Medicare doesn't pay anything for hearing exams, hearing aid fittings, or hearing aids. Just FYI. So you're wrong in that sense.

But, it is a huge market.

OTC hearing aids have really brought the price down and forced prescription models to become more price competitive.

Still, a proper hearing test and fitting of a few different models to see what you like best is worth the cash if you have it. Plus follow up appointments to get everything dialed in.

But, this could prove a stepping stone for people curious if a proper hearing aid would benefit them.

This IS the Hellscape of our future.

It's like you're a Simpson's episode.

Bloatware creep never ceases.

Here's the one thing that is unabashedly basic and straightforward... for *decades*. NOPE, not allowed.

Ok, Ok... probably fine ;) But I'm an old man Genx-er and want to rant.

I don't get the "Air" moniker these days. The lineup is SO fragmented.

I'd love to see them drop "Air" and just have the MacBook (13.6" and 15.x") and the MacBook Pro (14" and 16").

Then move on and clean up the mess that is the iPad lineup.

In the life/biological sciences at a major US research university, our graduate students are making between $27-$32k (this depends on their particular program). That also receive full tuition coverage and health insurance. $18.7k is crazy low. We could not retail or recruit any students with stipends that low.

Not to mention utility customers as far north as Minnesota are being forced to pay for the irresponsibility of Texas based natural gas companies (Centerpoint Energy) through increased utility bills (and we are being charged interest on it at nearly 9% to boot!).

From the perspective of a PhD trained cancer researcher, working on drug discovery/development in academia:

The cost might seem high. Some people think the cost is really going to make these types of cellular based therapy difficult to push into wide spread use. I'm more hopeful that new technology will drive down the cost in coming years. The techniques used to make these cells are years old at this point. That's just how long it takes to get things approved and trials conducted.

But remember the following:

1. This isn't (nor would you want it to be) front line therapy. It's for relapsed or non-responsive b-cell ALL. The side effect profile is risky, this therapy can kill a person, and there are life long implications to receiving it.

2. This is the first approved cellular therapy for wide spread use. It cost a massive amount of money to do the research and push this through the approval process. Billion of dollars for a product not very many people will get.

3. It isn't something that can be made and stored on a shelf. They take your cells out, process them, use a retrovirus to insert a new chimeric antigen receptor into them to target B-cells, and then reinfuse that into the patient. It's personalized medicine to the extreme.

3. The facilities to do what's listed in 2 are insanely costly to build and run, as their are extreme biosafety concerns when altering cells and putting them back into a person. The use of retroviruses makes the biosafety converses higher. Newer technologies will improve this aspect, but haven't been vetted and approved yet.

4. There would be many people involved in making these modified T cells, all of whom likely have masters degrees or PhDs. I'm not talking about the research side to develop them... but production. It's that involved.

5. This is in line with or in most cases cheaper than bone marrow transplants, which are fairly common for other cancers.

6. Novartis will only bill for the product if a patient shows a response within 30 days.

7. These patients have essentially few other options and would likely die without this therapy.

What could possibly go wrong? :)

What we really need is jobs for all of these new trains to fill once they graduate. Talk to any recent PhD in the biomedical sciences, engineering, etc, and ask them what they think of the push for greater STEM education efforts. They'll tell you it's basically BS. We can't place the number of graduates we currently have into even remotely well paying, long term, jobs.

Now, we might need more STEM education and training for more technical, lower level, jobs. But of course that's never how these programs are billed. It's not as sexy of a sell to parents and students! Instead we push people to go to graduate school, get a MS or PhD. Then dump them into a market with slashed education funding, so there are few prospects in the university system. Combine that with a large number of foreign applicants for postdoc and technician positions that are willing to work for MUCH less in terms of wages and you've got a disaster. US citizens do have a slight advantage in that most of the NIH/NSF funded pre and postdoc training fellowships/grants are only open to citizens. But, those are so small in number and highly competitive that it doesn't have a large effect.

We need to face the fact that we're really training WAY too many PhDs and even masters graduates in most of the STEM fields right now. It's a vicious cycle though. Profs want lots of PhD students because they are very inexpensive labor. Likewise with postdocs... for their training and amount of work they are expected to do... they are paid much less than minimum wage. Moreover, most profs will kick out postdocs after 2-3 years because of pay raises that some institutions mandate. It's just easier to dump the experienced person and higher in a new 1st year that gets paid 10k less, pump and dump... factory style.

There have been a number of really excellent articles written about this problem over the last few years. Science and Nature have both dedicate page space to the topic. Some suggest forcing researchers funded by NIH/NSF monies to be required to higher long term technicians to their labs and reduce graduate student/postdoc usage. Such actions would start to limit new graduate number, while at the same time providing employment for scientists that aren't interested or can't get a faculty position in academia or don't want to work for industry. A lot of people also think it would help lab productivity, as you'd retain talent and skill sets that were honed over years of work.

Maybe CISCO should hire a Transporter :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This is the form factor the 13' Macbook Pro should be.

I love my Mid2014 13", but the form factor needs an update. Especially with competing models like this coming out.

I'll still take the build quality and metal construction of my Macbook though.

Lysozyme is a very robust protein found in hen egg whites. This process is going to be VERY difficult to apply to other proteins.

Even with purified lysozyme, you can boil it for extended amounts of time and it will refold on it's own just fine... in very short time scales. You can lyophilize it down to a powder, store it for years, add water... and it will refold and be active. (Lysozyme is an enzyme that degrades bacterial cell walls.)

Loved the show you hosted a number of years about about the development and implementation of the SOSUS system. Can you speculate or comment on the types of next generation technologies that could potentially fill in some of the gaps we now have with the reduction in traditional SOSUS effectiveness against quiet(er) ships from other nations? Presumably we still have to keep track of other countries missile and attack subs, is that much harder now than in the past?

Thanks!

Talk about a straw man.

"Mainstream" tech sites are bad enough already.

At least they are listening. But, it would be nice if they pushed a unified OS between the Chrome stuff and Android. Annoying when a phone/tablet has more software available than a "laptop".