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(credit: Braeburn Pharmaceuticals)

Four tiny, implantable rods that steadily ooze drugs could help some patients kick opioid addictions, an advisory committee for the Food and Drug Administration concluded Tuesday. With a 12 to 5 vote, the committee of medical experts recommended that the regulatory agency approve the implantable device for use—and the agency often follows such advice.

If approved, the treatment would debut amid a national epidemic of addictions and overdoses involving opioids, which includes prescription painkillers and heroin. The committee concluded that the implantable device could offer a safer way to deliver medication-based treatments for addicts, who desperately need better options. However, dissenting members of the committee expressed concern over the device’s safety and hinted that the need to address the addiction epidemic may have clouded the committee’s judgment.

"We all desperately want something to be available," the committee's acting chairwoman Judith Kramer told USA Today after the committee’s Tuesday vote. But, she said, “I’m very concerned about the precedent this sets." Kramer, a professor emerita at Duke University, was one of the five dissenting committee members.

The BBC has posted an 18-minute interview with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has offered some interesting insights into his vision of the future and his goals for his companies.

Journalist Rory Cellan-Jones asked Musk about what Telsa hopes to accomplish on a grander scale with Tesla, and the CEO suggested that he’s looking to build an ecosystem for sustainable transportation. “If we can have sustainable energy production and combine that with electric cars, we have a long term sustainable future,” Musk said, adding that he believes eventually “all transport with the exception of rockets will go fully electric.”

Indeed, Musk is on the board of SolarCity, a solar panel company, and last year he announced a new line of stationary batteries, called the Tesla Powerwall, which will be sold to people who want to store energy on their premises. “The whole point of Tesla is to accelerate the presence of sustainable transport,” Musk said.

The two faces of Ross Ulbricht. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Ross Ulbricht, convicted last February of being the mastermind behind the Silk Road darknet marketplace, has filed his appeal brief. It’s a 170-page whopper that revisits several of the evidentiary arguments that Ulbricht's lawyer made at trial. It also focuses on allegations of government corruption that didn’t come out until afterward.

The brief reprises the central elements of Ulbricht’s defense: namely, that he didn't do it. Ulbricht still says he wasn’t “Dread Pirate Roberts,” or DPR, and that “there were multiple DPRs over the course of Silk Road’s existence.”

As to the digital mountain of evidence that the feds found on his computer—including Silk Road logs and thousands of pages of chats with Silk Road admins—Ulbricht answers with a kind of vague “the Internet is scary” story. His attorney, Joshua Dratel, writes that “vulnerabilities inherent to the Internet and digital data,” like hacking and fabrication of files, made “much of the evidence against Ulbricht inauthentic, unattributable to him, and/or untimely unreliable.”

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North Carolina's so-called ag-gag law is in the legal crosshairs. Activists with groups backing government accountability, food safety, and animal rights lodged a federal lawsuit Wednesday in a bid to block enforcement of the measure that became law January 1.

The lawsuit follows challenges to similar anti-speech laws in Idaho and Wyoming. 

(credit: Amsterdamized)

GoPro has been the king of action cams for the past few years, but it seems like its reign could be faltering. In a statement released today, GoPro says it will cut about seven percent of its global workforce as it plans to "better align resources to key growth initiatives."

In the same statement, the company disclosed its Q4 2015 earnings, which are lukewarm at best. GoPro expects its revenue to be $435 million for the fourth quarter and about $1.6 billion for the 2015 calendar year. The fourth quarter earnings are down nearly $200 million from 2014's Q4 revenue projection of $633.9 million.

It's noticeably different from 2014, when GoPro's CEO cited selling "1,000 units per hour" for the entire fourth quarter. This time around, however, the company appears to have overestimated how many of its action cams would fly off the shelves around the holiday season. "Fourth quarter revenue reflects lower than anticipated sales of its capture devices due to slower than expected sell through at retailers, particularly in the first half of the quarter."

An artist's concept of the Space Launch System rocket ascending through the clouds. (credit: NASA)

Almost from the inception of NASA’s large and costly rocket program, the Space Launch System, aerospace engineers have questioned the viability of a rocket that will fly infrequently, perhaps as little as once every two to four years. The most influential body to review the rocket, the National Research Council, concluded in 2014 that such low flight rates “will not be sustainable over the course of an exploration pathway that spans decades.”

NASA has steadfastly maintained that it will be able to fly the SLS rocket on an annual basis. However, on Tuesday, the website NASA Spaceflight.com reported on an “all hands” meeting at Kennedy Space Center in Florida where Robert Lightfoot, the agency’s top civil servant, addressed employees. According to the report, NASA officials explained during the meeting that the SLS lacks “booked missions at this time due to tight funding.”

Essentially this appeared to be an acknowledgement by NASA that it lacks funding to build payloads for its flagship rocket, largely because it is spending so much time and money building that rocket. This has been a main contention of SLS critics, who have said it gobbles up so much of the agency’s budget that NASA cannot afford to use it. For this reason the SLS has been derided as a “rocket to nowhere.”

(credit: Flickr user Noticias UFM)

We reported yesterday on the workplace difficulties that many female scientists face as they advance through their careers. But all of those problems happen after the women have been through years of education, a process that can also be a source of challenges. A variety of surveys have found indications that stereotypes about women's capabilities in science and math influence expectations throughout their education.

Connecting these biases to actual educational problems can be challenging, but a Swiss researcher named Sarah Hofer has found a way to test these issues. Hofer provided a large panel of physics teachers with a single answer that was attached to either male or female biographical information and asked them to grade it. She found that tests with a female bio got significantly lower grades, at least from teachers who were early in their careers.

Hofer's approach was simple. She told physics teachers in Switzerland, Austria, and Germany that she was doing a survey on their grading practices. They'd be given a physics question with an answer that required detailed reasoning in Newtonian mechanics, along with some information about a student and the student's answer.

Icons now get forced to a standard size.

An update to the Google Now Launcher has brought some nifty new features to Android's home screen. Google is reining in unruly app icons to make everything a consistent size and adding auto rotate support to the launcher.

Google's icon design guidelines give developers the tools to create a consistently sized icon in many different shapes. Many developers totally ignore the guidelines in favor of just creating the biggest icon possible, which often leaves Android's app drawer and home screen an inconsistent mess. The recent launcher update fixes this problem by ignoring the app developer's wishes and normalizing all the icon sizes—big icons get shrunken down.

Google doesn't police its app store the way Apple does, and since asking nicely via the guidelines doesn't work, Google has turned to automatically reducing the size of icons via software. This idea was actually pioneered last year in the third-party app "Nova Launcher," which similarly made fat icons smaller with a software enforcer.