Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Residents line up for nucleic acid testing of COVID-19 on August 3, 2021, in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. (credit: Getty )

After going a full year without any locally spread cases of COVID-19, the city where the coronavirus pandemic first began has now detected its first cases involving the delta variant.

Officials in Wuhan, China, on Monday confirmed three delta cases, prompting them to order coronavirus testing for all 12 million or so of the city's residents.

"To ensure that everyone in the city is safe, city-wide nucleic acid testing will be quickly launched for all people to fully screen out positive results and asymptomatic infections," Wuhan official Li Qiang said at a news briefing, according to the Associated Press.

Enlarge / NASA's science chief, Thomas Zurbuchen, has worked hard to bring the oft-delayed James Webb Space Telescope to the launch pad. (credit: NASA)

For scientists who spend a decade or more planning, designing, lobbying for, building, and testing exploratory spacecraft, the launch is always a pucker factor moment.

Years and years of work. Millions or even billions of dollars. It can all go up in a puff of smoke in seconds if something goes wrong with the rocket. Unlike with most human spacecraft, there are no emergency escape systems for scientific spacecraft. Some of these delicate payloads would be unlikely to survive the violent escape thruster firings, anyway.

"For most missions, launch contributes the majority of mission risk," explained Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for science missions at NASA. "If the spacecraft is in space, most risk is behind us."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Ronald Martinez)

AT&T has completed its spinoff of DirecTV after six years of mismanagement in which nearly 10 million customers ditched the company's pay-TV services.

AT&T bought DirecTV for $49 billion ($67 billion including debt) in July 2015 even though DirecTV and other traditional TV services were already losing subscribers in the face of competition from online streaming. Customer losses were inevitable but DirecTV's losses under AT&T ownership went far beyond anything experienced by other major TV providers.

AT&T revealed the spinoff plan in February and announced the deal's completion yesterday. AT&T partnered with private-equity firm TPG to create a new company called DirecTV, which "will own and operate the DirecTV, AT&T TV, and U-verse video services previously owned and operated by AT&T," the announcement said.

Enlarge / Brack promoting World of Warcraft onstage at Blizzcon 2017. (credit: Blizzard)

Blizzard President J. Allen Brack, who was recently named in a California state discrimination and harassment lawsuit against the company, is leaving "to pursue new opportunities," the company announced this morning.

In his place, Blizzard Executive VPs Mike Ybarra (a former long-time Xbox executive) and Jen Oneal (formerly head of Vicarious Visions) will serve as studio co-leads starting today. Both have long histories in the game industry but joined Blizzard's executive team relatively recently—Ybarra in 2019 and Oneal earlier this year, when Vicarious Vision merged into Blizzard. Brack had been at Blizzard for nearly 16 years, including eight as an executive and three as president of the company. Before that, he worked on games like Wing Commander and Star Wars Galaxies.

"I am confident that Jen Oneal and Mike Ybarra will provide the leadership Blizzard needs to realize its full potential and will accelerate the pace of change," Brack said in a statement. "I anticipate they will do so with passion and enthusiasm and that they can be trusted to lead with the highest levels of integrity and commitment to the components of our culture that make Blizzard so special."