An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Some districts are giving up on remote learning and ending the academic year early, after concluding that it was too cumbersome for teachers, students and parents. Washington, D.C., as well as parts of Georgia, Texas and elsewhere plan to end a week to several weeks early. Schools have struggled to launch remote learning for more than 50 million children across the country during the coronavirus pandemic in the largest experiment in remote learning ever. Among the issues they've encountered, not all students have internet access or have parents available to help, causing concerns about inequity. As a result, many districts haven't required schoolwork be completed or graded. Student participation, when schools are even able to measure it, has often been below regular attendance level. When schools do eventually reopen, they'll look vastly different than they did before. There may be more scheduled days home, more online learning, and lots of hand-washing. In parts of China, where life is slowly returning to normalcy, an elementary school in Yangzheng had students design hats that measure 1 meter (3.2 feet) across as a lesson in coronavirus safety practices. "We're advocating students to wear a one-meter hat and maintain one meter's distance," the Zhejiang Daily newspaper quoted Hong Feng, the school's principal, as saying as the kids returned to school this week for the first time in several months. "Along with teaching the students about social distancing, the headgear is giving the kids a history lesson: The hats resemble those worn during the Song Dynasty, which ruled China between 960 and 1279," adds CNET. "The long horizontal plumes on Song Dynasty toppers were supposedly to prevent officials from conspiring sotto voce with one another while at court -- so social distancing was in fact their original function," Eileen Chengyin Chow, a Duke University professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, explained on Twitter.

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Face ID was a great idea -- until large swathes of the world were forced to wear face masks, rendering it largely useless. Apple has apparently heard our pain. From a report: Users are reporting a subtle new feature in the latest developer version of iOS 13.5 that will make it easier to unlock your iPhone without having to take off your protective face mask. Videos shared on Twitter by Robert Petersen and Guilherme Rambo show that Apple devices with Face ID will jump to the backup passcode-entry screen if it detects a mask. That's not only helpful if you're unlocking your phone dozens of times a day -- which we all do -- but it's also helping to keep people safe by not forcing users to take off their masks and potentially exposing themselves to the virus.

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The Trump administration Wednesday included Amazon's foreign websites in Canada, the U.K., Germany, France and India in its annual report on "notorious markets" for counterfeit foreign goods, the first time a U.S. company's overseas operations have been listed. From a report: The inclusion does not carry any penalty, other than the embarrassment for Amazon of being listed alongside other websites and physical markets where counterfeit goods are sold. But the Seattle-based e-commerce giant said it strongly disagreed with the action, accusing the Trump administration of ignoring its efforts to make sure only legitimate products are sold on its website. "This purely political act is another example of the administration using the U.S. government to advance a personal vendetta against Amazon," a company spokesperson said. "Amazon makes significant investments in proactive technologies and processes to detect and stop bad actors and potentially counterfeit products from being sold in our stores."

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The world's biggest PC company (in terms of shipments) now offers select models with Linux pre-installed. In doing so, it joins the existing club that includes Dell and other smaller players like Purism, ZaReason, and System76. From a report: If Linux has a special place in your heart, you will want to know Lenovo is partnering with the Fedora Project to give you your dream machine in the form of ThinkPad laptops that make it easy even for a newcomer to get started with Fedora. This is supposed to be a pilot program dubbed Linux Community Series -- Fedora Edition, which will include the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad X1 Gen8, ThinkPad P53, with the possibility that the company will expand the selection in the near future if it sees enough demand. These models will come with the newly released Fedora 32 Workstation Linux pre-installed, and will presumably be certified to play nice with it while only using first party repositories. That means the ThinkPad P53 and ThinkPad P1 Gen2 won't come with Nvidia drivers installed by default. However, that's easy to fix by downloading them from proprietary sources.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: As more and more people desire higher-quality video communication over internet while working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for webcams has increased dramatically, triggering incredibly high prices, sometimes three to four times over MSRP. And that's if you can find one at all. To help bridge a growing gap, Canon has announced the release of the EOS Webcam Utility Beta, a program for that will, with a single USB cable, turn compatible Canon EOS interchangeable lens cameras (ILCs) and PowerShot cameras into dedicated webcams on PCs running the 64-bit version of Windows 10. "In unprecedented times, it's imperative for Canon to provide our customers with useful, simple and accessible solutions to assist them in whatever imaging needs they have," said Tatsuro Kano, executive vice president of the Canon U.S.A., Inc. Imaging Technologies & Communications Group in the press release.

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On Monday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published a decision that claims artificial intelligences cannot be inventors. Only "natural persons" currently have the right to get a patent. From a report: Last year, two relatively mundane patents -- one for a shape-shifting food container and another for an emergency flashlight -- posed an existential question for international patent regulations around the world: Does an inventor have to be a human? These two inventions were the work of DABUS, an artificial intelligence system created by physicist and AI researcher Stephen Thaler. Now, the USPTO has decided that DABUS and any other AI cannot be listed as an inventor on a patent filing. Until now, US patent law was vague about whether machines could invent, referring to "individuals" as eligible inventors. Thaler, along with a group of patent law experts, argued that because Thaler didn't have any expertise in containers or flashlights, and didn't help DABUS make the inventions, it wouldn't be right for him to be listed as the inventor.

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The National Football League is giving Amazon exclusive rights to live games for the first time, marking a deeper push by streaming services into sports. From a report: The league announced Wednesday that it would select a Saturday game in the coming season and give Amazon the sole rights to show it outside of the two teams' home markets. The NFL schedules a handful of Saturday games late in its season, when college football's regular season is over. Amazon will also have an exclusive game in 2021 and 2022. It's part of a new three-year extension of the Thursday-night partnership between the tech giant and the world's richest sports league. Amazon and its Twitch platform will continue to have nonexclusive rights to 11 Thursday-night games a season through 2022. Those games, which are also televised on Fox and the NFL Network, will be available to Amazon Prime subscribers in more than 200 countries and territories.

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The discovery that the badger-like animal lived alongside dinosaurs challenges ideas about mammals.

A government-run study of Gilead's remdesivir, perhaps the most closely watched experimental drug to treat the novel coronavirus, showed that the medicine is effective against Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. From a report: Gilead made the announcement in a statement Wednesday, stating: "We understand that the trial has met its primary endpoint." The company said that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is conducting the study, will provide data at an upcoming briefing. The finding -- although difficult to fully characterize without any data for the study -- would represent the first treatment shown to improve outcomes in patients infected with the virus that put the global economy in a standstill and killed at least 218,000 people worldwide. During an appearance alongside President Trump in the Oval Office, Anthony Fauci, the director of NIAID, said the data are a "very important proof of concept" and that there was reason for optimism, but cautioned the data were not a "knockout." Over the past few weeks, there have been conflicting reports about the potential benefit of remdesivir, a drug that was previously tried in Ebola. As previously reported by STAT, an early peek at Gilead's study in severe Covid-19 patients, based on data from a trial at a Chicago hospital, suggested patients were doing better than expected on remdesivir. Days later, a summary of results from a study in China showed that patients on the drug did not improve more than those in a control group.

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Problems with the Cuomo podcast in Apple's podcasts app? I have subscribed to it, of course, but it hasn't updated since the Boris Johnson special. But it keeps floating to the top of the list, and indicates that it has updated, but no new episodes show up. Yesterday I saw a complaint from a user about this. What's going wrong? We go to the trouble of updating this podcast feed every day with the latest Cuomo briefing, but if people aren't hearing it, what's the point? If you have a comment please post it here on Twitter.

WhatsApp, which began testing its mobile payments feature in India two years ago, could offer at least one more financial service to people in its biggest market. From a report: In a filing with the local regulator in India, the Facebook-owned service has listed credit as one of the areas it will pursue in the country. The Facebook -owned service declared with the local regulator earlier this month providing credit or loans as one of the "main objects to be pursued by it in the country." No other financial service is listed in the filing. At an event in Bangalore late last year, Abhijit Bose, WhatsApp's head in India, said he believed that the mobile payments market in India, which has attracted dozens of local and international firms in recent years, is still at a very early stage in the country and may eventually see firms move beyond just offering a way for people to send money to one another. WhatsApp has yet to receive approval from New Delhi for a nationwide rollout of Pay in India.

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The record-long U.S. economic expansion is over after almost 11 years, with what's likely to be the deepest recession in at least eight decades now under way. The world's largest economy shrank at a 4.8% annualized pace in the first quarter, the biggest slide since 2008 and the first contraction since 2014, as the need to fight the coronavirus forced businesses to close and consumers to stay home. From a report: The current quarter is likely to be far worse, with analysts expecting the economy to tumble by a record amount in data going back to the 1940s. Bloomberg Economics has projected a 37% annualized contraction, but UniCredit is the most bearish with a 65% estimate. The first-quarter downturn, reported Wednesday by the Commerce Department, was led by the steepest drop in consumer spending since 1980 and the fastest decline in business investment in almost 11 years. The worse-than-expected report reveals the wide-scale hit to U.S. output from Covid-19 and the subsequent freezing of economic activity. "It's kind of incredible when you think about the fact that the economy was running pretty much on a normal footing for over 80% of the first quarter," Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC, said on Bloomberg Radio. U.S. stocks gained amid renewed hopes for a drug to fight the coronavirus, helping investors shrug off the GDP data. The dollar slipped and Treasury yields were lower.

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Sarah Cooper: "Having the Blue Angels fly over the city for healthcare workers is like when I ask my husband for help around the house and he buys me flowers."

Chinese scientists say the novel coronavirus will not be eradicated, adding to a growing consensus around the world that the pathogen will likely return in waves like the flu. From a report: It's unlikely the new virus will disappear the way its close cousin SARS did 17 years ago, as it infects some people without causing obvious symptoms like fever. This group of so-called asymptomatic carriers makes it hard to fully contain transmission as they can spread the virus undetected, a group of Chinese viral and medical researchers told reporters in Beijing at a briefing Monday. With SARS, those infected became seriously ill. Once they were quarantined from others, the virus stopped spreading. In contrast, China is still finding dozens of asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus every day despite bringing its epidemic under control. "This is very likely to be an epidemic that co-exists with humans for a long time, becomes seasonal and is sustained within human bodies," said Jin Qi, director of the Institute of Pathogen Biology at China's top.

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As Bob Dylan once wrote, "the answer my friends is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind."