The vast majority of the world's mountain glaciers are losing 31 percent more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to 3D satellite measurements. Scientists blame human-caused climate change. NBC News reports: Using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, scientists calculated that the world's 220,000 mountain glaciers are losing more than 328 billion tons (298 billion metric tons) of ice and snow per year since 2015, according to a study in Wednesday's journal Nature. That's enough melt flowing into the world's rising oceans to put Switzerland under almost 24 feet (7.2 meters) of water each year.

The annual melt rate from 2015 to 2019 is 78 billion more tons (71 billion metric tons) a year than it was from 2000 to 2004. Global thinning rates, different than volume of water lost, doubled in the last 20 years and "that's enormous," said Romain Hugonnet, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and the University of Toulouse in France who led the study. Half the world's glacial loss is coming from the United States and Canada. Alaska's melt rates are "among the highest on the planet," with the Columbia glacier retreating about 115 feet (35 meters) a year, Hugonnet said.

Almost all the world's glaciers are melting, even ones in Tibet that used to be stable, the study found. Except for a few in Iceland and Scandinavia that are fed by increased precipitation, the melt rates are accelerating around the world. The near-uniform melting "mirrors the global increase in temperature" and is from the burning of coal, oil and gas, Hugonnet said. Some smaller glaciers are disappearing entirely.

Beavers took down internet service for about 900 customers in a remote Canadian community this weekend after gnawing through crucial fiber cables, the Candian Broadcasting Corporation reported Sunday. From a report: The outage, which has since been resolved, also affected 60 cable TV customers and disrupted local cell phone service, according to a statement from the area's provider, Telus. Tumbler Ridge, a tiny municipality in northeastern British Columbia with a population of about 2,000 people, lost service for roughly 36 hours in what Telus described as a "uniquely Canadian disruption!"

"Beavers have chewed through our fibre cable at multiple points, causing extensive damage," said Telus spokesperson Liz Sauve in an email to Gizmodo. "Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations." After going down early Saturday morning, service was restored just before 6:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, Sauve confirmed. In its statement, the company said crews worked "around the clock" to address the issue and determine how far the damage continued up the cable line. Telus brought in additional equipment and technicians to tackle "challenging conditions" due to the fact that the ground above the cable is partially frozen this time of year.

An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a Bloomberg article, written by Joe Deaux: As David DeYoung, then a director of business technologies at Alcoa, walked into Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters in September 2015, he knew that the stakes were high. DeYoung led a group of engineers who'd spent decades pursuing the holy grail for the notoriously dirty aluminum industry: a way to smelt the metal without producing any direct carbon emissions. Apple, which Harbor Intelligence analyst Jorge Vazquez estimates uses almost 15,000 metric tons of aluminum annually for its electronics gear, had invited DeYoung to explain a potentially revolutionary carbonless manufacturing process for aluminum that his group was developing. Alcoa was on the verge of ending the DeYoung team's yearslong search. To make the tension even worse, moments before DeYoung stepped into a roundtable with Apple engineers, he received word Alcoa was splitting into two publicly traded companies -- casting another cloud on his unit's project. So Apple's interest in reducing the carbon footprint of its metal casings looked to be key to saving the funding.

But it wasn't until later in 2015 that the payoff from that meeting came, with help from an unexpected source. That's when Vincent Christ, a manufacturing information technology expert from Rio Tinto Group Plc, flew to Cupertino for a similar visit. The London-based company, one of Alcoa's biggest rivals, was also struggling to develop a way to produce aluminum through a process that would emit oxygen instead of carbon dioxide. While heading back to the airport after an hourslong confab with Apple engineers, Christ received a call. Apple had an idea: Rio Tinto and Alcoa were both close to the answer they were looking for, but neither company seemed able to do it on its own. So why not combine efforts? "We had the engine, but we didn't have the wheels, chassis, or body, and Rio brought that all to the party," says DeYoung, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT. "[Apple] said, 'You guys really ought to talk to Rio,' and we were like, 'Yeah, we have already.' But then we said we'll talk to them again, and Apple actually facilitated that second contact."

The result was the creation of Elysis, a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto with investments from Apple, the government of Canada, and the provincial government of Quebec, which is one of the biggest aluminum-producing regions in the world. The venture has developed a technology that makes so-called green aluminum, whose production doesn't emit carbon dioxide. If the partners can make the process work at commercial scale, it could be used to retrofit existing smelters, transforming them from some of the dirtiest industrial polluters into the kind of green manufacturing facilities business and government are shifting toward. "Elysis has developed a process that substitutes carbon with inert materials -- it won't say what they are -- to make the anode that conducts the electricity causing the chemical reaction," reports Bloomberg. "Elysis' operating costs are about 15% lower than those of conventional smelting, in part because the carbon anodes used in the chemical reaction must be replaced after 25 days, while Elysis' inert material lasts two years. The carbonless process also requires fewer workers, since there's no need to frequently change out the cathodes sitting in the pots of molten alumina."

The immediate hurdle for Elysis is to prove it can crank up the amperage used during carbonless smelting to industrial-strength power levels, which would allow higher daily production rates, says CRU Group analyst Greg Wittbecker. "Elysis announced on April 20 it will begin installing commercial inert anode prototype cells on a smelter in Quebec in an effort to prove it can retrofit existing smelters," adds Bloomberg. "A pivotal moment will be if or when governments implement carbon credit or carbon tax programs that would penalize low-cost aluminum made in plants in China and India that use power from coal-fired plants."

Ford has revealed that it spent last year conducting the "mother of all road trips" for its upcoming BlueCruise system, sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a collective 110,000-mile journey across the US and Canada. Engadget reports: The aim, to no one's surprise, was to gauge how BlueCruise handled in a wide range of realistic road and traffic conditions. Ford had already racked up 500,000 miles of development testing, but these were shorter, narrowly-focused dry runs. The road trips helped Ford look for changes in everything from road signs to weather while traveling cross-country.

BlueCruise will reach 2021 Mustang Mach-E and F-150 models later in the second half of the year through a software update, although you'll need the Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package. Like Super Cruise, it relies on looking for "prequalified" highway sections and verifies that you're paying attention to the road. You really can take your hands off the wheel, but you'll have to be ready to intervene when you either leave the BlueCruise-ready area or face an unexpected issue on the road.

innocent_white_lamb writes: The Saskatchewan government will implement a new tax for passenger electric vehicles. The announcement was made Tuesday. The new $150 annual tax on passenger electric vehicles (EVs) will take effect Oct. 1, 2021. The government said the reason for this tax is that EVs do not contribute to highway maintenance through the provincial fuel tax. The new tax will be collected when the vehicle is registered. The province says it will continue to examine the future potential for expanding the EV tax to commercial vehicles and inter-jurisdictional trucking. The province will also consider options to apply a tax at EV charging stations.

The NBA expects all arenas to be at full capacity next season, thanks to increased COVID-19 testing and more vaccines being administered. Another key aspect toward that effort is the NBA's new multiyear leaguewide partnership with Clear, a biometric screening company known for its expedited security process at hundreds of airports worldwide. ESPN reports: The partnership makes Clear's COVID-19 health screening technology available to all 30 teams in their NBA arenas, and it's expected to help facilitate more fans returning to games, though it's up to each team how to use the technology. Conversations for a leaguewide partnership began in early September. This is Clear's first leaguewide partnership with a professional sports league, but the company has been working with teams in MLS, MLB, NHL and the NFL. Clear first rolled out this program in a leaguewide format with the NHL's bubble season across two cities in Canada last year.

As it pertains to attendance, fans can download the Clear app and upload an identifying document along with a selfie. To link their COVID-19 test results, fans log into their testing account through the app, and results will be linked to their health pass. Before entering the venue, fans can open the app, verify their identity with another selfie and then answer health survey questions. (There are also expected to be an unspecified number of Clear kiosks where fans receive a temperature check and scan their QR code.) Fans are issued a red or green notification depending on their COVID-related health information. A Clear spokesperson noted that the arenas only receive information about whether a fan has passed the requirements for access and not any private health information from the individual. They said that the Clear program is scalable, and could facilitate thousands of fans entering arenas.

Uber and Lyft said U.S. drivers on their ride-hail platforms were earning significantly more than before the pandemic as trip demand outstrips driver supply, prompting the companies to offer extra incentives. From a report: Uber on Wednesday said it would invest an additional $250 million to boost driver earnings and offer payment guarantees in an effort to incentivize new and existing drivers. Uber's Vice President of U.S. & Canada Mobility, Dennis Cinelli, in a blog post told drivers to take advantage of higher earnings before pay returns to pre-COVID-19 levels as more drivers return to the platform. Lyft on Tuesday said drivers in the company's top-25 markets were earning an average of $36 per hour compared to $20 per hour pre-pandemic. Those numbers include tips, but Lyft did not disclose the share of tips in earnings. Lyft is also offering additional incentives and promotions in select markets. Further reading: Uber and Lyft have a driver shortage problem, and it's costing them a lot of money

180 miles east of Seattle, "A pressure vessel from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage fell on a man's farm in Washington State last week," reports the Verge, "leaving a '4-inch dent in the soil,' the local sheriff's office said Friday."

Space.com reports: Although Falcon 9 rocket successfully delivered 60 Starlink satellites to orbit last month, the rocket's second stage didn't deorbit properly after completing the mission. The second stage is the smaller, upper part of the Falcon 9 rocket that separates from the main booster to take satellites to their intended orbit. While the main booster returns to Earth for a landing (so SpaceX can refurbish and reuse it on future launches), once the second stage has completed its role in the mission, it is either intentionally destroyed or left to linger in orbit.

Typically it conducts a "deorbit burn" that sends the craft on a safe trajectory to burn up in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean. But this time, something went wrong: According to Ars Technica, "there was not enough propellant after this launch to ignite the Merlin engine and complete the burn. So the propellant was vented into space, and the second stage was set to make a more uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere." So, instead of burning up over the ocean, the rocket stage ended up breaking up in the sky over the Pacific Northwest — the fiery display visible not only from Washington but also from surrounding states and parts of Canada — just after 9 p.m. local time on Thursday, March 25, or midnight EDT (0400 GMT) on Friday, March 26.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, calls it "a bit of a puzzle" that the stage wasn't de-orbited under control back on March 4, telling the Verge that it "looks like something went wrong, but SpaceX has said nothing about it. However, reentries of this kind happen every couple of weeks. It's just unusual that it happens over a densely populated area, just because that's a small fraction of the Earth."

April 2nd was "World Autism Awareness Day." This prompted Salon to ask: What would a good representation of autism in the media look like? When you talk to people who are neurodiverse, one problem they consistently identify is that even well-developed characters who seem to be on the spectrum are frequently "coded" — that is, they are given personality traits associated with autism but are never directly identified as being autistic.

"I have yet to seen a portrayal in the media that feels genuine," Becca Hector, an autism and neurodiversity consultant and mentor in Colorado, told Salon via Facebook. After noting the prevalence of autistic stereotyping in media, and particularly the entertainment industry, she added that "the closest they ever got, in my opinion, is Temperance Bones from the TV show 'Bones.'" Hector praised how the character "acted" autistic and the people around her responded with a mixture of laughter and exasperation, which struck her as realistic. At the same time, Bones was "absolutely coded."

Jen Elcheson, a 39-year-old autistic paraeducator and published author living in western Canada, agreed with Hector about Bones in the Facebook conversation. "Honestly, I find autistic coded characters easier to relate to in entertainment than the ones they purposely make autistic," she observed. "Because when they do it deliberately, it's usually characters laden in all the stereotypes."
Although Elcheson argued the alternative was also bad.

"When characters are coded not only does the greater public miss out on seeing a different depiction of an autistic that isn't a stereotype, but the autistic community once again experiences erasure."

hackingbear shares a report from The Guardian: Residents [in the Canadian province of New Brunswick] first learned of the investigation last week after a leaked memo from the province's public health agency asked physicians to be on the lookout for (neurological) symptoms similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). For more than a year public health officials have been tracking a "cluster" of 43 cases of suspected neurological disease in the province with no known cause. Despite the initial similarities, screening produced no confirmed cases of CJD, a rare, fatal brain disease caused by misformed proteins known as prions. Only a single suspected case was recorded in 2015, but in 2019 there were 11 cases and 24 in 2020. Researchers believe five people have died from the illness. Health officials have refused to disclose the precise locations of the cases. "The majority of cases are linked to the Acadian peninsula, a sparsely populated region in the north-eastern part of the province," the report says. Some of the symptoms include memory loss, vision problems, abnormal jerking movements, unexplained pains, spasms and behavioral changes.

One of our most precise mechanisms for controlling matter has now been applied to antimatter atoms for the first time. From a report: Laser cooling, which slows the motion of particles so they can be measured more precisely, can make antihydrogen atoms slow down by an order of magnitude. Antimatter particles have the same mass as particles of ordinary matter, but the opposite charge. An antihydrogen atom is made out of an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter equivalent of an electron. Makoto Fujiwara at TRIUMF, Canada's national particle accelerator centre, and his colleagues used an antihydrogen trapping experiment called ALPHA-2 at the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland, to create clouds of about 1000 antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic trap. The team developed a laser that shoots particles of light called photons at the right wavelength to slow down any anti-atoms that happen to be moving directly towards the laser, slowing them down bit by bit. "It's kind of like we're shooting a tiny ball at the atom, and the ball is very small, so the slowing down in this collision is very small, but we do it many times and then eventually the big atom will be slowed down," says Fujiwara. The group managed to slow the anti-atoms down by more than a factor of 10.

Apple said on Monday it is expanding its "Independent Repair Provider" to over 200 countries, nearly every country where the iPhone-maker's products are sold. From a press release: Launched originally in 2019 and expanded to Europe and Canada last year, the program enables repair providers of all sizes access to genuine Apple parts, tools, repair manuals, and diagnostics to offer safe and reliable repairs for Apple products. There are now more than 1,500 Independent Repair Provider locations serving customers across the US, Canada, and Europe. "Being a part of the Independent Repair Provider program has been a huge benefit to my business, employees, and customers," said Scott Baker, owner of Mister Mac in Wimberley, Texas. "Since joining, we've received great support from Apple, and we're able to deliver that same level of service to our customers. It has even brought genuine excitement to our town." All participating repair providers in the program have access to free training from Apple and the same genuine parts, tools, repair manuals, and diagnostics as Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and Apple Store locations. Further reading: Apple's Independent Repair Program is Invasive To Shops and Their Customers, Contract Shows (Published in February 2020).

NBC News reports: Facebook said Wednesday that hackers based in China used the social media platform as part of a campaign to hack and spy on diasporas of Uyghurs, the minority group the country has been accused of putting in "re-education" camps. The hackers used Facebook to identify, track and send malicious links to Uyghur activists, dissidents and journalists living in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Turkey, among other countries, Facebook said.

Facebook stopped short of directly blaming the Chinese government for sponsoring the campaign. "We can see geographic attribution based on the activity, but we can't actually prove who's behind the operation," the company's head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said in a phone call with journalists. But Facebook did say the hackers are part of the same operation that the cybersecurity company Volexity cited in 2019 as being affiliated with the Chinese government. It published research that revealed that the country's hackers had gone to extreme measures to hack and spy on Uyghurs. They used sophisticated, previously unknown tools to load malicious code into multiple Uyghur news sites so that they would hack and spy on nearly any smartphone that visited.

"Who else would have the resources, the time and effort to go after these people? If you told me it was Iceland I'd be pretty surprised," Volexity CEO Steven Adair said in a phone call Wednesday...

Facebook's head of cyberespionage, Mike Dvilyanski, said on the call that while it had found and removed fewer than 500 accounts that sent malicious links to Uyghurs, it was "an extremely targeted operation... We were seeing them create personas on Facebook that are designed to look like journalists that focus on issues critical to the Uyghur community, that are designed to look like activists that might be standing up for the Uyghur community, designed to look like members of the community," Dvilyanski said. "Then use that as a way to trick them into clicking into these links to expose their devices."
The article also cites "multiple investigative reports" showing China "maintains re-education camps that detain an estimated 1 million Uyghurs...

"With omnipresent cameras, face recognition technology and intense collection of residents' data, it's one of the most heavily surveilled areas in the world."

The Drive reports on an "unprecedent exercise" which included a Russian nuclear submarine firing a torpedo underneath Arctic ice, which it calls "a bold statement of Russia's presence and capabilities in the increasingly tense Arctic region." Three Russian ballistic missile submarines surfaced next to each other from beneath the ice near the North Pole as part of a recent major Arctic exercise. The head of the country's Navy said that event was a first for his service. It also underscores the growing geopolitical competition in this highly strategic region... A pair of MiG-31 Foxhound interceptors, supported by an Il-78 aerial refueling tanker, also flew over the North Pole and troops have been conducting maneuvers on the ground in extreme cold weather conditions as part of Umka-2021. Average temperatures in the exercise area, at present, are ranging between -13 and -22 degrees Fahrenheit, with winds gusting up to just over 70 miles per hour, according to state-run media outlet TASS....

[A]ll of this is magnified by the ever-increasing strategic significance of the Arctic and growing geopolitical competition there, as a result. Much of this has been driven by the emergence of new economic opportunities as global climate change has caused ice in the region to recede. This has made the prospect of sending commercial shipping via the Northern Sea Route more viable and offers the possibility of greater access to untapped natural resources, including oil and natural gas. Just this week, Russia's state nuclear agency Rosatom has been promoting the Northern Sea Route as an alternative to traditional routes in light of the very serious situation in the Suez Canal...

The Umka-2021 drills come as Russia and the United States, among others, are working to expand their abilities to project military power into the Arctic. Russia has been working particularly hard to build new facilities and expand existing ones, especially air bases, in the region. The U.S. military, in cooperation with Canada, just recently demonstrated its ability to conduct more routine combat aviation operations out of the strategic Thule Air Base in Greenland, as well.
The article notes that U.S. Navy also conducts Ice Exercises each year with submarines surfacing from under Arctic the ice, "though not with ballistic missile boats. However, this particular drill is, nevertheless, a significant show of force and general demonstration of the Russian Navy's strategic capabilities...."

"We're in competition... and to be competitive with Russia and China, specifically in the Arctic, you have to be on the field," said the U.S. Air Force general who heads NORAD in remarks to Congress last week. The Drive quotes him as saying "And, so it's crucial that we do that and we continue producing capabilities that will allow us to be in the Arctic." The Russian Navy sending three ballistic missile submarines punching through the Arctic ice together in a row near the North Pole provides a very clear look at this competition and more such displays are likely to come as the geopolitical friction in the region continues to increase.

"When Luke Stark sought money from Google in November he had no idea he'd be turning down $60,000 from the tech giant in March," reports CNN: Stark, an assistant professor at Western University in Ontario, Canada, studies the social and ethical impacts of artificial intelligence. In late November, he applied for a Google Research Scholar award, a no-strings-attached research grant of up to $60,000 to support professors who are early in their careers. He put in for the award, he said, "because of my sense at the time that Google was building a really strong, potentially industry-leading ethical AI team...."

Gebru's ouster kicked off a months-long crisis for the company, including employee departures, a leadership shuffle, and an apology from Google's CEO for how the circumstances of Gebru's departure caused some employees to question their place there. Google conducted an internal investigation into the matter, results of which were announced on the same day the company fired Gebru's co-team leader, Margaret Mitchell, who had been consistently critical of the company on Twitter following Gebru's exit. (Google cited "multiple violations" of its code of conduct.) Meanwhile, researchers outside Google, particularly in AI, have become increasingly distrustful of the company's historically well-regarded scholarship and angry over its treatment of Gebru and Mitchell.

All of this came into sharp focus for Stark on Wednesday, March 10, when Google sent him a congratulatory note, offering him $60,000 for his proposal for a research project that would look at how companies are rolling out AI that is used to detect emotions. Stark said he immediately felt he needed to reject the award to show his support for Gebru and Mitchell, as well as those who yet remain on the ethical AI team at Google...

Gebru said she appreciated Stark's action.
Stark is the first person to turn down one of the 6,500 academic and research grants Google has given out over the last 15 years, the company tells CNN. But CNN also notes some AI conference organizers are now rethinking having Google as a sponsor.

"The widening fallout from Google's tensions with its ethical AI team now pose a risk to the company's reputation and stature in the AI community. This is crucial as Google battles for talent — both as employees at the company and names connected to it in the academic community."

Long-time Slashdot reader theshowmecanuck writes: A grandmother let her 13 year old grandson use her credit card to buy added content for one of his games for which she thought would be a $15 charge. After the account opened up because of the credit card on it, he started downloading other things not realizing they were adding substantial charges to her credit card. She asked Sony to refund the charges, it's not like they can't disable the added content if they wanted, but they told her basically too bad so sad.
From the article: When CTV News Toronto reached on to PlayStation on Liscoumb's behalf a spokesperson said "We reviewed this case at your request and determined that it did not qualify for a refund as outlined in our terms of service and user agreement."

"I'm just heartbroken and Visa said they can't do anything, because I'm the one that put the credit card into the system," [the grandmother, Diana] Liscoumb said... Liscoumb said it will be difficult to pay back the $1,400 in charges and says her grandson is upset too. "He even offered to get a job when he turns 14 to help pay for it."
This story drew a range of reactions from Slashdot readers:

• "This was a $1400 lesson that hopefully they both learned. Never trust a corporation to do the right thing."

• "This is not on the vendor it is on the grandson, his parents and his grandmother... This should not be a news story at all. This should be a private learning lesson for the child, and his guardians."

• "The real problem is still that companies are putting addictive gambling mechanics into games."

• "Someone at Sony should fix the problem."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, and that the technology behind it will soon be used to fight another global scourge -- cancer. Ozlem Tureci, who founded the German company BioNTech with her husband, Ugur Sahin, was working on a way to harness the body's immune system to tackle tumors when they learned last year of an unknown virus infecting people in China. Over breakfast, the couple decided to apply the technology they'd been researching for two decades to the new threat.

Britain authorized BioNTech's mRNA vaccine for use in December, followed a week later by Canada. Dozens of other countries, including the U.S., have followed suit and tens of millions of people worldwide have since received the shot developed together with U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. [...] As BioNTech's profile has grown during the pandemic, so has its value, adding much-needed funds the company will be able to use to pursue its original goal of developing a new tool against cancer. The vaccine made by BioNTech-Pfizer and U.S. rival Moderna uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumors.

"We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA," said Tureci. Asked when such a therapy might be available, Tureci said "that's very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines [against] cancer at a place where we can offer them to people." For now, Tureci and Sahin are trying to ensure the vaccines governments have ordered are delivered and that the shots respond effectively to any new mutation in the virus.

After a year in which most people were stuck indoors, it should come as little surprise that streaming platforms skyrocketed in popularity over the past 12 months. For the first time ever, subscriptions to streaming services surpassed one billion, reaching 1.1 billion globally. From a report: At the same time, box office receipts plummeted because movie theaters across the world were closed for a significant part of 2020. Global ticket sales tapped out at $12 billion, with North America accounting for $2.2 billion of that haul. Though the circumstances aren't comparable, worldwide box office receipts totaled $42.5 billion in 2019, with $11.4 billion coming from domestic theaters. Still, it marks a 72% year-over-year decline. These statistics come from the Motion Pictures Association's annual theme report, which is conducted by the entertainment industry trade group and intends to analyze how film, television and streaming content performs yearly.

The 2020 study covers a year that was overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, making some of the data understandably skewed and difficult to compare box office totals between countries. In Asian countries, particularly in China, the box office has already returned to pre-pandemic levels. That hasn't been the case in the U.S. and Canada, where new movies are few and far between and audiences are returning to theaters at a glacial pace. Outside of North America, the top three box office markets were China ($3 billion), Japan ($1.3 billion), and France ($500 million). Combined, the global theatrical business and home and mobile entertainment market totaled $80.8 billion in revenues in 2020, shrinking by 18% from the $98.3 billion amassed last year. The success of digital home entertainment, which grew 23% to $68.8 billion, helped offset the depleted theatrical box office numbers. In the U.S., subscriptions reached 308.6 million, representing a 32% increase from 2019.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: /e/ OS, the "open-source, pro-privacy, and fully degoogled" fork of Android, is coming to Canada and the USA. Of course, you've always been able to download the software in any region, but now (as first spotted by It's Foss News) the e Foundation will start selling preloaded phones in North America. Previously, /e/ only did business in Europe. Like normal, the e Foundation's smartphone strategy is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with /e/ preloaded. In the US, there are only two phones right now: the Galaxy S9 for $379.99 or a Galaxy S9+ for $429.99. North Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can get /e/ preloaded on a Fairphone, which is also Europe-exclusive. These Samsung phones are used devices, but the site says the devices have "been checked and reconditioned to be fully working at our partner's facilities." The phones have a one-year warranty and are described as "Good-as-New" with "no surprises." An /e/ device means you'll be getting a fork of Android 10, and for ongoing support, the e Foundation says, "We aim to support with at least 3 years of software updates and security patches."

/e/ OS was founded by Gael Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux, and the project describes itself as a "non-profit project in the public interest." /e/ is built a lot like a Linux distribution, in that it takes a curated collection of other open source projects, merges them into a single product, and does its best to fill in the remaining gaps. In this case, /e/ is based on LineageOS, the Android community's open source, device-ready version of Google's Android source code. The primary contribution of /e/ is filling in all the gaps left by the lack of Google apps, so there's an /e/ app store, an /e/ cloud storage and account system, and various Google-replacement apps like a Chromium-based browser, a fork of K-9 Mail for email, contacts, search, photos, etc. The company is even trying to build a Google Assistant replacement. Actually getting regular Android apps to run on a forked version of Android is a challenge. Google Play Services is built into many apps for things like push notifications, and there's a good chance that functionality won't work on /e/ OS. These apps will at least run on /e/ OS instead of exiting outright, thanks to the inclusion of MicroG, an open source project that hijacks Google API calls.

America's Food and Drug Administration just authorized Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, according to CBS News. "The vaccine is the third to be approved for use in the United States, and the first that requires only one shot..." Among people who got the vaccine in clinical trials, there were no COVID-related deaths. Phase 3 clinical trials also showed protection against multiple emerging virus variants, including a more contagious strain that was first discovered in South Africa and has since been detected in the U.S.

The vaccine can be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to three months.
More from the BBC: The company has agreed to provide the U.S. with 100 million doses by the end of June. The first doses could be available to the US public as early as next week. The U.K., EU and Canada have also ordered doses, and 500 million doses have also been ordered through the Covax scheme to supply poorer nations.