Are Tech Workers Fleeing the San Francisco Bay Area?

NBC News reports:
Many urban centers have seen residents move out in large numbers since the start of stay-at-home orders in March, but the shift has been especially dramatic for San Francisco, a city that was already experiencing rapid change because of the tech industry. Software engineers, CEOs and venture capitalists have chosen to jump from the Bay Area to places such…

What Happened After Silicon Valley Tried to Make Telecommuting Permanent

California’s state air quality mandates require each region to have a feasible plan for a 19% reduction in emissions by 2035. But “after a barrage of criticism from Silicon Valley businesses and Bay Area mayors, Metropolitan Transportation Commission planners have backed off a requirement to have employees from big companies work from home three days a week,” reports the Bay Area…

Study Claims 18% of Covid Patients Later Diagnosed with Mental Illness

A new article summarizes research from the University of Oxford and NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. Slashdot reader AleRunner writes: Nearly one in five people who have had Covid-19 are diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder such as anxiety, depression or insomnia within three months of testing positive for the virus,” Natalie Grover writes. Although “people with a pre-existing mental health…

In World First, Slovokia Plans To Test the Entire Country For COVID-19

The BBC reports: Slovakia has begun an ambitious project to test everyone over the age of 10 for Covid-19, but the president has said she thinks the idea is “unfeasible”. The operation to test four million people is to last over two weekends. Infections have soared in Slovakia and officials argue the only alternative would be a total lockdown. President Zuzana…

4.5-bil­lion-year-old ice on comet ‘fluffi­er than cap­puc­ci­no froth’

After years of detective work, scientists working on the European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta mission have now been able to locate where the Philae lander made its second and penultimate contact with the surface of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on 12 November 2014, before finally coming to a halt 30 metres away. This landing was monitored from the German Aerospace Center Philae Control…

What Happens When Researchers Give Thousands of Dollars to Homeless People?

CNN reports on “The New Leaf Project,” an initiative in which the University of British Columbia partnered with a Vancouver-based charity called Foundations for Social Change: Researchers gave 50 recently homeless people a lump sum of 7,500 Canadian dollars (nearly $5,700). They followed the cash recipients’ life over 12-18 months and compared their outcomes to that of a control group who…

China Secretly Built a Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims

In a series of investigations, BuzzFeed News used satellite images to reveal 268 newly-built internment camps for Muslims in the Xinjiang region. Longtime Slashdot reader wiredog shares the reports with us. Part 1: China Secretly Built A Vast New Infrastructure To Imprison Muslims
Part 2: What They Saw: Ex-Prisoners Detail The Horrors Of China’s Detention Camps
Part 3: Blanked Out Spots On China’s…

‘Landlord Tech Watch’ Site Lets You Report Landlords Using Tech To Screw Over Tenants

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of activists have released Landlord Tech Watch, a site that allows anyone to report where this “landlord tech” is being used and plot it on a map — like a version of Nextdoor that turns the tables to hold property owners and real estate companies accountable. The project is the effort…

As Colleges Move Classes Online, Families Rebel Against the Cost

“A rebellion against the high cost of a bachelor’s degree, already brewing around the nation before the coronavirus, has gathered fresh momentum as campuses have strained to operate in the pandemic,” reports the New York Times. “Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?” one incoming freshman tells them: Incensed at paying face-to-face prices for education that is increasingly…

NASA’s ‘robot hotel’ gets its occupants

Storage is just as important aboard the International Space Station as it is on Earth. While the space station is about the size of a football field, the living space inside is much smaller than that. Just as you wouldn’t store garden tools in a house when you could store them in a shed outside, astronauts now have a “housing unit”…