Latest News

Last updated 14 May, 04:00 PM

BBC News - Home

Covid antibody test a 'positive development' - The test, now approved in the UK, can tell who has had Covid-19 - but gives no guarantee they are immune.

One in 400 people in England has coronavirus, tests suggest - The estimate is based on tests on 11,000 people from 5,000 households over the past two weeks.

Coronavirus: A&E visits in England down to record low - NHS bosses say they are worried seriously ill patients are staying away as visits drop by half.

Coronavirus: First steps to ease NI lockdown can start next week - Garden centres and recycling centres will be allowed to reopen from next Monday, the executive says.

Coronavirus: Government faces WW2-sized bill for tackling virus - The increased cost of the furlough scheme pushes borrowing to a level not seen since wartime.

The Register

Google says it'll pick up the tab – and stick it in a lovely colour-coded Chrome group - A desktop browser spring clean can do the soul a power of good Google is taking steps to deal with tab overload in its browser by adding the ability to group the things together.…

Let's slip into something a bit more relational: SQL database crowd strikes back with brace of cloudy releases - And you thought this was purely a NoSQL release this week? MariaDB, which counts Deutsche Bank, Nasdaq and telecoms giant Verizon among its users, has launched a DBaaS rendition of its relational database, adding options to configure and customise it.…

AWS pulls its Red Hat on with managed OpenShift collab - Plus: AWS tool for defining Kubernetes apps without having to write YAML Amazon Web Services and Red Hat have linked arms to bring managed OpenShift, a Kubernetes service, to the AWS cloud. The service is not yet available, but "currently preparing for an early access program".…

Got a few spare terabytes of storage sitting around unused? Tardigrade can turn that into crypto-bucks - Just not very many – don't go all Bitcoin farming on this Storj Labs, which in March launched decentralized storage network Tardigrade, is releasing an app to allow users of QNAP's network-attached storage devices to generate cryptocurrency revenue from their unused hard disk space and bandwidth.…

Ampere, Nvidia's latest GPU architecture is finally here – spanking-new acceleration for AI across the board - Your guide to the A100 GTC Nvidia has lifted the lid on a fresh line of products based on its latest Ampere architecture, revealing its latest A100 GPU - which promises to be 20X more powerful than its predecessor and capable of powering AI supercomputers – as well as a smaller chip for running machine learning workloads on IoT devices.…

New Scientist - News

Can higher CO2 levels boost plant life enough to dent global warming? - Increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may be boosting vegetation for now, but climate change is set to more than wipe out any gains, says James Wong

Virtual reality game lets you play with hypercubes in four dimensions - Imagining how four-dimensional objects would behave in our 3D world is hard, but an interactive simulation of how those objects move and interact could help

Shock therapy temporarily improves woman’s colour blindness - A woman who is colour-blind says she could see red berries in a green bush for the first time after receiving electroconvulsive therapy for depression

Mouse embryos that are 4 per cent human are step towards spare organs - Mouse embryos injected with human stem cells grew for 17 days, creating chimeras with up to 4 per cent human cells, a step towards growing human organs for transplant

Algae transplant could protect coral reefs threatened by warming seas - Heat-resistant algae made in a lab seems to protect coral from bleaching. It could help to save reefs if we fail to tackle global warming fast enough

Hacker News

Nvidia CEO Introduces Nvidia Ampere Architecture, Nvidia A100 GPU - Comments

Building Uber’s Go Monorepo with Bazel - Comments

You can sign up for an email address so long that its practically useless - Comments

Stuxnet's Legacy Lives on in New Windows Bug - Comments

Earnest Capital Trailhead - Comments

Slashdot

Vint Cerf on COVID-19's Impact on the Future of Internet - Vint Cerf on the great many lessons that the coronavirus crises has taught us about infrastructure writ large: More directly associated with COVID-19 is the need for detecting exposure and tracking contacts to reduce the spread of the disease. Mobiles and the Internet appear to have roles to play for at least some tracking and tracing system designs. The application of machine learning to large medical datasets may help identify the ways in which SARS-COV-2 actually works. It seems that we are finding new syndromes triggered by this virus as research progress is made. We don't know enough and we must learn more. Among the stark lessons we have learned is the fragility of food and medical equipment supply chains, either because of excessive concentration or because transport connections are broken. We are seeing this dramatically in the United States where farmers have been unable to sell to restaurants that are closed or operating at much reduced capacity out of concern for the propagation of the virus. These lessons should teach us to create much more resilient infrastructure in every dimension. We need to refresh national stockpiles of protective equipment, medical devices and vaccines. More generally, we must imagine other potential global catastrophes and put in place plans to mitigate. The time to agree on best practices for emergency response is before the emergency, not during. We must not allow this pandemic or a future one to become our society's Titanic. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Faster Internet Coming To Africa With Facebook's $1 Billion Cable - Facebook and some of the world's largest telecom carriers including China Mobile are joining forces to build a giant sub-sea cable to help bring more reliable and faster internet across Africa. From a report: The cost of the project will be just under $1 billion, according to three people familiar with the project, who asking not to be identified as the budget hasn't been made public. The 37,000-kilometer (23,000 miles) long cable -- dubbed 2Africa -- will connect Europe to the Middle East and 16 African countries, according to a statement on Thursday. The undersea cable sector is experiencing a resurgence. During the 1990s dot-com boom, phone companies spent more than $20 billion laying fiber-optic lines under the oceans. Now tech giants, led by Facebook and Alphabet's Google, are behind about 80% of the recent investment in transatlantic cable, driven by demand for fast-data transfers used for streaming movies to social messaging. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Takes Step Toward Phasing Out 32-bit PC Support for Windows 10 - Starting with Windows 10 2004, Microsoft is changing the minimum hardware requirements for the device. The change affects new, not existing PCs from OEMs only. From a report: According to the documentation, Microsoft isn't making available copies of 32-bit Windows 10 media. For now, Microsoft is still allowing users to buy 32-bit Windows 10 at retail and to continue to get updates for their existing 32-bit Windows implementations. Anyone with a 32-bit PC should be fine for as long as their devices remain usable. "Beginning with Windows 10, version 2004, all new Windows 10 systems will be required to use 64-bit builds and Microsoft will no longer release 32-bit builds for OEM distribution. This does not impact 32-bit customer systems that are manufactured with earlier versions of Windows 10; Microsoft remains committed to providing feature and security updates on these devices, including continued 32-bit media availability in non-OEM channels to support various upgrade installation scenarios," Microsoft wrote. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Windows 10 Previews DNS Over HTTPS - An anonymous reader quotes a report from Paul Thurrott: With the new build of Windows 10 [19628], Microsoft is starting to test DNS over HTTPS. The new build comes with Microsoft's initial support for DNS over HTTPS on Windows, and Insiders will have to manually enable the new feature. If you would like to enable DNS over HTTPS in Windows 10, you will have to first install the latest Insider build. After that, you will have to go into the registry and tweak an entry to first enable the new DNS over HTTPS client, and then update the DNS servers your computer is using. It's not as easy as ticking a checkbox, but Microsoft has shared the instructions to enable the feature in detail, so make sure to check it out here. What is DNS over HTTPS and why is it important? "DNS, to put simply, is the process where an easy-to-read and write domain address is translated into an actual IP address for where a web resource is located," writes Thurrott. "Although most websites already use HTTPS for added privacy, your computer is still making DNS requests and resolving addresses without any encryption. With DNS over HTTPS, your device will perform all the required DNS requests over a secured HTTPS connection, which improves security thanks to the encrypted connection." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpaceX Releases Crew Dragon Simulator To Show What It's Like To Dock With the ISS - New submitter quantumghost writes: SpaceX has opened up a new online simulator that mimics the Crew Dragon capsule controls. The game was released in anticipation of SpaceX's upcoming launch of Crew Dragon to the International Space Station. On May 27th, it'll be the first American-built spacecraft to haul American astronauts to the ISS in 11 years. The goal of the simulator is to see if you can dock your spacecraft to the ISS. "According to the new game's opening slide, this is the actual interface on which astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, Crew Dragon's inaugural test pilots, have been," reports Popular Mechanics. "The central interface is packed with a slew of numbers. The green numbers indicate whether corrections need to be made. When they're below 0.2, it means you've successfully docked and beat the simulation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.