AT&T has launched its 5G network for consumers, along with the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G.

Apple has partnered with Amazon to launch support for Apple Podcasts on Amazon Echo devices. Starting today, Echo owners in the United States can ask Alexa to play any of the 800,000 shows in the Apple Podcasts directory.

To set up the integration, Echo customers must first link their Apple ID in the Alexa app. As well as asking Alexa to play a specific show, playback progress will automatically sync with all of your Apple Podcasts app across iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac.

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Mathematicians regard the Collatz conjecture as a quagmire and warn each other to stay away. But now Terence Tao has made more progress than anyone in decades. From a report: It's a siren song, they say: Fall under its trance and you may never do meaningful work again. The Collatz conjecture is quite possibly the simplest unsolved problem in mathematics -- which is exactly what makes it so treacherously alluring. "This is a really dangerous problem. People become obsessed with it and it really is impossible," said Jeffrey Lagarias, a mathematician at the University of Michigan and an expert on the Collatz conjecture. Earlier this year one of the top mathematicians in the world dared to confront the problem -- and came away with one of the most significant results on the Collatz conjecture in decades. On September 8, Terence Tao posted a proof showing that -- at the very least -- the Collatz conjecture is "almost" true for "almost" all numbers. While Tao's result is not a full proof of the conjecture, it is a major advance on a problem that doesn't give up its secrets easily. "I wasn't expecting to solve this problem completely," said Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles. "But what I did was more than I expected." Lothar Collatz likely posed the eponymous conjecture in the 1930s. The problem sounds like a party trick. Pick a number, any number. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. If it's even, divide it by 2. Now you have a new number. Apply the same rules to the new number. The conjecture is about what happens as you keep repeating the process. Intuition might suggest that the number you start with affects the number you end up with. Maybe some numbers eventually spiral all the way down to 1. Maybe others go marching off to infinity. But Collatz predicted that's not the case. He conjectured that if you start with a positive whole number and run this process long enough, all starting values will lead to 1. And once you hit 1, the rules of the Collatz conjecture confine you to a loop: 1, 4, 2, 1, 4, 2, 1, on and on forever.

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Apple shared which Macs will be compatible with the Pro Display XDR and very notably, the iMac Pro wasn’t on the list. However, we’ve got confirmation today that it will work, but with a limitation.

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Mozilla announced this week that all developers of Firefox add-ons must enable a two-factor authentication (2FA) solution for their account. From a report: "Starting in early 2020, extension developers will be required to have 2FA enabled on AMO [the Mozilla Add-Ons portal]," said Caitlin Neiman, Add-ons Community Manager at Mozilla. "This is intended to help prevent malicious actors from taking control of legitimate add-ons and their users," Neiman added. When this happens, hackers can use the developers' compromised accounts to ship tainted add-on updates to Firefox users. Since Firefox add-ons have a pretty privileged position inside the browser, an attacker can use a compromised add-on to steal passwords, authentication/session cookies, spy on a user's browsing habits, or redirect users to phishing pages or malware download sites. These types of incidents are usually referred to as supply-chain attacks.

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The cellular-enabled version of the Apple Watch takes advantage of embedded SIM technology (eSIM) that doesn't require a physical SIM card.

Bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland have emitted a massive pulse of CO2 into the atmosphere since August that is equivalent to almost half of Australia's annual greenhouse gas emissions, Guardian Australia can reveal. From a report: Analysis by Nasa shows the NSW fires have emitted about 195m tonnes of CO2 since 1 August, with Queensland's fires adding a further 55m tonnes over the same period. In 2018, Australia's entire greenhouse gas footprint was 532m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. Experts say the pulse of CO2 from this season's bushfires is significant, because even under normal conditions it could take decades for forest regrowth to reabsorb the emissions. But scientists have expressed doubt that forests already under drought stress would be able to reabsorb all the emissions back into soils and branches, and said the natural carbon "sinks" of forests could be compromised.

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We’re under a week away from the release of the latest Star Wars film, and Apple is commemorating the event with a huge movie sale today. That includes nearly every Star Wars film, plus markdowns on various bundles including Batman, DC Universe, Superman, and more. All of which will become a permanent part of your library, delivering excellent value along the way. You’ll find all of our top picks down below.

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The iPhone maker has teamed up with Color Genomics to genetic screening free of charge to all its Silicon Valley employees through AC Wellness.

Tim Cook is continuing something of a whirlwind tour of Asia, after beginning the trip in Japan earlier in the week. From there he headed to Singapore and is currently in Thailand…

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If you wish you could have Apple Watch Complications on your iPhone's Lock screen, then you won't want to miss this new jailbreak tweak.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Cigna plans to expand a system that uses artificial intelligence to identify gaps in treatment of chronic diseases, such as patients skipping their medications, and deliver personalized recommendations for specific patients. The product, called Health Connect 360, integrates data from a combination of sources and analytical tools, some developed at Cigna and others brought in as part of its $54 billion acquisition of pharmacy-benefit manager Express Scripts Holding Co., completed late last year. Express Scripts, which began developing the service two years ago, rolled out portions of it to some customers this year. Health Connect 360 was developed for treatment of chronic diseases, including diabetes and heart disease, as well as for pain management. The system aggregates medical, pharmacy, lab and biometric data -- such as information from glucometers, which measure blood-sugar levels -- into a dashboard that is accessible through an online interface. The dashboard will be visible to the service's customers and to Express Scripts case managers and nurses with access rights. The system can also feed information to electronic-medical record systems for physicians. Cigna is already using AI to predict whether patients might abuse or overdose on prescription opioids. Another Cigna tool, One Guide, provides personalized help to health-insurance holders on their benefit plans, appointments and health coaching. The new Health Connect 360 system combines algorithms that analyze data such as clinical and pharmacy information with predictive models to generate recommendations and ways to best engage a patient, whether through an app or in person.

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The Philips Hue brand has established itself as a frontrunner in the world of HomeKit smart lighting. And it looks to be continuing to push the envelope in 2020 with a new lineup of outdoor products, thanks to leaked product catalog found by Hueblog.de.

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If you use Safari on your Mac for work or school, then you probably need to save sites for reference. Here’s how to save tabs in Safari on your Mac.

iPhone and iPad users were rather surprised to see an AT&T 5G E symbol appear back in February. Surprised partly because AT&T didn’t have a 5G network at the time, and partly because no current iPhone or iPad could connect to one anyway.

What AT&T launched then was a fake 5G which was really just a form of LTE that had existed since 2014. It’s continued to use the misleading symbol despite a lawsuit and full page ad designed to draw attention to the fakery, but has now finally launched the real thing …

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You can enable Dark Mode in Safari on your Mac for almost any website you come across with a couple of simple tools. Here’s how they work.

Tune brings two pleasant new Now Playing interfaces to jailbroken iPhones.

schwit1 shares a report from People: Doctors in New Zealand are currently awaiting nearly 1,300 square feet of skin from the United States in order to treat the dozens of victims who suffered severe burns when a volcano erupted on White Island Monday afternoon. Dr. Peter Watson, chief medical officer of Counties Manukau Health, said at a press conference Wednesday that there are 29 patients being treated in intensive care and burn units at four different hospitals throughout New Zealand. Twenty-four of the burn patients remain in critical condition. "We currently have supplies but are urgently sourcing additional supplies to meet the demand for dressing and temporary skin grafts," Watson said. "We anticipate we will require an additional 1.2 million square centimeters [1,292 square feet] of skin for the ongoing needs of the patients. These supplies are coming from the United States and the order has been placed." Watson said the nature of the victims' injuries had been made "complicated" by the gases and chemicals in the eruption, thus making "more rapid" surgical treatment necessary, as opposed to if they'd suffered thermal-only burns. CNN reports that the skin grafts are coming from people who are registered to donate skin after their deaths, and typically are taken from the donors' backs or the backs of their legs. There were a total of 47 travelers on the island when the volcano erupted Monday just after 2 p.m. Six people were killed.

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In a piece for the BBC, Chris Baraniuk writes about how the intelligence of New Caledonian crows may be far more advanced than we ever thought possible. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Intelligence is rooted in the brain. Clever primates -- including humans -- have a particular structure in their brains called the neocortex. It is thought that this helps to make advanced cognition possible. Corvids, notably, do not have this structure. [New Caledonian crows belong to the corvid family of birds -- as do jackdaws, rooks, jays, magpies and ravens.] They have instead evolved densely packed clusters of neurons that afford them similar mental prowess. The specific kind of brain they have doesn't really matter -- corvids and primates share some of the same basic capabilities in terms of problem-solving and plasticity, or being able to adapt and change in the face of new information and experiences. This is an example of convergent evolution, where completely different evolutionary histories have led to the same feature or behavior. It's easy for humans to see why the things corvids can do are useful. From identifying people who have previously posed a threat to them or others in their group to using gestures for communication -- we too rely on abilities like these. [Christian Rutz at the University of St Andrews] is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies -- can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn't use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. In the wild, New Caledonians use their tools to scoop insects out of holes, for example in tree trunks. Footage of this behavior has been caught on camera. You might think that some animals are smarter than others -- with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn't mean we're the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorize where food is located in the forest canopy, for example. Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialization. "New Caledonian crows, like us and other clever animals, have moods and memories. Strategies and expectations. They seem remarkably able to engage with complexity," writes Baraniuk in closing. "Evolution made this possible. But cognition, like life itself, serves more than just a need. Animal intelligence allows all sorts of fascinating phenomena to arise. [...] Nature provided the notes, but animal brains make the music. The mind, as they say, is the only limit."

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