Month: January 2020

Enlarge / Xbox Series X, due in late 2020. It's tall. And it has a modified controller compared to the Xbox One pad. (credit: Xbox)

Today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke with investors on the company's quarterly earnings call to share some numbers about Microsoft's performance in the second quarter of the 2020 fiscal year, which ended on December 31, 2019. In general, Microsoft beat analyst projections with a strong quarter thanks primarily to impressive performance by Azure and Office.

Key numbers include $36.9 billion in revenue with a net income of $11.6 billion, an improvement over analyst predictions of $35.7 billion for the first of those figures.

The cloud and productivity divisions each delivered around $11.8 billion in revenue. That makes for a 29 percent gain for cloud and 17 percent for productivity, which includes both Office and LinkedIn. More specifically, Azure revenue increased by 64 percent. Office saw 16 percent revenue growth for the commercial segment and 19 percent for the personal.

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The US Department of Justice has filed lawsuits (PDF and PDF) against two small telecommunications providers that have allegedly connected hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls from Indian call centers to US residents. The feds want a New York federal judge to cut off the companies' access from the US telephone network. The government says a judge has already issued a restraining order against one of the defendants.

Fraudulent robocalls are a serious problem in the United States—and the Justice Department says two US companies contributed significantly to the problem. Over a 23-day period in May and June of last year, for example, defendant TollFreeDeals connected 720 million calls to US numbers. According to the Justice Department, 425 million of the calls lasted for one second or less—suggesting that many were unwanted.

The feds say that during those two months, TollFreeDeals connected 182 million calls from a single India-based call center. Of these calls, more than 90 percent appeared to come from one of 1,000 source numbers. And of those numbers, more than 80 percent have been associated with fraudulent robocalls.

Enlarge / Purell's marketing might need something like this. (credit: Getty | NBC, Lloyd Bishop)

The maker of Purell hand sanitizers is washing away some unproven marketing claims that its products reduce school absenteeism and prevent infections from germs such as Ebola, norovirus, flu, and certain drug-resistant infections.

The marketing disinfection comes after the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning letter to Purell's parent company, GOJO Industries. The letter, dated January 17 and released this week, stated that the company's claims violated federal regulations and that the agency now considers Purell hand sanitizers unapproved new drugs.

The FDA also noted that it is "unaware of any adequate and well-controlled clinical trials in the published literature that support" GOJO's claims.

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Tens of thousands of people once lived in Cahokia, the city at the heart of the mound-building Mississippian culture (which dominated the midwestern and southeastern United States from 700 to 1500 CE). And then, around 1450, they all left. Now, sediment cores from nearby Horseshoe Lake suggest that the area didn't stay deserted for long.

Wait, fecal chemicals last how long?

The study looked for the chemical signature of ancient human feces, which washed into nearby Horseshoe Lake over the centuries along with layers of soil, pollen, and other material. When bacteria in your gut break down cholesterol, they produce a chemical called coprostanol, which can survive in soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. More coprostanol in the soil means more people living (and pooping) in the area around the lake.

If you want to get really technical, archaeologist A.J. White of the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues actually measured the ratio of coprostanol to another chemical called cholestenol, which is formed when soil microbes break down cholesterol in the soil. A higher ratio means more human waste. That ratio can't measure population sizes, but it can tell researchers whether populations were increasing or decreasing—and how quickly.