Month: May 2020

Enlarge / 5G, Rocket House, Pew-Pew! Does it make sense? No. Does it channel the usual breathless 5G marketing materials? Yes. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Telecomm analytics firm OpenSignal released a report last week analyzing the connection experience of 5G users across the world, on ten different providers. Unfortunately—and typically for 5G—the source data is so muddled that it's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from the results.

In the USA, Verizon is the only carrier which has deployed a significant millimeter-wave (5G FR2, various bands from 24GHz to 40GHz) network—and in fact, at the moment Verizon is only deploying 5G FR2, which is why their average 5G download speed bar leaps off the chart, at 506Mbps. 5G is a protocol, not a wavelength—and the extreme high speeds and low latencies carriers and OEM vendors promote so heavily come with the high-frequency, short-wavelength FR2 spectrum, not with the protocol itself.

The other carriers in the chart are deploying 5G in the FR1 range—the same frequencies already in use for 2G, 3G, and 4G connections. FR1 spectrum runs between 600MHz and 4.7GHz, and is further commonly split informally as "low band"—1GHz and less, with excellent range but poor throughput and latency—and "mid band", from 1GHz to 6GHz, with improved throughput and latency, but less range.

Enlarge / Let's start with something nice... check the orange popping out of this April 14 satellite image of the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve. (credit: NASA EO)

On Friday, NOAA released its latest seasonal weather outlook for the US, which followed an updated hurricane season outlook. As always, the seasonal outlook starts with a look back at the previous month.

April 2020 was the 2^nd warmest April on record globally, but a southward meander of the jet stream over Canada and the eastern US made this region of North America the exception. For the contiguous US, April was slightly below the average going back to 1895. Precipitation was similarly just below average, but a few states including Colorado and Nebraska had an extremely dry April, while the Virginias and Georgia were extremely wet.

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  This was the 2nd warmest April on record, globally. [credit: NOAA ]

If you live around the Midwest or Plains states, you won’t be surprised to hear that recent weeks have not been particularly warm. That’s because mid-April saw a hard freeze come through, with another freeze in the second week of May. While the April freeze wasn’t really late compared to the long-term averages, it followed a warm spring that caused vegetation to pop up early in many places—only to be bitten by a frost.

The diagnostic spinner in action. (credit: Yoon-Kyoung Cho (Nature )

Urinary tract infections have been called the “canary in the coal mine” of global antibiotic resistance. With more than half of all women having a UTI in their lifetime and men increasing in susceptibility as they age, UTIs are one of the most common bacterial infections in the world.

Because it’s not always possible to check for a bacterial infection in a urine sample, patients are often given antibiotics on the basis of symptoms alone—a practice that contributes to the growing resistance of many UTIs to the most common treatments.

We may be rescued by an unexpected hero: the fidget spinner. In a paper in Nature Biomedical Engineering this week, researchers in South Korea and India describe a new test for UTIs that needs nothing more than a couple of spins, by hand, of a spinner-like device. Its results—which can be read by anyone—are ready in around an hour.

Enlarge / Chances are, you and your loved ones might get into anxious quarantine moments like this one, shared between Sisko (Avery Brooks) and Quark (Armin Shimerman) in the DS9 season two episode "The Jem'Hadar." (credit: CBS / Getty Images)

As millions binge-watch Netflix and coop up indoors, virus-inspired films such as Outbreak and Contagion, as well as television shows like The CW’s Containment, have found new audiences for those looking to tackle pandemic-related anxiety. After all, research seems to show that seeking out forms of entertainment that scare us—a method of confronting fears in a safe environment—can be a coping mechanism against perceived threats.

When thinking about the above criteria, however, one not-so-scary show comes to mind as a fitting series to retread: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. That prompts a fair question: how does a '90s Star Trek spinoff about a space station in the 24th century relate to a coronavirus-driven pandemic in 2020?

Deep Space Nine turned the Star Trek paradigm upside-down when it debuted in 1993. Instead of going where no one has gone before, this show largely trapped its crew in a single place: aboard an isolated station located near the galaxy’s only stable wormhole, where any form of alien life—hopefully benign, though often scary and hostile—might suddenly appear and invade. Encountering never-before-seen threats was the norm, forcing the barebones senior staff and medical crew to solve problems they didn’t have either the skills or equipment for.