Month: April 2023

Enlarge / The US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 19, 2023. Democrats oppose the Republican-led Congressional Review Act resolution to disapprove of the Department of Veteran Affairs' interim rule on reproductive health care. Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty | Al Drago)

Supreme Court on Friday issued an order that will maintain status quo access to the abortion and miscarriage drug mifepristone as the legal battle over the Food and Drug Administration's approval and regulation of the drug continues. The court did not explain its reasoning, but noted that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.

The ruling overrides an order from the Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, which would have curtailed access to the drug as the federal government pursues an appeal of a district court ruling. That ruling, issued by conservative District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk on April 7, would have revoked access to the drug entirely, finding the FDA's 2000 approval of mifepristone was unlawful, as was the agency's subsequent actions.

A three-judge panel for the appeals court, however, determined that the plaintiff's in the case—a group of anti-abortion organizations and individuals, led by the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine—had exceeded the statute of limitations in which they could have legally challenged the FDA's 2000 approval. But, the judges ruled in a 2-1 decision to allow the rest of Kacsmaryk's ruling, revoking the FDA's actions in 2016 and 2021, which eased restrictions and access to the drug.

Enlarge / The 2022 iPhone SE. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple plans to unveil a personal journaling app at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The app will be pre-installed on all iPhones that run iOS 17, and it will deeply integrate with location services, contacts, and more on the user's phone.

The WSJ  based its reporting on analysis of internal Apple documents about the product. Apple plans to position the app (which is codenamed "Jurassic") as a mental health tool, noting research that shows regular journaling can help with depression and anxiety.

Jurassic (the name will surely be changed before launch) will be able to look at data stored locally on your phone to determine what a typical day looks like, with access to your contacts, your location, workouts, and more. It will make recommendations to users about what they might journal about that, including when the app detects behavior that is outside of the normal routine.

Enlarge / Minks are seen at a farm in Gjol, northern Denmark, on October 9, 2020. (credit: Getty | Henning Bagger)

Between September to January of this year, mink in three Polish farms tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2— presenting a concerning mystery as to how the animals became infected.

SARS-CoV-2 infections in mink aren't particularly noteworthy or concerning on their own; it's well established that mink are susceptible to the virus. The realization early in the pandemic resulted in extensive culls in Denmark and the Netherlands during 2020 and led to intensive monitoring and regulation of remaining mink herds in many places, including Poland.

But the recent cases in Polish mink, reported this week in the journal Eurosurveillance, are unusual. While previous mink outbreaks have linked to infected farmworkers and local circulation of the virus—indicating human-to-mink spread—none of the farm workers or families in the recently affected farms tested positive for the virus. In fact, health investigators found that the infected mink carried a strain of SARS-CoV-2 that has not been seen in humans in the region in more than two years (B.1.1.307).

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Tesla today defeated a lawsuit that claimed its Autopilot technology caused a car crash that left the plaintiff with severe injuries.

"A California state court jury on Friday handed Tesla a sweeping win, finding that the carmaker's Autopilot feature did not fail to perform safely in what appears to be the first trial related to a crash involving the partially automated driving software," Reuters reported.

Justine Hsu sued Tesla in Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2020, saying Tesla's Autopilot technology in her Model S malfunctioned and caused the car to swerve into the road's center median so fast that she had no time to react. The lawsuit said the airbag deployed improperly during the July 2019 crash, "caus[ing] numerous breaks in Hsu's jaw and the loss of multiple teeth."

Enlarge / The red arcs at the right of center are background galaxies distorted by gravitational lensing. The number, location, and degree of distortion of these images depends on the distribution of dark matter in the foreground. (credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Newman, M. Akhshik, K. Whitaker)

Decades after it became clear that the visible Universe is built on a framework of dark matter, we still don't know what dark matter actually is. On large scales, a variety of evidence points toward what are called WIMPs: weakly interacting massive particles. But there are a variety of details that are difficult to explain using WIMPs, and decades of searching for the particles have turned up nothing, leaving people open to the idea that something other than a WIMP comprises dark matter.

One of the many candidates is something called an axion, a force-carrying particle that was proposed to solve a problem in an unrelated area of physics. They're much lighter than WIMPs but have other properties that are consistent with dark matter, which has sustained low-level interest in them. Now, a new paper argues that there are features in a gravitational lens (largely the product of dark matter) that are best explained by axion-like properties.

Particle or wave?

So, what's an axion? On the simplest level, it's an extremely light particle with no spin that acts as a force carrier. They were originally proposed to ensure that quantum chromodynamics, which describes the behavior of the strong force that holds protons and neutrons together, doesn't break the conservation of charge parity. Enough work was done to make sure axions were compatible with other theoretical frameworks, and a few searches were done to try to detect them. But axions have mostly languished as one of a number of potential solutions to a problem that we haven't figured out how to resolve.

Enlarge / Google DeepMind will presumably be getting a rainbow logo, but for now here's the old DeepMind logo. (credit: Deepmind)

Google's 'Code Red' panic over the rise of ChatGPT and its failure to excite the world with its AI products is resulting in a big merger. Alphabet's two big AI teams, the independent Alphabet company DeepMind and the "Google Brain" AI division, are merging to form "Google DeepMind." Google and DeepMind have both released blog posts. Google CEO Sundar Pichai says merging the two units will "help us build more capable systems more safely and responsibly."

DeepMind was a UK AI research lab that Google acquired in 2014. Since then it has lived as an independent Alphabet company, separate from Google, with CEO Demis Hassabis. DeepMind most famously captured the world's attention around 2017 when it built AlphaGo, a computer taught to play the ancient Chinese game of Go. This was previously thought to be an impossible task for computers due to the incredible number (10³⁶⁰) of moves required to play the game. Since then, the company has tackled protein folding, video games like Starcraft II, the Wavenet voice synthesis system, and matrix multiplication.

The Google Brain division was run by Jeff Dean. This group has kept a much lower profile by only doing research and making incremental improvements to existing Google products. The Brain team invented and open-sourced the "Transformer" neural network architecture that led to chatbots like ChatGPT. (The "GPT" in "ChatGPT" stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer".)

Enlarge / US PIRG's "Chromebook Churn" report casts a harsh spotlight on flaws in Chromebook repairability and longevity. (credit: Scharon Harding)

Google is in the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) hot seat. This week, the nonprofit published its "Chromebook Churn" [PDF] report, pointing a finger at Google for enabling Chromebooks that “aren’t designed to last.” It highlighted Chromebook quirks, like seemingly pointless hardware tweaks across models that challenge parts-sourcing and automatic update expiration (AUE) dates, as examples of the repair-averse Chromebook culture Google has enabled. For target Chromebook markets, like schools, that opt for Chromebooks to save money, long-term costs may outweigh the immediate savings, PIRG’s analysis concluded.

The report focuses on Chromebooks in schools and is based on an unspecified number (we've reached out to PIRG for a firm head count) of interviews with "school IT directors, technicians, journalists, repair shop owners, parts suppliers, and teachers," as well as a "five-question survey with 13 school IT administrators and technicians." The sample size could be much larger, but the details in the report are also based on undisputed characteristics of ChromeOS devices. And while PIRG's paper emphasizes the impact this all has for schools, especially considering the influx of Chromebooks purchased for schools during the COVID-19 pandemic's height and beyond, it's food for thought for any current or prospective Chromebook owners or people who like to vote with their dollar.

Sneaky design changes hinder repairs

The report, written by PIRG's Designed to Last Campaign director, Lucas Rockett Gutterman, argues that because Chromebooks are largely web-based and don't vary in power as much as other laptops, it should be "easy" to offer modular designs that allow for parts to be shared across Chromebook models. Indeed, Framework's modular Chromebook proves this is possible. But in its "Failing the Fix" [PDF] report from February, PIRG reported that Chromebooks have an average French repairability index score of 5.8 out of 10, compared to 6.9 for all non-Chromebook laptops.