A temporary coronavirus hospital ward in China is being staffed entirely by robots. Around 200 patients with mild symptoms will be fed and treated by machines, while medical staff issue commands from outside

TikTok's rise has been meteoric. With more than 3 million people a day now downloading the app, its success is down to more than just luck

Doom Eternal does contain gratuitous violence, but the evidence suggests violence in video games doesn't affect people's behaviour in the real world, says Jacob Aron

Is our love affair with AI really about building a new kind of deity to meet human needs no amount of rationality can fill? Max Barry's disturbing novel Providence lays out the case, says Sally Adee

The video game Resident Evil 3 was in development long before the coronavirus outbreak, but it holds up a mirror to the strange times we live in today

A program that combines artificial intelligence and geometrical modelling can create an accurate 3D model of your face from a single 20-second video

The covid-19 pandemic has many of us stuck at home. The result could completely reshape how we use the internet, writes Annalee Newitz

Fabric with tiny vibrating motors elicits sensations associated with clouds, water and rocks on the skin and has been made into a dress that could improve emotions

Many countries are hoping to use contact-tracing apps to leave lockdown and suppress further coronavirus outbreaks, but the use of such technology has many issues

Artificial intelligence can tell whether a human or a bot is posting on Twitter based on how regularly they post and how much they reply to others, which could help identify fake accounts

The US Navy is researching how to use lasers to form plasma into 2D or 3D infrared images of aeroplanes that can distract heat-seeking missiles

A cheap, lightweight smartphone-heated device can test for DNA in blood, urine and other samples in a fraction of the time it takes to test in a lab

A 3D printed grate can be used to make a smart window that blocks heat from sunlight out in the summer while letting it through in the winter, conserving energy

Psychologist Pete Etchells explores what the scientific research has to say about game violence and addiction and busts some myths

Martha Wells's action-packed novel Network Effect puts you inside the head of a Murderbot. It raises fascinating questions you will think about for a long time, says Sally Adee

Telling Lies is a game where you sift through video calls to solve a mystery. Half the time you don't know what you should be doing, but that's part of the fun, says Jacob Aron

उत्तर प्रदेश के गोरखपुर जिले में कोरोना पॉजिटिव मरीजों की संख्या बढ़कर चार हो गई है।

आगरा में नहीं थम रहा कोरोना वायरस का कहर

Why? Because that’s our reality here in the year 2020.

While such a plan might sound appealing, it’s likely to provide a false sense of security

The company could be preparing to release a new iMac, a new pair of AirPods, and an updated Apple TV 4K.

These findings suggest that scientists may need to broaden their definition of what a life-supporting planet might look like.

Because Amazon movie purchases are really just long-term rentals that can disappear from your library at any time.

Perhaps astronomers need help from something that thinks a bit less like a human.

Anything that encourages more people to enable two-step verification can only be a good thing.

"This government has failed to show any self-criticism whatsoever, when it is glaringly obvious to everybody that big mistakes have been made."

This solar contact could provide a potential explanation for the asteroid's weird, two-tone surface.

The hacker in question hasn't even graduated high school yet.

The majority of these children have tested positive for the virus or seem to carry antibodies from an earlier infection.

Marissa Guale is like all too many Americans right now. Her husband and father of her two children, Raul, is on a ventilator in a hospital on Long Island, fighting for his life while sick with COVID-19. Raul, a 34-year-old nurse, likely caught the disease while working in a nursing home. When the National Institutes of Health announced an emergency use authorization for the experimental antiviral drug remdesivir, Marissa scrambled friends and family on Facebook to figure out how to get access for Raul, emailing hospital administrators, senators, and doctors. They pressed the Guale family’s case for a potentially lifesaving treatment on social media to anyone who would listen.

Her confusion about where and how to get access to the drug isn’t unique. All over the country, families, doctors, and hospitals are wondering how to get the drug and on what basis it’s being distributed. The Trump administration, which is in charge of allocation, hasn’t published any guidance on how it’s making decisions about the scarce supplies of the drug.

So who decides which hospitals get remdesivir? And what’s the most ethical way to prioritize access?

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Roy Horn, half of the iconic magician duo Siegfried and Roy, has died from complications of the new coronavirus in Las Vegas. He was 75.

Together with Siegfried Fischbacher, Horn, born Uwe Ludwig Horn, created one of the most widely known magic acts in the world, staging shows filled with sleights of hand and exotic animals for packed audiences in Las Vegas for more than a decade. At its height, the glitzy show grossed $45 million per year, according to The Hollywood Reporter, among the highest ever in Las Vegas.

“Today, the world has lost one of the greats of magic, but I have lost my best friend,” Fischbacher said in a statement. “There could be no Siegfried without Roy, no Roy without Siegfried.” Fischbacher thanked the doctors and nurses who cared for his friend.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

The Queen gave a 75th anniversary VE Day speech Friday night that doubled as a rallying cry against coronavirus. “Never give up, never despair, that was the message of VE Day,” she told the British people.

Second World War heroes would “recognize and admire,” the sacrifices the British were making today in the fight against coronavirus, the Queen added. It was her second major coronavirus-themed speech to the nation.

“It may seem hard that we cannot mark this special anniversary as we would wish. Instead we remember from our homes and our doorsteps. But our streets are not empty,” the Queen said, “They are filled with the love and the care that we have for each other.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Adele posted a message to her social media channels this week thanking those on the front lines fighting COVID-19. In the process, the celebrated singer unveiled a thinner frame—and the internet had a lot of thoughts about it, almost all trash.

Enter Bill Maher, noted #MeToo skeptic, with perhaps the most garbage take of them all.

On Friday night, during the interview portion of his HBO show Real Time, the comedian began by placing the bulk of the blame for the high amount of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. compared to other countries on America’s obesity problem—not, say, the fact that the Trump administration didn’t do a single thing during the month of February to contain the spread of the virus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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This week, new claims about the accuracy of the Garden of Eden story emerged online and in tabloid magazines. Professor Tom Meyer, a scripture expert known as the Bible Memory Man, argues that there are two artifacts—a 4,000-year-old seal and roughly 3,600-year-old stone—that provide evidence both for the location of the Garden of Eden and the Adam and Eve story. But do his claims add up? (Spoiler alert: No)

In a story, reported this week in the Daily Express, Meyer, who teaches at his alma mater Shasta Bible College and University, refers first to a Sumerian king list, an inscribed Middle Bronze aged stone prism currently housed at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The prism dates to between 2100 B.C. and 1650 B.C. and was discovered in 1922 by Herbert Weld-Blundell during his excavations in Kish, the ancient capital of Sumer, in Mesopotamia. It was purchased by the Ashmolean shortly thereafter.

Meyer said, “In addition to enumerating the long reigns of pre-flood rulers, this prism lists Eridu—an ancient site in southern Iraq—as the first city ever built.” This is significant, he says, because “The ancient site of the Garden of Eden… is thought by some to be located at Eridu under a cluster of tels” (Tels are artificial hills).

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Morningside USA was supposed to be apocalypse-proof. 

A gated, stucco fortress in the southwest corner of Missouri’s Ozark mountains, Morningside is an evangelical Christian community built to rent condos right through the end of the world.

“Where are you going to go when the world's on fire? Where are you going to go? This place is for God's people and this place, we need some farmers to move here,” Morningside’s founder, the disgraced doomsday televangelist Jim Bakker, said in a May 2018 sermon. “Did you know people from the government, from NASA, research from so many of them, they have said in their research, the safest place to live in troubled times is right here?”  

Read more at The Daily Beast.

“HOLY MOTHER OF GOD.” 

That’s how epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding began a since-deleted 14-tweet thread on Jan. 25 warning about the “thermonuclear pandemic level bad” infectiousness of the coronavirus that broke out in Wuhan, China.

The first confirmed U.S. case had been announced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) days earlier outside Seattle. But the disease was not widely understood to be a potentially nightmarish pandemic. Many infectious disease experts had been ignored despite warning for years that the U.S. was not prepared for a seemingly inevitable health crisis. Feigl-Ding, a visiting scientist at Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, wanted to help ensure their message was heard.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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By Rachana Pradhan and Fred Schulte | Kaiser Health News

The Trump administration has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic-related bailouts to health care providers with checkered histories, including a Florida-based cancer center that agreed to pay a $100 million criminal penalty as part of a federal antitrust investigation.

At least half of the top 10 recipients, part of a group that received $20 billion in emergency funding from the Department of Health and Human Services, have paid millions in recent years either in criminal penalties or to settle allegations related to improper billing and other practices, a Kaiser Health News review of government records shows.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Two years ago, the voices of survivors of sexual harassment and assault launched an unprecedented movement the world over, using Tarana Burke’s MeToo framework. That one moment was a spark into the unknown, but the movement itself was no happy accident. It was built to fuel a reclamation of power for those who had been silenced for too long, a laborious undertaking by activists, advocates, and organizations including mine—the National Women’s Law Center, which also houses and administers the TIME’S UP Legal Defense Fund.

Since then, the #MeToo movement has enabled considerable progress, including making space for more and more people who have claims of sexual misconduct to come forward. People like Tara Reade.

But despite this dramatic cultural awakening, our institutions and systems are just beginning to stir. The lack of necessary legal and policy changes both in our government and in our workplaces, schools, houses of worship, and otherwise have created a world that very imperfectly serves the needs of survivors. Every domestic worker who is entirely unprotected by our federal and most state civil rights statutes, and every person who is classified as an independent contractor and left out of civil rights protections, have proven that our work must take on the reform and re-envisioning of the very systems that excluded them in the first place. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

On Tuesday the president took his first trip since the coronavirus grounded the country, to a Honeywell factory in battleground state Arizona. This particular Honeywell factory produces N95 masks. Pictures of the trip immediately surfaced on the internet, and they showed a president sporting his usual mango-tinted, ever-tan skin, his usual topiary-structured hair tinted a baffling yellowish, and a pair of clear safety goggles.

But what was missing? What we did not see on the president’s face was a mask. While the rest of us cover our faces as recommended by the CDC, the president does not. In fact, we have never seen a mask on the president, despite the president’s love of masking himself when it comes to his tax returns, his sexual assault allegations, and his financial dealings.   

On Wednesday, when pressed on his decision not to wear a mask at a mask factory, the president responded with the very fishy, “I had a mask on for a period of time, I had it on back, backstage. But they said you didn’t need it, so, I didn’t need it. And by the way, if you noticed, nobody else had it on that was in the group.” Okay. Whatever you say. 

Read more at The Daily Beast.

A 7-year-old boy from Westchester County is the second child in New York state to die from pediatric multi-symptom inflammatory syndrome tied to COVID-19 since the pandemic began. A 5-year-old boy died earlier in the week from the same syndrome at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in New York City.

The childhood ailment has affected at least 73 children in New York state and authorities are now looking for other potential cases across the country. Cases have also been reported in Washington, D.C., California, Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington state and New Jersey, where a 4-year-old died with symptoms last month.

It has been previously thought that children are less likely to suffer any serious complications from the coronavirus.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

It’s not going out on much of a limb to say that the single greatest line in any rock and roll song—shall we double down and say all music ever?—is “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!!”

Surely that says it all.

As with any truly oracular pronouncement, it inspires consternation in the first-time listener, and the second-time listener, and the third, the fourth, and on and on. The mystery never diminishes.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Five Australian hospitals are set to receive the experimental coronavirus drug, remdesivir. Sydney's St Vincent hospital has been confirmed as one location, according to a report from The Guardian. More »

Last year, Google turned the mid-range phone market on its head by introducing the ludicrously-priced and well-specced Pixel 3a. A few other brands have followed suit since then, but none have been quite as exciting as the new iPhone SE. Now it truly seems like flagship inclusions at lower price points are here to stay - and it's about damn time. The trend of $1,500 - $2,000 becoming the norm for new phones over the last few years has been bad for buyers. A new middle ground has been long overdue and we welcome it. But is the resurrected iPhone SE actually a good phone to buy in 2020? More »

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding the government's coronavirus tracing app, COVIDSafe, but at the forefront has been issues of privacy and its ability to work properly on devices. With the federal government tying the easing of social restrictions to app downloads, developers have reverse engineered the app to find out what's actually wrong with it. Here's what they've found. More »

Over the past few years plant-based meat has become increasingly popular. Thanks to the popularity of brands such as Impossible, we;re now seeing increasingly more vegan-friendly meat alternatives in the supermarkets and even being sold by fast food chains. Meal kit delivery service Marley Spoon has even begun offering plant-based options, using v2food mince. This is what they taste like. More »

Researchers at a Sydney university have discovered how some female bees have managed to reproduce despite never doing the deed with another. More »

MONEY saving hacks are something which many people will look to adopt in their lives, be it for a financial milestone or for a rainy day fund. And, there may be a way in which some soon see their spare cash add up.

THE CORONAVIRUS lockdown is now causing serious damage to the UK's economy, Tory MP Steve Baker has warned - stressing he was now "gravely concerned" at the situation

CORONAVIRUS has forced people to re-evaluate their finances as income takes a hit and budgets are stretched. One of the first port of calls for change has been direct debits and new research reveals that some people may find themselves with more cash available once this all ends.

APRIL saw 20.5 million job losses in the United States, the biggest rise in the jobless rate since the Great Depression.