Month: October 2018

Jim Salter

A few months ago, I bought a couple of cookbooks on Amazon. As usual, I got the ebooks, which I greatly prefer. But unlike all my other ebooks, I ended up not using these. The problem was that I wanted to look through my new Thug Kitchen cookbooks in the kitchen, but I didn't want to get my tablet all gross—and I felt like the screen was a little small anyway.

So I got excited when the folks behind the Puppy Cube reached out to ask if I'd like to review a short-throw, touchscreen projector.

Enlarge / Artist’s concept of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the Sun. (credit: NASA)

In August, the Parker Solar Probe rocketed away from Earth aboard a Delta IV Heavy booster. The relatively small, 685kg spacecraft needed to achieve a high speed in order to establish an orbit around the Sun—rather than getting drawn into the star's massive gravity well never to escape.

According to NASA, the spacecraft is well on its way. The space agency reports that the probe now holds the record for closest approach to the Sun by a human-made object, passing inside the current record of 42.7 million kilometers from the Sun's surface on Oct. 29, 2018, at about 1:04pm ET (17:04 UTC). The previous record was established in April 1976, by the German-American Helios 2 spacecraft.

“It’s been just 78 days since Parker Solar Probe launched, and we’ve now come closer to our star than any other spacecraft in history,” said Project Manager Andy Driesman, from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, in a news release. “It’s a proud moment for the team, though we remain focused on our first solar encounter, which begins on Oct. 31."

Enlarge / The NRG power plant in El Segundo, California. (credit: Getty Images)

A bit of moderately good news this morning: carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the US electricity sector decreased by 28 percent between 2005 and 2017, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Before you start celebrating too much, note that this is only for the electricity sector. "CO₂ emissions from all other energy sectors fell by only 5 percent," the EIA wrote. "Other energy sectors" include home heating, which is natural-gas based in much of the country and very difficult to decarbonize.

Turning back to the electricity sector, though, the EIA looked at energy demand in 2005 and projected how it might have grown out to 2017 if everything had stayed the same over those 12 years. In the prior period—between 1996 and 2005—electricity demand was growing at nearly two percent per year, causing a steady rise in emissions. If that growth trend had continued out to 2017 and no other changes to the carbon-intensity of the energy mix had been made, the electricity sector would be emitting more than 620 million metric tons of CO₂ than it was in 2005.

Enlarge / The NRG power plant in El Segundo, California. (credit: Getty Images)

A bit of moderately good news this morning: carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from the US electricity sector decreased by 28 percent between 2005 and 2017, according to data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Before you start celebrating too much, note that this is only for the electricity sector. "CO₂ emissions from all other energy sectors fell by only 5 percent," the EIA wrote. "Other energy sectors" include home heating, which is natural-gas based in much of the country and very difficult to decarbonize.

Turning back to the electricity sector, though, the EIA looked at energy demand in 2005 and projected how it might have grown out to 2017 if everything had stayed the same over those 12 years. In the prior period—between 1996 and 2005—electricity demand was growing at nearly two percent per year, causing a steady rise in emissions. If that growth trend had continued out to 2017 and no other changes to the carbon-intensity of the energy mix had been made, the electricity sector would be emitting more than 620 million metric tons of CO₂ than it was in 2005.

Enlarge / A woman walks at the Genentech headquarters in South San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 21, 2009. (credit: Chip Chipman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Four ex-Genentech employees have been criminally charged with stealing trade secrets from their former employer.

According to a press release issued Monday by the United States Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, Xanthe Lam, Allen Lam, John Chan, and James Quach are alleged to have taken "confidential Genentech information to help a company in Taiwan create and sell drugs similar to those that were created by Genentech."

Xanthe Lam, the wife of Allen Lam, and the two other men reportedly became consultants for a Taiwan-based company known as JHL Biotech, which was founded in 2012 and manufactures "biosimilar" pharmaceuticals. According to the Food and Drug Administration: "A biosimilar is a biological product that is highly similar to and has no clinically meaningful differences from an existing FDA-approved reference product."

Enlarge / A woman walks at the Genentech headquarters in South San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, Dec. 21, 2009. (credit: Chip Chipman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Four ex-Genentech employees have been criminally charged with stealing trade secrets from their former employer.

According to a press release issued Monday by the United States Attorney’s Office in San Francisco, Xanthe Lam, Allen Lam, John Chan, and James Quach are alleged to have taken "confidential Genentech information to help a company in Taiwan create and sell drugs similar to those that were created by Genentech."

Xanthe Lam, the wife of Allen Lam, and the two other men reportedly became consultants for a Taiwan-based company known as JHL Biotech, which was founded in 2012 and manufactures "biosimilar" pharmaceuticals. According to the Food and Drug Administration: "A biosimilar is a biological product that is highly similar to and has no clinically meaningful differences from an existing FDA-approved reference product."