Month: August 2018

Enlarge / EpiPen two-pack. (credit: Getty | Joe Raedle)

Mylan’s life-saving epinephrine auto-injector EpiPen now has a generic rival, the Food and Drug Administration triumphantly announced.

Teva Pharmaceuticals USA now has FDA approval to market a direct generic competitor of the device, as well as a version for pediatric patients, a generic EpiPen Jr. Both products are used in emergency situations to auto-inject a dose of epinephrine into a person’s thigh to thwart deadly allergic reactions, namely anaphylactic shock.

The approval comes years after Mylan outraged patients and lawmakers by ruthlessly hiking the price of its product by more than 400 percent. Mylan purchased the rights to EpiPen in 2007 and gradually raised the list price from about $50 per auto-injector to slightly over $600 for a two-pack. The move boosted EpiPen profits to $1.1 billion a year. In step, Mylan CEO Heather Bresch saw her salary soar by millions, reaching nearly $19 million in 2015—a point lawmakers hammered her for during a House Oversight committee hearing in September of 2016.

Enlarge / The original iMac was hardly a workhorse. It was designed to be a relatively affordable, visually pleasing consumer desktop, and that's what it was. (credit: Apple)

Apple released the first iMac on August 15, 1998—that makes this week the 20th anniversary of the often divisive, always popular, and ever iconic all-in-one. That first iMac was a revolution in terms of design—an important part of the history of not just Macs but personal computing generally. But some of the choices Apple made haven't aged that well and were controversial even at the time.

It all began with the iMac G3, which was the first product created under the watchful eye of a returning Steve Jobs. Jobs resigned from Apple in the wake of a reorganization by then-CEO John Sculley in the '80s, but he returned to the company in the late '90s and oversaw the iMac and other subsequent successes like the iPod and iPhone. Jobs unveiled the iMac in 1998. His presentation is included below; the iMac reveal begins 16 minutes into the video.

Also notable, of course, were the commercials—in the past, Apple was known for its exceptional advertising campaigns. (Lately not as much.) The iMac was introduced to the world in a series of TV ads featuring Jurassic Park's Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum shot several of them, which you can find on YouTube, but the most well-known was probably the one titled "Step 3," embedded below.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson/SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 1.13 of the Rocket Report! This week's issue covers a lot of ground, from more commercial space activity in China, to new Russian launch pads, and finally a not-so-brief history of SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket. We're also looking forward to the next flight of the Vega rocket, carrying an important weather satellite.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Chinese startup raises $44 million. The Chinese rocket company OneSpace, which aims to attempt its first orbital launch late this year, has raised $43.6 million in Series B financing, SpaceNews reports. This fourth round of financing brings the total raised since the founding of OneSpace in August 2015 to $116 million.