Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 197

We all know the panic that COVID-19 coronavirus is having on the world, and with more time spent at home -- pet owners would be cuddling their bundles of love all day long, right? Remember you can be more protected from COVID-19 coronavirus with this Catface N95 mask.

Well, over in Belgium a cat owner has infected their beloved pet with coronavirus according to Belgium health authorities. Dr Emmanuel Andre, a government spokesperson on COVID-19 coronavirus said that this was "an isolated case" that happens after "close contact between animals and infected humans".

He added that coronavirus can be transmitted between humans and animals, but "there is no reason to think that animals can be vectors of the epidemic in our society".

If you want to protect yourself from COVID-19 coronavirus in a little bit of style, here's a handy guide on how to make your own "Catface" N95 mask, and it even has whiskers.

Grassy Knoll Industries have put the work into making some instructions and a guide on how to make a Catface N95 mask, with the company considering its new cat-styled mask as "Quarantine Couture". But it's not just a boring old guide, it is filled with some laughs and is worth a look on that alone. Meow.

Just to give you an idea of what Grassy Knoll Industries has in its guide to the Catface N95 mask: "Welcome to the Future. This design is easy to make with materials found around the house. Are you in quarantine for two or more weeks? Are you slowly losing your mind from boredom? Are you worried about having to appear in public in a dreary white mask? This design is free to use, share, mash up or make in a factory in China. We don't care what you do with it. We do care that you have fun and attempt to amuse your fellow citizens".

New York could be completely quarantined over the current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, with President Trump tweeting that is thinking about quarantine the entire city. The news of a full quarantine of New York comes just 3 weeks after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo established a containment zone over COVID-19 coronavirus.

In a tweet, President Trump said: "I am giving consideration to a QUARANTINE of developing 'hot spots', New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A decision will be made, one way or another, shortly". With over 115,000 coronavirus cases in the United States alone, it stands as the highest amount in a country in the world.

The tri-state area of New York State, New Jersey, and Connecticut have seen 65,000 cases of COVID-19, alongside 1056 deaths so far. New York City is accounting for most of the increasing numbers of cases and deaths of COVID-19 coronavirus. It's not just President Trump that is concerned, but New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo who has said that President Trump's proposal is a "civil war-kind of discussion".

The US Space Force is about to launch its first National Security Mission. The mission will put a next-gen military communications satellite in orbit.

The satellite is a Lockheed Martin Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF-6), and will be launching into orbit on the back of a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket. According to Lockheed Martin, the satellite will provide "vastly improved global, survivable, protected communications capabilities for strategic command and tactical warfighters operating on ground, sea and air platforms."

The AEHF-6 satellite will orbit Earth at about 22,200 miles above the planet and will be providing vital information to the US military force, as well as international partners such as Canada, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The AEHF-6 is one of six satellites that are currently circling Earth; the first five were launched in August 2010, May 2012, September 2013, October 2018 and August 2019. If you are interested in more information regarding the satellite, check out this link here.

The Folding@Home project has now reached a new power level, as both the public and companies have given their spare compute power to the project in an attempt to combat the coronavirus COVID-19.

If you don't know what Folding@Home is, it's a project run by Stanford University that allows the public to donate spare GPU/CPU compute power into a single force to be reckoned with. Just last week, Folding@Home received donated compute power from more than 400,000 volunteers, bringing its power level to an astonishing 470 petaFLOPS of computing performance.

To put that number into context, the world's most powerful supercomputer, IBM's 'Summit' has a peak compute of 200 petaFLOPS. Now, a recent announcement from the Folding@Home Twitter page has revealed that the project has hit another milestone - "Thanks to our AMAZING community, we've crossed the exaFLOP barrier! That's over a 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second making us ~10x faster than the IBM Summit!" In fact, according to the stat page for Folding@Home, the project has crossed over to 1.5 ExaFLOPS, or 1,500,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second. The power of Folding@Home is being aimed directly at uncovering the mysteries of the coronavirus COVID-19.

Some would argue Nintendo has already done enough for coronavirus relief by releasing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But the Big N isn't done yet.

Nintendo of America is donating 9,500 N95 respirator masks to its local Eastside Fire & Rescue division to help protect responders against the growing coronavirus pandemic. North Bend, Washington's official community site reports Nintendo rep Jerry Danson initiated the donation. The company stockpiled a surplus of masks for its employees in case of a crisis, but now that everyone's working from home, the highly sought after masks are better used for health workers on the front lines.

Eastside Fire & Rescue plans to dole out the masks to the community as needed to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, including hospitals, doctor's offices, and more. Nintendo's generosity hasn't gone unnoticed and the community of North Bend is thankful for the billion-dollar games-maker's donation.

We knew it was going to happen, but now the day is here -- the Toyko 2020 Olympics have been postponed, the first time an Olympics has been disrupted by a pandemic: coronavirus COVID-19.

The world is being rocked to its core over coronavirus COVID-19, and while International Olympic Committee (IOC) member Dick Pound said it would be making its final decision regarding the postponing of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics with the World Health Organization (WHO), the decision has been made: the Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been officially postponed.

The Tokyo 2020 Olympics have been postponed until summer 2021 at the very least, which is another big deal -- it is the first time in history that the Olympics have been delayed or postponed in peacetime. The last time this happened was during the world wars, a much more violent and tumultuous time.

In early March, the team behind the Folding@Home project dedicated the public's power to uncover the mysteries of the coronavirus COVID-19.

If you aren't sure what Folding@Home is, it's a computing project run by a team at Stanford University. The premise of Folding@Home is that PC users around the world can dedicate spare CPU/GPU computational resources to the project, which will then fuel its purpose, and in this case, its purpose is to explore the mystery behind the coronavirus COVID-19. The donated computational power the project receives goes toward researchers who are looking at the molecular structures, and who are attempting to understand its properties.

Greg Bowman, the Director of Folding@home, has taken to his personal Twitter account to announce that Folding@Home "has over 470 petaFLOPS of compute power. To put that in perspective, that's more than 2x the peak performance of the Summit super computer!". Bowman then followed up by saying, "I think that makes @foldingathome the largest super computer in the world, and we're trying to bring the whole thing to bear on #Covid_19. We can't guarantee what the results will be but man is this a cool opportunity!"

Apple is on the move to save struggling healthcare workers who are lacking essential medical supplies. A significant donation from the tech giant is inbound.

According to a Twitter post from CEO of Apple, Tim Cook, Apple has currently been working hard at trying to source medical supplies for healthcare professionals that are at war with coronavirus COVID-19. Cook says that due to the medical supply shortages, Apple will be donating a "millions" of facemasks to health professionals across the United States and Europe.

Cook then goes on to thank all medical professionals that are currently on the front line battling the virus, calling all of them "heroes". Cook didn't state how many facemasks would be going to the United States and Europe, but according to what Vice President Mike Pence said in a briefing, the United States will receive 2 million N95 masks. I'd assume Europe will be receiving a similar amount.

Amidst all the doom and gloom recently, fresh data was released earlier today from the European Space Agency (ESA), showing increased nitrogen dioxide emissions over China, as monitored by its Copernicus Sentinel-5 Precursor observation satellite.

In a recent tweet by ESA, embedded above, a 10-day moving average graphic shows levels of NO2 from December 20, 2019 till March 16, 2020 from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS). In December and January, we saw a high measured amount of nitrogen dioxide, which starts to reduce over time. By the end of January, the levels of nitrogen dioxide reduced significantly till around the start of March, which shows a build-up again, particularly in the northern regions of China.

Yesterday, many news reports surfaced claiming that China is "getting back to normal". Some flights have resumed, some factories are re-opening, school classes are slowly returning, bars have been allowed to open, and more. Many have doubted these claims, but the evidence of increased NO2 levels may back up these claims.

Congress is not immune to coronavirus COVID-19, with Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (a 9th-term Florida Republican) and Rep. Ben McAdams (a new Democrat from Utah) announcing they've tested positive for coronavirus.

The two members of Congress are now the first US lawmakers to be struck down with coronavirus, with Diaz-Balart feeling the symptoms on Saturday -- hours before he left the House floor for a vote on a coronavirus response bill. He explained: "I want everyone to know that I am feeling much better".

Diaz-Balart added: "However, it is important that everyone take this extremely seriously and follow CDC guidelines in order to avoid getting sick and mitigate the spread of this virus. We must continue to work together to emerge stronger as a country during these trying times".

I can only imagine the type of load that digital infrastructure is under right now, with hundreds of millions of people forced to stay at home over the current coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak -- but especially Facebook.

During a conference call on Wednesday to address Facebook's response to coronavirus COVID-19, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the number of voice calls on both Messenger and WhatsApp in Italy have skyrocketed, as well as many other countries around the world as people keep in contact with their loved ones.

Now that more and more people are at home using social media, it has seen a gigantic surge in activity on Facebook's servers. The social media giant has increased its infrastructure and server capacity, with Facebook noting it has doubled the server capacity for WhatsApp.

The search for a coronavirus COVID-19 vaccine is probably the most-wanted thing on this planet right now, outside of toilet paper that is -- and don't worry, scientists are on top of it.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) have said that their clinical trial of investigational vaccine for COVID-19 begins, with a new study kicking off in Seattle with local, healthy adult volunteers putting their arms up for a jab. A new Phase 1 "clinical trial evaluating an investigational vaccine designed to protect against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has begun at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute (KPWHRI) in Seattle", according to a new post on the NIH website.

The new COVID-19 vaccine trial will see 45 "healthy adult volunteers" that are aged between 18-55 years old, across the next 6 weeks, where the first "participant received the investigational vaccine today". The 6-week study will be evaluating "different doses of the experimental vaccine for safety and its ability to induce an immune response in participants".

NASA has been directly affected by COVID-19 coronavirus, with the US space agency having a staffer in Alabama testing positive for COVID-19.

This has forced NASA into a lockdown and pushing a mandatory work-from-home order, elevating the center to "Stage 3". This is NASA's internal label for a mandatory work-from-home order. The Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama is the NASA site affected, with all employees at the Alabama-based facility forced to work from home.

In a NASA press release, the US space agency explains that all staff will have "restricted access to the center until further notice". Stage 3 designation has NASA forcing its other facilities into a Stage 2 mandate, which means the US space agency "strongly encourages" employees to work from home, but it's not mandatory at this stage -- which is where Stage 3 comes in.

Ava Louise is a 22-year-old "clout-chaser" on social media, where she posted a video of her doing the "coronavirus challenge" which saw her licking a plane toilet seat. Yeah, I wish I was joking, but I'm not.

Louise completed the "coronavirus challenge" stunt and then has been slammed on social media across the world, with the video in question shared to TikTok and saw her licking a plane toilet seat. She captioned the 6-second video clip with: "Please [retweet] this so people can know how to properly be sanitary on the airplane".

She has 19,000 followers on TikTok and over 150,000 followers on Instagram. The video was posted on her personal Twitter on March 14. The reason for her doing the "coronavirus challenge" -- that would be clout. Yeah, she actually admitted that in a follow-up tweet:

The current COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak is stopping the world, forcing the largest technology companies in the world to issue a joint statement.

Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube have all joint forces against coronavirus -- with the joint statement reading:

"We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We're helping millions of people stay connected while jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms, and sharing critical updates in coordination with government healthcare agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe".

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has recommended that in-person events with over 50 people be limited, or outright cancelled in the United States over coronavirus.

In an update of COVID-19 coronavirus on March 15, the CDC has new interim guidance that recommends "in accordance with its guidance for large events and mass gatherings, recommends that for the next 8 weeks, organizers (whether groups or individuals) cancel or postpone in-person events that consist of 50 people or more throughout the United States".

The CDC includes "conferences, festivals, parades, concerts, sporting events, weddings, and other types of assemblies" in its criteria for "large events" and "mass gatherings". However, the new guidance over COVID-19 coronavirus spread doesn't include schools, institutes of higher learning, or businesses.

AMC is the largest movie theater chain in the United States, and has just announced plans it is pushing forward with social distancing plans -- cutting down theater attendance by 50% to reduce the chance of COVID-19 coronavirus spread.

The company will now only sell half the tickets per theater that it does now, with any theater that can seat over 500 people to be capped at 250. AMC will also be complying with local and federal restrictions on large social gatherings, where it will be limiting ticket availability and screenings in some of its auditoriums, too.

AMC Theaters boss Adam Aron, said in a statement: "The health and safety of our guests and theatre teams are of the utmost importance to AMC. Therefore, AMC is proactively taking action to cut in half the number of tickets that we will make available at all our US theatres. With this action, who still want to see movies on a big screen".

If you want to use the power inside of your GPU and CPU at home to help researchers find a cure for COVID-19 / coronavirus, then Folding@Home is where you'll want to go.

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project spearheaded by Stanford University, and has been around for what feels like forever. Instead of a single gigantic supercomputer, the premise of Folding@Home will use regular computers owned by regular people, building the computing power up into a single, much more powerful force -- towards a single effort, which in this case is coronavirus.

Your unused computational resources from your CPU and graphics card/s can be used to help researchers that are working on understanding the structures of potential drug targets for 2019-nCoV (COVID-19 / coronavirus) that will help "aid in the design of new therapies".

This probably won't be surprising to anyone who has been keeping up with the news recently, but the coronavirus has caused The Walt Disney Company to announce the closure of Disneyland.

The announcement was made this past Thursday, and according to the statement, there have been no cases of COVID-19 at the park, but the company has decided to close it anyway in the people's best interest. The closure will be for Disneyland Park and Disney California Adventure and will begin on March 14th until the end of the month. It was also mentioned that Disneyland Resort Hotels would remain open until March 16th so guests can sort out the proper travel arrangements.

According to New York Times reporter Brooks Barnes, this is the fourth time in the history of the park that it has closed down. The previous times the park has experienced a close was on September 11th, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the Northridge earthquake in 1994. At the moment, there is no word on whether or not The Walt Disney Company will be deciding to close Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. If the news is announced, I will be sure to update you in a follow-up post.