Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Liver lesions in patient with chronic active hepatitis C. (credit: Getty | BSIP)

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has ruled out the pandemic coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, as a possible cause of the puzzling, international outbreak of severe hepatitis (liver inflammation) in children, according to a statement released Friday.

The outbreak has sickened more than 170 children in more than a dozen countries in recent months, with case counts ticking up by the day. Around 10 percent of the children—mostly under the age of 10—have required liver transplants. The World Health Organization has reported one death.

In the US, officials in at least five states have reported at least 25 confirmed or possible cases: Alabama (9), North Carolina (2), Wisconsin (4), Illinois (3), and California (7). At least three of the US cases have required liver transplants and officials in Wisconsin are investigating a possible death linked to the outbreak.

Enlarge / A very detailed view of one of the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies. (credit: NASA/STScI)

In mid-March, NASA released an image from the Webb Space Telescope that demonstrated that its primary mirror reached the point where it focused light as finely as physics would allow for hardware of its size. That was a critical milestone, but it only applied to one of the five instruments carried by the telescope. On Thursday, NASA announced that the next milestone had been reached: All the instruments were now equally in focus.

Webb’s instruments include two spectrographs, two imaging cameras, and the fine guidance sensor that helps with pointing the telescope. Each of these has had to be aligned individually to the primary mirror to ensure focus, a process that has taken several weeks. But now, the focus for each of them is about as good as physics will allow.

That limit is set by diffraction, the process by which light interferes with itself and diffuses when it reaches an edge or corner. While it’s possible to beat the diffraction limit if you have complete control of the photons and play quantum mechanical tricks with them, that isn’t the case with telescopes. So, diffraction-limited is the best we can hope for from a telescope. And, according to NASA, it’s somewhat better than we had planned for: “The optical performance of the telescope continues to be better than the engineering team’s most optimistic predictions.”

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Epic and Google are gearing up for another legal battle. You might recall that Google has an in-app billing crackdown coming to the Play Store soon. The new rules require all apps selling digital goods to use Google Play Billing by March 31, so Google gets a cut of the sales. Any app in non-compliance has been unable to ship updates since March 31, but the real deadline is June 1, when these apps will be removed from the Play Store. Epic Games bought the popular independent music site Bandcamp in March, and it’s already taking Google to court over its newest acquisition. Bandcamp isn’t in compliance with the billing rules, so it’s due for a ban in June. As part of its antitrust case against Google, Epic is filing a motion for a preliminary injunction to block Bandcamp’s de-listing from the Play Store.

Epic has attacked Google and Apple over their app store rules and what Epic says are excessive fees. In March, there were a lot of questions surrounding why the creator of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine would buy an independent music site. One line of commentary from Music Business Worldwide founder Tim Ingham seems to have nailed Epic’s strategy. Ingham notes that Epic failed to get Apple to reduce its 30 percent app store cut, in part because the alternative model Epic could demonstrate to the court, the Epic Games Store and its 12 percent fee, wasn’t profitable. Apple’s lawyers argued the unprofitability of Epic’s Games Store justified Apple’s 30 percent fees.

Bandcamp is a profitable digital content business, though. Bandcamp has a searchable content store, and it hosts and delivers the content by charging artists a 10 to 15 percent commission. Ingham predicted Epic would hold up Bandcamp’s business model as a viable alternative to Apple and Google’s app store fees, and that Epic would use its new acquisition to attack app store owners. It looks like we’re seeing the first actions of that plan.

Enlarge / The USPS’s new mail truck. (credit: United States Postal Service)

The US Postal Service is facing lawsuits from 16 states and several environmental groups challenging its decision to buy tens of thousands of gasoline-powered delivery vehicles instead of electric vehicles.

As previously reported, the Environmental Protection Agency says the gas-powered trucks being ordered by the USPS “are expected to achieve only 8.6 miles per gallon (mpg), barely improving over the decades-old long-life vehicles that achieve 8.2 mpg.” The USPS countered that the vehicles get 14.7 mpg when air conditioning isn’t being used and that the trucks’ size will make it possible to deliver the same amount of mail in fewer trips.

The USPS plan is to buy 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years. Of those, at least 10 percent are slated to be battery-electric vehicles (BEV). Amid controversy, the USPS last month said its initial order of 50,000 trucks for $2.98 billion would include over 10,000 BEVs for “specific delivery routes that present the best initial application for electric vehicles.”