For the better part of two decades, we’ve devoted space in our pockets and bags for smartphones (ones that only keep getting bigger).

The rectangular slabs have been MP3 players, PDAs, and cameras. The app economies on Android and iOS blew open the doors on what your smartphone could do, what services you could access, and what ways you could make money (i.e. selling in-app purchases and influencing).

Smartphones and apps changed everything, and in the process, they replaced the need for separate devices. But pay close attention, and you’ll notice a trend: Generative AI, machine learning, and the growing question of whether it’s actually better to have one device that does everything are weakening the hold smartphones have on our attention.

A small window of opportunity is opening to unbundle the phone, and with it, a new wave of AI-first gadgets is emerging. But do we actually want to have a pocket full of devices again?

Scientists have confirmed in a new study that the scientific playground of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover — Jezero Crater — was once home to an ancient lake.

New radar data from one of Perseverance’s instruments revealed layers of sediments that, billions of years ago, sat at the bottom of a Martian lake like the material that settles at the bottom of Earth’s oceans. Though it’s no longer a wet environment, the former lakebed reveals itself through stratified sections sandwiched throughout the 65 feet below the rover’s six wheels.

“Imagine a very still pond where nothing much happens except fine layers of muck are laid down every year. That’s the sort of situation we think we’re seeing with these radar signatures,” David Paige, the deputy principal investigator of the instrument behind the discovery: Perseverance’s Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX), told Inverse.