Month: September 2024

Enlarge (credit: Frazao Studio Latino/ Getty Images)

Four years after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors and researchers are still seeking ways to help patients with long COVID, the persistent and often debilitating symptoms that can continue long after a COVID-19 infection.

In adults, the most common long COVID symptoms include fatigue and brain fog, but for children the condition can look different. A study published last month suggests preteens are more likely to experience symptoms such as headaches, stomach pain, trouble sleeping, and attention difficulties. Even among children, effects seem to vary by age. “There seems to be some differences between age groups, with less signs of organ damage in younger children and more adultlike disease in adolescents,” says Petter Brodin, professor of pediatric immunology at Imperial College London.

While vast sums have been devoted to long COVID research—the US National Institutes of Health have spent more than a billion dollars on research projects and clinical trials—research into children with the condition has been predominantly limited to online surveys, calls with parents, and studies of electronic health records. This is in spite of a recent study suggesting that between 10 and 20 percent of children may have developed long COVID following an acute infection, and another report finding that while many have recovered, some still remain ill three years later.

Enlarge / A still from Wolfs, an Apple-produced film starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt. (credit: Apple)

For the past few years, Apple has been making big-budget movies meant to compete with the best traditional Hollywood studios have to offer, and it has been releasing them in theaters to drive ticket sales and awards buzz.

Much of that is about to change, according to a report from Bloomberg. The article claims that Apple is "rethinking its movie strategy" after several box office misfires, like Argylle and Napoleon.

It has already canceled the wide theatrical release of one of its tent pole movies, the George Clooney and Brad Pitt-led Wolfs. Most other upcoming big-budget movies from Apple will be released in just a few theaters, suggesting the plan is simple to ensure continued awards eligibility but not to put butts in seats.

iFixit has published teardown views for the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro, along with their larger cousins, the Plus and Pro Max.

The videos are really marketing for iFixit's various repair kits and other tools and products that you can buy—and sometimes these videos now have lengthy plugs for some new product or another—but nonetheless, the videos almost always include interesting insights about devices' components.

Tearing down the iPhone 16, iFixit confirmed one thing we already suspected: One of the mmWave antennas was removed and replaced in that same spot by the Camera Control button. It also found that the camera systems in the 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max are almost interchangeable, but sadly aren't because of the placement of a single screw and the length of a single cable. Too bad.

Enlarge / There's been a lot of AI news this week, and covering it sometimes feels like running through a hall full of danging CRTs, just like this Getty Images illustration. (credit: Grandfailure via Getty Images)

It's been a wildly busy week in AI news thanks to OpenAI, including a controversial blog post from CEO Sam Altman, the wide rollout of Advanced Voice Mode, 5GW data center rumors, major staff shake-ups, and dramatic restructuring plans.

But the rest of the AI world doesn't march to the same beat, doing its own thing and churning out new AI models and research by the minute. Here's a roundup of some other notable AI news from the past week.

Google Gemini updates

(credit: Google)

On Tuesday, Google announced updates to its Gemini model lineup, including the release of two new production-ready models that iterate on past releases: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002. The company reported improvements in overall quality, with notable gains in math, long context handling, and vision tasks. Google claims a 7 percent increase in performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark and a 20 percent improvement in math-related tasks. But as you know, if you've been reading Ars Technica for a while, AI typically benchmarks aren't as useful as we would like them to be.

Enlarge / One of the jets emitted by galaxy M87's central black hole. (credit: NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

The intense electromagnetic environment near a black hole can accelerate particles to a large fraction of the speed of light and sends the speeding particles along jets that extend from each of the object's poles. In the case of the supermassive black holes found in the center of galaxies, these jets are truly colossal, blasting material not just out of the galaxy, but possibly out of the galaxy's entire neighborhood.

But this week, scientists have described how the jets may be doing some strange things inside of a galaxy, as well. A study of the galaxy M87 showed that nova explosions appear to be occurring at an unusual high frequency in the neighborhood of one of the jets from the galaxy's central black hole. But there's absolutely no mechanism to explain why this might happen, and there's no sign that it's happening at the jet that's traveling in the opposite direction.

Whether this effect is real, and whether we can come up with an explanation for it, may take some further observations.

Enlarge / A warning sign outside a laboratory testing the H5N1 bird flu virus at The Pirbright Institute in Woking, UK, on Monday, March 13, 2023. (credit: Getty | Jason Alden)

More than a month after a person in Missouri mysteriously fell ill with H5-type bird flu, investigators in the state are still identifying people who became ill after contact with the patient, raising questions about the diligence of the ongoing health investigation.

On September 6, Missouri's health department reported the state's first human case of H5-type bird flu, one that appears closely related to the H5N1 bird flu currently causing a nationwide outbreak among dairy cows. But the infected person had no known contact with infected animals—unlike all of the other 13 human cases identified amid the dairy outbreak this year. Those previous cases have all occurred in dairy- or poultry-farm workers. In fact, Missouri has not reported bird flu in its dairy herds nor recent poultry outbreaks.

Given the unexplained source of infection, health investigators in the state have been working to track the virus both backward in time—to try to identify the source—and forward—to identify any potential onward spread. The bird flu patient was initially hospitalized on August 22 but recovered and had been released by the time the state publicly reported the case.