Month: April 2020

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump (L), flanked by US Vice President Mike Pence, speaks during the daily briefing on the novel coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, in the Brady Briefing Room at the White House on April 9, 2020, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Jim Watson)

The US National Institutes of Health on Thursday began a clinical trial to treat adult COVID-19 patients with hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly promoted during the pandemic despite a lack of evidence for its effectiveness against the new coronavirus.

The trial is one of dozens underway to test the drug, which is currently used to treat malaria and rheumatoid conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. At this point it only has mixed, anecdotal evidence to support its use against COVID-19.

But that hasn’t stopped President Trump from repeatedly promoting it as a promising treatment and calling for its use. In tweets last month, Trump said that a combination treatment of hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin “have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” He followed the declaration saying he hoped they will “be put in use IMMEDIATELY.”

Enlarge / Popular myth associates creativity with the right side of the brain, but expert jazz musicians, like Pat Metheny, may actually rely more on the left side of the brain when improvising. (credit: Roberto Panucci/Corbis/Getty Images)

There's a popular myth that divides people into "left brain" and "right brain" categories, whereby the former are analytical and logical, while the latter are creative and innovative. The reality, of course, is much more complicated than that, and a new brain-imaging study of improvisational jazz guitarists is a useful case in point. Researchers at Drexel University found that while the right hemisphere is associated with creativity in fairly inexperienced jazz musicians, experts with high mastery of improvisational skills actually rely primarily on the left hemisphere of the brain. They described their results in a recent paper in the journal NeuroImage.

Co-author David Rosen is a musician and scientist who started playing the piano at age eight before picking up the bass guitar in high school. (Rosen's band, Nakama, has just released a new EP, for those looking to explore some new musical vibes while we're all under isolation orders.) Because improvisation—defined as "the spontaneous invention of melodic solo lines or accompaniment parts"—is a defining feature of jazz, Rosen thought it would provide an excellent opportunity to explore the brain's role not just in creativity, but more broadly in musical perception and expression.

"I think there are a lot of interesting questions to ask about [musical] perception, both for people who are listening to music and people who are performing music," Rosen told Ars. "The brain is the part that makes us most human and lets us feel those emotions. It's almost not possible to quantify the altered state we get into when we're performing or listening to the music we like the most and that means the most to us as individuals. Ultimately, we're trying to ask very focused scientific questions about pieces of what it means to share in that musical experience."

Enlarge / iOS 13 on an iPhone 11 Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

According 9to5Mac's analysis of an alleged leaked build of iOS 14, the next major release of Apple's mobile operating system for iPhones, iPads, and iPods will introduce a new API that will let developers offer some functionality of their apps to users who have not actually downloaded or installed those apps.

The publication says that Apple refers to the feature as "Clips" and that it is built off of the existing tools that allow users to navigate to app-specific content via QR codes. The idea seems to be that tapping an app-targeted link or scanning a QR code could bring up content in a temporary "floating card" of the app on the device that allows you to consume the content or perform some other app-related action.

Presently, using a link or code like that when you don't have the associated app installed opens it in Safari and sometimes directs you to the App Store to download the app before you can do anything with it. Now, a portion of the app could be downloaded "as an Over-The-Air package." Apple would provide the API to developers to determine which parts of the app should be accessible this way and to let developers implement this themselves using Apple's own tools.

Enlarge (credit: seksan Mongkhonkhamsao / Getty)

Testing is one of the most important tools for getting the coronavirus pandemic under control in the United States. More than 160,000 COVID-19 tests were performed in the US on Thursday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. But there's good reason to believe that there are still many people with the virus who have not been tested. More testing would help guide treatment and quarantine decisions and give government officials more data about the extent of the COVID-19 outbreak.

At the same time, a Nature investigation has revealed that a number of academic labs capable of performing COVID-19 tests are operating well below capacity. Nature's reporting suggests that incompatible IT systems are significant reasons for this mismatch.

Many hospitals are used to working with large commercial labs that have the software necessary to interface with a hospital's electronic health records and billing systems. When an academic lab shows up with the capacity to run tests but not the infrastructure to interface with hospital systems, hospitals are often reluctant to do business with them.

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  A selection of pro-democracy protest images being created and shared in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. [credit: Joshua Wong ]

Chinese online retailers are cracking down on third-party sales of imported copies of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The move comes as the game has become a popular virtual spot for anti-government protests amid coronavirus-induced lockdowns.

Reuters reports that popular gray market Chinese e-commerce sites Pinduoduo and Taobao have taken down all listings for Animal Crossing as of this morning. Chinese tech site Pingwest reports that the two retailers sent messages to their resellers late Thursday notifying them of the ban. The Chinese government hasn't issued a statement regarding the game, though a directive from government officials seems the most likely reason for the sudden move.

A licensed Chinese version of the Switch launched late last year through local partner Tencent after the lifting of an outright game console ban in 2015. That version of the system can currently play three Mario-themed games officially licensed for the Chinese market, as well as imported international Switch cartridges, but it can't access the system's online features.