Safari 14, scheduled to be released later this fall with iOS 14 and macOS 11, is a release that is packed choke-full with features. From a report: The biggest and most important of the new additions is support for WebExtensions, a technology for creating browser extensions. What this means for Safari users is that starting this fall, they'll see a huge influx of new Safari extensions as add-on developers are expected to port their existing Chrome and Firefox extensions to work on Apple's browser as well. Apple said that, for now, WebExtensions will only be available for Safari on macOS.

Safari 14 is also an end of an era, as this will be the first version of Safari that won't support Adobe Flash Player content. But while old stuff is being removed, new stuff is also being added. One of the new technologies added to Safari is support for HTTP/3, a new web standard that will make loading websites faster and safer. Another important addition in Safari is support for WebP, a lightweight image format that has been gaining widespread adoption across the internet. The format, created by Google, serves as an alternative to the older JPEG format, and Safari has been the last browser to add support for it. [...] But Safari hasn't been lagging behind other browsers just in terms of HTTP/3 and WebP support. Apple has also added support for another cool feature, namely breach alerts, already present in both Chrome and Firefox. Starting this fall, Apple says that Safari 14 will scan a user's locally-stored passwords and show a prompt if one or more of the user's credentials are present in publicly available lists of breached accounts.

The World Health Organization has now halted research on whether hydroxychloroquine could be an effective treatment for COVID-19, reports NBC News, after multiple studies showed the drug "has no impact on the coronavirus."

But now that America's Food and Drug Administration has revoked permission for using it to treat coronavirus patients, CNN reports that the U.S. government "is stuck with 63 million doses of hydroxychloroquine." The government started stockpiling donated hydroxychloroquine in late March, after President Trump touted it as "very encouraging" and "very powerful" and a "game-changer." But Monday, the FDA revoked its emergency use authorization to use the drug to treat Covid-19, saying there was "no reason to believe" the drug was effective against the virus, and that it increased the risk of side effects, including heart problems... [M]any infectious disease experts, including those who've studied the drug for coronavirus, say there was never any evidence that the drug worked for the virus.
And some of America's states are now also stuck with millions of hydroxychloroquine pills which they're no longer allowed to use to treat COVID-19, reports The Columbus Dispatch: The state of Ohio purchased more than 2 million hydroxychloroquine pills for $602,629 on April 9, Melanie Amato, spokeswoman for the Department of Health, said via email. [And an additional 2 million were donated by an Ohio-based drugmaker...] The FDA change leaves the Ohio Department of Health with more than 4 million pills, which Amato said have a shelf life of about 18 to 24 months... [T]he state can give the drug only to facilities licensed to maintain dangerous prescription drugs...

Utah purchased $800,000 worth of the drug and Oklahoma spent $2 million on it...

A spokeswoman for Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, a Glenford Republican, called the state Health Department's purchase of hydroxychloroquine "a waste of money."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting out seven factors that would need to be known to come up with an estimate for the number of intelligent civilizations out there. These factors ranged from the the average number of stars that form each year in the galaxy through to the timespan over which a civilization would be expected to be sending out detectable signals.

But few of the factors are measurable. "Drake equation estimates have ranged from zero to a few billion [civilizations] -- it is more like a tool for thinking about questions rather than something that has actually been solved," said Christopher Conselice, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Nottingham and a co-author of the research. Now Conselice and colleagues report in the Astrophysical Journal how they refined the equation with new data and assumptions to come up with their estimates. "Basically, we made the assumption that intelligent life would form on other [Earth-like] planets like it has on Earth, so within a few billion years life would automatically form as a natural part of evolution," said Conselice.

The assumption, known as the Astrobiological Copernican Principle, is fair as everything from chemical reactions to star formation is known to occur if the conditions are right, he said. "[If intelligent life forms] in a scientific way, not just a random way or just a very unique way, then you would expect at least this many civilizations within our galaxy," he said. Under the strictest set of assumptions -- where, as on Earth, life forms between 4.5 billion and 5.5 billion years after star formation -- there are likely between four and 211 civilizations in the Milky Way today capable of communicating with others, with 36 the most likely figure. But Conselice noted that this figure is conservative, not least as it is based on how long our own civilization has been sending out signals into space -- a period of just 100 years so far. The team add that our civilization would need to survive at least another 6,120 years for two-way communication. "They would be quite far away ... 17,000 light years is our calculation for the closest one," said Conselice. "If we do find things closer ... then that would be a good indication that the lifespan of [communicating] civilizations is much longer than a hundred or a few hundred years, that an intelligent civilization can last for thousands or millions of years. The more we find nearby, the better it looks for the long-term survival of our own civilization."