Tag: TechTips

Enlarge / A woman takes a swab as part of a COVID-19 antigen rapid test. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)

The Food and Drug Administration is alerting Americans to the potential dangers of at-home COVID-19 tests after receiving reports of people egregiously misusing them, resulting in injuries.

In a safety communication released Friday, the FDA said it had received reports of injuries after people used the kits’ liquid test solution as eye drops or stuck the solution up their noses. “The liquid test solution is not supposed to touch your body,” the FDA wrote sternly. The agency also reported that some children had been injured after putting test components in their mouths and swallowing the solution.

“The liquid solutions may include chemical ingredients, such as sodium azide, that help the test work properly or act as preservatives,” the FDA wrote. “The test chemicals can be irritating or toxic if they get on your skin, nose, or eyes or if they are swallowed.”

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  Check out the right side of the taskbar—it’s an app drawer! [credit:
  Ron Amadeo ]

Android 13 Developer Preview 2 is out, and with it come a bunch of changes for the next version of Android. Preview 2 is still a very early look at Android 13, and most of the big feature reveals for these Android previews come during Google I/O. The good news is that Google just set a date for that event: May 11–12.

First up, if you’re disappointed at the relatively tame tablet changes brought about by Android 12L, know that Google is still working on tablet features. The latest Android 13 preview adds an app drawer button to the taskbar, letting you easily access all your apps from any screen. It’s a great addition, and it’s hopefully a sign of things to come for the brand-new taskbar added in Android 12L.

Next, it would be great if the Android taskbar worked more like a Windows or Mac taskbar. The Android taskbar shows the bottom row of home-screen icons, and that’s it. Instead, it should show pinned apps on one side and recently opened apps on the other. Other operating systems work like this because it makes sense. Google officially calls this a “Taskbar,” so shouldn’t current tasks appear in it?

(credit: Deanna Barch)

One of the unfortunate realities of science is that small data sets often produce unreliable results, as any minor, random fluctuations can have a large impact. One solution to this issue has been building ever-larger data sets, where these fluctuations tend to be small compared to any actual effects. One of the notable sources of big data is the UK Biobank; brain scans from people in the Biobank were recently used to identify changes in the brain driven by SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Now, a large team of researchers has turned this idea upside down in a new paper. They took some of the biggest data sets and divided them into smaller pieces to figure out how small data sets could go before things got unreliable. And for at least one type of experiment, the answer is that brain studies need thousands of participants before they’re likely to be reliable. And even then, we shouldn’t expect to see many dramatic effects.

Associate all the things

The research team behind the study termed the type of work they were interested in “brain-wide association studies,” or BWAS. It’s a pretty simple approach. Take a bunch of people and score them for a behavioral trait. Then give them all brain scans and see if any brain structures have differences that consistently correlate with the behavioral trait.

Enlarge / Web-based cloud-streaming is now live and awesome on Steam Deck, courtesy of… Microsoft? Sure. We’ll take it. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Steam Deck’s viability as an all-in-one portable gaming machine just became stronger, as it now formally supports a one-click option to get any web-based cloud gaming service working—including Stadia and Xbox Cloud Gaming.

While the Deck comes with both Firefox and Chrome preinstalled, this update does not work with either of those browsers. Rather, Steam Deck owners will need to install and configure the latest Linux beta of Microsoft Edge. Yes, Linux users, Microsoft has come to your rescue.

The process, as detailed on the official Microsoft Edge Reddit community, requires jumping through a few hoops in the Deck’s Arch Linux environment, but it’s a mostly painless way to get a web browser to recognize and translate the Steam Deck’s buttons, triggers, and joysticks as video game input—something the other browsers haven’t gotten around to yet.