 Coming up on DTNS, you can't stop Science Weeks folks. We're talking Microscope Tech with Ariel Waldman plus Europe and Google Square off over news snippets and an app that aims to protect your privacy and bring society back to life amid a pandemic. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, April 9th, 2020 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Oakland, California, I'm Justin Robert Young. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And we're very happy to have back on the show Ariel Waldman, host and producer of Offworld on tested.com, NASA advisor, global director, science hacker, day and Antarctic explorer. How's it going, Ariel? I'm good, how are you doing? It's very good to have you back. I can't wait to talk about moss piglets, water bears, tardigrades and how to find them with some microscopes. Yeah. We're gonna do that. We were just talking about sandwiches, quite a lot of talk about sandwiches and whether a hot dog is a sandwich, whether a hamburger is a sandwich, that was part of our wider conversation on good day internet become a member and get that show. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Mary Jo Foley reports that according to sources, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay informed his team that the dual screen surface Neo device won't ship in 2020 as originally announced. The delay will also see Microsoft not enabling third party dual screen windows 10X devices in this year as well. And sources say that the Android based surface duo has not been delayed as part of these internal discussions. The Unicode consortium announced that it was delaying the release of Emoji 14.0 due to COVID-19, likely not releasing until spring 2022. Emojis for the release have not been finalized and the deadline for submissions is delayed through September 2020. The release of Emoji 13 is still on schedule and should be available on devices by fall 2020. Google Hangouts Meet is just being rebranded folks. It's okay, they're not killing it. Google Meet is the new name according to The Verge. Google made it official in a Google Cloud blog post Wednesday when listing a number of privacy measures. Google Meet users will keep remote meetings secure. Meet is an independent part of G Suite and Google says usage is way up. As you might expect 25 times what it was in January and gaining more than two million new users per day. But again, just a change to take the word hangouts out. I know sometimes Google stuff is unknowable but why didn't they do this a long time ago? Yeah, I know. The US Federal Communications Commission approved Google's request to operate a portion of the 8,000 mile undersea Pacific light cable network system. Google has approval to operate the cable between the US and Taiwan but not Hong Kong. Google and Facebook both contributed to the cable systems construction costs and warned in its petition that without the added cable capacity, the value of large recent capital investments that Google's made in the United States is significantly reduced. Being of Google, they updated a support page which suggests AI chat agent Google Duplex is being expanded to the UK, Australia and Canada in a limited capacity. New Zealand previously ran a pilot duplex program to confirm holiday hours for a small group of local businesses. Google could also use duplex to help confirm if restaurants are currently closed or have altered hours or services due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Ever heard of it? Yeah, I think I might have. On the other side of helping you figuring out local businesses, Yelp told employees Thursday it's cutting 1,000 jobs and furloughing another 1,100 workers as business suffers from small business closures due to that pandemic that Justin just mentioned. Yelp had 5,950 employees at the end of 2019 and the company is also cutting server costs, de-prioritizing multiple projects and cutting executive pay by 20 to 30%. Alphabet's drone delivery company, Wing, has seen a significant increase in demand as social distancing rules continue to be observed. Business Insider reports that Wing drones have made over 1,000 deliveries in the last two weeks and Bloomberg reports that deliveries in the US and Australia have doubled and delivery options have expanded to items like pasta and baby food for people staying at home. I got excited there, kind of a whistle. Wing currently operates in Virginia state in the US anyway, Finland and Australia. And Microsoft announced that its collaboration tool teams had a new record 2.7 billion meeting minutes beating its mid-March high of 900 million by 200%. Teams also announced custom backgrounds, custom images slated for November, a raise hand feature launching globally this month and one-click session ends and participation reports from meeting organizers. Microsoft plans to introduce AI-driven real-time background noise suppression later this year as well. All right, let's talk about a crackdown that's happening in Europe, Justin. What a shocker. Last year, the EU passed an online copyright reform bill which included Article 11 to extend digital copyright cover snippets of news stories, something typically scraped and used by news aggregators like Google News. France was the first EU member country to pass the reform into national law and the country's competition authority has now ordered Google to negotiate with publishers to pay for reuse of news snippets used in Google News and Search. Google has previously changed Google News to show only headlines and URLs, but the competition authority has ruled that the withdrawal of snippets to deny payment is likely to constitute an abuse of dominant market position. The order requires Google to negotiate in good faith with publishers for three months and to show content snippets in news during that time in accordance with publishers' wishes. Once payment agreements are reached, Google must pay publishers retroactively going back to October 2019. So yeah, you heard that right. They put a law that said you can't use snippets without paying for them. Google said, great, then we'll take the snippets out and a bunch of publishers saw the traffic go down and said, we'll let you put the snippets in for free. It's worth it to us. Other publishers got mad about that and Europe has now told Google that their dominant market position means it's an abuse to pull the snippets, that they must use the snippets and also must pay for them. Obviously, Google is probably going to appeal this ruling, I'm sure, but in the meantime, if it does stick and if it is applied across Europe, not just in France, I would expect Google to either pull Google News, which they've done in Spain when they ran into a similar situation before it was a European-wide rule, or replace it and just say, we're gonna come up with an Apple News-like thing that just sidesteps this whole situation because remember, Google News is really just supposed to be the Google search engine but narrowed down to just news stories. Yeah, and that's the issue here, and it comes at a very, very, very unfortunate time for these websites because traffic and advertising are very much in going in opposite directions and you want as many gaudy numbers as you possibly can, hopefully for when this economy restarts, you're going to have a good ad rate sheet for the advertisers to come back to. If I'm Google, I'm gonna go through this three month period, I'm going to good faith negotiate and then in all likelihood, unless the payment structure is something that is a sweetheart deal worth more than me rebuilding another product, then I'm gonna pull it. I mean, they've shown that that's been the default position and to be totally honest, looking at this one and Europe never change, I don't blame them. It seems odd to me that Google would just say, all right, we don't care to make a product that works around these laws better, we're gonna pull the whole thing. I don't really see that happening. I do some sort of a standalone Apple news type product, like you mentioned, Tom, that seems the most feasible to me. I mean, is it gonna get Google out of hot water with this whole argument that they're so dominant in the marketplace that publishers need to squeeze money out of them somehow? I don't know. I mean, I guess you're not dominant in a particular market if you're not in the market anymore, so if they pulled the product, that could fix that, right? I suppose, yeah. I mean, if news is news, you have to package it pretty differently for Europe to be like, very clever, Google. All right, I guess you won this one. Here's the other thing from Google's perspective in terms of not agreeing to this is that you do have to wonder where is the next step here, right? Like what do you have to pay for links? Do you have to pay for other things that are involved in what Google just considers to be a scraping of the internet? We don't know. I mean, the good news is those processes would take as long as this process took, which has taken a decade to get to this point. But you're right, it still might get there. It's interesting to think about. Let's talk a little bit about the state of track and trace regarding the virus. Restricting people's movements slows the spread of the virus, saves lives, keeps the healthcare system working. It also kills the economy because people can't do certain jobs anymore. But if you ease the social distancing too soon, you strain the healthcare system, people die, and that also hurts the economy. New York University economist and Nobel Laureate Paul Romer is among economists and healthcare experts urging governments to stop focusing on that Sophie's choice and instead focus on repeatedly testing those without symptoms. If you've got the symptoms, they're just like just assume they have it. Definitely test those without symptoms to determine who is infected. Asymptomatic infected people who test positive could then self-isolate until they test negative when they are then allowed to return to work and travel and socialize. In other words, you don't have to restrict everyone if you know who's infected. Tests would still be conducted every two weeks under Romer's plan. Testing could be voluntary with social pressure enough to ensure compliance, giving businesses the right to refuse service if you're not being tested. Like, hey, if you haven't been tested, we're not gonna let you in here. Now, we can have all kinds of arguments about whether that would work or not, but the focus has come up with a system that focuses on that. A Booth School Survey showed that 93% of economists agree that some kind of massive increase in testing is required for an economic restart. Ezekiel Emanuel, Chair of the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, believes an increase in testing could lead to restarting the economy in June, if done right. Harvard Medical Faculty have outlined similar ideas. So we have a couple of challenges if we even wanna follow that advice. One challenge is to find the money to massively increasing the testing availability in the lab capacity. There's a lot of coverage about that out there. Another challenge, once you have that, is to how to track people and balance privacy rights, how to not let this be a land grab into privacy. One idea comes from researchers at MIT who have developed a system called PACT, Private Automatic Contact Tracing. It uses Bluetooth on your mobile device. The way the system works is it assigns random numbers, not just one, but random numbers to each device. So you can't link one number to a device. There's a lot of numbers in the system. That number is not linked to any other information. Devices then send that number to each other anonymously and record which numbers were in range from about 40 feet. So you're out walking around, your phone says, oh, I was near this number and that number and that number. And again, those numbers aren't tied to a device in particular. They're part of a set that's part of a device. And that set is kept secret until a person tests positive for COVID-19. Then they would be made to upload that list of numbers from their device to a database and which numbers they received. So these are my numbers I was infected. These are the numbers that I was near. And then your device can automatically look into the database and see if your numbers are in there. You can confirm positives to see if your device came near them. And if so, then you can choose to get tested or self-isolate. There's no geolocation involved in this. There's no personal information ever used. But it would allow us to tell if we're good about keeping the devices on us and all of that, which, you know, there's other questions about compliance here. But it's a system that says we can preserve the privacy and still let people know with a sort of double blind system whether they were near someone who was infected without having to tell them who that infected person was. Whatever system is used would need to preserve anonymity and any requirements would have to have a sunset date after which the system would no longer be in use. That's the pretty day we go across all these kinds of things. But what do you guys think of this idea of that, you know, I wanted to set up why this track and trace is so important, but what do you think of this idea of having this as a system? Well, you know, we're gonna get something in this vein. Much as the attacks on 9-11 gave us the Patriot Act, I believe we are going to get some kind of legislation or push for enhanced contact tracing, not only for this pandemic and subsequent waves of it, but also for future pandemics. The question is exactly how we balance that. And if we, as many people are unhappy at some of the civil liberty trade-offs that we did give back at the turn of the century, then things like this where it is voluntary, it does involve you interacting with people, but also it doesn't involve specific geolocation or your personal information. Maybe that's a place where people can meet halfway. You know, the whole voluntary thing on its surface, it's like, this is great. You know, as a rule, people want to help other people. You know, you wanna be part of the solution, not the problem. But as we've seen across the world, certainly where we all live in the US, across the US, the rules are different, depends on where you are. The leaders in charge might have different opinions, depends on where you are. How much you feel that you should be doing things that other people are doing or not doing, depends on who you are. So I think that a lot of this, you know, particularly the researchers at MIT, that is a great idea, but it does require someone to be like, I'm on board with this, I trust the system, and I am in a position to understand how it works enough to be of help. Yeah, and it also needs to be part of operating systems. You're gonna need at least Apple and Google on board to implement this on the massive platforms. Ariel, what do you make of all this? I mean, the short of it, I think is that technology is actually not the answer. People are. I think there are still too many instances for things to be incorrect, for misreadings to happen when it's based on technology. Also, when just looking at the science of how many people are catching something because they were within the same room or touched the same surface versus people who were across the street while someone was walking by. You know, I think we've been seeing a lot of success when there has been the capacity to do contact tracing with humans. And so I am much more on the side of, you know, let's keep trying to like get and train an army of people to do contact tracing the way it has been done because it has been seen to be effective. We just don't have the capacity for it. But I think technology sort of being the like, oh, we don't need people, we just have technology. I actually don't think it's going to be helping I don't think it'll be yielding the same amount of help that it would be if you're doing actual person-to-person contact and tracing, you know, where they've been and who they've been around as opposed to whose phones are getting pinged. I think there's just way too much, I guess granularity to it that's missing. I think there's a lot of potential for just misreadings. And right now with everything being as it is, there's just so much misinformation and so many people who are misunderstanding the recommendations and the alerts and the warnings that they're getting. So I think this would actually be trouble for creating more of that rather than relying on a system that we already know works. Well, theoretically, this would just be a starting place for human-to-human contact tracing, right? Like that you would find out, somebody says that they are infected, right? And so now you pull the registry of all the phones that they pinged and then you're still going person-to-person and checking all the people there, you just have a starting point. Yeah, I don't know. I'm skeptical. Well, another system that works well in theory but has seen a lot of disruption lately is the supply chain. And you can look at Apple as a bit of a canary in the coal mine for how well tech companies are weathering the global pandemic or not weathering it well. A Wall Street Journal report shows how Foxconn follows Chinese rules to supply workers with face masks and check their temperature daily. The company also does its own social distancing and disinfecting measures. Workers must scan QR codes to record where they sit in a cafeteria. They can't face each other while they're eating. Foxconn also believes it's an autumn launch. It says it's taking the proper precautions. But will people want to buy those iPhones? A key bank analysis of spending data estimates that iPhone sales in the US fell 56% year over year in March. And the South China Morning Post notes that as customers begin returning to stores in China, retailers are offering pretty steep discounts on the iPhone 11, though not from Apple itself. Yeah, this is, I mean, proof's in the pudding, right? If we even, if we see an iPhone 9 slash SE ship in the next month, I think that tells us a lot. But even if we don't, it's whether Foxconn can get these things made and we see an autumn launch. Justin, do we think people will be in a position to want to buy these? Whether or not, I think we're getting them because, look, China is in a very, very interesting situation. Not only have they been ravaged by this virus as much of the world has, although we don't exactly know how much because of the secrecy of their government, there's no doubt that their economy has been affected by it and there were certainly signs that it was in trouble beforehand. I believe that the iPhone 9 or whatever else it's going to be called could be one of the most important in terms of understanding the state of the Chinese supply chain products that we have seen in our recent memory. I believe that they are going to put a priority on it. They want it to be good and they want it to be on time and what the Chinese government wants very often the Chinese government gets. Hey folks, if you wanna get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. Ariel Waldman did a video for tested.com recently on how to find tardigrades in your backyard. Those are the Microsoft, or a Microsoft, microscopic extremophiles. You may have heard them called water bears or moss piglets. Of course, being microscopic, you need a microscope to see them. So we wanted to know more about the tech of microscopes. Ariel, what makes a good microscope? Is it just magnification? Is it ease of use? Is it a combination? What do you need? I mean, it's a combination of things, but certainly to look at tardigrades, what you're wanting to get is any sort of microscope or magnification that allows you to see a quarter of a millimeter very easily. So tardigrades can be up to a millimeter big. I've personally never seen one that large, but a lot of the ones that I look at are a quarter of a millimeter to a third of a millimeter in size. And so on Amazon or wherever you can get many kids' microscopes are totally sufficient to see tardigrades. You've got also things like this. This is like the U-handy duet, which essentially is a little high-mag lens that can clip onto your phone and then you can have a little wide... That's a microscope, that thing that just clips onto the edge of your phone. That's crazy. Yeah, so this just here, let's see, this is a little ball lens. Yeah, you can just put a slide on top and it sort of clips in. It's a crazy echo. Oh, yeah. Let me do this. Okay, I can't hear you, but you're me. Yeah, so this is just a little ball lens and a slide that clips with magnets and it's good enough to see tardigrades. You have to create your own light source. So using it in daylight is important, but otherwise, yeah, things like this totally work. Now, we've seen a lot. I know you use a 60s era Bausch & Lohm, but which is great. But we've seen a lot of changes in microscopes in the past 15 years. Like what can people expect if they're like, you know what, I haven't used something since the dual optical stereo one that I used in high school in the 80s. Yeah, I mean, if you want to get the clip on sort of iPhone things, they work totally fine. They're not as good of clarity. You get some distortion around the sides, but the difference between a 1960s microscope and today in terms of actual microscopes that you might be buying for anywhere between a thousand to $10,000, depending on what you want to spend, really, it's a difference in build quality. So this Bausch & Lohm behind me is like really solid metal. Whereas this Nikon over here is mostly plastic, but the big thing you have to look out for when you're shopping like on Amazon or something for a relatively cheap microscope is the build quality. So for instance, Amscope is a very common brand on Amazon, but the build quality of them, even though they're on the cheaper end, is really terrible. But that said, the microscope itself, the actual objectives and everything, they're pretty similar. So it's not necessarily that you're going to get a bad image quality. It's mostly about the quality of the actual device itself. And for some people, that might not really be a big deal at all. If I know a lot of these work with phones in one way or another, even if they don't clip right onto the end in the cool fashion like that one, it doesn't matter if you're getting an optical microscope versus something electronic. What should you look for there? Yeah, so the two main differences if you don't know too much about microscopes is, a lot of the microscopes that you get for like looking at electronics or like things like this, these are essentially stereo microscopes, which means that they look at reflected light. So pretty much the way anything appears to us right now in the real world, like you can look at electronics with it, it's reflected light versus a different microscope like this Nikon is transmitted light, which means that you're actually putting light through this specimen. So when you see videos of tardigrades and they look transparent, it's because light is going through the tardigrade and they're tiny and transparent enough that it illuminates them. So in my video with tested, I tested out both sort of these stereo reflected ones and the transmitted light ones. Typically with stereos, you can't get as high of magnification. So you're going to be able to see more color of the tardigrade because it's not as transparent, but you're probably not going to be able to get a very detailed image because it's still going to be relatively small. Whereas a transmitted light microscope typically allows you to get higher magnification. So you can like really zoom in on their little creepy claws and stuff like that. Yeah, that microscope that you were talking about that's meant for looking at electronics, looking at circuit boards and stuff. I was impressed that you, even though it doesn't get that much magnification compared to an optical one, you could still see the little tardigrade swimming around in that little drop of water is pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, just getting, you know, there's so many options. So it's like that little stereo microscope. Yeah, you're barely going to see the tardigrade, but you'll see it and that one costs $75. The one that attaches, you know, to your phone is like $135. There's also a bunch of kids microscopes for around $150 or so. And then if you want to, you know, get into the larger ones, then you're getting into anywhere between a thousand to $6,000 maybe. Yeah, so if you just want to mess around and follow Ariel's tested video and dig up some moss and look at tardigrades, you probably don't need to spend $1,000 to do that. No, you can definitely just do it with any of these cheaper ones. Yeah, yeah. Now, if you can't get hold of a microscope, maybe you just can't get a chip to you in the time you want, you can still explore some microscopic critters, I understand, because you have an alternative at lifeundertheice.org. Yes, yeah, so if you don't have a microscope at all and you still want to sort of go hunting for tardigrades and other microbes, you can go to lifeundertheice.org on your phone or on your laptop, what have you. And it's kind of a tardigrade and microbe safari of all the different microbes that live under the ice in Antarctica that I was able to film. And it's all stitched together so that you can just pan around and zoom in and out and learn about different microbes. And it really gives you the feeling of being out of microscope and what it's like to have a large Petri dish of a bunch of different microbes to look at. So it really replicates the feeling of being out of microscope. Yeah, that's the cheapest way to start right there. And then you can decide if you want to plunk down $7,500 and go even further. That's so cool. Get ready to see a bunch of nematodes too, right? Like there's all kinds of other things you're gonna see. Yeah, I was saying in the tardigrade video for tested that the most likely thing you're going to see first and foremost are nematodes because for every single human on the earth, there are 60 billion nematodes. So nematodes are incredibly ubiquitous. So you're definitely going to see them first. But they're really cool in their own way because they're not quite earthworms and they're not quite snakes. They're their own creature. That's so cool. You think tardigrades are hanging out in our subreddit? I'd like to think so. I'm sure nematodes are as many of them as there are. That's for sure. Science and technology certainly collides in our subreddit. And as a human, or if you're not a human, that's cool too. You can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Thank you in advance. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's. Andrew, the keen archeologist wrote in about our science discussion yesterday about the technology of archeology and how it's advancing. Andrew says, yes, it definitely is. The jobs are catching up now. My current job was offered to me based on my experience with drones and 3D modeling in archeology. I'm now operating professional grade survey drones and making 3D models for work. I agree. It's a combination of collaboration and specialization that'll continue to drive tech adoption in archeology forward. I benefited from partnering with robotics experts early in my career. And now I've become an expert myself in less technologically savvy archeologists can go to for support with implementing more advanced technology in their project. So he's somebody that people go to and say, hey, how's this work? I continue to collaborate to expand my capabilities not just with other scientists. We're currently moving towards doing 3D printing in archeological resources for educational and interpretive materials. And to implement this, I'm collaborating with an artist. I know that 3D prints and finishes terrain for tabletop gaming to construct museum-style dioramas of archeological sites from drones derived from 3D source data. Drone-derived 3D source data turned into tabletop games. That sounds fascinating. Thank you, Andrew, for sending that along. That's cool stuff. Yeah, very cool. Also shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Degorashi A. Daniels, Steve Aya Darula, and Michael Aikens. Also thanks to Ariel Waldman, Science Week, Rolls Along, Tartigrades, and all sorts of things. Ariel, you keep pretty busy, so let folks know where they can keep up with all of your work. Yeah, I mean, the easiest place right now is just to check out my YouTube channel, which is youtube.com slash Ariel Waldman. I'm posting new videos week to week there, and you can find also videos from my Antarctic expedition and the Tartigrade guide, which is on Tested's YouTube channel, but I have a playlist where you can find that also on my channel as well. So that's probably the best place to find me now. Excellent. Also thanks to Justin Robert Young. Justin, it's been a week. What's been going on? Well, not much, Sarah. There's a lot of sitting around, eating food. Yeah, eating a sandwich perhaps. You know, I'll tell you, maybe a few. I have a new podcast though. In fact, I did a politics, politics, politics podcast yesterday where I spoke to a man who voted in Wisconsin. Despite the fact that there is indeed a stay-at-home order, they braved the wiles of Wisconsin so they could have their voice heard. In fact, that man was named Merritt, but not the Tom Merritt that you hear hosting this show. No, it's his brother Tim. If you are tickled by the fact that Tom has the brother Tim and he is living in Wisconsin and voting despite the stay-at-home order, then you need to go ahead and listen to politics, politics, politics. That is the Wednesday episode that was obviously yesterday. They kid did a good interview, didn't he? Yeah. He was a good interview. I just have to say, editorially, Tom and Tim Merritt is the most Midwest thing I think I've ever heard. He has the better beard too. He told Justin that and he's right. Hey folks, as he hung up, he made sure that I got that message. That is his parting shot, that's great. Hey folks, do you like comics? Do you like robots? Do you like tales set in oldie times but also modern cutting-age sci-fi? Well, you need atomic robo in your life. And not only that, you can support TeslaDine, which makes atomic robo and great comics like it. Fulfill both those needs at patreon.com slash teslaDine, just our way of sharing the love in these hard times. They didn't pay for that, that is just my own pick. Go check it out, patreon.com slash teslaDine and of course you can support us at dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon. Thanks so much for your support and also thanks for your feedback. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We are live, Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern, 20.30 UTC. We'll chug along again, same time, same place tomorrow and you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Len Peralta will be here to draw and Riley Black on the tech of paleontology. Talk to you tomorrow. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.