Unnervingly futuristic, these bulky, high-tech toothbrushes promise to scrub your choppers thoroughly in 20 seconds. WSJ: Dentists like Dr. Lana Rozenberg are overly familiar with two eternal fibs: that their clients floss regularly, and that they brush their teeth for at least two minutes twice a day. "Most people don't brush their teeth for two minutes," said the Manhattan-based industry veteran. "Thirty seconds is more like it," or under a second for each of their 32 teeth. But what if, in those 30 seconds, a device could reach the front, back and sides of every tooth at once? That's the proposition of new "whole mouth" toothbrushes, which rely on vibration and a preponderance of bristles packed inside a structure resembling a mouthguard to deliver an up-to-snuff scrubbing in as little as 20 seconds -- 10 each for top and bottom sets of teeth. "It helps make things way faster, way easier and feels a little more guaranteed because you actually feel it on each one of your teeth," said Kristopher Paul, a medical-transportation driver in St. Petersburg, Fla., who has bit down on a 360 Sonic Brush Pro ($70) each morning for the past year. Mr. Paul, 36, also likes the tool's 15-minute whitening mode, which combines a blue LED light and whitening gel to fade bothersome coffee stains.

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A team of scientists from a Swiss university has discovered a way to bypass PIN codes on contactless cards from Mastercard and Maestro. From a report: The now-patched vulnerability would have allowed cybercriminals to use stolen Mastercard and Maestro cards to pay for expensive products without needing to provide PINs on contactless payments. Discovered by a team from the Department of Computer Science at the ETH Zurich university, the attack is extremely stealthy and could be easily deployed in a real-world scenario if new bugs in contactless payment protocols are discovered. The general idea behind the attack is for an attacker to interpose itself between the stolen card and a vendor's Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminal, in what security researchers would normally call a Man/Person/Meddler-in-the-Middle (MitM) scenario. To achieve this, an attacker would require: a stolen card, two Android smartphones, a custom-made Android app that can tamper with a transaction's fields. The app is installed on both smartphones, which will act as emulators. One smartphone will be placed near the stolen card and act as a PoS emulator, tricking the card into initiating a transaction and sharing its details, while the second smartphone will act as a card emulator and be used by a crook to feed modified transaction details to a real-life PoS terminal inside a store.

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The U.S. intelligence community said Thursday that it was divided over the exact origin of Covid-19 in China. CNBC reports: "After examining all available intelligence reporting and other information, though, the IC remains divided on the most likely origin of Covid-19. All agencies assess that two hypotheses are plausible: natural exposure to an infected animal and a laboratory-associated incident," the unclassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said. In May, President Joe Biden ordered a closer intelligence review of what he described as two likely scenarios of the origins of the Covid-19. "Here is their current position: 'while two elements in the IC leans toward the [human contact] scenario and one leans more toward the [lab leak scenario] -- each with low or moderate confidence -- the majority of elements do not believe there is sufficient information to assess one to be more likely than the other," Biden said. Developing...

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Elise Blanchard, writing on Mozilla blog: [...] What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. I often hear that blue was chosen as the hyperlink color for color contrast. Well, even though the W3C wasn't created until 1994, and so the standards for which we judge web accessibility weren't yet defined, if we look at the contrast between black as a text color, and blue as a link color, there is a contrast ratio of 2.3:1, which would not pass as enough color contrast between the blue hyperlink and the black text. Instead, I like to imagine that Cello and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1 had just come out a few months before the beginning of both projects, and this interface was the first to use blue prominently as a selection color, paving the way for blue to be used as a hyperlink color. Additionally, we know that Mosaic was inspired by ViolaWWW, and kept the same gray background and black text that they used for their interface. Reviewing Mosaic's release notes, we see in release 0.7 black text with underlines appearing as the preferred way of conveying hyperlinks, and we can infer that was still the case until something happened around mid April right before when blue hyperlinks made their appearance in release 0.13. In fact, conveying links as black text with underlines had been the standard since 1985 with Microsoft 1, which some once claimed Microsoft had stolen from Apple's Lisa's look and feel. I think the real reason why we have blue hyperlinks is simply because color monitors were becoming more popular around this time. Mosaic as a product also became popular, and blue hyperlinks went along for the ride. Mosaic came out during an important time where support for color monitors was shifting; the standard was for hyperlinks to use black text with some sort of underline, hover state or border. Mosaic chose to use blue, and they chose to port their browser for multiple operating systems. This helped Mosaic become the standard browser for internet use, and helped solidify its user interface as the default language for interacting with the web.

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For Zapotec artist and weaver Porfirio Gutierrez, colour is a way to connect with his ancestors' way of life, which has sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. BBC: Back home in the village of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, Mexico, Porfirio Gutierrez is referred to by his indigenous community as "El Maestro." In Ventura, California, where he lives now, and to the contemporary art world that he is courting, he is an artist with a mission. But for Gutierrez, the job is the same: to conserve, preserve and innovate, when necessary, generations' worth of wisdom and culture associated with the making of one thing that keeps everything interesting -- colour. But not just any colour. These colours are derived from nature, meaning that Gutierrez's charge is to discover new and old ways of plucking plants and insects straight out of the natural world and transform them into the pigments that give forth the glorious, rich, fullness of natural dyes. Bins of these dried plants and insects in Gutierrez's Ventura studio are all colours in waiting. The most unusual of them all is a shimmering silver bead-like insect called cochineal that will spend its next life as a luxurious red dye. These bugs are cultivated year after year in the same way that seeds are saved by farmers, passing environmental wisdom from generation to generation. Gutierrez cultivates his own cochineal on an impressive wall of prickly pear cactus leaves installed in his studio. The insects grow like parasites on the the leaves, consuming the cactus juice which produces carminic acid in their body cavities. When dried and ground they miraculously transform into a velvety powder and the base for a red colour. When compared with the synthetic dyes that are used today in essentially all our clothes and textiles, nature's version is almost always inexplicably better. It's the visual equivalent of a peach ripened by the tree, or a tomato baked in sunshine. Some lost part of you recognises that this is how it's supposed to be. Natural dyes are no different. Across time and cultures, we've been carpeting cave floors and dipping our jeans in dye, not because they won't otherwise function but because colour makes life's banal objects durable and our memories last longer. And if you are as blessed with knowledge as Gutierrez is, then that colour also grounds you spiritually and connects you to your ancestors' way of life -- a way of life that sustained civilisations by living in symbiosis with nature. A way of life that 500 years of colonisation has systematically erased.

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Microsoft is announcing today that it won't block people from installing Windows 11 on most older PCs. While the software maker has recommended hardware requirements for Windows 11 -- which it's largely sticking to -- a restriction to install the OS will only be enforced when you try to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11 through Windows Update. From a report: This means anyone with a PC with an older CPU that doesn't officially pass the upgrade test can still go ahead and download an ISO file of Windows 11 and install the OS manually. Microsoft announced its Windows 11 minimum hardware requirements in June, and made it clear that only Intel 8th Gen and beyond CPUs were officially supported. Microsoft now tells us that this install workaround is designed primarily for businesses to evaluate Windows 11, and that people can upgrade at their own risk as the company can't guarantee driver compatibility and overall system reliability. Microsoft won't be recommending or advertising this method of installing Windows 11 to consumers.

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They say a tiny island off Greenland's coast was discovered by luck during a recent expedition.

Duckstation, an emulator that allows users to run Playstation games, was recently made available for installation onto the latest generation of Xbox consoles. From a report: It's time to jog those nostalgia muscles, as the emulator will not only be able to play your PS1 favorites but also scale those games up to native 4K resolution at 60fps. In addition to the 4K treatment, Duckstation will let gamers improve the overall look of the emulation experience in a couple of other ways. Turning this on disables dithering, an effect that was built into the original Playstation hardware. Dithering in layman's terms was basically a function to improve depth of color by underpinning graphics with a series of lines or dots, which were then blurred by the system's video encoders. Turning this on helps improve graphic capabilities by smoothing out the blocky textures on 3D objects. The original low-poly graphics of the PS1 would often look cruder as they enlarged, so this function basically smoothes out those clunky compositions.

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Brussels is set to launch a formal competition probe early next month into Nvidia's planned $54 billion takeover of British chip designer Arm, after months of informal discussions between regulators and the US chip company. From a report: The investigation is likely to begin after Nvidia officially notifies the European Commission of its plan to acquire Arm, with the US chipmaker planning to make its submission in the week starting September 6, according to two people with direct knowledge of the process. They added that the date might yet change, however. Brussels' investigation would come after the UK's Competition and Markets Authority said its initial assessment of the deal suggested there were "serious competition concerns" and that a set of remedies suggested by Nvidia would not be sufficient to address them. The UK watchdog said it feared the deal could "stifle innovation across a number of markets" including by giving Nvidia the power to hurt its rivals by limiting their access to Arm's technology. Nvidia announced a plan in September last year to buy the UK chip designer from SoftBank, the Japanese investment conglomerate.

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Microsoft has warned thousands of its cloud computing customers, including some of the world's largest companies, that intruders could have the ability to read, change or even delete their main databases, according to a copy of the email and a cyber security researcher. From a report: The vulnerability is in Microsoft Azure's flagship Cosmos database. A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies. Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak is a former chief technology officer at Microsoft's Cloud Security Group. Because Microsoft cannot change those keys by itself, it emailed the customers Thursday telling them to create new ones. Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz. Microsoft's email to customers said it has fixed the vulnerability and that there was no evidence the flaw had been exploited. "We have no indication that external entities outside the researcher (Wiz) had access to the primary read-write key," according to a copy of the email seen by Reuters.

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China's Supreme People's Court said the overtime practice of "996", working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, is illegal, taking aim at the controversial policy that is common among many Chinese technology firms. From a report: China's top court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security on Thursday published guidelines and examples on what constituted as overtime work, saying they were focusing on the issue as it had attracted widespread attention recently. While the authorities used a case involving a parcel delivery company to explain why "996" was illegal, working such hours had become a badge of honour for some Chinese companies and employees. Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Sequoia Capital's Mike Moritz have highlighted it as a competitive advantage the country had over the United States. But a backlash surfaced in 2019, prompting a public debate about work hours in China's tech industry that has continued. Last month, TikTok owner ByteDance on Friday said that it would formally end its weekend overtime policy from Aug. 1, two weeks after its short-video rival Kuaishou announced a similar decision. The court and ministry's criticism of "996" also comes amid a wide ranging Beijing-led regulatory crackdown on country's technology giants that has targeted issues from monopolistic behaviour to consumer rights.

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Tesla wants to sell electricity directly to customers in Texas, according to an application filed by the company this month with the Public Utility Commission there. From a report: The application follows the start of a big battery build out by Tesla in Angleton, Texas (near Houston), where it aims to connect a 100 megawatt energy storage system to the grid. Texas Monthly first reported on the application, submitted by a wholly owned subsidiary of Tesla called Tesla Energy Ventures. Tesla has also built several utility-scale energy storage systems around the world, including one east of Los Angeles, another underway in Monterey, California, and two in Australia -- one in Geelong, Victoria, and another in Adelaide, South Australia.

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Apple announced today it has reached a proposed settlement in a lawsuit filed against it by developers in the United States. The agreement, which is still pending court approval, includes a few changes, the biggest one being that developers will be able to share information on how to pay for purchases outside of their iOS app or the App Store -- which means they can tell customers about payment options that aren't subject to Apple commissions. The settlement also includes more pricing tiers and a new transparency report about the app review process. From a report: The class-action lawsuit was filed against Apple in 2019 by app developers Donald Cameron and Illinois Pure Sweat Basketball, who said the company engaged in anticompetitive practices by only allowing the downloading of iPhone apps through its App Store. In today's announcement, Apple said it is "clarifying that developers can use communications, such as emails, to share information about payment methods outside of their iOS app. As always, developers will not pay Apple a commission on any purchases taking place outside of their app or the App Stores."

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BBC Reality Check looks at whether it's possible to buy your way out of creating harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

The three-metre whale was found in Egypt and has been named after Anubis, the ancient god of death.