Month: June 2020

Enlarge / Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, wears a Washington Nationals protective mask after a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing in Washington DC on Tuesday, June 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The National Institutes of Health abruptly cut off funding to a long-standing, well-regarded research project on bat coronaviruses only after the White House specifically told it to do so, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Fauci made the revelation Tuesday at a Congressional hearing on the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is caused by a coronavirus that is genetically linked to those found in bats. Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) asked Fauci why the NIH abruptly canceled funding for the project, which specifically worked to understand the risk of bat coronaviruses jumping to humans and causing devastating disease.

Fauci responded to Veasey saying: “It was cancelled because the NIH was told to cancel it.”

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  Just a tiny amount of the $15 billion dollars YouTube made last year. [credit: Jericho / Ron Amadeo ]

In under six months, YouTube Music will be Google's one-and-only music service. Google Play Music is scheduled to shut down at the end of the year, leaving YouTube as Google's one-stop media brand. As part of this transition, YouTube Music recently added the last great Google Music feature to its lineup: music-library support. After an agonizingly slow rollout, this long-time Google Music user gave the service a whirl and is back to report: this is going to be a mess.

For those that aren't aware, the "Music Library" feature lets you bring your own purchased music to the service. Google Music launched with the feature back in 2011, which let you upload your MP3s and whatever else to Google's servers, and then you could stream or download them to your other devices. Google Music has its quirks, but it is a fantastic service for syncing your music collection across multiple devices, backing up your music, and putting your music into the Google Cast ecosystem for easy playback on a Google Home speaker or Android TV. YouTube's takeover of the service includes an easy one-click library-transfer feature, which works great. The problem with YouTube Music are the restrictive playback rules, which are a major downgrade from Google Music.

I could sit here and complain for days about YouTube Music's regressions, the maze-like UI, and the weird blending of random YouTube crap and my music collection. But what I really want to shout from the rooftops right now is this: YouTube Music doesn't respect people who purchase music. If you bought your music, uploaded it to YouTube Music, and expect to be treated like you own the music, this service is not for you. If you bought a Google Home smart speaker or any other Google Cast device, Google's public position right now is that you'll need to pay a monthly fee to cast to your speaker once Google Music shuts down.

Enlarge / The 2020 13-inch MacBook Pro running macOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)

When Apple announced its plans to transition the Mac to its own, ARM-based silicon and away from the x86 architecture used in Intel Macs, the company listed a plethora of tools for making sure as many applications survive the shift as possible. But while it's helpful that Apple is providing developer tools for adapting Intel Mac apps and virtualization tools for running the apps that won't make the move right away, there's one scenario Apple didn't talk about at all during its keynote: running Windows natively on a Mac.

Presently, Apple offers a tool in macOS called Boot Camp that facilitates the installation of Windows on another drive or partition, right from macOS. It includes drivers and other boons that make the process a lot simpler than it might be otherwise. Once users install Windows by this method, they're running it natively on the machine just like they would on a Windows laptop from Dell or Lenovo.

While virtualization via tools like Parallels or VMWare are usually sufficient for running most Windows apps under macOS, there are some edge cases when the Boot Camp approach is the only option. One of the most common: running Windows PC games, which tend to run more optimally under Windows than they do under macOS, no matter how well done the ports are. (This is, in part, because the games were built with Windows in mind, and it's also because Apple's macOS video drivers emphasize different priorities.)

Enlarge / The light-colored layers in this 3D printed block are much harder steel, while the dark layers in between are more ductile. (credit: Frank Vinken)

Damascus steel—and modern versions of the steelmaking technique—is generally synonymous with artisan forgework. In traditional Japanese sword-making, for example, the steel is repeatedly folded to produce hundreds or thousands of alternating layers, producing intricate patterns in the finished product. That’s not just for the visual effect—the layers alternate between hard-but-brittle and more flexible steel, combining for the best of both worlds.

A new study led by Philipp Kürnsteiner of the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research shows that it is possible to do something very similar with laser additive manufacturing—3D printed metals.

Traditional folded steels combined two steels that varied by carbon content and in their microscale structure, which is controlled by how quickly it cools (by quenching). In this case, the researchers were using a nickel-titanium-iron alloy steel that works well with these 3D printing techniques, in which metal powder is fed onto the work surface and heated with a laser.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Tesla)

On Wednesday, J.D. Power has just released its Initial Quality Survey for 2020. Conducted annually for the past 34 years, the survey queries buyers of new cars of that model year to find out what, if any, problems they encountered within the first 90 days of ownership. Each brand is then ranked on the number of problems it experienced per 100 vehicles (PP100).

2020 is the first year that Tesla has been included in the survey, and as readers of our recent story on Model Y problems might have guessed, things don't look great for the California-based electric car company. Meanwhile, things look very good indeed for Dodge, which shares the top spot with Kia.

According to J.D. Power's survey, Tesla's initial quality score is 250 PP100, a feat which makes even Audi and Land Rover seem reliable by comparison. Although to be entirely accurate, Tesla isn't officially ranked last, because the brand won't allow J.D. Power to survey its customers in 15 states where OEM permission is apparently required. "However, we were able to collect a large enough sample of surveys from owners in the other 35 states and, from that base, we calculated Tesla's score," said Doug Betts, president of the automotive division at J.D. Power.

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  This image shows Dragonship Endeavour approaching the International Space Station. [credit: NASA ]

After a flawless launch from Florida, the Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken docked with the International Space Station a little more than three weeks ago.

Before this flight of Dragonship Endeavour, one of the biggest questions engineers at NASA and SpaceX had concerned the durability of the spacecraft. The first Crew Dragon spacecraft launched on an uncrewed test flight, in 2019 and spent less than a week attached to the space station. NASA hoped this Dragon could last a few months in space.

In particular, the engineers were not sure how quickly Endeavour's solar panels would degrade and accordingly produce less power. Therefore, since the spacecraft docked to the station, it has been powered up once a week to test power output from the solar panels.

Enlarge / Spanish chef Jordi Roca prepares dishes at the "El Celler de Can Roca" restaurant in Girona on June 23, 2020, on the day it reopens after a national lockdown to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. (credit: JOSEP LAGO / Getty Images)

Countries like the United States have never really gotten the pandemic under control, while others, like Brazil, haven't even slowed the pace of infections. But elsewhere, many countries that took dramatic action to limit the spread of COVID-19 have seen the rate of infections plunge, leaving them with the issue of how to successfully emerge from the restrictions they put in place.

One of those countries is Spain, where infections have dropped from a peak of over 9,000 a day in late March to only about 300 a day at present. Two researchers based in Barcelona (Leonardo López and Xavier Rodó) decided to look at different ways Spain could have exited its restrictions while protecting future public health. After building their model, they set it loose on other countries, including the US. Their work lets us test what might happen if the immunity developed in those infected fades over time or the public's fear of the virus subsides after it's under control.

Lockdown vs. open up

How did Spain get cases in check? In part, by following the advice of public health experts. On March 29, it placed everyone in non-essential jobs on a strict lockdown. Two weeks later, with cases dropping, restrictions started being eased. But the easing was done cautiously, with a variety of restrictions being kept in place as cases continued to drop. López and Rodó were interested in looking at how this reopening could be handled in a way that most effectively limits future returns of widespread infections.