“Plasticrust” sticking to rocks on the shores of MadeiraPhoto: Ignacio Gestoso
If you go to the beach, you’re likely to see some form of plastic pollution scattered in the waves or sprinkled among the sand grains. But researchers have identified a new, and perhaps more permanent type of plastic pollution, one that incorporates itself right into the rocky shoreline: “plasticrust,” a veneer of plastic encrusted right onto wave-licked rocks. Plasticrust is a form of plastic pollution not yet seen before on Earth’s coastlinesPhoto: Ignacio Gestoso
In a paper published this month in the journal Science of The Total Environment, Gestoso and his team formally dubbed the phenomenon as “plasticrust,” a never-before-seen form of plastic pollution.

Many flies and flying insects in hospitals carry bacteria that could pose an infection risk to patients, and more than half of them carry the types that resist antibiotics, a new study says. The findings show that “a variety of flying insects collected from U.K. hospitals do indeed harbor pathogenic bacteria of different species,” said study lead author Federica Boiocchi, a Ph.D. student at Aston University in Birmingham. The study also found that 53 percent of the bacterial strains on the insects were resistant to at least one class of antibiotics — so-called “superbugs.”

Now rivals are stepping up their advocacy in the U.S., where antitrust enforcers recently divvied up the job of examining antitrust concerns at large tech platforms, with the Justice Department preparing a Google probe. , which has a long-pending copyright case against Google, has briefed European antitrust regulators about Google’s use of data to target ads and was part of a successful coalition of plaintiffs against Google’s alleged anticompetitive behavior in its Android operating system for smartphones, which led to a record fine issued by the European Commission last year, of €4.3 billion. They and others are expected to seek out Justice Department officials as they prepare a Google probe, according to industry executives and antitrust lawyers.

Enthusiasm for a wealth tax on the country’s thin sliver of multimillionaires and billionaires may be unsurprising — after all, most Americans wouldn’t have to pay it. “We thought it would be a good idea,” Mr. Simmons explained by phone as he waited out a traffic jam in the Boston area. “Liesel and I decided to reach out to some other folks to see if they thought it was a good idea, too.”

PC giant Microsoft has informed its staff not to use popular chat app and competitor Slack, adding it to a list of “prohibited and discouraged technology” comprised of software and services that it does not want employees using outside of specific circumstances, Geekwire reported on Friday. Geekwire wrote that while the list does cite the competitive rivalry between Microsoft and the other tools’ developers, the “prohibited” section specifically consists of software and services that could pose an IT security or intellectual property management risk. Slack has moved to compete by building better native Office 365 support into its products, though Microsoft has also introduced a free version of Teams designed for small businesses that may grow into future Office 365 enterprise customers.

Located 34 miles from the North Carolina mainland, Ocracoke Island is fairly isolated. For several decades, he dropped out of sight, only to reappear in 1759 when he bought Ocracoke Island for £105 from a man named Richard Sanderson, a justice and later a General Assembly member in mainland North Carolina. Even today, things are a bit different for the island’s 948 residents than on mainland North Carolina.

Remote, in-memory key-value (RInK) stores such as Memcached and Redis are widely used in industry and are an active area of academic research. Instead, data center services should be built using stateful application servers or custom in-memory stores with domain-specific APIs, which offer higher performance than RInKs at lower cost. In this paper, we evaluate the potential performance improvements of stateful designs, propose a new abstraction, the linked, in-memory key-value (LInK) store, to enable developers to easily implement stateful services, and discuss areas for future research.

Six days ago, on the 18th, I saw a familiar (and super helpful) notification from the Revolut app:

“You have reached your monthly spending limit”, with no information at all as to transaction, merchant or amount. Meanwhile, the fraudulent transactions keep happening, long after I canceled my card and told Revolut it wasn’t me. However, this wasn’t proof enough for Revolut, who apparently still think I’m the one making the transactions, knowing that they will be declined because I canceled my card.

Libra offers new revenue opportunities, partly by inviting people to exchange national currencies for the new medium, thereby gifting Facebook and its partners a vast pool of funds. In these territories, and more affluent places, the new currency also offers Facebook the chance to accelerate what sits at the heart of everything it does: the harvesting of endless data, which can then be monetised. Facebook is at pains to address such anxieties, but its initial outline of how the new currency will be used in Messenger and WhatsApp via Calibra is not exactly reassuring.

In a typical data-processing program, the representation of data in memory is distinct from its representation in a serialized form on disk. LoCal extends a region calculus into a location calculus, employing a type system that tracks the byte-addressed layout of all heap values. We transform the existing Gibbon compiler to use LoCal as an intermediate language, with the goal of achieving a balance between code speed and data compactness by introducing just enough indirection into heap layouts, preserving the asymptotic complexity of traditional representations, but working with mostly or completely serialized data.