Month: June 2020

Enlarge (credit: LOUISA GOULIAMAKI)

On Monday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked its Emergency Use Authorization that allowed doctors to prescribe chloroquine and its derivatives to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections. The move came in response to a growing body of data indicating that the drugs had little to no impact on the progression of COVID-19 but retained all of its well-known side effects. But the politics behind these drugs, which have a user list that includes President Donald Trump, will probably continue to drive controversy long after this decision.

The FDA and the soap opera

US law allows the FDA to approve emergency use of therapies under a specific set of circumstances. In late March, with a few small, anecdotal studies suggesting that chloroquine derivatives could improve the prognosis for COVID-19 patients, the FDA determined that the potential benefits outweighed the known risks and granted the drugs an Emergency Use Authorization. This came after doctors had already started prescribing them off-label, leading to shortage of the drugs, which are normally used to treat malaria and autoimmune diseases.

Over time, however, supporting evidence failed to build, and the known side effects—which include the ability to trigger potentially fatal arrhythmias in susceptible patients—continued to be a problem. Responding to some fatal incidents, the FDA updated its Emergency Use Authorization to indicate that the drug should only be used in the context of a clinical trial or in hospitals, where care is available to immediately identify and treat any issues caused by the drugs' side effects.

Enlarge / Demonstrators gather to protest the killing of George Floyd on May 29, 2020 in Detroit, Michigan—one of the cities where advocates and political action groups have been using phone location data to reach protesters after the crowds go home. (credit: Matthew Hatcher | Getty Images )

It's no secret that police and other law enforcement agencies have a history of using mobile phone location and other data to target or investigate individuals, and the wave of mass protests in support of black communities and against police brutality this month has provided a rich data trove for them to probe. As it turns out, cops aren't the only ones diving into the data to follow demonstrators after the streets are clear.

Political advocacy and voter-registration groups are reaping the bounty of location data tied to protests, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The groups use geofencing to contact those who were at protests—basically, reaching out to every device that was in a certain area at a certain time, without specifically identifying the individual. In this case, activists reach out with political messages.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Because of the lag between infection and the onset of symptoms, people can contract the SARS-CoV-2 virus and then pass it on, potentially to many others, before they know they're infected and have to isolate. So being able to identify and warn individuals who have been exposed to an infected person—known as contact tracing—is widely acknowledged to be a vital part of any effective strategy to beat COVID-19. Which is why it is extremely dismaying to see survey data that says fewer than 3 in 10 Americans intend to use contact-tracing apps to allow that to happen.

The data was gathered from an online survey of just over 2,000 people in the United States, collected on June 1 by polling company Opinion Matters on behalf of the security company Avira. When asked if they planned to download a contact-tracing app, an overwhelming majority—71 percent—answered no. Not only is that bad, it appears to be a deterioration from earlier this year; in April, we covered a poll that found 1 in 2 Americans would probably or definitely not use a contact-tracing app.

Most of the resistance to downloading a contact-tracing app came from people over the age of 55. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show that people aged 55 and over account for almost 80 percent of US COVID-19 deaths to date.

If you died in Europe 35,000 to 25,000 years ago, you’d probably be buried with parts of your body painted with red ochre and bedecked with beads, carved figurines, and other items. Depending on your social standing, you might have just a little body art, or someone might have taken the time to paint your whole body red; you might be buried with just a few beads or with thousands.

But people in at least one part of southwestern France laid their dead to rest in abandoned bear nests in the deepest recesses of a cave—and then returned once the bodies had decomposed to carefully arrange the bones and take away the skulls.

Both a gallery and a tomb

Bears used to make their homes in Grotte de Cussac, a karst cave in southwestern France. They left behind tracks on the floor, claw marks on the walls, and bear-sized depressions in the cave floor where they’d made their hibernation nests. (Pro tip: if you rent to bears, get a very large deposit.) But the bears left “long before any human incursions,” wrote University of Bordeaux archaeologist Sacha Kacki and his colleagues. Traces of human activity in the cave—footprints, torch marks, artwork, and carefully arranged skeletons—lie on top of the bear traces, and not the other way around.

Enlarge / FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly speaks during an FCC meeting in Washington, DC, on November 16, 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

President Trump has some convincing to do in order to get his social media crackdown through the Federal Communications Commission.

Michael O'Rielly, part of the FCC's 3-2 Republican majority, says he has doubts about whether the FCC has authority to implement Trump's order regarding Twitter and other online platforms. With Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr having enthusiastically endorsed Trump's executive order and Democrats opposed to it, the views of O'Rielly and Chairman Ajit Pai will play a big role in determining the outcome.

O'Rielly discussed the topic on C-SPAN last week, saying he won't take a position until he has researched the topic more thoroughly. "I haven't taken a position because I have to do my homework," O'Rielly said, adding that he has "deep reservations" that the FCC has authority to act as Trump directed.

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  The new experiment: after loading, Chrome shows only the domain name. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

It looks like Google is trying to mess with the URL bar again. As spotted by Android Police, new flags in the developer versions of the popular browser now want to hide the URL path. So for an article like this one, instead of "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/new-chrome-experiment-hides-the-url-path-in-the-address-bar," the address bar would show "arstechnica.com."

For now, the feature isn't on by default. You have to have the developer versions of Chrome and need to dig into chrome://flags to enable the feature, which is called "Omnibox UI Hide Steady-State URL Path, Query, and Ref." Everything in Chrome://flags is an experiment, but most Chrome changes land here first before they are rolled out to stable versions.

With main flag on, the full URL appears while the page is loading and then simplifies to only the domain name once loading is finished. Clicking on the address bar will display the full URL, as will switching tabs. A second flag lets you tweak the behavior so that the full URL appears when hovering over the address bar.