Exposure

One of the unpleasant technological reminders of the pandemic is fading away. States have turned off COVID-19 exposure notifications on iPhones across the US now that the public emergency has expired. At least some states also appear to be shutting down notifications for Android users. You won't get alerts if you approach someone who tested positive and reported their results. No personal data traded hands, as the system relied on anonymized Bluetooth exchanges rather than GPS. California and other states chalk up the…

Americans in most states will no longer receive Covid exposure notifications on their smartphones now that the U.S. public health emergency has ended. Since 2020, nearly 30 states have used a Bluetooth system developed by Apple and Google to track the spread of Covid infections and send push alerts to any smartphone user who came in close contact with a person who tested positive for the virus. The Association of Public Health Laboratories hosted the national server that the system ran on. On Thursday, the organization…

Amazon landscape overtaken by wildfire with a strong blaze in the center and a smoke-filled sky. A recent study in the journal Environmental Research: Health has found that Indigenous people in the Amazon Basin are twice as likely to die prematurely from smoke exposure due to wildfires compared to the broader South American population. Credit: IOP PublishingIndigenous people in the Amazon Basin are twice as likely to die prematurely from wildfire smoke exposure than the broader South American population. Approximately…

Apple Inc. would have to pay a maximum of $1.85 billion if it's found liable of illegally profiting from a competitor's technology, a little more than half the $3.1 billion Masimo Corp. initially sought.A federal judge in Santa Ana, California, dismissed business and marketing claims against the iPhone maker at the end of a three-week trial, leaving for the jury to decide only if Apple improperly used trade secrets related to a blood-oxygen monitoring sensor in its Apple Watch. Apple poached Masimo employees to learn…

Diagram of the street canyon scale model used, all measurements of the coordinate system are in mm. Gray boxes represent the cyclists, while dots indicate the position of the source during the experiments. Case 1 refers to the car positioned upstream of the cyclists in blue and Case 2 is when the car is adjacent to the cyclists in red. The wind direction indicates the wind incidence in the free stream. Credit: Journal of Wind Engineering and…

Within weeks of Covid-19 shutting down the world in 2020, teams at archrivals Apple and Google partnered on a rare joint project. They developed a way to log people’s proximity using Bluetooth chips in iPhones and Android phones, enabling the creation of apps that let someone who tested positive for the virus to anonymously notify fellow users whom they'd been near in the preceding few days. Those alerted to the exposure could then isolate, test, and quarantine, hopefully slowing the spread of Covid.Covid is still around,…

The iPhone can’t take long exposure photos out of the box. Apple hasn’t added the functionality to the default Camera app. But third-party applications will let you increase exposure and capture time. And they use algorithms to obtain the beautiful effects that long exposure photography makes possible. The best thing about these apps is that you don’t have to be a professional photographer to start taking great long exposure photos in no time. The apps are very easy to master, and you’ll quickly learn by…

During the COVID-19 outbreak, Apple and Google partnered to offer the COVID-19 Exposure Notifications feature. While this tool could show whether you were near – or passed by – someone who could have the disease, it never actually worked as intended, as people had to add a serial number showing the positive status for COVID-19, and in the US, it depended on each state to add support for this feature. In 2020, here’s what Apple (and Google) said around iOS 13.7 release regarding the COVID-19 Exposure…

There is no direct investment by Nigerian banks in Silicon Valley Bank (SBV) that could result in a loss of investment, the Central Bank of Nigeria has said. The apex bank spoke amid uncertainty over the takeover of the Silicon Valley Bank by the U.S. government after its clients, including venture capitalists and tech startups, withdrew funds from their accounts, leading to the eventual crash of the bank. The collapse has raised concerns about the potential impact on other banks in the world. The CBN Governor,…

Back in 2020, Apple and Google teamed up to launch the Exposure Notifications API for COVID-19 contract tracing. The feature aimed to alert you to potential COVID-19 exposures, allowing you to get a test and isolate yourself if necessary. Three years later, Apple is now giving health agencies the ability to sunset their adoption of the Exposure Notifications API. In iOS 16.4, Apple has added underlying support for health departments to end their support of the Exposure Notifications API.…