Month: February 2025

An outbreak of measles in one of Texas' least vaccinated counties continues to rapidly expand, with officials reporting 24 cases Tuesday, up from just nine confirmed on Friday.

According to an update by the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS), all 24 cases identified in the two-week-old outbreak are in unvaccinated people. Nine of the patients (37.5 percent) required hospitalization.

Most of the cases are in children. DSHS provided an age breakdown that listed six cases as being in infants and young children between the ages of 0 and 4. This is the age group most vulnerable to measles because they have a heightened risk of complications from the disease and may be too young to be fully vaccinated with the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine. Children are recommended to get two doses of the MMR vaccine, one between 12 and 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years. One dose of MMR vaccine is estimated to be 93 percent effective against measles, while two doses are 97 percent effective.

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Apple services like iMessage and FaceTime often work exclusively on Apple’s hardware, something the company uses to keep customers inside its ecosystem and encourage people who buy one Apple product to buy other Apple products so they can keep using the features they like.

Apple’s streaming and media services have been an exception to this, going all the way back to iTunes for Windows—the company offers Apple Music on Android devices, for example, and Apple TV+ (the service) works on Roku devices, game consoles, and most other smart TVs. Even if people haven’t bought an iPhone or Mac, Apple’s fast-growing Services division relies on pulling in new subscribers regardless of the device they’re using to subscribe.

To that end, Apple announced today that it’s finally bringing an Apple TV+ app to Android devices for the first time since Apple TV+ launched in 2019. The app will work on all Android phones and tablets running Android 10 or newer and will be available today. The app will support both Apple TV+ subscriptions and subscriptions to Apple’s MLS Season Pass service for soccer fans.

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A teacher in high school once quoted an old proverb to me: "Do something you love, and you'll never work a day in your life!"

Perhaps 18-year-old Alan Filion encountered a similar teacher during his school years in California, because once Filion learned that he truly loved making fake "swatting" calls to law enforcement—well, he turned the crime into a job, using handles like "Nazgul Swattings" and "Third Reich of Kiwiswats." Originally it was all about the "power trip," but it soon became about "money and the power trip."

"Prices: $40-Gas leak/Fire for EMS/Fire/Gas Leak [$35 for returning customers]," Filion wrote in a 2023 advertisement that ran on various social media channels. "$50 for a major police response to the house [$40 for returning customers]; $75 for a bomb threat/mass shooting threat (they will shut down the school or public location for a day) [$60 for returning customers]. All swats will be done ASAP or present time."

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The Elecrow CrowPi 3 is a kit that provides a bunch of tools and resources to help young people develop computer science skills. The kit is about the size of a small, but chunky laptop. But instead of a large display and keyboard, it has a small screen, a bunch of sensors, and support for […]

The post CrowPi 3 is a Raspberry Pi 5-powered education kit (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.

Eine Studie, die das Bundesdigitalministerium in Auftrag gegeben hat, hält wenig von Vouchern für die Haushalte. Die Verbände widersprechen. (Glasfaser, Mobilfunk)

On Wednesday, a team of researchers announced that they got extremely lucky. The team is building a detector on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea that can identify those rare occasions when a neutrino happens to interact with the seawater nearby. And while the detector was only 10 percent of the size it will be on completion, it managed to pick up the most energetic neutrino ever detected.

For context, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider, accelerates protons to an energy of 7 Tera-electronVolts (TeV). The neutrino that was detected had an energy of at least 60 Peta-electronVolts, possibly hitting 230 PeV. That also blew away the previous records, which were in the neighborhood of 10 PeV.

Attempts to trace back the neutrino to a source make it clear that it originated outside our galaxy, although there are a number of candidate sources in the more distant Universe.

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Je mehr Daten Prometheus als Zeitreihendatenbank speichert, desto behäbiger wird es. Thanos, Cortex, Mimir und M3db wollen Abhilfe schaffen. Ein Ratgebertext von Martin Loschwitz (Software, API)

Last night, Apple posted a new support document about migrating purchases between accounts, something that Apple users with long online histories have been waiting on for years, if not decades. If you have movies, music, or apps orphaned on various iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iTunes accounts that preceded what you're using now, you can start the fairly involved process of moving them over.

"You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account," the document reads, suggesting that people might have older accounts tied primarily to just certain movies, music, or other purchases that they can now bring forward to their primary, device-linked account. The process takes place on an iPhone or iPad inside the Settings app, in the "Media & Purchases" section in your named account section.

There are a few hitches to note. You can't migrate purchases from or into a child's account that exists inside Family Sharing. You can only migrate purchases to an account once a year. There are some complications if you have music libraries on both accounts and also if you have never used the primary account for purchases or downloads. And migration is not available in the EU, UK, or India.

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In early February, a dataset tracking car crash deaths in the US curiously went missing from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) website.

Unlike other Donald Trump-ordered changes to government websites in which entire studies were removed and later court-ordered to be restored, only the most recent data on car crash deaths from 2022 was deleted from download files on NHTSA's website.

The odd removal sparked concerns that the Trump administration may be changing or possibly even ending the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)—a collection of police-reported data from every state that has tracked car crash fatalities since 1975. The Health department has said the data is used to help reduce deaths from not wearing a seatbelt or deaths involving a drunk driver.

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American roads have grown deadlier for everyone, but the toll on pedestrians has been disproportionate. From a record low in 2009, the number of pedestrians being killed by vehicles rose 83 percent by 2022 to the highest it's been in 40 years. During that time, overall traffic deaths increased by just 25 percent. Now, a new study from AAA has identified a number of common factors that can explain why so many more pedestrians have died.

Firstly, no, it's not because there are more SUVs on the road, although these larger and taller vehicles are more likely to kill or seriously injure a pedestrian in a crash. And no, it's not because everyone has a smartphone, although using one while driving is a good way to increase your chances of hitting someone or something. These and some other factors (increased amount of driving, more alcohol consumption) have each played a small role, but even together, they don't explain the magnitude of the trend.

For a while, researchers started seeing that the increased pedestrian death toll was almost entirely happening after dark and on urban arterial roads—this has continued to be true through 2022, the AAA report says.

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