Hasta La Gadget!

Las Vegas health officials may not be able to stop opioid addiction, but they’re hoping to make addicts’ lives safer.

The city will be the first in the U.S. to dispense clean syringes for free in vending machines. The effort aims to reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis C, which can be transmitted via shared needles.

“There’s zero downside and lots of pluses,” Dr. Jerry Cade, co-founder of the HIV clinic at University Medical Center of Southern Nevada, told CBS News.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in 10 people with HIV inject drugs, but only one in four use clean needles. And heroin use among young people (18-25 years old) has more than doubled over the past decade. 

The vending machines will dispense kits with 10 syringes, a tourniquet, a disposal container for used syringes, alcohol swabs and adhesive bandages as well as an information sheet about where to get treatment for addiction. Three vending machines located in central Vegas will be operational by the end of May, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported. 

Southern Nevada Health District, Nevada AIDS Research and Education Society and Trac-B Exchange will run the machines, which are funded through private donations.

Users must register to access the machines, though personal identifying information won’t be required, officials told the Reno Gazette-Journal.  Once registered, users will receive a card and a code that gives them access to the machines twice a week.

“This is a harm-reduction approach,” Trac-B Exchange program manager Chelsi Cheatom told KSNV-TV. “Anytime someone’s engaging in a behavior that could cause them some potential health side effects, we want to encourage them to reduce their risk.”

While the Vegas machines will be the first in the nation to dispense syringes, needle vending machines have been used for years in Puerto Rico, Europe and Australia.

“The debate over whether syringe exchanges are beneficial has long been settled,” Daniel Raymond, deputy director of planning and policy at the Harm Reduction Coalition, said per NBC. “The issue now is more, what method is appropriate for my community?”

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Edgar Mitchell, the late NASA astronaut who had walked on the moon, once said that when you see Earth from outer space, you develop a “global consciousness … an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

“From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty,” Mitchell continued. “You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’”

Those same words were evoked this week in a project the Autonomous Space Agency Network is calling the “first protest in space.” 

ASAN, an organization that promotes “DIY space exploration,” sent a tweet high above Earth using a homemade weather balloon in an attempt to get President Donald Trump’s attention.

The balloon floated 90,000 feet into the sky, toting a large printed tweet for Trump and a video camera. Although it didn’t reach the layer of atmosphere that is technically considered outer space, the balloon did get high enough for the camera to record the tweet floating above the curvature of the planet.

Its message was exactly what Mitchell had suggested: “LOOK AT THAT, YOU SON OF A BITCH.” 

ASAN “is a decentralized and open group of like minded autonomous astronauts,” a spokesperson for ASAN who only identified themselves as “LV” said in a message to The Huffington Post.

“Our purpose is to promote DIY space exploration using both art and science, free from the influence of military or corporate interests.”

The group launched its weather balloon tweet as a show of solidarity with the March for Science protest, which takes places on Earth Day, April 22. Professionals and advocates for science are hosting the event to celebrate the role scientists play in public policy and highlight the Trump administration’s anti-science agendas.

ASAN published a two-and-a-half hour video of the balloon’s ascent on Wednesday, more than a week ahead of the protest.

The group wrote on its YouTube channel: “In solidarity with the upcoming March for Science (4/22), the Autonomous Space Agency Network is proud to have executed the first protest in near space (~90,000 ft).”

Last month, Trump signed a bill into law that approved NASA’s $19.5 billion budget and added the human exploration of Mars as an objective for the agency. But the president’s administration also urged NASA to abandon its climate change research and focus largely on space missions instead.

Some people saw ASAN’s sky-high tweet as an innovative jab at Trump’s policies, while others were simply in awe of seeing a tweet above space.

Watch the tweet travel through the sky in ASAN’s video below.

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A passenger on a United Airlines flight was stung by a scorpion that apparently fell out of an overhead bin. 

Richard Bell was flying with his wife, Linda, from Houston to Calgary on Sunday when the encounter occurred.

“While I was eating, something fell in my hair from the overhead above me,” Bell told the CBC.

He pulled it off his head when another passenger told him the scorpion was dangerous.

“So I dropped it on my plate and then I went to pick it up again, and that’s when it stung me,” Bell said. “It got my nail, mostly.” 

The scorpion was likely a stowaway, the CBC reported.

United told CNBC that the flight crew contacted a physician on the ground to provide guidance and medical personnel met the aircraft after it arrived in Calgary,

Although the sting was not considered life-threatening, Bell told Global News it felt like a wasp sting. He said another passenger stomped on the scorpion and flushed it down the toilet, which was the “worst thing to do because when we landed everyone wanted to see it.”

Linda Bell told CNN that the airline apologized and offered the couple compensation, but did not give any details. 

The incident took place on the same day a passenger on a different flight was violently dragged off a United plane to make room for an employee. Outrage over United’s actions have prompted calls for a boycott and turned the company into the butt of late-night jokes. The fallout has also caused United’s stock to plunge.  

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KABUL, April 14 (Reuters) – As many as 36 suspected Islamic State militants were killed in Afghanistan when the United States dropped “the mother of all bombs,” its largest non-nuclear device ever unleashed in combat, the Afghan Defence Ministry said on Friday.

The claims have not been independently verified, but ministry spokesman Dawlat Waziri said no civilians were harmed in Thursday’s massive blast that targeted a network of caves and tunnels.

“No civilian has been hurt and only the base which Daesh used to launch attacks in other parts of the province, was destroyed,” Waziri said in a statement, using an Arabic term for Islamic State, which has established a small stronghold in eastern Afghanistan and launched deadly attacks on the capital, Kabul.

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Although Microsoft isn’t promoting its Xbox One camera add-on nearly as much these days (and using one on new systems requires an adapter just to plug it in), it has acknowledged the Kinect with a new version of Skype for the console. This “all new”…