Month: November 2017

Arrivo

A Hyperloop-related startup called Arrivo is building a $15 million test center and test track in the Denver Metro area, with the blessing of the Colorado Department of Transportation (DOT). The deal will be the second Hyperloop-related project for Colorado, after startup Hyperloop One and engineering firm Aecom announced in September that they would begin feasibility studies for a Rocky Mountain Hyperloop that would extend from Pueblo, Colorado, to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Arrivo is headed by a name that may be familiar to Ars readers: Brogan BamBrogan. BamBrogan was an engineer at SpaceX and later the Chief Technology Officer at Hyperloop One. He quit, along with a small cadre of Hyperloop One executives, amid a flurry of lawsuits accusing the remaining executives on the Hyperloop One team of mismanagement and harassment. Hyperloop One sued back, accusing BamBrogan and his group of breaches of duty. The two sides quietly settled last November, and BamBrogan focused on building Arrivo while Hyperloop One moved forward with its Nevada test track.

Enlarge / Peter Thiel is serious. (credit: Getty | Alex Wong)

Questionable herpes vaccine research backed by tech heavyweight Peter Thiel may have jeopardized $15 million in federal research funding to Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. That’s according to documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by The State Journal Register.

In August, Kaiser Health News reported that Thiel and other conservative investors had contributed $7 million for the live-but-weakened herpes virus vaccine, developed by the late SIU researcher William Halford. The investments came after Halford and his private company, Rational Vaccines, had begun conducting small clinical trials in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. With the off-shore location, Rational Vaccines’ trial skirted federal regulations and standard safety protocols for human trials, including having approval and oversight from an institutional review board (IRB).

Experts were quick to call the unapproved trial “patently unethical,” and researchers rejected the data from publication, calling the handling of safety issues “reckless.” The government of St. Kitts opened an investigation into the trial and reported that health authorities there had been kept in the dark.

Enlarge (credit: Junglecat)

The parents of a 39-year-old who died in a Christmas Eve confrontation with the Los Angeles Police Department in 2014 was awarded $5.5 million by a federal jury on Monday, KPCC radio reports.

KPCC reports that LAPD officers "hit the man with their batons and fists, pepper sprayed and restrained him." An officer also stunned the man with a Taser six times in a row. He suffered a heart attack an hour later and died after two days.

The coroner's report blamed an enlarged heart, cocaine use, and "police restraint with use of Taser."

Enlarge / CompuServe brought millions of Americans "online" for the first time—before AOL and the Internet stomped it down. Now AOL is killing off CompuServe's venerable forums. (credit: CompuServe)

In the 1980s and early 1990s, before America Online CDs clogged America's mailboxes and the word "Internet" had yet to be spoken by nearly anyone outside the tech world, CompuServe was the Internet for most people. Even as the Internet rose into more general awareness in 1994, CompuServe—aka CompuServe Information Service—was still how a significant majority of people in the US got "online." But AOL's move to a monthly subscription model instead of metered dial-up time in 1996 (plus something called the World Wide Web) was a death blow to CompuServe's dial-up business. WorldCom bought CompuServe's networks, and the information service ended up in the hands of AOL in 1998.

Yet somehow, CompuServe's Forums, the venerable discussion platform of the dial-up era, have lived on—until now. As AOL and Yahoo become Oath, a Verizon Company, the last vestiges of CompuServe are finally being extinguished, Fast Company's Harry McCracken (one of the last CompuServe forum users on Earth) reports.

In an e-mail message, the CompuServe team at AOL announced that CompuServe Forums—a somehow still-living archive of online discussions that largely predates even some of the cruftiest of Usenet groups—would be removed on December 15. "For more than two decades, the CompuServe Forums paved the way for a wide variety of topics," the e-mail stated, "and we appreciate all of the participation and comments you have provided over the years."