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ICYMI: the week’s 8 biggest news stories from Amazon’s awful ad plans to Apple’s magnificent M4 iPad Pro reveal

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We’re getting into the busy tech season, folks. Apple had its massive 2024 iPad event this week, Google I/O 2024 is coming next week, and there are so many more announcements on the way.

But before we get into next week, we need to catch up on the week we’ve just had. So, to lend a hand, we’ve gathered the 8 biggest tech news stories of the week and bundled them here for you to read through them. This list includes Apple’s iPad news, Amazon‘s terrible ad plans, a new Superman suit, and another major Windows 11 bug that could slow down your PC.

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Asus officially confirms the Asus ROG Ally X, but full reveal delayed until June 2

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Asus officially confirmed the latest ROG Ally PC gaming handheld, called the Asus ROG Ally X, during a live stream on May 9, 2024. According to the stream, the ‘X’ stands for the hardcore audience wanting to see major hardware changes and fixes to the portable.

While it was announced that a full stream featuring all of the changes to the ROG Ally X would drop on June 2, 2024, there was a brief overview of some of the overhauls coming. Those include upgrades to the RAM, ports (with a mention of a proper fix to the SSD port), battery life, and its UI Armoury Crate. 

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New benchmarks reveal just how powerful the new Apple M4 chip is

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Recently posted benchmarks have revealed how capable the brand-new Apple M4 chip is in terms of single-core performance, outpacing even the best processors on the market. 

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, there’s a new champion in the Geekbench 6 CPU benchmarks as the iPad Pro line featuring the M4 chip actually beat out the previously leading Intel Core i9-14900KS in single-core benchmarks. Apple’s latest silicon scored confident averages of around 3,800 in comparison to Team Blue’s average of 3,100. 

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Leaked plans reveal Intel could release 21 Arrow Lake-S CPUs this year

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Intel Arrow Lake appears to be on the horizon according to new insider information which claims a total of 21 CPUs will be available in the upcoming lineup. 

As spotted by Wccftech, Intel Arrow Lake-S Core Ultra-200 processors are rumored to be announced at Computex next month with a full suite of processors headed for store shelves this year. According to Benchlife, this is set to include the Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K, and the Core Ultra 5 245K. 

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What China’s mission to collect rocks from the far side could reveal about the Moon

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Later this week, China will embark on the world’s second-only trip to the Moon’s far side. The goal is to collect the first rocks from inside the South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin, the largest and oldest impact crater on the lunar surface, and bring them back to Earth for analysis.

A stack of four spacecraft needed to complete this unprecedented and highly challenging mission, known as Chang’e-6, is now tucked into the nose of a 57-metre-tall Long March 5 rocket, waiting to lift off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on southern China’s Hainan Island.

“The whole process is very complex and risky,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But he says it’s a risk worth taking: “Samples from the SPA basin would be very interesting scientifically and tell us a lot about the history of the Moon and of the early Solar System.”

Far side science

Because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth, humans were only able to see its near side for thousands of years. In 1959, the first lunar far-side images returned by the Soviet probe Luna 3 revealed a face pocked with mountains and impact craters, in contrast to the relatively smooth near side. Scientists have since been collecting data from satellites orbiting the Moon to understand its little-known other half. In 2019, China’s Chang’e-4 became the first spacecraft to soft land and conduct surveys on the Moon’s far side.

The upcoming Chang’e-6 mission, with its landing site carefully chosen by Chinese scientists and international colleagues, aims to give the first accurate measurements of the age and composition of the geology of the Moon’s far side. It might provide key clues to why the two sides of the Moon are so different — the so-called lunar dichotomy mystery — and help test theories about the early history of the Solar System.

The SPA Basin is a vast indentation on the lower half of the far side some 2,500 kilometres wide and 8 kilometres deep. Inside the northeastern part, Li’s team has identified three potential landing areas. They believe the sites could have a variety of materials formed during repeated asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions over two billion years, and therefore could be scientifically rich.

The South Pole-Aitken Basin on the lunar far side. The low center is dark blue and purple. Mountains on its edge, remnants of outer rings, are red and yellow.

The South Pole-Aitken Basin is the blue area in the centre of this false-colour image. The indentation is 2,500 kilometres wide.Credit: NASA/GSFC/University Of Arizona

The most likely rock to be collected is basalt — dark-coloured cooled lava — which has previously been brought back to Earth for analysis from the Moon’s near side. With the first far-side basalt samples, scientists will be able to date them and assess their chemical composition, giving clues to their formation. “Then we can make comparative studies to understand why volcanic activities happened on a much smaller scale and ended much earlier on the far side of the Moon,” says Long Xiao, a planetary scientist at the China University of Geosciences in Wuhan.

Being able to pin down the SPA Basin’s age would also be a major achievement, says planetary geologist Carolyn van der Bogert from the University of Münster, Germany. It will help settle the long-standing debate about whether the Moon and the inner Solar System was battered by a massive cluster of asteroids between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago. If the SPA Basin is older, then it would cast doubt on the heavy bombardment theory.

Besides basalts, scientists hope that Chang’e-6 will also pick up fragments of other rocks that have been scattered during impact events. If the Chinese mission strikes ejecta the from the deeper lunar crust or mantle, it will be scientific gold.

Engineering challenges

Chang’e-6 was originally built as a backup for the Chang’e-5 mission, which successfully returned 1.73 kilograms of samples from the Moon’s near side in 2020. Because the two craft are identical, site selection for Chang’e-6’s landing was constrained to similar latitudes as Chang’e-5’s and needed a relatively flat surface, says Chunlai Li, the mission’s deputy chief designer from the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing.

Like its predecessor, Chang’e-6 does not pre-determine its landing site but will use its instrumentation during the descent process to find the safest and most favourable spot. “The landing of Chang’e-6 would be more challenging than Chang’e-5 simply because the far side landing site is more rugged,” says Xiao.

Chang’e-6, like its twin, consists of an orbiter, a lander, an ascender and a re-entry module. When the spacecraft arrives at the Moon, it will separate into two parts, with the lander and ascender headed for the lunar surface while the orbiter and re-entry module remain in orbit.

If it pulls off the difficult soft landing, the lander will drill and scoop up two kilograms of soil and rocks. The sampling process needs to be completed within 48 hours, after which the ascender is intended to blast off from the lander and return to the lunar orbiter. There it is supposed to dock and transfer the precious samples to the re-entry module for the trip home.

During the sample collection and lunar surface liftoff, the Chang’e-6 lander would be unable to directly communicate with Earth. Every command will need to go through a relay satellite named Queqiao-2. Launched last month and now operating in a highly elliptical orbit around the Moon, Queqiao-2 is more powerful than the Queqiao satellite which served the Chang’e-4 mission. Its 4.2-metre umbrella-shaped antenna has the ability to simultaneously serve up to ten spacecraft working on the Moon’s far side.

International collaboration

Chang’e-6 is also carrying scientific payloads from France, Sweden, Italy and Pakistan. The Detection of Outgassing RadoN (DORN), which will be the first French instrument on the Moon, plans to use radon released from the lunar surface as a tracer to study the origin and dynamics of the Moon’s faint atmosphere. Pierre-Yves Meslin, a planetary scientist at the Research Institute in Astrophysics and Planetology in Toulouse, France, says previous spacecraft have measured radon gas movement from orbit, but surface-level radon information is the missing piece of the puzzle.

The Negative Ions at the Lunar Surface, a payload developed in Sweden with funding from the European Space Agency, will seek to answer the question of why no negative ions have yet been detected on the lunar surface. Negative particles could be short-lived, formed either by atoms at the surface snatching electrons from the solar wind, or by molecules breaking apart from the high-energy solar radiation. The biggest challenge for this instrument is overheating, since it needs to face the Sun, says ESA project manager Neil Melville. But he says one hour of operation should be enough to gather the data.

Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics is sending a laser retroreflector for distance measurements. And Pakistan has piggy-backed its first lunar satellite to the Chang’e 6 orbiter, which will deploy after entering the lunar orbit.

Both surface instruments need to complete their work and send data back to Earth within the 48-hour window. “As soon as the samples lift off, the ascender will bring with it the communications and control system it shares with the lander. Even if the instruments on the lander continue to take data, there is no way to receive them here on Earth,” Li says

He says that like Chang’e-5 samples, the returned Chang’e-6 samples will be shared with the international community.

“When those samples come back to Earth, they will be like a Christmas present — whoever opens it will be happily surprised,” Bogert says.

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Leaked AMD Navi 4X GPU notes reveal up to 50% more powerful than RX 7900 XTX

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A prominent hardware leaker has uncovered new patch notes revealing that the now-allegedly canceled AMD Navi 4X / 4C graphics cards would have been significantly more powerful than the current AMD flagship RX 7900 XTX. 

Uncovered by Kepler_L2 (via Tweaktown), new patch notes for AMD GFX12 supposedly showcase Navi 4X die models, the newer equivalent of the Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which would feature up to 50% more shader engines, however, it’s not looking likely that anything from RDNA 4 will be as quick as has been touted here.

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Meta’s massive OS announcement is more exciting than a Meta Quest 4 reveal, and VR will never be the same again

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Meta has announced that its Meta Horizon OS will no longer be exclusive to its Quest headsets (such as the incredible Meta Quest 3), and this might be the most important news we’ll see in the XR space this decade.

It’s an announcement I’ve been expecting for years – for reasons I’ll outline below – but the short version is Meta has started to turn its Horizon OS into the Windows of the spatial computing era; it’s even complete with a rival Apple OS (the Apple Vision Pro’s VisionOS) and a dash of irony given one of the first three non-Quest systems will be Xbox branded (Xbox is Microsoft’s gaming department for those not in the know).

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What toilets can reveal about COVID, cancer and other health threats

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In late 2020, COVID-19’s global death toll was rising as cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere and holiday gatherings spurred rapid transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in the absence of a vaccine. Scientists and public-health officials were desperate for new ways to track the virus, which often moved faster than contact tracers could follow it.

Tong Zhang, an environmental engineer and microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), and his colleagues were pioneers of what was fast becoming a popular surveillance method. They had been collecting periodic wastewater samples from about two dozen maintenance holes in the city and testing the sewage for coronavirus DNA, with support from Hong Kong’s government. In late December, they traced an outbreak to a single apartment building where there had been no sign of cases1.

The government quickly took action. Officials tested all of the building’s 2,000-odd residents; 9 tested positive. “Those people were isolated and went to a quarantine site. So they stopped the transmission chain,” Zhang says. After that success, he and his colleagues expanded their efforts.

Wastewater testing remains part of Hong Kong’s COVID-19 strategy to this day. Zhang’s team tests for the coronavirus at about 20 sites across the city each week, he says, and the team has expanded the analysis of these samples to cover other pathogens, including influenza, rotavirus, norovirus and mpox, as well as markers of antimicrobial resistance. He views wastewater testing as a way to gauge the health of an entire community at once. “If we can make the methodology more standardized”, this tool becomes a “promising and exciting” way to screen the world for pathogens, including those that scientists haven’t yet identified,he says.

Many researchers are following similar approaches. There are currently more than 4,600 sites around the world where wastewater is being collected for SARS-CoV-2 testing, and some of the research teams involved are investigating other potential applications, such as tracking illicit drug use and even the prevalence of cancer.

But whether this has the potential to be an effective public-health strategy is still a matter of debate. Leo Poon, a colleague of Zhang’s at HKU’s School of Public Health, says that more research should be done before health agencies expand their sewage testing programmes and make this surveillance part of their routine budgets. “There’s still a lot unknown,” he says, particularly in terms of testing for pathogens besides SARS-CoV-2. “I think there’s a steep learning curve at the moment: when we detect something, what does it mean?”

Early accomplishments

Many of the projects tracking COVID-19 through wastewater started in similar ways. Scientists learnt early in the pandemic that SARS-CoV-2 could be identified in sewage2, and made contact with local water authorities and health agencies to get samples.

By the end of 2020, several studies had shown that levels of coronavirus in public water systems could correlate with the number of COVID-19 cases in the community. For example, researchers at Stanford University in California found that viral levels in wastewater rose and fell with cases in the San Francisco Bay area3. The group that led the work has gone on to found the WastewaterSCAN project, which tests samples from nearly 200 sites across the United States (see ‘Peak transmission’).

Peak transmission: Chart showing levels of SARS-Cov2 in wastewater tests in California and Georgia peaking in December 2023.

Source: WastewaterSCAN

In the most successful wastewater projects, scientists say, researchers collaborated directly with public-health officials, who used the data to inform COVID-19 safety policies. This happened in rural parts of Ghana, where, as in Hong Kong, wastewater testing found COVID-19 cases that hadn’t been caught by other types of surveillance. Habib Yakubu, a public-health researcher at Emory University’s Center for Global Safe Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene in Atlanta, Georgia, worked with a team of Ghanaian scientists to develop testing methods that accounted for the country’s limited public sewers and laboratory equipment. They tried this in two rural districts, Nanumba North and Mion, where government officials suspected that COVID-19 might be spreading but where clinical testing hadn’t identified any cases.

The researchers worked with community leaders to identify sites for sampling, including schools, health-care facilities, markets and streams used for washing clothes. “We looked at, where do people converge?” Yakubu says. COVID-19 was, in fact, present in these regions, the researchers found. As a result, officials increased public-health activities, including community education and vaccination efforts. The team tested for other diseases that are common in Ghana, including cholera and typhoid, which has also informed health actions.

For scientists at the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society in Bengaluru, India, the need for wastewater testing for COVID-19 became clear after the country’s devastating wave of the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 in early 2021, says Farah Ishtiaq, an evolutionary ecologist at Tata who leads the COVID-19 surveillance programme in the city. She and her colleagues worked with officials to set up testing at 28 water treatment plants in Bengaluru — a logistically challenging task, because the team had to collect samples manually rather than using the automated samplers common in higher-income nations.

This testing proved its worth during the spread of the Omicron variant in Bengaluru the following year, Ishtiaq says. Wastewater data demonstrated that Omicron variants were spreading widely across the city at a time when data from the health-care system were limited. Officials responded by renewing mask mandates and placing restrictions on large gatherings, she says.

Inspired by case studies such as these, the field has grown drastically over the past 4 years, with hundreds of research teams now testing in 72 countries, according to the COVIDPoops19 dashboard maintained by environmental engineer Colleen Naughton and her colleagues at the University of California, Merced (see ‘Uneven coverage’).

Uneven coverage: Chart showing number countries which test wastewater for infectious pathogens, arranged by income level.

Sources: COVIDPoops19 (https://go.nature.com/4ATGHY)/World Bank

Interpreting poo

In December 2023 and January 2024, it was clear that COVID-19 was spreading widely in several parts of the world. But public-health agencies had severely cut back on conventional testing and surveillance programmes, leading to uncertainty about how much the coronavirus was spreading, and a sudden focus on wastewater-based epidemiology.

Some scientists and social-media commentators stated that SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater correlated with specific case numbers, estimating huge surges in the United States and Europe. But others cautioned that wastewater surveillance is not reliable enough to predict true infection numbers. There’s a “false sense of precision” in such estimates, says Sam Scarpino, an epidemiologist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, who has worked on COVID-19 data systems.

Estimates are difficult to make because the sewage data differ considerably from conventional health indicators. In typical surveillance, data represent individual infected people who can be identified through contact tracing, isolated and treated. In wastewater surveillance operations, data can represent entire communities.

They make “a litre represent a million people”, says Douglas Manuel, a public-health physician at the University of Ottawa in Canada. Manuel and his colleagues have identified several variables that can alter results from such screenings; these include population density, precipitation, sample composition, handling and testing methods and quality-control measures4. For example, as snow melts in Ottawa’s spring, it flows into the wastewater system and “scours out” solid waste that might have built up in the pipes, Manuel says. This could interfere with findings relating to SARS-CoV-2 measurements.

To account for those variables, researchers tend to compare measurements from one site over time. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, developed a metric called the wastewater viral activity level that compares a testing site’s recent SARS-CoV-2 measurement to past ones, then averages those comparison values across larger regions.

These comparison metrics can be helpful for presenting wastewater results to the public, but they gloss over the data’s complexity. Bilge Kocamemi, an environmental engineer at Marmara University in Istanbul and a project coordinator for Turkey’s wastewater testing, says that she quickly realized that “scientific representation of the data makes the data unusable for the public”. Instead, she and her colleagues developed a relatively simple COVID-19 map: testing sites are displayed in different shades of yellow and green, depending on how high SARS-CoV-2 levels are. This coloured scale is not precise, Kocamemi says, but it’s easy for people who don’t have a scientific background to understand.

Improving estimates

Modelling case counts — or other metrics of COVID-19 spread in a community, such as how many people will be hospitalized — from viral levels in wastewater is difficult, but not impossible, say scientists who work on this challenge. Such models would make it easier for health officials to make policy decisions on the basis of sewage data.

The CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics in Washington DC, which launched in 2022, is one group taking on this challenge. Wastewater data are “a really good leading indicator” for COVID-19’s burden on hospitals, says Dylan George, the centre’s director. In February, George and his colleagues released new hospital forecasting models informed by wastewater data, among other metrics (see go.nature.com/43xumbz). Studies have shown that such models are more accurate when they use wastewater data in tandem with data from the health-care system, rather than just one of those sources5.

George cautions that ongoing research will be needed to better understand the connection between virus levels in wastewater and disease levels in a community. For example, some scientists think that virus levels might change as SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate; a variant known as JN.1 might cause people to shed more virus particles, or shed them for longer compared with previous variants, George says. “I think that’s going to be an active area of research going forward.”

Modellers would like to have more detailed clinical testing data to allow them to make better comparisons between wastewater results and community infections. The challenge is often even greater for researchers testing wastewater for other viruses, says Casandra Philipson, a scientist at Ginkgo Bioworks, a company in Boston that analyses sewage from aeroplanes and airports, along with conducting research into new biosecurity tools. Philipson says that there are decent clinical data available for COVID-19, flu and respiratory syncytial virus. But, she adds, “When you get outside of those three pathogens, there really is a massive data scarcity issue.”

What else can be tested in sewage?

Some scientists are interested in a range of other diseases and health indicators that show up in people’s waste.

A group of environmental engineers take water samples from public toilets in a village in Tamil Nadu, India.

Manual wastewater sampling in India.Credit: Environmental Images/Universal Images Group/Shutterstock

Bernd Manfred Gawlik, who coordinates wastewater work at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Brussels, calls wastewater the “dirty blood of the city”, and compares sewage sampling to blood testing. “We are now only starting to understand” how to diagnose this “blood” at the collective level, he says.

One common target of testing is antimicrobial resistance (AMR), an area of wastewater research that pre-dates the pandemic. Ishtiaq, in Bengaluru, says that “AMR is a huge problem in this part of the world”, because many people use unregulated antibiotics. Her research has expanded from COVID-19 testing to a multifaceted, genomic platform that can look for both viral and bacterial infections. Wastewater data will help researchers to understand which pathogens are driving infections and communicate that information to physicians, she says.

Fatma Guerfali, a molecular biologist and bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, is also tracking AMR in Tunisia, one of the countries considered most at risk. Guerfali says that she and her colleagues are working with the country’s health agency, as well as with research collaborators in other African countries, to determine how best to expand the programme, which started with COVID-19 testing.

Beyond global targets such as AMR and flu, wastewater testing priorities differ according to local health challenges. Because this testing can pick up a wide variety of pathogens, scientists often consult with health agencies to determine which targets to prioritize. In Louisville, Kentucky, for example, Ted Smith, director of the Center for Healthy Air, Water and Soil at the University of Louisville, and his colleagues are testing for a ‘panvirome panel’ that includes about 30 pathogens of interest to the local health agency. Last year, the testing picked up measles during an outbreak in the state, and health officials used the data to inform vaccination programmes, alerts for physicians and other health efforts, he says.

Another area of expansion lies in testing chemicals that people excrete into wastewater. Some researchers, such as those at the start-up company Biobot Analytics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are screening for opioids and other drugs with a risk of misuse. Smith and his colleagues are testing sewage for compounds indicative of exposure to air pollution and they have started research into lead levels. “Every day, we come up with new things that we can interrogate wastewater for,” he says.

A few researchers are even going beyond diseases spread by humans to those spread by animals. In 2022, scientists published work linking new SARS-CoV-2 variants in New York City’s wastewater to the city’s rats6. Ishtiaq is looking at avian flu in Bengaluru, and Ekta Patel, a scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, is studying animal diseases there.

Patel and her colleagues are sampling sewage at slaughterhouses and testing for 66 pathogens, including anthrax, brucellosis, and Rift Valley fever. To complement the wastewater tests, Patel hopes her team can collect data from veterinary clinics and community hospitals.

Some wastewater scientists reflect on how different the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic might have been had there been a robust global sewage-surveillance system in place. Researchers could have “immediately retroactively screened wastewater all around the planet” as soon as the virus’s sequence was released, Scarpino says. This screening could have led to a global list of places SARS-CoV-2 was already spreading, informing strategies to contain the virus even before clinical testing was widely available.

Scarpino argues that such a system would require major financial investment, national and scientific leaders who can take ownership of those projects and standards that make wastewater data more comparable across countries7.

The current COVID-19-testing community “came out of need and chaos”, says Megan Diamond, who works on wastewater surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York City. Global and regional institutions such as the World Health Organization, the European Union and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention might need to step up and offer guidance for testing, data sharing and standards, Diamond says.

Gawlik has worked on one such broad effort: the Global Consortium for Wastewater and Environmental Surveillance for Public Health, or GLOWACON, which was launched in Brussels in March. By recruiting more than 300 collaborators from around the world, including scientists, government officials and representatives of international organizations, to this consortium, he hopes to advance new methods for diagnosing health issues from the “dirty blood” of cities around the world.

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New DJI Avata 2 drone leaks reveal design, features, pricing, and more

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DJI is scheduled to announce its new Avata 2 on April 11 yet that hasn’t stopped a flood of information about it leaking onto the internet. We even saw the drone itself being unboxed out in public late last month in a low-quality video. This new leak saw a series of hi-res images and specifications for the Avata 2 as well as the Goggles 3 headset and RC Motion 3 controller posted on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter).

Many of the pictures come from leaker Roland Quandt and they give us our first clear look at the drone which has notable design changes when compared to the original Avata. The camera is now at the front inside a smaller housing rather than sitting prominently at the top. Additionally, the flight fans have three blades instead of five. This streamlined design is identical to the one seen in an earlier leak from industry insider Quadro News giving it some validity. 

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Long-lost photos reveal details of world’s first police crime lab

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A photographic archive has been discovered in Lyon, France, that adds precious detail to what we know about the founding of the world’s first police crime laboratory in 1910 and its creator, Edmond Locard, a pioneer of forensic science.

The huge collection, which comprises more than 20,000 glass photographic plates that document the laboratory’s pioneering scientific methods, crime scenes and Locard’s personal correspondence, is thrilling historians at a time when many consider that forensic science has lost its way. “There is a movement to look back to the past for guidance as to how to renew the science of policing,” says Amos Frappa, a historian affiliated with the Sociological Research Centre on Law and Criminal Institutions in Paris, who is overseeing the analysis of the images.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many people in Europe and beyond were thinking about how criminals might be accurately identified by using techniques such as fingerprint, blood and skeletal analysis. Locard was the first person to create the semblance of forensic science. He established the first scientific lab that came under the aegis of the police, and that was dedicated to studying ‘traces’ of criminal activity collected from crime scenes.

Garage find

The collection of photographic plates almost didn’t survive. It languished for decades in a garage belonging to the National Forensic Police Department in Ecully, a Lyon suburb. In 2005, the glass plates were rescued from the garage and stored in Lyon’s municipal archives. But at the time, the Lyon archives lacked the resources to treat the collection properly, says director Louis Faivre d’Arcier. It wasn’t until 2017 that an inspection revealed that the plates’ gelatine layer containing the image information was, in many cases, infected with mould. After a sorting and decontamination project in 2022, conservators saved around two-thirds of the plates.

Left: attooed woman by the first name of Marie-Clémentine, 20 February 1934, from the collection of glass plates of the Lyon police laboratory; Right: Guided-hand technique for the identification of handwriting, undated.

Left: A tattooed woman named Marie-Clémentine in 1934; Edmond Locard’s team used tattoos as a way of identifying potential criminals. Right: Handwriting analysis as a means of identification was investigated but later spurned by Locard, who deemed it unreliable.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon

The mammoth task of digitizing the contents of the fragile plates, which are mostly unindexed and disordered, became possible only when a local publisher and historian of funerary practices, Nicolas Delestre, offered to finance it. In collaboration with the municipal archives, his team developed a photographic protocol to capture as much information from the plates as possible. The digitization will be completed this spring, to coincide with the publication of Frappa’s French-language biography of Locard. The slow rebuilding of the indexes continues.

Locard, who worked in the early to mid-twentieth century, is famous for his maxim, which is usually formulated in English as “Every contact leaves a trace.” Trained as a forensic pathologist, he turned to the study of trace evidence after a French political scandal called the Dreyfus affair, in which a Jewish army officer called Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused of espionage. During the affair, Locard’s mentor Alphonse Bertillon, who had invented a method of identifying people through bodily measurements, was called on as a handwriting specialist, despite having no expertise in the field. He wrongly identified Dreyfus as the author of an incriminating note.

Locard, seeing other countries adopt fingerprint identification, embraced that method instead. In 1910, he set up his laboratory in the attic of Lyon’s main courthouse, and gradually expanded his scientific analyses to include traces such as blood, hair, dust and pollen.

Sherlock Holmes connection

This much was known from published sources, but the photographic archive offers details about the social and intellectual milieu that produced Locard, onthe scientific networks in which he was embedded, and on how his thinking evolved as he experimented and made errors. His exchanges with contemporaries in countries including Germany, Switzerland, Italy and the United States shaped his approach, which might be why he did not consider himself a founder of a new field. But Locard’s ideas — his scientific methods and his insistence on meticulously studying crime scenes — fell on fertile ground in Lyon’s police chiefs and judges, who, unlike their Parisian counterparts, accepted the evidence that such approaches generated. “Lyon was a receptacle,” says Frappa.

Edmond Locard using a Leitz photographic bench in the 1920s.

Edmond Locard using a photographic bench in the 1920s.Credit: Archives municipales de Lyon

The new collection reveals Locard’s team at work. It captures their equipment and experiments, and the forensic traces they analysed. The close-knit group socialized together, received international visitors and investigated myriad means by which people could be identified. One way was to look at people’s tattoos, and the collection contains a large set of tattoo images. Locard took inspiration from many sources, including the Lyon-based Lumière brothers, who were pioneers of cinematography, and the creator of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, with whom he corresponded. In time, Locard discarded some techniques — notably, handwriting analysis — deeming them unreliable.

Since 2009, when a report from the US National Research Council found that many modern forensic techniques were inadequately grounded in science, the discipline has struggled to reorient itself. “By the late 20th century, it’s fair to say that forensic science had become an adjunct of law enforcement without allegiance to science,” says Simon Cole, who studies criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, and directs the US National Registry of Exonerations. Cole has written about the problems with fingerprint identification, and last year reported on the fallibility of microscopic hair comparison. These techniques are routinely used to investigate crimes in the United States and elsewhere, and the evidence they generate is admissible in court.

Modern troubles

The 2009 report suggested that improving forensic science would require larger labs in which diverse specialists were insulated from each other and from the police to prevent bias. The trouble with that view, says Olivier Ribaux, director of the School of Criminal Sciences at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, is that, when considering the potentially infinite number of traces that a crime scene can generate, some subjective selection by humans is inevitable. To ensure that this selection is as informative and as unbiased as possible, the forensic scientist must understand a trace in its context — as Locard’s maxim in French originally implied. “The problem with the big labs is that they have severed the connection with the crime scene,” Ribaux says.

He favours an alternative model in which smaller labs employ generalists, who can oversee specialists in certain fields, such as ballistics and DNA, but can also offer a more holistic view of a case. These generalists would work closely with the police — a return to Locard’s approach, in other words. But the two aren’t mutually exclusive, Ribaux says. They are just snapshots of the ongoing debate about how the field should reinvent itself.

That debate will surely be fuelled by the emerging portrait of Locard, sometimes dubbed the French Sherlock Holmes, whom Frappa describes as “a man so visionary he predicted, correctly, that he would be forgotten”.

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