Month: December 2016

Enlarge / End of line. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Welcome (almost) to 2017. If you're reading this, the Seventh Seal has not yet been broken, the cybers have not all fallen over, and you apparently have not been consigned to the kids' table by a disagreement with relatives about which bowl game to watch. Hooray for minor victories.

That means it's time for us to look forward to the year ahead and select the companies and technologies least likely to see its end.

"Deathwatch" is not a prediction of actual corporate demise—that sort of thing, as we've seen with past Deathwatch selectees, rarely happens quickly or completely. Most failing companies—and even many failed products—limp on in some way through acquisition, integration, inertia, or the eternal zombie life of bankruptcy protection. Instead, Deathwatch is a way of recognizing those entities in a different sort of mortal peril: technical, economic, and/or cultural irrelevance.

Enlarge / Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) (credit: Dovidena )

Usually, it’s just parents who anxiously await test results from their fertility doctors. But for one particular IVF clinic in the Netherlands, the doctors, too, are sweating this one.

After technicians at Utrecht's University Medical Center reproductive technology clinic discovered a problem with a rubber apparatus used in a fertility treatment, the clinic and 26 couples are nervously waiting to see if eggs were fertilized with the wrong sperm. Half of the couples had their fertilized eggs frozen, while the other half are either pregnant or have already had their babies. The oldest baby affected by the rubber apparatus fiasco is around one year old.

“In each of these cases there is a small risk—small but it cannot be ruled out—that during the procedure, sperm cells of the mother’s own partner have been mixed with remaining sperm from a previous procedure,” center spokesperson Paul Geurts told the New York Times.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images News)

We covered a ton of legal cases in 2016.

The entire Apple encryption saga probably grabbed the gold medal in terms of importance. However, our coverage of a California fisherman who took a government science buoy hostage was definitely our favorite. The case was dropped in May 2016 after the fisherman gave the buoy back.

Among others, we had plenty of laser strike cases to cover. There were guilty verdicts and sentencing in the red-light camera scandal that consumed Chicago. The Federal Trade Commission settled its lawsuit with Butterfly Labs, a failed startup that mined Bitcoins. A man in Sacramento, California, pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful manufacture of a firearm and one count of dealing firearms—he was using a CNC mill to help people make anonymous, untraceable AR-15s.