Month: April 2020

Enlarge / A smartphone belonging to a resident of Cranston, R.I., shows personal notes he made for contact tracing Wednesday, April 15, 2020. (credit: Steven Senne | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images)

After what feels like the longest March and April in human history, hundreds of millions of us are itching to reboot the world and get schools, retail, and every other "non-essential" part of society up and running again. Before we can safely do that, though, we'll need an enormous increase in our ability to perform contact tracing—identifying and contacting everyone who's been in contact with a person infected with COVID-19 so that they in turn can hunker down in quarantine and avoid infecting others.

Contact tracing in a small or medium-size community is one thing, but doing it at scale is quite another. There are roughly 330 million people living in the United States, and reaching them all, even with a small army of trained contact tracers, is a challenge, to say the least. Scale, however, is one thing modern technology excels at, so Apple and Google have proposed a platform that would let everyone's smartphones become part of a massive national contact-tracing network.

Before the platform is even developed, though, it's showing two huge problems. First, billions of phones won't be able to use the tech. And second: even among those who could, a solid half of Americans would refuse to because they don't trust insurers or tech companies with their health data.

Enlarge / A bit like this, except for photons. (credit: Image Alliance/Getty Images)

Sometimes you can't seem to go a week without hearing new lidar news. This is disconcerting, as lidar was the desperation application for lasers for a very long time. If you had made a new pulsed laser and couldn't think what it might be good for, you figured out something that needed a measurement at distance and claimed your laser was useful for that application. At best, you'd give the laser to an atmospheric scientist and get them to measure the density of aerosols in the upper atmosphere.

OK, maybe that's a bit cynical, but for a very long time, lidar research was an unvisited backwater port on the sea of laser physics. But new research demonstrates how much this has changed: a new device that has wide applications and will probably make a huge impact in optical communications. Yet the device is being sold as great for lidar, which it may well be.

Lidar is hard

It wasn't that lidar was unattractive to engineers in the past. It's more that lidar was unwieldy. Lasers were big, the pulse durations were too long, the collection optics to get the signals were large, the electronics were simple... but big. Lidar instruments were delicate. The idea of putting an expensive and breakable device in the grille of a nitrous-injected Honda Civic, driven by a hormonal boy racer, probably didn't thrill many engineers.

Enlarge / A vial of the drug Remdesivir destined for a clinical trial. (credit: ULRICH PERREY/Getty Images)

Update, 5:40pm ET, April 29: Additional data on remdesivir's effects from a separate study are described below the original article.

Today, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced the first potential treatment for COVID-19 had emerged from a randomized clinical trial sponsored in part by the National Institutes of Health. The drug, remdesivir, significantly shortened the recovery time for patients with COVID-19, triggering an ethical clause that allowed the placebo group to receive the real drug. Unfortunately, that cut the trial short before a significant effect on mortality was clear.

Fauci made the announcement while speaking to the press with President Donald Trump in the White House.

Enlarge (credit: Google Meet)

Google Meet, Google's newest video chat service, will soon be free for everyone. The service, which was previously locked behind G Suite, is opening up to anyone with a Google account.

Users will be able to access the service at meet.google.com or through the iOS and Android apps. While the service is free now, it won't be free forever. Google says that, after September 30, meetings will be limited to 60 minutes.

If you've never heard of "Google Meet" before, don't feel bad. The branding only popped up earlier this month, when Google quietly renamed "Google Hangouts Meet" to "Google Meet." Hangouts Meet is something we've written about before, and it launched in 2017 as a reboot to Google's enterprise messaging suite, which consisted of Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat. Both of these 2017 enterprise "Hangouts" products have no relation to the widely used, consumer-focused "Google Hangouts" chat app from 2013, which is still part of Gmail and was a default Android app for a long time. Google claims it wants to merge all the "Hangouts" products together, but you can never be sure what the future of Google's disorganized messaging strategy will hold.

Enlarge / Artist's conception of Square Enix temporarily casting the Trials of Mana demo back into the void. (credit: Square Enix)

Square Enix has removed the demo version of Trials of Mana from Steam after hackers found a workaround that used the demo to gain access to the full version of the game.

"Due to unforeseen circumstances, we need to temporarily take the Trials of Mana Demo on Steam offline, we hope to have it back up again very soon," Square Enix wrote on the game's Steam Community. "Please rest assured, all progress made by those who have downloaded and played the demo will remain and be carried over when it's back online."

The workaround, as described in message board posts around the Internet, required downloading a copy of the Steam files distributed with a legitimate copy of Trials of Mana. Those files usually wouldn't work if loaded onto a Steam account that hasn't purchased the game. But by copying over a couple of files found in the "Paks" directory, users could essentially trick Steam into loading the full game through the free demo version associated with their account (though some users reported problems loading the "extra" chapter at the end of the game when using this method).

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  Audi's vehicles have shown up in plenty of movies recently, but this RSQ e-tron concept car was designed just for Spies in Disguise. [credit: Audi ]

One of the more jarring things about movies for the last couple of decades, to me at least, has been the heavy product placement that comes with the price of admission. You know the sort of thing—a shot that needlessly lingers on a beer bottle's label or a car's badge before moving to the actual drama of a scene. Sure, it gets the product in front of the audiences' eyeballs, but it often ruins any suspension of disbelief that was going on at the time. But on Wednesday, Audi gave us a look at the other side of that equation by posting a Q&A with Kai Mensing, its head of international product placement.

Mensing has been in his role for a decade now, during which time we've seen Audis show up in, among other things, Transformers: Age of Extinction as well as several Marvel movies and (to my surprise, because I haven't seen them) the various Fifty Shades films.

But the car company has been helping movie makers with cars for a lot longer—Mensing points to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial as the first, which saw an Audi 5000 sedan share a little screen time with the brown wrinkly alien and his young costars. The company also provided a first-generation S8 sedan for what might have been the last truly good car chase movie—John Frankenheimer's Ronin. (Frankenheimer was a true petrolhead and director of 1966's Grand Prix, so the man knew how to film things on four wheels.)