Science and Technology

Saturday, 06 November 2021 05:58

Pfizer says its antiviral pill slashes risk of severe Covid-19 by 89 percent

Pfizer Inc's experimental antiviral pill to treat Covid-19 cut by 89% the chance of hospitalization or death for adults at risk of severe disease, the company said on Friday, as its CEO vowed to make this promising new weapon in the fight against the pandemic available globally as quickly as possible. The trial's results suggest that Pfizer's drug surpasses Merck & Co Inc's pill, molnupiravir, which was shown last month to halve the chance of dying or being hospitalized for Covid-19 patients at high risk of serious illness. Pfizer's pill, with the brand name Paxlovid, could secure U.S. regulatory approval…

Wednesday, 03 November 2021 06:00

Google just banned 150 dangerous Android apps. These are the apps, so you them from your phone immediately

No matter what device you’re using, you have to be on the lookout for scams. Any email you receive, text someone sends you, or app you download could be dangerous. We can’t even go a week without a new threat popping up, and this week’s is a collection of fake Android apps on Google Play. Cybersecurity software company Avast has been reporting on a scam campaign dubbed UltimaSMS in recent weeks. According to Avast, 151 apps were part of the premium SMS scam campaign. These fake Android apps disguise themselves as legitimate tools, from photo editors and camera filters to…

Wednesday, 03 November 2021 05:54

5 things Mark Zuckerberg said about his plan for Metaverse that should make you very worried

On Thursday, at Facebook's developer conference, Mark Zuckerberg outlined his vision for the metaverse. Of course, the details were somewhat lost in the midst of his announcement that the company he founded in his Harvard dorm room waschanging its name from Facebook to Meta, in an attempt to better define its mission as it moves beyond its core social media apps. I definitely have thoughts about the idea that Facebook is changing its name, but those will have to wait. There is far a far more important thread to pull on, which is what Zuckerberg had to say about the…

Friday, 29 October 2021 05:54

Facebook changes name to Meta in move towards its ‘metaverse’ vision

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said his company is rebranding itself as Meta in an effort to encompass its virtual-reality vision for the future, what Zuckerberg calls the “metaverse.” Skeptics point out that it also appears to be an attempt to change the subject from the Facebook Papers, a leaked document trove that has revealed the ways Facebook ignored internal reports and warnings of the harms its social network created or magnified across the world. Zuckerberg says he expects the metaverse to reach a billion people within the next decade. The metaverse, he says, will be a place people will be…

Thursday, 21 October 2021 05:45

Pig-to-human transplants come a step closer with new test

Scientists temporarily attached a pig’s kidney to a human body and watched it begin to work, a small step in the decades-long quest to one day use animal organs for life-saving transplants. Pigs have been the most recent research focus to address the organ shortage, but among the hurdles: A sugar in pig cells, foreign to the human body, causes immediate organ rejection. The kidney for this experiment came from a gene-edited animal, engineered to eliminate that sugar and avoid an immune system attack. Surgeons attached the pig kidney to a pair of large blood vessels outside the body of…

Wednesday, 20 October 2021 05:55

Israeli startup AIR unveils flying vehicle to be used 'like cars'

Israeli startup AIR on Tuesday unveiled its first “easy-to-operate” electric, vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that it aims to sell directly to consumers predominantly in the United States starting in 2024. AIR has been working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) for two years and expects to obtain certification by the end of 2023 for the AIR ONE, a two-seater, 970 kg (2,138 lb) eVTOL, which will have a flight range of 110 miles (177 km), Chief Executive Rani Plaut told Reuters. AIR raised seed funding of under $10 million last year and has been running unmanned tests…

Wednesday, 20 October 2021 05:52

Facebook to announce name change soon

Social media giant Facebook Inc is planning to rebrand itself with a new name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, the Verge reported on Tuesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about the name change at the company's annual Connect conference on Oct. 28, but it could be unveiled sooner, the Verge reported. A metaverse refers to shared virtual world environments, which people can access via the internet. The term can refer to digital spaces, which are made more lifelike by the use of…

Monday, 18 October 2021 05:48

WhatsApp rolls out encryption for chats backed up in the cloud

WhatsApp is the mobile messaging backbone of much of the global population, and all of its users just got an added layer of privacy protection. On the WhatsApp blog, the Facebook-owned messaging app confirmed that end-to-end encryption for backed up chats in the cloud will roll out "slowly" to all of its two billion (!) users starting now. This was previously announced in September, but without a specific release date. All you need to do is have the latest version of the WhatsApp mobile app installed to get access to the feature. Here's how it works: Let's say you're getting…

Tuesday, 12 October 2021 05:42

China has won AI battle with U.S., Pentagon's ex-software chief says

China has won the artificial intelligence battle with the United States and is heading towards global dominance because of its technological advances, the Pentagon's former software chief told the Financial Times. China, the world’s second largest economy, is likely to dominate many of the key emerging technologies, particularly artificial intelligence, synthetic biology and genetics within a decade or so, according to Western intelligence assessments. Nicolas Chaillan, Pentagon's first chief software officer who resigned in protest against the slow pace of technological transformation in the U.S. military, said the failure to respond was putting the United States at risk. "We have…

Monday, 11 October 2021 05:47

FG approves home-grown genetically modified maize

Federal government has granted environmental approval for evaluation and open cultivation of TELA Maize, a new maize variety developed by researchers at the Institute for Agricultural Research, Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, that resists fall armyworm, stem borers, and tolerates moderate drought. The government’s decision was contained in a certificate issued to IAR by the National Biosafety Management Agency (NBMA), the federal government agency mandated to regulate genetically modified products in the country. The Certificate dated October 8, 2021, with permit code no. NBMA/CM/003, was issued to IAR for General\Commercial Release of TELA Maize Genetically Modified for Drought Tolerance, Resistance to…

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Sunday, 10 October 2021 14:14

AI is no match for the quirks of human intelligence - Herbert L. Roitblat

We may sometimes behave like computers, but more often, we are creative, irrational, and not always too bright. At least since the 1950s, the idea that it would be possible to soon create a machine that was capable of matching the full scope and level of achievement of human intelligence has been greeted with equal amounts of hype and hysteria. We’ve now succeeded in creating machines that can solve specific fairly narrow problems — “smart” machines that can diagnose disease, drive cars, understand speech, and beat us at chess — but general intelligence remains elusive. Let’s get this out of…

Thursday, 07 October 2021 05:48

WHO approves malaria vaccine to protect African children

Children across much of Africa are to be vaccinated against malaria in a historic moment in the fight against the deadly disease. Malaria has been one of the biggest scourges on humanity for millennia and mostly kills babies and infants. Having a vaccine - after more than a century of trying - is among medicine's greatest achievements. The vaccine - called RTS,S - was proven effective six years ago. Now, after the success of pilot immunisation programmes in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, the World Health Organization says the vaccine should be rolled out across sub-Saharan Africa and in other regions…

Wednesday, 06 October 2021 05:53

Why did Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram go down globally?

Facebook has apologised after it stopped working for users around the world for several hours on Monday. WhatsApp and Instagram - which are owned by the company - were also down. What was the problem? In a nutshell, Facebook's systems stopped talking to the wider internet. It was as if "someone had pulled the cables from their data centres all at once and disconnected them from the internet", explained web infrastructure firm Cloudflare. Facebook's explanation was a little more technical. It said "configuration changes on the backbone routers that co-ordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted…

Tuesday, 05 October 2021 05:42

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram down worldwide

The massive global outage that plunged Facebook, its Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and many people who rely heavily on these services — including Facebook’s own workforce — into chaos Monday is gradually dissipating. Facebook said late Monday that it’s been working to restore access to its services and is “happy to report they are coming back online now.” The company apologized and thanked its users for bearing with it. But fixing it wasn’t as simple as flipping a proverbial switch. For some users, WhatsApp was working for a time, then not. For others, Instagram was working but not Facebook, and…

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