Month: September 2017

Without much fanfare, NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson will return to Earth on Saturday night—it will be Sunday morning on the steppes of Kazakhstan—aboard a Soyuz spacecraft. Quietly, she will have spent 288 days in space, or nearly 10 months. The duration of her spaceflight will fall short of only one other US astronaut, Scott Kelly, who returned to Earth in 2016 with a lot more attention after 340 days.

Whitson is known around NASA's Johnson Space Center as perhaps the agency's most efficient astronaut in space, regularly getting ahead of her timelines, research, and maintenance tasks for each day. Mission controllers typically have to come up with extra work. Partly because of this, she is one of only a handful of NASA astronauts to have been selected to serve three rotations on the International Space Station.

(credit: J.K. Califf)

A nine-month-old baby in Connecticut had dangerously high levels of lead in her blood after chewing on a homeopathic “healing bracelet” used to ease teething pain, according to a report published Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The baby’s condition came to light last September during a routine health screening. Healthcare workers found that the baby was anemic and had a blood lead level of 41 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL). While no level of lead is known to be safe, the CDC recommends health interventions when a child’s blood lead level reaches 5 μg/dL.

Local public health authorities worked to track down the source of the lead. They were first drawn to peeling lead-based paint on two windows in the house in which the infant lived. Dust and peelings from deteriorating lead-based paint in older homes are among the most common sources of lead exposure in children in addition to contaminated soils. But the authorities ruled it out after the baby’s three siblings, who also lived in the house, were found to have blood lead levels less than 3 μg/dL. And, they noted, the young infant had no access to the windows.

HOLLYWOOD, CA - APRIL 22: A Juicero juicer on display at The Humane Society of the United States' To the Rescue Los Angeles Gala at Paramount Studios on April 22, 2017 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for The Humane Society of the United States) (credit: Getty Images)

In a letter posted on its website on Friday, Juicero said that it would be closing down its business. The Silicon Valley startup sold a cold-press juice machine that squeezed juice out of proprietary bags of fruit and vegetable matter. The bags were delivered to the Juicero owner’s home on a subscription basis.

“[A]fter selling over a million Produce Packs, we must let you know that we are suspending the sale of the Juicero Press and Produce Packs immediately,” Juicero wrote today.

The company was hailed by tech investors, but it ran into problems with price. The juice press was very expensive—it started out at $700 until the company reduced the price of the hardware to $400. That was not including the price of the juice bags, which cost $5-$8 each.

Enlarge / A Tesla Model S electric car sits in the Tesla Motors Inc. auto plant, formerly operated by New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI), in Fremont, California, on Wednesday, October 27, 2010. (credit: Tony Avelar/ Bloomberg/Getty Images)

On Thursday evening, a federal labor board filed a complaint against Tesla (PDF), alleging that the electric vehicle company had discouraged workers from distributing pro-union information, stopped them from talking about employee safety to the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, and in one case, prevented an employee from taking a picture of the Confidentiality Agreement they had to sign.

The Oakland, California-based regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) consolidated the complaints of three former Tesla employees, Michael Sanchez, Jonathan Galescu, and Richard Ortiz, as well as complaints made by UAW.

Tesla and the NLRB will appear at a hearing in November before an administrative law judge.

Enlarge / The Nintendo Co. Wii U Remote Plus controller, right, is displayed in a showroom in Tokyo, Japan. (credit: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A jury has ruled that Nintendo must pay $10.1 million because its Wii and Wii U systems infringe a patent belonging to a Dallas medical motion-detection company.

iLife sued Nintendo (PDF) in 2013 after filing lawsuits against four other companies in 2012. The case went to a jury trial in Dallas, and yesterday the jury returned its verdict (PDF). They found that Nintendo infringed US Patent No. 6,864,796, first filed in 1999, which describes "systems and methods for evaluating movement of a body relative to an environment."

The patent drawings show a body-mounted motion detector that could detect falls in the elderly, which is the market that iLife was targeting, according to its now defunct website.