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akela-nakamura · 5 years

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They stop at Mars. There’s no reason not too. Xan’Toch wants this relationship to work, it’s been many years since there was a major intergalactic failing. Xan’Toch is not keen to repeat last time and the humans’ request to stop at world that is devoid of life is not the weirdest request Xan’Toch has received.

The human is young and goes by the name Carrie. Xan’Toch has been informed that she is a female or a “woman” as she prefers. She carries with her a bag filled with old transmitters and outdated equipment. Her space suit is clearly higher tech, almost laughably so. She stands at a viewing port, intense in a way Xan’Toch cannot understand. What could be on this planet that is worth stopping for?

They land not far from the coordinates Carrie gave them. Curious and wanting to take notes on this strange new species, Xan’Toch asks to accompany Carrie on her mission. She agrees but seems more focused on getting out fo the airlock.

The bag seems to be heavy, and though Xan’Toch offers, Carrie says she will carry it herself. Xan’Toch makes a note--Humans are either possessive of things they deem theirs or stubborn. Either one could become an issue if they are pressed in the wrong way. Xan’Toch has been smoothing inter-species relationship for far too long to let details like that slip by. Though humans, by and large, are confusing and seem...disinclined in fitting into the categories Xan’Toch has organized most species into, every bit of information is important.

Xan’Toch remains silent on their journey. They are heading for a ridge, and for the life of them, Xan’Toch cannot tell what the difference between this ridge and every other ridge on the planet is. But they keep their mouth shut, in fear of insulting Carrie. This species is one of many with confusing religions and Xan’Toch does not wish to insult a human god of some sort.

She seems to know where she’s going, though how Xan’Toch doesn’t know how. Humanity has said they’ve never sent people past their moon. Carrie slows, struggling up the steeper terrain. Xan’Toch, of a hearty species, helps where they can.

“There!” Carrie cries, sliding down a rock face. Xan’Toch winces--surely they know the dangers of damaging their space suit? Carrie doesn’t seem to care and is very busy dusting off--something. Xan’Toch approaches, confused. They cannot figure out what Carrie is cleaning off. They catch a reflection and suddenly the thing Carrie has found no longer seems to be a rock.

It’s mechanical and old. Xan’Toch cannot name some of the parts that make it up but Carrie seems to know what to do. Which doesn’t make sense. Humans, as primitive as they are, have some very interesting and impressive bit of engineering. Whatever Carrie has found is outdated even to humans.

“What is this?” Xan’Toch asks, hoping they haven’t crossed some invisible line.

“Opportunity,” Carrie replies, fixing hoses and replaces what looks like old solar panels.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Xan’Toch says, after several moments.

Carries laughs, and shoots Xan’Toch what they know now to be a ‘grin.’ Something indicative of human happiness. “This is Opportunity,” She says, gesturing to the old machine, almost obscured by the dust and sand. “She was an exploratory Rover back in the early 2000s, gathering information on Mars. She was lost after a major dust storm came through, it knocked her solar panels and communications out. Her last broadcast....” Carrie looks back at the machine, apparently called ‘Opportunity.’ “She reported that her batteries were low....and that is was cold. After fifteen years, Opportunity finally stopped. She finally rested among the stars.”

Xan’Toch has lost the thread of this conversation. Carrie sounds...fond, sad even. Like this machine meant something more than exploration and science. Like it had been a friend, lost to a planet unknown. It doesn’t make sense. It is simply a tool.

“You look confused,” Carrie comments but doesn’t seem surprised. “It’s...silly, but I grew up listening about Oppy’s adventures. Seeing her discoveries and getting excited when she found something new. When we lost contact...I cried. I wasn’t alone. Losing Oppy felt like losing a friend. She took thousands and thousands of pictures and took so many samples--she-she was here when we couldn’t be. We left a mark on Mars before we could stand on it. And now I’m here and...” Carrie swipes a hand across what looks to be an optical device.

Xan’Toch has no words. Has to previous experience with this. from the sounds of it, humanity....bonded with this machine. Sent it off into space, followed its discoveries and mourned its final malfunction.

“I can bring her back. Whether it’s just back online or back to Earth I don’t know yet. But...I had to stop. I had to see her, to let her know we hadn’t forgotten.”

What Carrie’s saying doesn’t make any sense to Xan’Toch. But what she’s saying is genuine, full of feeling. They do not know what to say or how to articulate it back to their superiors. So Xan’Toch does the only thing they can.

They walk over and start digging Opportunity out of...her grave.

The smile Carrie gives them is worth it.

#Humans are Space Orcs #Akela Writes #I have Feelings about Oppy #Humans will Pack bond with ANYTHING #Xan'Toch doesn't know what to do with us #OppyPhoneHome #Akela Suffers

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sciencespies · 3 years

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SpaceX's First Civilian Astronauts 'Underestimated' How Intense The Training Would Be

https://sciencespies.com/space/spacexs-first-civilian-astronauts-underestimated-how-intense-the-training-would-be/

SpaceX's First Civilian Astronauts 'Underestimated' How Intense The Training Would Be

SpaceX is about to attempt a new first: launching a spaceship full of people who aren’t professional astronauts into orbit.

The four-person crew consists of a billionaire, a physician assistant, an engineer, and a scientist. On Wednesday, weather permitting, they’ll climb aboard a Crew Dragon spaceship atop a Falcon 9 rocket, then roar into space.

They’re set to orbit Earth for three days, enjoying the views and collecting data for scientific research, then plummet back through the atmosphere and parachute to a safe landing. They call their mission Inspiration4.

Billionaire Jared Isaacman chartered the flight from SpaceX and is both footing the bill and commanding the Crew Dragon spaceship. He gave the other three seats to Hayley Arceneaux, who survived bone cancer as a child and now works at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran who works for Lockheed Martin; and Dr. Sian Proctor, a geoscientist who serves as an analog astronaut in simulations of long-term Mars missions.

The crew isn’t just climbing into the spaceship like you or I might board a plane. They’ve spent the last four months training – studying manuals, pushing their bodies to new limits, and practicing for worst-case scenarios. They completed the training, which is largely based on NASA’s program, this week.

Even though Isaacman has spent thousands of hours flying jets and ex-military aircraft, he told Insider that the astronaut training was “more intense” than he expected.

“I definitely underestimated it to some extent,” he said.

When billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson each took their own rocket rides – flights which skimmed the edge of space but did not enter orbit – neither revealed the details of their training. But the Inspiration4 crew has been sharing its preparations publicly, offering a glimpse into what it takes to prepare amateurs for spaceflight.

Here’s what they’ve revealed.

Step one: Meet your rocket and watch it launch

Once the Inspiration4 crew was assembled, one of the first things they did together was watch SpaceX launch its third set of professional astronauts towards the International Space Station.

Arceneaux had never seen a rocket launch before.

“I thought I was gonna have anxiety before the launch, but it was actually really serene,” she told Axios reporter Miriam Kramer for the podcast “How It Happened.”

The soon-to-be spacefarers used a centrifuge to simulate the feeling of launch

Chris Sembroski sits in a SpaceX centrifuge chamber. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

A centrifuge spins really fast to create centrifugal force that pushes things outwards, much like a salad spinner or the spinning carnival ride that presses you against a wall. That force mimics the feeling of launch, when the pull of gravity on your body feels three times its normal strength. Many astronauts and pilots use centrifuges in their training.

Isaacman took his teammates up Mount Rainier

The Inspiration4 crew climbs Mount Rainier. (Inspiration4/Scott Poteet)

Washington’s Mount Rainier is a 14,410-foot active volcano covered in glaciers, with punishing weather and hazardous crevasses. Summiting requires ice axes and crampons. So Isaacman decided it would be the perfect place to break the ice with his new crewmates. They climbed the mountain together in early May.

“They built some mental toughness. They got comfortable being uncomfortable, which is pretty important,” Isaacman said. “Food sucks on the mountain. Temperatures can suck on the mountain. Well, that’s no different than Dragon. We don’t get to dial up and down the thermostat … And I can tell you the food isn’t great in space, from what we’ve tasted so far.”

After camping, it was time to hit the books

After Mount Rainier, the crew flew to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California to begin training in earnest.

“Every day was pretty much a 12-hour day, and then you were getting back to the hotel room, and you’re just studying. That was kind of the intense academic portion of the training,” Isaacman said.

They had to learn about the parts of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spaceship, how everything works, and what can go wrong.

“We have like 3,000 pages across 100 different manuals. It was a lot. I don’t think any of us really predicted that,” Isaacman said.

Then the crew practiced flying Crew Dragon in simulations

Sian Proctor on a visit to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

Inside a mock Crew Dragon model, the Inspiration4 passengers practiced the procedure for launches and landings. Once they got used to how things are supposed to work when all goes smoothly, trainers started adding issues and spacecraft malfunctions to the simulation.

Some of these exercises involved all four crew members, but some were just for Isaacman and Proctor – the commander and pilot of the mission. Eventually, they were doing full simulations with mission control and a launch director.

In early August, the crew did a grueling 30-hour simulation

Isaacman, Proctor, Arceneaux, and Sembroski put on their spacesuits, climbed in the simulation model of the Crew Dragon, and sealed themselves inside for the 30-hour ordeal. Nobody knew what was coming, not even the mission controllers. A simulation supervisor had pre-programmed everything.

They practiced a regular launch, with a weather delay included. They ate a meal and slept. But as their simulated mission began to reenter the atmosphere and fall back to Earth, all hell broke loose.

The Axios podcast recounts what happened. In the simulation, as the Crew Dragon pushed itself into Earth’s atmosphere, three computers failed. The crew lost touch with mission control. Then the capsule’s parachutes wouldn’t deploy.

“Now you’re blind, you can’t talk, and there’s no way for the chutes to come out. There’s also no way for Dragon to stabilize itself during essentially a hypersonic reentry,” Isaacman told Kramer.

When they got their bearings, the crew realized the simulation was sending their hypothetical capsule a continent away from its intended splashdown site.

“It felt very real. You’re living in it for 30 hours. The last 45 minutes, there was awareness from us in the capsule, and them on the ground, that there is a chance that this might not be actually a survivable situation,” Isaacman told Kramer.

In the end, they landed safely, but the podcast did not specify how the crew pulled it off.

The training also involved fun parabolic flights to simulate microgravity

In a parabolic flight, a plane flies in arcs up and down, creating up to 30 seconds of weightlessness at the peak of the arc. Some people call the planes “vomit comets.”

The team tested their bodies in a high-altitude chamber

It’s rare, but sometimes spaceship cabins become depressurized, just like an airplane cabin. Spaceships typically have oxygen masks on board in case this happens. But it’s still helpful to know how your body will react before you slip that mask on. Being familiar with the symptoms of oxygen deprivation can also alert crew members to a cabin leak if the spaceship’s systems don’t detect it first.

To experience those symptoms firsthand, under supervision, the crew took to an altitude chamber that exposed them to a low-oxygen environment.

“It provided great insight into each of our various symptoms,” Arceneaux said, according to a tweet from the mission’s account.

They’ve learned to draw blood and take skin samples

Since scientists want more information on how spaceflight affects the body, the Inspiration4 crew offered to gather biological data for NASA. In addition to taking each other’s blood and skin samples, the crew will monitor their sleep, take daily cognitive tests on an iPad, and scan their organs with an ultrasound device. Isaacman said they didn’t realize quite how extensive this research would be.

“We were like, maybe we should have talked about this before we did it,” he said.

He added that the crew members will have to take skin-cell swabs “three times a day on 10 different parts of our body.”

The crew squeezed in some jet piloting above SpaceX’s facilities in Texas

During their training period, the crew members made public appearances, did media interviews, and took trips to Space Camp and SpaceX’s rocket-development facilities in Boca Chica, Texas.

That latter site, which SpaceX founder Elon Musk calls “Starbase,” is where the company is building and testing prototypes of its Starship mega-rocket and Super Heavy booster. When they visited, the Inspiration4 crew members went for a plane ride high above the rockets.

Earlier in the summer, Isaacman and Proctor also did fighter-jet training in Montana to brush up on their piloting skills. NASA astronauts do the same to practice thinking and responding quickly under stress.

The Inspiration4 crew flies jets above SpaceX’s facilities in Boca Chica, Texas. (Inspiration4/John Kraus)

With their training is complete, Isaacman, Proctor, Arceneaux, and Sembroski flew to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday to complete the final preparations for launch.

They are SpaceX’s first commercial passengers, but the company aims to fly more. It already has another such mission lined up in January: For that flight, called AX-1, the company Axiom Space chartered a Crew Dragon to take customers to the International Space Station for eight days.

The AX-1 crew includes real-estate investor Larry Connor, Canadian investor Mark Pathy, and former Israeli fighter pilot Eytan Stibbe. Axiom Space’s vice president, former NASA astronaut Michael López-Alegría, will command the mission. It’s not yet clear what their training regimen will be.

This article was originally published by Business Insider.

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#Space

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thelmasirby32 · 5 years

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Page speed optimization: Six areas to focus on for better SEO results

Page speed optimization should be at the core of your SEO strategy. Your page speed is just as important as site speed is to SEO. Here, page speed should not be mistaken for website speed.

What is page speed optimization and how important is this factor to your overall website ranking? Your page speed is technically how long it takes the content of a specific page on your website to load completely – or in more technical terms, “time to first byte”, which the time it takes for your client’s browser to get the first byte of data from your web server. Just like site speed which measures how fast a sample of page views on your website, page speed is critical to your search rankings.

Several reports are saying, including Google admitting in 2010, that site speed due to the high relevance of page speed, is used as a web search ranking factor. Now that this is the case, how can you optimize page speed and improve your search rankings? Read on to learn more.

Site speed as Google’s page ranking signal

Since Google’s admission to the importance of page speed, we’ve seen several tutorials on how to understand page speed and improve it for your website. Given Google’s reputed tight-lipped stance on what makes for their ranking factors, it’s understandable to see the level of importance users have paid to page speed since the announcement.

In my view, page speed would be critical to Google owing to the fact that good user experience is one of its chief aim for its users. It’s now important to take measures to get your page speed right by focusing on the following areas.

1. Time to first byte (TTFB)

An area to focus on to get insight on how to improve your page speed is how long it takes your browser to receive the first byte of information from your web server. This is what is technically known as “time to first byte”.

A perfect tool to evaluate this is Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which measures reports from the FCP (First Content Paint) and DCL (DOM Content Loaded) by polling data from CrUX (Chrome User Experience Report).

Running a test using Google’s PageSpeed Insights doesn’t only provide you with site speed data but also includes suggestions on areas to work on to improve speed. An example is a test on NYTimes/section/politics which returned 45% for the desktop and 34% for mobile – which is actually more important.

2. Your web hosting

While most would go ahead and start tweaking their web design and looking at what plugins may cause a lag in page speed, the culprit is not always obvious.

Your web host would play the biggest role in how fast the pages of your website loads. You can run a lean one-page website on some hosting services and still come short on the page speed or website speed.

According to a guide on website speed published by Kinsta, mediocre web-hosting contributes significantly to how fast a website loads. Factors such as geographic proximity to users (cloud hosts are superior in this regard), the volume of clients on a single server and the size of a server’s RAM and bandwidth limit all contribute to the performance of a website hosted on any giving server.

Since 74% of users will never return to a website that takes longer than 4 seconds to load, a poor hosting provider could cost you thousands of dollars in lost revenue opportunities. This is not counting the loss of traffic as a result of negative search rankings from poor SEO.

3. Redundant and inactive plugins

Inactive plugins on your website are often serious culprits in slow site speed.

Although, the reason plugins have the option to “activate” and “deactivate” them is to make them dormant while you decide whether they may serve any need in the future, rather than deleting them. However, the most efficient way to prevent plugins that are not being used from dragging down your website is to remove it.

To prevent plugins from unnecessarily slowing down pages of your website, you can consider taking the following measures:

Only install plugins when they are absolutely necessary

Clear your website cache and Minified CSS/JS after removing a plugin

If a plugin hasn’t been active for three months, consider removing it from your website

Only install plugins that are up to date and marked as compatible with your WordPress version

Aside from causing lags in your website’s page speed, inactive plugins may cause vulnerability to the security of your website leaving you exposed to attackers and hackers. This undoubtedly will negatively affect your website’s SEO and rankings, costing you traffic and revenue.

4. Clean your website codes

Another area you should look out for when dealing with page speed is the codes that make up your website. While this is a more technical exercise and is better handled by technical professionals, taking care of your website codes and ensuring nothing is off can help you gain some speed.

When investigating website codes that could affect site speed, look into these areas:

JavaScript

CSS

HTML

Theme files

Poorly configured theme files, for example, may conflict with your users’ browser, thereby negatively affecting how fast your website loads. Below are some aspects you may want to investigate to make sure your website codes are in proper shape:

Enable dynamic caching

Minify JavaScript and CSS files

Avoid making changes to parent theme files and opt for child theme instead

5. Content delivery network (CDN)

Using a content delivery network or content distribution network, commonly known as CDNs can significantly reduce the time it takes to fully load pages of your website. When users are browsing the internet, proximity to your server can affect how fast content is delivered to them.

What CDN does is host your website content in the cloud, and let the nearest server to your clients handle the delivery of the content when they access your website. Since geographic proximity is also a factor in the speed of content delivery, using a CDN takes care of this and eliminates the associated delays that come with loading a website’s content from a distant location.

CDNs also utilize caching to reduce your hosting bandwidth, making room for smooth content delivery and rendering. Plus, it also helps prevent downtimes with your website.

When you opt for a CDN, the following aspects of your website’s content are taken care of:

Images and videos on your server

Your website JavaScript files

HTML pages

Stylesheets

Apart from speeding up your website and helping you to improve your SEO, utilizing a CDN can also be beneficial in the following areas:

Security: Your website can be protected from hackers and random attacks targeting your website

Mitigation against DDOS attacks: Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks is the most common form of hacks launched against websites to date when a malicious agent tries to disrupt the service of your website. CDNs can fortify your website against this common attack.

Increases content redundancy and availability: Since CDNs keep content distributed, pages of your website will remain active and accessible should there be a malware malfunction or spike in traffic

6. Images

Images are important components of every webpage. And roughly nine out of ten pages on a website would include at least an image. It also goes without saying that images consume the most bandwidth on a website.

To boost your website page speed and enjoy solid SEO dividends, you should optimize images on your website to consume as little bandwidth as possible. Heavy and oversized images are among the top reasons a website may experience slow page speed.

Images that are wider than the content area of your website would overlap on the screen, causing the user experience to suffer. Getting your image size right can make a huge difference in how your page loads.

6a. Image compression

According to findings reported by Blake Hawksworth for effective inbound marketing on how to improve website page speed, it is revealed that –

“Compression has the potential to have the largest impact on page speed, as on average, images make up a total of 65% of a website’s weight.”

This further solidifies the fact that getting your image size and compression right can have the biggest impact on your page speed optimization.

In order to see gains on your SEO, improving page speed by compressing images on your website should be a top priority. To get this right, use image compression plugins such as WP Smush (for WordPress users) or Mass Image Compressor to reduce the file size of images that are uploaded to your website. On image width, ensure you’re not uploading images that are wider than the frame of your website content display area.

6b. Google’s guidelines for image optimization for page speed

Another reliable way to ensure images are well optimized for page speed on your website is to follow Google’s guidelines for image optimization. Realizing the traffic generated by images and their impact on a website’s page speed, Google decided to release a set of guidelines for webmasters to adhere to meet content efficiency and page speed optimization.

And since Google is releasing a set of guidelines for image optimization, it’s safe to assume that images would have significant outcomes on a website’s rankings. Since the scope of this article would not allow me to go over everything in Google’s image optimization guidelines, I recommend visiting the resource for consultation. Rather, I’ll share a breakdown of the most important factors required in the “image optimization checklist”, as recommended by Google, in the next point.

6c. Image optimization checklist

Google declares that there is no definitive answer for how best to compress an individual image, but there are “well-developed” techniques and algorithms that can help see improvements in size reduction. Below are the tips they shared:

Prefer vector formats: to meet the demands of a multi-device and high-resolution world, vector images which are resolution and scale-independent are the best option.

Minify and compress SVG assets: Ensure your servers are configured to apply GZIP compression for SVG assets.

Pick the best raster image format: pick images based on the most-suitable functional requirements.

Experiment with optimal quality settings for raster formats: Google recommends dialing down the “quality” settings and you’ll see significant byte savings.

Remove unnecessary image metadata: Google concludes that many raster images contain unnecessary metadata such as geoinformation, camera information, etc. They recommend using appropriate tools to strip this data.

Serve scaled images: Google recommends that you resize your images on the server and ensure that the “display” size is close to the “natural” size of the image. Pay more attention to large images because they account for the largest overhead when resized.

Automate: Google recommends investing in automated tools that will ensure all image assets are always optimized.

Conclusion

Page speed is, as we’ve seen, an important factor in Google’s SEO rankings. And from this article, it’s obvious that getting image optimization right takes the lead in improving your website’s page speed. Try the tips I’ve shared in this article and let me know how your page speed has improved, and if it translates to better rankings for you.

Ayodeji is the founder and CEO of Effective Inbound Marketing, a leading digital agency. He recently acquired BoostMyMedia.com to help clients in the online reputation area.

The post Page speed optimization: Six areas to focus on for better SEO results appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2019/11/07/page-speed-optimization-tips/

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ramialkarmi · 6 years

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How a $9 billion startup deceived Silicon Valley

John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal broke the original story about how Theranos, a company that pitched a revolutionary blood-testing system, was misleading investors, patients, and business partners about how its technology worked. Carreyrou’s new book, “Bad Blood,” documents the history of Theranos and how its CEO Elizabeth Holmes sold a vision that was too good to be true. Carreyrou sat down with Business Insider to talk how Theranos was able to pull off this massive deception. Following is a transcript of the video.

Steve Kovach: Theranos was one of those Silicon Valley stories that sounded too good to be true. It was going to revolutionize the laboratory testing industry. And it turns out, it was too good to be true. John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal charted that story about Theranos in his new book, Bad Blood. John, thanks for joining us.

John Carreyrou: Thanks for having me.

Steve Kovach: So, let's talk about what Theranos was saying it's technology could do and what it was actually doing behind the scenes. What were they selling to the public and investors?

John Carreyrou: Right, so, when I started looking into the company in early 2015, they had already gone live with the blood test for a year and a half.

Steve Kovach: And this was in Walgreens?

John Carreyrou: In Walgreens stores, they'd rolled out in a couple Walgreens stores in Northern California and then another 40 or 45 Walgreens stores in the Phoenix area. And the claim was that they had a technology that could run the full range of laboratory tests from just a drop or two of blood pricked from the finger, get you very fast results and do it at a fraction of the cost as regular laboratories, even cheaper than Medicare. The reality was that Theranos had a prototype that was the last iteration of its device called the Mini Lab. And that was a malfunctioning prototype that it was still trying to make work. And when they had gone live in the fall of 2013, they had gone live with a previous iteration of the technology they called the Edison, so named after Thomas Edison, that was actually a very limited machine. It could only do one class of blood tests known as immunoassays. And it didn't do those tests well. It was an error-ridden machine. And so for the rest of the tests on the menu, and they had about 250 tests on the menu, they had hacked machines made by the German conglomerate, Siemens. They had modified them so that they could accommodate small blood samples. And then there was a third bucket of tests that they just did the regular, the old regular way with venous draws, drawing the same amount of blood as everyone else and running it also on commercial analyzers.

Steve Kovach: So how does this happen? This is a highly regulated industry here in the US, you would think something like this that was mostly smoke and mirrors wouldn't be able to get past regulators let alone into a major retail chain like Walgreens. What did Elizabeth Holmes and her colleagues do to sway regulators and sway Walgreens into believing that this should actually be put to use on real patients?

John Carreyrou: Right. So for one thing they exploited a, what I call a regulatory no man's land, in the laboratory space. You have on the one hand the FDA which regulates reviews and improves the laboratory instruments that labs use that they buy off the shelf and that they use in their labs. And on the other hand, you have CMS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which is the regulator of clinical laboratories. But, then there's this category of tests known as laboratory developed tests which are fashioned by labs with their own methods that aren't really regulated by either of these entities. And Elizabeth Holmes and her boyfriend, Sunny Balwani, were able to exploit this third category and say we fall in this category, what are known as LDTs, because we're using our own proprietary machine within the walls of our own lab. Therefore, we don't have to be reviewed by the FDA or at least our machines don't have to be reviewed by the FDA. And CMS which regulates labs doesn't look closely at LDTs so that's the loophole that they were able to exploit. Theranos had been doing, had been attempting to validate its technology for years with pharmaceutical companies. All these validation studies with big pharma companies had failed and in early 2010 it was running out of options so it decided to go straight to consumers. And the way to do that was to align with a retail partner and so they started courting Walgreens. And they told Walgreens, we've got this great technology, it's portable, it can do all these tests off just a drop of blood and we want to partner with you. And Walgreens was desperate for a new way to renewed growth. And so it started meeting with Elizabeth in Palo Alto and in Chicago where Walgreens is based. And it hired a laboratory consultant, named Kevin Hunter to help it do due diligence. And this guy, Keven Hunter, as I explained in the book, very early on smelled a rat. And tried to alert Walgreens executives to his suspicions and they just wouldn't listen to him.

Steve Kovach: So these tests are being done in Walgreens, you know they're hyping the technology, cover stories on famous magazines and so forth. Why weren't we hearing much from the medical community or if we were why did it seem so diminished? Why weren't there more flags from peers in the industry?

John Carreyrou: Right. There were whispers in especially the field of laboratory science. But the bottom line is that the company was so secretive and very little if anything was filtering out of the company itself. So, while there were some skeptics in academia and in the field of laboratory testing, all they could say was that there was this company that was getting a lot of hype, whose founder was becoming a Silicon Valley celebrity, at the same time wasn't doing what you usually do in medicine, which is that you publish studies about your innovation and you publish them in peer-reviewed publications and you have your peers check what you're doing and verify it. So there were a couple laboratory scientists who actually wrote op-eds in scientific journals. One of them was Dr. Ioannidis at Stanford who came out with a gen op-ed in, I believe it was 2015. I'd already started digging into the company at that point. A couple months later, a laboratory scientist at the University of Toronto, I believe, had another op-ed in another scientific journal.

Steve Kovach: Which no one reads these by the way, it's not like The Wall Street Journal where everyone's going to see it. It's like these nerdy guys just talking about it.

John Carreyrou: And you know, they started raising alarm bells about the secrecy, about the, they called it the stealth research.

Steve Kovach: Which doesn't happen in this industry, it should be peer reviewed right?

John Carreyrou: Right, it should be, it certainly hasn't been the way medical science has unfolded for the past century. And so, to their credit, they were on the right track. They didn't have the goods in terms of knowing what was actually going on behind the scenes. But, they had the right intuition.

Steve Kovach: This story sounds a lot like what we hear from Silicon Valley, the overpromise and under deliver. You know, we're going to put out this really cool phone, turns out to be vaporware. How does that relate to what happened with Theranos?

John Carreyrou: In this case, I think Elizabeth lost sight of the fact that her company wasn't a computer software company.

Steve Kovach: Even though she was running it like that.

John Carreyrou: She was running it like that. She lost sight of the fact that it was first and foremost a healthcare company. A medical technology company whose product doctors and patients were going to rely on to make crucial health decisions.

Steve Kovach: And if that new iPhone doesn't come out it's not going to affect your health.

John Carreyrou: And that's a big part of what went wrong with this story is by really draping herself in the modus operandi of Silicon Valley, instead of modeling herself after say the biotech industry or another corner of the healthcare industry. She ended up behaving that way and while it's OK most of the time to behave that way in traditional tech, it isn't in healthcare.

Join the conversation about this story »

#Tech Insider #Arab #Entrepreneurship #sillicon alley insider

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