At least 14m tonnes of plastic pieces less than 5mm wide are likely sitting at the bottom of the world's oceans, according to an estimate based on new research. From a report: Analysis of ocean sediments from as deep as 3km suggests there could be more than 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the world's ocean than there is floating at the surface. Australia's government science agency, CSIRO, gathered and analysed cores of the ocean floor taken at six remote sites about 300km off the country's southern coast in the Great Australian Bight. Researchers looked at 51 samples and found that after excluding the weight of the water, each gram of sediment contained an average of 1.26 microplastic pieces. Microplastics are 5mm or less in diameter and are mostly the result of larger plastic items breaking apart into ever smaller pieces. Stemming the tide of plastic entering the world's waterways and ocean has emerged as a major international challenge. Dr Denise Hardesty, a principal research scientist at CSIRO and a co-author of the research published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, told the Guardian that finding microplastic in such a remote location and at such depths "points to the ubiquity of plastics, no matter where you are in the world."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nvidia has announced a new videoconferencing platform for developers named Nvidia Maxine that it claims can fix some of the most common problems in video calls. From a report: Maxine will process calls in the cloud using Nvidia's GPUs and boost call quality in a number of ways with the help of artificial intelligence. Using AI, Maxine can realign callers' faces and gazes so that they're always looking directly at their camera, reduce the bandwidth requirement for video "down to one-tenth of the requirements of the H.264 streaming video compression standard" by only transmitting "key facial points," and upscale the resolution of videos. Other features available in Maxine include face re-lighting, real-time translation and transcription, and animated avatars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rastos1 shares a report: The health secretary has said a technical glitch that saw nearly 16,000 Covid-19 cases go unreported in England "should never have happened." The error meant that although those who tested positive were told about their results, their close contacts were not traced. By Monday afternoon, around half of those who tested positive had yet to be asked about their close contacts. Labour said the missing results were "putting lives at risk." Experts advise that ideally contacts should be tracked down within 48 hours. The technical error was caused by some Microsoft Excel data files exceeding the maximum size after they were sent from NHS Test and Trace to Public Health England. It meant 15,841 cases between 25 September and 2 October were left out of the UK daily case figures. PHE said the error itself, discovered overnight on Friday, has been fixed, and outstanding cases had been passed on to tracers by 01:00 BST on Saturday. But Health Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs the incident as a whole had not yet been resolved - with only 51% of those whose positive results were caught up in the glitch now reached by contact tracers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raisey-raison writes: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded jointly to Dr. Harvey J. Alter, Michael Houghton and Charles M. Rice on Monday for the discovery of the hepatitis C virus, a breakthrough the Nobel committee said had "made possible blood tests and new medicines that have saved millions of lives." "For the first time in history, the disease can now be cured, raising hopes of eradicating hepatitis C virus from the world population," the committee said in a statement. They announced the prize at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. About 71 million people worldwide live with a chronic infection of the hepatitis C virus, a blood-borne pathogen that can cause severe liver inflammation, or hepatitis, and is typically transmitted through shared or reused needles and syringes, infected blood transfusions and sexual practices that lead to blood exposure. Tests and treatments "all start with being able to recognize the virus exists," said Craig Cameron, chair of the department of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a hepatitis C virus researcher.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention revised its coronavirus guidance Monday, acknowledging that it can sometimes spread through airborne particles that can "linger in the air for minutes to hours" and among people who are more than six feet apart. From a report: The CDC cited published reports that demonstrated "limited, uncommon circumstances where people with COVID-19 infected others who were more than 6 feet away or shortly after the COVID-19-positive person left an area. In these instances, transmission occurred in poorly ventilated and enclosed spaces that often involved activities that caused heavier breathing, like singing or exercise," the CDC said in a statement. "Such environments and activities may contribute to the buildup of virus-carrying particles." The agency added that it is "much more common" for the virus to spread through larger respiratory droplets that are produced when somebody coughs, sneezes, sings, talks, or breathes. People are infected through such droplets mostly when they are in close contact with an infected person, the CDC said. "CDC's recommendations remain the same based on existing science and after a thorough technical review of the guidance," the agency said. "People can protect themselves from the virus that causes COVID-19 by staying at least 6 feet away from others, wearing a mask that covers their nose and mouth, washing their hands frequently, cleaning touched surfaces often and staying home when sick."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A study finds that 58 percent of faculty at four prominent universities have received grants, fellowships, or other financial support from 14 tech firms. From a report: A paper published in July by researchers from the University of Rochester and China's Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business found that Google, DeepMind, Amazon, and Microsoft hired 52 tenure-track professors between 2004 and 2018. It concluded that this "brain drain" has coincided with a drop in the number of students starting AI companies. The growing reach and power of Big Tech prompted Abdalla to question how it influences his field in more subtle ways. Together with his brother, also a graduate student, Abdalla looked at how many AI researchers at Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, and the University of Toronto have received funding from Big Tech over their careers. The Abdallas examined the CVs of 135 computer science faculty who work on AI at the four schools, looking for indications that the researcher had received funding from one or more tech companies. For 52 of those, they couldn't make a determination. Of the remaining 83 faculty, they found that 48, or 58 percent, had received funding such as a grant or a fellowship from one of 14 large technology companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Intel, IBM, Huawei, Samsung, Uber, Alibaba, Element AI, or OpenAI. Among a smaller group of faculty that works on AI ethics, they also found that 58 percent of those had been funded by Big Tech. When any source of funding was included, including dual appointments, internships, and sabbaticals, 32 out of 33, or 97 percent, had financial ties to tech companies. "There are very few people that don't have some sort of connection to Big Tech," Abdalla says.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't understand why the debaters have to be in the same physical place. The whole thing would be much more manageable if they did it electronically.

A former Chinese government official decided what content should be allowed on TikTok, the Financial Times reported, citing two people close to the short-video app company. From a report: Cai Zheng ran ByteDance's global content policy team in Beijing until early this year. He'd previously worked at China's embassy in Tehran, the FT said, citing a deleted LinkedIn profile. Cai joined ByteDance in 2018 and wrote guidelines for what videos were acceptable on TikTok and other apps including Helo and Vigo Video. TikTok told FT that Cai wasn't involved in developing policies, noting that he worked on regional and local teams on localization of early content policies. ByteDance told the newspaper it was "not a consideration in hiring Zheng that his previous role was in the public sector, and there were no conversations with the government in the hiring process." The former diplomat transferred from the content policy role in January this year, the people told the paper, and his role has not since been filled.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As promised, the Apple TV is finally starting to play YouTube videos in 4K -- with caveats. From a report: Users on Reddit and elsewhere are starting to see YouTube 4K support enabled on the media hub when it's using at least tvOS 14. However, you can only watch in Ultra HD at 30 frames per second, and without HDR. Don't expect to make full use of that posh new TV just yet, although 60FPS video will play at up to 1440p. It also said current iPads and iPhones should support 4K video with 60FPS and HDR, although support looks to be be inconsistent at this stage. Apple TV support also isn't universal, at least not yet. YouTube appears to be delivering the update remotely rather than tying it to an app release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you want to follow my development work, I've created a public outline where I report my daily work, when I can. Click the link, and the outline will open in LO2 as a read-only live-updating outline.

Microsoft is rebranding its Bing search engine to Microsoft Bing today as part of a rebranding effort. From a report: While the vast majority of people are likely to still just call it Bing, Microsoft unveiled its shift toward Microsoft Bing in a blog post today. Microsoft doesn't go into detail about why it added the company's name to the Bing brand, other than it reflecting "the continued integration of our search experiences across the Microsoft family." This rebranding means Bing is now using its own updated logo and a Microsoft Bing logo on the search engine's homepage. It's not clear if Microsoft will eventually retire the Bing logo in favor of this more Microsoft-centric logo or simply use both in the future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Novak Djokovic's relationship with line officials has been difficult of late and the Serbian risked their wrath again late last week when he suggested they were unnecessary. From a report: The 33-year-old world number one was dramatically defaulted in the U.S. Open fourth round after inadvertently hitting a female line judge in the throat with a loose ball. Now he believes their job should be done by Hawkeye technology. "With all my respect for the tradition and the culture we have in this sport, when it comes to people present on the court during a match, including line (judges), I really don't see a reason why every single tournament in this world, in this technological advanced era, would not have what we had during the Cincinnati/New York tournaments," Djokovic said. The COVID-19 pandemic meant the majority of courts at the U.S. Open, part from the main show courts, dispensed with line judges as a health precaution. They are back at the French Open which, because it is on clay, does not use Hawkeye technology for close calls, relying instead on the umpire to examine a mark in the red dust. While the issue of whether players should be able to challenge via a Hawkeye review at the French Open and other claycourt events, as they do on other surfaces, has been debated all week here, Djokovic appears to want to go further.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I wrote about what's right with Twitter these days.

Today -- Facebook.

One thing overshadows all other considerations. They swapped out the old user interface in favor of a new more modern-looking one. It is more attractive, better use of fonts, the text is generally more readable, and it has a brighter look.

But that's all that I can say about it that's good.

What's bad? The product is depressing. Almost everything it shows you is junk. They must be trying to get us to stop using Facebook.

This isn't the usual thing, users hate redesigns, but get used to them and after a while see that it's better in some ways, worse in others. I've been using it for a while, and it's every bit as ridiculous today as it was a few weeks ago.

First all the spam friend requests are treated as super important, higher priority than anything else.

It's like opening your real-world mailbox and all you get are catalogs, mailers, special offers, political ads, notices, most of it goes in the garbage, but you have to look at everything, because there will be things you have to pay attention to.

How can their code fail to see that all the friend requests I get are spam?

No one with any influence inside Facebook is using the version of the software we are using or they'd revert it immediately and then fix it. I've seen companies ship upgrades so bad the company failed, and this one is right up there.

You know how sometimes your brain as it scans sees one word but the word that's actually there is something else? It happens every time I see NakedJen's logo on Twitter. It says "nakedjen anarchist & agitator." But my brain always sees "antichrist" in place of anarchist. It keeps happening, finally I had to mention it. Sorry Jen, I have no idea what it means, if anything.