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From Taylor Swift: The Era's Tour (Taylor's Version) to The Marvels, here’s what you need to watch on the streaming platform.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Hardware sold for years by the likes of Intel and Lenovo contains a remotely exploitable vulnerability that will never be fixed. The cause: a supply chain snafu involving an open source software package and hardware from multiple manufacturers that directly or indirectly incorporated it into their products.

Researchers from security firm Binarly have confirmed that the lapse has resulted in Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro shipping server hardware that contains a vulnerability that can be exploited to reveal security-critical information. The researchers, however, went on to warn that any hardware that incorporates certain generations of baseboard management controllers made by Duluth, Georgia-based AMI or Taiwan-based AETN are also affected.

Chain of fools

BMCs are tiny computers soldered into the motherboard of servers that allow cloud centers, and sometimes their customers, to streamline the remote management of vast fleets of servers. They enable administrators to remotely reinstall OSes, install and uninstall apps, and control just about every other aspect of the system—even when it's turned off. BMCs provide what’s known in the industry as “lights-out” system management. AMI and AETN are two of several makers of BMCs.

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Enlarge / Poster issued by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advocating for measles immunizations in 1985. (credit: Getty | National Library of Medicine.)

In 2000, after a decadeslong public health battle and a Herculean vaccination program, the US won a coveted status: measles elimination. The designation means that the extremely infectious measles virus is no longer endemic in the US—defined as continuous transmission in the country over 12 or more months while in the presence of an effective disease monitoring system. The country went from having 3 to 4 million children fall ill with the severe infection each year, to tallying just dozens of mostly travel-linked cases.

But in an alarming turn, the country's elimination status is now at risk. Measles cases in the first quarter of 2024 have increased more than 17-fold over the cases seen in the first quarters of 2000 to 2023. Measles vaccination rates among kindergarteners have slipped in that time, too, with vaccination coverage in the last three consecutive years below the 95 percent target that is needed to prevent sustained transmission. Outside the US, measles cases are exploding in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions to routine childhood vaccination programs. Altogether, the conditions are prime for measles to regain its foothold in the country—and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is clearly anxious.

"The rapid increase in the number of reported measles cases during the first quarter of 2024 represents a renewed threat to elimination," CDC researchers write in a new analysis of the country's measles cases and surveillance system. The analysis was published Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

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Enlarge / Google's Magic Editor and Photo Unblur. (credit: Google)

Google Photos is opening up its premium editing tools to more users. The company says features like Magic Editor, Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, and Portrait Light will be open to everyone, though the editor will have some usage limits for free users. Previously these were exclusive to Pixel devices or users subscribing to Google One.

All of these AI-powered photo manipulators will be hit-or-miss depending on your exact photo, but "Portrait Light" will brighten up people's faces, and "Photo unblur" claims to be able to remove blur from movement or camera shake from your photos. Magic Eraser is Google's much-touted photo feature that lets you circle an item and have some AI processing remove it, generating a new background from the existing picture. These features will now all be free to Android and iOS users.

For an even bigger extension of Magic Eraser, there's "Magic Editor" that lets you remove things and move them around. Magic Editor lets you imprecisely circle objects via your touchscreen, and it's entirely up to the AI system to both 1) correctly identify and cut out the object you very roughly circled and 2) replace the background where it used to be. It's a lot to ask of a photo editor. Moving an item won't correct its perspective, and Google's examples all do their best to stay away from that with landscape shots and moving an object only a small amount. The nicest part of the editor is that when it has to generate something, you'll get several different solutions presented in a lineup and can pick the one that looks the best.

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H5N1 has infected cattle across the US and jumped from a mammal to a human for the first time. Experts fear it may someday evolve to spread among humans.

After pressure from state lawmakers, Apple is making concessions on “parts pairing.” Right-to-repair advocates say it’s the bare minimum.

Election deniers are training others to challenge voter rolls and overwhelm election officials. And they’re using tech to do it.

Three 5.25-inch floppy disks help keep Muni running every morning. A tech upgrade could take until 2030.

The 2024 Watches and Wonders event featured a timepiece as thick as a 25-cent coin, one accurate for 45 millions years, and another with a carbon-sucking case.

Enlarge / A selection of the Fitzwilliam Museum coins that were studied, including coins of Charlemagne and Offa. (credit: The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge)

Sometime around 660 CE, silver coinage replaced gold as the dominant form of currency in northwest Europe. But what was the source of all that silver? According to a recent paper published in the journal Antiquity, silver for the earlier post-Roman coins during this period came from Byzantine silver plate, while silver for the later coins most likely came from mines located in Melle, Aquitaine.

“This was such an exciting discovery," said co-author Rory Naismith, a medieval historian at the University of Cambridge. "I proposed Byzantine origins a decade ago but couldn’t prove it. Now we have the first archaeometric confirmation that Byzantine silver was the dominant source behind the great seventh-century surge in minting and trade around the North Sea.”

There are a number of high-tech tools that can be used to learn more about historic currencies. For instance, Michael Wiescher, a nuclear physicist at the University of Notre Dame, has combined XRF scaling with PIXE mapping of Roman denarii to test the currency's quality and learn more about the production techniques. Working with his undergraduate students, he has also used electron spectroscopy to measure the silver content of each coin and learn about how the impurities were distributed.

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Our new limited-series podcast explores AI’s impact on policy, the economy, science, democracy, sustainability, and more.

Some businesses are replacing people with AI; others are augmenting their workforce or hiring new workers. The long-term impact on labor is murky.

Some businesses are replacing people with AI; others are augmenting their workforce or hiring new workers. The long-term impact on labor is murky.

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Among the many things upended by the pandemic was the traditional American car-buying experience. Factories were idled to safeguard public health, then supply chains broke down, and the chip shortage took hold. Dealer inventories dried up, and hefty markups became the norm, causing new car prices to skyrocket. Those days are over, with inventory growing and both new and used prices dropping, particularly for electric vehicles, according to a new study from the digital marketplace cars.com.

Although automakers like Ford and General Motors have scaled back their EV ambitions, with a chorus of complaining car dealers in the background, it looks like increasing numbers of US car buyers are considering going electric.

Searches for new EVs on cars.com were up 14.9 percent year over year (14.7 percent month over month). And there are many more cars for buyers to pick from, with 107.7 percent more inventory than in March 2023 (or 8.8 percent more than this February). Those EVs are hanging around on lots longer than dealers might like, with an average of 91 days of inventory—the industry prefers to keep less than 60 days of inventory on hand and averaged 65 days for March 2024.

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These child-friendly stories will keep your little ones entertained and ease the stress of long road trips.

Your smartphone or wearable could help you out in a truly dangerous situation. Here are some options to consider.

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A board member of Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns Truth Social, has been accused of hacking one of the executives who helped bring the firm public as part of a corporate coup attempt, according to a lawsuit filed in the Southern District of Florida.

Trump Media became a publicly traded company last month when it merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a special purpose acquisition company. DWAC was first led by Patrick Orlando, one of the original architects of the deal to take Truth Social public. Orlando was fired in March 2023, after that deal was delayed, and replaced immediately by Eric Swider. That ouster is the focus of the lawsuit, which was filed in March of this year by a company Orlando controls called Benessere Investment Group.

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A new virtual experience allows users to explore the Clementinum’s stunning Baroque Library in Prague.A new virtual experience allows users to explore the Clementinum’s stunning Baroque Library in Prague.

We've tried dozens of litter boxes, pet cameras, and fancy cat furniture. These are our favorites.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of a pressurized lunar rover design conceived by Toyota and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. (credit: Toyota/JAXA)

On the sidelines of the state visit by the Japanese prime minister to Washington this week, US and Japanese officials have signed an agreement to cement a partnership that will pave the way for a Japanese astronaut to walk on the Moon.

The Japanese astronaut, still unnamed, will become the first international astronaut to walk on the Moon under the auspices of the NASA-led Artemis program. Astronauts from NASA's other major partners on Artemis—the European Space Agency (ESA), Canada, and the United Arab Emirates—will also get a chance to fly to the Moon, either to the planned Gateway space station in lunar orbit or on trips to the surface.

But Japan will get the first international seat on a lunar landing mission, President Biden announced Wednesday during a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Other topics on the agenda for the official visit included deepening economic, military, scientific, and educational ties between the two nations.

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