Verizon Support Recommends Turning Off 5G to Conserve Battery Life

“Are you noticing your battery life is draining faster than normal?” tweeted Verizon Wireless customer support on Sunday, the Verge reports: Despite its relentless promotion of 5G phones and the fact that it spent more than $45 billion bidding on a new faster spectrum, Verizon support now is advising people on Twitter to turn off their phones’ 5G access to preserve…

Adobe Flash Is Officially Dead After 25 Years With Content Blocked Starting Today

When a user attempts to load a Flash game or content in a browser such as Chrome, the content now fails to load and instead displays a small banner that leads to the Flash end-of-life page on Adobe’s website. While this day has long been coming, with many browsers disabling Flash by default years ago, it is officially the end of…

Brexit Deal Mentions Netscape Browser and Mozilla Mail

References to decades-old computer software are included in the new Brexit agreement, including a description of Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Mail as being “modern” services. From a report: Experts believe officials must have copied and pasted chunks of text from old legislation into the document. The references are on page 921 of the trade deal, in a section on encryption technology….

FDA Panel Recommends Approval of Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine For Emergency Use

A key Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Thursday recommended the approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use in people over 16 years old, the last step before the FDA gives the final OK to broadly distribute the first doses throughout the United States. CNBC reports: If the FDA accepts the nonbinding recommendation from the Vaccines and…

New Report: Havanna Syndrome Could Be Directed Microwave Energy

NBC News reports:
The mysterious neurological symptoms experienced by American diplomats in China and Cuba are consistent with the effects of directed microwave energy, according to a long-awaited report by the National Academies of Sciences that cites medical evidence to support the long-held conviction of American intelligence officials. The report, obtained Friday by NBC News, does not conclude that the directed energy…

1% of Farms Operate 70% of World’s Farmland

One percent of the world’s farms operate 70% of crop fields, ranches and orchards, according to a report that highlights the impact of land inequality on the climate and nature crises. The Guardian reports: Since the 1980s, researchers found control over the land has become far more concentrated both directly through ownership and indirectly through contract farming, which results in more…

Discover how Joanne applies her learning from the IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate with her clients in the online education industry

Meet Joanne Roxburgh, a PhD student in technology-enhanced learning from the UK. Joanne had heard about the growing potential of artificial intelligence in her industry and wanted to learn more. She didn’t have a coding background, but as soon as she found the IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate on Coursera, she was able to start […]
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Ask Slashdot: What’s the Ultimate Backup System? Cloud? Local? Sync? Dupes? Tape…?

Long-time Slashdot reader shanen noticed a strange sound in one of their old machines, prompting them to ponder: what is the ultimate backup system? I’ve researched this topic a number of times in the past and never found a good answer… I think the ultimate backup would be cloud-based, though I can imagine a local solution running on a smart storage…

Building the University of the Future

By Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera CEO Even before COVID-19 changed the ways we live, work, and learn, universities were facing major challenges. Almost half of the higher education institutions in the U.S. had no formal online programs in 2018, and last year, fewer than 50 percent of faculty had ever taught an online course. Meanwhile, universities […]
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Year’s closest new moon October 16

October 16 brings us the closest new moon of 2020. Some will call it a supermoon. You won’t see this extra-close new moon because it’ll travel across the daytime sky with the sun. But you might see its gravitational effect on the tides along ocean shorelines in the days following new moon. Source: https://earthsky.org/tonight/years-closest-new-moon-october-16…