TLDR 2022-02-04

Blizzard is working on a new Warcraft mobile title for a 2022 release. The news was part of Activision Blizzard's quarterly earnings report. Activision Blizzard also plans to release Diablo Immortal this year. The quarterly earnings report revealed that consumers spent over a billion dollars on Call of Duty mobile in 2021.

Details on Samsung's upcoming Galaxy A53 have been leaked. The new phone will have a 6.5-inch FHD 120Hz display with a built-in fingerprint sensor under the glass, a mid-range Samsung chip, either 6GB or 8GB RAM, at least 128GB storage with a microSD expansion slot, and a 5,000 mAH battery. It will also have four rear cameras and a 32MP front sensor. A release date has not been announced yet. Official-looking renders of the new phone are available in the article.

A team of researchers from the US Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago managed to maintain a quantum state for more than five seconds, a new record. They used a method called 'single shot readout', which uses precise laser pulses to add single electrons to qubits to extend their quantum states for longer. The system they developed is theoretically able to perform over 100 million quantum operations in the five seconds. Five seconds is long enough for light to travel around the world almost 40 times, so the advance brings the possibility of a distributed quantum internet closer to reality.

Afrigen Biologics and Vaccines, a biotechnology company in South Africa, have recreated very small amounts of Moderna's mRNA-based vaccine against Covid-19 without any involvement by Moderna. The company developed the vaccine as part of an initiative launched by the World Health Organization to build capacity for vaccine manufacturing in low- and middle-income countries. mRNA vaccine developers have sent more than 70% of their doses to wealthy nations. Millions of orders to poorer countries have been delayed. While Afrigen's vaccine won't help curb the pandemic this year, it will lay the foundation for a more globally distributed mRNA vaccine industry in the future.

A recent viral tweet making a joke about recruiters with unreasonable expectations inspired a developer to write CSS code that connects to a database. This article details how the developer built the app with code and examples. The project only works in Chrome, but it will work with any SQLite database provided.

Flutter is a cross-platform platform that compiles apps that take full advantage of hardware graphics into machine code. Windows support is now available. The Windows version can work with Windows modalities for internationalization and communicate with the Win32, COM, and Windows Runtime APIs. Several common plugins have been adapted to include Windows support, and community packages that add support for various Windows features are available. More details about Flutter Windows support, along with screenshots of Windows apps built with Flutter, are available in the article.

Raspberry Pi has released a 64-bit version of its default operating system. Raspberry Pi OS is a Debian-based Linux desktop built specifically for the Pi family. Adding a 64-bit version of the operating system will help increase compatibility with many applications. It also means more applications and services can access the higher amounts of RAM on higher-tier Raspberry Pi boards. The new OS is only compatible with the Pi Zero 2, Pi 3, and Pi 4.

The International Landscape Photographer of the Year competition is now in its eighth year. The competition has no specific categories and no strict definition of what a landscape photograph should be, allowing photographers to be more creative with their entries. This article contains several entries from the competition. A link to a larger gallery is available at the end of the article.