Month: February 2017

Tesla Factory in Fremont, California. (credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pestoverde/8763130149/)

In a Medium post published today, Tesla employee Jose Moran detailed working conditions at the company’s Fremont factory and called for the factory workers to unionize with United Auto Workers (UAW).

Tesla currently employs more than 5,000 non-union workers at its Fremont, CA-based factory. Moran wrote that the workers are often faced with “excessive mandatory overtime” and earn between $17 and $21 hourly, compared with the national average of $25.58 hourly for most autoworkers in the US. The Tesla employee noted that the astronomical cost of living in the Bay Area makes $21 an hour difficult to live on.

The post was Moran’s first on Medium, and Ars could not find a way to contact him for further details.

Enlarge / A photo taken on February 9, 2017 shows nuclear reactor number 1 ("Flamanville 1") of the Flamanville nuclear plant after an explosion at the plant in Flamanville, northwestern France. An explosion at the nuclear power plant on France's northwest coast caused minor injuries on February 9, but the authorities said there was no risk of radiation. The blast took place in the engine room at the Flamanville plant, which lies 25 kilometres (15 miles) west of the port of Cherbourg and just across from the Channel Islands. (credit: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images)

On Thursday morning the BBC reported that a turbine at the Flamanville nuclear power plant on the western shore of France caught fire after an explosion, although officials assured the public that there was no risk of nuclear contamination. The fire occurred in a building that housed the turbine that turns steam into electricity, “a few dozen yards from the nuclear reactor, which is isolated by a thick cement wall,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

Plant operators shut down reactor 1 at the two-reactor site (reactor 2 is still online). No one was hurt in the incident, but five workers reported feeling ill and were evaluated for smoke inhalation. According to Le Monde, plant operators ruled out an act of malice and suggested that the explosion and fire were due to overheating, although an official cause has not been determined yet.

According to The Independent, the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) said the fire originated in a fan underneath an alternator.

Enlarge (credit: Saul Loeb/Getty Images)

A federal appeals court late Thursday upheld a lower court's decision blocking the travel ban that was implemented under executive order by President Donald Trump two weeks ago.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals was reviewing a decision by US District Judge James L. Robart, who last week ruled against Trump’s executive order and imposed a nationwide temporary restraining order. In both the hearings before the 9th Circuit earlier this week, as well as before the lower district court, lawyers from the Department of Justice largely argued that the states of Washington and Minnesota had no standing to challenge the executive order, and that it was well within the president's right to set immigration policy. The 9th Circuit disagreed on both counts.

"There is no precedent to support this claimed unreviewability, which runs contrary to the fundamental structure of our constitutional democracy," the appeals court concluded.

(credit: speed4)

The reliability of the Transportation Security Administration's program to weed out terrorists based on their behavior among travelers is coming under scrutiny. Doubts about the program are coming directly from within the TSA, according to documents the ACLU obtained from the agency via the Freedom of Information Act.

The ACLU report (PDF) says that the TSA's own files were loaded with research questioning the behavior detection program. The program has cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion to deploy 3,000 detection officers at 176 airports nationwide over the last decade.

"Academic research and other documents in the TSA's own files reinforce that behavior detection is unscientific and unreliable," the ACLU said. "The TSA repeatedly overstated the scientific validity of behavior detection in communications with members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office."

Enlarge / Salmonella (credit: CDC)

A notorious germ best known for getting people rushing to the bathroom may one day have cancer patients headed to clinics for a new treatment instead.

With some genetic tweaking, Salmonella typhimurium transformed from a germ that causes mayhem in people’s intestines to one that can infiltrate deep into the bowels of tumors and spark immune system warfare. In a study published Wednesday in Science Translational Medicine, South Korean researchers reported that the weaponized gut bacteria could prevent human cancers from growing and spreading in mice—all with no evidence of harmful side-effects.

The study is just in mice and far more work is needed to test efficacy and safety in humans. But the researchers are encouraged by the data so far. Overall, it seems the trained germs have “excellent anticancer effects in diverse mouse tumor models, suggesting that this strategy could be applied to a wide spectrum of malignancies,” the authors conclude.

Enlarge / See this? This is what we want to avoid. (credit: Cynthia Sears, Johns Hopkins)

Everyone is familiar with it. The buzz of a fly, the thwack as it hits the window, followed by frantic buzzing noises. A fly is stuck against the window, skittering along as it blindly attempts to get through the glass. If only they'd read The Men Who Stare at Goats, they'd realize the futility of their actions. It turns out that bacteria do something similar (and also haven't done the required reading), but it's not due to their inability to recognize glass.

Bacteria form films that are, at best, a nuisance, and at worst, downright dangerous. Essentially, if you put a surface into a fluid containing bacteria, they will gather at the surface, possibly swapping stories about the good old minutes long gone. But given enough time, they will often grow into a sticky, cohesive film that covers the surface. On surgical implants and such, this needs to be avoided at all cost.

It's actually a bit strange that this happens at all. Bacteria that is freely swimming along in water is driven by a great flappy propellor, called a flagella. This thing doesn't really know where it's going, so eventually it runs into any walls that you've cruelly placed in its path. But this is a tiny object in a fluid, so it is subject to diffusion. In a short time, the forces of diffusion will reorient the bacteria, allowing it to blindly swim away from the surface.