US Reaches $1 Billion Deal For Doses of Potential Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The Trump administration on Wednesday announced a deal worth approximately $1 billion for the manufacturing of 100 million doses of a potential coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson that the federal government would then own. The move is the latest in a series of agreements the Trump administration has made with several…

AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All

An anonymous reader shares a report: In the future, deepfake videos and audiofakes may well be used to create distinct, sensational moments that commandeer a press cycle, or to distract from some other, more organic scandal. But undetectable textfakes — masked as regular chatter on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the like — have the potential to be far more subtle, far…

US Secures 300 Million Doses, Almost a Third, of Potential AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccine

schwit1 shares a report from Financial Post: The United States has secured almost a third of the first one billion doses planned for AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to $1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work. While not proven to be effective against the coronavirus, vaccines are seen by world leaders…

Is NASA Actually Working On a Warp Drive?

“Is NASA really working on… a warp drive?” asks Popular Mechanics? Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares their report:
An internal feasibility report suggests the agency might be, or at least that the idea of traveling through folded space is part of the NASA interstellar spaceflight menu. In the report, advanced propulsion physicist Harold “Sonny” White explains the ideas of theoretical physicist (and…