Moderna’s variant-specific COVID vaccine heads into trial, NIH reports

Enlarge / A vial of the current Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Ivan Romano)

Researchers have given out the first jabs of a tweaked version of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, one aimed at fighting one of the most concerning coronavirus variants—the B.1.351 variant, first identified in South Africa.

The jabs are part of an early trial of the tweaked vaccine, which is being run by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The agency aims to enroll around 210 healthy adults in the trial by the end of April.

“The B.1.351 SARS-CoV-2 variant, first identified in the Republic of South Africa, has been detected in at least nine states in the United States,” NIAID Director Anthony Fauci said in an announcement. “Preliminary data show that the COVID-19 vaccines currently available in the United States should provide an adequate degree of protection against SARS-CoV-2 variants. However, out of an abundance of caution, NIAID has continued its partnership with Moderna to evaluate this variant vaccine candidate should there be a need for an updated vaccine.”

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Microsoft, US Army ink $21.9 billion deal to strap HoloLens onto personnel

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Microsoft | Getty Images)

On Wednesday, the US Army formally moved forward with the largest-ever government-related deal for headsets in the virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR) sector: a 10-year agreement with Microsoft to provide 120,000 headsets "based" on the HoloLens line.

Reports by CNBC and Bloomberg point to a $21.9 billion value for this week's updated arrangement, following its initial announcement in November 2018. Neither of those reports points to exact reasons for the deal's jump from an initial contract value of $480 million, despite that earlier deal confirming similarly high headset numbers.

Official IVAS image as provided by Microsoft as part of Wednesday's announcements. Notice an array of sensors across the top, along with an apparent headset-strapping requirement for this model. (credit: Microsoft)

The headset model in question, as revealed by Microsoft's Alex Kipman in a Wednesday blog post, appears to deviate slightly from its originally announced intent. While it's still known as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) and includes an array of HoloLens-like sensors, the model seen in today's announcement appears to attach to a helmet. Ars previously reported that Microsoft and the US Army intended for this headset to not require mounting on a helmet, arguably to increase its applicability.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple commits to build “grid-scale” energy storage in California

• 

  Apple's "California Flats" solar energy farm in Northern California. [credit: Apple ]

Apple announced Wednesday that it will build a "grid-scale" energy-storage project in California capable of storing 240 megawatt-hours of energy. The storage will work closely with the 130-megawatt solar farm the company already built to power daytime energy needs at its headquarters in Cupertino. Additionally, Apple says that 110 of its manufacturing partners are moving to 100 percent renewable energy, as part of a commitment by Apple to make its supply chain and products carbon neutral by 2030.

The project is intended to store energy so the energy produced by the solar farm can be used during the night as well as during the day, and Cupertino says the project will store enough energy to "power over 7,000 homes for one day." Apple plans to share some of what it learns from the project with other companies, executives have said.

Apple's own corporate footprint is already carbon-neutral, the company says, but it will be a longer and more challenging road to bring its various manufacturing partners and suppliers along with it. Apple's newsroom post offers details about how Apple works with suppliers to reduce their carbon footprints:

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ubiquiti breach puts countless cloud-based devices at risk of takeover

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Network devices maker Ubiquiti has been covering up the severity of a data breach that puts customers’ hardware at risk of unauthorized access, KrebsOnSecurity has reported, citing an unnamed whistleblower inside the company.

In January, the maker of routers, Internet-connected cameras, and other networked devices, disclosed what it said was “unauthorized access to certain of our information technology systems hosted by a third-party cloud provider.” The notice said that, while there was no evidence the intruders accessed user data, the company couldn’t rule out the possibility that they obtained users’ names, email addresses, cryptographically hashed passwords, addresses, and phone numbers. Ubiquiti recommended users change their passwords and enable two-factor authentication.

Device passwords stored in the cloud

Tuesday’s report from KrebsOnSecurity cited a security professional at Ubiquiti who helped the company respond to the two-month breach beginning in December 2020. The individual said the breach was much worse than Ubiquiti let on and that executives were minimizing the severity to protect the company’s stock price.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Xiaomi’s first foldable features a liquid camera lens, Samsung-style design

• 

  The Xiaomi Mi Mix Fold, which looks a lot like Samsung's foldables. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Xiaomi is resurrecting the Mi Mix model line with the Mi Mix Fold. The first Mi Mix was a futuristic-looking smartphone that kicked off the slim-bezel smartphone race. This new Mi Mix Fold is Xiaomi's first commercial foldable, and, like Huawei's efforts, represents the company doing its best to just copy the Samsung Galaxy Fold design.

Just like Huawei's clone, the Xiaomi Fold is a bit bigger than Samsung's 7.6-inch device and sports a 60 Hz, 2480x1860, 8.01-inch internal flexible OLED display. The outside display on Xiaomi's Fold is a 90 Hz, 2520x840, 6.5-inch OLED display, which is bigger than Samsung's 6.2-inch display and Huawei's 6.45-inch outer display. Interestingly, Xiaomi is taking the opposite approach to screen refresh rates that Samsung is taking. On the Z Fold 2, a fast 120 Hz display is the interior tablet screen on the device, while the phone-style screen is 60 Hz. Xiaomi made the big inside screen slow and the outside screen fast.

Xiaomi has settled on an iPad-like 4:3 aspect ratio for the inside screen, while Samsung switched from nearly 4:3 in the first generation (4.2:3) to a taller 5:4 aspect ratio in its second-generation foldable. Huawei landed around this 5:4 aspect ratio for its foldable, too. It's hard to know what the right screen dimensions are for an Android foldable, since Android tablets have been dead for so long that there's really no app support anymore. Today, most Android apps are phone apps, and they really struggle to adapt to bigger displays. Samsung's and Huawei's ~5:4 displays are nearly two regular 21:9 Android phones placed next to each other, so they can sidestep this issue by just running in split-screen most of the time. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the Galaxy Fold 1 was a bit too cramped for split-screen.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Biden broadband plan will be hated by big ISPs, welcomed by Internet users

Enlarge / President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, DC, on Monday, March 29, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

President Biden's plan to connect all Americans with high-speed broadband includes proposals to boost competition, build more publicly owned networks, lower prices, and prioritize "future-proof" networks instead of ones that would quickly become outdated. In other words, the plan includes some of the broadband industry's least-favorite ideas and is sure to meet fierce resistance from cable and telecom lobby groups and Republicans.

Biden's $100 billion broadband proposal is part of the American Jobs Plan described by the White House in a fact sheet released today. The broadband details released so far are a bit vague, and the plan could be changed in Congress, but there's a lot to like for Internet users.

"The president believes we can bring affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American through a historic investment of $100 billion," the fact sheet said. The $100 billion in broadband funding would be spread out over a number of years, as the entire jobs plan is slated to "invest about $2 trillion this decade." (We published another story today on how the Biden plan would also eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.)

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Real F1-to-road car tech: The Mercedes-AMG performance hybrid

• 

  Mercedes-AMG has been developing this Project One hypercar—which uses the same powertrain as its all-conquering F1 cars—for a few years now. It's not quite ready yet, but the hybrid system is about to appear on some other Mercedes-AMG road cars. [credit: Mercedes-AMG ]

This week should have seen the start of the New York International Auto Show, but despite its postponement, many of the automakers who would have attended are still showing off their latest new-and-shiny projects online instead. Most of Mercedes-Benz's headlines have come from its new electric EQS sedan and the humongous 56-inch screen embedded in its dash. I don't know about you, but I'm fast approaching burnout when it comes to huge screens in cars, so I'm far more interested in the details that Mercedes-AMG shared about its new performance hybrid system.

In 2014, Formula 1 racing adopted a new set of technical regulations as the sport moved from naturally aspirated 2.4 L V8 engines to hybrid powertrains that combine a 1.6 L V6 with a pair of hybrid systems to recover energy from waste heat as well as under braking. The Mercedes-AMG team came out of the starting blocks with a better hybrid powertrain than anyone else and dominated the sport from then on, racking up both the driver's and constructor's world championships that season and every year since.

I've repeatedly said that F1 technology almost never shows up in street cars, and endurance racing is the venue for real racetrack-to-road technology transfer. But in this case, Mercedes-AMG really is translating its F1 hybrid know-how into the brand's street cars.

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

CDPR puts off planned multiplayer Cyberpunk game amid restructuring

Enlarge / Bad news if you've been hoping to shoot sword-wielding laser-beam punks controlled by other humans, rather than AI...

A planned standalone multiplayer version of Cyberpunk 2077 is being "reconsidered," developer CD Projekt Red says, as the company reconfigures itself for a new development structure going forward.

In a "strategy update" video posted Tuesday, CDPR joint CEO Adam Kicinski mentioned that the team had previously "hinted that our next AAA would be a multiplayer Cyberpunk game, but we have decided to reconsider this plan given our new more systematic and agile approach [to development]."

Instead, CDPR will be focusing on "building an online technology that can be seamlessly integrated into all of our future games," Kicinski said. That means developing technologies that can "power online components we choose to add to our games without any technological delay."

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Biden plan eliminates billions in fossil fuel subsidies

Enlarge (credit: Jose Luis Stephens | Getty Images)

Today, President Joe Biden will unveil a $2 trillion infrastructure plan that promises to overhaul the nation’s highways, airports, electrical grid, and more. It will be partly paid for by repealing subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

Currently, the United States gives the $180 billion fossil fuel industry between $5 billion to $62 billion per year in direct subsidies, depending on the estimate. When accounting for indirect subsidies, including public health impacts and climate change, the handout could be as high as $649 billion. The Biden administration hasn’t specified which tax credits or subsidies it would eliminate, and certain subsidies probably will be subject to horse trading in Congress. That makes it difficult to get an accurate number at this point, but the number would certainly be in the range of billions of dollars. 

If the Biden administration is successful, the US would be following through on a promise made at the 2009 G20 summit, which stated that signatories should “phase out and rationalize over the medium term inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.”

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Pfizer: COVID vaccine shows “100% efficacy” in adolescents 12-15

Enlarge / Jonathan, a 16-year-old teenager, receives a dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine at Clalit Health Services, in Israel's Mediterranean coastal city of Tel Aviv on January 23, 2021. (credit: Getty | Jack Guez)

Adolescents aged 12 to 15 were completely protected from symptomatic COVID-19 after being vaccinated with the Pfizer/BioNtech mRNA vaccine in a small Phase III clinical trial, Pfizer reported in a press release Wednesday.

The company also said that the vaccine was well-tolerated in the age group, spurring only the standard side effects seen in people aged 16 to 25. The vaccine is already authorized for use in people aged 16 and over.

The vaccine appeared more effective at spurring defensive immune responses in adolescents aged 12 to 15 than in the 16- to 25-year-old group, producing even higher levels of antibodies that were able to neutralize SARS-CoV-2. In a measure of neutralizing antibodies, vaccinated youths in the new trial had geometric mean titers (GMTs) of 1,239.5, compared with the GMTs of 705.1 previously seen in those aged 16 to 25, Pfizer noted.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments