Month: March 2020

Enlarge / WESTMINSTER, MD - MARCH 16, 2020: Dawn Canova, clinical manager for outpatient wound care at Carroll Hospital, takes samples from people to test them for the coronavirus at a drive-thru station in the hospital's parking garage. Not open to the general public for testing, the station was set up to take samples from people who had spoken with their doctors and received explicit direction to get a test for the novel coronavirus called COVID-19. (credit: Chip Somodevilla)

As the United States continues to struggle to ramp up basic testing for COVID-19, experts at the World Health Organization on Monday emphasized that countries should prioritize such testing—and that social-distancing measures are not enough.

“We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (aka Dr. Tedros) said in a press briefing March 16.

Dr. Tedros noted that, as the numbers of cases and deaths outside of China have quickly risen, many countries—including the US—have urgently adopted so-called social-distancing measures, such as shuttering schools, canceling events, and having people work from home. While these measures can slow transmission and allow health care systems to better cope, they are “not enough to extinguish this pandemic,” Dr. Tedros warned.

Enlarge / A Tesla Model Y. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla isn't exactly known for hitting its own deadlines, but the company is apparently turning over a new leaf with the Model Y.

When Tesla announced the new crossover vehicle last year, it projected the first deliveries in the fall of 2020. Spring hasn't even begun, yet Tesla says it is already shipping out the first Model Ys to customers—putting it a solid six months ahead of schedule.

A key part of Tesla's strategy for the Model Y has been to share as much as possible from the Model 3. That saved Tesla from having to design the Model Y from scratch, and it also allowed the company to reuse major portions of the Model 3 manufacturing process. This strategy may explain how Tesla was able to get the Model Y to market so quickly.

Enlarge (credit: EpicTop10.com / Flickr)

Emails and websites are promising vital information about keeping safe from the coronavirus pandemic that’s sweeping the globe and threatening millions. In fact, a flood of them are scams that push malware, ransomware, and disinformation; attempt to steal passwords and personal information; and conduct espionage operations by hackers working for nation-states.

One of the most recent coronavirus hoaxes to come to light is an Android app available at coronavirusapp[.]site. It claims to provide access to a map that provides real-time virus-tracking and information, including heatmap visuals and statistics. In fact, a researcher from DomainTools said, the app is laced with ransomware.

“This Android ransomware application, previously unseen in the wild, has been titled ‘CovidLock’ because of the malware’s capabilities and its background story,” DomainTools researcher Tarik Saleh wrote in Friday’s report. “CovidLock uses techniques to deny the victim access to their phone by forcing a change in the password used to unlock the phone. This is also known as a screen-lock attack and has been seen before on Android ransomware.”

Enlarge / A research associate works at the Moderna Therapeutics Inc. lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

On Monday, the Associated Press reported watching the first safety tests of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that recently spread into a global pandemic. Considering we didn't even know the virus existed five months ago, this represents remarkable progress. But the technology that allowed such rapid development is relatively untested at the scale we'd need for a global vaccine.

How to make a vaccine quickly

Most vaccines use viruses or bacteria that are either treated so that they are unable to reproduce or damaged in a way that ensures that they reproduce very poorly. These vaccines are generally very effective, as they expose the immune systems to many of the proteins normally made by the pathogen, thereby ensuring a robust immune response. The downside, however, is that you have to be able to isolate and manipulate the bacteria or virus, and then you have to grow and purify it at scale. This will mean a significant amount of time is needed to build up a production stock for widespread use.

Many viruses, however, have a limited number of proteins on their surface that the immune system typically responds to. For these viruses, it's possible to focus on the genes for these proteins, either cloning them into a harmless virus, or producing large quantities of the proteins themselves. This still involves challenges with large-scale production but avoids the steps involved with isolating the pathogen and figuring out how to grow large quantities safely.

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  A visualization shows how the expansion storage-card slots into the back of the Xbox Series X. [credit: Microsoft / Eurogamer ]

This morning, Microsoft dumped a massive cache of details on the Xbox Series X's internal specs and features. But the most surprising revelation buried in that info dump might be the fact that the system uses a proprietary solution for expanding its 1TB of internal game storage.

Digital Foundry's deep-dive report on the Series X, created in close conjunction with Microsoft, shows off a 1TB SSD expansion card, which the site says is "very short, quite weighty for its dimensions and actually presents rather like a memory card." The NVMe memory on that card (which looks about half the size of a standard NVMe stick) connects through the back of the system using the same PCI Express 4.0 connection as the system's internal memory (this is the rectangular "mystery slot" seen next to the Ethernet port when images of the Series X ports leaked in January).

The Series X will still support standardized USB 3.2 hard drives, according to the Digital Foundry report, but those can only be used to natively run backward-compatible games designed for previous Xbox systems (the Xbox One, 360, and original Xbox). For Series X games, a USB hard drive can only be used as a backup solution, where you can "park" games that then need to be shuffled over to the internal storage to be played.