The devices in your home come from different manufacturers, and that’s usually fine. You might have a Samsung smart television, a TP-Link router, and an iPhone, but they can probably all connect to your Wi-Fi network. That’s one of the nice things about Wi-Fi: The protocol is indifferent to who made the device. For that, you can partly thank the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry organization that certifies devices to show that they play nicely with the other gadgets on the invisible Wi-Fi playground in your home.

But the way Wi-Fi is distributed throughout our abodes is changing. Sure, one router can broadcast the signal from a single location. Another option, however, is a mesh network, in which multiple points throughout your home work together to send out the signal from various spots, forming a mesh, or web. It’s a good strategy for people with big homes, and popular mesh-network makers include Eero and Google Wifi. Now, the Wi-Fi Alliance has unveiled a novel initiative designed to make sure that mesh networks in your home, even with nodes made by different companies, work together.

The Wi-Fi Alliance calls the new project EasyMesh. Kevin Robinson, vice president for marketing at the organization, says that the context for the initiative is that people are increasingly adding smart home devices throughout their homes, and those devices, especially gadgets like TVs that stream high-def content, require robust internet connections. In short, a router in one room might not cut it for some people, but a mesh network, with a strong signal in lots of places, could. One of the benefits of EasyMesh, Robinson says, is that someone could “very easily add Wi-Fi EasyMesh access points, regardless of vendor.”

Translation: The parts of your mesh network providing a signal to all your devices could come from different companies. Right now, individual companies make different mesh networks that are designed to work with their own equipment. (Although you can always add range extenders from different companies to your network.)

Of course, standards—which generally help consumers—require companies to agree to them if they’re going to work well. “I think it’s a great idea,” says Swarun Kumar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. “The question is how quickly will the industry embrace and adopt this—it’s a little bit unclear.” After all, a company that doesn’t participate in the EasyMesh standard can keep its consumers buying its own products.

“It should lead to more openness and more choice for the consumer,” Kumar adds, if the standard is easy enough for the companies to adopt.

Some companies, like router-maker TP-Link, are supportive of the new protocol. “TP-Link is working closely with the alliance on the final development of the standard and plans to be one of the first companies to support EasyMesh when it becomes available,” Derrick Wang, the director of product management for TP-Link USA Corporation, says via a spokesperson.

Others aren’t currently hopping on board. Eero spokesperson Zoz Cuccias said via email: “We will continue to follow the draft development of the WiFi Alliance’s EasyMesh. For now, we’re fully devoted to TrueMesh, the most reliable and secure mesh available to consumers today.”

Ditto with Google, which makes Google Wifi. “We’re excited to see the industry acknowledging the consumer benefits of mesh technology and we’ll be monitoring the progress of this proposed standard as it evolves,” a company spokesperson said via email. “Google Wifi is built on 802.11s, the IEEE standard for Wi-Fi mesh, and we’ll continue to focus on providing the best experience to consumers.”

It’s early days for the new certification. Robinson, of the Wi-Fi Alliance, says that they respect the decisions that companies make, and that they want to keep pushing innovation in the field forward. “Ultimately, any of the certifications that Wi-Fi Alliance develops are optional,” he says.

This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave final approval for a drug shown to mitigate the symptoms associated with opioid withdrawal. It’s not the first treatment designed to help those with opioid addiction, but it has a distinguishing feature: It’s the first one that isn’t an opioid itself, and has no addictive component.

Medications exist now to assist those trying to break their addiction to pain medications, but all of those are opioids themselves, given in gradually lower doses to mitigate the symptoms associated with addiction and withdrawal. But the problem with this is that some patients remain addicted to and dependant on opioids in the long term, even if the drugs they’re receiving come under a doctor’s guidance and at a much lower dose. The idea behind the newly approved medication Lucemyra is to treat those same symptoms without including an addictive component.

The active ingredients in the pill bind to cell receptors in the body that lower the production of norepinephrine. This hormone works as part of your body’s fight-or-flight response, working in concert with adrenaline to increase your blood pressure, heart rate, and alertness when necessary.

While researchers don’t completely understand the mechanisms involved, they believe the fight-or-flight response, also known as the autonomic nervous system, plays a key role in the development of the classical symptoms of opioid withdrawal—which include nausea, anxiety and agitation, increased heart rate, severe aches and pains, and sleeping problems. The two clinical trials (which included a total of 866 adults) that enabled Lucemyra’s approval showed the drug worked to lessen the severity of those symptoms.

The impetus behind this medication approval, FDA officials say, is to provide more options for people with opioid use disorders. However, according to the FDA, the drug’s main purpose for now is to help those with more severe addictions. For those taking opioids as part of a pain management regimen, the method to wean off of the addictive meds remains the same: A physician-managed, slow taper of the medication, meant to lessen the withdrawal side effects and help the body adjust to being off the drugs.

But for people with what’s called opioid use disorder—which often starts with an opioid pain medication prescription—physicians often swap in another opioid medication, such as methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone. Doctors then gradually taper them off those drugs with the hope that the body will continue to adjust. These opioid alternatives tend to be less potent than either opioids typically prescribed for pain or ones commonly used recreationally, like heroin. For example, Buprenorphine is what’s known as an opioid partial agonist; its addictive side effects are similar to other opioids, but it’s far less dangerous overall. And at low tapering doses, it’s far less likely to initiate withdrawal symptoms than a gradual taper of a full opioid agonist.

This new drug offers doctors a way to help severely addicted patients without switching them to another opioid, but it remains to be seen how it will fit into the existing medical toolbox. However, its innovation is important: In 2017, the U.S. Department of Health declared the opioid addiction crisis in America to be a public health emergency. In 2016, 2.1 million people had an opioid use disorder, resulting in over 42,000 deaths. Looking for safe and effective ways to treat this condition that minimize the drugs’ addictive nature could significantly lessen both those numbers.