Month: January 2021

Enlarge / President-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks January 07, 2021 in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Getty | Chip Somodevilla)

President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly planning to ditch the current Trump Administration policy of withholding half of all available COVID-19 doses to ensure that the requisite second doses are available, according to a report by CNN.

Instead, the incoming administration plans to release the full available supply to states and jurisdictions.

"The President-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible. He supports releasing available doses immediately and believes the government should stop holding back vaccine supply so we can get more shots in Americans' arms now," TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden's transition told CNN. "He will share additional details next week on how his administration will begin releasing available doses when he assumes office on January 20th."

Enlarge / President-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks January 07, 2021 in Wilmington, Delaware. (credit: Getty | Chip Somodevilla)

President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly planning to ditch the current Trump Administration policy of withholding half of all available COVID-19 doses to ensure that the requisite second doses are available, according to a report by CNN.

Instead, the incoming administration plans to release the full available supply to states and jurisdictions.

"The President-elect believes we must accelerate distribution of the vaccine while continuing to ensure the Americans who need it most get it as soon as possible. He supports releasing available doses immediately and believes the government should stop holding back vaccine supply so we can get more shots in Americans' arms now," TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for Biden's transition told CNN. "He will share additional details next week on how his administration will begin releasing available doses when he assumes office on January 20th."

Enlarge / Ajit Pai backs slowly away from President Trump. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he is dropping his plan to help President Trump impose a crackdown on social-media platforms and offered mild criticism of Trump's incitement of a mob that stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the election results.

In October, Pai backed Trump's proposal to limit the Section 230 legal protections for social-media websites that block or modify content posted by users. At the time, Pai said he would open an FCC rule-making process to declare that companies like Twitter and Facebook do not have "special immunity" for their content-moderation decisions. But Pai hasn't moved the proposal forward since Trump's election loss and has now stated in an interview that he won't finalize the plan.

"The status is that I do not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making [to reinterpret Section 230] at the FCC," Pai said in an interview published yesterday by Protocol. "The reason is, in part, because given the results of the election, there's simply not sufficient time to complete the administrative steps necessary in order to resolve the rule-making. Given that reality, I do not believe it's appropriate to move forward." Pai announced shortly after Trump's election loss that he will leave the FCC on January 20, President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration day.

Enlarge / The current Google Nest Hub.

A "sleep-tracking smart display" sounds like something you might come up with if you were pulling tech product buzzwords out of a hat, but that is the latest Google product rumor on the always-reliable 9to5Google. Earlier this week, a new Nest product hit the FCC with Project Soli onboard, and after some digging, 9to5's sources now say it's for a new Nest Hub smart display with sleep tracking. I guess the idea here is a bedside alarm clock that will scan you with radar waves while you sleep.

The Project Soli support revealed in the FCC filing is a tiny radar chip Google developed in-house for gesture sensing. The chip has been in development for at least six years now from Google's ATAP group and has yet to be commercially successful. The original promise was that Soli would be able to detect fine finger movements like the virtual tapping of a button or turning of a dial, but the commercial models have never approached this level of fidelity. Soli debuted on the Pixel 4, where it could only detect large hand movements, and it was enough of a failure that it didn't make it to the Pixel 5. The chip is currently in the new Nest thermostat, but it only replaces the old motion sensor and does not seem to provide any new capabilities or improved features.

Google's partners have pitched the idea of a Google Assistant smart display as a bedside alarm clock, most notably in the Lenovo Smart Clock, but Google itself has not made one. Some of Google's smart displays come with cameras for video calls and face ID, but it's easy to imagine consumers balking at putting a camera in the bedroom. Soli radar would let Google track user movements without seeing the gruesome details. Today Google smart displays and speakers use ultrasonic sonar for some basic presence detection, but it's possible Soli could provide greater fidelity.

The versatility that helped humans take over the world emerged very early in our evolutionary history, according to sediments and stone tools from Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Olduvai has provided some of the oldest known tools and fossils from our genus, Homo. A recent study lines that evidence up with environmental clues buried in the sediment. The results suggest that our early relatives were equipped to adapt to new environments by around 2 million years ago.

That seems to have been a key ability that allowed our relatives to go global. By 1.7 million years ago, an early human relative called Homo erectus had spread beyond Africa and throughout most of Asia, as far as Indonesia. They had reached western Europe by 1.2 million years ago. Along their travels, the hominins encountered environments very different from the ones their ancestors had evolved in, like the tropical forests of Indonesia and the arid steppes of central Asia.