Month: December 2016

Enlarge (credit: By Provincial Archives of Alberta [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons)

For the last few decades, syphilis has been re-emerging around the world. This may seem surprising; it can be treated successfully with antibiotics, after all. Yet, amid failures in public health campaigns and the challenge of fighting a disease that can sometimes spread undetected, syphilis is making its comeback. Estimates suggest that there were 10.6 million cases worldwide in 2008. And with its reemergence, it brings a new weapon: drug resistance.

For Natasha Arora, a population geneticist, the reemergence was intriguing. Although she started out studying orangutans, the tools of population genetics are multi-purpose, and she took a sideways step into researching syphilis instead. By studying syphilis samples taken from patients around the world, Arora and a team of researchers have found that one of the two modern strains of syphilis is far more widespread than previously thought and that both current strains show resistance to second-line antibiotics called macrolides.

Penicillin is the first choice to treat syphilis, but sometimes macrolides are prescribed instead. “Penicillin needs to be given intramuscularly (for early syphilis) or intravenously (for late syphilis)," says Lola Stamm, who sent syphilis samples to Arora and her team but wasn’t an author on their paper. "This can be a problem in developing countries, and most people don’t like needles.”

Enlarge / One of the extra-crispy Galaxy Note 7s after a charging accident. (credit: BusinessKorea )

It's hard to imagine anyone still carrying around a potentially explosive Samsung Galaxy Note 7 after the smartphone was recalled (twice), cancelled, and limited to 60 percent battery capacity. If someone in the US is still holding out against the carriers, Samsung, and common sense after all that, an OTA update will put any active Galaxy Note 7 devices to the sword.

That's according to The Verge, at least, which says it received an image of a US Cellular alert sent out to users. “As of December 15th," the message reads, "Samsung will modify the software to prevent the Galaxy Note 7 from charging. The phone will no longer work.” As with other Galaxy Note 7 restrictions, the other US carriers will probably follow suit soon, too.

In early November—a month after the second recall started—Samsung said around 85 percent of Galaxy Note 7s had been returned. There are apparently still some diehards out there who just don't want to give up their devices—check out the Galaxy Note 7 subreddit—and unless users go to the extreme task of disabling their OTA updates, this should get the last of them.

Audi

LAS VEGAS—“You go and you build it in California, but where are you gonna test it? You’re gonna test it in Nevada.”

Angela Castro, the Senior Director of Government Affairs Media and Marketing in Southern Nevada, was speaking. She looked around the room at a small group of sleepy reporters in a second-floor conference room looking over Sin City’s Traffic Management Center (TMC), which was surprisingly hushed despite the real-time images of bustling intersections displayed on a handful of giant mounted screens.

Jeff Bezos stands next to the copper lining for a BE-4 engine nozzle in his Blue Origin rocket factory. (credit: Eric Berger)

On Thursday night, just hours after John Glenn died, the Smithsonian Institution's held its 2016 American Ingenuity Awards banquet. This year the magazine honored Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, and as part of the ceremony former astronaut Mae Jemison read a rather extraordinary letter John Glenn had written less than two weeks before, on Nov. 28.

The letter commended Bezos for his achievements with Blue Origin, which mark critical steps toward developing a low-cost, reusable launch system. Blue Origin plans to offer suborbital tourism flights in 2018 aboard its New Shepard vehicle, and it has announced plans for ambitious orbital and deep space flights soon thereafter. Bezos wants to enable millions of people to live and work in space.

Glenn praised Bezos for a vision of space travel accessible not to just highly trained pilots and engineers, such as himself, but for all of humanity. "You understood that to realize that vision, we would have to be able to get to space more often and more inexpensively. So you and your Blue Origin team began designing rockets that can be reused over and over again," Glenn wrote.