Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Medical staff transfer patients to Jin Yintan hospital on January 17, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei, China. (credit: Getty )

Among thousands of the earliest survivors of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, nearly half had at least one persistent symptom a full year after being released from the hospital, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open.

The study followed up with 2,433 adult patients who had been hospitalized in one of two hospitals in Wuhan early on in the pandemic. Most had nonsevere cases, but a small number had severe COVID-19 and required intensive care. All of the patients were discharged between February 12 and April 10, 2020, and the study follow-up took place in March of 2021.

Overall, 45 percent of the patients reported at least one symptom in that one-year follow-up. The most common symptoms were fatigue, sweating, chest tightness, anxiety, and myalgia (muscle pain). Having a severe case of COVID-19 increased the likelihood of long-lingering symptoms; 54 percent of the 680 severe cases reported at least one symptom after a year. But persistent symptoms were also common among the nonsevere cases, with 41.5 percent of 1,752 nonsevere cases reporting at least one symptom a year later.

Enlarge / Apple's AirTags—as seen clipped to a backpack, above—allow users to attempt to find their own device via location rebroadcast from other Apple users. If all else fails, the user can enable a "Lost mode" intended to display their phone number when a finder scans the missing AirTag. (credit: James D. Morgan / Getty Images)

The hits keep coming to Apple's bug-bounty program, which security researchers say is slow and inconsistent to respond to its vulnerability reports.

This time, the vuln du jour is due to failure to sanitize a user-input field—specifically, the phone number field AirTag owners use to identify their lost devices.

The Good Samaritan attack

AirTags are tiny, button-like devices which can be personalized with engraving and attached to easily lost devices either directly or via "loop" holders. (credit: James D. Morgan via Getty Images)

Security consultant and penetration tester Bobby Rauch discovered that Apple's AirTags—tiny devices which can be affixed to frequently lost items like laptops, phones, or car keys—don't sanitize user input. This oversight opens the door for AirTags to be used in a drop attack. Instead of seeding a target's parking lot with USB drives loaded with malware, an attacker can drop a maliciously prepared AirTag.

Enlarge (credit: Play Station)

After months of speculation, it's finally official: Sony is acquiring Demon's Souls developer Bluepoint Games.

News of Bluepoint's addition to the PlayStation Studios roster shouldn't surprise many. The Austin-based studio turned heads with 2018's Shadow of the Colossus remake before tackling its redux of FromSoftware's Demon's for the PS5. It has been a longtime independent collaborator with Sony, remastering critical favorites like Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid, and Gravity Rush, and it has almost exclusively worked with PlayStation-branded properties. (Other than Metal Gear, Bluepoint's only other third-party project was its 2014 port of Titanfall for the Xbox 360.)

A long history with Sony

Rumors that Sony would be buying the developer date back to the company's acquisition of Returnal developer Housemarque in June. That's when the PlayStation Japan Twitter account accidentally tweeted out a PlayStation Studios splash image that included key art from both Returnal and Demon's Souls alongside other established Sony games. Naturally, the tweet was quickly deleted, but not before the image was saved.

Enlarge / Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a soft and stretchable device that converts movement into electricity. The device works in wet or dry environments and has a host of potential applications. (credit: Veenasri Vallem)

Scientists at North Carolina State University have developed a flexible, stretchy energy-harvesting device solely out of biocompatible soft materials: liquid metal and soft polymers known as hydrogels. It produces small amounts of electricity comparable to other energy-harvesting technologies, and it can also operate in water as well as air, according to the team's recent paper published in the journal Advanced Materials. The team thinks their technology holds promise for powering wearable devices, charging them spontaneously with no need for an external power source.

"Mechanical energy—such as the kinetic energy of wind, waves, body movement and vibrations from motors—is abundant," said co-author Michael Dickey,  a chemical and bimolecular engineer at NCSU. “We have created a device that can turn this type of mechanical motion into electricity. And one of its remarkable attributes is that it works perfectly well underwater.”

The NCSU scientists were particularly inspired by a 2013 paper by Korean researchers. The 2013 researchers found they could harvest energy from an electrical double-layer capacitor (ELCD) by depressing arrays of water droplets sandwiched between two rigid electrodes, thereby spontaneously charging the capacitor. But the rigidity proved to be a shortcoming, since electricity was only generated by moving the stiff electrode up and down. Dickey and his co-authors wanted to create a flexible version of this technology.

Enlarge / The USB-IF is planning new logos to go with the upgraded capabilities of USB-C 2.1 cables and chargers. (credit: USB-IF)

In just a few years, the USB-C port has gone from infancy to ubiquity. Aside from a couple of exceptions, it is the main charging, data, and display port for nearly all modern phones, tablets, and laptops. The European Union has even proposed making it mandatory in all devices.

The problem is that the USB-C connector has always been related to but separate from the other specifications in the USB protocol. USB-C cables can use 2.0 or 3.2 speeds, they can support multiple charging wattages, they can either have or not have Thunderbolt support, and even Thunderbolt cables can be either "active" or "passive." The connector is the same, but the capabilities aren't.

The group behind USB-IF has always taken a hands-off approach to this problem, choosing to solve it not with top-down mandates but with certification and optional logos. Today, the group announced a new batch of logos (PDF) intended to demystify the USB-C 2.1 and USB Power Delivery (USB-PD) 3.1 standards that were announced earlier this year. Among other tweaks, the new logos account for USB 4 support, as well as an increased maximum USB-PD charging wattage, from the old maximum of 100 W up to a new maximum of 240 W.

Enlarge / Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith (black hat) walks with Jeff Bezos after his flight on Blue Origin’s New Shepard into space in July 2021. (credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A former communications executive at Blue Origin and 20 other current and former employees have written a blistering essay about the company's culture, citing safety concerns, sexist attitudes, and a lack of commitment to the planet's future.

"In our experience, Blue Origin’s culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs," the essay authors write. "That’s not the world we should be creating here on Earth, and certainly not as our springboard to a better one."

Published Thursday on the Lioness website, the essay is signed publicly by only Alexandra Abrams, who led employee communications for the company until she was terminated in 2019. The other signatories, a majority of whom were engineers, declined to publicly disclose their names because they did not want to jeopardize employment at Blue Origin or harm their prospects in the aerospace industry for other jobs.