Month: January 2022

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple has added a new feature for app developers that should prove useful for internal tools and other kinds of applications that are meant for a specific set of users but not for the wider world: unlisted apps.

Making an app unlisted means that it won’t show up “in any App Store categories, recommendations, charts, search results, or other listings,” according to Apple. The only way to get to the app is with that link—or through Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager.

Developers must submit a request to receive a link that can point to their app. Apple’s documentation on the feature goes a little deeper for each of the possible cases:

Enlarge / (L-R) Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical adviser to the President, Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Dawn O’Connell, assistant HHS secretary for preparedness and response, testify during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on January 11, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty | Pool)

The US Health and Human Service Department has botched multiple aspects of its COVID-19 pandemic response, and those failures can be linked back to longstanding leadership and preparedness deficiencies the department has failed to address for more than a decade, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

“These deficiencies have hindered the nation’s response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of past threats, including other infectious diseases—such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic, Zika, and Ebola—and extreme weather events, such as hurricanes,” the GAO concluded.

The new report, released Thursday, is the GAO’s ninth assessment of the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it lays out a series of deficiencies it found at the HHS. But the GAO also emphasizes that it has been here before with the HHS, which encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), among other components. Since 2007, GAO has given the HHS 115 recommendations for how it can improve its leadership and coordination of public health emergency responses—and the HHS has yet to address 72 of them.

Enlarge / Neil Young’s fans aren’t happy that the rocker’s music is no longer available on Spotify. (credit: Dave J Hogan/Getty Images)

Neil Young was mad. Now his fans are, too, and they’re telling Spotify about it.

Earlier this week, Young had asked the music-streaming service to remove his music from its library in response to COVID misinformation aired on Joe Rogan’s podcast, which is available only on Spotify. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” Young wrote on his website. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Spotify complied with the request, which ultimately came from Warner Brothers, Young’s label. Though the loss of Young’s music likely represents a small percentage of overall streams on Spotify, Young pointed out that “Spotify represents 60% of the streaming of my music to listeners around the world.” 

Enlarge (credit: Seagate)

Whereas NVMe SSDs tend to focus on getting faster, good old spinning hard drives are intent on getting larger. Tom’s Hardware reports that hard drive manufacturer Seagate announced on a recent earnings call that it is shipping huge 22TB hard drives to some of its customers. The company uses shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to squeeze a couple more terabytes out of its biggest drives.

The highest-capacity drives most people can currently buy top out at 20TB; the Seagate Ironwolf Pro or WD Gold are two such drives, and they both generally retail for over $600. In its NAS drives, Seagate uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which provides better random read and write speeds than SMR disks but at a lower density—this is fine for archival storage but not so much for servers where multiple users are regularly accessing and modifying data. We found this out firsthand a few years back when Western Digital covertly started using SMR technology in its WD Red drives for consumer NAS devices.

As for more dramatic capacity boosts, Seagate is continuing to work on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) drives, which the company has been testing with some of its customers for a few years now. Seagate has certainly been guilty of overpromising and underdelivering on HAMR, which the company has been talking about on and off since 2002. But as of early 2021, Seagate said it was aiming for 30TB drives by 2023, 50TB drives in 2026, and 100TB drives by 2030.

Enlarge / Philips OLED807. (credit: TPVision)

Philips has revealed the first TVs to use LG’s new type of OLED panel, OLED EX. The Philips OLED807 line of 4K HDR TVs announced Thursday doesn’t have a price, but it will be released in Europe sometime this year.

OLED EX promises to increase brightness “up to 30 percent compared to conventional OLED displays,” LG says. In spite of their famously rich contrast, OLED panels generally don’t reach the brightness levels of LED panels, which can surpass 1,400 nits. Unfortunately, Philips didn’t provide a specific brightness spec for the OLED807 beyond reiterating the “30 percent brighter” claim.

The OLED807’s diodes use deuterium compounds that LG says are brighter and more efficient than hydrogen. OLED EX panels combine this material with machine learning to control the TVs’ “energy input to more accurately express the details and colors of the video content being played,” LG said when announcing OLED EX.

Enlarge / The string of interrupted bright patches moving from top left to lower right is a channel filled with salt deposits. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

By now, there’s plenty of evidence that Mars had a watery past, and more data is coming in all the time. But that evidence doesn’t necessarily give us a complete picture of Mars’ past. Was the red planet covered in watery oceans, or was most of the water trapped as ice, with erratic seasonal melting?

This week, two researchers at Caltech—Ellen Leask and Bethany Ehlmann—helped provide a clearer picture of Mars’ past by figuring out the likely behavior of the last liquid water on Mars and determining when it stopped flowing. Their secret was tracing salt deposits on the Martian surface.

Follow the salt

There are many different salts we’ve detected on the Martian surface, but the ones of interest here are chlorides (which probably include the sodium chloride of table salt). These are especially informative because they are the salts most readily soluble in water. So if there’s any water around, these chloride salts would be dissolved in it. Any deposits of these salts currently present on the surface of Mars, then, were put there as the last water in that region of the planet dried out.