 2 phone. But I wouldn't have known that after a chat with a Verizon salesman.

Sean gets a little help from Sean this week.

The Audiophiliac loves the KEF R300 stand-mount speaker’s sleek design and rich sound.

Would you drop $99 on a Schiit Magni 3 if it could make your headphones sound better?

Enlarge (credit: Patrick Shepherd/CIFOR)

It’s a common suggestion that we should just plant trees to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, but this isn’t quite the solution it may seem. Reforestation would roughly make up for the carbon added to the atmosphere by past deforestation, but our burning of fossil fuels is another matter.

Still, that’s no argument to ignore reforestation. There is no silver bullet solution to climate change, and many things like reforestation add up to make meaningful contributions. And reforestation has a host of other benefits, including improving air quality and providing species with habitats.

So how much of a difference could efforts to save and regrow forests—together with conservation of other ecosystems—really do? That’s the question asked by a group led by Bronson Griscom, an ecologist at The Nature Conservancy. By including a broad set of possible reforestation actions, Griscom and his colleagues found a larger opportunity than we'd previously estimated.

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These two phones go head-to-head in a video camera comparison.

A Japanese company says it claimed rights to animated emoji before Apple did.

It's been 17 years since Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy wrapped up, and a decade since "Compass" hit the big screen. The wait for a follow-up is over.

The Pixel 2 and the iPhone 8 Plus battle it out to determine which phone's camera does better portraits, landscape selfies and low-light shots.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

I love October. As an avid baker and Halloween reveler, I usually spend the whole month whipping up my favorite fall desserts and packing in as many gnarly sci-fi and horror flicks as possible. It’s just not October without the smell of spiced apples baking in the oven, knife-wielding serial killers, sage and sausage stuffing, flesh-eating zombies, pumpkin bread, and ferocious aliens.

But this year—this October—is extra special. With the upcoming release of the much anticipated second season of Stranger Things, I, along with some folks at Ars, thought we should go a little bigger. I’ve spliced together my two favorite pastimes to create sci-fi inspired treats that can fuel a lengthy, nostalgia-fueled Netflix binge.

I could pull out a themed recipe or two that would provide adequate sustenance for a binge of the entire new season plus a full re-watching of the first season. But this isn’t amateur hour. There’s just so much amazing sci-fi to celebrate.

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These are unequivocally the best Android games on the planet and some of the best games on any system right now.

The first of the new wave of Windows VR/AR headsets is easy to use, but the software isn't there yet.

Enlarge / Things tend to be a bit out of focus for my kids. (credit: Baruk Feddabonn)

I have to admit that my only experience of dyslexia is via family members. My youngest daughter has just started high school, and she's struggling with all the reading associated with three languages, an issue that bleeds over into all the other subjects. In testing, she scores high on reading comprehension but really low on reading speed. My oldest son reads and reads and reads... but cannot write worth a damn. Both have trouble internalizing spelling rules and multiplication tables.

These all standard symptoms of dyslexia. Dyslexia is a spectrum disorder, one that covers many aspects of reading and writing, so when people start touting single causes, my skepticism goes into overdrive. But it turns out that new research on its causes is reasonably solid, and it raises some interesting questions.

Your brain in the mirror

When the brain creates an image, it's faced with a problem. The two eyes report two images that are extremely similar, but shifted with respect to each other. The displacement is awesome, because it provides us with better depth perception. However, in the absence of a large amount of alcohol, the brain still has to decide on a single coherent image so it has something to present to our consciousness. To do that, the two images are melded into one, which is fine for displacement. But for mirror images, the brain must choose a single image.

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Looking for a new game to play on your mobile device? Here are our picks of the best mobile games released in 2017 (so far).

Every week we ask people around the office a question about pop culture to see what makes them tick. With "The Walking Dead" returning this Sunday on AMC, we wanted to know which zombie movies or shows are their favorites.

A photo comparison between Apple's iPhone Plus and Google's Pixel 2. The results are interesting.

The Asus ZenPad Z8s tablet is a small and stylish Verizon exclusive that costs considerably less than the iPad Mini 4.

The reef is big, beautiful and on its deathbed. Nature can heal it, but she needs our help.

Gran Turismo Sport is a great racing game. What it's not is a simple PS4 port of the last GT game. Almost everything about this latest release is different from every game that has come before it in the series. There are way fewer selectable cars than the competition (and previous GT games). There aren't many tracks. You won't spend hours buying new parts for your car or taking it for an oil change or a car wash. Gran Turismo Sport might not be the world’s most accurate driving simulation, but it’s fun—a lot of fun, particularly with a steering wheel. And refreshingly, it doesn't try to make you open your wallet to unlock anything.

But if racing against other humans online isn't something you care for, GTS is not the game for you. Unlike GT games of old, GTS is all about racing online, and maybe—just maybe—becoming a real racing driver at the end.

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Enlarge / A Los Angeles police officer wears an AXON body camera during the Immigrants Make America Great March to protest actions being taken by the Trump administration on February 18, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

Axon, the largest manufacturer of body-worn cameras, said Thursday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it had missed e-mails from the agency due to "miscommunication issues."

According to Bloomberg, the snafu was due to an e-mail that the SEC sent on August 10 to the company’s new chief financial officer—however those messages were quarantined in a spam filter, and he seemingly did not see them.

The SEC was seeking clarification about the company’s financial disclosures, particularly surrounding its 2016 financial report and its first quarter 2017 report.

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