Akihabara News (Tokyo) — e-Mobility Power, the joint venture led by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings (TEPCO) aiming to increase accessibility to electric vehicle charging stations across the nation, has revealed that it aims to double its number of quick chargers by 2025.
By that year, 13,000 quick chargers are expected to be available.
The firm is also experimenting with schemes to share quick chargers between multiple companies or organizations. The first test of such a system is currently underway in Minami-Alps city, Yamanashi Prefecture.
In addition to TEPCO, e-Mobility Power also receives backing from Chubu Electric Power (Chuden), Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi Motors, and the Development Bank of Japan.
TEPCO, the primary mother company, is also in the process of going electric with its own fleet of about 3,800 company vehicles. Currently, about 15% of these cars and trucks are EVs, but it aims to go 100% electric by the end of this decade.
In April, the company took over the Nippon Charge Service (NCS) operations and effectively provides one-stop charging for electric cars nationwide.
(Some spoilers for the first book in Jordan’s series below.)
“Wheel of Time is the first fantasy series that really dove into the political and cultural worlds of all these different characters,” Judkins told Entertainment Weekly. “It was also one of the first to dive into multiple POV characters, so you’re following an ensemble, with each of them having their own agendas and approaches to everything. That’s always felt to me like the missing piece of the fantasy-literature landscape that hasn’t been brought to TV or film yet.”
On Sunday, Formula E’s seventh series came to a close on the concrete of Templehof in Berlin. It was the sport’s first season as an official FIA world championship, which technically makes the Mercedes-EQ team and driver Nyck de Vries the first ever Formula E world champions. But the team’s celebrations may have been brief. On Wednesday, Mercedes-Benz confirmed that it will quit Formula E at the end of 2022, bringing a bittersweet end to the season.
Formula E’s low point was undoubtedly round 5, the Valencia E-Prix in Spain. This was held on a permanent racetrack—Circuit Ricardo Tormo—which was a change from Formula E’s usual MO of holding events at temporary tracks in city centers. Racing on tight street circuits with short straights definitely played to the original Formula E race car’s strengths and worked with its weaknesses. The introduction of the faster, more powerful Gen2 car in 2018 meant there was plenty of interest in seeing what these cars could do on a permanent track. But after the first of two races at Valencia in April, I’m sure many audiences had seen enough.
Between the heavy rain and a tight, temporary chicane at the end of the lap, more than a few drivers came a cropper, resulting in multiple periods behind a safety car. Formula E races are designed around energy management; without recapturing energy under regenerative braking, the car’s 56 kWh battery is insufficient to get to the finish line. Although the organizers have access to telemetry showing every car’s battery state of charge, the teams do not. This is done intentionally to make things a bit harder. This information has to be communicated to the teams by their drivers each lap.
Enlarge/ A health professional holds a vial of the Moderna vaccine against Covid-19 (credit: Europa Press News)
US officials on Wednesday formally announced plans to offer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to Americans—and the plans are already under fire from experts at the World Health Organization.
US officials are recommending that all Americans vaccinated with two doses of an mRNA vaccine (either the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine) get a third booster dose of the same vaccine eight months after receiving their second dose. As such, boosters will be rolled out based on the order in which people were initially offered vaccines, i.e., with frontline health workers, nursing home residents, and other seniors at the front of the line.
US officials are prepared to begin offering booster shots the week of September 20. However, the timing of the boosters is pending authorization from the Food and Drug Administration and the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, an independent committee of experts that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On the back of a myriad of new motherboard launches based on AMD’s X570 chipset, we have the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max. The new Max motherboard supersedes the previous X570 Ace, and fittingly has lots of new and improved features. Some of the biggest features of the new Ace Max include a large 18-phase power delivery with premium 90 A power stages and the inclusion of an Intel Wi-Fi 6E wireless interface. Other features include four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, support for DDR4-5300 memory, and 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet.
Perhaps on par with MSI’s flagship X570 model, the Godlike, the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max looks to take things to the next level with a stylish all-black design with contrasting gold stripes and multiple areas of integrated RGB lighting. Looking at PCIe support on the X570S Ace Max, it includes three full-length PCIe 4.0 slots that operate at x16 or x8/x8/+x4, with a single PCIe 4.0 x1 slot. The latter of which unfortunately shares bandwidth with the Wi-Fi 6E module, so when that is in use, the slot is disabled.
Looking at storage options, the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max has four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots, including three with support for SATA drives, as well as eight SATA ports with support for RAID 0, 1, and 10 arrays. MSI also includes an M.2 Xpander-Z Gen4 S M.2 PCIe 4.0 addon card for users looking to add more M.2 storage. Memory support is also impressive, with support for up to DDR4-5300 and a maximum supported capacity of up to 128 GB across four memory slots. Keeping the system cool is a combined total of eight 4-pin headers, including one designated to a CPU fan, one for a water pump, and six for chassis fans. MSI also has a premium power delivery, with an 18-phase design using 90 A power stages versus the 60 A power stages used on the original MEG X570 Ace.
The rear panel has a solid array of input and output befitting a premium model, including one USB 3.2 G2x2 Type-C, three USB 3.2 G2 Type-A, four USB 3.2 G1 Type-A, and four USB 2.0 ports. It uses a Realtek RTL8125B 2.5 GbE controller for Ethernet, and Intel’s latest AX210 Wi-Fi 6E wireless interface for Wi-Fi, offering access to the 6 GHz band and support for BT 5.2 devices. There’s also a premium onboard audio pairing of a Realtek ALC4082 HD audio codec and an ESS Sabre 9018Q2C DAC.
At the time of writing, we don’t have pricing information or when the MSI MEG X570S Ace Max will be available at retail, but we expect this to be within the coming months.
Enlarge/ Members of PAIN (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now), Truth Pharm, and other advocacy groups working in response to the overdose crisis protested the Sacklers’ immunity deal outside US Bankruptcy Court in White Plains, New York on August 9, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Erik McGregor)
The Sackler family is threatening to back out of a $4.5 billion opioid settlement if it is not granted broad immunity from lawsuits. The pending settlement between the Sacklers and 15 states includes an immunity provision, but other states oppose it, and a bankruptcy court judge is still considering whether to approve the deal.
Forty-one-year-old David Sackler, a former Purdue Pharma board member and grandson of one of the company’s founders, “vowed in court on Tuesday that the family would walk away from a $4.5 billion pledge to help communities nationwide that have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, unless a judge grants it immunity from all current and future civil claims associated with the company,” The New York Times wrote.
“We need a release that’s sufficient to get our goals accomplished,” Sackler said in testimony via video at a hearing in US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. “If the release fails to do that, we will not support it.” The family is worth $11 billion, a fortune boosted substantially by sales of OxyContin.
Facebook released its first report today detailing which content it says is widely viewed on the site and Instagram. The report comes as research and news stories have highlighted how misleading posts and outright disinformation can draw intense engagement on the company’s platforms.
Much of the scrutiny has focused on far-right accounts, which according to Facebook’s own tool, CrowdTangle, receive the most engagement—likes, shares, comments, that sort of thing. For example, Kevin Roose, a reporter at The New York Times, uses CrowdTangle to tweet out a list of the “10 top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.” What his experiment has revealed is that, day after day, far-right accounts and pages from the likes of Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Newsmax appeared on the list, sometimes occupying multiple spots. Critics have pointed to the list as evidence that the platform has become a right-wing media machine.
The Twitter account, Roose said, “drove executives crazy” at Facebook. They felt the it was making Facebook look like it favored right-wing accounts. Which brings us to today.
Samsung says it will cut down on the ads it shows on its smartphones. The announcement was first reported by Korean news agency Yonhap and was later confirmed by Samsung in a statement to The Verge. The official line from the industry giant is “Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps, including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme.” The company added, “The update will be ready by later this year.”
Samsung ships Android on all its smartphones, but it changes the experience with a “One UI” skin and includes several Samsung-developed packed-in apps. Many of these apps—like Bixby, Samsung Health, and Weather—contain big banner ads, sometimes right at the top of the app, where you would normally expect to find an app logo or navigation information. The worst offenders are notification ads—a Samsung app will spawn a notification to entice you to buy a new gadget or install a new app.
It’s not a great feeling to spend anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars on a piece of hardware and still get ads on that device. (And for you whataboutists out there—yes, Google also shows ads in some of its apps, but they are in serious, ad-supported web services, like YouTube or Google Maps, and they aren’t notification ads. You also paid Samsung ~$1000, while you’re using Google services for free.)
Enlarge/ See these solar panels in space? They’re way too heavy to economically provide power to Earth. (credit: NASA)
“This is an idea that’s older than even the space program,” Caltech’s Harry Atwater told Ars over Zoom. Citing Asimov and Clarke, Atwater conjured an image of gleaming solar panels floating above the Earth on a large metal truss, all wired in to hardware that converts the current to a form suitable to beam back down to Earth. Unlimited clean power, delivered around the clock.
He then went on to explain why the system he was working on would end up looking nothing like that vision, even if it would ultimately accomplish the same thing.
A long gestation
In August, Caltech announced that a member of its board of trustees had given over $100 million meant to foster the development of space-based power. The timing was somewhat odd, given that the donor, Donald Bren, had started the process over a decade ago. At the time, Bren had described his interest in space-based power to the university administration, which began identifying faculty who had research interests that might be relevant to the project.
Enlarge/ A cuttlefish leisurely hanging out in a tank. A new study found that cuttlefish can remember specifics of place and time for receiving their favorite yummy food rewards. (credit: University of Cambridge)
Can you remember what you had for dinner last weekend? That ability is a function of episodic memory, and how well we can recall the time and place of specific events typically declines with age. Cuttlefish also seem to exhibit a form of episodic memory, but unlike with humans, their capability doesn’t decrease as they get older, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Cuttlefish can remember what they ate, where, and when, and use this to guide their feeding decisions in the future,” said co-author Alexandra Schnell of the University of Cambridge, who conducted the experiments at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “What’s surprising is that they don’t lose this ability with age, despite showing other signs of aging like loss of muscle function and appetite.”
Earlier this year, we reported on a study by Schnell and other colleagues showing that cuttlefish can delay gratification. Specifically, they could pass a cephalopod version of the famous Stanford marshmallow test: waiting a bit for their preferred prey rather than settling for a less desirable prey. Cuttlefish also performed better in a subsequent learning test—the first time such a link between self-control and intelligence has been found in a non-mammalian species.
T-Mobile on Wednesday said criminals obtained the personal information of almost 49 million current, former, or prospective customers in the latest mega-hack of its servers.
The haul includes customers’ first and last names, date of birth, SSN, and driver’s license/ID information for 7.8 million current post-paid accounts, meaning accounts that are billed at the end of each billing cycle. The unknown hackers obtained the same data from more than 40 million records belonging to former or prospective customers who had previously applied for credit with T-Mobile.
Names, phone numbers, and account PINs for about 850,000 active T-Mobile prepaid customers were also stolen. T-Mobile said that “additional information” from an unspecified number of inactive prepaid accounts was also affected.
Enlarge/ This browser popup, which you see in Windows 10 the first time you try to open a link after installing a new browser, isn’t present in current beta builds of Windows 11. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
A report from The Verge today has drawn attention to the way current Windows 11 betas are handling third-party Web browsers like Chrome and Firefox. These tweaks continue a trend that has intensified over Windows 10’s lifecycle—you can use any browser you want on Windows! But are you sure that you wouldn’t like to try Microsoft Edge instead? Are you sure? Are you really, really sure?
There are two functional changes in the current beta of Windows 11 that make switching browsers more annoying. The first is that the OS no longer pops up a window asking you if you’d like to switch browsers the first time you click a link after installing a new browser. The second is that the “default apps” screen has removed the broad app categories currently available in Windows 10—Windows 10 allows you to set the default email app, map app, music player, photo viewer, video player, and web browser from the default apps screen, while Windows 11 makes you choose an app first and assign defaults one file extension at a time.
Windows 10’s Default Apps settings screen lets you change the default apps for a handful of common tasks, like browsing, checking email, or playing video. [credit:
Andrew Cunningham ]
When you do attempt to change the default app that handles .htm or .html files from Edge to something else, Windows 11 takes it as yet another opportunity to make sure that you’re absolutely, positively sure that you actually want to switch away from Edge.
Today’s Dealmaster is headlined by a great deal on Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite that brings the e-reader down to $80. That matches the lowest price we’ve ever tracked.
While an ebook reader isn’t exactly essential for most people, we’ve long recommended the Paperwhite as a great option for anyone in that market. It’s almost three years old at this point—and we wouldn’t be surprised if Amazon gave it a refresh in the not-too-distant future—but it still offers a compact and comfortable design, a side-lit, 6-inch, 300-pixels-per-inch display that is crisp and allows you to read in darker settings, and Amazon’s typically extensive catalog of ebook and audiobook content. This model also has Bluetooth audio support for listening to audiobooks from Audible, as well as an IPX8 waterproof rating, so it’s safe to read in the tub or pool.
You still have to put up with ads on the lock screen and such unless you pay an additional one-time fee, and if you can live with a lower-resolution display, Amazon’s base-level Kindle is a solid budget-friendly alternative that’s currently on sale for $65. If you’d rather avoid entering Amazon’s locked-down platform altogether, Kobo’s Clara HD offers similar hardware—minus the waterproofing and Bluetooth support—and is discounted to $100. If you go with one of Amazon’s deals, though, note that both Kindle offers include a three-month trial of the Kindle Unlimited service, which provides an on-demand selection of books for one monthly fee.
Google’s up-and-coming Fuchsia OS has reached another milestone. According to a report from 9to5Google’s Kyle Bradshaw (the Internet’s premiere Fuchsia resource), the new OS is rolling out to all first-gen Google Nest Hubs. The OS launched in May but only to a select few devices in the preview program.
The first-gen Google Nest Hub (which launched as the “Google Home Hub” and was later renamed) has always had a strange OS story. The smart display launched in 2018 with an OS based on the Google Cast platform at a time when Google was pushing partners to ship displays with Android Things, an Internet-of-things OS based on Android. Today, Android Things is dead—at least, as a public platform—and there’s not much future in turning the simple Google Cast Platform into a smart display. The Fuchsia team, which has been experimenting on the Home Hub for years, apparently commandeered the project and started rolling out the new OS.
You can check if you have Fuchsia by going to the “About” page in the settings. If there’s an “Operating System Version” field at the bottom, you’re running Fuchsia. You won’t notice any differences, though. The Google smart display UI is written in Flutter, which can run on both Fuchsia and the Google Cast OS, so everything you interact with comes from the same code base. Google just quietly replaced the underlying OS.
Enlarge/ Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa holds his vaccination card after receiving his first shot of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty Images | Allen J. Schaben)
A Chicago pharmacist was arrested yesterday on charges that he sold 125 authentic CDC vaccination cards to 11 buyers for about $10 per card, the Department of Justice announced.
“Knowingly selling COVID vaccination cards to unvaccinated individuals puts millions of Americans at risk of serious injury or death,” Special Agent Emmerson Buie Jr. said. “To put such a small price on the safety of our nation is not only an insult to those who are doing their part in the fight to stop COVID-19, but a federal crime with serious consequences.”
The licensed pharmacist, 34-year-old Tangtang Zhao, was indicted in July. Zhao worked for a pharmacy that went unnamed by the DOJ and that “distributed and administered COVID-19 vaccines at its physical locations nationwide.” The company “provided a CDC Vaccination Record Card to each vaccine recipient” as required by the CDC, and “Zhao obtained and subsequently offered authentic CDC vaccination cards for sale online,” the DOJ said.
The portable SSD market has been steadily expanding thanks to the increasing digital footprint of consumers. Technological advancements such as 3D NAND with high layer counts and the emergence of QLC have enabled SSD capacities to increase substantially over the last few years. And with those economies of scale kicking in, multiple vendors are finally able to offer consumer-focused flash-based storage devices in capacities up to 4TB.
At the 2021 CES, Western Digital introduced 4TB variants of almost all their portable SSD families, including their flagship SanDisk Extreme PRO v2 and the WD_BLACK P50 lines. In March, Crucial updated its affordable X6 lineup to include a 4TB version. WD’s flagships and Crucial’s mainstream X6 offerings represent two ends of the pricing spectrum. At the same capacity point, they present an interesting view of the tradeoffs involved in bringing a portable SSD to the market. Read on for an analysis of the performance and value propositions of the SanDisk Extreme PRO v2 and the Crucial X6 4TB portable SSDs.
If this desktop doesn’t look hauntingly familiar to you, you either didn’t live through the 1990s—or perhaps just didn’t live through them right. [credit:
Jim Salter ]
Today, I test-drove an in-development operating system project that seems almost disturbingly tailored to me specifically: SerenityOS. I cannot possibly introduce SerenityOS more accurately than its own website does:
SerenityOS is a love letter to ’90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core. It flatters with sincerity by stealing beautiful ideas from various other systems. Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.
Every word of this introduction is almost surgically accurate. To someone in SerenityOS’s target demographic—someone like myself (and likely many Arsians), who grew up with NT4 systems but matured on modern Linux and BSD—SerenityOS hits like a love letter from the ex you never quite forgot.
SerenityOS isn’t Linux—and it’s not BSD, either
What that brief intro doesn’t get across is the scale of the project. You might think that SerenityOS is just a Linux distro with an unusually ambitious vaporwave aesthetic, but it’s actually an entire operating system built from the ground up. That means custom-built kernel, display manager, shell… everything.
Today, it’s easy to run Edge Impulse machine learning on any operating system, like Raspberry Pi OS, and on every cloud, like Microsoft’s Azure IoT. Evan Rust, Technology Ambassador for Edge Impulse, walks us through it.
Building enterprise-grade IoT solutions takes a lot of practical effort and a healthy dose of imagination. As a foundation, you start with a highly secure and reliable communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. We picked our favorite integration, the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, which provides us with a cloud-hosted solution backend to connect virtually any device. For our hardware, we selected the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi 4, and of course Edge Impulse, which will connect to both platforms and extend our showcased solution from cloud to edge, including device authentication, out-of-box device management, and model provisioning.
From edge to cloud – getting started
Edge machine learning devices fall into two categories: some are able to run very simple models locally, and others have more advanced capabilities that allow them to be more powerful and have cloud connectivity. The second group is often expensive to develop and maintain, as training and deploying models can be an arduous process. That’s where Edge Impulse comes in to help to simplify the pipeline, as data can be gathered remotely, used effortlessly to train models, downloaded to the devices directly from the Azure IoT Hub, and then run – fast.
This reference project will serve you as a guide for quickly getting started with Edge Impulse on Raspberry Pi 4 and Azure IoT, to train a model that detects lug nuts on a wheel and sends alerts to the cloud.
Setting up the hardware
Raspberry Pi 4 forms the base for the Edge Impulse machine learning setup
To begin, you’ll need a Raspberry Pi 4 with an up-to-date Raspberry Pi OS image which can be found here. After flashing this image to an SD card and adding a file named wpa_supplicant.conf
along with an empty file named ssh (both within the /boot directory), you can go ahead and power up the board. Once you’ve successfully SSH’d into the device with
and the password raspberry, it’s time to install the dependencies for the Edge Impulse Linux SDK. Simply run the next three commands to set up the NodeJS environment and everything else that’s required for the edge-impulse-linux wizard:
Since this project deals with images, we’ll need some way to capture them. The wizard supports both the Pi Camera modules and standard USB webcams, so make sure to enable the camera module first with
and make sure your device appears within the Edge Impulse Studio’s device section after logging in and selecting your project.
Capturing your data
Training accurate machine learning models requires feeding plenty of varied data, which means a lot of images are required. For this use case, I captured around 50 images of a wheel that had lug nuts on it. After I was done, I headed to the Labeling queue in the Data Acquisition page and added bounding boxes around each lug nut within every image, along with every wheel.
To add some test data, I went back to the main Dashboard page and clicked the Rebalance dataset button, which moves 20% of the training data to the test data bin.
Training your models
So now that we have plenty of training data, it’s time to do something with it, namely train a model. The first block in the impulse is an Image Data block, and it scales each image to a size of 320 by 320 pixels. Next, image data is fed to the Image processing block which takes the raw RGB data and derives features from it.
Finally, these features are sent to the Transfer Learning Object Detection model which learns to recognize the objects. I set my model to train for 30 cycles at a learning rate of .15, but this can be adjusted to fine-tune the accuracy.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the model I trained was able to achieve an initial accuracy of 35.4%, but after some fine-tuning, it was able to correctly recognize objects at an accuracy of 73.5%.
Testing and deploying your models
In order to verify that the model works correctly in the real world, we’ll need to deploy it to our Raspberry Pi 4. This is a simple task thanks to the Edge Impulse CLI, as all we have to do is run
which downloads the model and creates a local webserver. From here, we can open a browser tab and visit the address listed after we run the command to see a live camera feed and any objects that are currently detected.
Integrating your models with Microsoft Azure IoT
With the model working locally on the device, let’s add an integration with an Azure IoT Hub that will allow our Raspberry Pi to send messages to the cloud. First, make sure you’ve installed the Azure CLI and have signed in using az login. Then get the name of the resource group you’ll be using for the project. If you don’t have one, you can follow this guide on how to create a new resource group. After that, return to the terminal and run the following commands to create a new IoT Hub and register a new device ID:
to add the necessary libraries. (Note: if you do not set the environment variable or pass it in as an argument, the program will not work!) The connection string contains the information required for the device to establish a connection with the IoT Hub service and communicate with it. You can then monitor output in the Hub with
To make sure it works, download and run this example to make sure you can see the test message. For the second half of deployment, we’ll need a way to customize how our model is used within the code. Thankfully, Edge Impulse provides a Python SDK for this purpose. Install it with
where <LUG_NUT_COUNT> is the correct number of lug nuts that should be attached to the wheel (you might have to use python3 if both Python 2 and 3 are installed).
Now whenever a wheel is detected the number of lug nuts is calculated. If this number falls short of the target, a message is sent to the Azure IoT Hub.
And by only sending messages when there’s something wrong, we can prevent an excess amount of bandwidth from being taken due to empty payloads.
The possibilities are endless
Imagine utilizing object detection for an industrial task such as quality control on an assembly line, or identifying ripe fruit amongst rows of crops, or detecting machinery malfunction, or remote, battery-powered inferencing devices. Between Edge Impulse, hardware like Raspberry Pi, and the Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, you can design endless models and deploy them on every device, while authenticating each and every device with built-in security.
You can set up individual identities and credentials for each of your connected devices to help retain the confidentiality of both cloud-to-device and device-to-cloud messages, revoke access rights for specific devices, transmit code and services between the cloud and the edge, and benefit from advanced analytics on devices running offline or with intermittent connectivity. And if you’re really looking to scale your operation and enjoy a complete dashboard view of the device fleets you manage, it is also possible to receive IoT alerts in Microsoft’s Connected Field Service from Azure IoT Central – directly.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — In the twenty-first episode of Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, Rui’s backstory is shown, while Tanjiro tries to protect his demon sister from the other demon slayers.
The episode begins with Rui’s childhood. He is shown to be weak and almost completely bedridden as a child due to an illness. Muzan Kubutsuji takes pity on the child as he thinks it is no way for hm to live. He turns Rui into a demon so that he can have a strong body.
Rui’s parents are devastated by the change and one day when Rui kills a person they decide to take matters into their own hands. Rui’s father tries to kill him in his sleep. In response, he kills both his parents. Kibutsuji convinces him that its his parents fault for not accepting him the way he is.
Rui tried to forge a familial bonds his entire life as a demon and failed to do so miserably. As his demon body disintegrates, he reaches out towards Tanjiro and Nezuko for comfort. Tanjiro could smell the little demon boy’s grief and held him as he died. His soul finally reunited with his parents.
The Hashira Shinobu Kocho appears out of nowhere to attack Nezuko, as she is a demon. Giyu Tomioka stands between them and prevents her from doing so. He instructs Tanjiro to run away with his sister as he holds off Shinobu. She warns him that his actions go against the corps rules.
Before Tanjiro can make it out of the mountains, he is stopped by another demon slayer. She knocks him unconscious. As she is about to kill Nezuko, the Kasugai Crows announce loudly that Tanjiro and Nezuko are to be taken to the headquarters alive.
The episode ends with Tanjiro all tied up and waking up in front of a large group of Hashiras.
Enlarge/ Emergency medicine specialist Dr. Davis Wein walks in a parking garage that was turned into a series of COVID-19 test tents at Tampa General Hospital in Tampa, Florida, on August 19, 2020. (credit: Getty | The Washington Post)
As the hypertransmissible delta coronavirus variant continues its rampage through the unvaccinated, several states continue to set new COVID-19 cases records and many hospitals are hitting their limits.
At least five states have exceeded their previous peaks of seven-day averages for new daily cases—Florida, Louisiana, Hawaii, Oregon, and Mississippi. Seven states have exceeded their most recent peaks in hospitalizations—Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oregon, and Washington.
Florida in particular has been ablaze with COVID-19. The Sunshine State exceeded its previous record average of around 16,000 new daily cases, which was set in January. The state is now averaging just under 22,000, according to data reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As for daily hospitalization tallies, Florida is currently at its all-time record of around 15,000, exceeding its previous highest peak of around 12,000 last July.
