Month: August 2020

Enlarge / Signage outside the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

In a mindboggling and dangerous move, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week quietly reversed its recommendation on COVID-19 testing for those exposed to the virus. Now, the CDC says that exposed but symptomless people do not need to be tested.

The change immediately alarmed and outraged public health and infectious disease experts. It is well established that SARS-CoV-2—the pandemic coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19—can cause completely asymptomatic infections in some and spread from other infected people before they develop symptoms (so-called "pre-symptomatic transmission"). In fact, some modeling studies have suggested that pre-symptomatic transmission may account for nearly half, or even more, of SARS-CoV-2 spread.

That information previously spurred the CDC to recommend testing for anyone that was known to have—or even suspected to have—close contact with an infected person (that is, be within six feet for 15 or more minutes).

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  The LG Wing. It has two screens. [credit: Android Authority ]

Well, you can't accuse LG of being afraid to try something new. LG's next phone is the completely wild-looking LG Wing, a dual-screen design that looks like it spins open into a "T" shape thanks to a rotating hinge. Android Authority scored a 10-second video of the device that provides solid proof that this crazy idea actually exists.

The first news of the Wing phone came from Korean site ETNews earlier this year, which reported an October launch date. The site only had a mockup of the device at the time, which now seems spot on. The report says the device has a 6.8-inch main display, a 4-inch secondary display with a nearly 1:1 aspect ratio, and a Snapdragon 765G SoC. That would give it the same display and SoC as the LG Velvet.

The top and bottom halves of the phone are the same size, so it looks like the idea here is that the phone should fold up into a normal smartphone shape. LG basically built this design before on a feature phone, the LG VX9400, which showed up as Tony Stark's first phone in 2008's Iron Man. 

Enlarge / The Nikola Two truck drives out on the stage at an April 2019 event. (credit: Megan Geuss)

Lidar startup Luminar is going public, the company announced on Monday. Instead of going with a traditional IPO, Luminar is jumping on the latest Wall Street fad: merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). Merging with a SPAC allows a startup to go public more quickly, with less paperwork and more certainty about the sale price. The deal gives Luminar, which only expects to sell about 100 lidar sensors this year, a post-money valuation of $3.4 billion.

It's the latest in a string of companies connected to the electric and self-driving car revolutions that have gone public using a SPAC. Most have found strong interest from investors.

In March, electric truck startup Nikola announced that it would go public with help from a SPAC. By the time the merger concluded three months later, Nikola's value had shot up seven-fold. It has since settled down to four times the initial sale value. That values Nikola—a company that has yet to deliver a single vehicle to customers—at $14 billion, about half the value of Ford.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Napster, the file-sharing business that devastated the music industry at the turn of the century, has been sold to UK technology company MelodyVR in a $70 million deal.

The acquisition from US company RealNetworks is the latest attempt to transform the famous tech boom brand, which was cofounded in 1999 by digital pioneer Sean Parker, who went on to be an early Facebook investor.

Having found fame as a website that allowed millions of people to share music illegally over the internet, Napster was shut down in 2001 before being resurrected as a streaming platform.