Month: December 2019

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  The 3D Sonic Max slide from Qualcomm's presentation. [credit: Qualcomm ]

In-screen fingerprint readers were the standard form of Android biometrics on 2019 flagships, and in 2020 we'll start seeing the second-generation versions of this technology. Qualcomm is hosting its big tech show this week, and one of the first announcements is the new version of its "3D Sonic Max" ultrasonic in-screen fingerprint sensor. The second-gen sensor is absolutely huge. Qualcomm says it's 17 times larger than the previous version.

In-screen fingerprint readers offer the benefit of being invisible and under the screen, and they can go on the front of the device while still allowing for an all-screen smartphone design. Being on the front lets you activate the fingerprint reader while the phone is on a desk, without picking it up. The downside is that there's not tactile guidance for where your finger should go. There's just a big, smooth pane of glass, and if you miss the fingerprint sensor, you're going to fail to unlock your phone. For in-screen fingerprint readers, bigger is better, since a wider target area means less of a chance you miss the invisible reader.

Qualcomm's first in-screen fingerprint reader, available on the Samsung Galaxy S10, was basically as small as it could possibly be: 9mm x 4mm. This is much smaller than a fingertip, which is somewhere around 14mm x 14mm—you were only scanning a tiny sliver of your fingertip. Qualcomm's second-gen reader is huge: 30mm x 20mm. Qualcomm says this is big enough to scan two fingers at once, and—while I'm not sure why you would ever want to do this—"simultaneous two-finger sensing" is actually supported. You can be extra-secure at the cost of one-handed usage.

Enlarge / A false color image of a phage attached to a bacterium. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

About a third of the food that we grow, along with all of the effort and energy and labor and resources put into growing it, goes to waste. Much of it is thrown out by consumers or rots on shelves. But a substantial fraction of it is attacked by pests while still in the field. 

Bacterial wilt infects a number of crops throughout the world, including tomatoes, potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco. It is caused by Gram-negative bacteria. As with human antibiotics, treating agricultural pathogens suffers from problems with destructive, broad-spectrum, and increasingly ineffective pesticides. And just as in humans, people have suggested using viruses to attack the bacterial pests.

Phages are viruses that infect bacteria. They are highly selective, disabling only the bacterial species they specifically target and leaving neighboring bacteria alone. Since undesirable pathogens are often mired within a diverse bacterial community containing species that we want·(both in our guts or in the soil), this specificity is usually preferable to antibiotics and pesticides that indiscriminately kill every microbe they encounter.

Enlarge / AT&T service van driving in June 2019 in Oakdale, California. (credit: Getty Images | Andrei Stanescu)

AT&T thinks its TV-customer losses have peaked, but that isn't saying much, as the company has lost 5 million subscribers since 2016 and more than 1.3 million in the most recent quarter alone.

"It's tough and we'll go through it for the rest of this year. But we're optimistic we've hit the peak of losses in the third quarter," AT&T CFO John Stephens said at a Wells Fargo conference for investors yesterday, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

In Q3, AT&T reported a net loss of 1,163,000 customers in the premium TV category, which includes DirecTV satellite and U-verse wireline TV services. AT&T also reported a net loss of 195,000 customers of AT&T TV Now, the online streaming video service formerly known as DirecTV Now, bringing the total TV-customer loss to 1.36 million.

Enlarge

Ground-penetrating radar could help archaeologists spot otherwise invisible ancient footprints, suggests a recent experiment at White Sands National Monument, New Mexico.

Tracks left behind in layers of hardened mud and sand at the site record where humans crossed paths with giant sloths and mammoths during the last Ice Age. But some of the tracks appear only when conditions are just right—usually after a rain—which makes them difficult to study. Archaeologist Thomas Urban of Cornell University and his colleagues used ground-penetrating radar to spot these so-called ghost tracks. The radar images also revealed layers of compressed sediment beneath mammoth tracks, which could reveal information about how the now-extinct woolly giants strode across the Pleistocene world.

Invisible ink

To test the method, Urban and his colleagues pulled a radar antenna across the pale gypsum sands of the former lake shore, pacing out a grid pattern over a site where, 12,000 years ago, a human and a mammoth crossed paths. Excavations at the site had already revealed “ghost prints” left by a person who walked north, and then back south, for about 800 meters (2,625 feet).

Enlarge (credit: Media for Medical/UIG via Getty Images)

A recent blockbuster study found that software used in healthcare settings systematically provides worse care for black patients than white patients, and two senators want to know what both the industry and regulators are going to do to fix the situation.

Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday issued letters to the Federal Trade Commission, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the five largest US health insurers asking about bias in the algorithms used to make healthcare decisions.

"In using algorithms, organizations often attempt to remove human flaws and biases from the process," Booker and Wyden wrote. "Unfortunately, both the people who design these complex systems, and the massive sets of data that are used, have many historical and human biases built in. Without very careful consideration, the algorithms they subsequently create can further perpetuate those very biases."