Month: June 2022

Enlarge / The Abbott manufacturing facility in Sturgis, Michigan, on May 13, 2022. (credit: Getty | Jeff Kowalsky)

As the US struggles to recover from a dire infant formula shortage, the Abbott formula plant at the center of the crisis has again shut down—this time due to flooding from heavy rain on Monday.

The plant in Sturgis, Michigan, is the largest formula factory in the US and is operated by Abbott, one of the largest formula manufacturers in the county. The facility had previously shut down in February, driving a nationwide shortage of infant and specialty formulas to a critical point, but had managed to reopen on June 4.

The February closure occurred as the Food and Drug Administration investigated severe bacterial infections in four infants, two of whom died. All of the infants had consumed formula from the plant, and FDA investigators found that the same kind of bacteria infecting the infants—Cronobacter sakazakii—was also lurking in multiple areas of the plant. Although data was limited on each of the infants' cases, at least one container of formula from the plant tested positive for the strain of Cronobacter sakazakii infecting one of the infants.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Amazon on Thursday announced that its latest Prime Day sales event is set for July 12 through 13. The company says the event will begin at 3 am EST and run for 48 hours across 20 countries. As in past iterations of the event, you'll need to be a subscriber to Amazon's Prime service to receive access to the offers.

The annual promotion primarily drives sales and Prime subscriptions for Amazon during a relatively slow time of year for its e-commerce business. The event is often filled with many junk sales, in the sense that many of the items can be found at similar prices throughout the year, and many of the offers available apply to relatively generic products. That said, there are usually a few diamonds in the rough. Good deals often rival prices you typically find around the holiday season, plus various discounts on products you may buy anyway.

Amazon did not provide too many specifics on offers it will promote but noted that many of its own gadgets and services will be discounted before the event and that "select products" from Sony, Bose, Beats, and iRobot, among others, will see price cuts during the promotion. The company also said it would make more than 30 video games available at no extra cost through its Prime Gaming platform.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | SOPA Images)

Although Elon Musk recently banned remote work at both Tesla and SpaceX, he told Twitter employees today that he won't necessarily impose the same policy at the social network. "If someone can only work remotely, and they're exceptional, it wouldn't make sense to fire them," Musk said in a virtual town hall with Twitter staff, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Musk also pointed out that the work at Twitter is different from the work at Tesla. "Tesla makes cars, and you can't make cars remotely," he said, according to CNBC.

While his comments may be promising for those who want to keep working remotely, Musk reportedly did not provide specifics on how he'd handle remote work at Twitter if he completes the $44 billion acquisition. His reference to letting "exceptional" employees work remotely suggests that a Musk-led Twitter might reduce remote work options even if they aren't banned completely.

Enlarge / Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have mapped the composition of asteroid Psyche, revealing a surface of metal, sand, and rock. (credit: NASA)

Astronomers have produced the most detailed map to date of the surface of 16-Psyche, an asteroid that scientists believe could hold clues to how planets formed in our Solar System. According to a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, 16-Psyche has a highly varied surface of metal, sand, and rock that suggests its history could include metallic eruptions, as well as being hit by other celestial objects. The asteroid is the focus of NASA's Psyche mission, launching later this year.

As we've reported previously, 16 Psyche is an M-type asteroid (meaning it has high metallic content) orbiting the Sun in the main asteroid belt, with an unusual potato-like shape. The longstanding preferred hypothesis is that Psyche is the exposed metallic core of a protoplanet (planetesimal) from our Solar System's earliest days, with the crust and mantle stripped away by a collision (or multiple collisions) with other objects. In recent years, scientists concluded that the mass and density estimates aren't consistent with an entirely metallic remnant core. Rather, it's more likely a complex mix of metals and silicates.

Alternatively, the asteroid might once have been a parent body for a particular class of stony-iron meteorites, one that broke up and re-accreted into a mix of metal and silicate. Or perhaps it's an object like 1 Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter—except 16 Psyche may have experienced a period of iron volcanism while cooling, leaving highly enriched metals in those volcanic centers.

Enlarge / First hot-firing of the P120C solid-rocket motor that will be used by Europe's new Vega-C and Ariane 6 rockets. (credit: ESA/CNES)

Europe's much-anticipated next-generation rocket, which has a roughly comparable lift capacity to SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, was originally due to launch before the end of 2020.

The Ariane 6 rocket has subsequently been delayed a few times, but before this week the European Space Agency had been holding to a debut launch date before the end of this year. However, during a BBC interview on Monday, European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said the rocket would not fly until sometime in 2023.

On Thursday, during a background call with reporters, a senior European Space Agency official provided more information about the reasons for the additional delay.