Engineers from Yale University have developed a wearable device that can help individuals assess whether they have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. The cheap device can clip onto a person’s clothes and capture aerosolized viral particles in the surrounding environment.

From rapid tests to vaccines, many extraordinary innovations have helped us navigate this global pandemic. While we have several ways to determine whether a person has been infected with SARS-CoV-2, we still can only guess when and how someone has been exposed to the virus.

This innovation from a team of Yale University researchers is hoping to fill that surveillance gap. Called the Fresh Air Clip, the device is cheap, designed to attach to a person’s collar and capture aerosolized viral particles around a person’s mouth and nose.

The clip captures viral particles on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surface. At the end of a day, or several days, a wearer removes the clip and sends it to a lab, which uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) analysis to determine the presence of SARS-CoV-2.

A new study is reporting on several tests of the Fresh Air Clip establishing it can effectively capture airborne viral particles. One experiment involved supplying the clips to several volunteers who wore the monitors for up to five days. Of the 62 monitors deployed, five returned positive results, showing exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

“Of the positive Fresh Air Clips, four were worn by restaurant servers and one was worn by a homeless shelter staff person,” the study shows. “Notably, two positive samples collected in restaurants with indoor dining were found to have high viral load when compared to the other samples (>100 copies per clip), suggestive of close contact with one or more infected individuals.”

As well as establishing the wearable monitor as being able to capture detectable levels of viral particles, the researchers note the device is sensitive enough to catch exposure events at sub infectious doses. This suggests the volume of viral particles picked up by the monitor allows for the quantification of environmental exposure to the virus. This is important, as it means the device does not simply offer an indication of viral exposure but a measure of the level of exposure.

Krystal Pollitt, a researcher working on the device, says one interesting potential use for the device could be to test the effectiveness of ventilation settings in COVID positive patient hospital rooms. Speaking to Yale News recently, Pollitt said her team found airborne traces of SARS-CoV-2 in hospital rooms that were thought to be well ventilated.

“We found this to be really interesting because we know that one of the infection control measures that is being highly recommended is enhanced ventilation,” said Pollitt. “Within the hospital network we had very high air change rates. Despite having those high air change rates, we could still detect airborne levels across the room.”

In its current form, the Fresh Air Clip can screen indoor environments and establish whether they are high-risk areas for exposure. Pollitt also said the wearable can also be used to identify indoor exposure events days before positive cases appear.

“The Fresh Air Clip can be useful for early identification of exposure events and allow for rapid action to be taken,” Pollitt said. “Exposed individuals can get tested or quarantine to prevent potential community transmission.”

The next big step for the device will be to develop ways for the monitor to offer real-time notification of viral exposure, in much the same way a radiation strip can immediately notify a wearer they are exposed to gamma or x-rays. Pollitt says she is interested in further developing the device with real-time exposure notifications.
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“It’s key to report back results quick,” Pollitt says. “We are keen to incorporate techniques for real-time SARS-CoV-2 detection.”
The new study was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

A ruling at the end of December by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has backed up an April 2020 decision by the FCC to open up 1,200MHz of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use. Unlicensed means anyone can use it, if they do so responsibly, covering uses like your future Wi-Fi 6E home network.

While Wi-Fi 6 connections make more reliable and efficient use of the same spectrum, that’s been in use for the last couple of decades, especially when multiple devices are connected, Wi-Fi 6E routers will work at 2.4GHz and 5GHz plus the new 6GHz band. That has enough room for up to seven maximum capacity Wi-Fi streams to broadcast in the same area at once without interfering with each other or using any existing spectrum. 

Beyond that, there’s already work on a future standard, known as IEEE 802.11be or Wi-Fi 7. That could further optimize the use of the new band with even larger 320MHz channels, 46 Gbps maximum transfer rates, and more, but it’s not scheduled to be complete until 2024 (pdf).

In the immediate future, while 6GHz Wi-Fi has the same theoretical top speed as 5GHz Wi-Fi, the extra space means that instead of getting so much interference from other devices and nearby networks, you’ll have a faster, more consistent connection. Last year a representative for the Wi-Fi Alliance said that this should enable 1–2 Gbps connections over Wi-Fi, similar to what you see now with mmWave 5G.
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AT&T argued against the FCC’s plan, saying the commission failed to identify and address possible interference with “tens of thousands of microwave links critical to maintaining network infrastructure,” talking about the wireless tech that keeps many cell sites connected to the wider internet. In one filing, AT&T said, “The 6GHz FS [fixed service] band is the only band suitable for long distance transmission, routinely supporting paths between 10-50 miles and, in cases, even longer distances.” Mobile carriers preferred a plan where the FCC would auction off a chunk of the 6GHz bandwidth for use solely by their 5G networks. The FCC said that low-power indoor use protects licensed 6GHz tech like AT&T’s microwave links and TV broadcasts from interference, while “standard power” devices used indoors and outdoors could include automated frequency control to prevent interference.

Besides being one of the most powerful computers in the world and currently ranked 105 on the Top500 list, France's Jean Zay supercomputer is now the first HPC to have a photonic coprocessor.

Unlike traditional processors which use electric current, LightOn’s photonic coprocessor transmits and processes information using light. The company's photonics coprocessor was added to the Jean Zay supercomputer under a pilot program and represents not only a technological breakthrough but also a first for the industry.

So far, LightOn’s technology has successfully been used by a community of researchers since 2018. 

Now though, its photonic coprocessor will be available to select users of the Jean Zay research community over the next few months who will use the device to conduct research on machine learning foundations, differential privacy, satellite imaging analysis and natural language processing (NLP) tasks.

LightOn Photonic Co-processor. LightOn's Optical Processing Unit (OPU) uses photonics to speed up randomized algorithms at a very large scale. However, it also works in tandem with standard silicon CPUs and Nvidia's A100 GPU technology.

The company's Aurora 2 OPU powers its Appliance integrated computing unit which is built i so that it can be quickly and easily integrated in data centers or in this case, a supercomputer. According to LightOn, its Appliance can reach a peak performance of 1.5 PetaOPS or 1.5 X 1,000,000,000,000,000 operations per second and can deliver performance that is 8 to 40 times higher than GPU-only acceleration, like normal mainframes.

CEO and co-founder of LightOn, Igor Carror provided further insight into the pilot program that saw its Appliance integrated into the Jean Zay supercomputer in a press release, saying:

“This pilot program integrating a new computing technology within one of the world’s Supercomputer would not have been possible without the particular commitment of visionary agencies such as GENCI and IDRIS/CNRS. Together with the emergence of Quantum Computing, this world premiere strengthens our view that the next step after exascale super-computing will be about hybrid computing.”

Several industry pundits saw the tall-screen trend coming—but they didn't know things would get this tall. PC monitors that are taller than they are wide have enjoyed a resurgence last year, as they provide more vertical space for taking in long documents, articles, spreadsheets, and social media and news feeds. But this 420×1920 monitor takes the tall-screen thing to new heights.

As spotted by Gizmodo, the screen comes from Elsonic, a sub-brand of Japanese company Nojima, which started off with LED bulbs but now makes TVs and other tech products. The product page for the tall monitor specifically highlights web browsing, Twitter, and browser games as use cases. 

The display is only 8.8 inches, so it would best serve as a portable, secondary or tertiary monitor. It charges via USB-C but can't output video through the port. The monitor relies on mini HDMI for its video signal. That gives it a little versatility in the sense that it can connect to things lacking USB-C. But with more PCs ditching HDMI, and the monitor already having a USB-C port right there, it feels like a missed opportunity.

Built like a New York City skyscraper, the EK-MD088 takes up minimal surface space. Its base is approximately 3.07×0.83 inches (78×21 mm), and it towers 9.76 inches (248 mm) into the sky. The display should make an easy portable monitor (assuming you can find a case to accommodate its dimensions), as it only weighs about 0.43 pounds (198 g). 

A 420×1920 resolution gives the TFT panel an aspect ratio of 7:32. A picture wasn't provided, but the stand is supposed to allow for landscape mode, too.

Elsonic's listing doesn't get into color capabilities but says the screen has a standard refresh rate of 60 Hz and a typical brightness of 300 nits. The screen has two buttons on the side that let you pick between six brightness settings.
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Currently, the monitor is only available in Japan. So if you’re really craving this type of unit, you may have to act as an importer to get it. It's expected to release in "early February," the product page says, for 14,800 yen, which is about $128.21.

At Amazon’s AWS re: Invent conference earlier this month, the company announced a new platform for mainframe migration and modernization called simply “AWS Mainframe Modernization,” which aims to help AWS customers get off their mainframes “as fast as they can” to take better advantage of the cloud.

Today, customers may take a couple of different paths to get off their mainframes—either they take a “lift and shift” approach and bring their application pretty much as is, or they may refactor and break the application down as microservices in the cloud. But neither path is all that easy, and the process can take months or even years to complete as customers must evaluate the complexity of the application’s source code, understand the dependencies on other systems, convert or re-compile the code, and then everything must be tested to make sure it all works.

“It can be a messy business and involves a lot of moving pieces. And it isn’t something that people really want to do on their own,” said Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, speaking at the press event. “And while AWS Partners can help with the transition, it can still take a long time,” he added.

The new solution, AWS Mainframe Modernization, instead will make it faster to migrate, modernize and run mainframe applications on AWS. The company claims that it can cut the time to move mainframe workloads to the cloud by as much as two-thirds, using its set of development, test, and deployment tools and a mainframe-compatible runtime environment. The solution will also help customers assess and analyze their mainframe applications for readiness, then help them choose which path they want to take—re-platforming or refactoring—and then come up with a plan.

If the customer wants to re-platform, the Mainframe Modernization solution will offer compilers to convert code and testing services to make sure no functionality is lost during the translation. If the customer wants to refactor or decompose the application—if the components could be run in Amazon’s EC2 service, in containers, or in the Lambda service, for instance—then they can use the Mainframe Modernization solution to convert the COBOL code automatically over to Java. A Migration Hub lets customers track their migration progress across multiple AWS Partners and solutions from a single location.
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Amazon touts the system as being an agile and cost-efficient (with on-demand, pay-as-you-go resources) managed service that offers security and high availability, scalability, and elasticity.

Many readers of this newsletter know I spent four decades speaking to business, professional and academic audiences about the future of technology. In my research for material for Technology This Week, I found a marvelous lecture by former MIT professor Patrick Winston called "How to Speak." The lecture was posted on YouTube a few months after Winston's death in 2019 and has since been viewed just under 5 million times.

Winston, who taught at MIT for almost 50 years and was one of the school's most beloved professors, knew how to captivate an audience. His style wasn’t flashy, but it was extremely compelling—even more noteworthy when you consider he worked in the technical field of artificial intelligence.

If you invest an hour and watch the full lecture, and I highly recommend you do, you'll learn some invaluable tips that will make you not only a better speaker, but a better communicator. However, you'll also discover a priceless gem in the first five minutes of the talk, when Winston describes what he calls the "rule of engagement." It's a simple, non-negotiable policy, and it's only five words long. 

Winston's rule: When someone else is speaking:
                                                   "No laptops. No cell phones."

Although simple, this is a rule that almost no one today follows, and that makes it extremely valuable. Winston's rule of engagement is also a perfect example of emotional intelligence in real life: the ability to make emotions work for you, instead of against you.

Making a Better Listener. Winston explains the reasoning behind his rule of engagement. "Some people ask why [no laptops, no cell phones] is a rule of engagement," says Winston. "The answer is, we humans only have one language processor. And if your language processor is engaged, you're distracted. And worse yet, you distract the people around you—studies have shown that."

Back in the 1950s, psychologist Donald Broadbent proved a similar point by setting up subjects with headphones that were putting out two different messages at the same time, one to each ear. Afterwards, Broadbent tested the subjects on their ability to retain the information. 

What was Broadbent's conclusion? We can only listen to one voice at a time.

But how can the "no laptops, no cell phones" rule of engagement help you and your organization?

The Effect on Relationships. Nowadays, people are accustomed to respond to electronic messages immediately, and there's some good to that. When you respond quickly to others' messages, you provide information they need to move their work forward. Additionally, you show you value them.

However, in your efforts to respond quickly, you might also make a big mistake. By constantly checking your phone, even when you're in a meeting or conversation with others, you leave your conversation partner feeling that you aren't really "present"--and that you don’t care about them or the conversation. 

Just think of all the lost time in meetings in which someone repeats something that's already been said or goes off on a tangent because they were distracted and missed a key point.

True listening and collaboration require complete attention. And if you're speaking with another person, that person thought you were important enough to give you their time and attention. Why not return the honor?
You'd be surprised at the positive benefits these actions reap—and the depth and quality it adds to your relationships.

So, if you'd like to increase the quality of your meetings, conversations, and even your relationships, take a page out of Patrick Winston's playbook:
                                                   "No laptops. No cell phones."

​Because you can only listen to one voice at a time.

AR has populated science fiction, specialized industries, and high-tech experiments for decades. But in the 2010s, major companies—and countless startups—began treating AR headsets as a potential mass-market platform.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg predicted in 2017 that televisions and phones would be replaced by holographic glasses. Apple CEO Tim Cook called AR “a big idea, like the smartphone.” Microsoft envisioned people watching the Super Bowl in its HoloLens headset. Google launched its ambitious Glass platform as a potential successor to phones, then helped propel the AR startup Magic Leap toward billions of dollars in investments. More recently, telecoms have partnered with AR companies like the Chinese startup Nreal, hoping high-bandwidth holograms will create a demand for 5G networks.

These companies’ products—as well as those of other major players, including Snap, Vuzix, and Niantic—often look very different. But most of them promise a uniquely powerful combination of three features.

• Their hardware is wearable, hands-free, and potentially always on—you don’t have to grab a device and put it away when you’re done using it
• Their images and audio can blend with or compensate for normal sensory perception of the world, rather than being confined to a discrete, self-contained screen
• Their sensors and software can collect and analyze huge amounts of information about their surroundings—through geolocation and depth sensing, computer vision programs, or intimate biometric technology like eye-tracking cameras

Over the past decade, nobody has managed to merge these capabilities into a mainstream consumer device. Most glasses are bulky, and the images they produce are shaky, transparent, or cut off by a limited field of view. Nobody has developed a surefire way to interact with them either, despite experiments with voice controls, finger tracking, and handheld hardware.

Despite this, we’ve gotten hints of the medium’s power and challenges—and even skeptics of the tech should pay attention to them.

In 2016, for instance, millions of people fell in love with the phone-based AR game Pokémon Go. When players logged on to catch virtual monsters, many discovered parts of their neighborhoods they’d never thought to visit. But they also found a world built on data that placed more gyms and PokéStops in white and affluent neighborhoods. They forged in-person connections by sharing virtual experiences, but those connections could also allow for real-world harassment.

The effects went beyond people who played the game. The owners of some homes near Pokémon Go gyms experienced a sudden influx of trespassers, leading a few to sue its developer Niantic and secure tweaks to the game’s design. Public memorials like the US Holocaust Museum asked players to respect the space by not chasing virtual monsters into it. Even this early foray into augmented reality exported some of the internet’s biggest flaws—like its ability to collapse context and overwhelm individuals with its sheer scale—into physical space.

Writer and researcher Erica Neely says that laws and social norms aren’t prepared for how AR could affect physical space. “I think we’re kind of frantically running behind the technology,” she says. In 2019, Neely wrote about the issues that Pokémon Go had exposed around augmented locations. Those issues mostly haven’t been settled, she says. And dedicated AR hardware will only intensify them.
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Smartphone cameras—along with digital touchup apps like FaceTune and sophisticated image searches like Snap Scan and Google Lens—have already complicated our relationships with the offline world. But AR glasses could add an ease and ubiquity that our phones can’t manage. “A phone-based app you have to actually go to,” says Neely. “You are making a conscious choice to engage with it.” Glasses remove even the light friction of unlocking your screen and deliberately looking through a camera lens.

If you're among the millions of people who use payment apps like PayPal, Venmo, Square, and other third-party electronic payment networks, you could be affected by a tax reporting change that goes into effect in January. 

Payment app providers will have to start reporting to the IRS a user's business transactions if, in aggregate, they total $600 or more for the year. A business transaction is defined as payment for a good or service.

Prior to this change, app providers only had to send the IRS a Form 1099-K if an individual account had at least 200 business transactions in a year and if those transactions combined resulted in gross payments of at least $20,000.

The expansion of the reporting rule results from a provision in the American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law earlier this year. The aim of the provision is to clamp down on unreported, taxable income. 

Keep in mind, the new reporting threshold does not change your basic tax responsibilities. Income you receive for a good or service—including tips—has always been reportable and, most times, taxable. 

And you've always been responsible for reporting it on your tax return, regardless of whether a third party sends the information to the IRS.

The rule change also does not make other transactions suddenly taxable. For instance, your friend sending you money on Venmo to reimburse you for their half of last night's dinner tab will not become taxable.

The biggest change is the increased visibility the IRS will have into business income transactions, both those that have always been reported by the income recipient and those that haven't been. 

In theory, the only people who should be worried about the rule change are those who weren't reporting all their business income. "Those who are tax evaders, who violated the self-reporting rules and used the old thresholds to avoid paying taxes," said Scott Talbott, spokesperson for the Electronic Transaction Association.
But, tax experts say, the threshold change could mean some administrative hassles for many tax filers who use payment apps, whether or not they're engaged in business transactions.

"These third-party settlement entities may not know for sure if they are dealing with a business or an individual or if they are dealing with a payment for goods or services, or a non-taxable transaction. It is going to be up to the taxpayer, if they receive a 1099 in any form for a nontaxable event, such as splitting rent among roommates, splitting a dinner bill, or even selling something on eBay for less than you paid for it, to explain to the IRS that the 1099 was received for a non-taxable transaction," said Mark Luscombe, principal analyst for tax publisher Wolters Kluwer Tax & Accounting.

Also, Luscombe noted, there's a fair chance your business transactions may be reported in duplicate—for instance, if you're a freelancer or independent contractor, you might get a 1099-K from your payment app provider, as well as a 1099-NEC or 1099-MISC from your client for the same transaction.

"Again, the taxpayer will have to explain to the IRS that the two 1099s are for the same transaction," he said.

Each app provider must decide which procedures it will use to accommodate the rule change and will need to alert their customers about what will be required of them to better identify the nature of their transactions.

For instance, PayPal, which now owns Venmo, recently put out an initial Q&A for users of both apps. It noted that "In the coming months, we may ask you to provide tax information like your Employer Identification Number (EIN), Individual Tax ID Number (ITIN) or Social Security Number (SSN), if you haven't provided it to us already."
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The net effect of the new reporting requirements for users of payment apps may be that some will ask customers to pay them in cash—at least for smaller amounts, like tips. Or, as Luscombe noted, they may decide to only use an app for taxable business transactions and keep their other, non-taxable transactions separate.

The first two prototype satellites from Project Kuiper, the internet-from-space venture from the e-commerce giant, are scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter of 2022, Amazon announced on earlier this month. That will formally kick off its competition with SpaceX, the space company owned by Elon Musk, and OneWeb, among other rivals, for beaming high-speed internet connections to customers from low-Earth orbit. It will also be a crucial test of the satellites’ design before the company launches thousands more devices into orbit.

Amazon first announced its goal of deploying a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit in 2019. This was the second pursuit in space by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and former chief executive who also owns Blue Origin, the rocket company. A handful of other firms are also racing to offer high-speed internet to governments, other companies and consumers whose access is hampered by the digital divide in remote locations.

Like SpaceX, Amazon plans to spend $10 billion on the project, which sits within its device’s unit. But the company has been slower to start than SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rockets have lofted nearly 2,000 internet-beaming satellites into orbit for its own venture, Starlink. Thousands of customers are testing the SpaceX service for $99 a month with $499 antenna kits.

Amazon unveiled a customer antenna concept in 2020 and has been testing prototype satellites on the ground for years.

“You can test all the stuff you want in your labs, which we do,” Rajeev Badyal, a vice president at Amazon overseeing the Kuiper project, said in an interview. “But the ultimate test is in space.”

Competition among the companies is fierce, and their plans have drawn interest from investors and analysts who foresee tens of billions of dollars in revenue once the constellations become fully operational. But those same plans have also drawn criticism from space safety advocates who fear collisions of satellites adding to pollution in orbit; astronomers, whose ground-based telescope observations of the night sky could be disrupted by the satellites; and dark skies advocates who fear light pollution from sunlight reflecting from the constellations.

The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates satellite communications to the ground, approved Amazon’s network in 2020 and gave the company a deadline to launch half of its 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. Amazon bought nine launches from the rocket company United Launch Alliance in a deal likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Amazon has been talking to other launch companies, Mr. Badyal said, including its competitor, SpaceX, whose rapid Starlink deployment is partially because of its ability to use its own reusable rocket boosters for launches.

The first two prototype satellites, KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat- 2, will launch separately on rockets from ABL Space Systems, one of a handful of start-ups building smaller launch vehicles to sate demand from satellite companies. The market for smaller rockets, designed to deliver payloads to space quickly and affordably, is packed with competitors, making ABL’s Amazon contract — good for up to five launches on ABL’s RS1 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. — a boost for the company.
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The pair of Amazon prototype satellites will test internet connections between space and the company’s flat, square antennas for consumers on the ground for the first time in Amazon’s Kuiper program. Regions for the test include parts of South America, the Asia-Pacific region and Central Texas. Past experiments involved flying drones with satellite hardware over antennas on the ground and connecting ground antennas to other companies’ satellites already in space, drawing internet speeds fast enough to stream high-definition video.

Using high-speed lasers, researchers have created "5D" data storage technology that could allow 500 TB of data to be written to a CD-sized glass disc, according to The Optical Society. The technique uses higher writing speeds that might finally make it feasible to use the technology for archival and other purposes. 

With 5D optical storage, each file uses three layers of nanoscale dots. The dots' size, orientation, and position within the three standard dimensions, make up the five "dimensions." The dots change the polarization of light travelling through the disc, which is read using a microscope and polarizer.

We've seen 5D optical storage before, but there were several problems—particularly the slow writing speeds that made the technology impractical. It has huge upsides for (extremely) long-term storage, though. It's been estimated that the storage medium could withstand temperatures up to 1,000 degrees C and last 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading. 

To overcome the speed problem, researchers used a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. Rather than writing directly in the glass, they used the laser to produce a phenomenon called near-field enhancement, that creates tiny structures using a few weak light pulses. Those can enhance the circular voids generated by a more powerful, single-pulse "micro-explosion." This technique "minimized the thermal damage that has been problematic for other approaches that use high-repetition-rate lasers," according to the paper.

Using the new technique, the team could write 5GB of text data onto a silica glass disc the size of a conventional CD with nearly 100 percent readout accuracy. "With the writing density available from the method, the disc could hold 500 terabytes of data," the researchers said. They could also write at speeds of a million voxels per second, or about 230 KB per second. 
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That might sound slow, but by introducing parallel writing, you could feasibly fill a 500TB disc in about 60 days. That could provide a way to back up reams of valuable data, essentially forever. "With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person’s DNA," said research team leader Peter G. Kazansky.