The Tribune

• In a nod to its past as well as its future, WhatsApp is adding a “status” feature that lets users tell their contacts what they are up to.

It’s not a new idea — WhatsApp started out as a way for people to let their friends know what they are up to — at work or available, for example. Messaging, now the app’s main function, was added later.

But it’s also a sign that the Facebook-owned app is expanding the amount of features it has, just as Instagram, another Facebook subsidiary, has been doing over the years.

Users will be able to post photos or videos as status updates.

WhatsApp says the status posts will be end-to-end encrypted, just as its messages are. That means only the parties who are communicating can see the messages, not an outside party or even WhatsApp.

• A new supercomputer at a federally funded research centre in Wyoming will do important work for a wide range of Earth science research. Among upcoming projects:

— Researchers at the University of Wyoming are simulating air currents around the spinning blades of wind turbines, data that could help make wind farms more efficient. Wyoming ranks among the top states for wind energy potential and within a decade could be home to the nation’s biggest wind farm, the 1,000-turbine Chokecherry and Sierra Madre project under development by The Anschutz Corp., which traces its roots to the oil industry.

— University of Delaware and federal scientists are modeling how the sun produces solar flares, blasts of radiation through space that can threaten satellites and even the power grid.

— A study led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research will research how mimicking the effects of a volcanic eruption by deliberately putting sulfates into the atmosphere could work to counter the effects of climate change.

• A New Zealand judge on Monday upheld an earlier court ruling that flamboyant internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom and three of his colleagues can be extradited to the U.S. to face criminal charges.

The decision comes five years after U.S. authorities shut down Dotcom’s file-sharing website Megaupload and filed charges of conspiracy, racketeering and money laundering against the men. If found guilty, they could face decades in prison.

Dotcom, who lives in New Zealand, has been fighting extradition in a case which has moved with glacial slowness at times. And Monday’s decision won’t be the last, with the case likely to be appealed up to New Zealand’s Supreme Court, a process that could take another year or two.

U.S. prosecutors say that Megaupload raked in at least $175 million, mainly from people using it to illegally download songs, television shows and movies.

The New Zealand district court ruled in 2015 that Dotcom and the others were eligible for extradition on the charges.

High Court judge Justice Murray Gilbert found Monday that the district court made mistakes in its ruling but that those didn’t alter the big picture.