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Enlarge / Chinese President Xi Jinping learns about the progress on a COVID-19 vaccine during his visit to the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing on March 2, 2020. (credit: Getty | Xinhua News Agency)

China has approved an experimental COVID-19 vaccine for use in its military after early clinical trial data suggested it was safe and spurred immune responses—but before larger trials that will test whether the vaccine can protect against SARS-CoV-2 infections.

This marks the first time any country has approved a candidate vaccine for military use. China’s Central Military Commission made the approval June 25, which will last for a year, according to a filing reported by Reuters.

The vaccine, developed by biotech company CanSino Biologics and the Chinese military, is a type of viral vector-based vaccine. That means researchers started with a viral vector, in this case a common strain of adenovirus (type-5), which typically causes mild upper respiratory infections. The researchers crippled the virus so that it doesn’t replicate in human cells and cause disease. Then, they engineered the virus to carry a signature feature of SARS-CoV-2—the coronavirus’s infamous spike protein, which juts out from the viral particle and allows the virus to get a hold on human cells.

Enlarge / An Amazon worker in a fulfillment center in the Orlando area, April 2019. (credit: Paul Hennessy | NurPhoto | Getty Images)

After eliminating temporary "hazard" pay raises, Amazon is saying "thank you" to its hourly workers with a one-time bonus of $500, while at least one Amazon warehouse has been found to have a COVID-19 rate four times higher than the general population nearby.

Amazon yesterday announced its one-time bonuses for "front-line" employees. Full-time workers in warehouses and Whole Foods stores, as well as full-time delivery drivers, will receive $500. Part-time workers in those roles will get $250, and Amazon Flex drivers who worked 10 hours or more will get $150. Managers on-site in distribution centers or Whole Foods stores will get $1,000, and owners of the third-party firms that handle delivery for Amazon will get $3,000.

The company saw a massive spike in consumer demand as in-person retail shuttered around the nation and the world this spring due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon hired an additional 175,000 employees in its warehouses, logistics, and grocery businesses since early March to meet increased demand. The company also increased wages by $2 in warehouses, to a minimum of $17 per hour, to get new workers in the door.

Enlarge / UC graduate student Brian Lane climbs out of the Perdido Reservoir. (credit: Photo/Nicholas Dunning)

For centuries, Tikal was a bustling Maya city in what is now northern Guatemala. But by the late 800s CE, its plazas and temples stood silent, surrounded by mostly abandoned farms. A recent study suggests a possible explanation for its decline: mercury and toxic algal blooms poisoned the water sources that should have carried the city through dry seasons.

Tikal’s Maya rulers built the city’s reservoirs to store water from rain and runoff during the winter months. The pavement of the large plazas in the heart of the city tilted slightly, helping funnel rainwater into the reservoirs. Over the centuries, dust and litter settled into the bottom of the reservoirs, too, providing a record of what the environment around Tikal was like—and what was washing into the city’s water supply. University of Cincinnati biologist David Lentz and his colleagues sampled layers of sediment dating back to the mid-800s, and they found that two of Tikal’s central reservoirs would have been too polluted to drink from.

An X-ray fluorescence spectrometer (which identifies the chemicals in a sample based on how they react to being zapped with an X-ray light) revealed that the sediment on the bottom of the reservoirs was laced with dangerous amounts of mercury. Lentz and his colleagues also found ancient DNA from blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, which can produce deadly toxins.

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  A model shows off a prototype form factor for a holographic VR display. [credit: Facebook Research ]

For all the advancements in virtual reality technology in recent years, one major factor still holding the space back is the size and relative discomfort of current headset design. Even the most compact and comfortable VR headsets today still resemble something like a cross between ski goggles and a motorcycle helmet, requiring massive headstraps to secure a heavy display that protrudes multiple inches away from the face. Reference designs for "eyeglasses" style VR displays help a bit, but they still look like coke-bottle spectacles from a steampunk cosplay event (and provide a limited field of view, to boot).

Now, researchers at Facebook Reality Labs are using holographic film to create a prototype VR display that looks less like ski goggles and more like lightweight sunglasses. With a total thickness less than 9mm—and without significant compromises on field of view or resolution—these displays could one day make today's bulky VR headset designs completely obsolete.

In the newly published ACM Siggraph paper Holographic Optics for Thin and Lightweight Virtual Reality, researchers Andrew Maimone and Junren Wang detail the optics behind their lightweight prototype. The key to the thinness is a series of flat, polarized films that use a "pancake optics" light-folding technique to reflect the displayed image multiple times in a small space.

Enlarge / CCTV security guard in the mall building.

Detroit's police chief admitted on Monday that facial recognition technology used by the department misidentifies suspects about 96 percent of the time. It's an eye-opening admission given that the Detroit Police Department is facing criticism for arresting a man based on a bogus match from facial recognition software.

Last week, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Detroit Police Department on behalf of Robert Williams, a Black man who was wrongfully arrested for stealing five watches worth $3,800 from a luxury retail store. Investigators first identified Williams by doing a facial recognition search with software from a company called DataWorks Plus. Under police questioning, Williams pointed out that the grainy surveillance footage obtained by police didn't actually look like him. The police lacked other evidence tying Williams to the crime, so they begrudgingly let him go.

Now Vice's Jason Koebler reports that Detroit Police Chief James Craig acknowledged the flaws with its facial recognition software at a Monday event.