Kill

To Kill a Mockingbird, a coming-of-age story about racism and injustice, overpowered wizards and time travelers to be voted America’s best-loved novel by readers nationwide. The 1960 book by Harper Lee emerged as No. 1 in PBS’ The Great American Read survey, whose results were announced Tuesday on the show’s finale. More than 4 million votes were cast in the six-month-long contest that put 100 titles to the test. Books that were published as a series counted as a single entry. The other top-five finishers in…

More than a million Americans have died of Covid-19, and the World Health Organization estimated this Thursday that the global death toll is around 15 million — a horrifying, and largely unnecessary, tragedy. But for all that the world has lost in the last few years, the history of infectious disease has a grim message: It could have been even worse. That appalling death toll resulted even though the coronavirus kills only about 0.7 percent of the people it infects. Imagine instead that it killed 30 percent — and that…

While flagship smartphones seem to get most of the attention, the mid-range market has made huge strides over the past couple of years, thanks to advances in technology and better support for long-term software updates. After spending a few weeks with the new Samsung Galaxy A53 5G, it is clear I could continue to fully function with a mid-range phone and save hundreds of dollars over what I spend now on flagships.Samsung's recent public…

Invasive freshwater zebra mussels are a problem in many regions, clogging structures such as water intake and water treatment pipes as they rapidly reproduce. A new technology could help, by getting them to eat "eco-friendly" poison disguised as food.Mussels feed by drawing in waterborne particles, assessing them to determine if they have nutritional value, then digesting the particles that are deemed edible. The rejected particles are bound with mucus, then expelled.Led by professors David Aldridge and Geoff Moggridge, a…

Tony Fadell was instrumental in the development of the iPod and iPhone at Apple and then co-founded Nest Labs, which kicked off the consumer smart home market with its smart thermostat in 2011. Tony sold Nest to Google for $3.2 billion in 2014 and eventually left Google. He now runs an investment firm called Future Shape. Tony’s written a new book called Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, which, I’ll be honest, is total bait for Decoder. It’s one part memoir, one part tech industry gossip, and…

When choosing among the best gaming monitors, it can be challenging to keep up with all the different features that add to performance. In addition to picking a display's size and resolution, you must keep track of Adaptive-Sync compatibility (Nvidia G-Sync versus AMD FreeSync) and the supported refresh rates on a given monitor. Response times are also a critical spec that display OEMs can often fudge to seem superior to the competition. To help simplify the research/purchase process and provide more transparency for…

Google recently updated its Play Store policy to restrict third-party applications from providing the ability to record calls on recent versions of Android. The Android maker had previously blocked apps from recording calls via the microphone with the launch of Android 10 in September 2019. Google is now cutting off another avenue used by developers — the Accessibility API, from being used for call recording on Android. First party dialler apps and the Google Dialer pre-installed on phones will still be able to record…