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Martin Shkreli, chief executive officer of Turing Pharmaceuticals LLC, exits federal court in New York, US, on Thursday, December 17, 2015. Shkreli was arrested on alleged securities fraud related to Retrophin Inc., a biotech firm he founded in 2011. (credit: Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Martin Shkreli won’t appear in court on Wednesday after all.

After a last-minute plea by his now former legal team, Shkreli will get a two-week delay of his January 20 court hearing while he finds new counsel.

Shkreli, reviled former-CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, was charged last month with running a Ponzi-like scheme and defrauding two hedge funds he previously managed and one of the pharmaceutical companies he founded, Retrophin. He has pled not guilty and was released on $5 million bail he posted with a $45-million-dollar E-trade account.

Collins Oldsmobile, Indianapolis IN, 1971 (credit: Alden Jewell)

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) assembled a panel of experts in auto manufacturing and marketing to talk about whether or not automakers should be allowed to sell cars directly to customers.

Representatives from Tesla Motors, as well as Elio Motors, a company that has plans to manufacture cheap, three-seater vehicles, argued that new car companies shouldn’t have to comply with a dealership model of car distribution—something that been a contentious issue for Tesla in previous years. Tesla has been barred from selling directly to consumers in numerous states including New Jersey, West Virginia, and Texas. The FTC, however, has sided with Tesla, calling for legislation to revisit regulations on how cars are sold. (FTC officials stressed at today’s panel that the commission was not going to assert its opinion, but instead leave the stage to the speakers it had assembled.)

On the opposing side, auto industry analyst Maryann Keller and dealership attorney Paul Norman argued that the dealership model is good for consumers because it promotes “intrabrand competition”—or the idea that competition doesn’t just happen between, say, Ford and Volkswagen, but between Ford dealers within the same city.

(credit: anna gutermuth)

However miserable, common colds and other respiratory afflictions are unlikely to clear up from a round of antibiotics. And it’s about time doctors stop handing out the precious drugs for that purpose, according to a joint guidance by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Physicians (ACP).

In the new set of guidelines, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the ACP and the CDC give doctors a play-by-play for how to dodge requests for antibiotics to treat respiratory infections—the most common reason people go to the doctor—and push alternative, over-the-counter treatments instead.

Unnecessary prescriptions, the two groups argue, can expose swaths of bacteria to antibiotics, providing opportunities for the microbes to develop drug-resistance—a huge public health threat that renders drugs nearly useless against some life-threatening infections. Half of all current antibiotic prescriptions handed out likely fall into the ‘unnecessary’ category, costing more than $3 billion annually, the CDC estimates.

(credit: Photo illustration by Aurich Lawson)

General Motors has acquired the technology and most of the employees behind the now-defunct ride-hailing startup Sidecar, according to Bloomberg. Sidecar Co-founder and CEO Sunil Paul will apparently not be joining the company, but no explanation was given as to why.

The deal bolsters GM’s move into the driverless quasi-taxi space—earlier this month, it invested $500 million in Lyft to "leverage GM’s deep knowledge of autonomous technology."

Over the last four years, Uber has rapidly expanded to become the dominant force in the industry. Just last month, it was valued at $62.5 billion, making it the world’s most valuable startup.

Who wouldn't want to see space from the comfort of a balloon capsule? (credit: World View)

There are balloon rides, and then there are balloon rides. And although it may sound like something out of a Jules Verne novel, a company called World View says it will begin taking passengers to the edge of outer space by the end of 2017. In a step toward that goal on Tuesday, company officials confirmed that the first flights will take place in southern Arizona near the Tucson International Airport.

World View plans to fly six passengers in a pressurized cabin to an altitude of 30km, where they will remain for a couple of hours. The generally accepted boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space is 100km, known as the Kármán line. However, at 30km, or about 100,000 feet, the balloon will have risen above 99 percent of Earth’s atmosphere and afford fine views of the planet’s curvature and the blackness of space. The company has priced tickets at $75,000 per person for an experience that will last four to six hours in total.

The company is relying on established technology, as well as new innovations, to bring humans to the edge of space. Weather balloons have flown into the stratosphere for nearly a century. High altitude balloons, like the one World View will use, are made of a high performance polyethylene film. When inflated with helium, at its maximum altitude, World View’s balloon will be about the size of a football field.