Facebook will lift its ban on political ads on Thursday, ending a self-imposed prohibition that began immediately after the November 2020 general election and remained active for months. Politico reports: Facebook informed top political advertisers of its decision by phone and email on Wednesday, according to sources with knowledge of the announcement. The social media giant banned political and social issue-related…
Tag: fight
Is the Net Neutrality Debate a Pointless Distraction?
“People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America’s longest and now most pointless fights over technology.” So argues the New York Times “On Tech” newsletter author Shira Ovide, calling the debate “a distraction for our elected leaders and corporations when there are more pressing issues.” Ovide also shares their discussion with Times technology and…
Vaccines Adapted for Variants Will Not Need Lengthy Testing, FDA Says
The Food and Drug Administration said this week that vaccine developers would not need to conduct lengthy randomized controlled trials for vaccines that have been adapted to protect against concerning coronavirus variants. From a report: The recommendations, which call for small trials more like those required for annual flu vaccines, would greatly accelerate the review process at a time when scientists…
Facebook’s Australian news ban is a fight the whole world should watch
Plans by the Australian government to force digital firms to compensate news providers have pushed Facebook to ban news content in the country, as part of a fight that could have a global impact on media regulation Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2268431-facebooks-australian-news-ban-is-a-fight-the-whole-world-should-watch/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Astronauts test virus-fighting surface coating
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) are conducting experiments with an antimicrobial surface coating designed to fight the spread of bacteria and viruses. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-02-astronauts-virus-fighting-surface-coating.html…
How Bill Gates Is Funding the Fight Against Climate Change
Bill Gates was interviewed tonight on the CBS News show 60 Minutes about his efforts to combat climate change: The good news is Gates believes it’s possible to prevent a catastrophic rise in temperatures. The bad news? He says in the next 30 years we need scientific breakthroughs, technological innovations and global cooperation on a scale the world has never seen….
How Our Brutal Science System Almost Cost Us a Pioneer of mRNA Vaccines
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: As the first COVID-19 vaccines arrived at Penn Medicine last year, Penn Today reported with great pride, “It was mRNA research conducted at Penn—by Drew Weissman, a professor of Infectious Diseases, and Katalin Karikó, an adjunct associate professor—that helped pave the way for the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID vaccines.” While Weissman and Karikó…
Happy birthday to Galileo, born February 15
One of our greatest astronomers, Galileo Galilei, was born February 15, 1564. His discoveries with the improved telescopes he made changed the way we view the universe – and got him in trouble with the church. Source: https://earthsky.org/human-world/galileos-birthday-feb-15-1564…
Lancet Study Finds 40% of US COVID-19 Deaths Could Have Been Avoided
phalse phace shares a report from Slate: The British medical journal the Lancet, on Wednesday, published a damning assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on Americans’ health, concluding that 40 percent of the nearly 500,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. over the past year were avoidable. The journal came to the conclusion by comparing the U.S. health outcomes on…
Apple Privacy Chief: North Dakota Bill ‘Threatens To Destroy the iPhone As You Know It’
The North Dakota Senate recently introduced a new bill that would prevent Apple and Google from requiring developers to use their respective app stores and payment methods, paving the way for alternative app store options. In response, Apple Chief Privacy Engineer Erik Neuenschwander said that it “threatens to destroy the iPhone as you know it” by requiring changes that would “undermine…