Tech Roundup: Dissolvable Pacemaker, WhatsApp Encrypted Backups & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Researchers from Northwestern and George Washington universities create a transient, NFC-powered wireless and battery-free pacemaker for the heart that's made of thin, flexible, and lightweight biocompatible materials that dissolves in the body after use and can be reabsorbed by the body in five to seven weeks.
• Unicode releases a draft list of new emoji to be finalised in September, including contenders like multiracial handshake, melting smiley face, and a pregnant man.
• Automattic, the owner of WordPress, Tumblr and Day One, acquires popular podcast application Pocket Casts, as it readies to "explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts."
• Engineers in Japan achieve a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits/s on a fiber line over 3,000 kilometers long, shattering the previous record of 178 Terabits/s for the fastest internet speed.
• Twitter flips the switch on auto-captions for voice tweets in 11 languages including English, Japanese, and Hindi, more than a year after launching the feature on iOS.
• The U.S. government says social media platforms like Facebook are "killing people" by allowing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation to flourish on their services; Facebook says it won't be "distracted by accusations which aren't supported by the facts".
• Google effectively delays Play Billing requirement for Android in-app purchases until April 2022 by letting developers request an extension for adopting this policy change amid antitrust lawsuit in the U.S.

• Facebook-owned WhatsApp begins testing encrypted backups on the cloud, enabling users to save their chat histories securely on Google Drive with a 64-digit recovery key, and rolls out the ability to join group calls in progress; updates its AI chatbot, BlenderBot 2.0, with new capabilities that allow it recall past conversations that span months and search the internet to update itself about chat topics.
• Psiphon's censorship circumvention tool enables nearly 1.4 million people in Cuba gain Internet access as the country blocks popular social media and messaging platforms amid nationwide protests over shortages of basic goods, limits on civil liberties and the government's handling of a surge in COVID-19 infections.
• Ride-hailing giant Uber expands its grocery delivery service to more than 400 US cities and towns, including San Francisco, New York City, and Washington D.C., partly fueled by a partnership with Albertsons Companies and its 1,200 grocery stores across the country.
• Videoconferencing platform Zoom acquires cloud-based contact centre software company Five9 for US$ 14.7 billion; says "the addition of Five9 is a natural fit that will deliver even more happiness and value to our customers."
• Chinese tech behemoth Tencent buys British game studio Sumo in a deal worth US$ 1.27 billion, as reports emerge that ByteDance's news aggregator platform Jinri Toutiao has been blocking new user and content creator registrations since September 2020 at the behest of Chinese regulators, who have taken a number of steps in recent weeks to build a data regulation regime and rein in "platform economy" on concerns ranging from the appropriateness of content to anticompetitive behaviours and, increasingly, data security.