Month: June 2021

Enlarge / A UNLV Medicine medical assistant administers a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccination to a UNLV School of Nursing student. (credit: Getty | Ethan Miller)

Even mild cases of COVID-19 in young people often lead to lingering symptoms and health complications that drag on for six months or longer, according to a small Norwegian study published this week in Nature Medicine.

Researchers at the University of Bergen carefully followed 312 people with confirmed cases of COVID-19 for at least six months. Of those, 247 had mild to moderate illnesses and isolated at home, never becoming sick enough to be admitted to a hospital. Six months after testing positive, 136 of the 247 (55 percent) still had lingering symptoms. And those 136 weren’t only in the older age groups. In fact, in all the age groups between 16 and over 60 years old, between 50 percent and 60 percent of COVID patients reported persistent symptoms.

For instance, of those between 16 and 30 years old, 52 percent (32 of 61) still suffered COVID-19 symptoms after six months. The most common symptoms were disturbed taste and/or smell, fatigue, difficulty breathing, difficulty concentrating, and memory problems.

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  Simu Liu as Shang-Chi, a skilled martial artist who was trained at a young age to be an assassin by his father Wenwu (Tony Leung). [credit: YouTube/Marvel Studios ]

Marvel's official trailer for Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is here to give us a bit more of the title character's backstory. The trailer also serves up glimpses of classic villains the Mandarin and Abomination and a supporting (yet crucial) character from 2016's Doctor Strange.

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is the first Marvel film to feature an Asian lead—Simu Liu, best known for his role as Jung Kim on the sitcom Kim's Convenience—as well as a predominantly Asian/Asian diaspora cast and crew. Marvel continues to keep plot details tightly under wraps, except to say that the main character gets drawn into the clandestine Ten Rings organization and must confront his past. "Shang-Chi’s main problem in his life is rooted in not knowing who he really is," Cretton has said. "He has to learn how to own every part of himself. If he doesn’t allow himself to look at all of it—the good, the bad, the light, and the dark—and to own it all, he won’t be able to reach his full potential."

The "ten rings" of the title refers to the Marvel Comics supervillain Mandarin's Ten Rings of Power (worn on the fingers in the comics and shown as arm bracelets in footage from the Marvel film), each with a different powers: ice blasts, flames, or mind-control, for instance. As we've reported previously, Marvel created an entirely new character, Wenwu, who has gone by many names over the years, including the Mandarin, who made an appearance in Iron Man 3—or rather, Ben Kingsley played Trevor Slattery, an imposter posing as the Mandarin.

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  Little Android guy? How did you get in there? [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Microsoft's Windows 11 announcement surprised us with the news that the upcoming OS will run Android apps alongside Windows apps. Unfortunately, the keynote was light on details. Will these apps use emulation? Will Windows' existing Linux support be involved? We got our answers shortly after the keynote, thanks to a follow-up developer talk that went into some details.

The feature is officially called the "Windows Subsystem for Android," which should tell you a lot about how it works. Windows currently has a "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL), which uses a subset of the Hyper-V functionality to run Linux apps on a real Linux kernel alongside your Windows apps. (Hyper-V lets a second guest OS access the bare metal hardware instead of running on top of the host OS with less access to resources.) Real Android phones use the Linux kernel, and Microsoft is building an Android framework on top of WSL for the Windows Subsystem for Android. It sounds like we're essentially getting x86 Android running on Hyper-V.

Android apps under Windows should feel just like native Windows apps, with a top-level window, taskbar entry, and the ability to be pinned to the start menu. During its presentation, Microsoft said, "Behind the scenes, we actually create a proxy native app that handles the bridge between the Android app model and the Windows app model." Presumably, that means the system will provide things like a start menu shortcut, icons, entries in the app uninstall lists, and other minor Windows wrappings that will make the app feel native.

Enlarge / President Joe Biden delivers remarks on the Senate's bipartisan infrastructure deal at the White House on June 24, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

President Joe Biden announced a $65 billion broadband-deployment deal Thursday with Senate Republicans and Democrats, but he provided no details on whether the plan will prioritize municipal broadband networks as the president originally proposed.

Congressional Republicans have tried to ban municipal broadband nationwide, so it's highly unlikely that they would have agreed to Biden's stated goal of giving public networks priority over private ISPs in the next big round of government subsidies. Biden in March proposed $100 billion for broadband over eight years and a provision to prioritize "support for broadband networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives—providers with less pressure to turn profits and with a commitment to serving entire communities."

Eleven Senate Republicans, nine Democrats, and an independent who caucuses with Democrats agreed on the $65 billion broadband plan as part of a larger $1.2 trillion infrastructure framework. The fact sheet released by Biden provides no detail on how the funding will be distributed, but it says the $65 billion will pay for "universal broadband infrastructure."

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  Microsoft claims that "the new Windows is available on the widest array of devices," but the Internet had a minor panic attack when requirements were outlined yesterday. [credit: Microsoft ]

Since Microsoft's announcement of Windows 11 yesterday, one concern has reverberated around the Web more loudly than any other—what's this about a Trusted Platform Module requirement?

Windows 11 is the first Windows version to require a TPM, and most self-built PCs (and cheaper, home-targeted OEM PCs) don't have a TPM module on board. Although this requirement is a bit of a mess, it's not as onerous as millions of people have assumed. We'll walk you through all of Windows 11's announced requirements, including TPM—and make sure to note when all this is likely to be a problem.

General hardware requirements

Although Windows 11 does bump general hardware requirements up some from Windows 10's extremely lenient minimums, it will still be challenging to find a PC that doesn't meet most of these specifications. Here's the list:

Enlarge (credit: Chalongrat Chuvaree | Getty Images)

For years, security researchers and cybercriminals have hacked ATMs by using all possible avenues to their innards, from opening a front panel and sticking a thumb drive into a USB port to drilling a hole that exposes internal wiring. Now, one researcher has found a collection of bugs that allow him to hack ATMs—along with a wide variety of point-of-sale terminals—in a new way: with a wave of his phone over a contactless credit card reader.

Josep Rodriguez, a researcher and consultant at security firm IOActive, has spent the last year digging up and reporting vulnerabilities in the so-called near-field communications reader chips used in millions of ATMs and point-of-sale systems worldwide. NFC systems are what let you wave a credit card over a reader—rather than swipe or insert it—to make a payment or extract money from a cash machine. You can find them on countless retail store and restaurant counters, vending machines, taxis, and parking meters around the globe.

Enlarge / Original excavation photograph of Tsukumo No. 24, a young adult male with evidence of severe trauma consistent with an attack by a white or tiger shark. (credit: Kyoto University)

Marine biologists have spent decades counteracting the popular misconception of sharks as aggressive predators that target humans, particularly in the wake of the blockbuster Jaws franchise. But fatal attacks nonetheless do happen—and they happened even in prehistoric times. While examining the skeletal remains of a prehistoric hunter-gatherer cemetery in Japan dating back some 3,000 years, University of Oxford archaeologists found distinctive evidence that one such skeleton had been the victim of a fatal shark attack. They described their findings in a new paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. It's the oldest known victim of a shark attack yet—like a prehistoric cold-case film.

The Tsukumo burial site in Japan's Okayama Prefecture was discovered by construction workers in the 1860s and first excavated in 1915. More than 170 human skeletons were unearthed and housed at Kyoto University. The site dates to the Late-Final Jōmon period of the Japanese archipelago. Co-authors J. Alyssa White and Rick Schulting, both from Oxford, made their discovery while examining the remains for evidence of violent trauma, part of a larger study on violence in prehistoric Japan. Remains categorized as Tsukumo No. 24 showed marks of severe trauma that proved especially puzzling.

"We were initially flummoxed by what could have caused at least 790 deep, serrated injuries to this man," said White and Schulting. "There were so many injuries and yet he was buried in the community burial ground, the Tsukumo Shell-mound cemetery site. The injuries were mainly confined to the arms, legs, and front of the chest and abdomen. Through a process of elimination, we ruled out human conflict and more commonly-reported animal predators or scavengers."