Science and Technology

Friday, 12 June 2020 16:05

Breakthrough coronavirus drug may treat and even prevent infections

A coronavirus drug breakthrough has been able to both treat and prevent COVID-19 infections in early tests, and it could be a huge development before vaccines are ready. Monoclonal antibody therapies target the virus’s ability to replicate inside the body, and several companies have started clinical trials. Regeneron will conduct four distinct random trials for a drug called REGN-COV2, which contains two potent antibodies that should also block the virus if it mutates. A report in early May said that revolutionary new coronavirus drugs might be ready this summer, referring to monoclonal antibody therapies that were in development at several…

Thursday, 11 June 2020 05:13

Twitter introduces test asking you to open an article before sharing it

Twitter is about to deal with one of the greatest threats to meaningful discussions on the internet: people who forward articles they haven’t even read. It’s starting an Android test that asks you if you’d like to open an article you’re about to retweet. This should help foster “informed discussion,” the company said. The social network told Engadget it doesn’t have a timeline for bringing the feature to iOS. It’s not surprising that Twitter would explore a feature like this. The company is stepping up its fight against misinformation as the 2020 US presidential election looms, and encouraging users to…

Sunday, 31 May 2020 04:54

US astronauts begin historic mission on private spaceship

The private rocket company SpaceX has sent two Nasa astronauts into orbit. It's the first time since the retirement of the shuttles nine years ago that an American crew has made the journey from US territory. Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken are not only trialling a new capsule system, they are also initiating a new business model for Nasa. The agency will no longer own the vehicles it uses but merely purchase the "taxi" service offered by SpaceX. It's hoped companies other than tech billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX outfit will come in to expand the market. The aerospace giant Boeing…

Thursday, 28 May 2020 04:41

Scientists studied 100bn tweets to find out why we stretch our words. This is what they found

When we speak, we routinely stretch our words to convey emotion or to strengthen their meaning. Excitement: "Yessssssss!" Fear: "Noooooo!" Confusion: "Whaaaattt?" We've probably been doing this since humans began to speak, but such informal language has rarely left a written record. It's only since the rise of social media that we have had an opportunity to study these elongated exclamations, said scientists at the University of Vermont Burlington, who started collecting tweets back in 2008 when they first noticed that stretched words like "hahaha" and "duuuuude" were being used quite commonly. Since then with the aid of computers, they…

Thursday, 28 May 2020 04:38

Facebook engineered to ‘exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness’ - Report

If Facebook seems like a breeding ground for trolling and vitriol, there's good reason: it's exactly that. Facebook itself came to that same conclusion as far back as 2018. And according to a new story from the Wall Street Journal, once executives were made aware just how irrefutable the problem was, they deliberately axed efforts to fix it. Reporters for the Journal managed to get access to internal presentations. One in particular from 2018 was explicit, stating, "Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness." It warned that "if left unchecked" the platform would push "more and more divisive…

Monday, 25 May 2020 05:10

Scientists develop self-cleaning electric face mask ‘which kills Coronavirus’

Israeli researchers have developed an electric face mask that cleans itself and could kill Coronavirus. The face covering is powered by a mobile phone charger, and will be sold for as little as $1. A team of engineers have invented a self-cleaning mask that kills off Coronavirus by running an electrical current through the filter. Researchers at the Technion Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering say the electricity will heat up a carbon fibre layer and kill off any viruses that have settled on it. A patent for the face covering has been filed in the United States, and the…

Saturday, 23 May 2020 05:06

The science of gossip (and why everyone does it)

People feed off gossip. It's one reason why, in the 1960s, the National Enquirer swapped the gory, gruesome headlines they were known for with celebrity scoops and scandal. The switch gave the tabloid access to supermarket checkout lines and the "enquiring minds" in them. But it's not just tabloid readers who love to dish. Social scientists have found that everyone is hardwired to pay attention to gossip, and to participate in it. In fact, it's an evolutionary adaptation -- it's become human nature to spill the tea. "We're the descendants of people who were good at this," said Frank McAndrew,…

Thursday, 21 May 2020 05:10

Apple-Google contact tracing tech draws interest in 23 countries

Authorities in 23 countries across five continents have sought access to contact tracing technology from Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, the companies announced on Wednesday as they released the initial version of their system. But authorities would have to stop requiring phone numbers from users under the companies’ rules, one of several restrictions that have left governments fighting the novel coronavirus frustrated that the world’s top two smartphone software makers undercut the technology’s usefulness by prioritizing user privacy. Apple and Google said several U.S. states and 22 countries have sought access to their technology, but it is unclear how…

Wednesday, 20 May 2020 05:12

Covid-19: Remote controlled mask invented to allow eating

A face mask with a remote controlled mouth has been invented in Israel, allowing diners to eat food without taking it off. The mask can be opened mechanically by a hand remote or automatically when the fork reaches the mask. BBC

Thursday, 14 May 2020 05:35

Artificial intelligence can’t yet learn common sense

Mary Shackleton Machines can learn a lot of things--probably more than you can imagine. But can they learn common sense? David Ferrucci, the builder of IBM's original Jeopardy!-playing version of Watson, recently discussed his latest AI effort: An attempt to instill common sense knowledge from the everyday world into the automated reasoning that takes place with artificial intelligence (AI). At his company, Elemental Cognition, Ferrucci described how his AI team gave an advanced language program the sentence, "Zoey moves her plant to a sunny window. Soon …". The AI program was tasked to complete the second sentence. A human would…

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Wednesday, 13 May 2020 05:03

Four-legged robot enforces Coronavirus social distancing

Spot is a 4-legged machine being deployed in parks in Singapore. The robo-dog is armed with a camera, sensors and a speaker. Its mission: to seek out groups of people who are violating social distancing recommendations, and to remind them to cut it out. Spot joins a pack of other high-tech machines in the fight against the Coronavirus. It’s all hands on deck against this pandemic, and sometimes those hands aren’t even human. Yahoo News

Tuesday, 12 May 2020 05:37

Twitter to add warning labels to coronavirus misinformation

Twitter will soon begin adding labels and warning messages on some tweets with disputed or misleading information about Covid-19, the company said on Monday, as part of a new approach to misinformation that will eventually extend to other topics. Twitter's new labels will provide links to more information in cases where the risk of harm from the tweet is not severe enough to be removed, but people could be confused or misled, Twitter said in a blog post. The company said that depending on the propensity for harm and type of misleading information in the tweet, warnings may also be…

Monday, 11 May 2020 06:10

Men are more likely to contract coronavirus than women. Scientists have discovered why

Men’s blood has higher levels than women’s of a key enzyme used by the new Coronavirus to infect cells, the results of a big European study showed on Monday — a finding which may help explain why men are more vulnerable to infection with Covid-19. Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is found in the heart, kidneys and other organs. In Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel Coronavirus, it is thought to play a role in how the infection progresses into the lungs. The study, published in the European Heart Journal, also found that widely-prescribed drugs called ACE inhibitors or…

Sunday, 10 May 2020 04:23

Combining these three drugs helps Coronavirus patients recover quickly, study finds

A combination of three antiviral drugs plus an immune system booster seemed to help patients recover more quickly from coronavirus infections, doctors in Hong Kong reported Friday. They said the approach needs more testing but it could offer another treatment possibility for Covid-19 patients. Currently the only authorized treatment is the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, which also shortens the duration of illness but is limited in supply. Dr. Kwok-Yung Yuen at Hong Kong University and colleagues tested the HIV drug combination of ritonavir and lopanivir along with the general antiviral drug ribavirin and a multiple sclerosis drug called beta interferon.…

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