Month: May 2020

Enlarge / These pale corals were bleached by high temperatures. (credit: CSIRO)

The outlook for coral reefs in our warming world is truly dismal. The latest IPCC report stated that more than 99 percent of coral reefs will likely be lost if the world warms by 2°C—a level we are still on track to exceed. The Great Barrier Reef has given us a preview of this future in recent years, with bleaching due to marine heatwaves in 2016, 2017, and 2020.

Claims about small-scale conservation steps like artificial reef habitat creation or coral-safe sunscreen lotion frequently appear with descriptions ranging from hopeful to breathless. But the reality is that these things are dwarfed in importance by the real problem—climate change.

Still, a team led by CSIRO’s Patrick Buerger wondered if there might be a way to help, at least to some extent, by raising heat-tolerant strains of the corals’ symbionts. And the good news is that there may be.

Enlarge / Members of the National Assembly (France's legislature) meeting on May 12, amid slowly easing COVID-19 restrictions. (credit: Gonzalo Fuentes | Pool | AFP | Getty Images)

Lawmakers in France this week passed a controversial new law that could impose billions in fines on social media companies that fail to delete certain kinds of content quickly enough—within an hour, in some cases.

The new legislation (page in French) gives online platforms 24 hours from notification to remove certain kinds of content or else face fines.

Content subject to enforcement under the law includes: sexual harassment; child pornography; anything that promotes certain crimes; anything that promotes discrimination, hate, or violence; anything that denies crimes against humanity; and promotion of terrorism. The window for removing content related to child pornography or terrorism is shorter, only one hour.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a great discount on Anker's PowerCore 10000 PD Redux, which is currently down to $24.65 on Amazon. While we've seen this portable battery drop to $30 on a couple occasions, today's deal brings it down to a new all-time low. We usually see it priced in the $40 to $45 range online.

We recommended the PowerCore 10000 PD Redux in our guide to the best iPhone and iPad accessories and our most recent travel tech gift guide. While there are countless power banks that can get the job done, we like this particular Anker battery for packing a fast-charging USB-C Power Delivery port in a supremely portable design. The device measures just 4.2x2.05x1-inches and weighs a scant 0.4 pounds, making it noticeably smaller (albeit thicker) than most modern smartphones and easy to pop into a handbag or jacket pocket if need be.

The battery's USB-C port puts out 18W of power, which is enough to charge iPhones and many Android phones at maximum speeds, and there's an additional USB-A port for refilling a second device simultaneously. Its 10,000mAh (36Wh) capacity is enough to get two full charges out of most phones, while a handy quartet of LEDs lets you know how much power you have left. Anker covers the whole thing with a decent 18-month warranty and includes a USB-C-to-USB-C cable in the box.

After last week's somewhat blasé showcase of in-development Xbox Series X software, our expectations for the coming generation of new game consoles were somewhat tempered. But those expectations got a significant boost this week with Epic Games' unveiling of a jaw-dropping real-time demo of its Unreal Engine 5 technology.

The engine, which Epic says will launch next year, was shown running on PlayStation 5 development hardware, though the company said the same general level of fidelity should be possible on the Xbox Series X and high-end PCs as well. And it shows how the state-of-the-art in graphical quality on those platforms is quickly advancing past resolution and frame rate counts and toward new levels of lighting and modeling detail.

Lighting

The first pillar of Epic's new engine is what it's calling the Lumen system, a "fully dynamic global illumination solution that immediately reacts to scene and light changes."

Enlarge / Vials of measles vaccine at the Orange County Health Department on May 6, 2019 in Orlando, Florida. (credit: Paul Hennessy/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Last year, the United States reported the greatest number of measles cases since 1992. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 1,282 individual cases of measles in 31 states in 2019, and the majority were among people who were not vaccinated against measles. It was yet another example of how the proliferation of anti-vaccine messaging has put public health at risk, and the COVID-19 pandemic is only intensifying the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

But there may be hope: researchers have developed a "map" of how distrust in health expertise spreads through social networks, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature. Such a map could help public health advocates better target their messaging efforts.

Neil Johnson is a physicist at George Washington University, where he heads the Complexity and Data Science initiative, specializing in combining "cross-disciplinary fundamental research with data science to attack complex real-world problems." For instance, last year, the initiative published a study in Nature mapping how clusters of hate groups interconnect to spread narratives and attract new recruits. They found that the key to the resilience of online hate is that the networks spread across multiple social media platforms, countries, and languages.

• 

  The Huawei P30 Lite, now with a new hat (and more RAM). [credit: Huawei ]

Huawei is still struggling to cope with the Trump administration's US export ban, which blocks US companies from doing business with the Chinese company. While Huawei can be pretty independent as far as hardware goes, the loss of Google's software is basically going to kill Huawei's phone business outside of China. The company is already expecting a 20-percent drop in phone sales in 2020, and thanks to the yearly lifecycle of smartphones, a lot of Google/Huawei phones are still on the market, so we're seeing only the beginning of the effects of the export ban.

Huawei is doing its best to delay the effects of the export ban, though, and lately, it seems to have come up with a new loophole to keep shipping the Google apps: re-release old smartphones. The way the export ban has worked in practice is that Huawei devices that launched before the export ban (and some that launched even slightly after) can still be sold with Google apps. Devices that launched well after the ban, like the Mate 30 Pro, are stuck without the Google apps. So Huawei's solution, and its interpretation of the law, is that re-releases of old devices can still ship with Google apps.

So meet the "New Editions" of old Huawei phones. This week, the company announced that the Huawei P30 Pro would be returning as the "Huawei P30 Pro New Edition," and earlier this year it re-launched the P30 Lite as the "P30 Lite New Edition." Both of these phones are from March 2019, so they're well over a year old now, but they both have Google app licenses, so welcome back!