Month: May 2020

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

A significant difference between COVID-19 and past pandemics—even the 2009 outbreak of H1N1—has been the speed with which information on the disease has spread. Partly, that's down to social media, as platforms like Twitter have been embraced by scientists and doctors. But another major factor has been the rise of what we call a preprint—an academic research paper that's posted to a publicly accessible server in advance of it having gone through the traditional process of peer review. When unvetted science that makes bold claims goes straight to the public, that can cause problems, as illustrated by a recent preprint on coronavirus mutations covered by John Timmer earlier today.

How things used to work

The traditional way that scientists share their findings has been through peer-reviewed journals. A scientist—or more typically a team of scientists—conducts their research, writes up the results, and sends them to a journal that covers that particular field. (Or, if they want to make a bigger splash, a multidisciplinary publication like Nature or Science.) When the journal receives the paper, it sends copies out to be reviewed by (usually) three scientists that are also in the same field—peers of the authors. Those reviewers cast a highly critical eye upon the paper, looking for flaws in the methodology and analysis or other potential problems. Sometimes, they don't find any, and the paper sails through and shows up in print soon afterward.

More commonly, one or more reviewers will find something they deem objectionable or insufficient. Each reviewer sends the journal editor their thoughts, often with questions or suggestions to pass on to the authors. Those will typically need to be addressed before the editor will accept the research for publication. Sometimes these are helpful, although not always—many a scientist can tell tales of the mean and vindictive "reviewer 3" who keeps their graduate students and postdocs up at night.

Enlarge / Apparently, this is happening next month. (credit: Google)

The coronavirus pandemic has turned everyone's daily life upside down, and Google is no exception. Today the company is finally reflecting that reality in the Android 11 release schedule and delaying the first beta of Android 11, which was due out this month. Instead, Google is releasing a previously unscheduled "Preview 4" release of Android 11 today, and it's pushing the entire schedule back a month. The good news is that Google also announced a new online event, "Android 11: The Beta Launch Show," which will take place on June 3.

This month was supposed to have Google's biggest show of the year, Google I/O, on May 12, but that was completely canceled in March due to the pandemic, so the Beta event will serve as a stand-in. As part of the big show, we were supposed to get the first big "beta" release of Android, which usually comes with a lot of information on what Google has been working on all year. There have already been three (and counting today, four) "Preview" releases, but these are more like "alphas."

The beta releases are the next big step in Google's development process, and with that step comes wider phone support and easier installation. Lately, a big collection of third-party OEMs have jumped on board the beta program—basically everyone but Samsung—and curious users can install the beta themselves at Android.com/beta. Critically, the beta releases also let you go back to the stable release if you don't like them, while for the Preview releases, only phones with an unlocked bootloader can go backward to an older version.

Enlarge / Trump wore protective eyewear on his May 5 trip to a Honeywell N95 mask factory in Arizona, but not an actual mask. (credit: Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images)

The White House's coronavirus task force is shifting its focus away from emergency response and toward economic recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, even as the president openly acknowledges that the cost for easing restrictions affecting the US economy at this time may be paid in human lives.

Vice President Mike Pence told media on Tuesday that the task force managing the federal response to the novel coronavirus could be disbanded in the next month following "the tremendous progress we’ve made as a country." Today, however, President Donald Trump walked Pence's statement back—sort of.

Trump this morning claimed victory for the task force in a four-tweet thread. "Because of this success," he concluded, "the Task Force will continue on indefinitely with its focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN." The composition of the task force may now change "as appropriate," he added, with new members coming on board and old ones leaving, and will "also be very focused on Vaccines & Therapeutics."

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Early this week, with little warning, the Internet was graced with a Windows executable containing a fully playable PC port of Super Mario 64. Far from being just a usual emulated ROM, this self-contained program enables features like automatic scaling to any screen resolution, and players are already experimenting with adding simple graphics-card-level reshaders, including ray-tracing, as well.

The PC port—which was released with little buildup and almost no promotion—wasn't built from scratch in a modern game engine, in the manner of some other now-defunct Super Mario 64 porting projects. And its release has nothing to do with a recent leak of internal Nintendo files dating back to the Gamecube days.

Instead, the port seems to be a direct result of a years-long effort to decompile the Super Mario 64 ROM into parsable C code. This kind of reverse-engineering from raw binary to easy-to-read code isn't a simple process, but it's an effort that a growing community of hobbyist decompilers is undertaking to unlock the secrets behind some of their favorite games.