Month: May 2020

Enlarge / Medical workers take swab samples from residents (L) to be tested for the COVID-19 coronavirus, in a street in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on May 15, 2020. - Authorities in the pandemic ground zero of Wuhan have ordered mass COVID-19 testing for all 11 million residents after a new cluster of cases emerged over the weekend. (credit: Getty | STR)

Chinese officials have begun an unprecedented attempt to test 11 million people for COVID-19 in just 10 days.

Plans for the gargantuan feat came about earlier this week after officials in Wuhan—the capital city of China’s central Hubei province where the pandemic first began in January—identified a cluster of six new cases over the past weekend. The cluster included an 89-year-old symptomatic man and five asymptomatic cases, all of which lived in the same residential community.

The six cases were the first detection of new infections in more than a month in the hard-hit city—and government officials aren’t taking any chances when it comes to thwarting a dreaded second wave of infections. They quickly announced a plan to test all residents of the city, which number roughly 11 million.

Enlarge / Ironically, their logo is static, not animated. (credit: Giphy)

Seven years ago, Facebook claimed not to support the 21st century's new favorite communication tool, the animated GIF. Oh, how times have changed: Today, Facebook's newest acquisition is one of the Internet's most popular GIF hosting sites.

Facebook is making Giphy part of the Instagram team, the company said today. Axios, which was first to report the transaction, said the deal was valued at about $400 million.

According to Facebook, about half of Giphy's current traffic already comes from Facebook products, especially Instagram. That's perhaps unsurprising, given that Facebook's big three apps—WhatsApp, Instagram, and flagship Facebook—have literally billions of daily users among them.

Enlarge / Eye Oh Ess. (credit: Aurch Lawson)

A lot of people pronounce common tech terms wrong, from iOS to SQL to Qi. It's understandable: Some of the proper or official pronunciations of these terms are counterintuitive at best. Still, we think it's time to clear the air on a few of them.

It's something of a trope on tech sites to run vocabulary lists with definitions for common terms, and that makes sense. Reviewers addressing general audiences will often have to define their terms, as not everyone is as thoroughly immersed as they are.

But it's less common to see effort put into clarifying pronunciation, as differences on this front go well beyond the classic, written-about-to-death, hard-versus-soft-G GIF debate. To that end, we're going to go over a few commonly disputed pronunciations and ask Ars readers to share your insights, as well as any additional examples you think are worth discussing.

Enlarge (credit: Epic Games)

As longtime users of every PC gaming storefront imaginable, we have opinions about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Epic Games Store. High on our list of "good" is its frequent offers of free and heavily discounted games, and this week's new Mega Sale, going until June 11, is its biggest yet. (It's been met by a giveaway of Grand Theft Auto V, valid until May 21.)

Epic also announced plans this week to roll out a comprehensive, platform-agnostic toolset for game makers, complete with useful developer resources like cross-platform matchmaking tools and achievement systems—which will even work on PC ecosystems like Steam. While we're still waiting to see that whole system bear fruit—particularly in terms of achievements and friend lists, which still lag behind Steam's comparable services—we're hopeful that EGS might finally stand toe-to-toe with Steam in the near future, in terms of average features offered in a given game.

With that in mind, I've taken a moment to pluck out the most interesting discounts in this week's aggressive Mega Sale, along with notes about whether the EGS difference is worth the savings. Each entry includes a guess about if/when each game might eventually land on Steam, which is never guaranteed. EGS exclusivity agreements with game publishers typically expire after a year.

Enlarge (credit: Daxis)

The US electrical grid is in the middle of a remarkable streak that is partly the story of the rise of renewables, partly the decline of coal, and partly the pervasive repercussions of COVID-19. And the US Energy Information Administration’s latest projections suggest it’s more than just a spring curiosity.

According to the EIA’s daily data summaries, wind, solar, and hydroelectric power plants have combined to produce more electricity than coal every single day since March 24. (These numbers don’t include rooftop solar generation, but its inclusion certainly wouldn't change the streak.) Natural gas remains the largest source of generation, while nuclear’s contribution was similar to renewables.

Here's EIA's daily stats for utility generation on May 11. (credit: US EIA)

Renewable generation ticked upward over this time period while coal plants were dialed down. April also typically sees low demand for electricity, and the pandemic has decreased demand even more. But EIA’s latest “Short-Term Energy Outlook” projects that renewables will out-produce coal for 2020 as a whole—a first. They also expect that coal will bounce back very slightly in 2021 but at the expense of natural gas production, as slowed US gas production is expected to drive its price up. But even with a bit more coal use, the projection has renewables topping coal next year, too.