Month: May 2021

Enlarge / With new data, we're able to expand vaccinations to ever-younger populations. (credit: Roberto Jimenez Mejias / Getty Images)

On Wednesday, the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended that the CDC approve the use of the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for the 12- to 15-year age group. The decision comes two days after the FDA granted an emergency use authorization for the same age group and will help the US further limit the pool of people who can spread infections or foster the evolution of new viral variants. Formal CDC approval could come quickly, given recent history.

Given the FDA's earlier decision, the move might seem anticlimactic. But having the FDA and CDC officially on the same page is reassuring, and several state-run vaccination programs are awaiting the CDC's OK before expanding into that age group. Private providers and insurance companies were also varied in their response to the FDA's decision and were waiting for the CDC.

The data that supported the approval was pretty decisive, as a small Phase III clinical trial of 2,260 adolescents saw 16 cases of COVID-19, with every single one occurring in the placebo group. Side effects were similar to those experienced by older people, with a brief period of flu-like symptoms. The committee was tasked with considering whether the benefits outweighed the risks; given the minor side effects and the increasingly obvious benefits of vaccination, it's not a surprise that the vote in favor of approval by the committee was 14 in favor, none opposing, and a single recusal. The CDC director, Rochelle Walensky, is overwhelmingly likely to follow the committee's recommendation, most likely before the day is over. (We'll update this story if and when this occurs.)

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  This Echo Show 8 is handling a group video call. [credit: Amazon ]

Amazon launched hardware upgrades for its Echo Show 5 and Echo Show 8 products on Wednesday; the new versions have higher-resolution cameras and upgraded CPUs. There's also a new Echo Show 5 Kids, but the Echo Show 10 did not get a hardware refresh.

If you aren't familiar with the product line, the Echo Show is essentially an Amazon Echo smart speaker with a screen on it. The devices can be used as digital clocks, videoconferencing solutions, screens for Amazon Ring doorbells, and more—each Show device is basically an Alexa-controlled Fire HD tablet, with all the capabilities that implies.

Amazon points out the privacy controls on these devices, taking what certainly looks like a swipe at Google's competing Nest and Home devices:

Scientists at Brigham Young University (BYU) have created tiny 3D animations out of light. The animations pay homage to Star Trek and Star Wars with tiny versions of the USS Enterprise and a Klingon battle cruiser launching photon torpedoes, as well as miniature green and red light sabers with actual luminous beams. The animations are part of the scientists' ongoing "Princess Leia project"—so dubbed because it was partly inspired by the iconic moment in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope when R2D2 projects a recorded 3D image of Leia delivering a message to Obi-Wan Kenobi. The researchers described the latest advances on their so-called screenless volumetric display technologies in a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports.

"What you're seeing in the scenes we create is real; there is nothing computer generated about them," said co-author Dan Smalley, a professor of electrical engineering at BYU. "This is not like the movies, where the lightsabers or the photon torpedoes never really existed in physical space. These are real, and if you look at them from any angle, you will see them existing in that space."

The technology making this science fiction a potential reality is known as an optical trap display (OTD). These are not holograms; they're volumetric images, as they can be viewed from any angle as they seem to float in the air. A holographic display scatters light across a 2D surface, and microscopic interference patterns make the light look as if it is coming from objects in front of, or behind, the display surface. So with holograms, one must be looking at that surface to see the 3D image. In contrast, a volumetric display consists of scattering surfaces distributed throughout the same 3D space occupied by the resulting 3D image. That means when you look at the image, you are also viewing the scattered light.

Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar / Getty Images)

Xiaomi is no longer on the government's blocklist, according to a new court filing spotted by Reuters. On its way out the door on January 14, the Trump administration's Department of Defense declared Xiaomi a "Communist Chinese military company," but now with Joe Biden in charge, Xiaomi and the US government are burying the hatchet. According to Reuters, "The filing stated that the two parties would agree to resolve their ongoing litigation without further contest."

The DOD says the "Communist Chinese military company" list is meant to "highlight and counter the People's Republic of China's (PRC) Military-Civil Fusion development strategy," which the US government says funnels technology to China's army through "companies, universities, and research programs that appear to be civilian entities." This list isn't the all-out export ban that Huawei has been facing—that's the US Department of Commerce's "entity list." The military company list just bans US investment in the company.

Xiaomi called the ban "unconstitutional" and said it was "factually incorrect and has deprived the company of legal due process." The company added that the investment restrictions would cause "immediate and irreparable harm to Xiaomi." The first of the restrictions would have kicked in on March 15, 2021, (a ban on buying new shares of Xiaomi), but that was temporarily blocked by a federal judge, who called the government's ban process "deeply flawed." Eventually, the ban would have forced US investors to divest themselves of Xiaomi shares, which would have been a big problem for the company. Xiaomi had an IPO in 2018, and today three of the top 10 shareholders are US citizens.

Enlarge / An artist's schematic of the system. (credit: Nature)

Elon Musk's Neuralink has been making waves on the technology side of neural implants, but it hasn't yet shown how we might actually use implants. For now, demonstrating the promise of implants remains in the hands of the academic community.

This week, the academic community provided a rather impressive example of the promise of neural implants. Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand.

Dreaming is doing

Previous attempts at providing typing capabilities to paralyzed people via implants have involved giving subjects a virtual keyboard and letting them maneuver a cursor with their mind. The process is effective but slow, and it requires the user's full attention, as the subject has to track the progress of the cursor and determine when to perform the equivalent of a key press. It also requires the user to spend the time to learn how to control the system.