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Google has unveiled its Pixel 5 smartphone – a 5G-compatible flagship device with a more affordable price tag – and an updated Nest smart speaker, alongside new services including Google TV.
Although the Pixel 5 had been announced earlier this year when Google unveiled the low-cost Pixel 4a phone, consumers are now being given their first look at the device and its specs.

The new handset’s stand-out feature isn’t its 6″ screen or 90Hz OLED display, but its significantly reduced price tag – coming in at £599 ($699), well below the £669 ($799) that the last generation Pixel 4 retailed at.

Image: The Pixel 4a was released earlier this year
Affordability seems to have been the key factor for Google when developing the new device, with 5G connectivity allowing users to connect to services off of the device, rather than rely on the impressive hardware itself outperforming market competition such as Apple’s iPhone – the latest of which is set to be unveiled next month.
Access to Google services has always been the Pixel’s main selling point, and a principal advertising image for the new phone shows it being used with a controller for Google Stadia – the company’s games streaming platform.

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A three-month subscription to Stadia Pro is bundled with the Pixel 5, as are subscriptions to some of the company’s other digital services.

“The global economic crisis will suppress the demand for smartphones for at least the next 12 months,” said Marina Koytcheva of analyst firm CCS Insight.

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“Google’s decision to address the weak market with a more affordable device is smart and timely,” Ms Koytcheva added at the time of the 4a launch, although the analysis holds up considering the Pixel 5’s price.
That said, Google had begun developing the affordable Pixel 5 before the coronavirus pandemic had struck – and it is mostly fortuitous that it could meet a consumer need for reduced spending.

Image: Google Nest Audio has been redesigned to improve sound quality
Google also announced a replacement for its Home smart speaker with the new Nest Audio, a recycled-fabric covered WiFi speaker which has been re-engineered to improve its sound quality.
It functions like any other smart speaker might be expected to, responding to voice commands to play music or control smart home devices – although Google’s speakers have significantly less market share than Amazon’s standard Echo.

Some users of the new NHS contact-tracing app have received notifications saying they’d been near someone with coronavirus, only to discover the alerts were system checks sent by Google and Apple.
People who downloaded the COVID-19 app in England and Wales told Sky News they had received a notification which said: “Someone you were near reported having COVID-19.”

Yet, when they clicked on the message, they found no information explaining whether they should self-isolate.

Image: The correct NHS app message sent if you need to self-isolate
The Department of Health and Social Care said the notification was a “default message” sent by Google and Apple – the makers of the app’s technology – and should be ignored.
But the false alarms – which appeared to be only in England and Wales, despite the widespread use of contact tracing technology in countries across the world – had already caused confusion, forcing at least one user into avoidable self-isolation.

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“I’m now self-isolating, just to be on the safe side… I don’t know whether it’s correct or not,” Maurice Leaver said. He received the message on Sunday, the day after downloading the app, and had been unable to clarify the situation with contact tracers.

Kathryn Sian, a biomedical scientist in an NHS lab, received the same notification, but went into work after reading about it online.

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She said the “very stressful” message gave her “no confidence in this app at all”, adding: “I’ve turned off the contact tracing for now, only using it to check in at venues.”
Both Mr Leaver and Ms Sian described how the default messages “disappeared”. Although clicking on it took them to the homepage of the app, there was no sign it had ever been sent.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson confirmed that default messages from Google and Apple would disappear or not be able to be clicked on. An official Test and Trace instruction to self-isolate would produce a message inside the app which said: “Please stay at home and self-isolate to keep yourself and others safe.”

Image: The track and trace message sent if you test negative
Apple or Google notifications, the spokesperson said, could be called “COVID-19 EXPOSURE LOGGING” or “COVID-19 Exposure Notifications”. According to the spokesperson, it is not currently possible to turn off the notifications.
Despite the Department of Health and Social Care’s insistence that the notifications were “default messages”, it emerged that several other countries using the same contact tracing technology were not experiencing this issue.
NearForm, the developer behind the contact tracing apps in Scotland, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Gibralter, told Sky News it did not recognise the problem, even though these apps are based on Google and Apple’s technology.
It is not known how many false alarms have been sent in England and Wales, but dozens of people reported receiving them on social media, sometimes multiple times a day.
One asked: “Have I been ‘traced’?” Another said: “I got a notification that [someone] near me had tested positive… No information of it whatsoever in the app. What’s the point?”
Andrew Gwynne, MP for Denton and Reddish in Greater Manchester, an area currently under local lockdown, tweeted that he had “three messages this evening. I’ve not even been out of the house today. Mrs G got several yesterday.”
App users who had received a disappearing notification criticised the lack of guidance available online and from the NHS 111 telephone hotline.
Jonny Easton told Sky News that when he called NHS 111 for more information after getting the alert, the call handler told him they’d never heard of the notification, but that they believed it should be ignored.
“One would have thought when the app was released one of the first things you would have done would be to conduct extensive training with the 111 members of staff, that told them, when you get this message you do this,” he said.
“It has damaged confidence because it seems it hasn’t really occurred in this situation.”

How testing is going in other European countries

This confusion is the latest in a series of issues raised since the app launched. On the weekend, it was revealed that tests conducted in hospitals or NHS labs could not be put into the app, leaving nearly a third of tests unlogged.
Users also questioned why it was not possible to register negative test results on the app, as these might release someone from self-isolation.
The Department of Health and Social Care said it had fixed this issue by allowing users to ask for a code from NHS Test and Trace, and screenshots seen by Sky News show that it is now possible to add negative test results on the app using the same system.
But one user who had registered a negative test questioned whether the message on the app made it clear that people who have been given a negative test might still have to self-isolate: for instance, if other people in their household or bubble continued to have symptoms. This only became clear, the user said, after clicking on a link in the app.

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Professor Lillian Edwards, who sat on the Ethics Board for the first app, which was discarded by the government in June, said the issues raised questions about the app’s strategy.
“There was a choice to be made about putting out something very simple and very clear that gets it right the first time and therefore builds a lot of trust and confidence, or what the English app has gone for, which is putting in a lot of different functionalities,” she told Sky News.
“I think that is causing confusion which may lead to loss of trust.”
The issues come as the Westminster government revealed that the app had received 14 million downloads, or nearly 25% of the population of England and Wales.
Analysis by University of Oxford Professor Johannes Abeler comparing early adoption of contact-tracing apps in four different countries showed that the English and Welsh app was on track for record growth, with a larger proportion of the population downloading over its first weeks than in Scotland, Germany and Singapore.
Professor Abeler said: “The strong and widespread uptake of the app in England and Wales is very good news. This success is possibly due to people being asked about the app whenever they enter a pub or a restaurant. Prompting people about the app is likely to drive adoption. The extensive marketing campaign was surely also helpful.”
Commenting on the confusion caused by the Google and Apple notifications, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “NHS Covid-19 app users only need to self-isolate if they get a notification directly from the app advising them to do so.”
Sky News has contacted Google, Apple and NHS England for comment.

Earth may have lost up to 60% of its atmosphere in a collision that led to the formation of the Moon more than four billion years ago, scientists believe.
The research, led by Durham University, is based on 300 computer simulations looking at the consequences of the impact of collisions on rocky planets with thin atmospheres.

The team say the findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could be used by astronomers who are trying to learn more about the Moon, which was thought to have formed following a collision between a Mars-sized rock and Earth.
Research lead author Dr Jacob Kegerreis, of the Institute for Computational Cosmology at Durham University, said: “The puzzle about how the Moon formed and the other consequences of a giant collision with the early Earth is something that scientists are working hard to unravel.

Image: Scientists looked at the ways a planet’s atmosphere could be changed by objects of different size and mass impacting at different angles and speeds
“We ran hundreds of different scenarios for many different colliding planets, showing the varying impacts and effects on a planet’s atmosphere depending upon a number of factors such as the angle, speed of impact or the sizes of the planets.

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“While these computer simulations don’t directly tell us how the Moon came to be, the effects on the Earth’s atmosphere could be used to narrow down the different ways it might have been formed and lead us closer to understanding the origin of our nearest celestial neighbour.”

As part of the study, the researchers looked at the ways a planet’s atmosphere could be changed by objects of different size and mass impacting at different angles and speeds.

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Simulations revealed Earth could have lost anywhere between 10-60% of its atmosphere in the collision where the Moon came into existence.
The researchers say the findings also provide a new way to predict the atmospheric loss from other rocky planets that have been involved in collision.

The International Space Station (ISS) might have to receive a delivery of extra air after it began to leak at above-normal volumes, according to the Russian space agency.
The air leak has been localised to one section of a service module and presents no danger to the Russian and American crew on board, Roscosmos executive directer Sergei Krikalev was quoted as saying by Russian media.

The crew were said to be planning to eliminate the leak in the coming days.
NASA had earlier revealed how the crew on board the ISS were woken up by flight controllers to continue troubleshooting a small leak that appeared to grow in size.

Image: The leak is said to pose ‘no immediate danger’ to the ISS crew Pic: NASA
NASA astronaut and station commander Chris Cassidy and Roscosmos cosmonauts Antoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner were asked to collect data using an ultrasonic leak detector.

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NASA’s Kenny Todd, the deputy manager of the ISS, said on Tuesday: “As far as the station goes, we’re in very good shape.

“The only the only issue that I would would bring up at this point is this little atmosphere leak that’s proven to be a bit challenging over the last couple of months.

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“But for those of you that follow the station on orbit operations regularly, you’ll know that we’ve been dealing with a small atmospheric leak over the last… well… really over a year.”
He added: “We decided to go ahead and wake the crew up. We went through a several hour activity and we think we got, again, some more data.
“We got a finer point on where we think the leak is module wise. We, at this point, think it’s in the Russian segment, in the service module area. Again, we’re continuing to look at all the data from the test.
“But what we do know and have confirmed with our Russian colleagues that we think there’s something going on there.”

Image: This long-exposure photo shows the ISS as it streaks across the sky past the moon

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NASA said in a statement: “The size of the leak identified overnight has since been attributed to a temporary temperature change aboard the station with the overall rate of leak remaining unchanged.”
“The leak, which has been investigated for several weeks, poses no immediate danger to the crew at the current leak rate and only a slight deviation to the crew’s schedule,” the statement added.
NASA said, once the overnight checks were completed, the crew once again opened hatches between the US and Russian segments and “resumed regular activities”.
At the weekend, an uncrewed cargo craft is due to arrive at the ISS.
The next three residents of the ISS – due to take part in what would be the 64th mission to the ISS since its launch in 1998 – are scheduled to leave Earth on 14 October.

Jet pack paramedics could soon be a reality, after a successful test flight took place over the Lake District.
Gravity Industries has been testing the capabilities of its jet pack-suit in emergency situations in Cumbria, which can travel at speeds of up to 32mph (51kmph), alongside the local air ambulance service.

Footage of the test flight shows the pilot seemingly flying over the Lake District with ease to rescue a patient in 90 seconds, with devices attached to his arms and legs.

‘A little similar to using a motorbike’

“There are two patient types who we think can benefit from this,” director of operations at the Great North Air Ambulance Service (GNAAS), Andy Mawson, told Sky News.
“The first is those who need the helicopter, but those we can get to a little bit quicker.

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“Also patients that don’t require critical care that might have a more simple injury like a broken ankle or a broken arm that may still wait an hour for a mountain rescue team, and we can be by their side in a matter of minutes, giving them some strong pain relief, making them comfortable in lieu of the mountain rescue teams arriving.”

Rather than carrying medical equipment on their backs, users will take the kit, including a ventilator, to the top of the mountain using pouches on their legs, stomach or chest.

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Despite the test across the Lake District, Mr Mawson says GNAAS is not yet at the stage to rollout the technology, as Gravity Industries are still tweaking the suit and collecting data.
However, he added that a flight training programme would focus on safety, and initial footage shows that users would not necessarily have to fly quickly or high up to use the suit effectively.

Image: A flying paramedic has taken to the skies above the Lake District. Pic: Gravity Industries

Image: The technology could be used to help stranded walkers. Pic: Gravity Industries
Richard Browning, the test pilot and founder of Gravity Industries, said following the flight: “It was wonderful to be invited to explore the capabilities of the Gravity Jet Suit in an emergency response simulation and work alongside the team at GNAAS.
“We are just scratching the surface in terms of what is possible to achieve with our technology.
Emergency response is one of the areas Gravity are actively pursuing, alongside launching a new commercial training location at the world-renowned Goodwood Estate.”

After more than a decade of electoral failures, the Pirate Party UK (PPUK) is holding a ballot to dissolve. It seems likely that, when voting closes on Sunday 4 October, the party will be scuttled.
Speaking to Sky News, current and former members described a party which perhaps lacked political will and professionalism (in one infamous incident, members of its national executive faced being summonsed to the High Court), but a party which also lacked the toxic internal conflicts that can tear idealistic movements apart.
“A serious party with a silly name,” as former members describe it, the Pirate Party was never a truly significant political insurgency in British politics. At its height in 2015 the party had 766 members, six of whom ran in the general election, collecting just 1,130 votes. In comparison the Monster Raving Loonies – a silly party with a silly name – ran 27 candidates, receiving 3,898 votes.
If the Pirate Party is to sink as a political entity it will do so having fallen well short of the shores of electoral success, and without leaving much of a ripple in the turbulent seas of Westminster. But its demise is a reminder that at some point over the past 10 years a particular era of the internet quietly passed away too.
It’s hard to imagine today, but a decade ago the general sentiment regarding the internet was that it was a fundamentally democratising force. From the Arab Spring through to the open-source-software movement, there was an optimism that the self-propagating values of an open society would spread anywhere that information technology would allow them access to.
The Pirate Party even crowdsourced a general election manifesto on social media, without any fears of astroturfing from hostile trolls. It campaigned on a platform of radical copyright reform – reducing copyright terms to 10 years so society could enjoy its own cultural products. It demanded internet access for all, an infrastructure question which major parties have subsequently adopted.
In particular PPUK was formed in response to the last Labour government’s Digital Economy Act (2010), a law that introduced controversial powers to disconnect individuals’ internet connections if they were suspected of downloading copyright-infringing material.

Image: Loz Kaye was PPUK’s leader from 2010 to 2015. Pic: Andy Halsall
Loz Kaye, who served as the party’s leader from 2010 to 2015, told Sky News that the Digital Economy Act was what “galvanised me to act politically, rather than just writing a letter or appearing on a phone-in on the radio,” something he laughed about doing.
If the party’s core supporters were easy to stereotype as nerds hunched over laptops, Mr Kaye couldn’t have been more different. A handsome and outgoing professional music composer, active in Manchester politics, he brought a focus on social justice to a party which was generally focused on technology issues.
“Loz is not the person anybody expects when you’re talking about the Pirate Party,” Andy Halsall told Sky News. Mr Halsall, a British Army veteran turned IT professional, served as the party’s campaign manager during the first three years of Mr Kaye’s leadership and its greatest growth in membership and finances.
Mr Halsall, who joined the party because his brother-in-law was standing, told Sky News how the leadership team pulled information on how to run a political campaign “from Wikipedia and everybody else’s election manuals” and then attempted to convince activists they needed to put in work on the ground instead of just building websites.
“It’s very hard when people have the expectation that a digital-only campaign will sway people to actually vote for you – when they think that having the right ideas and the right position can win an election, when obviously that isn’t the case,” he said.

Image: Activists initially focused on digital-only campaigning
The party itself was essentially pluralist and a few former members who remain active in party politics are now members of the Conservative Party, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. “We were generally anti-authoritarian,” said Mr Kaye.
“What united us all was not feeling very comfortable in the demonstrated political clothes. I hate the socialist cosplay of Corbynites, I abhor the flag-waving numptyism of the current Tory party. I think all of those ways of demonstrating politics or political place are just fatuous,” he told Sky News in a phone call.
Despite this growth PPUK never quite matched the successes of pirate parties in Germany, Iceland and the Czech Republic.
In a way PPUK’s pluralism stands in contrast to the most successful pirate party, the Czech Pirate Party, which retains the third largest presence in the country’s lower house of parliament and functions as a liberal third party to the country’s populists and eurosceptics.
“I think if we were honest with ourselves, we never particularly saw becoming an MP as a short-term prospect,” Mr Kaye said, attributing this to the first-past-the-post system in Westminster, noting: “It’s not like say the Netherlands, where you can have a Party for the Animals and get into parliament.”
For onlookers such as Jim Killock, the director of digital rights organisation Open Rights Group, the Pirate Party failed to focus on the limited number of chances it had for electoral success – specifically the devolved assemblies in Scotland, Wales and London, and two seats in the European elections in the southeast England and London.
“In my own view, I saw too much political naivety for them to really grasp the chances that they had,” Mr Killock said.
Andy Halsall recollects: “Standing for elections was what political parties did, so there was a default position of ‘if we’re a political party, that’s what we do – otherwise we’re just a bunch of activists talking about it’.”
But converting its geographically dispersed support into votes in a national campaign was difficult on such a small policy platform.
As Mr Kaye recollected, voters who he met on doorsteps and at debates often expressed an appreciation for the party’s copyright policies, but had other issues too: “What are you going to do about the bins, Palestine, and all the rest of it?”

Image: The NEC almost ended up fighting a lawsuit in the High Court
Despite the struggle to establish itself as a national entity on par with the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, or Labour, for a six-month period the Pirate Party website was not only the most popular political website in the UK, but one of the most popular of any at all receiving more than 50,000 hits every hour.
Nobody who spoke to Sky News remembers who really started it, but just before Internet Service Providers in the UK implemented a court-ordered block on the website Pirate Bay for copyright-infringement, PPUK began to host a proxy service allowing people to access the site.
“I don’t know who kicked it of, at some point we simply had a proxy running for the Pirate Bay on party kit that we were managing, and that was it,” said Mr Halsall, who described the incident as one of the issues with professionalising the party and ensuring that when actions were being made and decisions taken they were overseen.
“We wanted to change the law, not circumvent it,” Mr Halsall added.
Loz Kaye, who was leader at the time, told Sky News he’d talked very little about the incident before. He said: “Essentially the point was if you start blocking sites you start out on a slippery slope and hand powers that perhaps you might want to think twice about to governments.
“The question was also about free access to culture, so that was the thinking – but it also then proved ridiculously successful.
“Because it was linked to our website, the Pirate Party website became the most popular political website in the country. We were in the top hundred sites in the country, ahead of major banks, so not surprisingly this came to the attention of the BPI.”
He added: “I don’t mind admitting we were a little bit naive, but I think we were all surprised by what happened.”
What happened was this: Six months after the proxy went up, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the trade association for record companies, targeted the individual members of the Pirate Party’s national executive committee (NEC) with legal threats to take the proxy down. They initially said no.
“Behind the scenes it was very hard for us to get legal representation,” Mr Kaye said. “It was hard to find lawyers, even though some were keen, but any firm with any knowledge of intellectual property would also potentially have conflicts of interest as they may have acted for potential litigants.
“We were days away from being summonsed to the High Court and the lawyers we had pulled out. That was possibly the most stressful thing that has ever happened to me,” he said.
Eventually replacement lawyers were found, but the proxy was taken down.
Although the party membership generally considered that the proxy was justified, as NEC members were being personally targeted by a potentially very expensive court case, Mr Kaye said: “I didn’t think it was fair to push it too far.”
It was an ignominious end for an action driven by a political cause that was sincerely believed in, but without the political will to be seen through. Many years later, a similar fate looms over the party as a whole.

Image: Pirate Party UK’s leadership proposed closing it down
In its proposal to close Pirate Party UK, the current leader and the chairman of the board wrote it was “with great sadness that we have reached the conclusion that PPUK has run out of steam”.
Members who are considering voting “no” to dissolving the party were instructed to only vote that way if they themselves were determined to help run the party, and not simply because they thought that somebody should do so.
In the case the ballot concludes that the party will be dissolved, members’ personal records will be destroyed and the Electoral Commission will be notified that the party has ceased to be.
Outstanding debts will be settled and any remaining funds will be split between two charities, the National Museum of Computing and Privacy International, fitting locations for the vestiges of PPUK.

New evidence has been revealed of an enormous salty lake of liquid water buried beneath the ice of the Martian south pole.
New radar data from a European Space Agency spacecraft suggests a large body of liquid water, as well as three smaller lakes, are spread out over 75,000 square kilometres – an area roughly the size of Scotland.

There is potential that the liquid water – if that is what it is – could harbour life. However, its extreme salinity could also make it uninhabitable.

Image: Liquid water can’t exist on the surface of the planet
Scientists who conducted the study used techniques that have been used on Earth to identify subterranean lakes in the Arctic and Antarctic.
It was led by researchers from Roma Tre University in Italy, who previously co-authored a paper based on initial observations suggesting a lake was present in 2018.

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Liquid water cannot exist on the surface of Mars due to the lack of any substantial atmosphere to raise the surface pressure.

However, there is evidence of flowing water from when the planet had an atmosphere billions of year ago.

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Scientists have suspected that water could still exist trapped beneath the surface and this has been hotly debated ever since the initial discovery back in 2018.
At the time, scientists said their ground-penetrating radar found a lake about a mile beneath the southern ice cap.
They proposed that salts in the lake had kept it from freezing, despite the -68C (-90F) temperature.

Image: Canals on the Martian surface show where water once ran
Lakes on Earth with a salinity about five times that of seawater can still support life, but there are limitations on how salty water can be for life to thrive.
There are briny sub-glacial pools in Antarctica where water has a salt content 20 times that of seawater, but there isn’t much life there.
Some scientists dispute that the reflective material the researchers found was liquid water and think it is more likely a kind of slush or sludge.
One potential investigation that could shed more light is the Chinese mission Tianwen-1, which means “quest for heavenly truth”, that launched in July.
Tianwen-1 will take seven months to reach Mars and plans to search for underground water and evidence of possible ancient life forms.
The tandem spacecraft – with both an orbiter and a rover – is expected to enter the planet’s orbit in February and is aiming for a landing site on Utopia Planitia.
NASA detected possible signs of ice at the site, according to an article in Nature Astronomy by chief engineer Wan Weixing, who died in May from cancer.
The latest Martian study is also published in the Nature Astronomy journal.

Apple’s share price has been steadily increasing over the past week as rumours about the iPhone 12 continue to grow.
A launch event held earlier this month did not announce a new product in its flagship line of smartphones – and instead, the Apple Watch and iPad stole the limelight.

The next-generation iPhone, and Apple’s first 5G device, is expected to be unveiled in October.

Image: The Apple Watch Series 6 dominated the company’s September event
Investors seemed to be spooked when the iPhone wasn’t mentioned at the launch event, with Apple’s share price tumbling to a low of $106.84 (£83.12) on 18 September.
However, it has now climbed to $114.96 (£89.44) as speculation builds about the new range.

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Here’s what those rumours say – although the only official word we’ve had from Apple so far is that the iPhone release would be “a few weeks” later than usual.

Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 12 range on 13 October, with the devices themselves being available for consumers on 23 October.

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It is rumoured there will be four devices in three different sizes. The smallest devices will measure 5.4in corner to corner, two will measure 6.1in, and the largest one will have a mammoth 6.7in screen size.

Image: Apple is expected to unveil the iPhone 12 range on 13 October
The larger smartphone and one of the 6.1in models are expected to be Apple’s higher-end devices, potentially called the iPhone 12 Pro range, and feature the latest technology that the company has developed.
These Pro models are expected to retain the triple-lens housing which debuted with the iPhone 11 Pro, while the regular and smaller iPhone 12 models will have a dual-lens set-up for its rear cameras.
It isn’t clear what the smaller iPhone 12 will be called, but there have been some suggestions it might be named the iPhone 12 mini.
Apple is rumoured to have added a new distinctive metal frame reminiscent of that used for the iPhone 4 and the newest iPad Pro models too to differentiate the devices from the iPhone 11 range.
The design is expected to align with that of the iPad Pro, with the stainless steel frame giving the device a square-edged look – although for most consumers these design features tend to be hidden by protective casings.
For months it has been rumoured that the iPhone 12 will be sold without headphones, a charger or a plug adaptor in the box.
The best features are rumoured to be packed into the 6.7in device, including a rear camera system which will use lasers to calculate depth information for the immediate environment – opening up a range of new photography and augmented reality features.
Whether all this will be enough to bring Apple shares back to their 1 September high of $134.18 (£104.12) is yet to be seen.

Older people are being excluded from the vast majority of trials to find treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19, according to a study.
Around 9% of the global population is 65 and older, but this demographic has accounted for up to 40% of coronavirus cases and 80% of deaths.

People in that age group were reported as absent from half of US trials for COVID-19 treatments, and all of the vaccine trials, researchers found.
It raises the risk that treatments won’t be suitable for those hit hardest by the pandemic.

Coronavirus: How are the vaccine trials developing?

The figures come from clinical trials registered with the US government between 1 October 2019 and 1 June 2020.

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They are reported in a study in the American Medical Association’s Internal Medicine journal, which warns treatments developed in the trials could be ineffective or even toxic for older adults.

The team reviewed direct age-based exclusions, as well as exclusions which would preferentially affect older people, such as requiring smartphones to participate in the trial.

More from Covid-19

It follows another study published earlier this year which found most older people killed by the disease would not have died otherwise.
Dr Sharon Inouye, the senior author of the study, said that while “some exclusions are needed to protect the health and safety of older adults – such as poorly controlled comorbidities,” this was not always applicable.
“However, many [exclusions] are not well-justified, and appear to be more for expediency or convenience of the trialists,” Dr Inouye said.
“We are concerned that the exclusion of older adults from clinical trials will systematically limit our ability to evaluate the efficacy, dosage, and adverse effects of COVID-19 treatments in this population.”
The research was done by scientists at Hebrew SeniorLife and the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research.

An order which would have banned the popular video sharing app TikTok from smartphone app stores in the US has been temporarily blocked.
The order, from the administration of Donald Trump, was due to take effect at 11.59pm on Sunday.

A more comprehensive ban remains scheduled for November, about a week after the presidential election.
Judge Carl Nichols of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, did not agree to postpone the later ban.

TikTok: What data does it collect, and how do other apps compare?

The ruling followed an emergency hearing on Sunday morning in which lawyers for TikTok argued the administration’s app store ban would infringe on the company’s First Amendment rights and do irreparable harm to the business.

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Earlier this year, the US president said TikTok was a threat to national security and it must either sell its US operations to US companies or be barred from the country.

TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, is scrambling to firm up a deal tentatively struck a week ago in which it would partner with Oracle, a huge database-software company, and Walmart in an effort to win the blessing of both the Chinese and American governments.

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In the meantime, it is fighting to keep the app available in the US.

Trump: ‘I don’t mind’ if Microsoft buys TikTok

Judge Nichols did not explain his reasoning publicly, instead filing his judicial opinion under seal.
In arguments to Judge Nichols, TikTok lawyer John Hall said that TikTok is more than an app, since it functions as a “modern day version of a town square”.
“If that prohibition goes into effect at midnight, the consequences immediately are grave,” Mr Hall said.
TikTok lawyers also argued that a ban on the app would affect the ability of tens of thousands of potential viewers and content creators to express themselves every month and would also hurt its ability to hire new talent.
Justice Department lawyer Daniel Schwei said Chinese companies are not purely private and are subject to intrusive laws compelling their cooperation with intelligence agencies.
The Justice Department has also argued that economic regulations of this nature generally are not subject to First Amendment scrutiny.