Month: July 2023

Enlarge / Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos Inc., left, arrives at Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Bryan, Texas, US, on Tuesday, May 30, 2023. (credit: Getty | Sergio Flores)

Just six weeks into her 11-year, three-month prison sentence, disgraced biotech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes has apparently already behaved well enough to convince the US Bureau of Prisons that she'll likely get out early.

Federal prison records now show that Holmes' projected release date is December 29, 2032. That puts her total stay at the minimum-security women's prison camp in Bryan, Texas, at just 115 months, or a little over 9.5 years. The updated projected release date is not particularly unusual, but given the notoriety of her case, her fate is closely watched.

Last November, US District Judge Edward Davila sentenced Holmes to 135 months in federal prison for four counts of defrauding investors of her infamous and now defunct blood testing start-up, Theranos. Holmes, along with her ex-boyfriend and former Theranos President, Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, claimed their proprietary technology could perform hundreds of medical tests using just a drop of blood from a finger prick. While their claims and publicity helped drive the company's valuation up to $9 billion in 2014, the technology never actually worked.

... and there's space for cables, accessories, and other knickknacks. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

I didn't upgrade my tech or add any of the hundreds of gadgets from our Amazon retail holiday coverage to my shopping cart this year for Prime Day—high interest rates and a perception that the economy isn't at its fullest potential contributed to my penny-pinching.

Instead, I played it more low-key this outing, opting for home, office, and desk organization tools in an attempt to add simplicity to my life. If you'd like to tackle similar organizational projects, I've got you covered. Here are the organizational tools I bought and the reasoning for my purchases.

Expandable bamboo drawer organizer

Expandable drawer insert can keep office items like pens, tools, and more organized. (credit: Amazon)

Originally designed for eating and cooking utensils, I've used these expandable organizers before in my desk to organize my pens, cables, and tools. They're a handy item to keep things organized, and you can expand them as your needs (or collection of wires) grow.

... and there's space for cables, accessories, and other knickknacks. (credit: Corey Gaskin)

I didn't upgrade my tech or add any of the hundreds of gadgets from our Amazon retail holiday coverage to my shopping cart this year for Prime Day—high interest rates and a perception that the economy isn't at its fullest potential contributed to my penny-pinching.

Instead, I played it more low-key this outing, opting for home, office, and desk organization tools in an attempt to add simplicity to my life. If you'd like to tackle similar organizational projects, I've got you covered. Here are the organizational tools I bought and the reasoning for my purchases.

Expandable bamboo drawer organizer

Expandable drawer insert can keep office items like pens, tools, and more organized. (credit: Amazon)

Originally designed for eating and cooking utensils, I've used these expandable organizers before in my desk to organize my pens, cables, and tools. They're a handy item to keep things organized, and you can expand them as your needs (or collection of wires) grow.

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission hearing room on February 26, 2015, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Mark Wilson)

Democrats are one step closer to having a majority on the Federal Communications Commission for the first time in Joe Biden's presidency.

Biden nominee Anna Gomez was approved by the Senate Commerce Committee today, advancing her nomination to the Senate floor. A vote of the full Senate on Gomez's nomination has not been scheduled yet.

Democrats hold a 14-13 majority on the Senate Commerce Committee. Gomez's nomination was passed without a full roll call, but nine Republicans, including Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), asked to be recorded as a "no" on Gomez's nomination.

Enlarge / For those with a mini-split, a TV, a desire to know the temperature, and a real thing for light-grain wood, the Hub 2 is mighty appealing. (credit: SwitchBot)

There are some people who are eager to automate every aspect of their home with the latest smart home gadgets. Then there are some—many of them regular readers and commenters on this site—who could not only care less about the latest white plastic IoT thingy, but actively avoid such things.

I get it: If it connects to Wi-Fi, it requires signing up for an account, and there's a chance the company selling it could go bust at any time. It's also a no-go for anyone who cares about security or who just wants simplicity. The Matter standard is supposed to solve exactly this problem, but its real implementation and impact have been slow and underwhelming.

This is why I'm writing about just one set of gear while it's on sale for the second Prime Day (even if you're not a Prime subscriber): SwitchBot. I didn't use SwitchBot stuff until recently, but now that I have, it's what I'd recommend to anybody who just wants to make a few things in their home easier to turn on, turn off, or automate. There are no voice controls, no AI, just buttons and switches that do what you tell them.

Enlarge (credit: Apple)

Apple is officially releasing the first public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 Sonoma today, a little over a month after releasing the first developer betas at its Worldwide Developers Conference.

Though it's not as big a milestone as it has been in past years—developer betas are now available to anyone who signs up for a free Apple developer account, and the builds being released today are essentially identical to the third developer betas Apple released last week—the public beta period typically signals that Apple's newest OSes are approaching the level of stability and polish needed for a public release.

To get the new iOS or macOS betas, first sign up for Apple's public beta software program with your Apple ID. Then, on a compatible device, navigate to the Software Update page in the settings and opt into the beta of your choosing (there's also a separate beta track available for those continuing to test iOS 16 and macOS 13 updates). Per usual, you should make sure you have current backups before you upgrade, and don't install beta software on any devices you rely on day to day since the only way to go back to non-beta software is a full reset in recovery mode.

Enlarge / Blood Falls seeps from the end of the Taylor Glacier into Lake Bonney. Scientists believe a buried saltwater reservoir is partly responsible for the discoloration, which is a form of reduced iron. (credit: NSF/Peter Rejcek/Public domain)

In 1911, an Australian geologist named Thomas Griffith Taylor was exploring a valley in Antarctica when he stumbled upon a strange waterfall. The meltwater flowing from beneath the glacier that now bears Taylor's name turns a deep red upon coming into contact with the air, earning the site the moniker "Blood Falls." Various hypotheses have been proposed over the last century to explain the strange phenomenon. A team of scientists now thinks they've finally found the answer: tiny nanospheres rich in iron, silica, calcium, aluminum, and sodium, among other elements.

But why has solving this mystery taken more than a century? It seems the nanospheres are amorphous materials, meaning they lack a crystalline structure and hence eluded prior analytical methods looking for minerals because they are not, technically, minerals, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Science. That might seem like an odd choice of journal for this study, but the Blood Falls at Taylor Glacier is a so-called "analogue" site for astrobiologists and planetary scientists keen to learn more about how life might evolve and thrive in similar inhospitable environments elsewhere in the universe.

"With the advent of the Mars Rover missions, there was an interest in trying to analyze the solids that came out of the waters of Blood Falls as if it was a Martian landing site," said co-author Ken Livi of Johns Hopkins University. "What would happen if a Mars Rover landed in Antarctica? Would it be able to determine what was causing the Blood Falls to be red? It's a fascinating question and one that several researchers were considering."

Enlarge (credit: avid Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that cars have gotten very expensive recently. Almost across the board, automakers have abandoned smaller, cheaper product lines. Then came the pandemic, and then the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Supply chains collapsed, and production lines were idled. New cars became scarce, with huge markups in many cases, causing used car prices to soar. But used electric vehicles have been bucking that trend, according to data from the car-shopping app CoPilot.

As we enter the second half of 2023, many of those logistics and sourcing problems have been overcome, and many automakers have ramped up EV production and increased imports into the US. That increase in inventory is being painted by some as new EVs becoming unsellable; this week, Axios warned of EVs "piling up on dealer lots," for instance.

That piece and quite a few others like it quote data from Cox Automotive about increasing inventory among brands like Genesis and Audi. It blames high purchase prices and a lack of federal tax credit eligibility as problems. Even more affordable EVs are called out—the Ford Mustang Mach-E is described as "once-hot" but now oversupplied, but that's a direct result of Ford heavily ramping up production over the course of 2023.