Early in the pandemic, scientists tried training dogs to detect COVID-19 infections in humans. The results were predictable. Man’s best friend proved adept at sniffing out the disease, but the question researchers kept asking themselves was how they would scale that approach. After all, training a dog is expensive, and taking care of one can be a handful.

Still, the idea of using animals to spot sick humans is a good one and one that a team of researchers from Michigan State University approached in a novel way. In a recent study published in the journal bioRXiv, they detailed a locust-based cancer screening system. Per MIT Technology Review, the tech involves surgically-altered locusts with electrodes implanted into the lobes of their brains by Professor Debajit Saha and his colleagues. Those electrodes were there to capture signals from each insect’s antennae, which they use to sense smells.

Additionally, the team grew three different types of cancerous human mouth cells – in addition to a separate set of healthy ones – and built a device for capturing the gases emitted by those tissues. They then used that device to give the insects a whiff of the gases. They found that the locusts' brains responded to each type of tissue differently and that they could correctly identify sick cells with only the recording of the gasses.

It’s hard to say if you’ll ever see your local clinic uses insects for cancer screenings. The study hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, and it’s difficult to know if regulators like the Food and Drug Administration would ever approve such a procedure. People could also find the treatment of the locusts questionable. “The insect is dead in terms of its body function,” Saha told MIT Technology Review. “We are just keeping its brain alive.”

Saha and his team plan to continue work on the project. Their current system requires between six and 10 locust brains to function. He hopes new electrodes will allow his team to record more neurons, thereby making a single locust brain sufficient for an individual screening. He also wants to make the device holding the brain and antennae portable, which would allow the team to use the system outside of a lab.

University of Michigan, Saha et al.

Canada is banning companies from producing and importing a handful of single-use plastics by the end of the year, Reuters reports. Among the items the country won’t allow the production of include plastic shopping bags, takeout containers and six-pack rings for holding cans and bottles together.

The federal government will subsequently prohibit the sale of those same items in 2023, with an export ban to follow in 2025. The one-year gap between the initial ban and the one that follows is designed to give businesses in Canada enough time to transition their stock of the listed items. Over the next ten years, the federal government estimates the new regulation will eliminate approximately 1.3 tonnes of plastic waste, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Twitter.

Not targeted by Canada’s new regulations are plastic fishing nets and lines, which can be far more problematic than single-use plastics like straws and shopping bags. Discarded fishing gear leads to ghost fishing, a phenomenon where those tools continue to trap and kill marine life. With more than 640,000 tons worth of fishing nets discarded every year, it’s a problem that’s only getting worse and one Canada’s plastics ban doesn’t address.

"It's a drop in the bucket," Sarah King, the head of Greenpeace Canada's oceans and plastics campaign, told the CBC. "Until the government gets serious about overall reductions of plastic production, we're not going to see the impact we need to see in the environment or in our waste streams."

The ban follows a similar one enacted by France last year and is part of a broader move by governments across the world to curb the production of single-use plastics. In March, the United Nations agreed to begin work on a first-ever global plastic pollution treaty. While the agreement won’t be complete until 2024 at the earliest, it could be among the most significant efforts to curb climate change since the Paris agreement in 2015.

While Google has long included a password manager among its account perks, accessing a native version of that tool on your Android phone or tablet hasn’t been straightforward. Before a recent Google Play Services update, you had to navigate to the “Privacy” section of Android’s Settings menu to find an option to launch the software. But as 9to5Google points out, you can now add a home screen shortcut to the tool on your Android phone or tablet.

You’ll have the option once you’ve updated to Google Play Services version 22.18. The easiest way to do that is to tap on a direct link to the software’s Play Store listing and manually download the latest release. Once that’s done, open the Settings app on your phone, then navigate to the Privacy section and tap “Autofill service from Google,” followed by “Passwords.” Doing so will launch the Google Password Manager. At that point, you’ll want to tap on the gear icon at the top of the interface to open the applet’s settings menu. You should then see an option that says “Add shortcut to your home screen.” You know what to do next.

Even the simplified process isn’t as straightforward as it should be, but Google making it easier to see and modify your passwords will also make it easier to change them when the situation calls for it. 

Ever since we got our first look at Dune: Spice Wars during the 2021 Game Awards, it has looked like one of the most promising videogame adaptions of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi series in a long time. If you’ve been playing the game in Steam early access, you can now look forward to fighting over Arrakis with your friends.

On Monday, developer Shiro Games announced the release of Spice Wars' multiplayer update, allowing you and up to three other players to participate in 2v2 or free-for-all matches. If you can’t find enough friends or strangers to play with, the game will fill your match with computer opponents. As with the Spice Wars' single-player component, you can tweak the difficulty of your AI foes and factors like map size, sandworm activity, and more.

Multiplayer support is the headline feature, but today’s update includes several other enhancements. Shiro has introduced additional in-game events and Landsraad resolutions that can change the course of your games. It has also added new regions to increase map diversity, and reworked building graphics, among other changes.

If you haven’t checked out Spice Wars yet, it’s currently 20 percent off on Steam. I’ve sunk about 30 hours into the game since it came out in early access back in April. So far, I can say Shiro has done a great job of creating an experience that feels authentic to the novels. 

WhatsApp has added a handful of features to make group calls more manageable. As of this week, you can both mute and message specific people in your group calls, the company announced in a tweet spotted by Android Central (via The Verge). The former should be particularly helpful in situations where someone might not be aware that everyone else can hear what’s going on in the background of their home or office. The company has also added a banner that will notify you when someone joins a group call.

WhatsApp has introduced a number of new features as of late. Alongside the group calling functionality, this week saw the addition of new privacy toggles that give people more granular controls over their profile photos and Last Seen status. The company also finally made it easier for Android users to migrate their chat histories to a new iPhone.

Nearly four months after integrating Comixology into its other services, Amazon acknowledged the platform has been left worse off. “We understand that the current experience needs improvements, and want you to know that we’re working hard to get those out the door as quickly as possible,” the company said in an 11-part Twitter thread spotted by Gizmodo.

In the coming weeks, Amazon promised to address some of the more prominent issues that have plagued the digital comics service since its integration with the Kindle app. For instance, an upcoming beta version of Comixology’s web-reading client will bring back support for double-page spreads. Additionally, Amazon said it was working to fix a problem with its store algorithm that causes the software to show results for novels and non-fiction books when customers search for comics, manga and graphic novels.

Amazon noted that some of the enhancements would arrive soon, but others do not yet have a release date. “We’ll let you know when this launches,” the company said of a feature that will allow people to filter for their comics within the Kindle app. “We know there’s a lot more that needs to be done to improve the Comixology experience, and we have many more initiatives we’ll share soon,” the company said.

For fans, Amazon’s handling of Comixology is particularly frustrating given that the previous version of the app was serviceable and included many of the features the company is now working on adding. Unfortunately, they can’t use that software anymore since it was shut down by Amazon shortly after it completed the Kindle integration. To make matters worse, Comixology is the only digital service you can currently use to purchase comics piecemeal from a variety of publishers.

Two weeks after release, Blizzard’s Diablo Immortal has earned approximately $24 million for the troubled studio, according to Appmagic. In an estimate it shared with GameDev Reports, the analytics firm said the free-to-play game was downloaded almost 8.5 million times over the same timeframe, with 26 percent of downloads originating in the US. The bulk of Blizzard’s revenue from Diablo Immortal has also come from America. To date, US players contributed about 43 percent of all the game’s earnings.

To put Immortal’s early financial success in context, Hearthstone, the only other mobile game Blizzard has out at the moment, earned about $5 million in May. Despite the vocal backlash to Immortal’s monetization systems, it’s probably safe to say no one expected the game to fail out of the gate. Instead, the worry for many fans was a scenario where Immortal was so successful for Blizzard that it went on to inform how the studio monetizes its future games.

For the time being, that fear seems unfounded. Diablo franchise general manager Rod Fergusson recently said Diablo IV would feature a different set of monetization systems than Immortal. “To be clear, D4 is a full-price game built for PC/PS/Xbox audiences,” he tweeted after the game’s recent showing at Microsoft’s recent Summer Game Fest presentation. Separately, Blizzard announced this week Overwatch 2 would do away with loot boxes.

Since the start of the year, Google has tried to publicly pressure Apple into adopting the GSMA’s RCS messaging protocol. The search giant’s campaign has involved everything from not-so-subtle jabs at I/O 2022 to long Twitter threads from the head of Android. Now the feud has expanded to include Drake.

In a tweet spotted by 9to5Google, the Android Twitter account shared an “unofficial lyric explainer video” for “Texts Go Green,” the third song from the rapper’s latest album. The song features Drake singing about a toxic relationship. Both the title and chorus of “Texts Go Green” refer to what happens when an iPhone user blocks someone from contacting them through iMessage. The service defaults to SMS and the blacklisted individual will lose all the benefits of iMessage, including read receipts if the other person had them enabled previously.

Calling the song “a real banger,” Google says the “phenomenon” of green text bubbles is “pretty rough” for both non-iPhone users and anyone who gets blocked. “If only some super talented engineering team at Apple would fix this,” the company says in the video. “Because this is a problem only Apple can fix. They just have to adopt RCS, actually.”

The irony of Google’s video is that doesn’t accurately explain the meaning of “Texts Go Green.” In the context of the song, iMessage’s incompatibility with RCS is a comfort for Drake. “Texts go green, it hits a little different, don't it?” he sings. “Know you miss the days when I was grippin' on it / Know you're in a house tonight just thinkin' on it / I moved on so long ago.”

But, hey, whatever it takes for Apple to adopt RCS, right?

Apple Store employees at the company’s Towson Town Center location in Maryland have voted to unionize. According to the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (AppleCore), the group that led the unionization effort, workers voted "overwhelming" in favor of joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). With the historic vote, Towson Town Center should become the first unionized Apple Store in the US. 

“I applaud the courage displayed by CORE members at the Apple store in Towson for achieving this historic victory,” said IAM International President Robert Martinez Jr. in a statement following the vote.“They made a huge sacrifice for thousands of Apple employees across the nation who had all eyes on this election. I ask Apple CEO Tim Cook to respect the election results and fast-track a first contract for the dedicated IAM CORE Apple employees in Towson. This victory shows the growing demand for unions at Apple stores and different industries across our nation.”

Developing...

An advocacy group is calling on Meta to allow Facebook users to list more than one romantic partner in their profiles. In a letter the Organization for Polyamory and Ethical Non-monogamy (OPEN) sent to the social media giant on Thursday, it said the current design of Facebook’s relationship status feature is “exclusionary” towards people who practice ethical non-monogamy. The group has asked that Meta allow users to tag all their romantic partners.

“At best, this restriction perpetuates the erasure and marginalization of non-monogamous relationships; at worst, it harms non-monogamous users by perpetuating social stigmas around the validity and authenticity of their relationships,” OPEN said.

A Meta spokesperson told The New York Times the company is reviewing the letter and noted that Facebook already allows users to mention on their profile that they’re in an “open relationship” with one or more people. The timing of the request may seem curious given Facebook’s declining daily userbase, but it’s in line with the growing number of people who find themselves in non-monogamous relationships. According to data cited by OPEN, about four to five percent of American adults practice ethical non-monogamy.