Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

7Up—the lemon-lime soda sometimes thought to be named for its original seven main ingredients—now has a troubling eighth ingredient in Mexico: methamphetamine.

Health professionals in Arizona are warning travelers to the Mexicali area to be aware of possibly contaminated sodas there. The warning comes days after medical toxicologists and emergency doctors received reports of soda tampering in the area.

According to the Attorney General of the State of Baja California, seven people were sickened and one died from the spiked soft drinks. Officials requested that merchants there suspend sales of 7Up and clear the product from their shelves. And an investigation is now in progress to figure out how the illicit stimulant got into the soda.

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

There’s a new iPhone out in the wild, which means there’s a new teardown from iFixit showing everything that’s going on inside Apple’s latest handset.

The popular repair site wrapped up its breakdown of the iPhone 8 on Friday, finding that the 8’s internals, unsurprisingly, look a good deal like those of last year’s iPhone 7. There are some small changes—more adhesive strips surrounding the battery, a slightly redesigned Lightning connector, the use of standard Phillips screws in some spots instead of obtuse tri-point screws—but most of the more immediately apparent changes, like the new Qi wireless charging coil, were announced by Apple when it revealed the new phone earlier this month.

The teardown does confirm a few things that Apple hasn’t publicized, though. For one, iFixit says the iPhone 8’s battery checks in at 1,821mAh and can deliver up to 6.96Wh of power. Technically, that’s a step down from the iPhone 7’s 1,960mAh, 7.45Wh battery, though iPhones are generally known for making the most of lesser capacity. There’s unlikely to be any major drop-off in real-world use—we’ll know more once Ars completes its full review—but the ceiling for battery life may be a bit lower than it could have been. Beyond the battery, the iPhone 8’s insides include 2GB of LPDDR4 RAM, Toshiba NAND flash storage, and Apple’s new A11 Bionic chip.

Enlarge (credit: Takver / Flickr)

In The Guardian, the headline was “Ambitious 1.5C Paris climate target is still possible, new analysis shows.” But over at Breitbart, readers were told that “Climate Alarmists Finally Admit ‘We Were Wrong About Global Warming.’” Other headlines spanned pretty much the entire range between these two. The grist for the mill was a new study published in Nature Geoscience by a group of well-known climate scientists, but different news outlets baked very different breads with it.

That happens pretty frequently these days, but, in this case, the new study was especially complex and more easily misunderstood—even by those without a Breitbartian aggressive ideological bias against climate science.

The story in Nature Geoscience starts with a widely used figure from the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The figure was meant to provide an easier way to represent the consequences of future greenhouse gas emissions. It turns out that the relationship between global warming and the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions since the Industrial Revolution is roughly a straight line (at least for the near future). So rather than trying to match accounting of greenhouse gas emissions with one of myriad scenarios of future gas concentrations, you have a much simpler way to describe our situation: to limit warming to less than x degrees, you can emit no more than y CO₂. This is the so-called “carbon budget.”

Enlarge / An employee inspects photovoltaic cells following electrical contact soldering during manufacture at Solarworld AG in Freiberg, Germany, in July 2016. (credit: Martin Leissl/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Friday, the International Trade Commission (ITC) sided with bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Suniva, voting 4-0 that cheap imported solar panels and modules have harmed domestic panel manufacturers.

The commission now has until November to send recommendations on remedies to President Trump, who will be responsible for either setting a tariff on imported solar materials or finding some other remedy. Given Trump’s promises to bolster American manufacturing, it’s likely that he’ll favor restrictions on solar panel imports.

The case is unique in that it has caused a considerable rift in the solar industry, with manufacturers on one side and installers on the other. Installers fought against Suniva’s bid for tariffs, saying that cheap imported panels have been a primary driver of the solar industry’s recent boom. Other solar installers have claimed that Suniva’s money woes were the result of mismanagement and poor products, not foreign imports.

Enlarge (credit: Verizon)

Verizon Wireless is giving a reprieve to some rural customers who are scheduled to be booted off their service plans, but only in cases when customers have no other options for cellular service.

Verizon recently notified 8,500 customers in 13 states that they will be disconnected on October 17 because they used roaming data on another network. But these customers weren't doing anything wrong—they are being served by rural networks that were set up for the purpose of extending Verizon's reach into rural areas.

As Verizon explained in 2015, the company set up its LTE in Rural America (LRA) program to provide technical support and resources to 21 rural wireless carriers. That support would help the carriers build 4G networks. Verizon benefited by being able to reach more customers in sparsely populated areas. Customers with these plans don't even see roaming indicators on their phones, as it appears that they're on the Verizon network.

(credit: JLS Photography - Alaska)

The Pact app was supposed to help users meet weekly goals for exercising and eating veggies. Users that succeeded were promised cash rewards, while those who broke their health “pact” paid penalties. But according to the Federal Trade Commission, it was the app maker that saw diet and exercise results—it feasted on users’ bank accounts and made a run for it when “tens of thousands” of them complained.

On Wednesday, the FTC announced that the maker of the app, Pact Inc., agreed to a $1.5 million judgement. Nearly $1 million of that will go to users as refunds and unpaid rewards. Pact has 30 days to fork over the dough.

Along with the settlement announcement, the FTC released its full complaint against Pact (PDF). The complaint outlines how the app was supposed to work and how it allegedly went terribly wrong.