Month: August 2021

Enlarge (credit: Europa Press News)

US officials on Wednesday formally announced plans to offer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to Americans—and the plans are already under fire from experts at the World Health Organization.

US officials are recommending that all Americans vaccinated with two doses of an mRNA vaccine (either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine) get a third booster dose of the same vaccine eight months after receiving their second dose. As such, boosters will be rolled out based on the order in which people were initially offered vaccines, i.e., with frontline health workers, nursing home residents, and other seniors at the front of the line.

US officials are prepared to begin offering booster shots the week of September 20. However, the timing of the boosters is pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration and the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent committee of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Enlarge / Members of PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), Truth Pharm, and other advocacy groups working in response to the overdose crisis protested the Sacklers' immunity deal outside US Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York on August 9, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Erik McGregor)

The Sackler family is threatening to back out of a $4.5 billion opioid settlement if it is not granted broad immunity from lawsuits. The pending settlement between the Sacklers and 15 states includes an immunity provision, but other states oppose it, and a bankruptcy court judge is still considering whether to approve the deal.

Forty-one-year-old David Sackler, a former Purdue Pharma board member and grandson of one of the company's founders, "vowed in court on Tuesday that the family would walk away from a $4.5 billion pledge to help communities nationwide that have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, unless a judge grants it immunity from all current and future civil claims associated with the company," The New York Times wrote.

"We need a release that's sufficient to get our goals accomplished," Sackler said in testimony via video at a hearing in US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. "If the release fails to do that, we will not support it." The family is worth $11 billion, a fortune boosted substantially by sales of OxyContin.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Ratcliffe / Bloomberg / Getty Images)

Facebook released its first report today detailing which content it says is widely viewed on the site and Instagram. The report comes as research and news stories have highlighted how misleading posts and outright disinformation can draw intense engagement on the company’s platforms.

Much of the scrutiny has focused on far-right accounts, which according to Facebook’s own tool, CrowdTangle, receive the most engagement—likes, shares, and comments. For example, Kevin Roose, a reporter at The New York Times, uses CrowdTangle to tweet out a list of the “10 top-performing link posts by US Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.” What his experiment has revealed is that, day after day, far-right accounts and pages from the likes of Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Newsmax appeared on the list, sometimes occupying multiple spots. Facebook's critics have pointed to the list as evidence that the platform has become a right-wing media machine.

The Twitter account, Roose said, “drove executives crazy” at Facebook. They felt it was making Facebook look like it favored right-wing accounts. All of that brings us to today.

Enlarge / A Samsung phone. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Samsung says it will cut down on the ads it shows on its smartphones. The announcement was first reported by Korean news agency Yonhap and was later confirmed by Samsung in a statement to The Verge. The official line from the industry giant is "Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps, including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme." The company added, "The update will be ready by later this year."

Samsung ships Android on all its smartphones, but it changes the experience with a "One UI" skin and includes several Samsung-developed packed-in apps. Many of these apps—like Bixby, Samsung Health, and Weather—contain big banner ads, sometimes right at the top of the app, where you would normally expect to find an app logo or navigation information. The worst offenders are notification ads—a Samsung app will spawn a notification to entice you to buy a new gadget or install a new app.

It's not a great feeling to spend anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars on a piece of hardware and still get ads on that device. (And for you whataboutists out there—yes, Google also shows ads in some of its apps, but they are in serious, ad-supported web services, like YouTube or Google Maps, and they aren't notification ads. You also paid Samsung ~$1000, while you're using Google services for free.)

Enlarge / See these solar panels in space? They're way too heavy to economically provide power to Earth. (credit: NASA)

"This is an idea that's older than even the space program," Caltech's Harry Atwater told Ars over Zoom. Citing Asimov and Clarke, Atwater conjured an image of gleaming solar panels floating above the Earth on a large metal truss, all wired in to hardware that converts the current to a form suitable to beam back down to Earth. Unlimited clean power, delivered around the clock.

He then went on to explain why the system he was working on would end up looking nothing like that vision, even if it would ultimately accomplish the same thing.

A long gestation

In August, Caltech announced that a member of its board of trustees had given over $100 million meant to foster the development of space-based power. The timing was somewhat odd, given that the donor, Donald Bren, had started the process over a decade ago. At the time, Bren had described his interest in space-based power to the university administration, which began identifying faculty who had research interests that might be relevant to the project.

Enlarge / A cuttlefish leisurely hanging out in a tank. A new study found that cuttlefish can remember specifics of place and time for receiving their favorite yummy food rewards. (credit: University of Cambridge)

Can you remember what you had for dinner last weekend? That ability is a function of episodic memory, and how well we can recall the time and place of specific events typically declines with age. Cuttlefish also seem to exhibit a form of episodic memory, but unlike with humans, their capability doesn't decrease as they get older, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“Cuttlefish can remember what they ate, where, and when, and use this to guide their feeding decisions in the future," said co-author Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge, who conducted the experiments at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. "What’s surprising is that they don’t lose this ability with age, despite showing other signs of aging like loss of muscle function and appetite."

Earlier this year, we reported on a study by Schnell and other colleagues showing that cuttlefish can delay gratification. Specifically, they could pass a cephalopod version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test: waiting a bit for their preferred prey rather than settling for a less desirable prey. Cuttlefish also performed better in a subsequent learning test—the first time such a link between self-control and intelligence has been found in a non-mammalian species.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

T-Mobile on Wednesday said criminals obtained the personal information of almost 49 million current, former, or prospective customers in the latest mega-hack of its servers.

The haul includes customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for 7.8 million current post-paid accounts, meaning accounts that are billed at the end of each billing cycle. The unknown hackers obtained the same data from more than 40 million records belonging to former or prospective customers who had previously applied for credit with T-Mobile.

Names, phone numbers, and account PINs for about 850,000 active T-Mobile prepaid customers were also stolen. T-Mobile said that “additional information” from an unspecified number of inactive prepaid accounts was also affected.