Month: July 2023

Enlarge (credit: Perrigo)

For the first time, the Food and Drug Administration has approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription, meaning it will be available to millions of people over the counter at pharmacies, convenience stores, and grocery stores around the country, as well as online.

The FDA's approval, announced Thursday morning, is seen as a victory for the sexual and reproductive rights of Americans, which are currently under intense attack in much of the country.

The OTC-approved pill is the Opill (norgestrel), a once-a-day progestrin-only pill manufactured by the Dublin-based company Perrigo. The company said it expects the pill will be available starting in the first quarter of 2024, though its pricing is not yet clear. For optimal efficacy, it needs to be taken consistently every day in the same three-hour window. Opill is estimated to be about 93 percent effective at preventing pregnancy in real-life use, higher than the real-life efficacy of other over-the-counter birth control methods, such as condoms, which are around 87 percent effective.

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket completes a "flight readiness firing." (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance has identified the root cause of a failure that destroyed the upper stage of its Vulcan rocket in late March. According to the company's chief executive, Tory Bruno, the Centaur V upper stage failed due to higher-than-anticipated stress near the top of the liquid hydrogen propellant tank and slightly weaker welding.

Bruno outlined the nature of the failure and steps the company is taking to remediate it during a teleconference with space reporters on Thursday. He said United Launch Alliance is working toward flying the heavy lift Vulcan rocket on its debut mission during the fourth quarter of this year.

Tank failure

The Centaur V upper stage was destroyed during pressure testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on March 29. Bruno said this was the 15th test in a series of 45 tests to qualify the Centaur stage for all potential mission profiles. However, about halfway through the test the hydrogen tank started leaking, and over the course of four and a half minutes the leak expanded.

Enlarge / United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket completes a "flight readiness firing." (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance has identified the root cause of a failure that destroyed the upper stage of its Vulcan rocket in late March. According to the company's chief executive, Tory Bruno, the Centaur V upper stage failed due to higher-than-anticipated stress near the top of the liquid hydrogen propellant tank and slightly weaker welding.

Bruno outlined the nature of the failure and steps the company is taking to remediate it during a teleconference with space reporters on Thursday. He said United Launch Alliance is working toward flying the heavy lift Vulcan rocket on its debut mission during the fourth quarter of this year.

Tank failure

The Centaur V upper stage was destroyed during pressure testing at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on March 29. Bruno said this was the 15th test in a series of 45 tests to qualify the Centaur stage for all potential mission profiles. However, about halfway through the test the hydrogen tank started leaking, and over the course of four and a half minutes the leak expanded.

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  The Honor Magic V2. [credit: Honor ]

Honor, the company spun out of some leftover bits of Huawei, is launching what must be the world's thinnest smartphone with a flexible display. The Honor Magic V2 measures an incredible 9.9 mm thick when folded (4.7 mm when open) and weighs 231 g, less than an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The sales pitch for this is a foldable "as slim and lightweight as a typical flagship smartphone," and Honor is pretty close to that.

We were never fans of the slab smartphone thinness wars when devices around 2014 were hitting sub-5 mm thicknesses—that thinness comes at a cost, mainly battery life, and normal-sized devices fit in a pocket just fine. Foldables are not normal-sized, though, and the weight and thickness of these devices is a major downside. You feel every gram of the Pixel Fold's 283 g weight, and the Galaxy Fold 4's 15.8-mm-thick body is a pocket-buster. The thinness wars are back, and they're actually valid this time.

The 4.7 mm thickness might make you immediately question how much battery Honor shaved off to make this thinness happen, but it doesn't look too bad at 5000 mAh. The thing is, at 156.7×145.4×4.7 mm, the Magic V2 has a bigger body area than the Pixel Fold (158.7×139.7×5.8 mm) and Galaxy Z Fold 4 (155.1×130.1×6.3 mm). That also leads to the giant inner screen, a whopping 7.92-inch, 2344×2156, 120 Hz OLED, while the Google and Samsung phones open up to 7.6-inch screens. The extra width also lets the 6.43-inch, 2376×1060, 120 Hz external screen hit a normal aspect ratio: 20:9.

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  The Honor Magic V2. [credit: Honor ]

Honor, the company spun out of some leftover bits of Huawei, is launching what must be the world's thinnest smartphone with a flexible display. The Honor Magic V2 measures an incredible 9.9 mm thick when folded (4.7 mm when open) and weighs 231 g, less than an iPhone 14 Pro Max. The sales pitch for this is a foldable "as slim and lightweight as a typical flagship smartphone," and Honor is pretty close to that.

We were never fans of the slab smartphone thinness wars when devices around 2014 were hitting sub-5 mm thicknesses—that thinness comes at a cost, mainly battery life, and normal-sized devices fit in a pocket just fine. Foldables are not normal-sized, though, and the weight and thickness of these devices is a major downside. You feel every gram of the Pixel Fold's 283 g weight, and the Galaxy Fold 4's 15.8-mm-thick body is a pocket-buster. The thinness wars are back, and they're actually valid this time.

The 4.7 mm thickness might make you immediately question how much battery Honor shaved off to make this thinness happen, but it doesn't look too bad at 5000 mAh. The thing is, at 156.7×145.4×4.7 mm, the Magic V2 has a bigger body area than the Pixel Fold (158.7×139.7×5.8 mm) and Galaxy Z Fold 4 (155.1×130.1×6.3 mm). That also leads to the giant inner screen, a whopping 7.92-inch, 2344×2156, 120 Hz OLED, while the Google and Samsung phones open up to 7.6-inch screens. The extra width also lets the 6.43-inch, 2376×1060, 120 Hz external screen hit a normal aspect ratio: 20:9.

Enlarge (credit: Juan Silva | DigitalVision)

Yesterday, an Ohio plastic surgeon, Katharine Grawe—who accumulated nearly 15 million likes by livestreaming operations on TikTok as "Doctor Roxy"—was permanently banned from practicing medicine and surgery in Ohio.

The decision came following a November 2022 suspension temporarily barring Grawe from seeing patients after the State Medical Board of Ohio reviewed "clear and convincing evidence" from multiple patients who were harmed during Grawe's livestreamed surgeries. The board decided to suspend Grawe's license, saying that her "continued practice presents a danger of immediate and serious harm to the public."

The suspension notice details three anonymized patient complaints about "Doctor Roxy." During one surgery that was livestreamed on TikTok, Grawe looked directly into the camera while inserting a thin tube called a cannula and performing liposuction on a patient.

Enlarge (credit: Juan Silva | DigitalVision)

Yesterday, an Ohio plastic surgeon, Katharine Grawe—who accumulated nearly 15 million likes by livestreaming operations on TikTok as "Doctor Roxy"—was permanently banned from practicing medicine and surgery in Ohio.

The decision came following a November 2022 suspension temporarily barring Grawe from seeing patients after the State Medical Board of Ohio reviewed "clear and convincing evidence" from multiple patients who were harmed during Grawe's livestreamed surgeries. The board decided to suspend Grawe's license, saying that her "continued practice presents a danger of immediate and serious harm to the public."

The suspension notice details three anonymized patient complaints about "Doctor Roxy." During one surgery that was livestreamed on TikTok, Grawe looked directly into the camera while inserting a thin tube called a cannula and performing liposuction on a patient.

Enlarge (credit: Raymond Gehman / Getty Images)

People in the US transmitted the pandemic coronavirus to white-tailed deer at least 109 times, and the animals widely spread the virus among themselves, with a third of the deer tested in a large government-led study showing signs of prior infection. The work also suggests that the ubiquitous ruminants returned the virus to people in kind at least three times.

The findings, announced this week by the US Department of Agriculture, are in line with previous research, which suggested that white-tailed deer can readily pick up SARS-CoV-2 from humans, spread it to each other, and, based on at least one instance in Canada, transmit the virus back to humans.

But the new study, led by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), provides a broader picture of deer transmission dynamics in the US and ultimately bolsters concern that white-tailed deer have the potential to be a virus reservoir. That is, populations of deer can acquire and harbor SARS-CoV-2 viral lineages, which can adapt to their new hosts and spill back over to humans, causing new waves of infection. It's conceivable that viruses moving from deer to humans could at some point qualify as new variants, potentially with the ability to dodge our immune protections built up from past infection and vaccination.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Christopher Furlong )

Elon Musk's X Corp. is suing four unidentified data scrapers accused of "severely tax[ing]" Twitter's servers and degrading the social network's user experience. The defendants, known only by their IP addresses so far, allegedly "engaged in widespread unlawful scraping of data from Twitter" by "flooding Twitter's sign-up page with automated requests."

"The volume of these requests far exceeded what any single individual could send to a server in a given period and clearly indicated that these automated requests were aimed at scraping data from Twitter. These requests have severely taxed X Corp.'s servers and impaired the user experience for millions of X Corp.'s customers," the lawsuit alleged.

The lawsuit, which seeks damages of at least $1 million, was filed last week in Dallas County District Court and reported yesterday by the Dallas-based station WFAA. The defendants are four John Does. Twitter hopes to learn their true identities during discovery.