Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Scientists at the University of Oxford have developed a new coronavirus test that produces results around three times faster than the current fastest testing methods, and that requires only relatively simple technical instrumentation. In addition to these benefits, the researchers behind the test’s development say that it  could even help detect patients affected by coronavirus in earlier stages of infection vs. current methods, and that its results can can “read by the naked eye,” which makes it more accessible to a broader range of healthcare facilities and professionals.

The Oxford-developed test can provide results in only half an hour – the fastest current methods that focus on viral RNA, like this one does, produce results in between 1.5 and 2 hours. The new tests have already been validated using real clinical samples of the virus at the Shenzhen Luohou People’s Hospital in China, and though they’ve so far only been used on 16 samples, evenly split between those positive for the virus and those that contain none, they’ve demonstrated a 100% success rate, which is a very reassuring result.

The biggest impact of this test, should it prove effective at scale, is that it manages to sidestep some of the existing limiting factors that apply to the existing early test methods. Scientists currently have to isolate COVID-19 RNA (the instructions for coding DNA), and then perform a process through which that RNA is actually turned into DNA – followed by testing the DNA in a microbiology laboratory setting by trained technicians using a specialized polymerase chain reaction machine.

The Oxford test, on the other hand, requires only relatively simple equipment for both conducting the test and for interpreting the results, which unlocks the possibility of deploying it in hard to reach areas or in local facilities that lack specialized equipment and personnel. The team that developed it is also working on the possibility of making it even more flexible with an integrated hardware design that could make it possible for it to be “used at clinics, airports or even for home use.”

This is still an early technology that’s coming out of a lab, which means that there are still a number of steps required before it becomes approved for broad use. Still, testing equipment doesn’t face quite as many hurdles as do treatments and antivirals, which can obviously have a much more direct impact on human patients, and given the current situation it’s likely everyone involved will want to expedite the next steps in terms of testing and validation.

Testing, and the ability to so accurately and in large numbers across a population, is a key element of any effort to counter the spread of coronavirus, and to evaluate the efficacy of the measures put in place to do so. Currently, the U.S. is far behind other countries in terms of its testing efforts, for instance, with the White House confirming that only under 60,000 tests had been conducted as of yesterday based on available data.

Testing is also focused on only the most severe and obvious cases, which means that large swaths of potentially asymptomatic carries who feel just fine are going untested. That has a huge impact on any effort to accurately track the transmission of COVID-19, and, as a result, of tracking the impact of measures like isolation, social distancing, and shelter-in-place tactics.

SpaceX has successfully launched and deployed its sixth batch of 60 Starlink satellites, further growing its constellation for the internet broadband system it plans to launch for customers starting later this year in the U.S. and Canada. This brings SpaceX’s total Starlink constellation size to 360 spacecraft, extending the company’s lead as the world’s largest private satellite operator.

The launch this morning used a Falcon 9 first stage booster that flew for its fifth time, marking a record for the company when it comes to re-use of this component of its launch system. The launch also included yet another recovery attempt for the booster, but unfortunately the first stage did not met the landing as planned.

That’s not the only way this mission furthered SpaceX’s reusable rocketry goals: The fairing, or protective covering that encloses the satellite cargo, has also flown previously – on a SpaceX Starlink launch from last May. SpaceX will also attempt to recover this fairing once it falls away from the cargo and returns to Earth, with an intent to catch both halves using two ships positioned at sea and equipped with nets to gently catch the fairing as it parachutes back to the surface. That recovery attempt will take place around 45 minutes after launch, and we’ll update this post with its results.

SpaceX currently is managing to refurbish its Falcon 9 boosters in roughly eight weeks, and will continue to look to improve that, and eventually achieve even more rapid reusability with its Starship spacecraft, a successor to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy being developed right now by the company in Boca Chica, Texas.

This is already SpaceX’s sixth mission of 2020, and its fourth Starlink launch of the year. Expect more to follow quickly as it ramps towards launch of service, beginning with North America in 2020 and parts of the rest of the world next year.

Apple has announced new iPad Pro models in a press release. In addition to better specifications, Apple is also releasing a new Magic Keyboard with backlit keys, a trackpad and a hinge that allows you to move the iPad freely.

The iPad Pro looks more or less like the existing iPad Pro. You can choose between an 11-inch display and a 12.9-inch display. It features an eight-core A12Z system on a chip — the previous version came with an A12X Bionic system on a chip.

The new iPad Pro features a 10MP ultra-wide camera sensor as well as a LiDAR sensor on the back of the device — LiDAR sensors can be useful for augmented-reality apps for instance. There’s a standard 12MP camera sensor as well. The microphones have been improved and Apple promises “studio-quality” sound.

Wi-Fi and LTE should be slightly faster, like on the iPhone 11 Pro. On the display front, the iPad Pro supports a refresh rate of 120 Hz and True Tone like previous models as well as a wide range of colors thanks to P3 support.

Apple also says that the thermal architecture has been improved, which should let you run demanding apps at peak performance for a longer time.

But let’s talk about the trackpad. 9to5mac previously noticed references to full mouse cursor support in iOS 14. It turns out that Apple will release that feature before iOS 14 this fall.

By default, Apple shows a rounded cursor. But the cursors changes depending on what you’re hovering over. If you’re moving a text cursor for instance, it becomes a vertical bar. If you’re resizing a text zone in a Pages document, it becomes two arrows. In other words, it works pretty much like a cursor on a desktop computer.

The new trackpad will support gestures that let you switch between apps, open the app switcher, activate the Dock or Control Center.

Third-party apps already support the trackpad without any change. But developers can release updates to improve support thanks to new APIs.

The keyboard of the Magic Keyboard now looks more like a traditional keyboard with separate keys. There’s a USB-C port, which recharges both the keyboard and the iPad attached to it. This way, you can recharge your device and plug another accessory to the iPad Pro itself.

The new keyboard accessory will be available in May and will cost $299 or $349 depending on the size of your iPad Pro. Yep, that’s an expensive keyboard.

The iPad Pro will be available next week — orders start today. There are two finishes — silver and space gray. The 11-inch iPad Pro with 256GB of storage costs $799. The 12.9-inch model with 256GB of storage costs $999. You can add cellular support for an additional $150. There are also more expensive options with more storage (512GB and 1TB).

Apple today announced the Mac Mini will ship with more standard storage space. Starting at $799, the base model Mac Mini now ships with a 256GB SSD, up from 128GB previously. The CPU, GPU and system memory remains the same from the previous model.

This refresh is a slight but welcomed bump to Apple’s least expensive Mac. With the updated specs, the Mac Mini offers a bit more bang for the buck but the specs still lags sorely behind similarly priced pre-packaged Windows PCs.

The $799 Mac Mini runs an Intel Core i3 CPU with a clock-speed of 3.6Ghz. It also sports an Intel HD Graphics 630 GPU and 8 GB of RAM. The $1,099 package ups the specs to a 3.0GHz Intel Core i5 CPU and a 512GB SSD hard drive.

Both of the new models ship on March 20. Apple Store pickup is currently unavailable as Apple closed all its stores outside of mainland China in response to the coronavirus.

Apple just offered up a new version of the the MacBook Air with some souped up internals, including a 10th-generation Intel processor and double the storage. Honestly, the big news here for many is probably the updated keyboard, doing away with a couple of generations of misfires on that front.

Starting at $999 (or $899 for education users), the latest version of Apple’s perennial favorite thin and light promises up to double the performance, from Apple’s numbers, courtesy of the new silicon, configurable to up to a 1.2GHz quad-core Core i7 with Turbo boost up to 3.8GHz.

That’s bolstered by Intel Iris Plus Graphics, which the company says are up to 80 percent faster than their predecessor. The systems start at 256GB of storage — double the previous model. That’s configurable to up to a 2TB SSD.

Perhaps the update, however, is that the the Air is getting the same Magic Keyboard mechanism that was introduced with the 16-inch MacBook Pro last year. The new scissor mechanisms offer more travel than earlier, maligned MacBook keyboard and should hold up much better. Per the released the system is made from 100% recycled aluminum and is available in gold (pictured), silver and space gray. It sports a 13-inch Retina display and can support an external 6K monitor, making it the first Air to do so.

Last year Lynk — then called Ubiquitilink — showed that from now on, every phone can be a satellite phone. But they’ve spent the last year honing the product and have just demonstrated the real thing: Sending a plain old text message from a “cell tower in space” to a normal phone on the surface.

Of course there are “real” satellite phones, but these expensive, complex devices establish a dedicated link using frequencies not used by normal mobiles — and of course, they’re quite expensive and bulky. The whole idea of Lynk is to provide similarly globe-spanning connectivity without anyone having to buy a dish, an accessory, or even a new phone.

It works, as founder and CEO Charles Miller explained to me last year, very much the way normal cell signals work. It turns out that when your radio beam goes straight up instead of passing through buildings and the landscape, it can easily reach low Earth orbit. The problem comes with the physics involved in synchronizing the signals — doppler shift and other factors.

That’s the problem Lynk set out to solve, and has lofted three satellites to test. A fourth is on the way, but the third was perfectly capable of their first public demonstration of what could eventually be a universally accessible data service.

“This is the first time we actually sent a message from space to a standard, unmodified phone,” Miller said. “We did it in the most visible way that people can understand, an emergency alert.”

You can watch the video of the text being received below. Bear in mind these guys are sitting out in the Falklands, a location where cell coverage is essentially nil but which happens to be an ideal location for receiving a satellite signal. They get pretty excited.

What’s happening is the satellite is passing overhead, establishing a 2G cell signal with the phone, and transmitting the text message with the correct encoding to create an alert. With a relatively small network of such satellites, one could alert the entire world in just a few minutes, if one had something important enough to say.

Importantly, however, the connection is two-way. It’s not demonstrated above, but your phone would be able to send a text via the same signal, when no other signal is available. That would be great for disasters, remote areas, and other outlier situations.

“There’s some interesting kinks to making it work,” Miller said. “We already knew we could do it — physics and engineering don’t lie if you know what you’re doing. We’ve had it working in the lab for a while, but getting it to work in reality, flying real hardware that connects to real hardware on Earth, is harder. People are skeptical, so we just had to prove it.”

Lynk’s device aboard the ISS.

The fourth satellite, with which Lynk plans to demonstrate more capabilities to its telecom partners (which Miller was very careful not to mention by name), is already up on the ISS and will be put into its own orbit soon. Further launches are planned for the fall.

“We’ve just launched satellite after satellite because that’s the best way to learn,” said Miller. “You’d never learn this stuff in books or computer analyses or simulations. You’re almost always going to have hiccups.”

The plan, though subject to the usual space-based business contingencies, is to announce partners around the world this year and perhaps even begin limited service. There’s a ton of paperwork, as you might imagine, because Lynk essentially has to get regulatory approval in every country that it plans to offer service in — which is to say, pretty much all of them.

Commercial partnerships will be present, of course, but Miller was quick with assurances that this would not hamper the system’s use for emergencies. 911 texts, alerts, and other applications are cut out of the exclusivity contracts.

Miller is highly optimistic about the market potential here. 5G, he pointed out, is costing billions but consumers couldn’t care less. “Really it’s just incremental, slightly faster speeds for people who already have connectivity, going from 4G to 5G. People say they want it, but they aren’t willing to pay for it. Telecoms are starting to realize that,” he said. “Going from zero G to 4G, that’s not incremental. For a person with no connectivity, some connectivity can be life changing.”

Japanese-made flu drug favipiravir (also known as Avigan) has been shown to be effective in both reducing the duration of the COVID-19 virus in patients, and to have improved the lung conditions of those who received treatment with the drug, based on results of clinical trials conducted with affected patients in both Wuhan and Shenzhen by Chinese medical authorities.

The trials involved 340 patients in total, and since they drug has already been developed and approved for use in treating flu, it has a “high degree of safety,” according to China science and technology ministry official Zhang Xinmin, who spoke to reporters on Wednesday according to The Guardian. The tests showed a reduction in the period during which patients tested positive for the new coronavirus from 11 days down to just four, and showed improvements in the lung condition of around 91 percent of patients treated with favipiravir, compared to just 62 percent for those without among the trial participants.

The Chinese studies are not the only attempt to test the efficacy of the drug in COVID-19 treatment – Japanese doctors are bonding their own studies. A Japanese health ministry source told Japanese newspaper the Manichi Shimbun that the drug so far has been given to around 70 to 80 people, but that early results suggest it isn’t effective in treating those with more severe symptoms where the virus has already multiplied to a much greater extend.

Still, a treatment that is effective in reducing the duration of the presence of the virus even in milder cases, and in lessening the impacts in moderate symptomatic patients, would be a huge benefit to the ongoing fight against the coronavirus. Any approvals for use of favipiravir would of course require further clinical testing, followed by approval of widespread use by each country’s relevant medical treatment regulating body.

Other drug treatments have been tested for COVID-19 treatment, and are in the process of development, but no antiviral has yet been approved or created specifically for dealing with the new coronavirus. Other drugs that have shown early promising signs include remadesivir, a compound developed by Gilead Sciences that has shown some promise as a general antiviral.

Grappling with the spread of misinformation on the platform, WhatsApp today announced two initiatives to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Facebook -owned instant messaging service announced WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub — for which it has partnered with the WHO, UNICEF, and UNDP — to offer simple, actionable guidance, general tips and resources for users around the world to be better informed about the disease and hence reduce the spread of rumors.

WhatsApp said it is working with the WHO and UNICEF to provide messaging hotlines for people around the world to use directly. These hotlines will provide information and will be listed on the WhatsApp Coronavirus Information Hub.

The messaging firm said it is also donating $1 million to the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). The $1 million grant will help in fact-checking for the #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance, which spans more than 100 local organizations in at least 45 countries.

The grant will support training to use the advanced features within WhatsApp Business, including the WhatsApp Business API. Expanding the presence of these IFCN certified fact-checking organizations will help ensure local communities are aware and responding to potential harmful rumors.

The announcement today comes days after it became apparent that WhatsApp, which is used by more than 2 billion users, is again grappling with spread of misinformation worldwide.

“We are also pleased to be able to partner with the Poynter Institute to help grow the amount of fact-checking organizations on WhatsApp and to support their life saving work to debunk rumors. We will also continue to work directly with health ministries around the world for them to provide updates right within WhatsApp,” said Will Cathcart, Head of WhatsApp, in a statement.

In a statement, Baybars Orsek, Director of IFCN, said, “the timely donation from WhatsApp will help the fact-checks published by the CoronaVirusFacts Alliance to reach wider audiences and, in consequence, help people sort facts from fiction during this avalanche of information that WHO called an ‘infodemic’. The International Fact-Checking Network also looks forward to discovering ways to understand the spread of health related hoaxes on WhatsApp in different formats and to make tools available for fact-checkers to detect and debunk misinformation on the messaging app.”

SpaceX is launching its latest Starlink mission today, with a takeoff time of 8:16 AM EDT (5:16 AM PDT) currently scheduled to take place at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The launch will carry 60 more Starlink broadband internet satellites to their low Earth orbit destination, using a Falcon 9 rocket with a booster that flew four times previously, including twice in 2018 and twice last year, most recently in November for another Starlink mission. This is the second launch attempt for this mission, after a scrubbed attempt on Sunday due to an engine power issue, and there’s a backup launch opportunity set for Thursday at 7:56 AM EDT should this try encounter any issues or weather delays.

SpaceX is proceeding with this launch despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which late on Tuesday prompted NASA to move to a ‘Stage 3’ condition across all of their facilities, which mandates telework for all agency employees except for those whose presence on site are mission critical for operations.

This launch will include a landing attempt for the Falcon 9 booster, meaning if all goes well SpaceX could recover it for a fifth time for an attempt at refurbishment and re-use. Five flights of a Falcon 9 booster would be a record for SpaceX – and the booster that it’s attempting this mission with is already a record-holder, since it achieved SpaceX’s existing high-water mark for re-use with its last November launch.

The primary mission is to deliver the sixth batch of 60 of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to space, which will grow the total constellation size to 360. SpaceX plans to begin commercial operation of the constellation later this year if all goes well, providing high-speed, reliable broadband internet to customers in North America, with lower latency and better speeds than are available using existing satellite internet service, which depend on larger, geosynchronous satellites placed much farther out from Earth.

SpaceX will also be aiming to recover the two fairing halves used to protect the satellite cargo on this launch, using two ships stationed at sea that have large nets strung across struts extending from their surface. SpaceX has been attempting these recoveries in order to further increase the reusability (and reduce the cost) of launch but so far it hasn’t had much consistency in its success, catching three fairings in total. The fairing being used today flew before, too – during the May 2019 Starlink satellite launch.

The broadcast of the launch will begin above around 15 minutes prior to the target takeoff time, so at around 8:01 AM EDT (5:01 AM PDT).

Deepgram, a startup focused on high-quality, real-time speech recognition, announced a $12 million Series A this morning.

The startup, founded a half decade ago, according to Crunchbase data, with just a few million in raised capital, is interesting, as its success to date was founded on two consecutive experiments. The first dealing with its technology, and the second concerning its market.

Deepgram sits in the midst of our continuing conversation about AI-grounded companies, or at least companies that make use of deep learning. Let’s explore its round, and how the company got to where it is today.

Foundations

Speech recognition has come a long way since terrible ’90s headsets and trying to train Dragon Naturally Speaking to better let you dictate into Word documents. Startups like Otter.ai have taken speech recognition tooling and made it available to the masses. But, while Otter.ai is something that journalists love for its ease of use and modest price point, there’s still something missing in the modern world of speech recognition.

Namely, improved accuracy. Otter and other services can do a fine job gisting a sound file into words and paragraphs, even working to differentiate between speakers. But it’s only so good, and it’s retroactive. With most calls that I execute for TechCrunch, for example, I record the chat on my phone, export the audio, upload it to Otter.ai, leave it be and circle back later on to listen and clean up the text for use in an article. (Here’s one, for example.)

What Deepgram can do is a bit heavier-duty, and is not aimed at journalists or other individuals. Instead, Deepgram has built a speech recognition tool that it claims is more accurate, and can handle real-time text input. It sells the tech to large companies.

TechCrunch spoke with Deepgram CEO Scott Stephenson about his company’s product during our call about the round itself. Summarizing our chat, here’s what we found out. Instead of trying to improve existing tech — which doesn’t sport strong gross margins, the CEO said — Deepgram started from scratch, building a deep learning tool that, after a few years’ work, was a step ahead of other speech recognition technologies in terms of accuracy.

Its investors agree. In a call with TechCrunch, Nvida’s Jeff Herbst, who took part in the investment, said that Deepgram was “one of the best, if not the best” speech recognition companies around. Deepgram provides its services in two ways, hosted on its own hardware (the firm claims better margins by running its own metal, and, you now know why Nvidia is involved), and on-prem on client hardware. The startup is targeting enterprise call centers and voice platforms as customers.

It took time to prove the company’s tech, years in fact. Deepgram then spent another few years testing out its possible commercial appeal. It may seem obvious today that there would be demand for what Deepgram built, but Gong.io and other, similar services are only so old. Regardless, after about four years, the company was content that it had proven out its product and customer base. Or as Stephenson told TechCrunch, the “tech risk” that Deepgram faced is now behind it, as is its “market risk.”

That’s why the company raised now, so let’s talk about the round.

The round

Deepgram’s $12 million investment was led by Wing VC. Other firms took part, including Nvidia as mentioned, and Y Combinator and SAP.

What’s the money for? Adding staff, among other things. Deepgram has about 40 people today, but declined to tell TechCrunch how quickly it will scale personnel (oddly, as that’s a pretty standard question), saying instead that it’s hiring aggressively, with a focus on go-to-market and engineering. The firm also intends to use some of its Series A on hardware.

What’s fun is that Deepgram has what it considers to be a strong market position, now crossed with a pile of cash. How fast it can grow is now the question, and the first thing we’re asking the next time we speak with the firm.