Radiohead has made a career for themselves writing songs about personal and social alienation. And so it should come as no surprise that the band is now trying to help its fans get through recent tough times by posting weekly concert videos to its YouTube channel.
The series starts tomorrow at 5PM ET. First on the docket is the Live from a Tent in Dublin show the band played on October 7th, 2020. The group’s set that night pulled primarily from Kid A, which Radiohead had released about a week before the show. As far as a first choice, it’s a particularly fitting one given the album’s themes and lyrics have only become more resonant in recent years. Fans of OK Computer and The Bends also have something to look forward to with “Paranoid Android” and “Just” making an appearance. If you’re the impatient sort, you can watch the concert right now through the Radiohead Public Library, an online archive of rarities, merch and more the band launched earlier this year. Doing so, however, you’ll miss out on chatting with other fans.
Next, Rocket Lab will attempt to recover a full Electron first stage following a launch. It won’t pull that from the air but will retrieve the rocket stage after it lands in the ocean. A parachute will help slow its descent, and like previous versions, it will include instrumentation to “inform future recovery efforts.” That mission is planned for late 2020.
Of course, catching a rocket stage after an actual launch is a lot different than catching one that’s dropped neatly by a helicopter. But the feat is a key milestone, as Rocket Lab’s plans to reuse the rockets depend on this recovery method. If it’s successful, Rocket Lab will be able to lower costs, and in theory, that may lead to more launches.
ESPN’s 12-hour esports marathon was just the start of its return to live competitive gaming. The broadcaster and Riot Games have reached a deal that will stream the League of Legends Championship Series Spring Split Playoffs live on ESPN2 or the ESPN app, starting with a match between 100 Thieves and TSM today (April 8th) available online at 4PM Eastern. You’ll also have on-demand access to events immediately after they’ve finished.
You can expect follow-up matches at the same time on April 11th, April 12th and April 18th. The final match for the North American championship is due on April 19th, although there isn’t a set time for it at this stage.
Amazon is temporarily extending its return policy window to help its customers during the coronavirus crisis. If you live in the US or Canada, you now have until May 31st to return any products you buy between now and April 30th through Amazon or one of the company’s partners, with purchases as far back as March 1st covered as well.
Similarly, if you live in Italy, Spain, France, Turkey or the Netherlands, you can return any items you bought between February 15th and today until to May 31st. You can also return any products you buy between today and April 30th until May 31st.
Still, TechCrunchwarns that privacy concerns remain. It’s not clear if StopCovid will be centralized or not. If it is, there’s a risk hackers could match anonymized identifiers to real names. And like other tracking projects, there’s a worry that the government might abuse the tracking technology for other purposes.
There’s also the question of its release. A prototype version of the app is expected in three to six weeks. That’s fast by typical development standards, but it could come relatively late into the outbreak. It might end up being used to prevent a resurgence of the virus after the main outbreak passes than to deal with the illness at its peak. And that’s assuming the app is released at all. The French digital sector minister, Cédric O, cautioned that the app might not reach the public if technical hurdles with Bluetooth prove insurmountable. If it does succeed, though, it wouldn’t be surprising to see a host of other countries follow suit.
There are six episodes in The Dream Machine, all released between 2010 and 2017. It feels like the game that Gustafsson used to fantasize about building, mechanically complex and narratively rich. It’s infused with surreal imagery and paranoid conspiracy, following a newly married man on a journey through the psychedelic landscapes generated by his neighbors’ sleeping brains. The game was introspective, gritty (though that might just be the hair) and beautifully tangible. It earned Cockroach Inc. a handful of award nominations, including a spot as a finalist at the 2011 Independent Games Festival.
Cockroach Inc. has been fairly quiet since closing out The Dream Machine in 2017. That is, until last week.
Gustafsson released Gateway III on March 31st, 2020, alongside revamped versions of GatewayI and II. Fourteen years after its debut, the Gateway series is on Steam for the first time, with the entire trilogy priced at $10.
“I’m a very different designer now,” Gustafsson said. He actually had the ending of the third installment in mind when he began working on Gateway I 14 years ago, and he’s proud to have finally wrapped it all up in a shiny black bow.
“I want the player to look back and feel that there was an oddball cohesiveness to the entire piece,” he said. “Even though I started the first game back in 2006 and finished the last one in 2020, I really tried to interconnect the parts together as tightly as possible, down to minuscule details that no one will ever notice.”
Cockroach Inc.
The Gateway Trilogy feels like the polygonal manifestation of The Adventure Zone’s Wonderland, pockmarked with logic games, spatial puzzles and the echoes of 1960s psychological experiments. Playing the original two episodes, Gustafsson’s penchant for mind games and surrealism is clear, and it’s easy to see how these ideas eventually transformed into The Dream Machine.
Visually, the Gateway Trilogy is simplistic, especially when compared with the claymation aspects of Cockroach Inc.’s tentpole franchise. Perfectly animated environments were out of the question when Gustafsson started the series, so he instead relied on audio cues to build its tense and eerie atmosphere.
“Sound and music sneaks under your guard in a way visuals and text doesn’t quite manage,” he said. “That’s been my go-to trick since animation school. I was too lazy to animate things like doors opening and closing, but I learned that I could get away with fairly limited animation as long as I put a good sound effect over the images. The viewer’s brain filled in the rest.”
Gustafsson prefers to linger in the spaces between concrete ideas. He has a distaste for obvious cues like laugh tracks, instead asking his players to interpret his scenes and react individually. Honestly.
“[Laugh tracks are] like serving a cake on top of another cake, as the Swedish saying goes,” Gustafsson said. “It’s too much. Settle for one delicious cake and serve it with a rattlesnake, just to keep people on their toes.”
After one week on Steam, the reviews for Gateway III are mixed. Plenty of players have fond memories of the first two titles, but some think the third installment is bogged down by too many tile puzzles. Essentially, these folks walked into Gustafsson’s pitch-black room expecting one thing, only to find it contained something else.
Now that the Gateway Trilogy is complete, Gustafsson wants to revisit The Dream Machine, adding things like achievements and “other knick knacks.” Probably not a laugh track, though.
The ground and satellite components of that system are largely automated and generally immune to at least the immediate impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lars Peter Riishojgaard, Director, Earth System Branch in WMO’s Infrastructure Department believes that the impact of losing those aerial observations will still be “relatively modest.” However, he explained in a recent press release, “as the decrease in availability of aircraft weather observations continues and expands, we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts.”
“The same is true if the decrease in surface-based weather observations continues, in particular if the COVID-19 outbreak starts to more widely impact the ability of observers to do their job in large parts of the developing world. WMO will continue to monitor the situation, and the organization is working with its Members to mitigate the impact as much as possible,” he continued.
More immediate is the problem with the system’s aircraft-based sensors; primarily that they’re no longer in the sky, collecting vital ambient temperature, wind speed and direction readings. Aircraft rely on the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay program (AMDAR) to collect the necessary data using onboard sensors, process and transmit it to relay stations on the ground via radio or satellite link.
“More than 3,500 commercial aircraft normally provide over 250 million observations per year,” a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson told Engadget. “Throughout the flight path… these aircraft provide pressure, temperature, wind speed and direction, and in some cases humidity.”
The COVID-19 crisis has severely curtailed the commercial air travel industry. According to FlightRadar24, commercial traffic declined by 4.1 percent year-over-year in February followed by a 21.6 percent YOY drop in March. We could potentially see an overall 8.9 percent reduction of global air traffic compared to last year, according to one Bloomberg analyst.
“As of March 31, the daily output of meteorological data from U.S. commercial aircraft has decreased to approximately half of normal levels,” the NOAA rep continued. They were also quick to point out that “even though a decrease in this critical data will possibly negatively impact forecast model skill, it does not necessarily translate into a reduction in forecast accuracy since National Weather Service meteorologists use an entire suite of observations and guidance to produce an actual forecast.”
However, a 2017 study conducted by NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory suggests that including aircraft-based data reduces six-hour forecast errors in wind, humidity and temperature by up to 30 percent in the Rapid Refresh (RAP) model for North America. As such, “we would expect some decrease in skill at least in some specific situations from the [current] decline in aircraft data volume,” Stanley Benjamin, the study’s co-author, told Weather.
A separate study conducted at the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) found that eliminating aircraft data from their models reduced the accuracy of Northern Hemisphere jet-stream level forecasts by 15 percent and 3 percent for surface pressure. What’s more, as of February, the National Weather Service reports that it is only incorporating around 65 percent of the aircraft-based observations into the GSF model that it normally does.
“We are anticipating the substantial reduction in the availability of US AMDAR data to continue over the coming weeks, likely to generate some measure of impact on the output of our numerical weather prediction systems,” Christopher Hill of the NOAA said in a March news release. That same release revealed that between March 3rd and March 23rd the number of aircraft reports over Europe received and used at the ECMWF dropped 35 percent with a 42 percent reduction, globally.
Thankfully, meteorologists won’t be flying completely blind with so many airlines effectively out of commission. The ECMWF began pulling wind data from the Aeolus satellite in January. As for the NOAA, “while the automated weather reports from commercial aircraft provide exceptionally valuable data for forecast models, we also collect billions of Earth observations from other sources that feed into our models, such as weather balloons, surface weather observation network, radar, satellites and buoys,” the spokesperson told Engadget. “Additionally, NOAA will soon be using COSMIC-2 GPS radio occultation satellite data to further increase observations throughout the depth of the tropical atmosphere.”
It took a while, but Google is finally making it easier for people to check out Stadia. Starting today, people in 14 countries around the world will be able to sign up for two free months of Stadia Pro. The full list is as follows: the US, UK, Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.
With the signup offer, you no longer need to buy one of Google’s hardware bundles to get access to the platform. Instead, all you need to do is visit the Stadia website, sign up and download the companion Android or iOS app — though you’ll need to provide a USB-compatible controller or keyboard and mouse. When you first launch the service, you’ll get access to nine games, one of which is Destiny 2. If you’re already a Stadia Pro subscriber, Google won’t charge you for the next two months.
Much to the woe of teens across the US and Europe, Snapchat is currently down in parts of the world. According to DownDetector, there was a surge in people reporting issues using the app at around 10:30AM, following widespread problems in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
We’re aware many Snapchatters are having trouble using the app. Hang tight – we’re looking into it 🛠️
Snapchat’s Support account tweeted an acknowledgment of the outage at 10:33AM ET but didn’t provide any additional details. It also hasn’t shared an update since. Based on the fewer number of recent reports, it does appear that Snap is slowly fixing the issue, however.
The situation is little better in the US, with testing numbers falling far short of what experts say is needed. BBC News reported that a retired doctor, Claudia Bahorik, believed she had symptoms, but despite requesting a test on March 9th, she was still waiting for results on the 23rd — the CDC said her profile did not qualify her, at the time, for one of the rationed tests. Her plight illustrates the US failure to follow the “test, treat and trace” strategy. And The New Yorker reported that in South Dakota, there is just one public health laboratory conducting COVID-19 tests for the entire state of close to 900,000 people.
The New York Times found that the UK government lacked the means to test every suspected case. Reporters even identified a rogue private doctor who bought up tests to sell at a high markup to private clients. Public Health England, the nation’s public health body, has advised against using these tests, which are yet to be proven accurate.But in desperation, people are turning to these kits as the country struggles to implement a holistic nationwide testing regime. And it’s not clear where the solution is coming from.
A small private DNA and drug testing company sits in a secure unit on the site of a decommissioned Air Force base in Norfolk, in the east of the UK. It normally supplies DNA relationship testing for court cases relating to immigration and family disputes. It also offers “peace of mind” tests, a home DNA-testing kit sold in major retailers, that enable people to check their family relationships. The company decided to use its expertise to help out as the coronavirus crisis began to become apparent.
“We’d all seen the news about a need for testing,” said Dr. Thomas Haizel, the lab’s managing director, “and decided that we could do it.” The company believed it could quickly and easily use some of its capacity to bolster the testing facilities at the nearby hospital. Not only did it have the raw materials to produce tests, but it has a number of automated Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) machines, each one costing up to £100,000 ($122,000). And thanks to the Chinese scientists who successfully sequenced the genome for SARS-CoV-2 back in January, the blueprint for the test is known.
The company emptied out a pair of labs, turning them into a virology suite that would be suitable for COVID-19 testing.
In the UK, labs are graded on their Containment Level (CL), which determines what organisms they can handle. Public Health England said that researchers that propagate, culture or do any form of “deliberate work on SARS-CoV-2” must be a CL3 lab. But standard tests for the virus, run on commercially available auto-analyzers, only require CL2. The only requirement that Haizel’s lab couldn’t immediately meet was having a specific form of Microbiological Safety Cabinet, or MSC.
It certainly had several MSCs already, but these were hard-wired into the DNA-testing facilities and so couldn’t be moved. Unfortunately, in the early stages of a pandemic, it’s not a piece of kit that’s particularly easy to get. And so began a frantic race to call every lab supplier in the country in the hunt for a spare cabinet. The company found one, 200 miles away, but it couldn’t make a delivery for several weeks due to high demand. Rather than wait, one employee — armed with his own truck — drove to collect it the following day.
With the MSC delivered, the team planned to have a working test facility up and running by March 23rd. And then the power ran out. “The day before we were due to have [the MSC] commissioned, a local power transformer went down, and we lost power to the site,” said Dr. Haizel. The company quickly found and set up a generator, and after a short delay, technicians got the system going. The lab now has the ability and capacity to offer COVID-19 tests — it’s just waiting for approval from official bodies.
How does a PCR Test work?
Polymerase Chain Reaction testing involves the application of oligonucleotides to strands of Deoxyribonucleic and Ribonucleic Acid…
Okay, how does a PCR test work, and please explain to me like I’m five.
A strand of DNA is usually represented as a ladder, with two uprights and a series of rungs that connect them. Normally, this ladder is curled, like a spiral staircase, but it’s easier to imagine a ladder propped up against a wall. RNA (Ribonucleic Acid), by comparison, looks as if someone just sliced a ladder from top to bottom, with one upright and shorter rungs sticking out of the side. We’re talking about RNA, by the way, because SARS-CoV-2 is a virus with RNA rather than DNA.
Each rung of this half-ladder is one of four different nucleotides, which make up any organism’s genetic code. Because the genome for COVID-19, or more accurately SARS-CoV-2, has been sequenced, you can create a “primer,” essentially a chunk of genetic material that finds and joins on to the SARS-CoV-2 code. Add some more ingredients and you can make a section of DNA that sits on or beside the SARS-CoV-2 strand. But this strand, on its own, is too small to be spotted by an analysis machine.
So, to make it bigger and, therefore, readable, you heat the mixture to separate and essentially duplicate the strands, and then let it cool. The more times you do this, the more times the strands will separate and replicate until you’ve got enough of a sample to see. All you have to do then is add a dye or fluorescent marker to find this material, and you can see if the SARS-CoV-2 RNA is present. This is how Polymerase Chain Reaction, or PCR, tests work.
A number of laboratories in the UK are working to devote resources to help the effort against COVID-19. In a statement, King’s College London said it’s offering its staff to support King’s College Hospital. King’s also has a commercial DNA lab that offers paid-for relationship testing for court cases and private individuals. It said it would work to “free up laboratory space for COVID-19 testing” and offered an “inventory of all the PCR machines on site to amplify NHS resources.”
In the US, Quest Labs told NPR that it has a backlog of 115,000 tests that it has yet to process. And while the company has successfully managed to increase the number of tests it can process, it is still overwhelmed. The report added that Quest’s tests take between four and five days to process. This, coupled with failures with initial kits and supply shortages, has meant that testing is far behind where it needs to be.
By comparison, Germany’s labs are said to be processing tens of thousands of tests each day and began manufacturing test kits in January. Italy, which has been hit hard by the virus, has said it plans to begin nationwide testing in the hope of restarting its economy very soon. The picture is different in some African countries, with Science reporting that several (unnamed) nations on the continent have only one or two facilities capable of conducting the tests.
A number of large international biotech companies, like Bosch and bioMérieux, are developing rapid COVID-19 tests. Tech companies, including Verily, Google/Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary, have joined the effort in various ways. A presidential announcement claimed that the company was building a tool to help screen for COVID-19, which, according to The Washington Post, prompted employees to scramble to make one. It has since launched a testing program, offering drive-thru swabs in California as part of the wider Baseline project.
Plenty of other big names in tech have pivoted to help in some way with the effort against the coronavirus. Razer has pledged to make surgical face masks that can be given to healthcare workers working with COVID-19 patients. Similarly, Tesla has offered to produce ventilators to cover the likely fall in supply when current resources become overwhelmed.
Employees at Verily administering drive-thru tests.
Justin Sullivan via Getty Images
In the eyes of another lab owner, it’s going to be a long wait before the overwhelmed UK government can approve independent tests. “There’s no point going top-down at the moment on anything,” says Mike Fischer, the co-founder of Research Machines and Alamy. He has funneled his wealth into the Fischer Family Trust, which bankrolls bodies in education, research and conservation.
One of Fischer’s tentpole projects is Systems Biology Laboratory (SBL), an Oxfordshire lab that looks into improving healthcare outcomes. SBL specializes in things like DNA instability, cancer immunotherapy and examining the medical applications of vitamin D. It has deep ties with a number of general practitioners (GPs) in the region and offers help when asked.
“My chief scientist was approached by a practice asking if [we] could test a couple of their GPs,” said Fischer. The doctors in question were showing symptoms of COVID-19 and were concerned that they were putting their patients at risk. “We ordered the first testing kit on March 6th,” said Fischer, and SBL could see “how valuable it was to [doctors] both motivationally and practically.”
Since SBL was already involved in biological research, it was an easy process to set up its PCR machines to offer the test. Since then, the lab has reached out to a number of GP surgeries in South Oxfordshire, testing more than 200 medical staff twice a week. That is enabling doctors and nurses who are free of COVID-19 to return to work while carriers can isolate as soon as possible.
These small-scale tests have inspired Fischer to set up the COVID-19 Volunteer Testing Network, a body that helps private labs test healthcare workers. “Our big thing is a call to labs,” said Fischer, who has the knowledge, resources and equipment to help. Fischer has promised to fund “consumable costs” for these tests out of his own pocket and will offer additional monetary support where required.
This sort of private largesse shouldn’t be necessary, but unfortunately, it is now. In the UK and US, there may be the capability and capacity to offer COVID-19 tests to those that need them, but both countries have so far struggled. They’ve been unable to implement the WHO’s isolate, test, treat and trace strategy, and the consequences could be very, very, bad.
