Month: May 2020

Enlarge / A bottle and pills of Hydroxychloroquine. US President Donald Trump announced May 18 he has been taking hydroxychloroquine for almost two weeks as a preventative measure against COVID-19. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

Two closely related anti-malarial drugs championed by President Donald Trump as promising treatments for COVID-19 appear to substantially increase the risks of death and heart complications in patients hospitalized from the disease.

That’s according to the largest study yet on the topic, which involved more than 96,000 hospitalized COVID-19 patients on six continents. The peer-reviewed study, appearing Friday in The Lancet, was led by Mandeep Mehra, a professor of medicine at Harvard.

The drugs studied included chloroquine and its analogue hydroxychloroquine, which are used to treat autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, as well as malaria. Early laboratory work suggested that they also have potent anti-viral properties. But small clinical studies looking into potential benefits for COVID-19 patients have largely provided mixed and inconclusive results to this point.

Enlarge / Warning sign outside a lab doing coronavirus testing. (credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Why do some people appear to handle a SARS-CoV-2 infection without developing symptoms, while it's fatal to others? Some factors, like age, have been easy to identify, but there's still a broad spectrum of responses among younger individuals that remains unexplained. Is there something with the patient, with the virus they're infected by, or both?

To try to learn more, a group of researchers in Shanghai did a basic characterization of over 300 patients with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections, sequencing the genome of the viruses they were infected by and looking through medical records to see what factors were correlated with outcomes. The results suggest that, at least at early stages of the pandemic, the virus itself made little difference. By contrast, the immune system's response to infection showed a strong correlation, supporting an idea that has already led to some drug trials.

It’s not all in the genes

The patient population included five asymptomatic individuals, 293 who were classified as having mild cases, 12 with severe symptoms, and 16 who needed critical care. The researchers obtained basic health information on all of them and managed to obtain the coronavirus genome from 112 of them.

Enlarge / The 1995 film Braveheart, starring Mel Gibson as the medieval Scottish knight Sir William Wallace, turns 25 this month. Archaeologists think they may have located the hidden fort he used during his battles against the English. (credit: Paramount Pictures)

William Wallace, the Scottish knight who emerged as a military leader during the First War of Scottish Independence in the late 13th century, has become a household name thanks to Mel Gibson's blockbuster film Braveheart, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Wallace's rebellion began with the murder of the High Sheriff of Lanark in May 1297, and he conducted several successful raids before achieving a stunning upset victory against English troops at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. He was particularly known for his strategic use of terrain, and legend holds that he conducted at least one raid from a hidden fort somewhere in the vicinity of Dumfriesshire.

There is mention of the fort in The New Statistical Account of Scotland (published between 1834 and 1845). It said the fort adjoined a glade called Torlinn, commanded "an extensive view of the south," and was protected on three sides by two branches of a steep ravine and a large ditch. In 1297, Wallace supposedly holed up in the fort with 16 men, "with whom he sallied forth to annoy the English garrison under Greystock and Sir Hugh of Moreland."

Now Forestry Journal has announced that archaeologists may have discovered the site of Wallace's hidden fort. Matt Ritchie is an archaeologist with Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), who has been working with an organization called Skyscape Survey to develop a drone-based method to conduct photogrammetric surveys. This involves using remote-controlled drones to take hundreds of photographs from the air, then stitching them together with the help of point-matching software.

Enlarge / Mark Zuckerberg demonstrates an Oculus Rift headset at a 2016 event. (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Facebook will become far more friendly to remote work, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a Thursday livestream to employees that was shared publicly.

"We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," Zuckerberg said. "I think that it's quite possible that over the next five to 10 years, about 50 percent of our people could be working remotely."

Right now, of course, far more than 50 percent of Facebook employees are working from home due to the pandemic. The company has told workers that they'll be free to work remotely through the end of 2020. But even after the COVID-19 threat subsides, Facebook will be more accepting of remote workers than it was before the pandemic.

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  Renders of the Galaxy Note 20. [credit: Xleaks7 x Pigtou ]

After launching the Galaxy S20 early in the year, the next big flagship for Samsung is the Galaxy Note 20, which is expected to launch in an online-only event sometime in August. For an early look at the phone, we have CAD-based renders from Pigtou and xleaks7.

The design is exactly what you would expect from Samsung: a device that is very close to the Galaxy S20 Ultra, but a bit more blocky. Xleaks7 warns the design isn't completely finalized yet, but the front design doesn't really change at all, with an all-screen front and a center camera hole punch in the top of the display. The back adopts the S20 Ultra's giant camera block design, with several lenses.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra talked a big talk with a "100x" camera zoom, but in reality, it only had a 5x optical zoom camera. It took cropping, AI upscaling, and a boatload of shameless marking hype to hit "100x." As you can probably imagine, turning a 5x zoom lens into 100x did not work very well, and if you got anywhere close to max zoom level, it turned your photos into unrecognizable mush. For the Note 20, the word from plugged-in Samsung leaker IceUniverse is that the 100x zoom will be axed from the Note 20. All the Android manufacturers pick from the same parts bins, and most companies with the same zoom camera setup as Samsung have only called it a "30x" zoom.

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  Stay six feet away, Ellie

Earlier this week, Twitter started rolling out a new feature to "a small % globally" of its users—namely, the ability to limit tweet replies to people tagged in the original tweet. That's nice for arranging more limited public conversations, but it also has an interesting side effect: if you don't tag anyone in your tweet, then absolutely no one can reply.

Some lucky Twitter users are already using this new feature for gimmicky jokes, tweeting out intentionally trolly messages with blocked replies and letting followers stew in their inability to answer back. But The Last of Us developer Naughty Dog seems to be using the feature for a more noble purpose: blocking the spread of spoilers for the upcoming The Last of Us Part II.

Ever since major plot spoilers for the game leaked onto the Internet via a debug build earlier this month, every one of Naughty Dog's social media posts has been bombarded with hundreds of trolls posting references to the footage. Yesterday's tweet from the company, sharing a promotional image for the game, avoided this fate simply because replies were not allowed by the system (as noted by the message "A conversation between @Naughty_Dog and people they mentioned in this Tweet" appearing at the bottom).