Juul
The US Food and Drug Administration says there is a “youth nicotine epidemic.” The number of teen vapers doubled in the last year, in what health officials are calling the fastest-moving substance addiction they’ve ever seen. Juul, with something close to 75% of the market, is the company profiting the most from the problem.
In November, Juul said it would shut down its social-media accounts and restrict sales of some flavors.
CRISPR babies
In November a scientist at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, had secretly launched the first attempt to create children with edited genes. He edited human embryos using the molecular tool CRISPR to remove a single gene. He claimed that twin girls—named Lula and Lala—had been born and that they would be immune to HIV because of how he’d altered their genomes. He, who was hoping for a Nobel Prize, is instead under investigation in China.
Censored search
When Google bailed out of China in 2010, shuttering Google.cn, the search giant said it could no longer abide by China’s insistence that it hide politically sensitive results. In a blog post, the chief legal officer of Google made a “promise to stop censoring search.” So much for promises. A team of as many as 100 Googlers has been at work on “Project Dragonfly,” an effort to build a new search engine for China. It’s an Android app engineered to comply with China’s censorship regime and block sites like Wikipedia and the BBC.
“100% fatal” brain uploads
Luckily, a startup called Nectome never actually hooked up a dying person to a heart-lung bypass machine to be pumped full of flesh-preserving chemicals. The problem is it wanted to. Some people had already given the company $25,000 deposits to get in line.
source: www.technologyreview.com