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Google Wallet gets support for Apple Wallet passes, linked passes

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Last updated: April 9th, 2024 at 13:07 UTC+02:00

Google Wallet is among the most used digital wallet apps in Western markets. It has now started supporting Apple Wallet passes, which is excellent, as many services offer passes for Apple Wallet. It has also received support for linked passes, which sometimes improve the user experience.

These Google Wallet features work on Galaxy phones, too.

Google Wallet now supports Apple Wallet passes, but it doesn’t work every time

Last month, Google Wallet started testing support for Apple Wallet passes (with .pkpass file extension), and it seems to have started rolling out that feature more widely in the US. It has been released through the latest Wallet and Play Services updates. It can now read data inside .pkpass files, which means you can add things like movie and travel tickets in the Google Wallet app.

The folks over at 9To5Google were able to add parking passes by clicking the ‘Add to Apple Wallet’ button, which allowed them to download the pass and import it into the Google Wallet app. However, they couldn’t add a baseball game ticket to Google Wallet, as the website asked them to download the pass using the Safari web browser.

An alternative method requires an iPhone. You can add the pass via Apple Wallet on an iPhone, email the pass file to yourself, open it on an Android phone, and import it into Google Wallet. However, this is too cumbersome, and most people don’t have two phones, let alone an Android phone and an iPhone.

Google Wallet also supports linked passes

Google Wallet has received a feature (via 9To5Google) that allows it to ‘Automatically Add Linked Passes.’ The new feature is enabled by default in the Passes section of the app. Pass providers can use this feature to automatically add passes or tickets related to an event, offer, or promotion.

Google Wallet Linked Passes Option

For example, passes can be added for offers linked to an existing loyalty card. A meal voucher pass can be added along with a flight boarding pass or an event ticket. It also allows a parking pass alongside an event ticket. All these are pretty convincing use cases.

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Business Industry

WhatsApp will soon allow you to lock chats on linked devices

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Last updated: April 2nd, 2024 at 10:20 UTC+02:00

As most of you might know, WhatsApp for Android and iOS allows you to lock chats behind a passcode or biometric authentication. Once you lock a chat, the app also moves it from the regular chats list to the Locked Chats folder. This feature is very helpful for people who don’t want anyone else to see or access particular chats on the messaging platform.

Unfortunately, the feature is limited to primary devices and does not extend to linked devices. It means that if you lock a chat in WhatsApp on your primary device, it will still be visible in the regular chats list in WhatsApp on your linked device, and will be accessible without the need to enter a passcode or authenticate your identity using biometrics, which is quite frustrating. Well, WhatsApp is now working on a solution to that problem.

According to WABetaInfo, the latest beta version of WhatsApp for Android (version 2.24.8.4) on your linked device does not show those chats in the regular chats list that you had locked on your primary device. Instead, it shows those chats in the Locked Chats folder, and to access those chats, you will have to enter a secret code (not a passcode). You can create a secret code from the Chat Lock settings on your primary device.

WhatsApp Chat Lock On Linked Devices

With the latest feature, you don’t have to worry about anyone else seeing/accessing those chats on your linked device that you had locked on your primary device, enhancing your privacy and security on the messaging platform. We hope that WhatsApp extends this feature to WhatsApp for iOS, Mac, Windows, and the web to make sure that the chats you lock on your primary device stay locked on your linked device no matter its platform.

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Life Style

COVID ‘brain fog’ linked to brain inflammation

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Hello Nature readers, would you like to get this Briefing in your inbox free every day? Sign up here.

Surgeons in protective clothing work on a patient.

Surgeons at Xijing Hospital in Xi’an, China, performed the first transplantation of a non-human liver into a human body.Credit: Xijing Hospital, Air Force Medical University in Xi’an China

Surgeons in China say they have transplanted a pig liver into a person’s body for the first time. With consent from the man’s family, the clinically dead patient received a liver from a pig that was genetically modified to prevent the recipient from rejecting the pig organ. The surgeons say the pig liver secreted more than 30 millilitres of bile every day, and the colour and texture of the liver remained normal after 10 days. In January, a US team conducted a similar experiment with a pig’s liver located outside a person’s body, and there have been further experiments with genetically modified pig kidneys and hearts.

Nature | 5 min read

Read more: Experts weigh in on the issues surrounding the xenotransplantation of pig organs in Nature Medicine (11 min read, from 2022)

Stellar detectives have identified seven stars that recently gobbled up a rocky planet. The planets seem to have been eaten during their stars’ relatively stable main-sequence period. If this is true, it means these systems have continued to be chaotic long after their formation, with planets disintegrating or falling into their star, says astronomer Johanna Teske. “It’s an inference at this point. We need to look at these systems in more detail.”

Nature | 3 min read

Reference: Nature paper

2,500

The number of researchers who have left Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, according to an estimate based on researchers’ ORCID identifiers. (Nature | 5 min read)

A slew of studies have identified how inflammation in the brains of people with COVID-19 might explain neurological symptoms such as loss of smell, headaches and memory problems. Growing evidence suggests that the immune response triggered by the virus leads indirectly to brain inflammation. One study found that people with long COVID and ‘brain fog’ had a leakier blood-brain barrier, which might let in molecules that cause inflammation.

Nature | 5 min read

Reference: Nature Neuroscience paper

Indian biotechnology company ImmunoACT is producing a much cheaper version of a cancer treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy. A single treatment of NexCAR19 costs between US$30,000 and $40,000 — a tenth of the price of comparable products now available. The safety profile also appears to be better than some US-approved CAR-T products. NexCAR19 is now being used to treat blood cancers in hospitals across India. “These are people for whom all other treatments have failed,” says immunologist Alka Dwivedi.

Nature | 6 min read

For 15 years, geoscientists have been involved in a complicated technical process to determine whether human impacts on Earth amount to a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. This week, following a controversial vote and challenge, the final verdict has arrived from the International Union of Geological Sciences: we are not in a new epoch. The current lack of agreement on a start date should not detract from the Anthropocene as a concept, says a Nature editorial. The reality is that humans are leaving a discernible fingerprint on Earth systems.

Nature | 5 min read & Nature editorial | 5 min read

Features & opinion

AI image generators can amplify biased stereotypes in their output. There have been attempts to quash the problem by manual fine-tuning (which can have unintended consequences, for example generating diverse but historically inaccurate images) and by increasing the amount of training data. “People often claim that scale cancels out noise,” says cognitive scientist Abeba Birhane. “In fact, the good and the bad don’t balance out.” The most important step to understanding how these biases arise and how to avoid them is transparency, researchers say. “If a lot of the data sets are not open source, we don’t even know what problems exist,” says Birhane.

Nature | 12 min read

Invasive ant species such as the Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) have conquered the land so thoroughly that “it can seem as if the spread of global trade was an Argentine ant plot for world domination”, writes science journalist John Whitfield. He explores what makes these insects so successful, their effects on ecosystems and the temptation to compare their spread with humanity’s own power struggles. Ants “speak to life’s ability to escape our grasp, regardless of how we might try to order and exploit the world”, writes Whitfield. “There’s something hopeful about that, for the planet, if not for us.”

Aeon | 15 min read

Quote of the day

The psychoactive drug ketamine is increasingly being used to treat depression and other mood disorders, including by high-profile users such as entrepreneur Elon Musk or actor Matthew Perry. More than 40 clinical trials support its effectiveness in treating severe depression. But neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt warns that those taking it need careful supervision. (Nature | 5 min read)

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Politics

Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck

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Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road, new Johns Hopkins University-led research shows. The findings raise doubts that materials pulled last year from the ocean are alien materials from that meteor, as was widely reported.

“The signal changed directions over time, exactly matching a road that runs past the seismometer,” said Benjamin Fernando, a planetary seismologist at Johns Hopkins who led the research. “It’s really difficult to take a signal and confirm it is not from something. But what we can do is show that there are lots of signals like this, and show they have all the characteristics we’d expect from a truck and none of the characteristics we’d expect from a meteor.”

The team will present its findings March 12 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston.

After a meteor entered Earth’s atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of “extraterrestrial technological” (alien) origin.

But according to Fernando, that supposition relies on misinterpreted data and the meteor actually entered the atmosphere somewhere else. Fernando’s team did not find evidence of seismic waves from the meteor.

“The fireball location was actually very far away from where the oceanographic expedition went to retrieve these meteor fragments,” he said. “Not only did they use the wrong signal, they were looking in the wrong place.”

Using data from stations in Australia and Palau designed to detect sound waves from nuclear testing, Fernando’s team identified a more likely location for the meteor, more than 100 miles from the area initially investigated. They concluded the materials recovered from the ocean bottom were tiny, ordinary meteorites — or particles produced from other meteorites hitting Earth’s surface mixed with terrestrial contamination.

“Whatever was found on the sea floor is totally unrelated to this meteor, regardless of whether it was a natural space rock or a piece of alien spacecraft — even though we strongly suspect that it wasn’t aliens,” Fernando added.

Fernando’s team includes Constantinos Charalambous of Imperial College London; Steve Desch of Arizona State University; Alan Jackson of Towson University; Pierrick Mialle of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization; Eleanor K. Sansom of Curtin University; and Göran Ekström of Columbia University.

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