Science and Technology

Thursday, 18 June 2020 04:43

Twitter to let you tweet with your voice

Twitter has spent years trying to combat misinformation and abuse on its platform. Now it's introducing a new feature with the potential to complicate that effort: audio tweets. On Wednesday, the company said it's allowing a "limited group" of iOS users to create tweets with their voice. In the coming weeks, all iOS users should have access to voice tweets. The feature comes after the launch of a buzzy, invite-only app called Clubhouse, which encourages users to spontaneously drop into voice chat rooms. But it also potentially opens the door to new forms of abuse, whether it be verbal harassment…

Wednesday, 17 June 2020 11:34

You don’t like to see political adverts? Facebook will let you block them from your feeds

Facebook boss, Mr Mark Zuckerberg says users will be able to turn off political adverts on the social network in the run-up to the 2020 US election. In a piece written for USA Today newspaper, he also says he hopes to help four million Americans sign up as new voters. Facebook has faced heavy criticism for allowing adverts from politicians that contain false information. Rival social platform Twitter banned political advertising last October. “For those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you -- so we’re also introducing the…

Wednesday, 17 June 2020 05:32

Algorithms and armies: Businesses are finding AI hard to adopt

Facebook: the inside story”, Steven Levy’s recent book about the American social-media giant, paints a vivid picture of the firm’s size, not in terms of revenues or share price but in the sheer amount of human activity that thrums through its servers. 1.73bn people use Facebook every day, writing comments and uploading videos. An operation on that scale is so big, writes Mr Levy, “that it can only be policed by algorithms or armies”. In fact, Facebook uses both. Human moderators work alongside algorithms trained to spot posts that violate either an individual country’s laws or the site’s own policies.…

Tuesday, 16 June 2020 14:45

Covid-19 breakthrough: Scientists find widely available, cheap live-saving drug

A cheap and widely available drug called dexamethasone can help save the lives of patients who are seriously ill with coronavirus. UK experts say the low-dose steroid treatment is a major breakthrough in the fight against the deadly virus. It cut the risk of death by a third for patients on ventilators. For those on oxygen, it cut deaths by a fifth. The drug is part of the world's biggest trial testing existing treatments to see if they also work for coronavirus. Researchers estimate that if the drug had been available in the UK from the start of the coronavirus…

Tuesday, 16 June 2020 05:12

Vitamin D has been found to help Coronavirus patients recover. This is how to get enough of it

When most people think vitamin D they think of bone health, but this vitamin does a lot more and it may even help the body fight off upper respiratory infections, like Covid-19. Why vitamin D helps build strong bones Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin, meaning it's stored in fat tissue in the body. One of its main functions is that it enables the digestive tract to absorb calcium and phosphorus from food, which helps keep bones strong. In fact, without vitamin D, experts estimate that you'd only absorb about 10-15% of calcium and 60% of phosphorus from the foods…

Monday, 15 June 2020 09:51

You made some posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter that you now regret. This is how to clean them up

These tips will help you safely tidy up your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts—or give your profile a fresh start. As social media platforms have evolved, they've become more and more about the moment—what you're doing now, rather than what you were doing five years ago. While looking back through photos and posts can be heart-warming and provide a buzz of nostalgia, it can also be painful and embarrassing. If your social media life spans more than a few years then you might not want friends, family, or prospective employers looking back on the sort of person that you used…

Monday, 15 June 2020 04:23

Polio vaccine could help protect against Coronavirus - Experts

As the world works to produce an effective Covid-19 vaccine, some experts suggest an existing vaccine that almost everyone already gets might help. There is plenty of evidence that existing vaccines such as polio vaccines protect children against a wide range of infections and it's worth trying them out against the new coronavirus, a team of experts wrote in Science magazine. An oral polio vaccine is safe, cheap, easy to give and widely available, with more than 1 billion doses produced and used annually in more than 140 countries, according to the team, which includes one of the scientists who…

Friday, 12 June 2020 16:40

This is the Messaging App being used by protesters

Over the last two weeks, the number of Americans who have downloaded Signal, an encrypted messaging application, has skyrocketed. Many are using the app to organize and participate in protests against police brutality (without being spied on by law enforcement). The week before George Floyd died on May 25, about 51,000 first-time users downloaded Signal, according to data from the analytics firm Sensor Tower. The following week, as protests grew nationwide, there were 78,000 new downloads. In the first week of June, there were 183,000. (Rani Molla at Recode noted that downloads of Citizen, the community safety app, are also…

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…

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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…

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