In an unanimous vote, the Federal Communications Commission adopted a proposal on Thursday that opens the 6GHz band for unlicensed Wi-Fi use. Doing so frees up more than 1,200MHz of additional bandwidth for next-gen Wi-Fi 6E devices with antennas and chipsets capable of tapping into the extra spectrum.
No word on when this will become available to the public.
Mid Thursday, Apple released iOS 13.4.1 for the new iPhone SE (2020 edition) to address the following:
iOS 13.4.1 includes bug fixes for your ‌‌iPhone‌‌.
– Fixes an issue where devices running iOS 13.4 could not participate in ‌‌FaceTime‌‌ calls with devices running iOS 9.3.6 and earlier or OS X El Capitan 10.11.6 and earlier.
– Addresses a bug with the Settings app where choosing a Bluetooth from the quick actions menu on the Home screen would fail.
NASA has joined the fight against coronavirus (COVID-19) with efforts underway across the country to augment the national response, a few of which were highlighted in a media briefing today.
"NASA's strength has always been our ability and passion – collective and individual – for solving problems," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "All the work being done shows how NASA is uniquely equipped to aid in the federal response to coronavirus by leveraging the ingenuity of our workforce, mobilizing investments made in the U.S. space agency to combat this disease, and working with public and private partnerships to maximize results."
On April 1, NASA launched an agencywide call for ideas on its internal crowdsourcing platform NASA@WORK for how the agency can leverage its expertise and capabilities to help the nation with this unprecedented crisis. In just two weeks, 250 ideas were submitted, more than 500 comments were submitted, and more than 4,500 votes were cast.
In addition to the NASA@Work challenge, the agency workforce developed ideas and worked with partners to quickly respond to the health crisis within the last month. Agency efforts highlighted during the media briefing include:
VITAL Ventilator
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California designed a new high-pressure ventilator tailored specifically to treat COVID-19 patients. The device, called VITAL (Ventilator Intervention Technology Accessible Locally), passed a critical test on April 21 at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York – an epicenter of COVID-19 in the United States – and now is under review for an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
VITAL is designed to treat patients with milder symptoms, thereby keeping the nation’s limited supply of traditional ventilators available for patients with more severe COVID-19 symptoms.
The device can be built faster and maintained more easily than a traditional ventilator, and is comprised of far fewer parts, making it more economical to produce. It was designed to use parts currently available to potential manufacturers but not compete with the existing supply chain of currently made ventilators.
Aerospace Valley Positive Pressure Helmet
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California partnered with Antelope Valley Hospital, the City of Lancaster, Virgin Galactic, The Spaceship Company (TSC), Antelope Valley College and members of the Antelope Valley Task Force to solve possible shortages of critical medical equipment in the local community.
One of the task force’s first efforts was to build an oxygen helmet to treat COVID-19 patients exhibiting minor symptoms and minimize the need for those patients to use ventilators. The device functions like a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine to force oxygen into a patient’s low-functioning lungs.
Called the Aerospace Valley Positive Pressure Helmet, the device was successfully tested by doctors at Antelope Valley Hospital. The Spaceship Company began producing 500 this week and a request was submitted April 22 to the FDA for an emergency use authorization.
Surface Decontamination System
Through its Regional Economic Development Program, engineers at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio partnered with Ohio company Emergency Products and Research in 2015 to guide the development and production of a small, portable, and economical device that decontaminates spaces such as ambulances in under an hour and at a fraction of the cost of systems currently in use. AMBUStat is being used in police cars and other areas killing airborne and surface particles of viruses. Now NASA is conducting additional research to continue to maximize the effectiveness of this device on COVID-19.
NASA’s legacy of human space exploration, research and technology development has yielded countless innovations that prove the direct and profound impact of taxpayer investment in America’s space program on our quality of life on Earth, including improved technologies for water purification, air filtration, kidney dialysis and tele-medicine, as well as research that has led to improved vaccines, drug therapies, and mitigations for bone loss. We can only speculate as to the breadth of transformative benefits that will come from America’s return to the Moon through NASA’s Artemis program and our efforts to put the first humans on Mars.
For more information about NASA’s efforts, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/coronavirus
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[Appleinsider]: A new so-called "text bomb," a string of characters that could crash iOS devices if received in a notification, has surfaced online.
Messaging bugs like these show up every now and then. Typically, they're messages of specific characters that can crash an iOS or iPadOS device when received, forcing a device restart.
This specific "text bomb" appears to consist of the Italian flag emoji and a specific Sindhi language character, and impacts all current versions of iOS and iPadOS 13. Reports indicate that the bug only causes crashes if it appears in an incoming notification.
According to information on Reddit, this specific malformed message first started making the rounds on Telegram, but it has also appeared on Twitter. It isn't clear which specific messaging apps the bug impacts, though the fact that it only crashes an iOS device when appearing in a notification suggests that it could be app-agnostic.
Notification-based "text bombs" can be particularly annoying, as they can cause iOS or iPadOS to get stuck in a "re-spring" loop.
A similar bug involving a character in the Telugu language caused a stir back in 2018 when it circulated around the internet.
As with the Telugu bug, it's likely that Apple will issue a fix in an upcoming version of iOS. In the meantime, users who are particularly worried about their devices crashing may want to disable notifications for messaging apps until the problem is resolved. Disabling message previews in notifications may also mitigate impact\
