Juul has asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block a Food and Drug Administration ban on sales of its vaping products in the US. The agency issued the order on Thursday, citing a lack of sufficient evidence provided by the company to show its devices are safe. The FDA acknowledged that it wasn’t aware of “an immediate hazard” linked to Juul’s vape pen or pods.
“FDA’s decision is arbitrary and capricious and lacks substantial evidence,” Juul said in a filing with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company called the ban extraordinary and unlawful. It requested an administrative stay until it can file a motion for an emergency review of the FDA’s order.
Juul claimed that, without the stay, it would suffer significant and irreparable harm. The company makes the lion’s share of its revenue in the US. If the stay is granted, Juul and retailers will be able to keep selling its products there. The company argued in the filing that the order marked a move away from the FDA’s typical practices, which allow for a transition period.
“We respectfully disagree with the FDA’s findings and decision and continue to believe we have provided sufficient information and data based on high-quality research to address all issues raised by the agency,” Juul’s chief regulatory officer Joe Murillo told Engadget after the FDA issued the order. “In our applications, which we submitted over two years ago, we believe that we appropriately characterized the toxicological profile of JUUL products, including comparisons to combustible cigarettes and other vapor products, and believe this data, along with the totality of the evidence, meets the statutory standard of being appropriate for the protection of the public health.”
In 2020, the FDA required makers of e-cigarettes to submit their products for review. It looked at the possible benefits of vaping as an alternative to cigarettes for adult smokers. It was weighing those up against concerns about the popularity of vaping among young people. The agency has authorized 23 “electronic nicotine delivery systems,” including products from NJOY and Vuse parent Reynolds American.
The FDA slammed Juul in 2019 for telling students that its products are “totally safe.” The Federal Trade Commission and state attorney generals have investigated Juul over claims it marketed its vape pens to underage users. In the last year, the company has agreed to pay at least $87 million to settle lawsuits in several states — including North Carolina, Washington state and Arizona — which alleged that it targeted young people with its marketing. It has faced similar suits in other states.
For millennia, our species looked at the Moon as a place that would forever be beyond our reach, but 20th-century technologies finally made our natural satellite accessible to probes, landers, and even human explorers. Despite these achievements, however, the Moon has furiously resisted our overtures, as these…
Netflix continues to lock down plans to offer ad-supported service. As The Hollywood Reporternotes, company co-chief Ted Sarandos confirmed to guests at the Cannes Lions festival that Netflix is adding an ad-backed tier with a lower price. He stressed that the option wouldn’t bring ads to Netflix “as you know it today” — as with rivals like Peacock, you’ll still have the option to avoid marketing altogether. This is just for people who “don’t mind advertising,” he said.
Sarandos didn’t share further details. However, The Wall Street Journalsources recently claimed Google and NBCUniversal are the “top contenders” to help Netflix build the ads-included plan. Either would likely have an exclusive arrangement to serve and (at least in NBCU’s case) sell ads. Roku has also had early discussions, according to tipsters. Industry executives talking to Netflix supposedly haven’t learned specifics, such as the amount of ads you’ll see each hour or whether there will be ad targeting. We’ve asked Netflix for comment.
The future option is an acknowledgment that Netflix left a large group of customers “off the table,” according to Sarandos. The company lost subscribers for the first time in a decade this past quarter, and it’s eager to return to growth quickly. An ad-supported plan could help with that goal by drawing in customers put off by Netflix’s regular pricing.
We don’t know for sure just when audiences outside of Japan will be able to feast their eyes on Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno and his Shin Godzilla partner Shinji Higuchi’s riff on Ultraman, one of the most iconic Japanese superheroes of all time. But in the mean time, we can spend the next few days in awe over the…
Twitch has been tightening its content policies in recent months, and that now includes mentions of self-harm. The livestreaming service has updated its Community Guidelines to include examples of the self-harm behavior it doesn’t allow. The clarified policy is meant to foster “meaningful conversation” about mental and physical health while preventing further harm.
Broadcasters can share stories of self-harm or suicide, but can’t describe them in “graphic detail” or share suicide notes. Studies show this could lead to similar thoughts among vulnerable people, Twitch said. The refined policy also singles out content that encourages eating disorders, such as unhealthy weight loss programs and attempts to glorify common eating disorder habits.
The move comes relatively soon after Twitch clamped down on usernames referencing hard drugs and sex, as well as creators who routinely spread misinformation. Not long after, the Amazon brand rolled out improved reporting tools to help viewers flag inappropriate content while providing a streamlined appeals process. Twitch has dealt with abuses in the weeks since, but it’s clearly hoping the policy changes will reduce the volume of incidents going forward.
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Crisis Text Line can be reached by texting HOME to 741741 (US), 686868 (Canada), or 85258 (UK). Wikipedia maintains a list of crisis lines for people outside of those countries.
Like strokes and folks, there are different types and sources of radiation both terrestrial and in space. Non-ionizing radiation, meaning the atom doesn’t have enough energy to fully remove an electron from its orbit, can be found in microwaves, light bulbs, and Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) like visible and ultraviolet light. While these forms of radiation can damage materials and biological systems, their effects can typically be blocked (hence sunscreen and microwaves that don’t irradiate entire kitchens) or screened by the Ozone layer or Earth’s magnetosphere.
Earth’s radiation belts are filled with energetic particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field that can wreak havoc with electronics we send to space. Credits: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio/Tom Bridgman
Ionizing radiation, on the other hand, is energetic to shed an electron and there isn’t much that can slow their positively-charged momentum. Alpha and beta particles, Gamma rays, X-rays and Galactic Cosmic Rays, “heavy, high-energy ions of elements that have had all their electrons stripped away as they journeyed through the galaxy at nearly the speed of light,” per NASA. “GCR are a dominant source of radiation that must be dealt with aboard current spacecraft and future space missions within our solar system.” GCR intensity is inversely proportional to the relative strength of the Sun’s magnetic field, meaning that they are strongest when the Sun’s field is at its weakest and least able to deflect them.
Chancellor, J., Scott, G., & Sutton, J. (2014)
Despite their dissimilar natures, both GCR and SEP damage the materials designed to shield our squishy biological bodies from radiation along with our biological bodies themselves. Their continued bombardment has a cumulative negative effect on human physiology resulting not just in cancer but cataracts, neurological damage, germline mutations, and acute radiation sickness if the dose is high enough. For materials, high-energy particles and photons can cause “temporary damage or permanent failure of spacecraft materials or devices,” Zicai Shen of the Beijing Institute of Spacecraft Environment Engineering notes in 2019’s Protection of Materials from Space Radiation Environments on Spacecraft.
“Charged particles gradually lose energy as they pass through the material, and finally, capture a sufficient number of electrons to stop,” they added. “When the thickness of the shielding material is greater than the range of a charged particle in the material, the incident particles will be blocked in the material.”
How NASA currently protects its astronauts
To ensure that tomorrow’s astronauts arrive at Mars with all of their teeth and fingernails intact, NASA has spent nearly four decades collecting data and studying the effects radiation has on the human body. The agency’s Space Radiation Analysis Group (SRAG) at Johnson Space Center is, according to its website, “responsible for ensuring that the radiation exposure received by astronauts remains below established safety limits.”
According to NASA, “the typical average dose for a person is about 360 mrems per year, or 3.6 mSv, which is a small dose. However, International Standards allow exposure to as much as 5,000 mrems (50 mSv) a year for those who work with and around radioactive material. For spaceflight, the limit is higher. The NASA limit for radiation exposure in low-Earth orbit is 50 mSv/year, or 50 rem/year.”
SRAG’s Space Environment Officers (SEOs) are tasked with ensuring that the astronauts can successfully complete their mission without absorbing too many RADs. They take into account the various environmental and situational factors present during a spaceflight — whether the astronauts are in LEO or on the lunar surface, whether they stay in the spacecraft or take a spacewalk, or whether there is a solar storm going on — combine and model that information with data collected from onboard and remote radiation detectors as well as the NOAA space weather prediction center, to make their decisions.
The Radiation Effects and Analysis Group at Goddard Space Flight Center, serves much the same purpose as SRAG but for mechanical systems, working to develop more effective shielding and more robust materials for use in orbit.
“We will be able to ensure that humans, electronics, spacecraft and instruments — anything we are actually sending into space — will survive in the environment we are putting it in,” Megan Casey, an aerospace engineer in the REAG said in a 2019 release. “Based on where they’re going, we tell mission designers what their space environment will be like, and they come back to us with their instrument plans and ask, ‘Are these parts going to survive there?’ The answer is always yes, no, or I don’t know. If we don’t know, that’s when we do additional testing. That’s the vast majority of our job.”
NASA’s research will continue and expand throughout the upcoming Artemis mission era. During test flights for the Artemis I mission, both the SLS rocket and the Orion spacecraft will be outfitted with sensors measuring radiation levels in deep space beyond the moon — specifically looking at the differences in relative levels beyond the Earth’s Van Allen Belts. Data collected and lessons learned from these initial uncrewed flights will help NASA engineers build better, more protective spacecraft in the future.
And once it does eventually get built, crews aboard the Lunar Gateway will maintain an expansive radiation sensor suite, including the Internal Dosimeter Array, designed to carefully and continually measure levels within the station as it makes its week-long oblong orbit around the moon.
“Understanding the effects of the radiation environment is not only critical for awareness of the environment where astronauts will live in the vicinity of the Moon, but it will also provide important data that can be used as NASA prepares for even greater endeavors, like sending the first humans to Mars,” Dina Contella, manager for Gateway Mission Integration and Utilization, said in a 2021 release.
NASA might use magnetic bubbles in the future
Tomorrow’s treks into interplanetary space, where GCR and SEP are more prevalent, are going to require more comprehensive protection than the current state of the art passive shielding materials and space weather forecasting predictions can deliver. And since the Earth’s own magnetosphere has proven so handy, researchers with the European Commission’s Community Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) have researched creating one small enough to fit on a spaceship, dubbed the Space Radiation Superconducting Shield (SR2S).
The €2.7 million SR2S program, which ran from 2013 to 2015, expanded on the idea of using superconducting magnets to generate a radiation-stopping magnetic force field first devised by ex-Nazi aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun in 1969. The magnetic field produced would be more than 3,000 times more concentrated than the one encircling the Earth and would extend out in a 10-meter sphere.
“In the framework of the project, we will test, in the coming months, a racetrack coil wound with an MgB2 superconducting tape,” Bernardo Bordini, coordinator of CERN activity in the framework of the SR2S project, said in 2015. “The prototype coil is designed to quantify the effectiveness of the superconducting magnetic shielding technology.”
It wouldn’t block all incoming radiation, but would efficiently screen out the most damaging types, like GCR, which flows through passive shielding like water through a colander. By lowering the rate at which astronauts are exposed to radiation, they’ll be able to serve on more and longer duration missions before hitting NASA’s lifetime exposure limit.
“As the magnetosphere deflects cosmic rays directed toward the earth, the magnetic field generated by a superconducting magnet surrounding the spacecraft would protect the crew,” Dr Riccardo Musenich, scientific and technical manager for the project, told Horizon in 2014. “SR2S is the first project which not only investigates the principles and the scientific problems (of magnetic shielding), but it also faces the complex issues in engineering.”
Two superconducting coils have already been constructed and tested, showing the feasibility in using them to build lightweight magnets but this is very preliminary research, mind you. The CORDIS team doesn’t anticipate this tech making it into space for another couple decades.
Researchers from University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Astronomy have recently set about developing their own version of CORDIS’ idea. Their Cosmic Radiation Extended Warding using the Halbach Torus (CREW HaT) project, which received prototyping funding from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in February, uses “new superconductive tape technology, a deployable design, and a new configuration for a magnetic field that hasn’t been explored before,” according to UWM associate professor and researches lead author, Dr. Elena D’Onghia told Universe Today in May.
NASA
“The HaT geometry has never been explored before in this context or studied in combination with modern superconductive tapes,” she said in February’s NIAC summary. “It diverts over 50 percent of the biology-damaging cosmic rays (protons below 1 GeV) and higher energy high-Z ions. This is sufficient to reduce the radiation dose absorbed by astronauts to a level that is less than 5 percent of the lifetime excess risk of cancer mortality levels established by NASA.”
Or astronauts might wear leaden vests to protect their privates
But why go through the effort of magnetically encapsulating an entire spaceship when really it’s just a handful of torsos and heads that actually need the protection? That’s the idea behind the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE).
Developed in partnership with both the Israel Space Agency (ISA) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), two of the MARE vests will be strapped aboard identical mannequins and launched into space aboard the Orion uncrewed moon mission. On their three-week flight, the mannequins, named Helga and Zohar, will travel some 280,000 miles from Earth and thousands of miles past the moon. Their innards are designed to mimic human bones and soft tissue, enabling researchers to measure the specific radiation doses they receive.
Its sibling study aboard the ISS, the Comfort and Human Factors AstroRad Radiation Garment Evaluation (CHARGE), focuses less on the vest’s anti-rad effectiveness and more on the ergonomics, fit and feel of it as astronauts go about their daily duties. The European Space Agency is also investigating garment-based radiation shielding with the FLARE suit, an “emergency device that aims to protect astronauts from intense solar radiation when traveling out of the magnetosphere on future Deep Space missions.”
Or we’ll line the ship hulls with water and poo!
One happy medium between the close-in discomfort of wearing a leaded apron in microgravity and the existential worry of potentially having your synapses scrambled by a powerful electromagnet is known as Water Wall technology.
“Nature uses no compressors, evaporators, lithium hydroxide canisters, oxygen candles, or urine processors,” Marc M. Cohen Arch.D, argued in the 2013 paper Water Walls Architecture: Massively Redundant and Highly Reliable Life Support for Long Duration Exploration Missions. “For very long-term operation — as in an interplanetary spacecraft, space station, or lunar/planetary base — these active electro-mechanical systems tend to be failure-prone because the continuous duty cycles make maintenance difficult.”
So, rather than rely on heavy and complicated mechanizations to process the waste materials that astronauts emit during a mission, this system utilizes osmosis bags that mimic nature’s own passive means of purifying water. In addition to treating gray and black water, these bags could also be adapted to scrub CO2 from the air, grow algae for food and fuel, and can be lined against the inner hull of a spacecraft to provide superior passive shielding against high energy particles.
“Water is better than metals for [radiation] protection,” Marco Durante of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, told New Scientist in 2013. This is because the three-atom nucleus of a water molecule contains more mass than a metal atom and therefore is more effective at blocking GCR and other high energy rays, he continued.
The crew aboard the proposed Inspiration Mars mission, which would have slingshot a pair of private astronauts around Mars in a spectacular flyby while the two planets were at their orbital closest in 2018. You haven’t heard anything about that because the nonprofit behind it quietly went under in 2015. But had they somehow pulled off that feat, the plan was to have the astronauts poop into bags, sophon out the liquid for reuse and then pile the vacuum-sealed shitbricks against the walls of the spacecraft — alongside their boxes of food — to act as radiation insulation.
“It’s a little queasy sounding, but there’s no place for that material to go, and it makes great radiation shielding,” Taber MacCallum, a member of the nonprofit funded by Dennis Tito, told New Scientist. “Food is going to be stored all around the walls of the spacecraft, because food is good radiation shielding.” It’s just a quick jaunt to the next planet over, who needs plumbing and sustenance?
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