A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket overcame a rare in-flight engine failure soon after launch from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday to place 60 satellites in orbit for the company's Starlink Internet network. Spaceflight Now reports: One of the rocket's nine first stage engines shut down prematurely around 2 minutes, 22 seconds, after liftoff from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, an event visible in a view from a camera streaming live video from the Falcon 9 as it climbed into the upper atmosphere. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, confirmed in a tweet that the Falcon 9 experienced an "early engine shutdown on ascent, but it didn't affect orbit insertion." The rocket's other Merlin engines fired a little longer to compensate for the loss of thrust. The rest of the Falcon 9's climb into orbit appeared to go according to plan, and the upper stage deployed the 60 Starlink satellites into orbit around 15 minutes after liftoff. "Shows value of having 9 engines!" Musk wrote on Twitter. The first stage missed a landing attempt on SpaceX's drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral, the second time SpaceX has missed a rocket landing in the company's last three missions. It was not immediately clear whether the engine shutdown on ascent affected the recovery attempt. Musk promised a "thorough investigation" of Wednesday's early engine shutdown before the next Falcon 9 launch, and it was not immediately clear whether the inquiry might prompt launch delays.

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According to The Associated Press and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler will shut down their factories for at least two weeks. "Meanwhile, Tesla appears to be defying officials in Alameda County, California -- the site of its only North American factory, in Freemont -- who have ordered Tesla to stop operations," reports Ars Technica. From the report: TechCrunch reports that a Wednesday email from the company's human resources department instructed employees to come to work. "We still do not have final word from the city, county, state and federal government on the status of our operations," the email said. "We have had conflicting guidance from different levels of government." In an email published Tuesday by Eletrek, Tesla's head of HR argued that Tesla didn't need to shut down because the company counts as National Critical Infrastructure, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security. The category "includes auto manufacturing and energy infrastructure," according to Tesla. "People need access to transportation and energy, and we are essential to providing it," the email said. Tesla evidently believes that its interpretation of this DHS guidance supersedes the instructions of Alameda County officials to shut down. It remains to be seen if Alameda County officials agree.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New York City is working with the hospitality industry to possibly convert entire hotels into hospitals for patients without the novel coronavirus, in an effort to increase capacity at medical facilities as the outbreak grows. The city's emergency management commissioner, Deanne Criswell, said in an interview Wednesday that hotels could be vital as New York City needs more beds to treat those with Covid-19. The hotels would be for "those non-Covid patients who are really minor but need care," she said. It couldn't be determined how many beds would be immediately available for these patients or how much the city would pay hotels. The city currently uses hotels for some quarantine, and could use them to house health-care workers who need places to stay, Ms. Criswell said. With the city's tourism industry hit by the virus, many hotels are now empty, she added. New York City has 1,339 confirmed cases of the virus as of Wednesday afternoon, with 10 deaths. City officials also hope to turn the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a large hospital, using federal medical stations, according to Ms. Criswell. Mayor Bill de Blasio said earlier this week the city had an additional 1,300 beds by reopening closed hospitals and other facilities, including Roosevelt Island's Coler hospital, a city hospital that was no longer in use. A recently built nursing home in Brooklyn will also be used to hold 600 beds, and two Bronx hospitals with more than 100 beds will also be available, according to Mr. de Blasio. To make more space, the city is also discharging patients that can leave hospitals, canceling elective surgeries, and building more capacity within hospitals. Earlier today, the U.S. and Canada announced it will suspend non-essential travel between the two countries to prevent the spread of the virus. This comes two days after Canada closed its borders to non-citizens with exceptions for U.S. citizens, air crews and diplomats. The U.S. is also ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to suspend foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days.

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During today's PlayStation 5 livestream, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will be backwards compatible with PS4 and PS4 Pro games, but the company made no mention of retro PS1, PS2, and PS3 titles. From a report: Mark Cerny, Sony's lead system architect for PlayStation hardware, said the following about the PS5's backwards compatibility: "The PlayStation 5 GPU is backwards compatible with PlayStation 4. What does that mean? One way you can achieve backwards compatibility is to put the previous console's chips at in the new consoles like we did with some PlayStation 3s, but that's of course extremely expensive. A better way is to incorporate any differences in the previous console's logic into the new console's custom chips, meaning that even as the technology evolves, the logic and feature set that PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro titles rely on is still available in backwards compatibility modes. One advantage of this strategy is that once backwards compatibility is in the console, it's in, and it's not as if a cost-down will remove backwards compatibility like it did on PlayStation 3. Achieving this unification of functionality took years of efforts by AMD, as any roadmap advancement creates a potential divergence in logic."

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Louis Poinsignon of Cloudflare, sharing findings in a blog post: As the COVID-19 emergency continues and an increasing number of cities and countries are establishing quarantines or cordons sanitaire, the Internet has become, for many, the primary method to keep in touch with their friends and families. And it's a vital motor of the global economy as many companies have employees who are now working from home. Traffic towards video conferencing, streaming services and news, e-commerce websites has surged. We've seen growth in traffic from residential broadband networks, and a slowing of traffic from businesses and universities. The Cloudflare team is fully operational and the Network Operating Center (NOC) is watching the changing traffic patterns in the more than 200 cities in which we operate hardware. Big changes in Internet traffic aren't unusual. They often occur around large sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup, cultural events like the Eurovision Song Contest and even during Ramadan at the breaking of the fast each day. The Internet was built to cope with an ever changing environment. In fact, it was literally created, tested, debugged and designed to deal with changing load patterns. Over the last few weeks, the Cloudflare Network team has noticed some new patterns and we wanted to share a few of them with you.

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Google said today it is pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases due to the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. From a report: The company cited "adjusted work schedules" as the primary reason for the delay, as most of its engineers are now working from home. The company published an official statement today after ZDNet reached out for comment last night, when Google failed to release Chrome v81. YouTube videos, tweets, and blog posts announcing the new Chrome release were posted online yesterday -- most likely scheduled days or weeks in advance. However, the actual Chrome v81 release never made it to users' devices, and the same videos, tweets, and blog posts were removed shortly after Google's PR realized their mistake.

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Maybe part of the trillion dollar stimulus could given to news orgs to temporarily take down their paywalls.

Today, we get another diminutive desktop option, but this one is designed for Linux and privacy. From a report: Yes, Purism is finally launching a tiny desktop, and it will come pre-installed with the Debian-based PureOS. Called "Librem Mini," the cute bugger has 4 USB-A ports on the front, along with a 3.5mm audio jack, and the power button. On the rear, there are two more USB-A ports, a single USB-C port, Ethernet, HDMI, DisplayPort, and the power port. "Announcing the Purism Librem Mini. Our small form-factor mini-PC that puts freedom, privacy and security first. We're really excited about the Librem Mini, it's a device our community have wanted and we've wanted to offer for some time. The Librem Mini is accessible, small, light and powerful featuring a new 8th gen quad core i7 processor, up to 64 GB of fast DDR4 memory and 4k 60 fps video playback. It's a desktop for your home or oïfce, a media center for your entertainment, or an expandable home server for your files and applications," says Purism.

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My list of local businesses is coming together. Then I had another idea, a barter system. For example, I have a lot of toilet paper. I need a thermometer, hand sanitizer and wipes. I would trade.

Hospital workers in Washington state have been making protective medical gear out of office supplies and other run-of-the-mill materials as they deal with a severe shortage of equipment needed to care for patients who may have Covid-19. From a report: Among the supplies coming in handy: clear vinyl sheets. "We are very close to being out of face shields," said Becca Bartles, executive director of infection prevention at Providence St. Joseph Health, a 51-hospital system. "Masks, we're probably a couple of days away" from running out, she said. To buy time, Providence infection control and quality experts designed prototype face-shields with off-the-shelf materials: marine-grade vinyl, industrial tape, foam and elastic. Monday night they bought supplies at craft stores and Home Depot. On Tuesday, about 20 administrative staff members at the health system's corporate headquarters volunteered to work an assembly line in a large conference room, putting together 500 home-spun face shields that were going to a hospital in Seattle that night.

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A newly discovered fossil bird could be the oldest-known ancestor of every chicken on the planet.

A medical device manufacturer has threatened to sue a group of volunteers in Italy that 3D printed a valve used for life-saving coronavirus treatments. From a report: The valve typically costs about $11,000 from the medical device manufacturer, but the volunteers were able to print replicas for about $1. A hospital in Italy was in need of the valves after running out while treating patients for COVID-19. The hospital's usual supplier said they could not make the valves in time to treat the patients. That launched a search for a way to 3D print a replica part, and Cristian Fracassi and Alessandro Ramaioli, who work at Italian startup Isinnova, offered their company's printer for the job. However, when the pair asked the manufacturer of the valves for blueprints they could use to print replicas, the company declined and threatened to sue for patent infringement. Fracassi and Ramaioli moved ahead anyway by measuring the valves and 3D printing three different versions of them.

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Horn & Hardart automats would be a perfect way to serve takeout food. No human-human contact. They were supposed to be the future when I was a kid, but they went the way of Chock Full o'Nuts coffee shops in NYC.

The 2019 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, was today awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, founding members of Pixar who helped shape the future of computer graphics. From a report: The two will share a $1M prize and, of course, the satisfaction of receiving this prestigious award for doing something they clearly love. The award has recently been given to such luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee, cryptographer Martin Hellman, and last year AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. Catmull was at Pixar for more than 30 years, appointed its president from the very beginning as a LucasFilm animation studio bought and repurposed by Steve Jobs. Hanrahan was an early hire, and between them the two would have had enormous effects on the world of CG, even if they hadn't built the poster child for the technology. TechCrunch spoke with Catmull and Hanrahan about the origins of the field and their early work in it that the Association for Computing Machinery chose to recognize this year. "When I started out, graphics didn't really exist," Hanrahan recalled. "I sort of discovered graphics in grad school, but there were no professors, no classes, it wasn't even in the computer sciences, really."

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Speaking of anxiety, I've been relatively anxiety-free since I got out on my own in my early 20s. All through my childhood I had terrible anxiety, which manifested in a very unhappy digestive system. Always had a stomach ache, trouble controlling my bowels. Upset. I was always upset. I understood why totally, my parents created a very tense atmosphere, and after many years of therapy and self-examination I understood why they were so tense. But a few years after I established myself outside their house the digestive problems magically went away. They're back. Started right after watching Trump's Oval Office speech last Wednesday. I was already hunkered down. I understood what was coming. What was clear from his speech that he didn't. And he was still throwing out racist bullshit. From the fucking Oval Office. After that, I realized fully how fucked we are. There have been moments of relaxation. But they're few and far between now.