Technology

During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, Sandra Quinn asked hundreds of Americans if they’d be willing to take a hypothetical vaccine that was authorized for emergency use but wasn’t formally approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Most were hesitant: Quinn, the senior associate director of the Maryland Center for Health Equity at the University of Maryland, found that only around 8 percent of people said that they’d definitely take the vaccine. An emergency H1N1 vaccine never came to be, but the questions Quinn asked 10 years ago are back in the spotlight today, as pharmaceutical companies in the US and around the world fight to produce a coronavirus vaccine as quickly as possible. It’s a real possibility that the FDA could allow for emergency use of a vaccine this time around. The United Sta...

An internal Facebook report presented to executives in 2018 found that the company was well aware that its product, specifically its recommendation engine, stoked divisiveness and polarization, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. Yet, despite warnings about the effect this could have on society, Facebook leadership ignored the findings and has largely tried to absolve itself of responsibility with regard to partisan divides and other forms of polarization it directly contributed to, the report states. The reason? Changes might disproportionately affect conservatives and might hurt engagement, the report says. “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” one slide from the presentation read. The group found that if this core element of its recom...

Spotify has finally removed its 10,000-song cap on library sizes, allowing users to add as much music as they’d like to their personal libraries without any limits at all, fixing a problem that has plagued music-lovers on the service for years. While Spotify has more than 50 million songs available to customers to stream at any time, until today, there was a hard limit of 10,000 songs that users could save to their own “Your Music” collections on Spotify for easy access. This is no more. After today, you can add as many songs as you like to your Liked Songs on @Spotify I’ve been working with a small team on the refactoring necessary to pull this off for a while now. Very happy to see this finally out. https://t.co/1nSExF5o3V — Felipe O. Carvalho (@_Felipe) May 26, 2020 Users have bee...

The OnePlus 8 series can now run Fortnite at 90fps, thanks to a collaboration between OnePlus and Epic Games. The update makes these devices the first phones to run Fortnite at a smooth 90 frames per second. Most Android phones run Fortnite at a maximum of 60fps, similar to the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game. Nintendo’s console, the Switch, falls behind with a maximum of 30 frames per second. Most Apple devices, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR, have the option to run the game at 60fps, while the iPad Pro can also run the game at a max frame rate of 120fps, thanks to the tablet’s high refresh rate display. Enabling a higher frame rate on the OnePlus 8 and 8 Pro will default the graphical settings to “Low,” as noted by GameSpot, so the game won’t look better in every way. Of c...

Niantic Labs is adding a new augmented reality feature to Pokémon Go next month that will make the virtual creatures look even more realistic. The new feature will let real-world objects obscure parts of the pocket monsters or let them hide entirely behind environmental fixtures like trees or furniture. The company calls the feature “reality blending,” and it’s based on the AR technique known as occlusion, which uses a mix of hardware and software features on powerful, modern smartphones to map an environment and understand the shape and depth of real-world objects. Niantic says the feature will come first to Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10 devices as well as the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 4. More devices are expected to join the list in the future. Niantic’s new reality blending will let pokémon ...

Slack is exploring a wide variety of new features that could be making their way to the popular messaging platform, including scheduled messages, Instagram-style stories, and short video and audio messages. According to CEO Stewart Butterfield in a recent interview on The Vergecast, the company has already “implemented APIs for scheduled sending of messages, and I think we’re going to end up putting that in the product at some point.” He also noted that competitors like G Suite already offer similar features. Butterfield also mentioned that the company is looking to add more tools to make it easier for users to “keep track of the things you want to get back to,” including the aforementioned scheduling tools and “more control over notifications,” although there aren’t too many details as to...

If you still think cars, even electric cars, are the future of urban transportation, the Carqon electric cargo bike is here to convince you otherwise. Cargo bikes are a way of life for many European families. For a decade, I bicycled my three kids everywhere in Amsterdam using a traditional “bakfiets.” My three-speed Dutch cargo bike with its large wooden box attached low to the elongated frame was something of a spectacle to tourists but very much the norm for cities that recognize the primacy of people over cars. The problem with cargo bikes has always been weight and bulk, making them difficult to maneuver when fully loaded. Adding an electric motor completely transforms the experience, making even the daintiest of parents feel superhuman. I just spent a week riding Carqon’s first produ...

ARM has announced its latest high-end mobile designs, the Cortex-A78 CPU and the Mali-G78 GPU, which will be used to power the next flagship smartphones of 2021 and beyond. ARM isn’t usually advertised on the spec sheets of your new smartphone or tablet, but it’s a critical company. It provides the designs that chipmakers like Qualcomm, Huawei, and Samsung use to create the system-on-a-chip designs that power nearly every mobile phone and tablet — and increasingly, laptops like the Surface Pro X. Double-digit improvements in CPU and GPU performance Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865, for example, uses partially customized versions of the ARM Cortex-A77 and Cortex-A55 designs for its Kryo 585 CPU, while Samsung’s Exynos 990 uses Cortex-A76 and Cortex-A55 CPU cores, along with a Mali-G77 GPU. The Cor...

On the afternoon of May 27th, SpaceX is slated to launch its very first passengers to space, potentially heralding a new era of human spaceflight for the United States. It’ll be the first time in nearly a decade that people have launched to orbit from American soil, and it’ll be the first time that a private vehicle takes them there. This historic flight is really a test. It’s the last big milestone for SpaceX as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The experimental initiative tasked private companies with creating new spacecraft for NASA that are capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX’s contribution to the program is a sleek, gumdrop-shaped capsule called the Crew Dragon. While it’s flown a few times before, the capsule has yet to carry p...

Once people got too scared to leave the house, there was lots of money to be made as a shopper-for-hire. Rachel had been running groceries for Instacart since October, but the Las Vegas market had barely offered enough gigs to scrape by. After the company switched to the On Demand model in February, the good orders (or “batches,” as Instacart calls them) went to whoever clicked first — and even when Rachel was lucky, she often wasn’t fast enough. But one morning in March, she logged on to see order after order piled up, lucrative ones at $50, $70, $100, all ready for the taking. “The demand was insane,” she says. “Things were great. You could make in one batch what a lot of people would be making in a day. But you could also be standing in line at Costco for an hour and a half just to get ...

Update May 25th, 5:20PM ET: Virgin Orbit’s test flight ended in failure shortly after LauncherOne dropped from under the company’s carrier 747 airplane. Virgin Orbit confirmed that the drop was successful and that the rocket’s main engine ignited. But then it quickly suffered some kind of anomaly at the beginning of the flight. The company says no one was hurt during the test and the team will be digging into the data to learn what went wrong. I’ll go to bed tonight smarter than I was when I woke up. I’m grateful for that, and proud of the team. Today, we tackled the biggest technical risk of the program. There’s a lot more to learn, but that is huge!!! pic.twitter.com/5keyW4r8Lr — William Pomerantz (@Pomerantz) May 26, 2020 Original Story: Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit — the sibli...

XRSpace, a company led by former HTC head Peter Chou, plans to launch a new virtual reality headset later this year. The headset is dubbed the Mova, and it’s supposed to ship in the third quarter of 2020 for $599. Its selling points include 5G support, a hand tracking interface, and an expansive virtual world called Manova. But it sharply bucks the trend of cheaper, more interoperable VR platforms — opting for a specialized system at a fairly high price. The Mova is a self-contained headset that’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor. It looks similar to the Oculus Quest or the business-oriented HTC Vive Focus, although it’s slicker than either of them and gives users a choice of white or bright orange. It uses two cameras to track users’ movement around a room, and its default c...