Month: August 2023

Enlarge / This 1980 transmission electron microscopic (TEM) image revealed some of the ultrastructural morphology exhibited by three poxvirus, molluscum contagiosum virions. (credit: CDC)

The Food and Drug Administration sent a flurry of warning letters this week over bogus homeopathic products falsely claiming to be antiviral cures—products mostly marketed to children.

Amazon, Walmart, and the homeopathic company behind Naturasil products were among those receiving warnings for allegedly selling unapproved drugs in violation of federal regulations. The products are "especially concerning from a public health perspective because they are marketed for use in children," the FDA wrote in its letter to Amazon.

The regulator identified four products on Amazon that were in violation. All of the products claimed to treat molluscum contagiosum and three were identified as homeopathic products. One of the products was Naturasil's "Molluscum Treatment Kit," which was also the focus of the letter to Walmart.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

California's main firefighting agency, Cal Fire, is training AI models to detect visual signs of wildfires using a network of 1,039 high-definition cameras, reports The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. When it sees signs of smoke, it quickly warns firefighters of emerging threats. During the pilot program, the system has already detected 77 wildfires before dispatch centers received 911 calls—about a 40 percent success rate, according to the NYT.

Traditionally, Cal Fire detects emerging wildfires by relying on the same network of over 1,000 mountaintop cameras monitored by humans, who look out for signs of smoke. But it's tedious and tiring work. Phillip SeLegue, the staff chief of intelligence for Cal Fire, told the NYT that the new AI system has not only improved response times but also identified some fires early, allowing those blazes to be tackled while still being a manageable size.

However, the technology is not without limitations. It can only detect fires that are visible to its network of cameras, and human intervention is still required to confirm the AI model's alerts. Engineers from DigitalPath, the California-based company responsible for creating the software, have been manually vetting each fire the AI identifies. The process has been challenging, with many false positives from fog, haze, dust kicked up from tractors, and steam from geothermal plants, according to Ethan Higgins, a chief architect of the software. “You wouldn’t believe how many things look like smoke,” Higgins told the NYT.

Enlarge / Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared in 2014 somewhere over the Indian Ocean. Scientists have reconstructed a possible debris origin point and drift path by extracting information about ocean temperatures from barnacle shells. (credit: Laurent Errera/CC BY-SA 2.0)

It's one of the biggest mysteries in modern aviation history. In March 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur International Airport en route to Beijing and lost communication about 38 minutes into the flight. Military radar tracked the aircraft as it veered off course before the signal (and the plane) disappeared somewhere over the Andaman Sea and Indian Ocean.

All 12 crew members and 227 passengers were presumed dead, and search-and-rescue efforts yielded no signs of the doomed plane apart from a few pieces of debris that washed up on coastal shores months later. Now, scientists have partially reconstructed the possible origin and drift path of that debris via a novel means: extracting data about ocean temperatures stored in shells of barnacles, according to a new paper published in the journal AGU Advances.

“Knowing the tragic story behind the mystery motivated everyone involved in this project to get the data and have this work published,” said co-author Nasser Al-Qattan, who recently received his PhD from the University of South Florida. “The plane disappeared more than nine years ago, and we all worked aiming to introduce a new approach to help resume the search, suspended in January 2017, which might help bring some closure to the families of those on the missing plane.”

Enlarge (credit: Morsa Images | DigitalVision)

Earlier this month, Zoom announced a surprising decision to require some of its employees to return to the office, where they were expected to work more effectively. Now, leaked audio from an internal Zoom meeting shared with Business Insider has revealed that Zoom CEO Eric Yuan called employees back to the office because he believes that "remote work didn't allow people to build as much trust or be as innovative."

None of this seems to jibe with Zoom's brand, which provides video-conferencing technology that the company promises enables "immersive in-office collaboration right from home."

Yuan's comments came in a company meeting held on August 3, where he told employees that the top reason for the return-to-office mandate was to build more trust among employees.

Enlarge / You can now use Touch ID to log in to your Windows virtual machine. (credit: Parallels)

It's an annual tradition to see an update to Mac virtualization software Parallels Desktop a few weeks before the next major macOS release. Like clockwork, we've come to that time again: Parallels Desktop 19 is available now, with a handful of improvements for users who want to run Windows or Linux on their Macs.

It's not the most radical year-over-year update we've seen, but there are some welcome optimizations and tweaks. The headlining feature is the ability to use Touch ID to sign in to your Windows virtual machine. When you next launch your Windows VM, your Windows password can be saved to your Mac's keychain with a Touch ID-specific record that is unique to your device. It's important to note that this is just for signing into the VM, though; this is not full Touch ID support for all the places Windows Hello appears throughout Microsoft's operating system.

There are also various tweaks to make Parallels macOS Sonoma-ready, what with Apple's annual OS update coming sometime this fall. For example, a change in Sonoma would have broken the Shared Printing feature that allows you to print from your Windows VM. Parallels' engineers re-configured the feature to get it working within the new release and made some improvements to it.