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To revive interest in smartphones, Samsung and LG are improving their cameras and embracing the nascent world of virtual reality. And Samsung is being backed by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who said Sunday the companies are teaming up to push VR in mobile phones and social networking. “Together this is by far the best mobile VR experience you can offer,” Zuckerberg said at Samsung’s unveiling of their new flagship phones in Barcelona. Samsung’s new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge promise better photos under low-light conditions, in part with sensors that capture more light. The main camera on LG’s upcoming G5 smartphone will have two lenses - one for standard shots and another with a wider angle so you can capture more of what’s in front of you without having to step back. Both companies will also release several camerarelated accessories. Samsung, which unveiled a virtual-reality device for consumers last fall, will now make a 360-degree camera for everyday folks to captu...

BY ABBY OLENA In 1685, when Louis Renard was seven or eight years old, he and his family left their native France to settle in the Netherlands, where Huguenots—French Protestants—could worship without fear of persecution. In Amsterdam, Renard led a colorful life as a spy, a seller of patent medicines, and a book publisher until his death in 1746. His only known likeness shows him smoking a pipe in a brothel as scantily clad women parade by. SOMETHING’S FISHY: Though many aspects of the drawings in Fishes, Crayfishes and Crabs do not represent reality, more than half of the engravings can be identified to species. WARNOCK LIBRARY AND OCTAVO CORP As the Age of Enlightenment dawned across Europe, Renard published Fishes, Crayfishes and Crabs, of Diverse Colors and Extraordinary Form, That Are Found around the Islands of the Moluccas and on the Coasts of the Southern Lands, his only scientific book. He called it “one of the most precious works to enrich natural histo...