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According to a report from the United Nations, relief organizations have set up 16 water stations around the island to meet that need. But the process of digging out wells and rooftop tanks has been slow-going, in part because to avoid introducing COVID to the largely disease-free islands, relief teams have remained in quarantine. An underwater volcanic eruption is, clearly, different from climate-related storms, fires, and floods. But it highlights the vulnerability of global water systems to withstand such events, creating humanitarian disasters that linger for months....

But the swiping goes both ways—Android and iOS have taken plenty of ideas from each other over the years, which has resulted in two operating systems that are much more similar in features and functionality than they used to be. Dig back a little and you’ll find plenty of examples—though we should say up-front this history is slightly edited. For example, one or two of these features appeared on the iPad before the iPhone, or in versions of Android from Samsung and LG before they appeared in the stock version....

It’s not just anecdotal—in July, the cost of rides on platforms like Uber and Lyft were up 92 percent compared to January 2018, according to data CNBC analyzed from Rakuten Intelligence. NPR reports the bulk of that increase happened over the past year and a half, citing data from GridWise, Inc. which found that in some cities, prices are up 79 percent from the pre-pandemic average. One major driver of this trend is the lack of available gig workers to meet this renewed passenger demand, as ridesharing apps have struggled to rebuild their ranks after experiencing a significant drop in drivers last spring....

PayPal described the partnership as part of a push to “expand the ways that Venmo can be used by both consumers and merchants,” citing an uptick in online shopping during the pandemic as a driving force. According to a survey the company produced in October 2020, 65 percent of Venmo users reported increasing their personal “online purchasing behavior” during the previous six months. In response, the app has rolled out features that support this shift, including the ability to pay with QR Codes, which PayPal introduced through its recent partnership with United Airlines....

The e-Golf touch, which has both gesture and voice controls and wireless phone charging, will be available later this year. But it was the BUDD-e that made the tech types at the annual conference in Las Vegas gasp. First, a video of the original VW microbus – “an apartment on wheels,” according to Diess – rolled on the giant screen that spanned the stage. Then the white micro van with colored LEDs rolled silently onto the physical stage, instantly charming the crowd....

Roboticists at the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Japanese Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, are trying to interpret brain waves into actions that can be understood by a robot. In the video below, a volunteer wears an electrode cap and watches a screen with flashing dots, which is used to teach his brain to associate flickering objects with actions....

For the first time, biologists filmed direct evidence of killer whales attacking and killing white sharks in South Africa. The first video was captured by drone in May 2022 in the Mossel Bay region, revealing three orcas cornering and fatally biting a three meter-length white shark. The shark’s body was not seen or recovered after the bloody battle. This video, along with extended helicopter footage of this attack and shark tag data, were published this week in the journal Ecology....

Every year since 2013, the CDC has held a competition called FluSight, in which researchers put their probabilistic models up against one another to see which can best predict the course of the flu season. Last year’s winning model, Dante, was helmed by Dave Osthus at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And here’s the bad news: “Dante is a little worried that it’s going to be a bad and early peaking season,” says Osthus....

Case in point is the latest electric motorcycle from California-based Zero Motorcycles, the SR/F, which the company unveiled yesterday. The bike can hit 124 mph, travel 201 miles in a city (if you pay for additional battery capacity) and has cellular connectivity, so it can receive firmware updates over the air, just like your smartphone. And Harley-Davidson is already accepting pre-orders for its electric bike, the LiveWire. It should ship in the fall....

Just kidding. But seriously, most of Ceres’ surface is about as bright as fresh asphalt, so what’s up with these shiny spots? Dawn has spotted 130 of them so far, and scientists have been unsure about what they’re made of. Guesses included volcanic activity, salt, and water ice. Now, in a paper published today in Nature, the Dawn team has narrowed the list down a bit. Slight color variations from Dawn’s camera data indicate that the brightest spots, located in Occator crater, contain a salt called magnesium sulfate....

It wasn’t long after Henry David Inglis arrived on the island of Jersey, just northwest of France, that he heard the old story. Locals eagerly told the 19th-century Scottish travel writer how, in a bygone age, their island was much more substantial, and that folks used to walk to the French coast. The only hurdle to their journey was a river—one easily crossed using a short bridge. “Pah!” Inglis presumably scoffed as he looked out across 22 kilometers of shimmering blue sea—because he went on to write in his 1832 book about the region that this was “an assertion too ridiculous to merit examination....

The New Jersey rapper/singer took to the stage that overlooked Bellagio’s famed fountain. Prior to Fetty taking the stage, Google’s Chrome logo drew eyes against a backdrop of the Paris Las Vegas’s Eiffel Tower. If you followed any of the attendees on Snapchat, you probably saw at least one Story filled with an extravagant fountain show, Google’s neon-lit brand and a smug selfie that needed no explanation. Google’s event started at 4:00....

What is Square? The startup company, founded in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, allows vendors to accept credit cards with the Square Register app for iOS and Android. The company also makes a Square Cash app for consumers on iOS and Android that allows for easy transfer of money between people, and is designed for occasions when cash or credit cards aren’t handy or wouldn’t be appropriate, say, splitting a bill at a restaurant....

Although the illness isn’t new, the epidemic that began in 2013 has had unprecedented impacts on the stars. At the beginning, big, brightly-colored sunflower sea stars were about as common and observable in the coastal waters as robins are in the trees, says Drew Harvell, a Cornell University biologist who studies disease in the changing ocean. “We don’t really know much about the pathogen,” she says—how it spreads from star to star isn’t even known....

As daylight wanes and darkness pays a visit once again, it’s not uncommon for mood and energy levels to take a nosedive right along with the temperature. Don’t worry—it’s normal for you to feel a little down during wintertime. About 1 in 7 Americans deal with this sort of seasonal irritability and sluggishness. Ironically, if you look closely at the World Happiness Report for 2019, you’ll notice the top 10 is peppered with cold-weather countries that deal with even lower temperatures and longer periods of darkness than most parts of the U....

And it’s that last point that’s most important to you as a user, because running “dead” software can put your devices and data at risk. If a security exploit is discovered, it may never get fixed—unless the software developer deems it serious enough to go back to something that’s been abandoned, which is not likely. To be fair to Microsoft, Windows 7 is now more than a decade old, and it’s about time users started moving to something a little more modern....

A fatality caused by a self-driving car might not be more tragic than another, but it does encourage the wariness many of us feel about technology making life-and-death decisions. Twelve months later, a survey by AAA revealed that 71 percent of Americans were too scared to zip around in a totally autonomous ride—an eight percent increase from a ­similar poll taken before Herzberg’s death. Self-driving cars are already cruising our streets, their spinning lasers and other sensors scanning the world around them....

While buoys, ships, oil rigs, and even Hurricane Hunter aircraft that fly into storms near land all provide access to useful data, getting that close to a moving storm—and getting accurate information out of it—is challenging. Instead, scientists rely heavily on satellite imagery. They’ve developed some pretty innovative ways of scoping out the inner-workings of these isolated storms. Here’s a look at some of those methods. The Dvorak Technique Meteorologist Vernon Dvorak developed this technique in the late 1960s as a way for storm trackers to judge the intensity of a tropical cyclone based on its appearance on infrared satellite imagery....

Mask mandates have almost entirely vanished across the United States, after a Florida judge voided a federal requirement to cover faces while in transit. Major airlines and Amtrak swiftly discarded their mask rules. States, meanwhile, had been shedding their mask regulations all spring. Now, no state has a public mask rule. Guam, the final US territory to require masking indoors in public, may lift that requirement in early May. Although cases have declined substantially, COVID transmission remains high in some areas of the country....

The new feature lets you make phone calls using VoIP, with either a Wi-Fi connection or over your phone’s 3G/4G connection, for free. Yep, Skype can already do this, but there’s a very good chance more people you know use Facebook than Skype–the Facebook branding and built-in network of people could mean a boost for VoIP like it’s never seen before. The only downside might be that calling someone over Messenger doesn’t trigger your phone’s ringer–instead, it pops up with a notification, just like you’ve gotten an email or text message....