Human Infection Search Results

How To: Use Apple & Google's COVID-19 Screeners on Your Phone to See if You Might Have Coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a frenzy for news and information that is nearly unprecedented in the smartphone era, with a major side effect of misinformation. Now, major tech companies are making it easier to ask for advice about novel coronavirus from their respective digital assistants. Results may vary, but Apple and Google are the most useful at the moment.

How To: Listen to Radio Conversations on Android with an RTL-SDR Dongle & OTG Adapter

Everyone from first responders to hotel cleaning staff use radios operating in the sub-megahertz range to communicate, often without even encoding the transmission. While encoding and encryption are increasingly used in radio communication, an RTL-SDR adapter and smartphone are all it takes to start listening in on radio conversations happening around you.

Hands-on: Meta's New Meta Viewer App Is the AR Collaboration Tool All Those Sci-Fi Films Imagined

When you drive along the deceptively sedate streets of Silicon Valley, there are few hints that all those nondescript office parks and low-rise buildings contain the very future of the planet, but they really do. On a recent trip to tech's epicenter, I found that out firsthand when I got to visit the offices of Meta, the startup that produced the Meta 2 augmented reality headset.

News: Stop Using Citronella Candles — They Don't Work

Mosquitoes are a big problem, and citronella candles are not the solution. There are a lot of mosquito species. The American Mosquito Control Association reports there are more than 3000 mosquito species in the world, and about 200 of those occur in the US. The most common are the Aedes, Anopheles, and Culex species. These are also the three mosquito species most likely to transmit serious illness, and all of them live in the US.

News: Scientists Are Using the Special Physics of Dragonfly Wings to Create Surfaces That Shred Bacteria on Contact

As drug-resistant bacteria become more commonplace, researchers are looking for new antibacterial strategies to disrupt disease-causing microbes. Some scientists are working to create new drugs, while others are trying out drug combinations. Another group, however, are ditching pharmaceuticals altogether and experimenting with non-drug alternatives.

News: Hino Motors Leads the Way to Japan's Planned 2020 Rollout of Commercial Truck Platooning

Japan is in the process of curbing its aging population and mature workforce. According to The Diplomat, the country's population has been declining at a steady rate. To meet future productivity demands in commercial and industrial sectors, local officials are turning to self-driving technology, including truck platooning, where three or five vehicles travel autonomously in a string formation. This practice, according to a study by MIT, can reduce fuel consumption by up to 20% (more about thi...

News: 14 Types of Bacteria & 10 Strains of Fungus Are Responsible for All the Delicious Flavors of Cheese

If you want to appreciate the value of microbes, look no further than a chunk of cheese. Because cheese roughly traces back to the Neolithic Era, we might say the earliest cheesemakers were the first humans to manipulate microbes—without even knowing it. Now, thanks to microbiologists and the long tradition of cheesemaking, we know a lot more about the microbes that make our favorite types of cheese possible.

News: Augmented Reality Surprised Sundance Film Festival with a Journey into the Human Brain

The largest and arguably most widely known event of its type, especially in the US, the Sundance Film Festival is an annual celebration of independent film—ones made outside the Hollywood system. This year, a new type of experience appeared at the Sundance Film Festival in an installation called "The Journey to the Center of the Natural Machine." This mixed reality presentation offered the user the newest type of storytelling in a long and important line—continuation of the species kind of im...

How To: Diceware Gives You Truly Random Yet Easy-to-Memorize Passwords

Passwords are everywhere. We use them to unlock phones, computers, websites, encrypted disks, encrypted files... the list just goes on and on. Savvy users will already have a password manager of some sort that can generate a very strong password on a per site basis. However, these password managers also require a password. Not only that, it has to be something memorable.

News: The People at Boston Dynamics Are Going to Kill Us All

I'm starting to wonder if the people at Boston Dynamics have ever watched a Terminator movie. Not just because the robotics company with the oxymoronic name develops machines that are able to move around environments with animal- and human-like agility, but because the people testing them seem to take such joy in openly antagonizing their creations. It's one thing to tempt fate by creating superhuman robots that could potentially end mankind. You've reached a whole new level of hubris when yo...