The Biden presidential campaign, emboldened by a recent surge in support, is going after a new target: Facebook. From a report: After months of privately battling the tech giant over President Trump's free rein on its social network, the campaign will begin urging its millions of supporters to demand that Facebook strengthen its rules against misinformation and to hold politicians accountable for harmful comments. On Thursday, the campaign will circulate a petition and an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, to change the company's hands-off approach to political speech. The petition will be sent to millions of supporters on its email and text message lists and through social media, including Facebook, imploring them to sign the letter. The campaign will also release a video this week to be shared across social media to explain the issue. "Real changes to Facebook's policies for their platform and how they enforce them are necessary to protect against a repeat of the role that disinformation played in the 2016 election and that continues to threaten our democracy today," said Bill Russo, a spokesman for the Biden campaign. The move puts the Biden camp in the center of a raging debate about the role and responsibility of tech platforms. Civil rights leaders, Democratic lawmakers and many of Facebook's own employees say that big tech companies have a responsibility to prevent false and hateful information from being shared widely.

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On Twitter, a question. Name something that your mother cooked that was your favorite. At first I was going to reply my mother wasn't a very great cook, but then I remembered. She sent us, my brother and I, cookies at summer camp. They were the best things ever.

"Defund the police" is practically a Republican slogan. In their hearts they probably agree with it. They plan to defund everything and pocket the proceeds. Defund the police is like the famous Republican "death panels" idea.

Folks, we're in a class war. Black Lives Matter is a very important facet of that, probably oldest and original sin of the class war, going back to 1619. But there are now many fronts. And the number one killer in the war is not the police, it's the virus.

It's good that the market corrected. Otherwise it was saying something pretty horrific. That the economy will just sail along with huge unemployment, hunger, disease and death.

On board the International Space Station since May 2018 is a mini-fridge-size facility called the Cold Atom Lab (CAL), capable of chilling atoms in a vacuum down to temperatures one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for all intents and purposes, one of the coldest spots in the known universe. And according to a new study published in Nature, scientists have just used it to create a rare state of matter for the first time ever in space. From a report: Bose-Einstein condensates, sometimes called the fifth state of matter, are gaseous clouds of atoms that stop behaving like individual atoms and start to behave like a collective. BECs, as they're often called, were first predicted by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose over 95 years ago, but they were first observed in the lab by scientists just 25 years ago. The general idea when making a BEC is to inject atoms (in the case of CAL, rubidium and potassium) into an ultra-cold chamber to slow them down. A magnetic trap is then created in the chamber with an electrified coil, which is used along with lasers and other tools to move the atoms into a dense cloud. At this point the atoms "kind of blur into one another," says David Aveline, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the lead author of the new study. To run experiments using a BEC, you need to turn down or release the magnetic trap. The cloud of crowded atoms will expand, which is useful because BECs need to stay cold, and gases tend to cool off as they expand. But if the atoms in a BEC get too far apart, they no longer behave like a condensate. This is where the microgravity of low Earth orbit comes into play. If you try to increase the volume on Earth, says Aveline, gravity will just pull the atoms in the center of the BEC cloud down to the bottom of the trap until they spill out, distorting the condensate or ruining it entirely. But in microgravity, the tools in the CAL can hold the atoms together even as the trap's volume increases. That makes for a longer-lived condensate, which in turn allows scientists to study it longer than they could on Earth (this initial demonstration ran for 1.118 seconds, although the goal is to be able to detect the cloud for up to 10 seconds). Though only a first step, the CAL experiment could one day allow BECs to form the basis of ultra-sensitive instruments that detect faint signals from some of the universe's most mysterious phenomena, like gravitational waves and dark energy. From a more practical perspective, Aveline believes the team's work could pave the way for better inertial sensors. "The applications range from accelerometers and seismometers to gyroscopes," he says.

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Still struggling with rising coronavirus cases, India, Mexico, Russia, Iran and Pakistan have decided they must end lockdowns and restart their economies. From a report: At Nigambodh Ghat, the oldest cremation grounds in India's capital, the bodies keep coming. One ambulance arrives with five inside. Then another. Then another, in an endless display of death. As the coronavirus pandemic surges in New Delhi, a public health care system that was already strained might be reaching its breaking point. People can't get tested. They can't find a hospital bed. The situation has become so grim that government officials have proposed commandeering some of New Delhi's fanciest hotels to turn into hospitals. But ready or not, much of India's coronavirus lockdown has ended, as have those in other countries struggling to balance economic damage with coronavirus risk. In many places -- India, Mexico, Russia, Iran and Pakistan, among others -- leaders have come to feel they have no choice but to take the surge of cases on the chin and prioritize the economy. Some of these leaders, especially those in the developing world, said they couldn't sustain the punishing lockdowns without risking economic catastrophe, especially for their poorest citizens. So the thinking has shifted, from commanding people to stay indoors and avoid the virus and other people at all costs, to now openly accepting some illness and death to try to limit the damage to livelihoods and to individual lives. A glimpse from the streets, reported by correspondents in countries especially hard hit, reveals a sharp rise in person-to-person contact in recent days -- precisely at the time that the World Health Organization is warning that infections from this highly contagious disease are roaring toward a new peak. India is now producing more new daily infections, around 10,000, than all but two countries, the United States and Brazil.

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The Internet Archive is a massive endeavor -- it's an online library aiming to "provide Universal Access to All Knowledge." It has digitized millions of web pages, movies, photos, recordings, software programs, and books that might otherwise be lost to history. But it's neither un-censorable nor outside the bounds of copyright law. And now open internet supporters are wondering how to save it before it disappears.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday announced a $100 million project focused on the systemic barriers to opportunity and dignity faced by the black community, with special emphasis on education, economic equality and criminal justice reform. Details: The effort will begin in the U.S., then expand internationally over time. It will be led by Lisa Jackson, the former EPA administrator who has led Apple's environmental efforts for the last several years. Apple is also addressing internal issues, promising to boost its hiring of underrepresented minorities and increase its spending with black-owned suppliers. YouTube announced a multiyear, $100 million fund dedicated to "amplifying and developing the voices of Black creators and artists and their stories," according to CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: "At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post. "We're committed to doing better as a platform to center and amplify Black voices and perspectives." As an example of content being funded under the new initiative, Wojcicki announced that this Saturday, June 13, YouTube will host livestream fundraising event produced by YouTube Originals, called "Bear Witness, Take Action."

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Over the past few months, OpenAI has vacuumed an incredible amount of data into its artificial intelligence language systems. It sucked up Wikipedia, a huge swath of the rest of the internet and tons of books. This mass of text -- trillions of words -- was then analyzed and manipulated by a supercomputer to create what the research group bills as a major AI breakthrough and the heart of its first commercial product, which came out on Thursday. From a report: The product name -- OpenAI calls it "the API" -- might not be magical, but the things it can accomplish do seem to border on wizardry at times. The software can perform a broad set of language tasks, including translating between languages, writing news stories and poems and answering everyday questions. Ask it, for example, if you should keep reading a story, and you might be told, "Definitely. The twists and turns keep coming." OpenAI wants to build the most flexible, general purpose AI language system of all time. Typically, companies and researchers will tune their AI systems to handle one, limited task. The API, by contrast, can crank away at a broad set of jobs and, in many cases, at levels comparable with specialized systems. While the product is in a limited test phase right now, it will be released broadly as something that other companies can use at the heart of their own offerings such as customer support chat systems, education products or games, OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said. [...] The API product builds on years of research in which OpenAI has compiled ever larger text databases with which to feed its AI algorithms and neural networks. At its core, OpenAI API looks over all the examples of language it has seen and then uses those examples to predict, say, what word should come next in a sentence or how best to answer a particular question. "It almost gets to the point where it assimilates all of human knowledge because it has seen everything before," said Eli Chen, CEO of startup Veriph.ai, who tried out an earlier version of OpenAI's product. "Very few other companies would be able to afford what it costs to build this type of huge model."

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Microsoft joined the list of tech giants who've decided to limit the use of its facial-recognition systems, announcing that it will not sell the controversial technology to police departments until there is a federal law regulating the technology. From a report: The move, announced by Microsoft president Brad Smith at a Post Live event Thursday morning, follows similar decisions by Amazon and IBM, and comes as protesters across the nation press for an end to police brutality and racial profiling. Smith said that Microsoft has not sold its facial-recognition technology to law enforcement. "We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights that will govern this technology," Smith said. The company also plans to put in place "review factors" that Smith said would "go even beyond what we already have" to determine the use of the technology beyond law enforcement.

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Linux computer maker/seller System76 has been offering AMD processors in its Thelio desktop computers, but believe it or not, the company has never offered an AMD-powered laptop -- until now, that is. From a report: You see, starting today, you can buy a "Serval WS" powered by AMD. No, System76 is not offering mobile Ryzen chips in this laptop, but instead, desktop-class processors. As you can expect, this 15-inch portable Linux workstation is quite chunky and heavy as a result. With that said, it is simply impossible to cram this much power into a thin and light notebook. "The Serval WS comes with either the 3rd Gen Ryzen 3600, 3700X, or 3900 CPU. The latter is equipped with 12 Cores and 24 Threads, making this laptop perfect for taking on heavy computational loads. Having this kind of desktop-caliber power in a laptop body helps if you need to run complex simulations at your desk or quickly render 3D scenes while on the road. AMD CPUs are also known for having the an extremely high price per performance, which means you get maximum bang-for-buck," says System76. The laptop starts at $1,300 -- and BetaNews has all the specs.

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Before June each year, content and media platforms in China anxiously anticipate a new round of censorship as the government tightens access to information in the lead-up to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown. This year, Chinese users lost access to two podcast apps -- Pocket Casts and Castro Podcasts. From a report: Neither apps are searchable within Apple's Chinese App Store at the time of writing. Pocket Casts, which was acquired by a group of American public radio companies in 2018, tweeted that it "has been removed from the Chinese App Store by Apple, at the request of the Cyberspace Administration of China," the country's internet watchdog. When Pocket Casts asked for clarification, Apple's app review team told the podcast firm to contact the CAC directly, an email seen by TechCrunch showed. "We will most likely contact them to find out more, though we weren't given that option to stop the app from being removed, only as a potential solution to have it re-instated. The very small amount of warning we were given between there being a problem, and our app being completely removed from the Chinese app store was quite alarming," a spokesperson for Pocket Casts told TechCrunch. "We assumed that what they'd want us to remove are specific podcasts, and possible some of the Black Lives Matter content we'd posted."

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Beatles: Revolution.

Scientists are stunned to find that some ancient crocodiles may have moved around on two feet.