Month: June 2019

Enlarge / The Food and Drug Administration headquarters in White Oak, Md. (credit: Getty | Congressional Quarterly)

One patient has died and another became seriously ill after fecal transplants inadvertently seeded their innards with a multi-drug resistant bacterial infection, the Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday.

The cases highlight the grave risks of what some consider a relatively safe procedure. They also flush out the mucky issues of federal oversight for the experimental transplants, which the FDA has strained to regulate. In its warning Thursday, the agency announced new protections for trials and experimental uses of the procedure.

The FDA shared minimal details from the deadly transplants. Its warning only noted that the cases involved two patients who were immunocompromised prior to the experimental transplants and received stool from the same donor. Subsequent to the transplant, the patients developed invasive infections from an E. coli strain that was resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics in the penicillin and cephalosporin groups. The E. coli strain carried a drug-defeating enzyme called an extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL), which generally cleaves a ring common to all the chemical structures of those antibiotics.. When unnamed researchers who administered the transplant looked back at the donor stool, they found that the stool contained an identical ESBL-producing E. coli.

Enlarge / Huawei's response to the export ban so far. (credit: KC Green / Ron Amadeo)

The Huawei export ban has claimed another victim. The embattled Chinese company told CNBC that it is now delaying perhaps its most anticipated product, the $2,600 Mate X foldable smartphone. Huawei's official explanation is that it wants to avoid a Samsung Galaxy Fold-level launch disaster, so the company is holding the device back for more tuning. But the Trump administration's export ban is undoubtedly a contributing factor. That policy has shut Huawei off from so many suppliers that it could not launch a new smartphone right now if it wanted to. Huawei cancelled a laptop launch just a few days ago, in fact.

The Mate X was originally scheduled for the middle of the year, with a rumored launch this month, but now CNBC reports that the Mate X launch will be delayed until September. Huawei doesn't officially blame this delay on the export ban, instead telling CNBC it didn't "want to launch a product to destroy our reputation." CNBC writes that Huawei will use this delay to do "extra testing with mobile carriers around the world and developers to make sure their apps work when the device is fully unfolded."

It is hard to believe Huawei's official explanation here, especially in light of the laptop launch it canceled just a few days ago. The export ban means Huawei cannot ship new devices running US-made operating systems like Windows and Android, and the wide scope of US export regulations means many hardware components are off-limits, too. Huawei has not shown the capability to launch anything since the export ban went into effect.

Enlarge / The first of the Air Force's new GPS 3 satellites launches on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in December, 2018. (credit: SpaceX)

Since becoming fully operational in 1995, Global Positioning System technology has become widely adopted in the United States and abroad. The concept of satellite-based navigation has become so essential that other world powers, including China, Russia, the European Union, India, and Japan, have all started building their own regional or global systems.

Now, one of the most comprehensive studies on the subject has assessed the value of this GPS technology to the US economy and examined what effect a 30-day outage would have—whether it's due to a severe space weather event or "nefarious activity by a bad actor." The study was sponsored by the US government's National Institutes of Standards and Technology and performed by a North Carolina-based research organization named RTI International.

Economic effect

As part of the analysis, researchers spoke to more than 200 experts in the use of GPS technology for various services, from agriculture to the positioning of offshore drilling rigs to location services for delivery drivers. (If they'd spoken to me, I'd have said the value of using GPS to navigate Los Angeles freeways and side streets was incalculable). The study covered a period from 1984, when the nascent GPS network was first opened to commercial use, through 2017. It found that GPS has generated an estimated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits during that time period.

Enlarge (credit: Shipt)

On Thursday, Target unveiled a new same-day ordering feature on its website. For just $9.99, customers can get items delivered to their door in a couple of hours. I gave the service a try on Thursday, and I loved it. It was fast, convenient, and affordable.

The part I'm most excited about, though, is something that isn't actually new—though I hadn't heard about it until yesterday. Target's same-day delivery option is powered by a startup called Shipt that Target acquired in 2017. And Shipt has a subscription offer that I find compelling: for $99, you can get a year of free same-day deliveries on any Target order over $35.

This is such a good deal that it ought to keep Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos up at night. Amazon Prime has been a key driver of Amazon's growth over the last decade. By making two-day deliveries free, Prime got millions of subscribers in the habit of checking Amazon first for almost anything they buy online.