Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Even this baby is annoyed. (credit: Getty | VW Pics)

The US Drug Enforcement Administration plainly reports that no death from an overdose of marijuana has ever been reported—a tidbit often repeated by cannabis enthusiasts when discussing the potential harms of the popular drug. But this week, many news outlets coughed up headlines saying that the famous fact had gone up in smoke.

Those media reports dubbed the death of an 11-month-old Colorado boy as the first marijuana overdose death ever reported. They based that startling stat on a case report published in the August edition of Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine.

But that’s not what the case report said—at all. And the doctors behind the report (who likely spent the week with their palms on their faces) are trying to set the record straight.

Enlarge (credit: Samuel Axon)

While it will be some time before 5G LTE becomes standard, Apple is thinking ahead about how to best incorporate 5G technology into its iPhones. According to a Fast Company report, Apple has been working with Intel to incorporate the chipmaker's 5G modems in future iPhones while talks with Qualcomm, the world's biggest modem supplier, have been "limited."

Qualcomm currently has a more advanced 5G modem than Intel does, but Intel reportedly has "multiple thousands" of employees working on improving its 5G chip. Intel first announced its 5G modem at CES 2017 and announced recently that it completed a "full end-to-end 5G call based on its early 5G silicon." While Qualcomm's 5G modem has more specialized carrier features, reports suggest that those features won't be "widely adopted" by all carriers. Also, Qualcomm's chips are particularly equipped to support CDMA networks but those may become obsolete over time as 5G infiltrates the industry.

An iPhone with a 5G modem would theoretically be capable of connection speeds of one gigabit per second or more, but the industry's transition to support 5G will take some time. The report suggests that Intel could supply a 5G modem for an iPhone debuting in 2019 or 2020.

Enlarge / Hard to believe that this stuff could cut carbon emissions. (credit: Department of Energy)

The boom in natural gas production has been essential to the drop in carbon emissions in the US, as methane, the primary component of natural gas, releases more energy for each carbon atom when burned. But there's still a carbon atom in each molecule of methane, so switching to natural gas will eventually lead to diminishing returns when it comes to emissions reductions. To keep our climate moderate, we'll eventually need to move off natural gas, as well.

But two new papers out this week suggest we could use natural gas without burning it. They detail efficient methods of converting methane to hydrogen in ways that let us capture much or all of the carbon left over. The hydrogen could then be burned or converted to electricity in a fuel cell—including mobile fuel cells that power cars. The supply obtained from methane could also be integrated with hydrogen from other sources.

The tech involved is also pretty cool in its own right, involving things like catalysts dissolved in liquid metal and solid materials that allow current to travel through them as protons, rather than as electrons.