An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Employees for Best Buy-owned Geek Squad who visit people's homes to install electronics are fearful that they may get sick or help spread the coronavirus as they are told to keep working during the pandemic. Many Geek Squad employees told Motherboard that their customers are most at risk of having a severe case of Covid-19, because many of them are elderly or have underlying health conditions. The news comes after Motherboard reported how Best Buy was running at "full capacity," allowing hundreds of customers in stores at once and leading multiple employees to believe Best Buy saw a business opportunity in staying open during a time of crisis. After publication, Best Buy announced it would shorten opening hours and limit the number of customers allowed inside stores.

In-house agents are tasked with setting up and repairing Best Buy customers' electronics in their homes. That might include installing a doorbell, television set, kitchen appliance, or setting up their computer or home router, for example. "They're expected to be in people's homes where there are no personal boundaries, no social distancing, touching of product, etc," one current Geek Squad employee told Motherboard. "They have compared their employees to 'essential workers' [...] such as gas stations, hospitals, grocery stores." An internal Best Buy email sent to agents and obtained by Motherboard reflected this, saying "The work we do is considered essential to our client's and customer's [sic] needs and we are being asked to continue to serve our clients in their homes." Elderly people who cannot install technology themselves may wish to have such a service during the looming quarantine period in the U.S. But multiple Geek Squad employees Motherboard spoke to highlighted how they may be putting clients at risk because in-house agents cater heavily to retirement communities and senior citizens in general. Best Buy says if a customer is showing symptoms while an agent is in their home, the agent is allowed to cancel the current appointment. Agents can also ask in a pre-visit call if anyone in the household is experiencing symptoms. But as for the first point, "you'd already be at the potential risk of exposure!" one agent said.

Another internal message said that customers no longer need to sign for completion of a visit, so as to minimize contact between clients and Best Buy employees' phones.

schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: Here on Earth, our lives have been transformed by the Global Positioning System, fleets of satellites operated by the United States and other countries that are used in myriad ways to help people navigate. Down here, GPS is capable of pinpointing locations with accuracy measured in centimeters. Could it help astronauts on lunar voyages? Kar-Ming Cheung and Charles Lee of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California did the math, and concluded that the answer is yes: Signals from existing global navigation satellites near the Earth could be used to guide astronauts in lunar orbit, 385,000 km away. The researchers presented their newest findings at the IEEE Aerospace Conference in Montana this month.

Cheung and Lee plotted the orbits of navigation satellites from the United States's Global Positioning System and two of its counterparts, Europe's Galileo and Russia's GLONASS system -- 81 satellites in all. Most of them have directional antennas transmitting toward Earth's surface, but their signals also radiate into space. Those signals, say the researchers, are strong enough to be read by spacecraft with fairly compact receivers near the moon. Cheung, Lee and their team calculated that a spacecraft in lunar orbit would be able to "see" between five and 13 satellites' signals at any given time -- enough to accurately determine its position in space to within 200 to 300 meters. In computer simulations, they were able to implement various methods for improving the accuracy substantially from there.

On Monday, the Imperial College report on COVID-19 was released and the results are terrifying. For those who may not know, the Imperial College in London "has advised the government on its response to previous epidemics, including SARS, avian flu and swine flu," reports The New York Times. "With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies."

In a series of tweets, Jeremy C. Young, Assistant Professor of History at Dixie State, summarized what the report says would happen if the U.S. does absolutely nothing. That is, if we treat COVID-19 like the flu, go about our business, and let the virus take its course. The Imperial College team plugged infection and death rates from China, Korea, and Italy into epidemic modeling software and ran a simulation... Here's what would happen: 80% of Americans would get the disease. 0.9% of them would die. Between 4 and 8 percent of all Americans over the age of 70 would die. 2.2 million Americans would die from the virus itself. It gets worse. People with severe COVID-19 need to be put on ventilators. 50% of those on ventilators still die, but the other 50% live. But in an unmitigated epidemic, the need for ventilators would be 30 times the number available in the US. Nearly 100% of these patients die.

So the actual death toll from the virus would be closer to 4 million Americans -- in a span of 3 months. 8-15% of all Americans over 70 would die. How many is 4 million people? It's more Americans than have died all at once from anything, ever. It's the population of Los Angeles. It's 4 times the number of Americans who died in the Civil War...on both sides combined. It's two-thirds as many people as died in the Holocaust. Americans make up 4.4% of the world's population. If we extrapolate these numbers to the rest of the world (warning: MOE is high here), this gives us 90 million deaths globally from COVID-19, in 3-6 months. 15 Holocausts. 1.5 times as many people as died in all of World War II. The Imperial College then ran the numbers for what would happen if countries assumed a "mitigation" strategy and "suppression" strategy. You can read the full summarized breakdown of what happens in each scenario below, but basically the mitigation strategy flattens the curve with an actual death toll at around two million deaths while the suppression strategy has the death rate in the U.S. peaking at 3 weeks with only a few thousand deaths.

You can view a screenshot of the thread below:

schwit1 shares a report from UPI: Construction on NASA's mobile launcher program for the new Space Launch System moon rocket is 44 percent over budget and three years behind schedule, a new report said. The space agency has built one massive rolling platform to move its moon rockets, with another on the way. Crews are adapting the first launcher to be mated with the SLS rocket for its first launch, planned later this year. But the first launcher cost $308 million more than a budget set in 2014, for a total of $693 million, according to the report released Tuesday from NASA's Office of Inspector General. Construction of the first platform "lacked coordination and competition with design contractors, coupled with ... design errors and integration challenges that drove the project's cost increases and schedule delays," the report said.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket overcame a rare in-flight engine failure soon after launch from Florida's Space Coast Wednesday to place 60 satellites in orbit for the company's Starlink Internet network. Spaceflight Now reports: One of the rocket's nine first stage engines shut down prematurely around 2 minutes, 22 seconds, after liftoff from pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, an event visible in a view from a camera streaming live video from the Falcon 9 as it climbed into the upper atmosphere. Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, confirmed in a tweet that the Falcon 9 experienced an "early engine shutdown on ascent, but it didn't affect orbit insertion." The rocket's other Merlin engines fired a little longer to compensate for the loss of thrust. The rest of the Falcon 9's climb into orbit appeared to go according to plan, and the upper stage deployed the 60 Starlink satellites into orbit around 15 minutes after liftoff. "Shows value of having 9 engines!" Musk wrote on Twitter.

The first stage missed a landing attempt on SpaceX's drone ship parked in the Atlantic Ocean northeast of Cape Canaveral, the second time SpaceX has missed a rocket landing in the company's last three missions. It was not immediately clear whether the engine shutdown on ascent affected the recovery attempt. Musk promised a "thorough investigation" of Wednesday's early engine shutdown before the next Falcon 9 launch, and it was not immediately clear whether the inquiry might prompt launch delays.

According to The Associated Press and confirmed by The Wall Street Journal, General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler will shut down their factories for at least two weeks. "Meanwhile, Tesla appears to be defying officials in Alameda County, California -- the site of its only North American factory, in Freemont -- who have ordered Tesla to stop operations," reports Ars Technica. From the report: TechCrunch reports that a Wednesday email from the company's human resources department instructed employees to come to work. "We still do not have final word from the city, county, state and federal government on the status of our operations," the email said. "We have had conflicting guidance from different levels of government."

In an email published Tuesday by Eletrek, Tesla's head of HR argued that Tesla didn't need to shut down because the company counts as National Critical Infrastructure, as defined by the Department of Homeland Security. The category "includes auto manufacturing and energy infrastructure," according to Tesla. "People need access to transportation and energy, and we are essential to providing it," the email said. Tesla evidently believes that its interpretation of this DHS guidance supersedes the instructions of Alameda County officials to shut down. It remains to be seen if Alameda County officials agree. UPDATE: BuzzFeed News is reporting that Tesla will drop from around 10,000 employees to 2,500, following a shelter-in-place order announced on Monday in six counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's unclear when the scaleback will take place, or what the company is doing to prevent those workers from being infected with or spreading the virus.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: New York City is working with the hospitality industry to possibly convert entire hotels into hospitals for patients without the novel coronavirus, in an effort to increase capacity at medical facilities as the outbreak grows. The city's emergency management commissioner, Deanne Criswell, said in an interview Wednesday that hotels could be vital as New York City needs more beds to treat those with Covid-19. The hotels would be for "those non-Covid patients who are really minor but need care," she said. It couldn't be determined how many beds would be immediately available for these patients or how much the city would pay hotels.

The city currently uses hotels for some quarantine, and could use them to house health-care workers who need places to stay, Ms. Criswell said. With the city's tourism industry hit by the virus, many hotels are now empty, she added. New York City has 1,339 confirmed cases of the virus as of Wednesday afternoon, with 10 deaths. City officials also hope to turn the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a large hospital, using federal medical stations, according to Ms. Criswell. Mayor Bill de Blasio said earlier this week the city had an additional 1,300 beds by reopening closed hospitals and other facilities, including Roosevelt Island's Coler hospital, a city hospital that was no longer in use. A recently built nursing home in Brooklyn will also be used to hold 600 beds, and two Bronx hospitals with more than 100 beds will also be available, according to Mr. de Blasio. To make more space, the city is also discharging patients that can leave hospitals, canceling elective surgeries, and building more capacity within hospitals. Earlier today, the U.S. and Canada announced it will suspend non-essential travel between the two countries to prevent the spread of the virus. This comes two days after Canada closed its borders to non-citizens with exceptions for U.S. citizens, air crews and diplomats.

The U.S. is also ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to suspend foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days.

Hospital workers in Washington state have been making protective medical gear out of office supplies and other run-of-the-mill materials as they deal with a severe shortage of equipment needed to care for patients who may have Covid-19. From a report: Among the supplies coming in handy: clear vinyl sheets. "We are very close to being out of face shields," said Becca Bartles, executive director of infection prevention at Providence St. Joseph Health, a 51-hospital system. "Masks, we're probably a couple of days away" from running out, she said. To buy time, Providence infection control and quality experts designed prototype face-shields with off-the-shelf materials: marine-grade vinyl, industrial tape, foam and elastic. Monday night they bought supplies at craft stores and Home Depot. On Tuesday, about 20 administrative staff members at the health system's corporate headquarters volunteered to work an assembly line in a large conference room, putting together 500 home-spun face shields that were going to a hospital in Seattle that night.

McGruber shares a report from Business Insider: Facebook is blocking users from posting some legitimate news articles about the coronavirus in what appears to be a bug in its spam filters. On Tuesday, multiple Facebook users reported on Twitter that they found themselves unable to post articles from certain news outlets including Business Insider, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and the Times of Israel. It's not clear exactly what has gone wrong, and Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.

Alex Stamos, an outspoken former Facebook security exec, speculated that it might be caused by Facebook's shift to automated software after it sent its human content moderators home. "It looks like an anti-spam rule at FB is going haywire," he wrote on Twitter. "Facebook sent home content moderators yesterday, who generally can't [work from home] due to privacy commitments the company has made. We might be seeing the start of the machine learning going nuts with less human oversight. In a tweet, VP of Integrity Guy Rosen said: "We're on this -- this is a bug in an anti-spam system, unrelated to any changes in our content moderator workforce. We're in the process of fixing and bringing all these posts back."

Rocket Lab's Electron launch vehicle has received Category 1 certification from NASA, meaning it is authorized for use on more important missions, opening up a whole new revenue stream for the growing launch provider. TechCrunch reports: The certification was largely based on the success of "This One's for Pickering" in late 2018, the company's fourth commercial launch, which took a batch of NASA cubesats into orbit as part of the ELaNa-19 mission. This experimental mission was undertaken as part of NASA's Venture Class Launch Services initiative to test out newer and smaller launch vehicles using non-critical payloads.

Certification categories go from 1-3, from "high risk" to "low risk," based largely on successful launches, which as you might imagine is something of a catch-22: You need the launches to get the certification, but you need the certification to get the launches. Fortunately, one can break the cycle with non-essential missions like small experimental satellites -- which is sort of the purpose of the VCLS program. Category 2 certification is in process, but is of course even more stringent and requires six consecutive successful missions with the same rocket configuration. Rocket Lab has 10 in a row at present, but there's likely a lot of paperwork involved as well.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The coronavirus has now been identified in all 50 U.S. states, and more than 100 deaths in the country have been linked to the illness. Those known deaths, all from the past three weeks, come as the number of diagnoses has surged into the thousands as the virus has spread and as testing has expanded significantly. On Tuesday evening, West Virginia became the 50th state to report its first case.

As of Tuesday evening, at least 5,587 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and three U.S. territories, have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 101 patients with the virus have died. Several hundred new cases are now being identified each day, including about 700 on both Saturday and Sunday and nearly 900 on Monday. The pace of diagnosis is expected to quicken as the virus spreads and testing becomes more widely available. More state and private labs have started running tests for the coronavirus in recent days, increasing the capacity to identify new patients after weeks of delays and test kit shortages. For comparison, a total of 70 cases were reported in the U.S. at the start of the month.

"Since then, new cases have poured in, including more than 200 announced on Monday in New York State alone," the report adds. "More than 2,200 cases have been announced nationwide since Friday morning, and the virus is now spreading in parts of the country where it had not been identified as recently as a week ago."

An Austin, Texas based technology company is launching "artificially intelligent thermal cameras" that it claims will be able to detect fevers in people, and in turn send an alert that they may be carrying the coronavirus. Motherboard reports: Athena Security is pitching the product to be used in grocery stores, hospitals, and voting locations. It claims to be deploying the product at several customer locations over the coming weeks, including government agencies, airports, and large Fortune 500 companies. "Our Fever Detection COVID19 Screening System is now a part of our platform along with our gun detection system which connects directly to your current security camera system to deliver fast, accurate threat detection," Athena's website reads. Athena previously sold software that it claims can detect guns and knives in video feeds and then send alerts to an app or security system.

"The AI detects it, and it says I have a 99.5 degrees temperature. It notices that I have a fever, and that I am infected," an Athena employee says during a video demonstration of the product. "Since higher temperature is one of the first symptoms, these cameras can be life-saving" warning the person that they could have the virus and encouraging that person to take serious steps to self-quarantine," the representative added in an email, suggesting that the company could deploy them at polling locations. "Although many voters today are bound to get it, steps in the coming weeks could prevent them from spreading the bug to loved ones and strangers alike." The representative claimed that the software is accurate within half a degree and that it detects a dozen different parts on the body. They added the system has "no facial recognition, no personal tracking."

As countries affected by the coronavirus pandemic expect to run out of ventilators and other equipment, makers are desperately trying to fill the gap with proposals for open-source, do-it-yourself devices. From a report: Most cases of COVID-19 -- the disease caused by the novel coronavirus -- do not require hospitalization. But for people hospitalized with severe infections, coronavirus damages their lungs and makes it hard to breathe in and circulate the amount of oxygen that their bodies need. Ventilators, machines that provide the lungs with oxygen, are proving to be key to treating these people, who seem to comprise around 10 percent of cases. Governments are already preparing for what a shortage of ventilators could do to their health care systems.

In a call to U.S. governors on Monday that was shared with The New York Times, President Donald Trump told states not to rely fully on the federal government for equipment. "Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment -- try getting it yourselves," he said, according to The Times. "We will be backing you, but try getting it yourselves. Point of sales, much better, much more direct if you can get it yourself." Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on CNN that the U.S. has stockpiled 12,700 ventilators, but in a worst-case scenario that number might not be enough. In Italy, he added, physicians are having to make "very tough decisions" about whom to treat.

India could become the next global hotspot for virus cases, with experts warning containment measures that proved successful elsewhere in Asia may not work in the world's second-most populous country. From a report: The South Asian nation, which has so far reported 137 infections and three deaths, is trying to contain the virus by closing its borders, testing incoming travelers and contact tracing from those who tested positive. On Tuesday, the Indian Council of Medical Research announced it was ramping up the country's testing capacity to 8,000 samples a day from the current 500. Its director general Balram Bhargava maintained there was "no evidence" of the transmission of the virus in the community. But some experts in the nation of 1.3 billion people say that won't be enough to contain the spread. Other measures like widespread testing and social distancing may be infeasible in cities with a high population density and rickety health infrastructure.

While growth in total numbers has been slow until now, "the number will be 10 times higher" by April 15, said Dr. T. Jacob John, the former head of the Indian Council for Medical Research's Centre for Advanced Research in Virology, a government-funded institution. "They are not understanding that this is an avalanche," said John, who was also chairman of the Indian Government Expert Advisory Group on Polio Eradication and chief of the National HIV/AIDS Reference Centre at the Christian Medical College in Vellore. "As every week passes, the avalanche is growing bigger and bigger." So far India has been relatively unscathed by the virus compared with other countries in Asia.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced on Tuesday that European Union member nations will close EU's external borders for 30 days to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. CNBC reports: Movement of people within European Union member nations will be still be allowed under the restrictions. "The union and its member states will do whatever it takes," said European Council President Charles Michel. Michel said the EU will arrange for the repatriation of citizens of member countries. Breaking...

Misleading text messages claiming that President Trump was going to announce a national quarantine buzzed into cellphones across the country over the weekend, underscoring how rapidly false claims are spreading -- and how often it is happening beyond the familiar misinformation vehicles of Facebook and Twitter. From a report: The false texts spread so widely that on Sunday night the White House's National Security Council, fearing the texts were an attempt to spook the stock market as it opened Monday, decided to directly debunk the misleading claims in a Twitter post: "Text message rumors of a national #quarantine are FAKE. There is no national lockdown." But by then the messages already had spread widely, as had similar ones both in the United States and Europe in recent days. Text messages, encrypted communication apps such as WhatsApp and some social media platforms have carried similarly alarming misinformation, much of it with the apparent goal of spurring people to overrun stores to buy basic items ahead of a new wave of government restrictions.

The one claiming that Trump was going to impose a national quarantine included the advice: "Stock up on whatever you guys need to make sure you have a two week supply of everything. Please forward to your network." In fact, authorities have warned against aggressive buying that could disrupt supply chains and fuel panic. Trump addressed the misleading text messages at an afternoon news conference Monday, saying, "It could be that you have some foreign groups that are playing games." On the possibility of a national quarantine, Trump said: "We haven't determined to do that at all. ... Hopefully we won't have to."

For decades, physicists have dreamed of this perfect amorphous solid. They desire ideal glass not so much for its own sake (though it would have unique, useful properties) but because its existence would solve a deep mystery. From a report: It's the mystery posed by every window and mirror, every piece of plastic and hard candy, and even the cytoplasm that fills every cell. All of these materials are technically glass, for glass is anything that's solid and rigid but made of disordered molecules like those in a liquid. Glass is a liquid in suspended animation, a liquid whose molecules curiously cannot flow. Ideal glass, if it exists, would tell us why. Inconveniently, ideal glass would take so long to form that it may not have done so in all of cosmic history. Physicists can only seek indirect evidence that, given unlimited time, it would. Ramos, an experimental physicist at the Autonomous University of Madrid, hoped that after 110 million years of aging, the Spanish amber might have started to show glimmers of perfection. If so, he would know what the molecules in ordinary glass are really doing when they appear to do nothing.

Ramos's amber measurements are part of a surge of interest in ideal glass. In the past few years, new methods of making glass and simulating it on computers have led to unexpected progress. Major clues have emerged about the nature of ideal glass and its connection to ordinary glass. "These studies provide renewed support for the hypothesis of the existence of an ideal-glass state," said Ludovic Berthier, a physicist at the University of Montpellier who was centrally involved in the recent computer simulations. But the emerging picture of ideal glass only makes sense if we set aside one piece of evidence. "Indeed," Berthier said, "the amber work stands out as difficult to rationalize."

Facebook on Tuesday told employees that it would give each of them $1,000 bonuses in an effort to support its workforce working remotely as they wait out the coronavirus pandemic. From a report: Facebook employs nearly 45,000 full-time workers, according to a January financial filing, but it also employs several thousands more contract workers. It is unclear if those contractors will also receive a bonus. Facebook isn't the only tech company providing cash bonuses to workers. Workday announced Monday it would pay cash bonuses worth two weeks of pay to its employees. Facebook on Tuesday also announced a $100 million program to help small businesses impacted by COVID-19. The program will provide up to 30,000 eligible small business with "cash grants and ad credits to help during this challenging time."

Microsoft's Bing team has launched a website for tracking coronavirus (COVID-19) infections across the globe. From a report: "Lots of Bing folks worked (from home) this past week to create a mapping and authoritative news resource for COVID19 info," said Michael Schechter, General Manager for Bing Growth and Distribution at Microsoft. The website, accessible at bing.com/covid, is a basic tracker. It shows up-to-date infection statistics for each country around the globe and all the US states. Data is aggregated from authoritative sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

Uber said on Tuesday that it has begun suspending shared rides on its ride-hailing platform in the United States and Canada to limit the spread of the coronavirus. From a report: The pooled option, which allows riders to book trips at lower prices by sharing the car with up to three other passengers traveling in the same direction, has been disabled for users opening the apps in the two countries. "Our goal is to help flatten the curve on community spread in the cities we serve," senior vice president Uber Rides and Platform Andrew Macdonald said in a statement. A spokesman said similar steps outside the U.S. and Canada would be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Regular rides and the company's food delivery platform Uber Eats remain available, but Uber said it was in contact with local authorities to adjust operations as needed.