Day: January 28, 2019

WASHINGTON — The founder of Virgin Galactic says he now expects to fly on the company’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle around the middle of this year after a series of test flights starting in the next several weeks.

In an interview on the “CBS This Morning” television show Jan. 24 to announce a partnership with athletic apparel company Under Armour to provide clothing for Virgin Galactic customers and employees, Richard Branson reiterated his plans to fly into space later this year on the first commercial SpaceShipTwo flight.

“I will hope to go up in the middle of this year myself,” Branson said. “We’ve got another test flight in a handful of weeks taking place from Mojave, then we’ll have another one a few weeks later, then another one. And then, we move everything to New Mexico where we have a beautiful spaceport.” [In Photos: Virgin Galactic Soars to Space in 4th Powered Test]

That plan for test flights is consistent with what Branson told reporters in December after the latest SpaceShipTwo test flight at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California, where the vehicle for the first time flew above the 50-mile (80 kilometers) altitude used by U.S. government agencies for awarding astronaut wings.

“Ideally, we want to do three more flights before we go to New Mexico,” he said then. At the time, he said that next test flight could take place as soon as January.

Virgin Galactic executives have been more circumspect about the number of test flights and their schedule. George Whitesides, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said after last month’s test flight only that “not a huge number” of test flights are planned before beginning commercial operations at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Branson appeared on television with Kevin Plank, chief executive of Baltimore-based Under Armour, to announce their apparel partnership. The agreement covers not only uniforms that Virgin Galactic staff will wear but also spacesuits for pilots and spaceflight participants flying on SpaceShipTwo. In addition, Under Armour will develop fitness and training programs for Virgin Galactic’s customers.

The companies didn’t reveal the designs that SpaceShipTwo customers will be wearing or other details, such as whether the suits will be pressurized and include a helmet. “The custom-fitted Under Armour spacesuits will inspire confidence through comfort and practicality without compromising the natural desire of every Virgin Galactic astronaut both to feel good and look good during this unparalleled life experience,” Virgin Galactic said in a statement, adding that the apparel designs would be unveiled later this year.

Virgin Galactic has more than 600 customers who have paid at least a deposit for tickets currently valued at $250,000 each to fly on SpaceShipTwo. Plank is not one of those customers, but in the CBS interview he didn’t rule out flying on SpaceShipTwo at some later time: “It’s not out of the question.”

This story was provided by SpaceNews, dedicated to covering all aspects of the space industry.

Our northern neighbors have invented a quintessentially-Canadian way of transporting oil from tar sands: They’re forging it into solid, hockey-puck-like briquettes. Dubbed ‘CanaPux,’ these bitumen-based blocks patented by the Canadian National Railway might make transporting oil by rail safer, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly—or at least as friendly as viscous petroleum can be.

The amount of oil transported by rail within Canada drastically increased this past year, partly as a result of several pipeline proposals being blocked, including the controversial Trans Mountain and Keystone XL. That also means that more Canadian oil is now being exported via rail to the United States, and with it a host of safety concerns.

Moving oil via rail is riskier than pushing it through a pipeline: Spills are more than twice as likely, according to a 2017 report by the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. The chance of a spill is still low (less than one incident per 5 million barrels), but the aftermath of an accident can be devastating. In the summer of 2018, a train derailed in Iowa, spilling an estimated 230,000 gallons of crude oil into flooded fields alongside the track and raising concerns about drinking water being contaminated downstream. In 2013, a train carrying 72 tanks of oil exploded in a small town in the northeastern Canadian province of Quebec, killing 47 people.

Since 2014, Canadian National Railway has been working on a technique to solidify heavy oil, or bitumen—the dark-colored sludge that comes out of Canada’s oil sands—that they say will make oil transport safer.

“Think of it as molasses,” says James Auld, who is leading the CanaPux project. To ship bitumen in pipelines or in railcar tankers right now, you have to heat it up or dilute it with a lighter hydrocarbon to make it flow, he explains. But that sticky, thick quality is also the reason it’s possible to turn the stuff into a puck. Researchers working with Canadian National Railway make palm-sized CanaPux by mixing shreds of recyclable plastics into heated bitumen and shaping the mixture into pucks about the size of a bar of soap. They encase each block in a thin layer of plastic to stop them from sticking together when stacked into train cars. When the bitumen bricks reach their destination, they are heated to separate the oil from the plastic, which floats on top of the oil so it can easily be scooped off and re-used.

Best of all, the pucks are also inert. They’re less flammable than diluted bitumen, they’re weather-proof and they don’t leak. In the event of a spill, they could just be picked up.

Canadian National Railway has tested the technology in a lab in Edmonton, where they have a machine that can build CanaPux one at a time. They’re now working with partners to build a commercial-scale pilot plant in Alberta that could process 10,000 barrels of bitumen per day. Because the resulting pucks are lighter and provide more efficient storage than traditional barrels, they’ll be able to load each tanker car with more weight—and therefore more oil. The company hopes to start using CanaPux for transportation by the end of 2020.

While the technology may reduce oil spills, it leaves a bigger problem unresolved. Environmental activists point out that more oil sands production is not what we need right now. Although emissions from Canada’s oil sands only make up about 0.15 percent of global emissions, they are the country’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. If the oil sands are further developed, “it will be game over for the climate,” writes former NASA scientist James Hansen in a 2012 New York Times op-ed responding to comments from then-President Barack Obama that Canada would develop its reserves “regardless of what we do.” CanaPux or not, the impact of oil sands development remains the same.

For the foreseeable future, however, there will be a demand for bitumen, Auld says. “Even if we all switch to electric vehicles, we still need roads to drive on,” he says. And, as an essential component of asphalt, bitumen is used to pave those roads. CanaPux could at least make it possible to move heavy oil in a safer, more environmentally-friendly way.

The question remains: Can you play hockey with these pucks?

“They’re not the most ideal shape,” Auld says, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t. “They’re solid.”

Tinder is supposed to dish out $17.25 million dollars worth of cash and in-app features to users over the age of 29 who were required to pay extra for their subscription services.

In 2015, the Tinder dating app launched Tinder Plus. While the basic Tinder service remained free, it limited the amount of profile-swipes someone could make in a day, whereas Tinder Plus began featuring perks like unlimited swipes, a “passport” option that allowed swiping in different cities, more “super likes,” and the option to undo a swipe.

The new features cost $9.99 in most places—that is, for users who were in their late teens and 20s. Anyone 30 and up had to pay $19.99.

The paid tier was criticized after the announcement. Engadget called it a “pretty sleazy catch.” But Tinder, which is owned by Match.com, defended the decision. In a statement to NPR, Tinder compared the Plus pricing to Spotify, which charges students less for streaming. A company spokesperson explained Tinder tested pricing points and found “that younger users are just as excited about Tinder Plus but are more budget constrained and need a lower price to pull the trigger.”

But Lisa Kim saw the pricing tier as age discrimination, and filed a complaint last year in California for herself and others who had to pay twice as much for being born before 1988.

Last week, Tinder settled the class action suit, as Law360 reported.

Under the settlement, Tinder agreed to stop charging different prices in California for subscription services based on age. But it may still offer a discount to users who are 21 or younger.

The company will compensate an estimated 230,000 people with 50 “super likes.” Additionally, the class members can choose between one of three options: a $25 check, 25 more“super likes,” or a subscription to Tinder Plus or the even more elite subscription Tinder Gold (depending on which they had been using).

Kim, the lead plaintiff, will receive $5,000. Sometimes being older can pay off.

[Law360, Top Class Actions]

An expert tasked with helping the Food and Drug Administration weigh potential new opioid drug approvals is openly calling out the agency for what he alleges are its continued missteps in handling the opioid crisis. In an interview with the Guardian Thursday, Raeford Brown claimed that the FDA has failed to learn from its past mistakes by approving the drug Dsuvia last year, the tablet form of an opioid painkiller up to ten times more potent than fentanyl.

Brown, a professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at the University of Kentucky, was tapped to chair the FDA’s Anesthetic and Analgesic Drug Products Advisory Committee in 2018. One of the committee’s duties involved recommending whether or not Dsuvia should be approved. (The FDA rarely goes against the recommendations made by its outside committees.) Ultimately, the committee voted 10 to 3 for its approval. But Brown alleged to the Guardian that the approval process had been manipulated, and that the FDA has still largely avoided taking any serious action to curtail the role of legal opioids in the crisis.

“I think that the FDA has learned nothing. The modus operandi of the agency is that they talk a good game and then nothing happens. Working directly with the agency for the last five years, as I sit and listen to them in meetings, all I can think about is the clock ticking and how many people are dying every moment that they’re not doing anything,” he told the Guardian. “The lack of insight that continues to be exhibited by the agency is in many ways a willful blindness that borders on the criminal.”

In 2017, Dsuvia was actually rejected for approval by the FDA, with the agency calling for additional safety data from its maker, AcelRx. But the vote by the panel convened last October occurred while Brown was unable to attend—a decision Brown contends was intentional. Brown had long criticized the potential approval of Dsuvia, a stance he says the FDA was well aware of.

“There’s no question in my mind right that they did that on purpose,” he said. “The FDA has a lack of transparency. They use the advisory committees as cover.”

Brown isn’t the only one who had trouble with how the FDA ultimately approved Dsuvia. In a letter sent to the FDA last October, senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), Edward Markey (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn), and former senator Claire McCaskill (D-Miss) criticized the agency over Brown’s absence during the panel vote. The senators also criticized the FDA’s decision to not fully include another panel of experts, the Drug Safety and Risk Management Committee, in the approval process of Dsuvia.

Soon after its approval in October, FDA chief Scott Gottlieb went out of his way to tamp down criticism. In a statement, Gottlieb said that there were “very tight restrictions being placed on the distribution and use of this product.”

Dsuvia is a form of the opioid sufentanil, taken as a tablet that dissolves under the tongue. It’s currently approved for people with moderate to severe pain who haven’t responded to other treatments. The drug is supposed to be administered only in medically-supervised health care settings, such as hospitals and emergency rooms, by approved medical staff. But sufentanil tablets like Dsuvia can still potentially be abused or improperly dosed to patients, according to the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the UK. And there’s still the possibility they can end up in the black market. The European Union approved a similar tablet version of sufentanil made by AcelRX, Dzuveo, last summer.

Brown, for his part, doesn’t buy Gottlieb’s assurances. And he thinks until the FDA has gotten its act together, no new opioid drugs should hit the market at all.

“They should stop considering any new opioid evaluation,” Brown told the Guardian. “For every day and every week and every month that the FDA don’t do the right thing, people drop dead on the streets. What they do has a direct impact on the mortality rate from opioids in this country.”

The FDA as well as AcerRX have not immediately responded to a request for comment from Gizmodo on Brown’s accusations.

[The Guardian]

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

January 28, 2019 at 04:54AM