Tech Digest daily roundup: 5G ‘protection necklaces’ found to be radioactive
Necklaces and accessories claiming to “protect” people from 5G mobile networks have been found to be radioactive. The Dutch authority for nuclear safety and radiation protection (ANVS) issued a warning about ten products it found gave off harmful ionising radiation. It urged people not to use the products, which could cause harm with long-term wear. There is no evidence that 5G networks are harmful to health. The World Health Organization says 5G mobile networks are safe, and not fundamentally different from existing 3G and 4G signals. Mobile networks use non-ionising radio waves that do not damage DNA. Despite this, there have been attacks on transmitters by people who believe they are harmful. BBC
For the first time you can see where to charge up while using the Waze app for driving directions. The Google-owned navigation app added more features for electric car owners in the U.S. on Friday. Instead of just gas stations, you can now look up public charging stations along your route or nearby. This comes as more people buy EVs, carmakers add more electric options to lineups, and more charging stations are planned. Waze is becoming increasingly EV-friendly as part of a partnership with Volkswagen, the German carmaker that released its first electric SUV, the ID.4, at the beginning of the year. You can also change your car icon to an EV. Mashable
“If you look at the car, it fundamentally hasn’t changed much in the last 50 years,” says Henrik Fisker, who designed the iconic Aston Martin DB9. “It still has four doors, a trunk that you slam, it’s put on a truck and sent out to a dealer. We looked at that entire chain of events and said: ‘what if we start with a clean sheet of paper?’” Fisker’s plan is simple: do what Apple did to the mobile phone market. The Danish-born veteran of BMW and Aston Martin came up with his business model for his synonymous automobile company after observing Apple topple Nokia as the biggest smartphone company in the world. Telegraph
Last year, when Josh Western and Andrew Bacon set up their company Space Forge, they had a garage to work in and little else. Today, the two Cardiff-based entrepreneurs have a staff of 25 and are now planning further expansion after raising £7.6m of international seed-funding. The financing – to be announced later this week – should allow the company to start a remarkable aerospace endeavour: deploying satellites in which new alloys, medicines and semiconductors can be manufactured in outer space and then brought back to Earth. The first missions are now planned for the end of 2022. Guardian
A major cybersecurity vulnerability is impacting nearly all of the internet, sending everything from financial institutions to government entities scrambling to patch their systems, before cybercriminals and nation states can launch cyberattacks. Known as the Log4j vulnerability, the flaw impacts a piece of open-source logging software that allows developers to understand how their programs function. The idea is to help companies understand potential bugs or performance issues in their own software. But Log4j, which is part of the software offered by the open source Apache Software Foundation, can be exploited to allow attackers to take over the computers and networks of any organization running the program. Yahoo!
A SpaceX rocket carried 52 Starlink internet satellites into orbit from California early Saturday. The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Space Force Base at 4:41 a.m. and arced over the Pacific. The Falcon’s first stage returned and landed on a SpaceX droneship in the ocean. It was the 11th launch and recovery of the stage. The second stage continued into orbit and deployment of the satellites was confirmed, said launch commentator Youmei Zhou at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Starlink is a satellite-based global internet system that SpaceX has been building for years to bring internet access to underserved areas of the world. AP News
