“I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently very unhealthy for those closest to you.” – Mr. Spock

Ignoring the often sage advice of the great Enterprise science officer, Apple is working on a new Spock-inspired emoji for you to express yourself via mobile devices and computers.

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As spotted by Quartz, a ‘Live Long and Prosper’ hand symbol emoji has been found in the test versions of both Apple’s OS X and iOS Mac and iPhone/iPad software, which should be released sometime later this year. Apple has yet to confirm that all the new emojis in its beta software will be in the upcoming official releases. Among them are the much-awaited multi-ethnic smileys and figures.

With Apple’s new emoji picker, you should be able to send the Live Long and Prosper salute in different skin shades once it hits devices. You can visit Emojipedia.org to see what all the versions look like.

The Vulcan Salute was introduced to the Unicode system last June, and like any other symbol available in the universal emoji consortium, it’s now just waiting for software-makers to build it into their operating systems and keyboards, which Apple certainly looks to be doing.

So after being in the works for almost a year, the Spock emoji could finally be beaming up to your devices soon. And the timing cold serve as a fitting tribute Leonard Nimoy, who died in February and who portrayed Mr. Spock in the Star Trek television series and films from 1966 to 2013.

We’d never go as far as to imagine that the use of emojis would ever be completely approved by any buttoned up Vulcan humanoid. But this emoji in particular would have to be an exception, right?

Note: An earlier version of this article called Mr. Spock “the great Enterprise captain.” Spock was promoted to captain in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but is best known as the science officer to Captain James T. Kirk.

Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com. Follow me on Twitter at @danielwbean.



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