Month: April 2017

Enlarge / Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes speaks at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York City on September 29, 2015. (credit: CNBC / Getty Images News)

If it’s not one thing, it’s another in the dizzying downward spiral of Theranos, the once-darling of Silicon Valley biotech.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the company "allegedly misled company directors" regarding its lab tests and used a shell company to buy commercial lab gear. These are just a few of the new revelations made by the Journal, which also include fake demonstrations for potential investors.

The new information came from unsealed depositions by 22 former Theranos employees or members of its board of directors. They were deposed by Partner Fund Management LP, a hedge fund currently suing Theranos in Delaware state court. Theranos is also facing multiple lawsuits in federal court in California and Arizona, among others.

Enlarge (credit: Juisir)

A cold-press juicer maker called Juicero found itself in the center of a lot of unwanted attention this week when Bloomberg reporters discovered that they could press juice out of the company’s proprietary juice bags with their bare hands—without the help of the accompanying $400 appliance.

But Juicero apparently still wants to be the only company to offer this type of appliance, as it filed a complaint (PDF) in federal court against another cold-press juice bag squeezer called Juisir earlier this month.

Juicero claims that Juisir, developed by Chinese company iTaste and marketed and imported with the help of Australian company Froothie, infringes on a patent Juicero was granted in November 2016. Juicero said in its April 6 complaint that Juisir also violates the Silicon Valley company’s trade dress and trademark rights.

Enlarge / Pictured: Probably an editor who peer-reviewed stuff for Tumor Biology. (credit: flickr user: 派脆客 Lee)

The journal Tumor Biology is retracting 107 research papers after discovering that the authors faked the peer review process. This isn’t the journal’s first rodeo. Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals— 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason.

It’s possible to fake peer review because authors are often asked to suggest potential reviewers for their own papers. This is done because research subjects are often blindingly niche; a researcher working in a sub-sub-field may be more aware than the journal editor of who is best-placed to assess the work.

But some journals go further and request, or allow, authors to submit the contact details of these potential reviewers. If the editor isn’t aware of the potential for a scam, they then merrily send the requests for review out to fake e-mail addresses, often using the names of actual researchers. And at the other end of the fake e-mail address is someone who’s in on the game and happy to send in a friendly review.

Enlarge (credit: NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio and NASA Center for Climate Simulation)

If you follow climate science news, you know that one of the hotter topics is “climate sensitivity”—the precise amount of warming you get for a given increase of greenhouse gases. A few years ago, a couple papers caused a stir by trying to estimate this sensitivity based on simple equations for the recent past, coming up with a lower warming sensitivity than numerous other studies based on climate models or paleoclimate records. The last IPCC report even widened its estimated range slightly to encompass these studies, which proved controversial.

Researchers have already found reasons to think those low sensitivity estimates were problematic, including the fact that the simplistic, global representations of warming and cooling factors missed some important spatial patterns that change things. A new study from the University of Washington’s Kyle Armour comes at the question from a different angle.

There are several different timeframes we can use to describe climate sensitivity. The one you most commonly hear about is called “equilibrium climate sensitivity." Technically, this is the amount of warming you’d get if you instantaneously doubled atmospheric CO₂ and waited a couple centuries or so for the climate to adjust. But there is also something called the “transient climate response," defined as the warming you get at the time a gradually increasing level of CO₂ reaches the doubling point. This is a smaller number, because the climate doesn’t have time to fully reach equilibrium.

After single-handedly tarnishing the diesel engines it had spent so long championing, Volkswagen Group's corporate redemption strategy involves a commitment to building a lot more electric vehicles. There's an all-new modular architecture for EVs—called MEB—that will be the basis for new models throughout the brands in VW's portfolio, but that won't be ready until 2020. In the meantime, Porsche and Audi have been working on long-range battery EVs that should start appearing next year. And at the Shanghai Auto Show on Friday, Audi announced a second long-range EV will go on sale in 2019: the e-tron Sportback.

The e-tron Sportback is built around the vehicle's 95kWh battery pack, giving it a range of 310 miles (500km). The battery pack is bookended by a pair of electric motors that provide a total of 430hp (320kW), although with a boost function that gives up to 500hp (370kW) for short periods. Atop this skateboard chassis is a sleeker body than the more upright e-tron SUV first seen in 2015. But as BMW's X6 has ably proved, the "four door coupé" effect is rather undermined by the huge wheels and lofty ride height.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich / Getty)

Canada is taking a much stronger stand against data cap exemptions than the United States.

In the US, the Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership signaled that it won't enforce net neutrality rules against zero-rating, the practice of favoring certain Internet content by exempting it from customers' data caps. The FCC made that clear when it rescinded a determination that AT&T and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules by letting their own video services stream without counting against customers' data caps while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions.

Canada is also taking a case-by-case approach to zero-rating instead of banning it outright. But yesterday, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) ordered changes to one carrier's zero-rating program and announced that it will enforce stricter guidelines for determining whether zero-rating programs are discriminatory.