Sources: Airbnb raises another $1B in debt from investors including Apollo Global and Silver Lake, after raising a similar $1B funding round last week — New debt finance deal comes a week after an equal-sized funding round to help weather crisis — Airbnb is raising $1bn of senior debt …
Enlarge / Detail from the winning entry in the first Olympus Global Image of the Year Life Science Light Microscopy Award. It shows immunostaining of a mouse-brain slice with two fluorophores. (credit: Ainara Pintor/Olympus)
For several years now, we've regularly featured the winners of Nikon's annual Small World microscopy contest. Now, Olympus has entered the artful imaging arena with its first Global Image of the Year Award. Like the Small World contest, the intent is to highlight artful scientific imaging in hopes of inspiring the world to appreciate the inherent beauty of microscopy imaging. Olympus announced the winners (one global winner, plus three regional winners), along with several runners-up, last month. They do not disappoint.
As Ars' John Timmer noted in his 2018 Small World coverage: "Microscopy is a sibling of photography in many ways beyond the involvement of high-end lenses. While it might not matter for scientific purposes, a compelling microscope image depends on things like composition, lighting, exposure, and more. And these days, both fields rely heavily on post-processing." All those elements are abundant in the new crop of Olympus winners.
Spain's Ainara Pintor snagged the top honor from over 400 submissions with her gorgeous image of an immunostained mouse-brain slice, titled Neurogarden. The image focuses on the hippocampus area of a single slice, but there are more than 70 million neurons in the mouse brain as a whole, according to Pintor. Howard Vindin of Australia won the regional prize for Asia-Pacific by capturing an autofluorescence image of a mouse embryo. US entrant Tagide de Carvalho won the regional award for the Americas with his colorful image of a tardigrade. The regional winner for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa was the UK's Alan Prescott, for his image capturing the frozen section of a mouse's head.
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Enlarge / President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Rose Garden of the White House on Tuesday, April 14, 2020. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
President Donald Trump today said the United States will stop funding the World Health Organization until his administration completes a review of the group's response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"Today, I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Trump said at a press conference today.
The US gives the WHO $400 million to $500 million per year and "has a duty to insist upon full accountability," Trump said. Trump said his administration will talk "with other countries and global health partners" about what to do with the US funding that would normally go to the WHO. The US provides about 15 percent of the WHO's budget. "Administration officials signaled the [funding] suspension would be for 60 days," according to Bloomberg, which noted that the US has "contributed $893 million to the WHO's operations during its current two-year funding cycle."
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GAO report highlights shortcomings in the Pentagon's ongoing cybersecurity efforts, with DOD's initiatives rarely completing goals and lacking status updates — Five years ago, the Department of Defense set dozens of security hygiene goals. A new report finds that it has abandoned or lost track of most of them.
Current and recently fired Amazon warehouse workers say they faced retaliation as they advocated for better working conditions; Amazon denies charges — Employees say they were targeted for organizing; tech giant defends firings, safety measures at facilities
Folding@Home, a ~20 year-old distributed computing project aiding scientific research, has seen a surge in users, breaking an exaFLOP of compute amid COVID-19 — Folding@Home had settled into a low-profile niche. Then came COVID-19. — Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department …
Online consignment company The RealReal is the latest tech company to lay off and furlough employees amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In the company’s quarterly earnings report today, The RealReal announced layoffs affecting 10% of its workforce and furloughs impacting 15% of employees.
By doing so, The RealReal says it will be able to reduce its operating expenses by about $70 million. In a press release, The RealReal said these changes are designed to “support its employees through the pandemic and ensure the team is well positioned for a strong restart on the other side of this health crisis.”
Those furloughed include employees in The RealReal’s e-commerce centers, retail stores, luxury consignment offices, sales organization and headquarters. The RealReal has also instituted a hiring freeze and reduced the salaries of executives.
The RealReal, which has been a public company for a little less than one year, joins the growing number of tech companies that have made personnel changes in the wake of the coronavirus.
“Given the unknown duration of the pandemic, we’ve focused on reducing operating expenses and preserving liquidity to weather the near-term challenges and ensure we are well positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunity in front of us,” The RealReal CEO Julie Wainwright said in a statement. “I am confident the strength of our balance sheet, customer satisfaction, healthy traffic trends, and buyer and consignor repeat rates, along with continuing progress in technology initiatives that support efficiently scaling our operations, will position us to bounce back quickly once the economy stabilizes.”
It’s hard enough in the first place having to drive an astronomically expensive rover around a planet millions of miles away. Doing it from home seems like a pretty big ask — but it turns out NASA’s Curiosity team is up to it.
The space agency posted today about how the team has adapted to the unprecedented situation of having to manage an important, ongoing mission involving hundreds of people, without any of those people meeting in person.
“We’re usually all in one room, sharing screens, images and data,” said team lead Alicia Allbaugh. Now they’re not only in separate rooms, but on different schedules and computing setups. “I probably monitor about 15 chat channels at all times. You’re juggling more than you normally would.”
Naturally there are video calls, too — sometimes several at once. Processes previously accomplished on high-performance workstations are now being done on laptops and web services. But while the added complexity makes the planning process less efficient, the results are still rolling in.
In mid-March, the Jet Propulsion Lab offices in Pasadena, Calif., had already been totally emptied of staff and work was suspended elsewhere. But Curiosity was still trucking. It drove up to a rock, drilled a sample and sent confirmation back to the team — just as it would if they were all working as normal. And the work continues.
“Mars isn’t standing still for us; we’re still exploring,” said Allbaugh.
Enlarge / Face masks may be a regular feature in our near-term future. (credit: Rob Kim/Getty Images)
Most of the optimistic ideas about what to do about SARS-CoV-2 involve engineering the virus' extinction. We could ramp up testing and isolate anyone who's been in contact with an infected individual. We could carefully manage infections to build up herd immunity without exceeding our hospital capacity. Or, in an ideal world, we could develop herd immunity using an effective vaccine.
Unfortunately, there are reasons to be worried that none of these will work. Tracing the contacts of infected individuals may be impossible with a virus that spreads as easily as SARS-CoV-2. And some of the virus' closest relatives don't build up the long-lasting immune response that's needed for persistent herd immunity. All of which raises a disturbing question: what happens then?
A group of Harvard epidemiologists attempted to answer the question by trying out models that tested the impacts of different assumptions about the virus' behavior and the immune system's response to it. The researchers find that there's a risk that it could become a seasonal menace, and we might have to be socially isolating every winter.
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Enlarge / A man looks at the home screen for the "new" Windows 7 platform when it was launched in October 2009. Microsoft has ended support, but the OS lives on. (credit: Katie Collins - PA Images / Getty Images)
Microsoft has patched four actively exploited vulnerabilities that allow attackers to execute malicious code or elevate system privileges on devices that run Windows.
Two of the security flaws—tracked as CVE-2020-1020 and CVE-2020-0938—reside in the Adobe Type Manager Library, a Windows DLL file that a wide variety of apps use to manage and render fonts available from Adobe Systems. On supported operating systems other than Windows 10, attackers who successfully exploit the vulnerabilities can remotely execute code. On Windows 10, attackers can run code inside an AppContainer sandbox. The measure limits the system privileges malicious code has, but even then, attackers can use it to create accounts with full user rights, install programs, and view, change, or delete data.
Attackers can exploit the flaws by convincing a target to open a booby-trapped document or viewing it in the Windows preview pane. Tuesday’s advisories said that Microsoft is “aware of limited, targeted attacks that attempt to leverage” both vulnerabilities. Microsoft revealed last month that one of the bugs was being exploited in limited attacks against Windows 7 machines.
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Enlarge / Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), speaks during a Coronavirus Task Force news conference at the White House in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, April 8, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
As Americans anxiously await news of when they can emerge from their 4-meter-wide personal-space bubbles and go back to something resembling normal life, public health experts are working furiously to determine essential steps to get us there safely. And a consensus is emerging that key among those steps is recruiting a massive number of people to perform contact tracing.
"It is going to be critical," director Robert Redfield of the US Centers for Disease Control told NPR in an interview late last week. Scaled-up contact tracing, along with increased testing, is needed to "make sure that when we open up, we open up for good."
"We can't afford to have multiple community outbreaks that can spiral up into sustained community transmission," he said, "so it is going to be very aggressive, what I call 'block and tackle,' 'block and tackle.'"
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Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
