Month: October 2021

Enlarge / Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes leaves the Robert F. Peckham Federal Building and US Courthouse in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. Holmes is charged with two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted. (credit: Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/The Mercury News)

Theranos’ former lab director has become a central focus of early questioning in Elizabeth Holmes’ criminal trial. Late last week, the defense continued its cross-examination of one of the prosecution’s key witnesses, attempting to paint Dr. Adam Rosendorff as unreliable.

Three facts could damage Rosendorff in the eyes of the jury. Whether those facts diminish his prior testimony depends largely on Holmes’ defense team. Given the damning facts Rosendorff laid out during the prosecution’s questioning, that will be a difficult task. But discrediting key witnesses is something all defenses have to attempt.

Three lines of questioning

First, Rosendorff admitted under questioning by Holmes’ attorney Lance Wade that he had approved of the company’s controversial pseudo-policy regarding outliers. While Theranos had no official policy for how to eliminate outliers—despite there being ample guidance for how to do so—the company did develop a framework called the “six tip policy.” Each sample produced six results, and from that, two were discarded and the remaining four were averaged. The policy says it was OK to eliminate two, but it didn’t help lab techs identify which are the best candidates for omission. So, this is kind of a policy, but it's one that didn’t cover everything it should have.

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Past projections of energy costs have consistently underestimated just how cheap renewable energy would be in the future, as well as the benefits of rolling them out quickly, according to a new report out of the Institute of New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford.

The report makes predictions about more than 50 technologies such as solar power, offshore wind, and more, and it compares them to a future that still runs on carbon. “It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” Matthew Ives, one of the report’s authors and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Programme, told Ars.

The paper used probabilistic cost forecasting methods—taking into account both past data and current and ongoing technological developments in renewables—for its findings. It also used large caches of data from sources such as the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and Bloomberg. Beyond looking at the cost (represented as dollar per unit of energy production over time), the report also represents its findings in three scenarios: a fast transition to renewables, a slow transition, and no transition at all.

Enlarge (credit: Hans Meleman | Getty Images)

It's an oppressively hot morning in the barnyard, even in the shade of the long open-air structure where the cows come to feed. On a typical farm, they would gather around a trough, but here at UC Davis they chow from special blue bins, which detect when and how much each one eats. It’s like Weight Watchers, only researchers here aren’t so much interested in these cows’ figures, but how much they burp.

Animal scientist Frank Mitloehner leads me to another kind of feeder, one that could easily be mistaken for a miniature wood chipper. He grabs a handful of the alfalfa pellets that the machine dispenses when it detects that a cow has poked its head in. “This is like candy to them,” Mitloehner says. I stick my head into the machine as Mitloehner points out a small metal tube within: “This probe measures the methane they exhale, and that happens every three hours for all the animals in this study.”