Month: August 2021

Enlarge / Police officers surround Jacob Wohl as he taunts protesters during a "Trump/Pence Out Now" rally at Black Lives Matter plaza August 27, 2020 in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Santiago )

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday proposed a $5.1 million fine against two right-wing political operatives accused of making over 1,100 illegal robocalls. The calls were an attempt to convince people not to vote.

The recorded messages sent before the November 2020 election "told potential voters that if they voted by mail, their 'personal information will be part of a public database that will be used by police departments to track down old warrants and be used by credit card companies to collect outstanding debts,'" the FCC said. Those messages were apparently targeted at Black voters and told them, "don't be finessed into giving your private information to the man."

John Burkman and Jacob Wohl were already facing felony charges in Wayne County Circuit Court for "orchestrating a robocall to suppress the vote in Detroit and other cities with significant minority populations," as Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced in November 2020. They were also indicted in Ohio, and New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking fines that would add up to $2.75 million.

Enlarge / Delta Air Lines plane taxis toward a gate between other Delta planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Monday, July 20, 2009. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

Hospital care for seriously ill COVID-19 patients is costing the US health care system billions of dollars. And with vaccines highly effective at preventing hospitalization now widely and freely available to everyone over the age of 12, insurers and some businesses want the unvaccinated—who make up the vast majority of COVID-19 hospitalizations—to cover more of those costs.

This past June and July alone, the estimated cost of caring for unvaccinated people who were hospitalized for preventable cases of COVID-19 reached about $2.3 billion, according to a recent analysis by the Peterson Center on Healthcare and Kaiser Family Foundation. The analysis estimated that in those two months there were 113,000 unvaccinated people who were hospitalized primarily for COVID-19 and that their infection would have been prevented with vaccination. They then multiplied that number by $20,000, a rough estimate of the average cost of hospital care for COVID-19 patients, bringing the total to $2.3 billion.

Waived waivers

Hospitalizations have only skyrocketed since then. On the last day of July, the country's seven-day rolling average of hospitalizations was around 40,000. Now, that average is nearly 86,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge / Detail from Matina Stavropoulou's original painting, Triton and Nereid, one of several used for a series of experiments with graphene veils. (credit: Matina Stavropoulou)

Graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few. And now this wonder material might just provide a solution to the fading of colors of many artistic masterpieces, according to a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology.

"All art establishments are concerned with the discoloration of paintings upon exhibition and storage, since harmful factors such as sunlight, moisture, and certain volatile organic compounds (VOCs) accelerate the degradation," said co-author Costas Galiotis, a chemical engineer at the University of Patras in Greece. "There are many references to well-known endangered artworks, such as [Vincent] Van Gogh's The Bedroom and Sunflowers, or [Edvard] Munch's The Scream."

A variety of culprits are behind the degradation of fine art. For instance, several of Georgia O'Keeffe's oil paintings housed in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt. As we've previously reported, conservationists and scholars initially assumed they were grains of sand trapped in the paint. But then the protrusions grew, spread, and started flaking off.

Enlarge / Apple's global headquarters in Cupertino, California. (credit: Sam Hall/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

As Apple and other big tech companies postpone their planned returns to physical offices, a survey has found that workers around the United States would give up a lot to stay remote.

As previously reported by ZDNet, GoodHire published a survey this week of 3,500 workers in the US and found that just over two-thirds of them would prefer to work remotely rather than in an office.

Further, 70 percent of those people said they would give up most or all of their benefits, like health insurance and holidays, to be able to work remotely. Sixty-one percent say they would take a pay cut to make it happen. Most said they'd take a 10 percent pay reduction, but some claimed they'd even accept half their current salary in exchange for remote work.