Data

Google has released a series of COVID-19 Community Mobility Maps, utilizing location history data from users around the world to present insights into how social distancing measures are changing the way people move around local communities.

Microsoft and Warner Bros. have crammed the 1978 movie Superman onto a silica glass slide the size of a drink coaster. This tough new medium is designed to last centuries, surviving punishment that would ruin film or magnetic drives.

A longstanding conspiracy is the tale of how Facebook is listening in on your conversations, but the way it is actually serving you ads is much more unsettling.

It looks like a Jackson Pollock painting, but this colorful mess is a new map of the Milky Way, showing strange star structures.

A newly published statement from the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has revealed inaccurate, intentionally manipulated data was included as part of a submission for a major new gene therapy that was approved for public use in May.

Researchers have developed a new method for transmitting data to smartphones – by embedding it in music. That means phones might one day receive Wi-Fi passwords or local information via tunes floating through the airwaves, with no perceptible change to the audio as far as the human ear can tell.

Declassified spy satellite photos have revealed that compared to the last quarter of the 20th century, Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast this century. In a rare piece of good news, a separate study has shown that a Greenland glacier has gained ice for the third year in a row.

We live in increasingly polarized times with increasingly entrenched views. Climate scientist Ed Hawkins hopes to persuade people of the threat of global warming with a new and striking way to visualize climate data: a series of vertical stripes that convey rising temperatures year on year.

The world's data has to be stored somewhere, and huge servers take up heaps of physical space and require huge amounts of energy. Now, Harvard researchers have developed a new system for reading and writing information with organic molecules, which could sit stable and secure for thousands of years.

Noting that complex, proprietary systems can hinder productivity and profitability, BMW and Microsoft have announced the Open Manufacturing Platform. The idea is to set up an open technology framework and cross-industry community to accelerate automotive and manufacturing sector developments.

Intel and the US Department of Energy will deliver the world’s first exascale supercomputer in 2021, boosting many different fields of research. Named Aurora, the new system will be a thousand times more powerful than the petascale generation that began in 2008 and is still in wide use today.

IBM’s annual 5 in 5 list is here. This time, all five technologies in this year’s list are designed to fix problems in every step of the food supply chain, from seed to your plate.