At this time of year, agricultural burning adds to the air pollution problems across northern India and Pakistan. The region contains 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the World Health Organization's global PM2.5 database. But are these the most polluted places ever recorded? Lack of measurements make historic comparisons difficult, but we have some clues. From a report: More than 200 years ago, Benjamin Franklin was famously among the first scientists to study electricity in the atmosphere. Lightning is the most obvious manifestation, but air pollution also changes the electrical properties of our air. Electrical measurements near Hyde Park in about 1790 suggest 18th-century London's particle pollution was perhaps half the annual average in the most polluted cities in modern India.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from LiveScience: A woman with COVID-19 in Washington state shed infectious virus particles for 70 days, meaning she was contagious during that entire time, despite never showing symptoms of the disease, according to a new report. The 71-year-old woman had a type of leukemia, or cancer of the white blood cells, and so her immune system was weakened and less able to clear her body of the new coronavirus, known as SARS-CoV-2. Although researchers have suspected that people with weakened immune systems may shed the virus for longer than typical, there was little evidence of this happening, until now. The findings contradict guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which say that immunocompromised people with COVID-19 are likely not infectious after 20 days. The new findings suggest "long-term shedding of infectious virus may be a concern in certain immunocompromised patients," the authors wrote in their paper, published in the journal Cell. "The virus was detected in her upper respiratory tract for 105 days; and infectious virus particles -- meaning they were capable of spreading the disease -- were detected for at least 70 days," the report says. "Typically, people with COVID-19 are contagious for about eight days after infection, according to the report. Previously, the longest duration of infectious virus shedding in a COVID-19 patient was reported to be 20 days."

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For the first time in the history of TIOBE's index, Java has slipped out of the top two, leaving Python to occupy the spot behind reigning champion, C. TechRepublic reports: October's TIOBE index had C at No. 1 and Java at No. 2, and historically those two languages have simply traded spaces while the rest of the competition battled it out for the privilege to fall in behind the two perennial leaders. With Python finally overtaking Java in popularity, the future could be one in which everything comes up Python. "In the past, most programming activities were performed by software engineers. But programming skills are needed everywhere nowadays and there is a lack of good software developers," TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen said. "As a consequence, we need something simple that can be handled by non-software engineers, something easy to learn with fast edit cycles and smooth deployment. Python meets all these needs." Jansen said that he believes this is the case despite claims from others that Python's popularity is due to booms in data mining, AI, numerical computing, and other initiatives that commonly use Python's extensive data processing capabilities. As TechRepublic's R. Dallon Adams wrote in his piece on the October index, Python has been giving Java a run for its money for some time. October saw Python at No. 3 with the largest year-over-year growth percentage in the top 50 languages. Java, still at second place in October, had the largest negative year-over-year growth rate in the top 50 during the same period. R, Perl, and Go are also all boasting positive growth. "R is in 9th place, the same it occupied last month," reports TechRepublic. "R has experienced explosive growth in 2020, which has led TIOBE to consider it a contender for programming language of the year."

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The first detection of a fast radio burst inside the Milky Way leads scientists back to a magnetar, partially solving a long-standing mystery. CNET reports: Sifting through a trove of radio telescope data in 2007, Duncan Lorimer, an astrophysicist at West Virginia University, spotted something unusual. Data obtained six years earlier showed a brief, energetic burst, lasting no more than 5 milliseconds. Others had seen the blip and looked past it, but Lorimer and his team calculated that it was an entirely new phenomenon: a signal emanating from somewhere far outside the Milky Way. The team had no idea what had caused it but they published their results in Science. The mysterious signal became known as a "fast radio burst," or FRB. In the 13 years since Lorimer's discovery, dozens of FRBs have been discovered outside of the Milky Way -- some repeating and others ephemeral, single chirps. Astrophysicists have been able to pinpoint their home galaxies, but they've struggled to identify the cosmic culprit, putting forth all sorts of theories, from exotic physics to alien civilizations. On Wednesday, a trio of studies in the journal Nature describes the source of the first FRB discovered within the Milky Way, revealing the mechanism behind at least some of the highly energetic radio blasts. The newly described burst, dubbed FRB 200428, was discovered and located after it pinged radio antennas in the US and Canada on April 28, 2020. A hurried hunt followed, with teams of researchers around the globe focused on studying the FRB across the electromagnetic spectrum. It was quickly determined that FRB 200428 is the most energetic radio pulse ever detected in our home galaxy. In the suite of new papers, astrophysicists outline their detective work and breakthrough observations from a handful of ground- and space-based telescopes. Linking together concordant observations, researchers pin FRB 200428 on one of the most unusual wonders of the cosmos: a magnetar, the hypermagnetic remains of a dead supergiant star. It's the first time astrophysicists have been able to finger a culprit in the intergalactic whodunit -- but this is just the beginning. "There really is a lot more to be learned going forward," says Amanda Weltman, an astrophysicist at the University of Cape Town and author of a Nature news article accompanying the discovery. "This is just the first exciting step."

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A Tesla-branded tequila, which is being described as a "small-batch premium 100% de agave tequila anejo made from sustainably sourced highland and lowland agaves," is now being sold on the automaker's website for $250. It comes in a handblown glass bottle shaped in the electric charge symbol. TechCrunch reports: The tequila first popped up in April 2018 when Musk tweeted a photo of himself passed out against a Tesla Model 3 "surrounded by 'Teslaquilla' bottles, the tracks of dried tears still visible on his cheeks." In the photo, Musk is holding a cardboard sign that reads "bankwupt." Later that year, Tesla filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark "Teslaquila."

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Eight of the 36 public utilities that had signed on to help build an innovative new nuclear power plant in the U.S. have backed out of the deal. Science Magazine reports: The withdrawals come just months after the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), which intends to buy the plant containing 12 small modular reactors from NuScale Power, announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion. "The project is still very much going forward," says LaVarr Webb, a spokesperson for UAMPS, which has nearly four dozen members in Utah, California, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Although some UAMPS members have dropped out, "promising discussions are ongoing with a number of utilities to join the project or enter into power-purchase agreements," Webb says. However, critics of the project say the developments underscore that the plant, which is designed by NuScale Power and would be built at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Idaho National Laboratory, will be untenably expensive. M. V. Ramana, a physicist who works on public policy at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, says he's not surprised that so many utilities have opted out of the project. The question, he says, is why so many are sticking with it. "They ought to be seeing the writing on the wall and getting out by the dozens," he says.

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A series of tweets by one Miami University student that were critical of a proctoring software company have been hidden by Twitter after the company filed a copyright takedown notice. TechCrunch reports: Erik Johnson, a student who works as a security researcher on the side, posted a lengthy tweet thread in early September about Proctorio, an Arizona-based software company that several U.S. schools -- including his own -- use to monitor students who are taking their exams remotely. But six weeks later, Johnson received an email from Twitter saying three of those tweets had been removed from his account in response to a request by Proctorio filed under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Proctorio, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, says its proctoring software is privacy friendly. Students are required to install its Chrome extension before taking a test, which the company says students can remove once they're done. Unlike desktop software, most Chrome extensions can be easily downloaded and their source code viewed and examined. Johnson did this and tweeted his findings. Three of those tweets described under what circumstances Proctorio would "terminate" a student's exam if it detected signs of potential cheating -- such as if a student "switched networks" or if "abnormal clicking" and "eye movements" were detected. The tweets also included a link to snippets of code found in Proctorio's Chrome extension, which Johnson posted to code-sharing site Pastebin. Those three tweets are no longer accessible on Twitter after Proctorio filed its takedown notices. The code shared on Pastebin is also no longer accessible, nor is a copy of the page available from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which said the web address had been "excluded." Proctorio emailed TechCrunch a statement through its crisis communications firm Edelman, claiming Johnson "violated Proctorio's exclusive rights by copying and posting extracts from Proctorio's software code on his Twitter account," and in response, Proctorio filed the DMCA takedown request "to ask that the content be removed and Twitter removed it." "Mr. Johnson's claim that he has the right to reproduce the code because he was able to download it is simply not true. Regardless of his ability to download the files, they remain protected under the Copyright Act. Also, had Mr. Johnson looked at the files he downloaded, he would have seen the multiple copyright notices in the header of each file that state expressly that the code is owned by Proctorio and that 'unauthorized reproduction, display, modification, or distribution of this software, or any portion of it, may result in severe civil and criminal penalties, and will be prosecuted to the full extent permitted by law.' His reproduction of that code violated Proctorio's rights, which is why Proctorio asked Twitter to remove it," said Edelman's senior vice president Andy Lutzky, on behalf of Proctorio.

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Volvo Trucks, Sweden's AB Volvo's main truck brand, will sell a complete range of electric, heavy-duty trucks in Europe starting in 2021, the company said in a statement on Thursday. Reuters reports: Volvo said it was currently running tests of the electric heavy-duty Volvo FH, Volvo FM and Volvo FMX trucks, to be used for regional transport and urban construction operations in Europe. The trucks will have a gross combination weight of up to 44 tons, and, depending on the battery configuration, the range could be up to 300 kilometers, Volvo said. Sales will begin in 2021 and volume production will start in 2022.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Economist: Over the past year, many reports have shown rapidly waning levels of covid-specific antibodies after the initial burst caused by an infection. [...] Yet antibodies tell only part of the story. Another important actor is the T-cell. Rather than attacking viruses directly, T-cells attack infected cells, to stop the virus reproducing. The balance of importance of the antibody and T-cell arms of the immune system varies with the illness in question. And, as far as this particular infection is concerned, although almost all patients who catch SARS-CoV-2 are thought to create T-cells in response, an understanding of their significance has been elusive. This is largely because T-cells are harder to measure than antibodies, and so are less often studied. Shamez Ladhani, a consultant epidemiologist with Public Health England, a government health-protection agency, who has worked on a new, long-term investigation of these cells, says it took nearly three weeks to count them in the 100 patients his study looked at. The effort was worthwhile, though, because it has shed new light on how long-lasting this form of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 might be. Dr Ladhani's project is part of a wider effort focused on health-care workers that Public Health England began in March. Over 2,000 people have donated blood samples every month since then. The 100 he and his colleagues have studied are a subset of these. In a paper just published as a preprint, but not yet peer reviewed, they say that six months after infection all of these patients, even those who had had only mild symptoms, or none at all, still had detectable levels of T-cells directed against the virus. Though their antibodies might have vanished, T-cells remained on the scene. These findings bode well for the idea that T-cells offer long-term protection against reinfection.

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San Francisco voters have overwhelmingly approved several tax measures targeting property owners and big businesses with CEOs who are paid far more than their average workers. The Los Angeles Times reports: Under a newly approved law, any company whose top executive earns 100 times more than its average worker will pay an extra 0.1% surcharge on its annual business-tax payment. If a CEO makes 200 times more than the average employee, the surcharge increases to 0.2%, and so on per multiple of 100. Voters also agreed to sweeping business-tax changes that will lead to a higher tax rate for many tech companies and a higher transfer tax on property sales valued between $10 million and $25 million. The results "show that San Franciscans are concerned about growing economic inequality," city Supervisor Matt Haney, the author of the measure titled Overpaid Executive Tax, said Wednesday. "The very wealthy are gaining more and more. They've gotten much richer during the pandemic, while everyone else has remained stagnant." The CEO tax is expected to generate between $60 million to $140 million per year. Haney said he wants most of the money directed towards health services. He dismisses fears that the surcharge will drive companies out of the city, saying the tax is modest in comparison to the cost of moving a business. He said he hopes the tax will drive companies to reexamine their compensation structures and will ultimately be adopted on a national level.

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Google officially introduced its Android mobile operating system on November 5th, 2007, which just so happens to line up with today, so happy 13th birthday, Android. Ryne Hager from Android Police reports: On November 5th, 2007, the "Open Handset Alliance" was revealed after long speculation that Google would enter the smartphone market, following the purchase of a little startup named "Android." Rumors had swirled surrounding a potential "Gphone," but Google quashed them as it announced that Android would be an open platform for anyone. Companies including Motorola, Qualcomm, HTC, and T-Mobile were all on board to help deliver the hardware and partnerships the nascent platform would require. Google promised that Android would change the status quo, and it definitely delivered, with it now claiming over 72% of the worldwide smartphone market share, according to some recent estimates (if not more). It's the primary vehicle that has allowed billions of people to get online in emerging markets, and it's the reason our site even exists.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Every week, Netflix sends out thousands of takedown requests, most of which target pirated copies of its movies and TV-shows. Yesterday, however, we spotted a series of copyright infringement notices with a different and rather uncomfortable theme. The streaming giant asked Twitter to remove dozens of tweets that included footage from the French coming-of-age film Cuties. This film hasn't been without controversy and the same can be said about the takedown requests too. To provide some context, Netflix acquired the global distribution rights for Cuties and started promoting it this summer. This created quite some backlash as many people felt that the young actors had been sexualized after being filmed in all kinds of suggestive poses. We won't go into the various viewpoints on this topic or the lawsuit Netflix faces in Texas over 'lewd visual material.' Opinions from both sides are readily available all over the web, including social media. Netflix didn't cancel Cuties, however, but this week it actively started to pull Cuties clips from Twitter. Not just a handful, but several dozens. Legally the company is allowed to do this of course, as they own the rights. However, it is at least a bit peculiar that the company appears to have targeted only negative tweets. The good news is that the texts of the tweets remain online. We don't know if that is Twitter's decision or if Netflix had a say in it. The takedown requests, which are posted on Lumen, target the full tweet URLs. The flagged tweets, according to TorrentFreak, all condemn Netflix. "The language is quite harsh at times, including terms such as child exploitation, pedophilia, as well as repeated calls to cancel Netflix," it adds. The company hasn't said why it's suddenly going after Cuties clips on Twitter. "The easy conclusion would be that Netflix is trying to shove these under the carpet," reports TorrentFreak. "However, there are still thousands of similar comments online, so that wouldn't be very effective."

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Apple has announced today that developers will be required to provide new privacy details to users in the App Store starting December 8. From a report: These privacy "nutrition labels" were first introduced at WWDC over the summer, with Apple saying the goal is to better inform consumers of the privacy practices of individual applications. In a post on the Apple Developer webpage today, Apple confirmed that the new privacy details will be required for new apps and app updates to the App Store starting on December 8.

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Just when we need them the most, with print shops locked down, online schooling in session, and everyone working from home, they fail to step up. From a column: Printers have been my enemy ever since I can remember. My first office job involved an evil printer that suffered daily paper jams. Tasked with fixing it, I suffered frequent burns and paper cuts. It had a door you had to close just so, or it would immediately break again with the dreaded phantom paper jam. It tormented me for months, completely indifferent to my cries. There isn't even any paper in it! More than two decades later, printers haven't improved at all. It feels like printer companies stopped innovating sometime in the '90s when sales stopped climbing. In fact, it's almost as if they've regressed. Manufacturers tempt with unbelievably cheap deals on printers and then nail you on expensive ink. To make sure they get their pound of flesh, they focus an inordinate effort on making sure printers only work with proprietary ink cartridges. [...] Three years and a couple of printers later, sick of being gouged for ink cartridges that always seem to run out at the worst moment, I optimistically signed up for a printing subscription plan. The idea is you are charged a flat fee based on how many pages you print each month, and the printer automatically orders ink refills when it's running low. Reading this back, I can only cringe at my naivety. Things were fine for the first few weeks. Then I made the mistake of turning the printer off. It doesn't like to be turned off. It started emailing me, insisting that it needs to be turned on and connected to the internet so the subscription plan can work properly. Every time I turn it on, it prints an ink-heavy test page. It is incredibly good at printing test pages -- it just won't print the document you want. Things got worse when I made the mistake of changing my internet service provider. I forgot about the printer for a while. Then I suddenly needed it. I didn't have time to set up the Wi-Fi, so I plugged directly into the printer with a good old-fashioned cable. It refused to print. I refused to connect it to the internet, so it refused to print for me. To get it working again I had to completely uninstall everything related to the printer, update my drivers, install three separate programs, carry it to another room to plug directly into my desktop, carry it back again, hold down the correct button sequence at the stroke of midnight, spin around three times, and recite the printer incantation into a mirror. It's finally connected and working ... for now. But I know it's only a matter of time before it betrays me again.

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MojoKid writes: AMD made bold claims when the company unveiled its new Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 series processors early last month. Statements like "historic IPC uplift" and "fastest for gamers" were waved about like flags of victory. However, as with most things in the computing world, independent testing is always the best way to validate claims. Today AMD lifted the embargo on 3rd party reviews and, in testing, AMD's new Ryzen 5000 series CPUs set a new performance bar virtually across the board, and one that Intel currently can't touch. There are four processors in the initial Ryzen 5000 series lineup, though it's a safe bet more will be coming later. The current entry point is the Ryzen 5 5600X 6-core / 8-thread processor, followed by the 8-core / 16-thread Ryzen 7 5800X, 12-core / 24 thread Ryzen 9 5900X, and the flagship 16-core / 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X. All of these new CPUs are backwards compatible with AMD socket AM4 motherboards. In comparison to Zen 2, Zen 3 has a larger L1 branch target buffer and improved bandwidth through multiple parts of its pipeline with additional load/store flexibility. Where Zen 2 could handle 2 load and 1 store per cycle, Zen 3 can handle 3 load and 2 stores. All told, AMD is claiming an average 19% increase in IPC with Zen 3, which is a huge uplift gen-over-gen. Couple that IPC uplift with stronger multi-core scaling and a new unified L3 cache configuration, and Zen 3's performance looks great across a wide variety of workloads for both content creation and gaming especially. AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X, Ryzen 9 5900X, Ryzen 7 5800X and Ryzen 5 5600X will be priced at $799, $549, $449 and $299, respectively and should be on retail and etail shelves starting today.

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A Slashdot reader writes: Denmark plans to cull its entire population of roughly 15 million minks in farms after the animals spread a mutation of the coronavirus to humans. The country's prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said at a press conference Wednesday that the mutated virus could spread to other countries and it "may pose a risk to the effectiveness of a future vaccine." "We have a great responsibility towards our own population, but with the mutation that has now been found, we have an even greater responsibility for the rest of the world as well," she said. The mutated virus was found in a dozen people who got infected by minks. Half of the 783 human Covid-19 cases in northern Denmark "are related to mink," Health Minister Magnus Heunicke said. Mike Ryan, the head of the emergencies program for the World Health Organization, has called for scientific investigations of the "complex, complex issue" of people outside of China infecting minks, which in turn transmitted the virus back to humans. Kare Molbak, a director at the research center Statens Serum Institut, said the worst-case scenario would be "a new pandemic, starting all over again out of Denmark." "That's why we have to take this extremely seriously," Molbak said. There are between 15 million and 17 million minks in Denmark, one of the world's main mink fur exporters. According to government estimates, culling the country's mink population could cost up to $785 million. National police head Thorkild Fogde urged that 'it should happen as soon as possible."

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Amazon.com is launching air cargo operations in Europe, the online retailer's first such expansion outside of the U.S. as it looks to bring more freight operations in-house. From a report: Amazon Air will run a 20,000-square-meter regional air hub at Leipzig/Halle airport in Germany, with two branded Boeing Co. 737-800 freighters flown by ASL Airlines, the company said in a statement. The facility will employ 200 people. Operating its own aircraft will let the world's largest e-commerce company offer "more flexible delivery options," Amazon said. The company unveiled the air cargo service in 2016, reducing its reliance on United Parcel Service and FedEx.

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Gaming hardware makers have been diversifying their laptops recently, and Razer is the latest to join that trend. From a report: The company is announcing the Razer Book 13 today, which it's calling a "hyper focused productivity laptop." It's not just a subtler version of a Blade laptop, either. The emphasis on productivity means Razer also strove to include a generous array of ports, as well as interesting lighting features that could help highlight keyboard shortcuts. The Book 13 is also the company's first Intel Evo-certified notebook, meaning it meets certain requirements for performance, battery life and wake time. As its name indicates, the Book 13 has a 13.4-inch IPS display that comes in touch or nontouch configurations. If you opt for the matte nontouch version, you'll only get Full HD+ resolution, while the touch models also come in UHD+ (3,840 x 2,400). The touchscreens are also covered in Gorilla Glass for better durability and you can add an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare. All configurations feature a 16:10 aspect ratio, which is new to Razer's family of laptops and lets you see more on the screen at once than older 16:9 devices. The Book 13 also houses a 720p webcam in its slim bezels, and it's Windows Hello-compatible. There isn't a fingerprint scanner here, though. That's understandable -- Razer's already crammed a lot into the Book 13, which is impressive for a device thatâ(TM)s 0.6 inches thick and weighs 2.95 pounds. Plus, despite that sharp profile, the company managed to offer two Thunderbolt 4 USB-C ports, a USB-A socket (at USB 3.2 speeds), a microSD card reader, a 3.5mm audio jack and an HDMI 2.0 slot. [...] The slim, lightweight package is something Razer fans are already accustomed to, and they'll also appreciate some other familiar features. The most prominent of these is Razer Chroma integration which allows users to customize the colors of individual buttons on the keyboard. Starts at $1,199. Pre-order starts today, with shipping to be followed later this month.

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Many industries use heat-intensive processes that generally require the burning of fossil fuels, but a surprising green fuel alternative is emerging in the form of metal powders. Ground very fine, cheap iron powder burns readily at high temperatures, releasing energy as it oxidizes in a process that emits no carbon and produces easily collectable rust, or iron oxide, as its only emission. From a report: If burning metal powder as fuel sounds strange, the next part of the process will be even more surprising. That rust can be regenerated straight back into iron powder with the application of electricity, and if you do this using solar, wind or other zero-carbon power generation systems, you end up with a totally carbon-free cycle. The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat. Recently, Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands has become the first business in the world to put this process to work at an industrial scale. The company has been working with the Metal Power Consortium and researchers at TU Eindhoven to install a cyclical iron fuel system at its Brewery Bavaria that's capable of providing all the heat necessary for some 15 million glasses of beer a year.

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For his monthly intention in November, Pope Francis prayed that AI will be beneficial for humanity. From a report: It's up for debate whether the development of automation and AI will ultimately be good for humankind, and it can't hurt to have a little divine intervention on our side. What he's saying: "We pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind," reads Francis' intention for November, which is published each month by the Pope's Worldwide Prayer Network. Background: This isn't the first time Francis has ventured into the fraught territory of AI ethics and alignment. In February, the Vatican hosted executives from IBM and Microsoft for a summit on "human-centered" ways of designing AI. They formulated the "Rome Call for AI Ethics," which called for AI to be designed with a focus on the good of the environment and "our common and shared home and of its human inhabitants."

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