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"BIDEN WINS" declares the all-caps headline at CNN.com. And the headline at NBC News reads "JOE BIDEN DEFEATS DONALD TRUMP TO WIN THE WHITE HOUSE, NBC NEWS PROJECTS." NBC News reports: Joe Biden became president-elect Saturday after winning the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, NBC News projected. The former vice president amassed 273 Electoral College votes after winning Pennsylvania's 20 electors, according to NBC News, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House and defeat President Donald Trump. Biden's victory capped one of the longest and most tumultuous campaigns in modern history, in which he maintained an aggressive focus on Trump's widely criticized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. A majority of voters said rising coronavirus cases were a significant factor in their vote, according to early results from the NBC News Exit Poll of early and Election Day voters. Biden regularly criticized Trump as unfit for office and positioned his campaign as a "battle for the soul of America." He promised from the outset of his run to heal and unite the country if he won, and made central to his closing message a pledge to represent both those who voted for him as well as those who didn't when he got to the White House. As president, Biden will immediately be confronted with a bitterly divided nation in the throes of a pandemic that has already killed 236,000 Americans.

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"BIDEN WINS" declares the all-caps headline at CNN.com. And the headline at NBC News reads "JOE BIDEN DEFEATS DONALD TRUMP TO WIN THE WHITE HOUSE, NBC NEWS PROJECTS." NBC News reports: Joe Biden became president-elect Saturday after winning the pivotal state of Pennsylvania, NBC News projected. The former vice president amassed 273 Electoral College votes after winning Pennsylvania's 20 electors, according to NBC News, surpassing the 270 needed to win the White House and defeat President Donald Trump. Biden's victory capped one of the longest and most tumultuous campaigns in modern history, in which he maintained an aggressive focus on Trump's widely criticized handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. A majority of voters said rising coronavirus cases were a significant factor in their vote, according to early results from the NBC News Exit Poll of early and Election Day voters. Biden regularly criticized Trump as unfit for office and positioned his campaign as a "battle for the soul of America." He promised from the outset of his run to heal and unite the country if he won, and made central to his closing message a pledge to represent both those who voted for him as well as those who didn't when he got to the White House. As president, Biden will immediately be confronted with a bitterly divided nation in the throes of a pandemic that has already killed 236,000 Americans.

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"Boeing's much-maligned 737 Max jet could be cleared to fly again in just a few weeks," reports SFGate, adding that one U.S. airline plans to carry passengers "as early as December." Although the Federal Aviation Administration has not disclosed a public timeline for the Max's return to service, approval to lift the grounding could come as early as mid-November, according to Reuters. Boeing executives said they expect to gain FAA recertification before the end of the year. The company will also need to get approval from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency and Transport Canada, which are conducting their own respective reviews... American Airlines said it plans to operate one daily Boeing 737 Max roundtrip from Dec. 29 through Jan. 4 between its Miami hub and New York's LaGuardia Airport. If it takes off, American will be the first US carrier to bring back the Max... Other U.S. airlines operating the Max are taking a wait-and-see approach before assigning the fleet type to flights.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: France's Neoen SA will partner with Tesla Inc. to install one of the world's biggest lithium-ion batteries in Australia after reaching a grid connection deal with the power market operator. The 300-megawatt Victorian Big Battery will be located in the southeastern city of Geelong and use Tesla's Megapack technology. It will be double the size of Neoen's Hornsdale site in South Australia, which was the largest facility when it began operation in 2017. Installing the new system in Australia's second-most populous state will help to modernize and stabilize the local grid, which is targeting 50% of its power to come from renewable sources by 2030, Neoen said Thursday in a media release. The Paris-based company is targeting the battery to be operational by the end of 2021. [...] Victoria's grid still relies heavily on aging coal-fired plants, which have become increasingly unreliable during periods of extreme heat. The state has experienced power outages in recent summers as the system struggled to cope with a surge in demand as businesses and households cranked up air conditioners. Neoen's new project in Victoria will be supported by a 250 megawatt grid services contract with the Australian Energy Market Operator, and will also partner with network provider AusNet Services, the company said.

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Panasonic has collaborated with JR East on a vacuum cleaner-style device to solve a new problem that has sprung up on recent years: a rise in people dropping wireless earbuds onto train tracks. "The device is being tested at Ikebukuro station, a major hub in northern Tokyo, and early results suggest it works much faster than the traditional grabber," reports The Verge. From the report: JR East, the part of Japan's formerly private railway group that covers the Tokyo and Tohoku regions of the country, says that there were 950 incidents of dropped earbuds across 78 Tokyo train stations in the July-September quarter, Jiji Press reports. The figure apparently accounts for a quarter of all dropped items. According to JR East, station staff normally use a grabber-style "magic hand" tool to pick up larger items that fall onto tracks, like hats or smartphones. But the gravel between the rails makes smaller objects -- like, say, a left AirPod Pro -- more difficult to retrieve, meaning staff sometimes have to wait until after the last train.

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On planet K2-141b, oceans are made of molten lava, winds reach supersonic speeds and rain is made of rocks. "Scientists have referred to the bizarre, hellish exoplanet as one of the most 'extreme' ever discovered," reports CBS News. From the report: According to a new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from McGill University, York University and the Indian Institute of Science Education have uncovered details of one of the newest "lava planets" -- a world that so closely orbits its host star that much of it is composed of flowing lava oceans. Scientists found the atmosphere and weather cycle of K2-141b to be particularly bizarre. The Earth-sized exoplanet appears to have a surface, ocean and atmosphere all made of the same ingredients: rocks. While analyzing the planet's illumination pattern, scientists found that about two-thirds of the planet experiences perpetual daylight. K2-141b's close proximity to its star gravitationally locks it in place -- meaning the same side always faces the star. This scorching hot part of the planet reaches temperatures of over 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit. It's hot enough to not only melt rocks, but also vaporize them, creating a thin, inhospitable atmosphere. The rest of the planet is cloaked in never-ending darkness, reaching frigid temperatures of negative 328 degrees Fahrenheit.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: A team of researchers led by Osaka University and National Taiwan University created a system of nanoscale silicon resonators that can act as logic gates for light pulses. ... [The scientists] have increased the nonlinearity of silicon 100,000 times by creating a nano-optical resonator, so that all-optical switches can be operated using a continuous low-power laser. They accomplished this by fabricating tiny resonators from blocks of silicon less than 200 nm in size. Laser light with a wavelength of 592 nm can become trapped inside and rapidly heat the blocks, based on the principle of Mie resonance. "A Mie resonance occurs when the size of a nanoparticle matches a multiple of the light wavelength," author Yusuke Nagasaki says. With a nanoblock in a thermo-optically induced hot state, a second laser pulse at 543 nm can pass with almost no scattering, which is not the case when first laser is off. The block can cool with relaxation times measured in nanoseconds. This large and fast nonlinearity leads to potential applications for GHz all-optical control at the nanoscale. "Silicon is expected to remain the material of choice for optical integrated circuits and optical devices," senior author Junichi Takahara says. The current work allows for optical switches that take up much less space than previous attempts. This advance opens the way for direct on-chip integration as well as super-resolution imaging. The study has been published in the journal Nature Communications.

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In an effort to cut road deaths, the Dutch government will be using a new digital system to automatically reduce electric bicycles' power in residential or built-up areas of Amsterdam. The Guardian reports: The digital technology, which has been successfully trialled on a 4km stretch of bike lanes at Schiphol airport, was funded by the Dutch ministry of infrastructure and water management. The not-for-profit Townmaking Institute behind the concept is working with e-bike manufacturers and government authorities with the expectation that the speed-cutting technology and new regulations could be rolled out by 2022. Sixty-five people died last year while riding e-bikes, which have an integrated electric motor to propel the wheels, up from 57 in 2018. The vast majority were men over the age of 65. The standard e-bike reaches speeds of 12mph (20km/h), but faster models, such as speed pedelecs, can reach 28mph. Discussions over the use of the technology are most advanced with the municipality of Amsterdam, but the provinces of Gelderland and North Holland are also said to have shown an interest. The technology trialled at Schiphol offers policymakers a range of options. "Say the weather is really bad, there is a headwind of 40km and cyclists are at a standstill, then cutting off the power would be counterintuitive," said [Indranil Bhattacharya, a technology strategist at the Townmaking Institute]. "We built it so you can detect the direction the bike is going, and a policymaker can say: 'We change the regulation. We won't cut your power off because the weather is bad.' The intelligent infrastructure would then tell the bicycle not to cut off the power.â The infrastructure could also inform an e-bike of upcoming obstacles or junctions, by alerting cyclists with a gentle vibration of the handlebars.

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Earlier this week, the FCC fined T-Mobile $200 million for its abuse of Sprint's Lifeline program for low-income consumers -- the largest fine to be paid in commission history. Now, the Better Business Bureau's National Advertising (NAD) is telling T-Mobile to tone down its misleading 5G claims about having the "best 5G network." Gizmodo reports: The NAD's investigation of T-Mobile's 5G claims, reported by Android Police, concluded yesterday. While the BBB division found that some of the carrier's post-Sprint merger claims had merit, like T-Mobile's assertion that it will build the nation's largest 5G network due to the merger, it asked the carrier to change the language of some of its other misleading claims. Specifically, the NAD took issue with T-Mobile telling consumers they will get the best 5G network. NAD said that consumers could "reasonably interpret" these claims to mean T-Mobile currently provides the best 5G network and that T-Mobile customers will "imminently" have 5G coverage when that's not currently the case. "NAD determined that the challenged advertisements did not reasonably convey a present-tense message that the aspirational future benefits from T-Mobile are presently available to consumers," the group said. "NAD recommended that the challenged advertising be modified to avoid conveying such messages."

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According to XDA Developers, Google is testing locking the Color Pop feature in the Google Photos app behind a paywall, requiring users to sign up for a Google One subscription to access this feature, and presumably other photo-editing features in the future. From the report: Shortly after we published our teardown of Google Photos 5.18 confirming that a Google One paywall for photo editing features is in the works, a reader in the comments section informed us that the Color Pop feature is locked behind a Google One membership for him. We've attached the two screenshots shared by the user, and we've also added two screenshots showing off the Color Pop feature in action (this was from a Google account that doesn't have a Google One subscription). The feature essentially keeps the subject in color while turning the background black and white (or vice versa), allowing the subject to "pop." It's a fun feature, and seemingly one Google thinks is advanced enough to convince people to pay for. It's unclear what other premium editing features will be put behind a paywall. However, we recently uncovered strings of code in version 5.18 that suggest Google will introduce preprocessing suggestions and a Skypalette feature, which will include new filters to help users edit the sky. UPDATE: Google has clarified that the Color Pop being reported above is not the same Color Pop feature that's available in Google Photos today. "Right now in Google Photos, Color Pop is only available on photos taken in portrait mode, meaning there is depth information available, which is especially helpful in making the background of an image pop," reports 9to5Google. "The version of Color Pop that will be locked behind Google One will work on photos without depth information. Likely this version attempts to use machine learning to automatically differentiate the foreground from the background." "More importantly, this means that Google Photos will not be putting an existing feature behind a Google One paywall. Instead, it seems Google intends to create new features to incentivize Google One subscribers."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE: On Thursday night, Facebook announced it had activated "break glass" measures to try to quell the spread of disinformation, which has been supercharged by the lies being spread by President Donald Trump and his allies. The unprecedented move may have been triggered by Facebook's decision hours earlier to shut down a viral group called "Stop the Steal" that had racked up 360,000 in the space of 24 hours. The group was spreading disinformation, advocating for gun violence, and organizing real-world protests. But the impact of Facebook's moves has been negligible. A VICE News investigation, using the Facebook-owned analytics tool CrowdTangle, found at least three active groups on Facebook using variations of the Stop the Steal name, all of which have tens of thousands of followers and all of which are sharing the same disinformation as the original group. The biggest group identified is called "StoptheSteal" which has almost 70,000 members. The next biggest is called "Stop the Steal 2.0" with 40,000 followers. Finally, a group with an identical name -- "Stop the Steal" -- has 25,800 members. By allowing the original group to grow so quickly, and to such a scale before removing it, Facebook could have inadvertently made the situation even worse, Ciaran O'Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, told VICE News. "The challenge in managing copycat groups is that there is additional potential for voter fraud disinformation and threats of violence among communities who may be motivated for further action given the removal of the original group, particularly around possible mobilization at election centers." "We are continuing to review additional content and activity and will take action accordingly," Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told VICE News.

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tlhIngan writes: Many years ago, Kojima Productions produced P.T., a "playable teaser" (rumored meaning to P.T.) for a now-cancelled Silent Hill survival-horror reboot. This was a popular teaser but when Kojima and Konami parted ways, it was swiftly removed from the Sony PlayStation Store. People who downloaded the trailer could still re-download it for a period but that was swiftly removed, leading to PS4s preloaded with the game spiking in price. Since the PS5 offers backwards compatibility, reviewers did test the PS5 playing back P.T. to find it still worked. However, this was short lived, as Sony removed the trailer from working in backwards compatible mode, as well as removing the ability to transfer the game to the PS5. Sony's response to the removal was "it was a publisher decision" to remove it from the backwards compatibility list.

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The federal government has cleared the way for collection agencies to send unlimited texts, emails and even instant messages to debtors on social media platforms. CBS News reports: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a final rule late last week outlining how collectors can use new communication methods. The federal agency, which is charged with protecting Americans from financial abuse, did not limit the number of messages collectors could send, but it did require that each message come with instructions on how to opt out. The bureau also limited the number of times collectors may call someone to seven calls per week for each debt. Consumer advocates criticized the rule for not requiring alleged debtors to consent before being contacted by email or text, and for setting a limit on phone contact that could result in a flood of calls for people who owe money to several creditors. Jay Gonsalves, president of Action Collection Agencies in Boston, called the rule a "win-win." "We're hearing more and more from consumers that they don't want to talk to us on the phone. Nobody does anymore. Everyone communicates with text," said Gonsalves, formerly president of the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals, the collection industry's trade group. While consumers may not appreciate hearing about what they owe, Gonsalves added that keeping a debtor in the dark could hurt them in the long term. The rule will formally take effect one year after it's published in the Federal Register, or near the end of 2021.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Time is starting to run out for vehicles powered purely by international combustion engines, and the auto industry knows it. This week Bentley, that bastion of British luxury, became the latest OEM to set a date for that happening -- the year 2030. As the company moves into its second century, it has revealed a new plan called "Beyond 100" that it says will "reinvent every aspect of its business to become an end-to-end carbon neutral organization. Bentley already introduced a plug-in hybrid EV version of the Bentayga SUV and next year it plans to add another pair of PHEVs to its roster -- presumably the Continental GT coupe and Flying Spur sedan. In 2025, the company plans to introduce a battery electric vehicle; Bentley CEO Adrian Hallmark told Autoweek that "you've got to pick a point in time where battery power density, especially for bigger cars, is the liberator for us. We've always said that the mid-2020s is the time when you can expect to see 120-plus kilowatt-hour batteries coming through the supply chain." 2025 will also be the last year you'll be able to buy a Bentley that doesn't plug in, because in 2026 the brand is dropping everything other than PHEVs and BEVs. In 2030, those PHEVs will be gone, too, leaving just BEVs to wear the winged B badge with pride. Along the way, Bentley is also pledging to reduce its factory's environmental impact and go plastic neutral.

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As work continues on Novi, Facebook's digital wallet the company hopes will one day be used to access currencies in the blockchain-based payment system Libra, semblances of a framework have emerged from new research published in AFT '20: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. From a report: A paper coauthored by scientists at Facebook's Novi division proposes a transaction settlement system called FastPay, which they claim can be used to settle cryptocurrency payments or as infrastructure to support retail payments in fiat currencies. In experiments, the team managed to achieve "intra-continental" confirmation of less than 100 milliseconds and over 80,000 transactions per second with as many as 20 different payment authorities. [...] FastPay aims to solve this by enabling authorities to jointly maintain account balances and settle prefunded retail payments between accounts. The researchers claim it supports "subsecond" latency confirmation appropriate for physical point-of-sale payments while providing capacity comparable with peak retail card network volumes and real-time gross settlement. [...] In experiments, they claim FastPay supported up to 160,000 transactions per second under a total load of 1.5 million transactions across the 48 cores -- about seven times the peak transaction rate of the Visa payments network -- while running on commodity computers that cost less than $4,000 a month to run.

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hackingbear writes: China successfully launched the world's first 6G communication satellite by a Long March-6 carrier rocket that blasted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China Central Television (CCTV) reported. The 6G experimental satellite, named after the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), was jointly developed by Chengdu Guoxing Aerospace Technology, UESTC, and Beijing MinoSpace Technology. It will be used to verify the performance of 6G technology in space as the 6G frequency band will expand from the 5G millimeter wave frequency to the terahertz frequency. The technology is expected to be over 100 times faster than 5G, enabling lossless transmission in space to achieve long-distance communications with a smaller power output.

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Facebook plans to put the name of the winner of the US presidential election at the top of Facebook and Instagram once it's been projected by a majority of media outlets, the company says. From a report: The company also will label presidential candidates' posts with a link to its voting information center, according to Facebook spokesperson Tom Reynolds. The company plans to "show the candidate's name in notifications at the top of Facebook and Instagram that say 'A Presidential Winner Has Been Projected -- is the projected winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election,'" Reynolds explained in an email to The Verge. Facebook will rely on "a majority opinion from Reuters as well as independent decision desks at major media outlets, including ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, CNN, and The Associated Press to determine when a presidential winner is projected," Reynolds says.

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Ransomware gangs that steal a company's data and then get paid a ransom fee to delete it don't always follow through on their promise. From a report: The number of cases where something like this has happened has increased, according to a report published by Coveware this week and according to several incidents shared by security researchers with ZDNet researchers over the past few months. These incidents take place only for a certain category of ransomware attacks -- namely those carried out by "big-game hunters" or "human-operated" ransomware gangs. These two terms refer to incidents where a ransomware gang specifically targets enterprise or government networks, knowing that once infected, these victims can't afford prolonged downtimes and will likely agree to huge payouts. But since the fall of 2019, more and more ransomware gangs began stealing large troves of files from the hacked organizations before encrypting the victims' files. The idea was to threaten the victim to release its sensitive files online if the company wanted to restore its network from backups instead of paying for a decryption key to recover its files.

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Can algorithms identify unusual medication orders or profiles more accurately than humans? Not necessarily. From a report: A study coauthored by researchers at the Universite Laval and CHU Sainte-Justine in Montreal found that one model physicians used to screen patients performed poorly on some orders. The study offers a reminder that unvetted AI and machine learning may negatively impact outcomes in medicine. Pharmacists review lists of active medications -- i.e., pharmacological profiles -- for inpatients under their care. This process aims to identify medications that could be abused, but most medication orders don't show drug-related problems. Publications from over a decade ago illustrate technology's potential to help pharmacists streamline workflows by taking on tasks like reviewing orders. But while more recent research has investigated AI's potential in pharmacology, few studies have demonstrated its efficacy. The coauthors of this latest work looked at a model deployed in a tertiary-care mother-and-child academic hospital between April 2020 and August 2020. The model was trained on a dataset of 2,846,502 medication orders from 2005 to 2018. These had been extracted from a pharmacy database and preprocessed into 1,063,173 profiles. Prior to data collection, the model was retrained every month with 10 years of the most recent data from the database in order to minimize drift, which occurs when a model loses its predictive power.

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Amazon will invest about $2.8 billion in Telangana to set up a new AWS Cloud region in the southern state of India, a top Indian politician announced on Friday. From a report: The investment will allow Amazon to launch an AWS Cloud region in Hyderabad by mid-2022, said K. T. Rama Rao, Minister for Information Technology, Electronics & Communications, Municipal Administration and Urban Development and Industries & Commerce Departments, Government of Telangana. The new AWS Asia Region will be Amazon's second infrastructure region in India, Amazon said in a press release. It did not disclose the size of the investment. [...] There is a lot in it for Amazon as well. Jayanth Kolla, chief analyst at consultancy firm Convergence Catalyst, told TechCrunch that by having more cloud regions in India, it will be easier for Amazon to comply with the nation's data localization policy. This compliance will also help Amazon, which currently leads the cloud market in India, attract more customers.

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