Month: April 2020

Enlarge / A colorized transmission electron micrograph (TEM) of an Ebola virus virion. (credit: CDC)

A virus that normally infects animals makes the jump to humans, whose immune systems have never seen it before. It suddenly sweeps across the globe, leaving death and chaos in its wake. We're living with that reality now and have gone through it previously with HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Hanta, and various flu viruses that have threatened humanity in just the past few decades.

While there are many organizations that try to stay on top of threats of emerging diseases, it would be helpful if we could identify major sources of potential threats. If, for example, we knew that certain species were more prone to carrying viruses that could make the jump to humans, we could potentially survey the viruses found in those species, identify major threats, and potentially even develop therapies or vaccines in advance.

But a study published recently in PNAS suggests there's no real pattern to where humans are picking up new viruses. Instead, groups with lots of species tend to have lots of viral species, and those make the jump to humans largely in proportion to the number of species.

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 rocket launched for the 84th time on Wednesday. (credit: SpaceX)

Wednesday's successful launch of 60 Starlink satellites checked a few boxes for SpaceX.

For the first time in three tries, the company successfully landed a first stage booster on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. The flawless flight brings SpaceX one step closer to the much-anticipated launch of a Crew Dragon spacecraft, as early as May 27. And, of course, the company extended its Starlink constellation to about 420 satellites, bringing SpaceX closer to offering broadband Internet service to North America from space.

But SpaceX also made a huge, symbolic leap on Wednesday. With the latest Starlink launch, the Falcon 9 rocket has now launched 84 times. This surpasses the total flights by United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket.

Enlarge / St. Louis, Missouri, back before everything was cancelled due to coronavirus. (credit: Tetra Images | Henryk Sadura | Getty Images )

The pandemic is a challenge for all of us. The economic knock-on effects of the health crisis are themselves another crisis. Many people are wildly casting about, not just for solutions, but for someone to take the blame. It's hard to punish the SARS-CoV-2 virus, of course; whether or not one regards a virus as a living thing, it is most certainly not a legal person in any sense.

The office of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt has apparently decided that, in the absence of any way to sue a virus, the next best course of action is to take to court the entire nation where the disease originated. To that end, Schmitt's office said yesterday it had filed a lawsuit against "the Chinese government, Chinese Communist Party, and other Chinese officials and institutions" for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The complaint (PDF) first confirms that, as of Monday, there were more than 5,800 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Missouri, from which at least 177 persons had died. It then claims that "the virus unleashed by the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government has left no community in the world untouched," adding that the pandemic "is the direct result of a sinister campaign of malfeasance and deception" carried out by all of China's leadership.

Enlarge (credit: ZecOps)

A critical bug that has lurked in iPhones and iPads for eight years appears to be under active attack by sophisticated hackers to hack the devices of high-profile targets, a security firm reported on Wednesday.

The exploit is triggered by sending booby-trapped emails that, in some cases, require no interaction at all and, in other cases, require only that a user open the message, researchers from ZecOps said in a post. The malicious emails allow attackers to run code in the context of the default mail apps, which make it possible to read, modify, or delete messages. The researchers suspect the attackers are combining the zero-day with a separate exploit that gives full control over the device. The vulnerability dates back to iOS 6 released in 2012. Attackers have been exploiting the bug since 2018 and possibly earlier.

Enormous scope

“With very limited data we were able to see that at least six organizations were impacted by this vulnerability— and the full scope of abuse of this vulnerability is enormous,” ZecOps researchers wrote. “We are confident that a patch must be provided for such issues with public triggers ASAP.”

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  The Motorola Edge +. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola is getting back in the flagship smartphone game, and today the company announced the Motorola Edge+. This thing is a full-fat flagship—it has a Snapdragon 865 SoC, mmWave 5G, and is $1,000. The Edge+ is coming exclusively to Verizon on May 14.

The phone has a 6.7-inch, 90Hz, 2340×1080 OLED display, 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage, a 5000mAh battery, only 18W wired quick charging, and 15W wireless charging. There's a bottom USB-C port, NFC, an in-screen fingerprint reader, IP68 dust and water resistance, and—here's a shocker—a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Moto Z was one of the first big phones to remove the headphone jack (it pre-dates the iPhone 7 release by a few months), and now with the Edge+, the jack is back. It sounds like the Edge+ will have a tough time topping the OnePlus 8 Pro, which is $100 cheaper, has a 120Hz display, and 30W wired charging.

The "Edge+" is named for its curved display, an annoying smartphone feature that distorts the sides of the display and catches glare from overhead lights. The display isn't just curved around the left and right sides; it's a "90-degree Endless Edge display," meaning it bends a full 90 degrees around the side of the phone. Motorola apparently realizes the curved part of the display isn't a very useful display surface, so it added a software feature that lets you double-tap the side of the display to move text and other app content into the flat, usable portion of the display. In addition to turning off the curved display, you can also swipe down on the curved part of the display to open the notification panel or swipe in from the side to open an app shortcut drawer.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Fox News)

One of the more frustrating aspects of the coronavirus pandemic has been the amount of disinformation swirling about. Much of this is politically motivated, perhaps unsurprising with the attention given to President Donald Trump's rambling, error-strewn press conferences. It may seem like commonsense that actively misleading the public during a national emergency has consequences, but now Fox News' two most-watched hosts have unwittingly performed a rather elegant experiment on their viewers that allows us to quantify that effect. The results are stark: greater exposure to Sean Hannity versus Tucker Carlson shows a measurable increase in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths throughout March and early April.

Hannity and Carlson are Fox News' two biggest stars, each commanding around 4 million viewers for their respective evening shows (Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight). While it can be often hard to see daylight between their ideological pronouncements on-air, in early 2020, the two had markedly different lines on the coronavirus outbreak. Carlson began regularly covering the virus in January. During February, he did so with a growing sense of alarm that it the United States could experience a heavy death toll—the same month that saw much inaction on the part of the federal government.

By contrast, Hannity gave the virus almost no attention in February. And when he began to discuss the virus at the same frequency as Carlson during the first two weeks of March, it was to minimize the threat compared to the number of annual deaths attributable to car crashes, shootings, or seasonal influenza. Additionally, Hannity also accused the Democratic Party of exaggerating the threat as a way of attacking the president. However, by mid-March, Hannity changed his tune once President Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency.