Researchers find just two plague strains wiped out 30%-60% of Europe

Scientists analyzed tooth samples taken from skeletal remains of medieval victims.

Remains of human plague victims in a mass grave in Toulouse, France, dating back to the Black Death period.

Enlarge / Remains of human plague victims in a mass grave in Toulouse, France, dating back to the Black Death period. (credit: Archeodunum SAS, Gourvennec Michaël)

The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Now researchers have traced the genetic history of the bacterium believed to be behind the plague in a recent paper published in Nature Communications. They found that one strain seemed to be the ancestor of all the strains that came after it, indicating that the pandemic spread from a single entry point into Europe from the East—specifically, a Russian town called Laishevo.

Technically, we're talking about the second plague pandemic. The first, known as the Justinian Plague, broke out about 541 CE and quickly spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. (The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, for whom the pandemic is named, actually survived the disease.) There continued to be outbreaks of the plague over the next 300 years, although the disease gradually became less virulent and died out. Or so it seemed.

In the Middle Ages, the Black Death burst onto the scene, with the first historically documented outbreak occurring in 1346 in the Lower Volga and Black Sea regions. That was just the beginning of the second pandemic. During the 1630s, fresh outbreaks of plague killed half the populations of affected cities. Another bout of the plague significantly culled the population of France during an outbreak between 1647 and 1649, followed by an epidemic in London in the summer of 1665. The latter was so virulent that, by October, one in 10 Londoners had succumbed to the disease—over 60,000 people. Similar numbers perished in an outbreak in Holland in the 1660s. The pandemic had run its course by the early 19th century, but a third plague pandemic hit China and India in the 1890s; there are still occasional outbreaks today.

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Thousands of DOS games have been added to the Internet Archive

It’s the biggest update since games first hit the archive.

Promotional image for video game Wizardry.

Enlarge / Just one of the games added to the archive recently. (credit: Sir-Tech)

The Internet Archive has been updated with more than 2,500 DOS games, marking the most significant addition of games to the archive since 2015.

New additions include forgotten classics like Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark SavantPrincess Maker 2, and Microsoft Adventure, a rebranding of Colossal Caves Adventure. They also include a whole lot of weird, early experiments and dead ends that should be fascinating to explore for historians, technologists, game designers, and players alike.

The blog post announcing the additions includes some disclaimers: not all games will run as speedily as one might like, not all games have manuals available (though some do), and frankly, not all games from these bygone areas are enjoyable by modern standards.

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Uber lays off another 350 workers amid ongoing losses

Uber has been losing more than $1 billion per quarter.

A man in an open-collared shirt during a presentation.

Enlarge / Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. (credit: George Grinsted)

Uber is laying off another 350 workers, the company announced on Monday. Uber Eats and Uber's self-driving car team are among the divisions hit by job losses. TechCrunch obtained a copy of an email CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sent to Uber workers. It describes the layoffs as "difficult but necessary changes."

This is Uber's third round of layoffs for 2019. The company laid off 400 workers in its marketing department in July and 435 engineering and product workers in September. Some workers have also been asked to relocate.

Uber announced in August that it racked up record losses of $5 billion in the second quarter of 2019. It's important to note that the bulk of that figure represents one-time charges connected to Uber's May stock offering. Excluding those charges, Uber's ongoing burn rate has been around $1 billion in recent quarters. Third-quarter financial results are due out next month.

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Veteran astronauts endorse NASA’s program for a return to the Moon

“The International Space Station offers a good blueprint for this project.”

A rocket sits on a launch pad at dawn.

Enlarge / In May, the test version of Orion attached to the Launch Abort System for the Ascent Abort-2 flight test arrives at Space Launch Complex 46 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (credit: NASA)

On Monday during a conference held in Houston, several veteran astronauts endorsed NASA's plan to return to the Moon. However, they also characterized the goal of landing humans there by 2024 as aspirational rather than realistic.

"It's quite aggressive," said four-time astronaut Michael López-Alegría of the Artemis Program's five-year timeline. López-Alegría, who is president of the Association of Space Explorers, made his comments during the organization's annual meeting.

He added that it was not a bad thing to have an aggressive plan. Rather, it was good for NASA and its international partners to have a clear goal to work toward. "I think that in any complex program like that, somebody needs to draw a line in the sand," he said. "It may be aspirational, but without something like that, it's really difficult to get people pulling in the same direction."

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Microsoft launches Project xCloud game streaming preview

Companies have been offering ways to stream PC games over the internet for a while, but game streaming seems to be having a moment — with Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s Project xCloud both set to launch soon. And by soon, I mean you …

Companies have been offering ways to stream PC games over the internet for a while, but game streaming seems to be having a moment — with Google’s Stadia and Microsoft’s Project xCloud both set to launch soon. And by soon, I mean you can now sign up to participate in a Project xCloud public preview. […]

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Microsoft wants to use AI to bleep out bad words in Xbox Live party chat

Speech-to-text algorithms mulled for machine-learning-based moderation.

"I'm so happy that I didn't hear whatever curse word you just screamed at me during our friendly game of <em>Uno</em> on Xbox Live!"

Enlarge / "I'm so happy that I didn't hear whatever curse word you just screamed at me during our friendly game of Uno on Xbox Live!" (credit: Future Publishing / Getty Images)

Today, Microsoft announced it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturiy tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." That's a long-overdue feature for a major communication platform that's well over a decade old now, but not really anything new in terms of online content moderation writ large.

What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added):

Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game.

That's all a bit vague, but The Verge reports on the real thrust of that passage: an effort by the company to "tackle the challenge of voice chat toxicity on Xbox Live." That means leveraging Microsoft's existing efforts in speech-to-text machine-learning algorithms to automatically filter out swear words that might come up in an Xbox Live party chat.

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Chuwi MiniBook 8 inch laptop now available for $430 (retail price)

The Chuwi MiniBook is a tiny laptop with an 8 inch touchscreen display, a 360-degree hinge, and Windows 10 software. It’s also one of the most affordable mini-laptops around — it went up for pre-order for about $430 and up during an Indiego…

The Chuwi MiniBook is a tiny laptop with an 8 inch touchscreen display, a 360-degree hinge, and Windows 10 software. It’s also one of the most affordable mini-laptops around — it went up for pre-order for about $430 and up during an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign earlier this year, and now it’s available from Banggood for […]

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Google Nest Mini is small smart speaker you can hang on the wall

Google is holding a hardware launch event tomorrow where the company is expected to unveil the Pixel 4 smartphone and Pixelbook Go Chromebook. It looks like a new entry-level smart speakers is also on the way. WinFuture has posted details about the Nes…

Google is holding a hardware launch event tomorrow where the company is expected to unveil the Pixel 4 smartphone and Pixelbook Go Chromebook. It looks like a new entry-level smart speakers is also on the way. WinFuture has posted details about the Nest Mini, which appears to be a follow-up to the Google Home Mini. […]

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AT&T charged customers for a corporate tax that it doesn’t have to pay

Portland tax exempts utilities like AT&T—but carrier added it to customer bills.

An AT&T logo seen on the outside of a building.

Enlarge / An AT&T store in Chicago. (credit: Getty Images | jetcityimage)

AT&T charged customers in Portland, Oregon for a corporate tax that AT&T doesn't actually have to pay. AT&T has agreed to provide refunds to customers who were wrongly charged the tax over the past few months, but it's facing a lawsuit that seeks additional payments of at least $200 to each of those customers.

AT&T's mistake relates to Portland's new Clean Energy Surcharge, a 1% tax on retail sales in the city. AT&T has been passing this tax along to its mobile customers, even though the city law exempts utilities such as AT&T from the tax.

"The city only recently notified us that we are exempt from the tax," AT&T said a statement Friday, according to The Oregonian. "We will be issuing refunds to our customers."

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The world’s oldest leftovers, left in Pleistocene storage containers

Humans have been saving leftovers for at least 200,000 to 400,000 years.

SAMSUNG

Enlarge / SAMSUNG (credit: By 66AVI - צילמתי, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17939578)

At Qesem Cave in Israel, Neanderthals or early Homo sapiens appear to have stored marrow-rich deer bones for several weeks, relying on the bones and their outer layer of dried skin and flesh to keep the marrow relatively fresh—like storing leftovers in Pleistocene Tupperware.

Based on the cut marks on the bones, people extracted the marrow after a few weeks, when the bones and their covering of skin and tendons had had time to dry out. That suggests the people who lived at Qesem were planning ahead for their future needs—which is one more piece of evidence that Neanderthals and the earliest members of our own species were smarter than we’ve often given them credit for.

Stone Age Tupperware

People of various groups have lived at Qesem Cave off and on for hundreds of thousands of years. Archaeologists haven’t found hominin fossils at the site so far, but in the oldest layers of artifacts, they’ve unearthed oval and pear-shaped handaxes in the Acheulian style—a stone calling card of Homo erectus or their descendants, Homo heidelbergensis. In layers dating from 300,000 to 200,000 years old, the stone blades and scrapers belong to a set of stone tool cultures called the Acheulo-Yabrudian, which has turned up at Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens sites.

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