Month: January 2018

Enlarge / A dose of Tc-99m to be used in an upcoming scan. (credit: Getty | Rene Johnston)

There’s a mad dash for a vital radioactive isotope that’s used in about 50,000 medical procedures every day in the US, including spotting deadly cancers and looming heart problems. Currently, access to it hinges on a shaky supply chain and a handful of aging nuclear reactors in foreign countries. But federal regulators and a few US companies are pushing hard and spending millions to produce it domestically and shore up access, Kaiser Health News reports.

The isotope, molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), decays to the short-lived Technetium-99m (Tc-99m) and other isotopes, which are used as radiotracers in medical imaging. Injected into patients, the isotopes spotlight how the heart is pumping, what parts of the brain are active, or if tumors are forming in bones.

But, to get to those useful endpoints, Mo-99 has to wind through a fraught journey. According to KHN, most Mo-99 in the US is made by irradiating Cold War-era uranium from America’s nuclear stockpile. The US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration secretly ships it to aging reactors abroad. The reactors—and five subsequent processing plants—are in Australia, Canada, Europe (Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and the Czech Republic), and South Africa, according to a 2016 report by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Private companies then rent irradiation time at the reactors, send the resulting medley of isotopes to processing plants, book the final Mo-99 on commercial flights back to the US, and distribute it to hospitals and pharmacies.

Enlarge / Nintendo Labo looks like a trip. (credit: Nintendo)

Nintendo has announced a new build-your-own-accessories line for the Switch console, dubbed Nintendo Labo. It will arrive on April 20 worldwide.

Labo's two playsets, the $69.99 Variety Kit and the $79.99 Robot Kit, will come with marked cardboard sheets that must be punched and folded by players. The foldable parts resemble everything from pianos to fishing rods, along with a full-body robot outfit, and they accept both the Switch console and its Joy-Con controllers in various slots.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

When you say "Hey Siri, give me the news" to your iOS device, Siri will now immediately begin playing a daily news update from a popular news podcast—NPR by default in the United States. Coming shortly before the launch of the HomePod smart speaker, also powered by Siri, this small feature is the latest that brings some Alexa or Google Assistant-style interactions to Apple's ecosystem.

In the US, NPR's News Now podcast immediately begins playing as soon as you say the words. Note that hitting the home button and then saying, "Give me the news," won't do it, though. The feature has to be activated by the hands-free "Hey Siri" prompt used in CarPlay or in the upcoming HomePod's screenless interface.

Samuel Axon

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Yet another Android OEM is dragging its feet with its GPL compliance. This time, it's Xiaomi with the Mi A1 Android One device, which still hasn't seen a kernel source code release.

Android vendors are required to release their kernel sources thanks to the Linux kernel's GPLv2 licensing. The Mi A1 has been out for about three months now, and there's still no source code release on Xiaomi's official github account.

Unfortunately, GPL non-compliance is par for the course in the world of Android. Budget SoC company MediaTek once tried charging users for access to GPL'd code. Motorola under Lenovo has been regularly accused of violating the GPL and releasing incomplete sources or sources that differ from the kernel shipping on devices. Unsurprisingly, the majority of these alleged GPL violators are from China, which often plays fast and loose with IP law.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Gary Waters)

Apple announced on Wednesday that it would pay $38 billion in taxes to the federal government as it brings cash earned overseas into the United States. The big payment is the result of President Donald Trump's tax cut bill, passed last month, which created a new, special tax rate for overseas cash.

Apple is likely to be the biggest beneficiary of that provision. The American company had around $250 billion in cash and other short-term assets held by overseas affiliates. Under previous tax law, Apple would have had to pay a tax of 35 percent in order to bring overseas cash back to the United States. Under the new law, that rate is cut to 15.5 percent, saving Apple tens of billions of dollars compared to what it would have paid to bring the cash home in 2017.

Apple didn't have a choice about this. Under the new tax bill, all overseas cash is subject to a one-time 15.5 percent tax whether Apple leaves it overseas or moves it to the United States.