The coronavirus was known in France earlier than it was believed. On December 27 last year, a patient in a hospital was positive. That has only been established by testing a sample of the man that was taken at the time for the lung virus, French media report. The patient had pneumonia and was admitted to a hospital in the …

Leiden-based biotechnology company Pharming reports encouraging results with his drug Ruconest against Covid-19, which is caused by the new coronavirus. Results from tests in five patients prompted a more extensive study into the effect of the drug against the lung virus. Pharming initially developed Ruconest as a medicine against hereditary forms of angioedema, or acute swelling in the body. The …

The 2019-nCoV corona virus has claimed a first victim in Europe. In France, an eighty-year-old Chinese tourist succumbed to the effects of the COVID-19 disease on Friday, French health minister Agnès Buzyn reported Saturday. The tourist is said to be from the Chinese province of Hubei, the epicenter of the virus outbreak, and arrived in the French capital Paris in …

Sun bursts can disrupt radio signals, make navigation instruments more unreliable, or even shut down entire power plants. To better understand that space weather, a probe from the European space agency ESA has been heading for the sun since last night: Solar Orbiter. The probe was launched early this morning from Florida. It doesn’t happen often that a solar storm …

The new corona virus is significantly reducing economic growth in China. Credit rating agency S&P Global expects the rate of growth of the second largest economy in the world to fall to 5 percent in 2020. Last year the Chinese economy improved by 6.1 percent. That was already the weakest growth in the country in almost three decades. S&P Global, …

Google launches OpenSK. That code should make it easier for other parties to create hardware security keys. With OpenSK, Google is introducing an open-source tool for creating FIDO2-compatible security keys. Such keys enable two-factor authentication. The combination of safe hardware and software in things makes them unique, so that you can only unlock accounts when you have the key. OpenSK …

A telescope in Hawaii made the most detailed solar photo to date. Cells of cooler and hotter plasma are visible. We have never seen the sun so detailed. Wednesday evening the first images were presented that were made with the new Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui. They give a spectacular impression of the …

The WHO chief praised the Chinese authorities’ actions. It has nevertheless been decided to declare an international emergency: PHEIC for short, the English abbreviation for International Emergency in Public Health. “We don’t know what damage this virus could cause in a country with a weaker health system,” he explained at a press conference. Tedros said to have confidence in China’s …

The new coronavirus has surfaced in Germany, reports the Bavarian Ministry of Health Monday evening. The patient would have been placed in isolation and would be fine. 4,515 people worldwide have now been infected and 106 people have died. The man comes from the Starnberg region in the German state. It was only confirmed on Monday evening that he was …

In 2018, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos received a WhatsApp message from a remarkable sender: a 4.4 MB video from none other than Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. The result? The iPhone of the richest man on earth rapidly leaked an enormous amount of information. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the crown prince supposedly sent this. Bezos …