Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | PeopleImages)

The pharmacy in any corner drug store brims with carefully formulated, tested, and regulated drugs. But aisles packed with personal care products—shampoos, makeup, lotions—are a different story.

For the most part, these products aren’t regulated at all. The gels, creams, and concoctions we slather on our skin and massage into our heads on a daily basis clear no regulatory hurdles before strolling into neighborhood stores and medicine cabinets. The Food and Drug Administration only looks into these products when people voluntarily report problems. And people hardly ever report problems to the FDA—even when there are big ones. In a research letter this week in JAMA Internal Medicine, a trio of researchers argue that something has got to change.

A major motivation for their argument is the recent scandal involving WEN by Chaz Dean hair care products. (You’ve likely seen the celebrity-studded infomercials.) The FDA opened an investigation into WEN in 2014 after the agency received complaints that the brand’s Cleansing Conditioners were irritating scalps and causing hair to fall out. A whopping 127 complaints rolled in—that’s a lot for the FDA. In 2007, for instance, the agency received fewer than 200 complaints total, for all personal care products sold in the country.

Enlarge / Sen. Richard Shelby, right, welcomes Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson to Huntsville, Alabama, this week. (credit: Huntsville/Madison County Chamber)

This week the governor of Alabama announced that Blue Origin would build a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, for its new BE-4 rocket engine. "I must commend founder Jeff Bezos and company President Robert Meyerson for their vision to create this innovative company, and for choosing to make Alabama its home sweet home," said Gov. Kay Ivey.

The decision has been widely hailed as largely a political one—Alabama has considerable influence in the US Congress over space policy, and, with its decision to build there, Blue Origin was aligning part of its future with the southern state—but that does not appear to be the sole rationale. Rather, a closer examination of the Alabama choice reveals that Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos, whose business acumen pushed Amazon to the top, has brought the same shrewdness to the aerospace industry. He is playing to win.

A year-long process

The BE-4 rocket engine is the cornerstone of Blue Origin's future as an orbital and deep-space rocket company. About 30 percent more powerful than the space shuttle's main engine, seven of the BE-4 engines will power the company's large New Glenn orbital rocket. It also is the front-runner to be selected by United Launch Alliance for its next-generation rocket, Vulcan. In other words, if the BE-4 engines work out, Blue Origin will need to build a lot of them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | designer491)

A group of small Internet service providers yesterday urged Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai to preserve the FCC's net neutrality rules and the related classification of ISPs as common carriers.

"We have encountered no new additional barriers to investment or deployment as a result of the 2015 decision to reclassify broadband as a telecommunications service and have long supported network neutrality as a core principle for the deployment of networks for the American public to access the Internet," the ISPs said in a letter to Pai that was organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

The current rules are necessary "to address the anticompetitive practices of the largest players in the market," but "the FCC’s current course threatens the viability of competitive entry and competitive viability," the companies wrote.

Google

Google is launching a major redesign for Google News, bringing the site more in line with Google's company-wide "Material Design" guidelines. A gray background and white cards around each story bring the site more in line with what Google has been doing on Android and makes it look a lot like Google Now. Everything is a lot more spaced out, so you'll see less information on a single page. Google says the airier design is "designed for readability" and will make it easier to scan stories.

The site remains recognizable as Google News. There's still a vertical column of sections on the left side, but now the list is customizable. There's also still a right-side column that houses recent items, the weather, sports scores, and local news. Google is highlighting its "Fact Check"  labeling program with a new block in the right column that will show "the top fact checked articles recently published." One new navigation element is a top bar that lets you jump between top headlines, local news, and "For You"—a suggested content section.

Enlarge / THIS is actually the most accurate finger angle for the tall, skinny fingerprint reader. The problem is this is not really comfortable. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

The next wave of fingerprint readers on smart devices could be more inconspicuous than they are now. Earlier this year, Synaptics announced a new range of fingerprint sensors that can be integrated under polymers, ceramics, and glass, potentially providing more functions to Android soft buttons. Rumor has it that Apple has also been experimenting specifically with under-display fingerprint readers, and that's the area that Qualcomm has been focusing on as well. At Mobile World Congress Shanghai, the chip maker showed off its first ultrasonic-based, under-display fingerprint sensors in a prototype of the existing Vivo Xplay6 smartphone.

The technology built into this prototype allows the bottom-third of the smartphone's display to act as the fingerprint reader and unlock the device. As demonstrated in a hands-on demo by Engadget, you simply press your thumb to the display and the device unlocks within a second or so of reading your fingerprint. It doesn't appear to be a speedy as traditional smartphone fingerprint sensors, but that's not surprising since the technology is still in its infancy and hasn't yet been incorporated into any consumer devices.

According to Vivo, the technology could be built out so the entire display could act as a fingerprint sensor. However, that will up the production costs dramatically. Engadget's report says that Vivo could eventually spread the technology through the bottom half of the display rather than just a small portion close to the bottom edge.

Enlarge / Web apps, declared Steve Jobs. All the original iPhone needs is Web apps! (credit: Jacqui Cheng)

When 2016 was over, Apple announced that its app store business generated well over $28 billion in sales that year. While that includes sales of software for its desktop operating system, it does not include the vast quantity of applications that are given away for free (many of which enable some sort of transaction when run). By any measure, the app store is big business, and an app-store-like ecosystem has now been part of any mobile OS for years.

One of the striking things about this is that, if you believe Steve Jobs, none of this was ever supposed to be. When the original iPhone was introduced, Jobs announced its development environment: Web apps.

There’s no SDK that you need! You’ve got everything you need if you know how to write apps using the most modern Web standards to write amazing apps for the iPhone today. So developers, we think we’ve got a very sweet story for you. You can begin building your iPhone apps today.

Jobs, of course, was famous for dismissing something as irrelevant right until the moment that Apple was ready to enter that market. The tight deadlines for putting something as complicated as iOS together undoubtedly left some of its SDK in a state of flux, and all of it was poorly documented—things were likely good enough for internal app development, but not the developer community. It was easy to see Jobs' promotion of Web apps as a strategic announcement, meant to put off developer demands while the SDK was cleaned up.