An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: New coronavirus variants seem to be cropping up everywhere. There’s one from the U.K., which is more contagious and already circulating in the United States. There’s one from South Africa, which is forcing Moderna and Pfizer to reformulate their COVID-19 vaccines and create “booster” shots, just to make sure the vaccines maintain their…
Tag: Moore
Rediscovering RISC-V: Apple M1 Sparks Renewed Interest in Non-x86 Architecture
“With the runaway success of the new ARM-based M1 Macs, non-x86 architectures are getting their closeup,” explains a new article at ZDNet. “RISC-V is getting the most attention from system designers looking to horn-in on Apple’s recipe for high performance. Here’s why…” RISC-V is, like x86 and ARM, an instruction set architecture (ISA). Unlike x86 and ARM, it is a free…
Senator Tries To Block Frontier’s FCC Funding, Citing ISP’s Various Failures
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Republican US senator from West Virginia has asked the government to block broadband funding earmarked for Frontier Communications, saying that the ISP is not capable of delivering gigabit-speed Internet service to all required locations. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) outlined her concerns in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit…
John le Carre, Author of Spy Novels, Dies at Age 89
“This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit,” tweeted novelist Stephen King, adding later that “The Little Drummer Girl was one of the best novels I’ve ever read.” Margaret Atwood tweeted “His Smiley novels are key to understanding the mid-20th century.” And the Associated Press tells the story of how spy-novel writer John le Carré was “drawn…
Celebrating the Path-Breaking Research That Lead to Coronavirus Vaccines
The Washington Post tells the remarkable story of how both Moderna’s vaccine and the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine relied on a specially designed spike protein partially created by America’s Vaccine Research Center — along with messenger RNA, “a technology never before harnessed in an approved vaccine.” And also decades of path-breaking research: If, as expected in the next few weeks, regulators give those…
Vaccine Maker Novavax Enters Final Large-Scale Testing of Its Covid-19 Vaccine
The New York Times reports:
Vaccine maker Novavax said Thursday that it would begin the final stages of testing its coronavirus vaccine in the United Kingdom and that another large trial was scheduled to begin next month in the United States. It is the fifth late-stage trial from a company supported by Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed a coronavirus…
To Assuage Fears of Google Domination, Istio Restructures Its Steering Committee
An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack:
While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control:…
Facial Recognition Designed To Detect Around Face Masks Is Failing, Study Finds
Many facial recognition companies have claimed they can identify people with pinpoint accuracy even while they’re wearing face masks, but the latest results from a study show that the coverings are dramatically increasing error rates. CNET reports: In an update Tuesday, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology looked at 41 facial recognition algorithms submitted after the COVID-19 pandemic was…
New Repository Leaks Souce Code From Microsoft, Adobe, and Dozens of Other Companies
Bleeping Computer reported this week that a new public repository of leaked code includes big names like Microsoft, Adobe, Lenovo, AMD, Qualcomm, Motorola, Roblox, and Disney:
The leaks have been collected by Tillie Kottmann, a developer and reverse engineer, from various sources and from their own hunting for misconfigured devops tools that offer access to source code… According to Bank Security, a…
Scientists dive deep into hidden world of quantum states
A research team led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed a technique that could lead to new electronic materials that surpass the limitations imposed by Moore’s Law, which predicted in 1975 that the number of transistors packed into a tiny silicon-based computer chip would double every two years. Their findings were reported in the…