A scientist's curiosity about an odd RNA discovery at MIT in the 1970s led to him winning a Nobel Prize and laid the foundation for the work that led to today's Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for Covid-19. MIT News interviews Phillip Sharp about what happened after he read a report that one virus's RNA was longer inside the nucleus of a cell it had invaded than it was in the rest of the cell and he wondered why.
An association of auto manufacturers today filed suit against Massachusetts to block the access to computerized vehicle information that voters just this month decided the companies have to provide. Read more.
Which'll teach you to get on the Internet at 7 a.m. on a Sunday, but in any case, the issue was a routing misconfiguration at Level 3, one of the larger Internet backbone providers (i.e., they provide the giant pipes that connect your Internet provider to Web sites' Internet providers).
A technical explanation from Pair Networks (UHub's Web hosting service): Read more.
A federal judge today told a wireless company to do a better job of filling out applications the next time it wants to install some of those utility poles/wireless transmitters in Cambridge. Read more.
Above the Law reports Boston-based Ropes & Gray recently told associates to remove TikTok from their phones - even their personal phones, if they use those to connect to the firm's e-mail and case systems. Seems the firm is concerned that the app could phone home with at least some of the contents of the phones - including potentially sensitive client information.
Manifest Boston, which organized the annual fall HubWeek and year-round forums with the Globe, Harvard, Mass. General and MIT, announced today it's throwing in the towel, because Covid-19 just proved too big a challenge for events that involve lots of people getting together in conference rooms. Read more.
The City Council today voted unanimously to bar police and other city agencies from using facial-surveillance software except for specific criminal investigations - and even then only if the data is not generated by city-owned cameras. Read more.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court today overturned a man's conviction for disobeying an order not to contact a former girlfriend, saying prosecutors failed to prove that he actually sent her an Instagram message that had his account name linked on it. Read more.
A team of MIT researchers is working on a system through which people's phones would send out a constant stream of Bluetooth "chirps" that would then be picked up and stored by other people's phones. Somebody who tests positive for coronavirus could then upload his or her chirps to a database that others could then check to see if they were close enough to that person to warrant their own trip to testing site or to self quarantine. Read more.
Biogen, yes, that company, will be one of two companies to work with a California startup that says it has discovered a possible molecule that could be used to fight Covid-19. Read more.
Some news on the Robot Overlords front from local researchers: Dexai Robotics of Somerville has raised $5.5 million for its robotic sous-chef replacement, called Alfred. Read more.
A Somerville start-up founded by two MIT researchers who say their software could revolutionize complex computing charge that their first employee stole their proprietary algorithms when he left for a job at Facebook. Read more.
Rudolph with your butt so bright, won't you guide my sleigh tonight? Image by MIT News.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that remote-access products such as GoToMyPC are more than just a service and so their use can be taxed by the Department of Revenue. Read more.
Pegasystems, which makes software for large corporations, has shown enough proof that it was damaged by a research report claiming a competitor's offerings were far superior that it can continue its federal lawsuit against the competitor that secretly paid for the report and the research firm that wrote it, a judge ruled today. Read more.
WBUR reports the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad got some loaners of Boston Dynamics's "Spot" robots - basically the pets a Terminator might have - and actually used them in the field at least twice. State Police declined to say exactly how they used them; the ACLU, of course, has some questions.
Was going to write up an indictment of a pair of Bay Staters for allegedly doing various bad things with crytptocurrency, social hacking and Twitter accounts. Read more.
Boston Restaurant Talk reports that Spyce, where robots make the food, is closing for a couple of months of renovations and menu changes. Maybe they could keep the robots working by having them repaint the digits of pi that the MIT graduates who opened the place felt needed to be torn off their Pi Alley wall so they could put in a window (honestly, you'd think MIT grads, of all people, would have some reverence for pi).
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