You’ll never uncover The Next Great Thing if you don’t deviate from the norm. When looking back at 2023’s laptops, we can see that many were merely refreshed designs—approaches that already work. But what happens when a company explores a design that, though not the most appealing today, might lead us to a new trend tomorrow?
You might end up with some computers that many, or even most, people aren’t currently interested in buying. But you could also end up glimpsing the designs that influence future laptops.
The laptops we’re about to look at all defied trends in some way, and we’re curious to see if they impact the laptop industry beyond 2023. We’ll also look at the challenges these ideas might face in the future—and some ways they could improve.
Lenovo’s laptop with dual 13.3-inch screens
A company called SZBOX is already selling a similar design, and I don’t think it’ll be the last.
Scharon Harding
I was able to multitask like never before on a 13-inch-size laptop.
Scharon Harding
Lenovo’s depiction of the Yoga Book 9i’s various forms. There has to be a useful idea somewhere in there, right?
Lenovo
With the number of secondary screens already being built into laptops, Lenovo’s Yoga Book 9i, as striking as it appears, was a somewhat expected progression. But Lenovo actually pulled it off with a legitimate PC featuring most of the bells and whistles found among traditional premium laptops. With the design serving practical use cases in an improved form factor, I expect it to not only be imitated (one small firm is already selling a laptop like this) but to also give the concept of foldable-screen laptops a good run for their money.
The Yoga Book 9i, with its pair of 13.3-inch OLED screens, isn’t kicking off this list solely because it’s creative, flashy, or unique. It’s because, as detailed in our Lenovo Yoga Book 9i review, it proved itself an effective way to boost the amount of multitasking one can reasonably do on a 13-inch-size laptop. Lenovo’s revision of how to use a 13-inch chassis could improve options down the line for the many people seeking that golden area between ultra-portability and productivity potential.
On the Lenovo laptop’s 26.6 inches of cumulative screen, I was able to do the types of things that would only bring me frustration, if not a headache, on a single 13.3-inch panel. Want to take notes on a video call while monitoring your news feeds, having a chat window open, and keeping an eye on your email? That’s all remarkably manageable on a laptop with two full-size screens. And that PC is easier to lug around than a laptop and portable monitor.
What’s next?
The dual-screen setup worked well for small-laptop multitasking. But the polarizing lack of an integrated physical keyboard and touchpad challenge this form factor’s longevity. Easily accessible touchscreen controls are handy, but you can’t really replicate the reliable tactility and comfort of a keyboard and touchpad with touchscreens. A super portable laptop suddenly feels less portable when you have to remember to bring its accessories.
Still, I think this design has a place in the increasingly mobile world of computing. Future designs could improve with less reflective screens, given that reflectivity is especially distracting on a dual-screen laptop where one screen can cast reflections on the other.
Moving from OLED could help improve battery life to some degree. But, as you might have guessed, a laptop with two 13.3-inch OLED displays won’t be winning any laptop battery-life contests. Further, I wonder what price improvements could be made by foregoing OLED.
But many of the creative laptop designs these days opt for OLED, due to its high image quality, flexibility, and broad market appeal from more mainstream tech implementations, like OLED smartphones and TVs. This presents an ongoing price obstacle for a laptop design that already leans niche.
Enlarge/ This picture, taken several months ago, shows different parts for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket inside the company’s manufacturing facility in Florida.
Blue Origin
For the first time, it’s starting to feel like Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, might have a shot at launching its long-delayed New Glenn rocket within the next 12 months.
Of course, there’s a lot for Blue Origin to test and validate before New Glenn is ready to fly. First, the company’s engineers need to fully assemble a New Glenn rocket and raise it on the company’s sprawling seaside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. There’s a good chance of this happening in the coming months as Blue Origin readies for a series of tanking tests and simulated countdowns at the launch site.
It’s tempting to invoke Berger’s Law, the guideline championed by my Ars colleague which states that if a launch is scheduled for the fourth quarter of a calendar year—and if it is at least six months away—the launch will delay into the next year. Given Blue Origin’s history of New Glenn delays, that’s probably the safer bet. New Glenn’s inaugural flight has been delayed from 2020 until 2021, then 2022, and for now, is slated for 2024.
But it’s worth noting that Blue Origin has been consistent in its 2024 launch schedule for New Glenn for a while now, and on Tuesday, a senior Blue Origin official doubled down on this goal for the debut of New Glenn. There are also several signs beyond statements from Blue Origin that the company is making real progress with its new rocket.
The two-stage New Glenn will stand more than 320 feet (98 meters) tall, with the capability to haul nearly 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of payload into low-Earth orbit, according to Blue Origin. This is a weight class above the uppermost capability of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket but below SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.
A NASA official last month said the agency anticipates putting one of its robotic Mars missions on the first flight of Blue Origin’s new rocket next year. The Mars science mission, named ESCAPADE, consists of two small identical spacecraft to study the Martian magnetosphere. It is relatively low in cost, and NASA is willing to accept some risk in launching it on the first New Glenn flight, but if it doesn’t depart Earth next year, the mission faces a two-year delay.
Lars Hoffman, Blue Origin’s vice president of government sales, gave a high-level overview of the privately-developed New Glenn rocket during a presentation Tuesday to the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference in Orlando.
“We’re now ready to really start amping things up a bit,” Hoffman said. “We’ll start launching New Glenn next year.”
What to watch for in 2024
Hoffman showed a video inside Blue Origin’s New Glenn manufacturing plant near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a few miles away from the launch site at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin intends to use most of the parts visible inside, which included tanks and other metallic structures, on real flightworthy New Glenn rockets, he said. Some of the equipment will be used for qualification testing on the ground.
“The manufacturing pace is just picking up by the day,” Hoffman told the gathering of Space Force officials. “This is all flight hardware that we’re going to fly on our first launches next year. There’s some qual hardware in there as well, but things are picking up very fast. In fact, we’re expanding the buildings there to support that scaling.”
In the last few weeks, photographers have caught glimpses of New Glenn’s payload fairing traveling on a transporter down a road near Cape Canaveral. The clamshell-like fairing has a diameter of 23 feet (7 meters) and a height of more than 70 feet (21.9 meters), with roughly twice the volume as a typical payload shroud flown on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket, according to Hoffman.
The fairing is now inside Blue Origin’s hangar near the New Glenn launch pad, Hoffman said. A large section of a New Glenn first stage booster, complete with Blue Origin livery, was also spotted just outside the manufacturing complex in Florida. When asked by Ars on Tuesday, Hoffman declined to confirm if this booster is slated for the first New Glenn flight, or if it is a ground test unit, but he said most of what Blue Origin has shown inside the factory is flight hardware.
“With our launch site right next door, it makes it very easy for us to build the rocket, transport it right to the launch site at our integration facility, with payload processing right nearby, all of it right there together,” Hoffman said.
Construction at the New Glenn launch pad, located on a site once used to launch Atlas rockets, is now complete, according to Hoffman. The pad is one of the largest launch sites at the Florida spaceport. “It is just ready to go, and we’ll put it to good use starting next year.”
Enlarge/ An artist’s rendering of a New Glenn rocket in flight.
Over the next few months, Hoffman said Blue Origin plans to ramp up engine testing ahead of the debut launch of New Glenn. This will include firings of the methane-fueled BE-4 engine and the hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engine on a test stand in Alabama. Seven BE-4s will power the first stage of New Glenn, and two BE-3Us will be on the second stage.
Similar versions of both of these engines will be flight-proven by the time New Glenn finally takes off. The BE-3U is a different variant of the BE-3 engine used on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket will use two BE-4 engines from Blue Origin on each of its first stage boosters.
One of the most significant milestones leading up to the debut of New Glenn will be out of Blue Origin’s hands. Hoffman identified the first launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket with its BE-4 engines, now planned for January, as one of the key events in the run-up to the maiden flight of New Glenn.
Hoffman didn’t provide a specific timeline, but he told Ars that Blue Origin’s gound teams in Florida are preparing to raise a New Glenn rocket vertical on its launch pad for a series of cryogenic propellant loading tests. These tests, sometimes called “wet dress rehearsals,” will include filling the rocket with methane and liquid oxygen propellants. Recent history with other new rockets suggests minor problems can stretch out these tests for months.
Two Blue Origin officials told Ars that the company is not currently planning to perform a full-scale test-firing of an entire New Glenn booster, with all seven of its BE-4 engines, before the inaugural launch. If this holds, it would be unusual. These hotfire tests are a standard part of preparing of the first flight of a new rocket. Just this year, we’ve seen ULA test-fire its Vulcan booster, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket go through multiple hotfire tests, and SpaceX’s enormous Super Heavy booster fire up its engines on the launch pad.
Blue Origin does plan to test-fire New Glenn’s second stage before the inaugural launch, the officials said.
Hoffman didn’t narrow down the schedule for the first flight of New Glenn beyond some time next year, but NASA’s ESCAPADE mission tentatively slated to fly on it is on contract for a launch date in August 2024. However, this schedule is under review, according to Laura Aguiar, a NASA spokesperson.
The official launch schedule in August would have the New Glenn rocket place the two ESCAPADE probes into an orbit around Earth, leaving the spacecraft themselves to perform the final maneuvers to escape Earth’s gravity and fly to Mars. Aguiar told Ars there are other options available, including using the ample lift capability of New Glenn to send the twin probes directly to Mars on a trajectory known as a Hohmann transfer, allowing for a launch date later next year.
“The NASA team, in conjunction with our spacecraft and rocket partners, are constantly evaluating alternative trajectory profiles that optimize the availability and flexibility of our launch opportunities,” Aguiar said in a written statement. “Some of these alternatives involve a more traditional (Hohmann) planetary transfer, which allows for launch availability further into 2024.”
Blue Origin, founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos in 2000, now has approximately 11,000 employees, primarily at locations in suburban Seattle, West Texas, Huntsville, Alabama, and Cape Canaveral. Although it has never launched anything into orbit, Blue Origin is one of two companies competing in the suborbital space tourism and research market, alongside Virgin Galactic. Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop a human-rated Moon lander to carry astronauts to the lunar surface on one of the agency’s Artemis missions.
Blue Origin also wants to join ULA and SpaceX in launching the US military’s most critical national security space missions. And Amazon, where Bezos made his fortune, wants to launch a large number of its Kuiper Internet satellites on Blue Origin rockets.
A new chief executive, Dave Limp, will take the reins at Blue Origin this month from Bob Smith, who oversaw a period of vast growth in employee headcount. Despite this, the company fell further behind its main competitor, SpaceX.
The orbital-class New Glenn is a centerpiece of making Bezos’s space ambitions a reality. Its first stage is designed to be reusable from the start to reduce launch costs and improve launch cadence. Hoffman said Blue Origin aims to recover the booster on a floating offshore platform beginning with the first flight. Blue Origin recently delivered a large fixture to Port Canaveral, Florida, to help rotate landed New Glenn boosters from a vertical to a horizontal position after returning to shore.
Blue Origin eventually intends to recover and reuse the entire rocket. “We are on a path to full reusability in the long term, and that’s the goal,” Hoffman said.
Enlarge/ This photo is exactly what it was like to be on the E3 show floor. Exactly.
Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
Today’s news that the Electronic Entertainment Expo is officially, totally, and completely dead was a bit bittersweet for your humble Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss the chance to meet industry luminaries, connect with far-flung associates, and play games months ahead of time in a setting that’s as much a theme park as a trade show. But after spending many a late night covering 15 E3 shows in 16 years, I can say that the crowds, the smells, and the sensory overload associated with the LA Convention Center aren’t always all they’re cracked up to be.
Still, those who have been there will tell you that, for a gaming fan, there was nothing quite like the bombast and spectacle of the E3 show floor in its heyday.
For those who haven’t been there, we’ve sorted through literally hundreds of E3 photos taken by Ars journalists over the years to assemble a few dozen of the best into this visual travelogue-meets-history-lesson. We hope that skimming through the galleries below will give you some idea of the madcap event that E3 was and why it has generated so many lasting memories for those who attended.
The people
From corporate cosplayers to celebrity guests, E3 was a great place for people-watching. Here are some of the favorite people we spotted over the years.
2013: Shigeru Miyamoto himself makes a stateside appearance to promote Pikmin 3.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains introduces Rocksmith at the Ubisoft press conference.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: The Shins play Microsoft’s preview event/press conference.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: I’m pretty sure Kratos can take this guy.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: I’m ready for my close-up, and my BRAAAAAAAAINS!
Andrew Cunningham
2015: People scoffed when Capcom added a balding journalist to the Street Fighter lineup, but he has become one of the series’ most enduring characters.
Mark Walton
2016: To promote Mafia III, 2K Games had a jazz band play a fake, New Orleans-style funeral procession up and down the E3 halls and sidewalks.
Kyle Orland
2016: Meanwhile, Sea of Thieves brought the sea shanties to the show floor.
Sam Machkovech
2016: The escort missions in “Warrior Princess meets Captain Carrot” are pretty hilarious, I have to say.
Kyle Orland
2016: Heihachi still knows how to impress the ladies.
Kyle Orland
2016: This “walker” from Horizon: New Dawn wandered the show floor as a giant puppet operated by a single person.
Sam Machkovech
2018: Good dog…
Kyle Orland
2018: A group of B-boys add to the atmosphere of a fake New York street Sony set up to promote Spider-Man.
Kyle Orland
2018: Sony’s Astro Bot isn’t quite as popular as Mario, but it’s not for lack of trying (or maybe it is…)
Kyle Orland
2018: This woman was literally screaming and running away from these costumed zombies just before this picture. I still don’t know if she was part of the act.
Kyle Orland
2018: Before playing the remake of Resident Evil 2, you had to walk through a “blood”-stained hallway featuring this fellow.
Kyle Orland
2019: The EA Play event at the Hollywood Palladium included this impressive cast of paid Apex Legends cosplayers. Yes, the person cosplaying as Octane is a bilateral amputee.
2019: Nothing says “E3” like a guy in a Yoshi/Mario costume livestreaming himself as he balks loudly at the show floor’s $6 pretzels.
Kyle Orland
The scenery
Publishers easily spent tens of thousands of dollars for decorations that they hoped would make their booth stand out on the crowded E3 show floor each year. Here are some of our favorite larger-than-life statues and installations.
2014: A life-sized Mario Kart adorns Nintendo’s booth to promote Mario Kart 8.
Andrew Cunningham
2014: You might say that riding this hover-bike is my… destiny.
Andrew Cunningham
2014: Tanks hanging from the ceiling are what E3 is all about.
Andrew Cunningham
2015: Lego Hulk smash!
Mark Walton
2015: Doom enemies are WAY more intense in person…
Mark Walton
2015: Life-size Pip-Boy approves of E3!
Mark Walton
2015: I, for one, welcome our alien overlords…
Mark Walton
2015: You died… at E3!
Mark Walton
2016: Sea of Thieves apparently has an ESRB rating of “Arrrrrrrr.”
2017: Why settle for balloon animals when you can have balloon demons?
Sam Machkovech
2017: It’s not a floating tank, but it’ll do.
Kyle Orland
2017: A rare viewpoint on a cross-eyed Mario tank.
Kyle Orland
2017: One of these things is not like the others…
Kyle Orland
2017: Donkey Kong has been taking a lot of performance-enhancing drugs, and it shows.
Kyle Orland
2018: This loop treadmill was closed after the first day of the show after someone fell over and cut their lip when trying to do a cartwheel on it.
Kyle Orland
2019: Link delves into a dungeon in a cute Nintendo booth diorama.
Sam Machkovech
2019: I’ll get you for this, Lego Jabba the Hutt!
Sam Machkovech
2019: This re-creation of an iconic FFVII backdrop was there to promote the remake.
Sam Machkovech
The history
Multiple E3 shows featured a small corner devoted to showing off rarities and collections from various video game history museums. Here are some of our favorite artifacts on the E3 show floor.
2013: An attendee plays Wario Land on a retail display unit for Nintendo’s Game Boy.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: We’re all used to game achievements now, but Activision was a real pioneer here. Each of these patches could be won by achieving certain goals in Activision games, photographing your TV screen, and mailing the photo in. Atari Age has an excellent roundup of the patches and the actions needed to get them.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: Only 116 of these cartridges were produced and given to competitors in a 1990 game championship held by Nintendo. In the rare events when these cartridges have been sold, they commonly fetch more than $10,000.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: An in-store demo kiosk for the Atari 800, a computer and game system that originally shipped with 8KB of RAM.
Andrew Cunningham
2014: Atari feels the existence of the “Game Boy” implies the necessity for a “Game Girl.”
Andrew Cunningham
2014: Before the Apple Watch, this was some of the best interactive content you could get on your wrist.
Andrew Cunningham
2015: A rare relic from the NES’s limited New York launch in 1985.
Sam Machkovech
2015: You might remember Columbia House for its “11 albums for a penny” catalog offers, but did you know it had a video game offering, too?
Sam Machkiovech
2015: If you mess with a retro console maker, you mess with me, pard’ner…
Sam Machkovech
2015: You’re asking a lot of questions about my “Just another high-strung prima donna from Atari” shirt that are already answered by the shirt.
Sam Machkovech
2015: In an alternate universe, we all fondly remember this multicolored monstrosity rather than Atari’s wood-grained Video Computer System.
Sam Machkovech
2018: Sega eventually abandoned this modem-equipped version of the Saturn for the Dreamcast.
Sam Machkovech
2019: The innards of an extremely rare prototype of a full-color Vectrex console.
Sam Machkovech
2019: Members of the original Xbox team got a limited edition system signed by Bill Gates himself.
Sam Machkovech
The crowds
Fighting through a wall-to-wall sea of people as you rush from South to West Hall for an appointment is not an experience we’re eager to repeat. Hopefully, these photos will give you some idea of the massive throngs of humanity that filled the LA Convention Center for E3 each year.
2013: The line to get into Microsoft’s Xbox press conference snaked around the block.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: Food trucks with huge lines feed hungry journalists between the Microsoft and EA press conferences
Andrew Cunningham
2013: A mad rush of attendees swamps the escalators as the show floor opens.
Andrew Cunningham
2013: A sea of humanity in the third-party-publisher-filled South Hall.
Andrew Cunningham
2014: Very little elbow room at Sony’s booth.
Andrew Cunningham
2015: Microsoft’s press conference lit the assembled throngs in Xbox’s signature neon green, which made everyone in attendance look like the Incredible Hulk.
Mark Walton
2015: Sony’s press conference crowds are lit in a much more flattering blue light.
Mark Walton
2015: These innocent bystanders should really get out of the way just in case the console war becomes a shooting war.
Mark Walton
2016: One of the longest lines at this year’s E3 was for Naughty America VR, the first porn company to have an E3 booth in as long as we can remember.
Sam Machkovech
The oddities
Since the days of the departed Kentia Hall, E3 has hosted some truly odd, loosely game-related products and displays. Here are a few of the oddest sights we stumbled across.
2015: Want to run in place on a slippery floor while in VR? The Virtuix Omni has you covered.
Mark Walton
2016: This giant NES controller was a big attraction for the 8bitdo booth for many years.
Kyle Orland
2019: Sega promotes the Genesis Mini with a not-so-mini controller.
Sam Machkovech
2019: While E3 has featured plenty of giant controllers, it has only featured one with a screen embedded inside, as far as I can tell.
Kyle Orland
2016: The Fulldome Pro was supposed to be some sort of immersive 3D display, but it looks a little hard to imagine in a living room, to be honest. One of the smaller projection domes on the show floor was by Fulldome Pro.
Kyle Orland
2016: I like to look at this picture and imagine the man in the cardigan is about 2 inches tall.
Kyle Orland
2016: A PC case shaped like Winston helps promote Overwatch.
Sam Machkovech
2016: Attendees get a hold of some, uh, unorthodox controllers at the Devolver Digital parking lot just outside of E3.
Sam Machkovech
2018: Hard to argue with this slogan for an accessory that provides wireless virtual reality.
Kyle Orland
2019: Pixl Cube was one of the more inventive games at the Indiecade booth, a tilt-sensitive box with LED dots that moved through a maze as if pulled by gravity.
Kyle Orland
2013: Parappa and I bid you a fond farewell from the storied halls of E3.
Recapping this unexpected threat to health, the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday released an advisory titled “What You Should Know about Eye Drops” in hopes of keeping the dangers of this year from leaking into the next. Among the notable points from the regulator was this stark pronouncement: No one should ever use any homeopathic ophthalmic products, and every single such product should be pulled off the market.
The point is unexpected, given that none of the high-profile infections and recalls this year involved homeopathic products. But, it should be welcomed by any advocates of evidence-based medicine.
Homeopathy is an 18th century pseudoscience that produces bogus remedies that work no better than a placebo and, if prepared improperly, can be toxic, even deadly. The practice relies on two false principles: the “law of similars,” aka “like cures like,” meaning a substance that causes a specific symptom in a healthy person can treat conditions and diseases that involve that same symptom, and the “law of infinitesimals,” which states that diluting the substance renders it more potent. As such, homeopathic products begin with toxic substances that are then extremely diluted—often into oblivion—in a ritualistic procedure. Some homeopaths hold that water molecules can have “memory.”
Clear risks
In the US, these products are marketed as legitimate treatments and sold alongside evidence-based treatments (though consumer advocates are trying to change that). The reason this is allowed for now is because of a regulatory quirk: Based on the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, homeopathic products are generally considered exempt from pre-market FDA safety and efficacy reviews as long as the active ingredient in the product is included in the Homeopathic Pharmacopoeia, a list of substances approved by homeopaths.
In recent years, the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission have cracked down on homeopathic products, though. And it seems from today’s advisory that the FDA is not holding back on homeopathic products for the eyes. The regulator notes that any products meant for the eye “pose a heightened risk of harm” because the eyes are an immune-privileged site in the body. That is, innate immune responses are restrained in the eye to prevent damaging inflammation, which could threaten vision. “Any drug used in the eyes must be sterile to reduce the risk of infection,” the FDA said.
But whether or not homeopathic eye drops are labeled as sterile doesn’t seem to matter to the FDA. The regulator cautions: “Do not use ophthalmic products that: Are labeled as homeopathic, as these products should not be marketed.” Their lack of pre-market safety and efficacy reviews appears to be enough to warrant avoidance.
The FDA also cautions consumers not to use any over-the-counter eye drop product that claims to treat glaucoma, cataracts, retinopathy, or macular degeneration because there are simply no actual over-the-actual treatments for these conditions. If a non-prescription product claims this, you can assume it’s bogus and avoid it. Consumers should also avoid anything that includes Methylsulfonylmethane (MSM), which is illegally sold in the US, and anything with silver sulfate or argentum because these can permanently change the white color of your eyes.
Dune: Part Two is the next chapter in director Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s celebrated novel.
We didn’t get to see Dune: Part Two—the second film in director Denis Villeneuve’s stunning adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic—last month as originally planned since the film’s November release was delayed until next March due to the Hollywood strikes. But Warner Bros. doesn’t want us to completely forget about Dune in the meantime, so it dropped another trailer for the holiday season.
(Spoilers for Dune: Part One below.)
As reported previously (also here and here), Herbert’s novel Dune is set in the distant future and follows the fortunes of various noble houses in what amounts to a feudal interstellar society. Much of the action takes place on the planet Arrakis, where the economy is driven largely by a rare, life-extending drug called melange (“the spice”). Melange also conveys a kind of prescience and makes faster-than-light travel practical. There’s betrayal, a prophecy concerning a messianic figure, giant sandworms, and battle upon battle as protagonist Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) contends with rival House Harkonnen and strives to defeat the forces of Shaddam IV, Emperor of the Known Universe.
Part One‘s finale left Paul and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), presumed dead in the harsh desert of Arrakis, having fled their home when Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) betrayed the Atreides family and killed Paul’s father, Leto (Oscar Isaac). They were taken in by the Fremen, the planet’s native inhabitants, who include Chani (Zendaya), a girl appearing in Paul’s dreams/visions.
All the surviving principles from Part 1 reprise their roles in Part 2: Chalamet, Zendaya, Ferguson, Skarsgård, Javier Bardem as Stilgar, Josh Brolin as Gurney Halleck, Dave Bautista as Glossu Rabban Harkonnen, Charlotte Rampling as the Reverend Mother Mohiam, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Thufir Hawat. New cast members include Christopher Walken as Shaddam IV, emperor of House Corrine; Florence Pugh as his daughter, Princess Irulan; Austin Butler as Harkonnen’s younger nephew, Feyd-Rautha, the presumed heir on Arrakis; Lea Seydoux as Lady Margot, a Bene Gesserit who is close with the Emperor; and Souheila Yacoub as a Fremen warrior named Shishakli.
Love blooms between Paul and Chani in the midst of pending war.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Paul is having recurrent nightmares.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Christopher Walken plays Shaddam IV, Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe and head of House Corrino.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen does love his knives.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Florence Pugh plays the Emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), Paul’s mother.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
“Silence!” Paul is starting to come into his power.
YouTube/Warner Bros.
Beware of sandworms!
YouTube/Warner Bros.
The first trailer dropped in May after being unveiled in an exclusive sneak peek during CinemaCon in Las Vegas. The highlight was a sequence showing Paul’s first ride on a sandworm. It’s a major rite of passage in Fremen culture, and the scene demonstrates that, in Part 2, Paul is well on his way to becoming Muad’Dib, prophet of the Fremen. A second trailer arrived in June, showing Paul offering to fight with the Fremen against their common enemy, though not everyone welcomes his inclusion. We also saw a reunion with Halleck; Shaddam IV learning that Paul is still alive; Feyd-Rautha’s lethal knife-fighting skills; and love blooming between Paul and Chani.
That love story is a major focus of this latest trailer after two that mostly highlighted the war for the future of Arrakis. The trailer opens with Paul having one of his recurring nightmares and Chani comforting him. He can only remember fragments but later tells Chani that he sees “possible futures all at once. And in so many futures, our enemies prevail.” He said, “There is a narrow way through.” Meanwhile, the Emperor orders assassins to “deal with this prophet.” One person who might get the job done is Feyd-Rautha, described as psychotic as we see him staring someone down while licking a sharp curved blade and brutally stabbing an opponent in an arena while a crowd cheers wildly.
There’s a fantastic battle scene involving Fremen warriors riding sandworms, and we catch a glimpse of the darker side of Paul when he screams “Silence!” after Mother Mohian asks him to carefully consider his planned course of action. Despite the war, he vows to love Chani “as long as I breathe.” She claims he will never lose her “as long as you stay who you are.” But fans of the books know that the romance has its complications, and given one new cast member in particular, we can expect to see the beginnings of those complications.
Broadcom has moved forward with plans to transition VMware, a virtualization and cloud computing company, into a subscription-based business. As of December 11, it no longer sells perpetual licenses with VMware products. VMware, whose $61 billion acquisition by Broadcom closed in November, also announced on Monday that it will no longer sell support and subscription (SnS) for VMware products with perpetual licenses. Moving forward, VMware will only offer term licenses or subscriptions, according to its VMware blog post.
VMware customers with perpetual licenses and active support contracts can continue using them. VMware “will continue to provide support as defined in contractual commitments,” Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for VMware’s Cloud Foundation Division, wrote. But when customers’ SnS terms end, they won’t have any support.
Broadcom hopes this will force customers into subscriptions, and it’s offering “upgrade pricing incentives” that weren’t detailed in the blog for customers who switch from perpetual licensing to a subscription.
These are the products affected, per Prasad’s blog:
VMware Aria Automation
VMware Aria Suite
VMware Aria Operations
VMware Aria Operations for Logs
VMware Aria Operations for Networks
VMware Aria Universal
VMware Cloud Foundation
VMware HCX
VMware NSX
VMware Site Recovery Manager
VMware vCloud Suite
VMware vSAN
VMware vSphere
Subscription-based future
Broadcom is looking to grow VMware’s EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) from about $4.7 billion to about $8.5 billion in three years, largely through shifting the company’s business model to subscriptions, Tom Krause, president of the Broadcom Software Group, said during a December 7 earnings call, per Forbes.
“This shift is the natural next step in our multi-year strategy to make it easier for customers to consume both our existing offerings and new innovations. VMware believes that a subscription model supports our customers with the innovation and flexibility they need as they undertake their digital transformations,” VMware’s blog said.
With changes effective immediately upon announcement, the news might sound abrupt. However, in May, soon after announcing its plans to acquire VMware, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan signaled a “rapid transition” to subscriptions.
At the time, Tan pointed to the importance of maintaining current VMware customers’ happiness, as well as leveraging the VMware sales team already in place. However, after less than a month of the deal’s close, reports point to concern among VMWare customers and partners.
Customer and partner concerns
VMware’s blog said “the industry has already embraced subscription as the standard for cloud consumption.” For years, software and even hardware vendors and investors have been pushing IT solution provider partners and customers toward recurring revenue models. However, VMware built much of its business on the perpetual license model. As noted by The Stack, VMware in February noted that perpetual licensing was the company’s “most renowned model.”
VMware’s blog this week listed “continuous innovation” and “faster time to value” as customer benefits for subscription models but didn’t detail how it came to those conclusions.
“Predictable investments” is also listed, but it’s hard to imagine a more predictable expense than paying for something once and having supported access to it indefinitely (assuming you continue paying any support costs). Now, VMware and its partners will be left convincing customers that their finances can afford a new monthly expense for something they thought was paid for. For Broadcom, though, it’s easier to see the benefits of turning VMware into more of a reliable and recurring revenue stream.
Additionally, Broadcom’s layoffs of at least 2,837 VMware employees have brought uncertainty to the VMware brand. A CRN report in late November pointed to VMware partners hearing customer concern about potential price raises and a lack of support. C.R. Howdyshell, CEO of Advizex, which reportedly made $30 million in VMware-tied revenue in 2022, told the publication that partners and customers were experiencing “significant concern and chaos” around VMware sales. Another channel partner noted to CRN the layoff of a close VMware sales contact.
But Broadcom has made it clear that it wants to “complete the transition of all VMware by Broadcom solutions to subscription licenses,” per Prasad’s blog.
The company hopes to convince skeptical channel partners that they’ll see the way, too. VMware, like many tech companies urging subscription models, pointed to “many partners” having success with subscription models already and “opportunity for partners to engage more strategically with customers and deliver higher-value services that drive customer success.”
However, because there’s no immediate customer benefit to the end of perpetual licenses, those impacted by VMware’s change in business strategy have to assess how much they’re willing to pay to access VMware products moving forward.
Enlarge/ Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, November 30, 2023.
Getty Images | Bill Clark
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other Republican senators are fighting a Federal Communications Commission plan to impose new data-breach notification requirements on telecom providers. In a letter sent to FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel today, the senators claim the pending FCC action would violate a congressional order.
The letter was sent by Cruz, Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). They say the proposed data-breach notification rules are preempted by an action Congress took in 2017 to kill an assortment of privacy and security rules issued by the FCC.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA) was used in 2017 by Congress and then-President Donald Trump to throw out rules that would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers’ opt-in consent before using, sharing, or selling Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information.
The invalidated FCC rules also included data-breach notification requirements that are similar to those the current FCC now plans to impose. The FCC already enforces data-breach notification requirements, but the pending proposal would expand the scope of those rules.
Rosenworcel’s data-breach proposal is scheduled for a vote at tomorrow’s commission meeting, and it may ultimately be up to the courts to decide whether it violates the 2017 congressional resolution. The Republican senators urged the FCC to rescind the draft plan and remove it from the meeting agenda.
Cruz also protested a recent FCC vote to enforce rules that prohibit discrimination in access to broadband services, calling it “government-mandated affirmative action and race-based pricing.”
Republicans: FCC plan “clearly unlawful”
When an agency-issued rule is nullified by a Congressional Review Act resolution, that rule “may not be reissued in substantially the same form” without authorization from Congress. The key legal question seems to be whether the FCC can re-implement one portion of the nullified rules as long as it doesn’t bring back the entire privacy order.
Cruz and fellow Republicans say that Rosenworcel’s plan would “resurrect a portion of the 2016 Broadband Privacy Order pertaining to data security.”
“This is clearly unlawful: the FCC’s proposed rules in the Report and Order are clearly ‘substantially similar’ to the nullified 2016 rules,” they wrote. “Specifically, the requirements in the Report and Order governing notification to the FCC, law enforcement, and consumers, as well as the recordkeeping requirements with respect to breaches and notifications, are substantially similar to the notification and recordkeeping requirements disapproved by Congress.”
The FCC proposal anticipates this argument but says the agency believes it can re-implement part of the Obama-era privacy order:
We conclude that it would be erroneous to construe the resolution of disapproval as applying to anything other than all of the rule revisions, as a whole, adopted as part of the 2016 Privacy Order. That resolution had the effect of nullifying each and every provision of the 2016 Privacy Order—each part being, under the APA [Administrative Procedure Act], “a rule”—but not “the rule” specified in the resolution of disapproval. By its terms, the CRA does not prohibit the adoption of a rule that is merely substantially similar to a limited portion of the disapproved rule or one that is the same as individual pieces of the disapproved rule.
Thus, according to the FCC proposal, the resolution “does not prohibit the Commission from revising its breach notification rules in ways that are similar to, or even the same as, some of the revisions that were adopted in the 2016 Privacy Order, unless the revisions adopted are the same, in substance, as the 2016 Privacy Order as a whole.”
Enlarge/ The New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen is made to be pointed at, rapidly, in a crowded environment.
Machinery Enchantress / Crowd Supply
“Hong Kong has better food, Shanghai has better nightlife. But when it comes to making things—no one can beat Shenzen.”
Many things about the Hua Qiang market in Shenzen, China, are different than they were in 2016, when Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen was first published. But the importance of the world’s premiere electronics market, and the need for help navigating it, are a constant. That’s why the book is getting an authorized, crowdfunded revision, the New Essential Guide, written by noted maker and Shenzen native Naomi Wu and due to ship in April 2024.
Naomi Wu’s narrated introduction to the New Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzen.
Huang notes on the crowdfunding page that Wu’s “strengths round out my weaknesses.” Wu speaks Mandarin, lives in Shenzen, and is more familiar with Shenzen, and China, as it is today. Shenzen has grown by more than 2 million people, the central Huaqiangbei Road has been replaced by a car-free boulevard, and the city’s metro system has more than 100 new kilometers with dozens of new stations. As happens anywhere, market vendors have also changed locations, payment and communications systems have modernized, and customs have shifted.
The updated guide’s contents are set to include typical visitor guide items, like “Taxis,” “Tipping,” and, new to this edition, “LGBTQ+ Visitors.” Then there are the more Shenzen-specific guides: “Is It Fake?,” “Do Not Burn Your Contacts,” and “Type It, Don’t Say It.” The original guide had plastic business card pockets, but “They are anachronistic now,” Wu writes; removing them has allowed the 2023 guide to be sold for the same price as the original.
Machinery Enchantress / Crowd Supply
Both the original and updated guide are ring-bound and focus on quick-flipping and “Point to Translate” guides, with clearly defined boxes of English and Mandarin characters for things like “RGB,” “Common anode,” and “LED tape.” “When sourcing components, speed is critical, and it’s quicker to flip through physical pages,” Wu writes. “The market is full of visitors struggling to navigate mobile interfaces in order to make their needs known to busy vendors. It simply doesn’t work as well as walking up and pointing to large, clearly written Chinese of exactly what you want.”
Then there is the other notable thing that’s different about the two guides. Wu, a Chinese national, accomplished hardware maker, and former tech influencer, has gone quiet since the summer of 2023, following interactions with state security actors. The guide’s crowdfunding page notes that “offering an app or download specifically for English-speaking hardware engineers to install on their phones would be… iffy.” Wu adds, “If at some point ‘I’ do offer you such a thing, I’d suggest you not use it.”
Huang, who previously helped sue the government over DRM rules, designed and sold the Chumby, and was one of the first major Xbox hackers, released the original Essential Guide on the rights-friendly Crowd Supply under a Creative Commons license (BY-NC-SA 4.0) that restricted commercial derivatives without explicit permission, which he granted to Wu. The book costs $30, with roughly $8 shipping costs to the US. It is dedicated to Gavin Zhao, whom Huang considered a mentor and who furthered his ambition to print the original guide.
Listing image by Machinery Enchantress/Crowd Supply
All of the big pharmacy chains in the US hand over sensitive medical records to law enforcement without a warrant—and some will do so without even running the requests by a legal professional, according to a congressional investigation.
The revelation raises grave medical privacy concerns, particularly in a post-Dobbs era in which many states are working to criminalize reproductive health care. Even if people in states with restrictive laws cross state lines for care, pharmacists in massive chains, such as CVS, can access records across borders.
Lawmakers noted the pharmacies’ policies for releasing medical records in a letter dated Tuesday to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra. The letter—signed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.)—said their investigation pulled information from briefings with eight big prescription drug suppliers.
They include the seven largest pharmacy chains in the country: CVS Health, Walgreens Boots Alliance, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart Stores, Inc., The Kroger Company, and Rite Aid Corporation. The lawmakers also spoke with Amazon Pharmacy.
All eight of the pharmacies said they do not require law enforcement to have a warrant prior to sharing private and sensitive medical records, which can include the prescription drugs a person used or uses and their medical conditions. Instead, all the pharmacies hand over such information with nothing more than a subpoena, which can be issued by government agencies and does not require review or approval by a judge.
Three pharmacies—CVS Health, The Kroger Company, and Rite Aid Corporation—told lawmakers they didn’t even require their pharmacy staff to consult legal professionals before responding to law enforcement requests at pharmacy counters. According to the lawmakers, CVS, Kroger, and Rite Aid said that “their pharmacy staff face extreme pressure to immediately respond to law enforcement demands and, as such, the companies instruct their staff to process those requests in store.”
The rest of the pharmacies—Amazon, Cigna, Optum Rx, Walmart, and Walgreens Boots Alliance—at least require that law enforcement requests be reviewed by legal professionals before pharmacists respond. But, only Amazon said it had a policy of notifying customers of law enforcement demands for pharmacy records unless there were legal prohibitions to doing so, such as a gag order.
HIPAA and transparency
The lawmakers note that the pharmacies aren’t violating regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The pharmacies pointed to language in HIPAA regulations that allow health care providers, including pharmacists, to provide medical records if required by law, with subpoenas being a sufficient legal process for such a request. However, the lawmakers note that the HHS has discretion in determining the legal standard here—that is, it has the power to strengthen the regulation to require a warrant, which the lawmakers say it should do.
“We urge HHS to consider further strengthening its HIPAA regulations to more closely align them with Americans’ reasonable expectations of privacy and Constitutional principles,” the three lawmakers wrote.
They also pushed for pharmacies to do better, encouraging them to follow the lead of tech companies. “Pharmacies can and should insist on a warrant, and invite law enforcement agencies that insist on demanding patient medical records with solely a subpoena to go to court to enforce that demand. The requirement for a warrant is exactly the approach taken by tech companies to protect customer privacy.” The trio noted that Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have since 2010 required law enforcement to have a warrant to obtain customers’ emails.
Also noting tech companies’ lead, the lawmakers encouraged pharmacies to publish annual transparency reports. In the course of the investigation, only CVS Health said it planned to do so.
“Americans deserve to have their private medical information protected at the pharmacy counter and a full picture of pharmacies’ privacy practices, so they can make informed choices about where to get their prescriptions filled,” the lawmakers wrote.
For now, HIPAA regulations grant patients the right to know who is accessing their health records. But, to do so, patients have to specifically request that information—and almost no one does that. “Last year, CVS Health, the largest pharmacy in the nation by total prescription revenue, only received a single-digit number of such consumer requests,” the lawmakers noted.
“The average American is likely unaware that this is even a problem,” the lawmakers said.
Enlarge/ An illustration of a robot holding a French flag, figuratively reflecting the rise of AI in France due to Mistral. It’s hard to draw a picture of an LLM, so a robot will have to do.
On Monday, Mistral AI announced a new AI language model called Mixtral 8x7B, a “mixture of experts” (MoE) model with open weights that reportedly truly matches OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in performance—an achievement that has been claimed by others in the past but is being taken seriously by AI heavyweights such as OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy and Jim Fan. That means we’re closer to having a ChatGPT-3.5-level AI assistant that can run freely and locally on our devices, given the right implementation.
Mistral, based in Paris and founded by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothée Lacroix, has seen a rapid rise in the AI space recently. It has been quickly raising venture capital to become a sort of French anti-OpenAI, championing smaller models with eye-catching performance. Most notably, Mistral’s models run locally with open weights that can be downloaded and used with fewer restrictions than closed AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. (In this context “weights” are the computer files that represent a trained neural network.)
Mixtral 8x7B can process a 32K token context window and works in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and English. It works much like ChatGPT in that it can assist with compositional tasks, analyze data, troubleshoot software, and write programs. Mistral claims that it outperforms Meta’s much larger LLaMA 2 70B (70 billion parameter) large language model and that it matches or exceeds OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 on certain benchmarks, as seen in the chart below.
Enlarge/ A chart of Mixtral 8x7B performance vs. LLaMA 2 70B and GPT-3.5, provided by Mistral.
Mistral
The speed at which open-weights AI models have caught up with OpenAI’s top offering a year ago has taken many by surprise. Pietro Schirano, the founder of EverArt, wrote on X, “Just incredible. I am running Mistral 8x7B instruct at 27 tokens per second, completely locally thanks to @LMStudioAI. A model that scores better than GPT-3.5, locally. Imagine where we will be 1 year from now.”
LexicaArt founder Sharif Shameem tweeted, “The Mixtral MoE model genuinely feels like an inflection point — a true GPT-3.5 level model that can run at 30 tokens/sec on an M1. Imagine all the products now possible when inference is 100% free and your data stays on your device.” To which Andrej Karpathy replied, “Agree. It feels like the capability / reasoning power has made major strides, lagging behind is more the UI/UX of the whole thing, maybe some tool use finetuning, maybe some RAG databases, etc.”
Mixture of experts
So what does mixture of experts mean? As this excellent Hugging Face guide explains, it refers to a machine-learning model architecture where a gate network routes input data to different specialized neural network components, known as “experts,” for processing. The advantage of this is that it enables more efficient and scalable model training and inference, as only a subset of experts are activated for each input, reducing the computational load compared to monolithic models with equivalent parameter counts.
In layperson’s terms, a MoE is like having a team of specialized workers (the “experts”) in a factory, where a smart system (the “gate network”) decides which worker is best suited to handle each specific task. This setup makes the whole process more efficient and faster, as each task is done by an expert in that area, and not every worker needs to be involved in every task, unlike in a traditional factory where every worker might have to do a bit of everything.
OpenAI has been rumored to use a MoE system with GPT-4, accounting for some of its performance. In the case of Mixtral 8x7B, the name implies that the model is a mixture of eight 7 billion-parameter neural networks, but as Karpathy pointed out in a tweet, the name is slightly misleading because, “it is not all 7B params that are being 8x’d, only the FeedForward blocks in the Transformer are 8x’d, everything else stays the same. Hence also why total number of params is not 56B but only 46.7B.”
Mixtral is not the first “open” mixture of experts model, but it is notable for its relatively small size in parameter count and performance. It’s out now, available on Hugging Face and BitTorrent under the Apache 2.0 license. People have been running it locally using an app called LM Studio. Also, Mistral began offering beta access to an API for three levels of Mistral models on Monday.
Enlarge/ Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch system consists of a booster and a capsule.
Blue Origin is finally returning to flight.
On Tuesday the company announced, via the social media site X, that its New Shepard spacecraft would launch no earlier than next Monday.
“We’re targeting a launch window that opens on Dec. 18 for our next New Shepard payload mission,” the company stated. “#NS24 will carry 33 science and research payloads as well as 38,000 @clubforfuture postcards to space.”
The uncrewed New Shepard 24 test flight will refly the science payloads that were aboard the New Shepard 23 flight, which experienced an engine nozzle failure at 1 minute and 4 seconds following liftoff in September 2022. The capsule’s emergency escape system performed as intended, rapidly pulling the spacecraft away from the disintegrating rocket and allowing Blue Origin to recover the payloads flown for NASA and other customers.
Blue Origin finished its accident analysis this spring and implemented a fix to the problem, including design changes to the BE-3 engine combustion chamber. In May, the company said it planned to return to flight “soon.” Then, in September, the Federal Aviation Administration closed its mishap investigation.
The company originally targeted an uncrewed return-to-flight mission in early October; however, two sources told Ars that the additional two-month delay was caused by an issue with certifying an engine part intended for flight.
A new rocket?
Blue Origin has not specified which rocket and spacecraft will be flying next week from its launch site in West Texas, near the town of Van Horn. The company’s first New Shepard rocket, Booster 1, was lost during an April 2015 flight. Booster 2 was retired in October 2016 after performing a successful test of the launch escape system on its fifth and final flight. Booster 3, which was lost during the NS-23 mission in September, was the company’s oldest operational rocket, making its debut in December 2017.
The company has used its newest rocket, Booster 4, exclusively for human launches on New Shepard. This rocket has some modifications from Booster 3 to qualify it as a human-rated rocket. The company has also built a fifth booster that may be making next Monday’s flight.
Tuesday’s announcement came amid a tidal wave of changes in leadership at Blue Origin this month, with several high-profile retirements and the arrival of its new chief executive, who has come to the company from Amazon, Dave Limp. He replaced Bob Smith, who had an uneven tenure as leader of Blue Origin. As Ars reported last month, Limp is likely evaluating the long-term prospects of New Shepard, which remains far from breaking even financially.
The company may pivot toward its larger projects, including the New Glenn rocket and lunar lander for the Artemis program, which have a greater chance of raising significant revenue. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has funded Blue Origin out of his pocket, providing as much as $2 billion a year in operating expenses.
However, given the announcement of New Shepard’s return to flight, it’s clear that Blue Origin isn’t moving entirely away from New Shepard just yet.
Enlarge/ Sisal is an invasive species that is also grown agriculturally.
Women and girls across much of the developing world lack access to menstrual products. This means that for at least a week or so every month, many girls don’t go to school, so they fall behind educationally and often never catch up economically.
Many conventional menstrual products have traditionally been made of hydrogels made from toxic petrochemicals, so there has been a push to make them out of biomaterials. But this usually means cellulose from wood, which is in high demand for other purposes and isn’t readily available in many parts of the globe. So Alex Odundo found a way to solve both of these problems: making maxi pads out of sisal, a drought-tolerant agave plant that grows readily in semi-arid climates like his native Kenya.
Putting an invasive species to work
Sisal is an invasive plant in rural Kenya, where it is often planted as livestock fencing and feedstock. It doesn’t require fertilizer, and its leaves can be harvested all year long over a five- to seven-year span. Odundo and his partners in Manu Prakash’s lab at Stanford University developed a process to generate soft, absorbent material from the sisal leaves. It relies on treatment with dilute peroxyformic acid (1 percent) to increase its porosity, followed by washing in sodium hydroxide (4 percent) and then spinning in a tabletop blender to enhance porosity and make it softer.
They tested their fibers with a mixture of water mixed with glycerol—to make it thicker, like blood—and found that it is as absorbent as the cotton used in commercially available maxi pads. It was also as absorbent as wood pulp and more absorbent than fibers prepared from other biomaterials, including hemp and flax. Moreover, their process is less energy-intensive than conventional processing procedures, which are typically performed at higher temperatures and pressures.
In a cradle-to-gate carbon footprint life cycle analysis, including sisal cultivation, harvesting, manufacturing, and transportation, sisal cellulose microfiber production fared roughly the same as production of cellulose microfiber from wood and much better than that from cotton in terms of both carbon footprint and water consumption, possibly because cotton requires so much upstream fertilizer. Much of the footprint comes from transportation, highlighting how useful it can be to make products like this in the same communities that need them.
Science for the greater good
This is not Odundo’s first foray into utilizing sisal; at Olex Techno Enterprises in Kisumu, Kenya, he has been making machines to turn sisal leaves into rope for over 10 years. This benefits local farmers since sisal rope and even sisal fibers sell for ten times as much as sisal leaves. In addition to making maxi pads, Odundo also built a stove that burns sawdust, rice husks, and other biodegradable waste products.
By reducing wood stoves, he is reducing deforestation and improving the health of the women who breathe in the smoke of the cookfires. Adoption of such stoves have been a goal of environmentalists for years, and although a number of prototypes have been developed by mostly male engineers in developed countries, they have not been widely used because they are not that practical or appealing to the mostly female cooks in developing countries—the people who actually need to cook with them, yet were not consulted in their design.
Manu Prakash’s lab’s website proclaims that “we are dedicated toward inventing and distributing ‘frugal science’ tools to democratize access to science.” Partnering with Alex Odundo to manufacture menstrual products in the low-income rural communities that most need them seems like the apotheosis of that goal.
