Month: April 2020

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  What good is a stack of 100 Super Famicoms if you can't share them with families stuck at home?

With families all over the world stuck inside under stay-at-home orders, we're all looking for new ways to keep busy and stay entertained without going out. The Japan Retro Game Association (JARGA) is doing its part to help with Japan's quarantine orders, setting aside 100 Super Famicom systems (Super NES in the West) as "emergency supplies" to ship to families "so that people in their 30s and 40s will be hooked on the game when many children are waiting at home due to the new coronavirus."

In the blog post announcing the program (Google Translate—via Cheesemeister), JARGA says the cleaned and sterilized systems might have some cosmetic wear and tear, but they're guaranteed to work for at least a week after shipment. Each shipment comes with a console along with the necessary cables, one controller, and two games: Super Donkey Kong (aka Donkey Kong Country) and Final Fantasy VI (originally released as Final Fantasy III in the West). "Both are easy to play and I think they are masterpieces that even beginners can enjoy," the organization writes.

JARGA asks that Japanese families requesting a share of this classic game bounty have a child under the age of 16 in the house and the ability to pay a small shipping fee. Recipients will also need a TV with RCA yellow/red/white input jacks, and JARGA suggests via Twitter that such TVs can be found for cheap at Japanese secondhand stores.

Enlarge / Ian Burkhard suffered a severe spinal cord injury in 2010. Battelle's NeuroLife project is restoring motor function to his right arm with a brain-computer-interface system. (credit: Battelle)

Ian Burkhart, now 28, had a diving accident in 2010 that severely damaged his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, with only limited movement in his elbow and shoulders. Thanks to an implanted brain-computer-interface (BCI) developed by Battelle, he has made significant progress over the last six years in restoring small movements; he's even able to play Guitar Hero again. And now Battelle scientists have succeeded in restoring his sense of touch, according to a new paper in the journal Cell.

BCIs are a booming R&D field, with startups like Elon Musk's Neuralink looking ahead to a world where human beings will connect directly to their computers with either external devices (similar in function to an EEG) or biologically compatible implanted BCIs. Such systems require a way to record neural activity (electrode sensors), a way to transmit those signals (like a small wireless chipset), and algorithms that can translate those signals into action. BCIs are already a medical reality for patients with spinal cord injuries, like Burkhart, or those who suffer from Parkinson's or epileptic seizures. The benefits patients gain far outweigh the risks of surgical implantation.

Over the past 90 years or so, Battelle has been instrumental in developing such prominent technologies as the Xerox machine, cruise control, and CD-ROMs, along with numerous medical devices. Patrick Ganzer, lead author on the new Cell paper, is a research scientist with the organization's medical devices division, working with the NeuroLife group to develop a BCI for clinical trial. Burkhart has been working with Ganzer and NeuroLife since 2014 to restore motor function to his right arm.

Enlarge / A COVID-19 blood test is administered outside of Delmont Medical Care on April 22, 2020 in Franklin Square, New York. The test identifies antibodies to the coronavirus. (credit: Getty | Al Bello)

Frustrated statisticians and epidemiologists took to social media this week to call out substantial flaws in two widely publicized studies trying to estimate the true spread of COVID-19 in two California counties, Santa Clara and Los Angeles.

The studies suggested that far more people in each of the counties have been infected with the new coronavirus than thought—that is, they estimated that true case counts in the two counties are up to 85 times and 55 times the number of the currently confirmed cases in the counties, respectively. Accordingly, this suggests that COVID-19 is far less deadly than thought. The large case counts in relation to unchanged number of deaths put COVID-19’s fatality rate in the same range as seasonal flu.

How dangerous is this?

We dig into the details of the studies below, but it's important to note that neither of them have been published in a scientific journal, nor have they gone through standard peer-review for scientific vetting. Instead, they have been posted online in draft form (a commonplace occurrence amid a rapidly evolving pandemic that inclines researchers to have fast access to data, however uncertain).

Enlarge / Bleach works great on surfaces, not inside your body. (credit: NurPhoto / Getty Images)

The daily pandemic press briefings held by the White House have had some very unusual moments, with medical experts often asked to correct misinformation or bad advice, some of it offered or favored by President Trump himself, standing just feet away. But those somewhat surreal scenes had become so commonplace that the events may have started to seem routine. But any normalcy changed yesterday, when, after receiving some good news from the research community, Trump suddenly suggested that we should test the idea of irradiating people internally or injecting them with disinfectant.

Before the day was over, the maker of Lysol disinfectant was issuing statements saying there are no circumstances in which its products should be ingested or injected.

We’ll do the good news first

The trouble was triggered by a rare bit of good news amid this global pandemic, delivered by Bill Bryan, the head of the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology Directorate. Bryan was brought on to discuss the survival of the virus under various environmental conditions. (You can watch his presentation here.)

Enlarge / AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson speaking at an investor event at Warner Bros. Studios on October 29, 2019 in Burbank, California. (credit: Getty Images | Presley Ann)

AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson is retiring at the end of June and handing the reins to executive John Stankey, who will lead the telco through a multi-year cost-cutting program. Stankey, the company president and COO, will become CEO on July 1, AT&T announced today. Stephenson "will serve as Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors until January 2021 to ensure a smooth leadership transition."

Stephenson, 60, has been AT&T's CEO since 2007; he began his AT&T career in 1982 with Southwestern Bell Telephone, a subsidiary.

"Stankey's selection as AT&T's next CEO completes the final phase of a succession planning process that AT&T's Board began in 2017, which included a thorough evaluation of internal and external candidates," today's announcement said.