Month: July 2023

Scanning electron micrograph of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria, which cause TB. (credit: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases)

For the second time, contaminated bone graft products from the medical company Aziyo Biologics Inc. are linked to a highly unusual and deadly outbreak of tuberculosis.

This week, three new tuberculosis cases were identified, bringing the outbreak total to five, according to Politico. One person has died. The contaminated material, used for surgical and dental procedures, was implanted in at least 36 other patients, who are now being treated as if they have tuberculosis.

Aziyo Biologics issued a recall of all of its bone matrix products earlier this month "out of an abundance of caution" after the first two cases were identified. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that all unused products from the affected lot have been sequestered so that they will not be used. The affected materials had been sent to health care facilities in California, Michigan, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Virginia.

Enlarge / A South Korean flag, left, and Samsung Electronics Co. flag fly outside the company's headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. (credit: Jean Chung/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Things are still bad at Samsung. After the company's Q1 2023 saw a crushing 95 percent year-over-year profit drop, Q2 2023 isn't any better, with the company posting KRW 0.67 trillion ($524.9 million) in profits, another huge 95 percent drop from the KRW 14.1 trillion ($10.7 billion) it made in Q2 2022.

Samsung is mostly known for its electronics and appliances, but on the earnings sheet, Samsung is a memory company. Estimates of the company's profit structure in more normal times (2022) puts memory (NAND and RAM) at 55 percent of profits, with mobile at 22 percent, and displays at 11. Samsung's LSI division—that's the foundry and Exynos chips—is at 6.9 percent, and other consumer electronics, for all the shelf space they take up, only make up 4 percent of profits.

While back-to-back 95 percent profit declines are definitely bad, Samsung expected this. The company is facing down a glut of unsold chips, leading to lower prices and lower profits. Memory companies stockpiled chips during the pandemic, and while some companies expected the boom times to end and cut production in November 2022, Samsung waited until April 2023, leading to its big pile of unsold inventory. Along with its earnings report, Samsung announced it is cutting memory production again to try to get its inventory under control. While Samsung's other divisions meant the company turned a small profit in the first half of 2023, the memory division contributed an operating loss of $7 billion for the year so far.

Enlarge (credit: Apple/Andrew Cunningham)

Apple is taking several steps to help developers prepare their apps for Apple's new Vision Pro platform next year, above and beyond the Vision Pro simulator that comes with the Xcode development environment. One of those steps is actual pre-release hardware in the form of the Apple Vision Pro developer kit (DK).

This is pre-release Vision Pro hardware that Apple will loan to selected developers for the express purpose of developing and testing apps. Apple has offered these kinds of kits to some developers before, most notably during the Apple Silicon transition when it loaned out Developer Transition Kits that put the guts of an iPad Pro into a Mac mini-sized enclosure.

But some developers have drawn attention to the terms and conditions (PDF) for the Vision Pro DK, which are notably restrictive and specific. The most specific terms are in section four, under "care and storage of the DK," which say that the DK is only to be used in a lockable windowless room, that your friends and family aren't allowed to see it, that it must remain within your direct line of sight at all times, that it must be in its case and locked up when not in use, and that you need to consult with Apple if you'll be on a long trip or vacation and are leaving the DK behind. The full paragraph:

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, is looking for ways to keep users interested after more than half of the people who signed up for the text-based platform stopped actively using the app, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees in a company town hall yesterday. Threads launched on July 5 and signed up over 100 million users in less than five days, buoyed by user frustration with Elon Musk-owned Twitter.

"Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We're not there yet," Zuckerberg told employees yesterday, according to Reuters, which listened to audio of the event.

Third-party data suggests that Threads may have lost many more than half of its active users. Daily active users for Threads on Android dropped from 49 million on July 7 to 23.6 million on July 14, and then to 12.6 million on July 23, web analytics company SimilarWeb reported.

Enlarge / An artist's interpretation of Voyager 2, pointed to transmit data to Earth. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

About a week ago, operators of the Voyager 2 spacecraft sent a series of commands that inadvertently caused the distant probe to point its antenna slightly away from Earth. As a result, NASA has lost contact with the spacecraft, which is nearly half a century old and presently 19.9 billion km away from the planet.

For the time being, NASA and the mission's scientists aren't panicking. In an update posted Friday, the space agency said Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation several times a year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth. It is scheduled to do so again on October 15, which should allow communication to resume. In the meantime, NASA said it does not anticipate the spacecraft veering off course.

Launched separately in 1977 on two different rockets, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft have been true trailblazers for NASA and the world. Never before had a spacecraft visited four worlds in a single, grand tour as the two Voyager probes did in the 1970s and 1980s with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.