Month: May 2021

Enlarge / Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaks during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing in Washington, DC on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is undergoing a shake-up amid criticism over its guidance for fully vaccinated adults, according to reporting by Politico. So far, two high-profile officials have announced their departure from the agency during the ongoing changes.

On May 7, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s top respiratory disease scientist who helped lead the agency’s response to the pandemic, announced her resignation effective May 14. Messonnier announced her departure just two weeks after new CDC director Rochelle Walensky restructured the CDC’s COVID-19 vaccine task force, which Messonnier had headed.

According to Politico, the restructuring meant Messonnier, who had been operating semi-autonomously, would now have to report to CDC’s incident response team overseen by Henry Walke, director of the agency’s Division of Preparedness and Emerging Infections. (Dr. Walke, in turn, reports to Walensky.) Amid the change, Messonnier took an “unplanned vacation” from the agency before announcing her resignation.

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  Congratulations! It's a bouncing, baby gaming console! [credit: Nintendo ]

In the last year, Nintendo sold roughly 5.8 million Switch units to households that already had at least one Switch. That's according to a recently translated investor Q&A in which Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa said that "household demand for multiple systems accounted for roughly 20% of [28.83 million] unit sales of the Nintendo Switch family of systems" for the fiscal year ending March 31.

While Nintendo said in 2019 that "some households have already purchased multiple consoles," this is our first concrete look into just how much multi-Switch households are contributing to the Switch's sales, which now amount to over 85 million units over the system's lifetime. And Furukawa thinks the trend of multi-Switch households is only set to increase.

"Going forward, we expect demand for multiple systems per household will increase even as hardware unit sales grow," he said. "By region, significant sales growth is continuing in Asia, and we believe there is still room for sufficient growth of new demand in Europe and the United States, considering the sizes of those populations. To this end, we must thoroughly convey the appeal of existing titles and future titles to consumers."

Enlarge / The red trinitite sample that contained the quasicrystal. It was formed in the aftermath of the first nuclear detonation in 1945—the famous Trinity Test at the Alamorgordo Bombing Range in New Mexico. (credit: Luca Bindi and Paul J. Steinhardt)

The detonation of the first atomic bomb during the 1945 Trinity Test produced temperatures and pressures so extreme that the surrounding sand fused into a glassy material called trinitite. Physicists have now discovered a rare material known as a quasicrystal in one of the trinitite samples. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that makes the discovery the oldest anthropogenic quasicrystal yet known.

The very definition of a crystal assumes a precisely symmetrical ordering of atoms in periodic patterns that repeat over and over in a 3D lattice. The patterns look the same no matter which direction you look at them, but quasicrystals are different. They clearly follow mathematical rules, but each cell has a slightly different configuration of cells nearby rather than repeating in an identical pattern. It's that unique structure that gives quasicrystals their unusual properties.

Think about tiling a bathroom floor. The tiles can only be in certain symmetrical shapes (triangles, squares, or hexagons); otherwise, you wouldn't be able to fit them together without leaving gaps or overlapping tiles. Pentagons, icosahedrons, and similar shapes with different symmetries that never precisely repeat just won’t work—except in the case of quasicrystals, where nature decided they could work. The trick is to fill the gaps with other kinds of atomic shapes to create the unlikely aperiodic structure.

Enlarge / Wear OS: It's coming back. (credit: Google)

Wear OS has been neglected for far too long. Google has been dead in the smartwatch space, and Samsung can't get a decent app ecosystem together with its smartwatches based on Tizen. The two companies, along with Fitbit (which was recently acquired by Google), are teaming up. Google says it is building "a unified platform, jointly with Samsung" that will combine "the best of Wear OS and Tizen." The new platform has been quietly renamed "Wear," dropping the "OS" suffix.

This announcement was just a tease, with no screenshots of the new OS other than a look at a few things made with the existing Wear OS "Tiles" API. So it's not clear what we're getting here. We do have some quotes, though. Executives from Google, Samsung, and Fitbit commandeered the stream to talk about their parts in all of this.

Samsung says it is bringing the best of Tizen (is there a best of Tizen?), but really what we're interested in—as usual—is the company's hardware. Samsung says the next version of Wear will run on "the next Samsung Galaxy Watch," presumably the Galaxy Watch 4. Samsung will also be bringing its Exynos system on a chip along for the ride, which means Wear OS will finally break free of Qualcomm's halfhearted wearables support. Samsung isn't great at competing with Qualcomm when it comes to smartphone SoCs, but it does turn in competent smartwatch SoCs that improve year over year, which is more than Qualcomm has been willing to dedicate to wearables.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images )

Verizon and other Internet service providers are preventing some low-income customers from getting new $50-per-month government subsidies unless they switch to different plans that are sometimes more expensive.

Over 825 ISPs nationwide are selling plans eligible for the new subsidies that the US government made available to people who have low incomes or who lost income during the pandemic. Verizon stands out among big ISPs in its use of the subsidy to "upsell" customers to pricier plans, according to a story yesterday by Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler.

"Soon after the EBB [Emergency broadband Benefit program] launched, I started hearing from Washington Post readers about their frustrations signing up with certain ISPs," he wrote. "Verizon elicited the most ire from readers."