While Rocketdyne’s ownership merry-go-round kept spinning, the company’s competitors pushed forward. SpaceX and Blue Origin, backed by wealthy owners, took a fresh approach to designing rockets. Apart from the technical innovations that led to reusable rockets, these newer companies emphasized vertical integration to cut costs and minimize reliance on outside supply chains. They wanted to design and build their own rocket engines and were not interested in outsourcing propulsion. Rocketdyne’s business was—and still is—entirely focused on selling ready-made engines to customers.

The launch startups that followed in the footsteps of SpaceX and Blue Origin have largely imitated their approach to insourcing. There are at least nine medium to large liquid-fueled rocket engines in production or in advanced development in the United States today, and just one of them is from the enterprise once known as Rocketdyne: the RS-25 engine used to power the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. //

The RS-25 engine, by far the largest in L3Harris’ portfolio and a former Rocketdyne product, is not part of the sale. The RS-25 was initially known as the Space Shuttle Main Engine and was designed for reusability. The expendable heavy-lift SLS rocket uses four of the engines, and NASA is burning through the 16 leftover shuttle-era RS-25 engines on the first four SLS flights for the agency’s Artemis Moon program. The second SLS flight is set to launch in the coming months on a mission carrying four astronauts beyond the Moon.

L3Harris will retain total ownership of the RS-25 program. The company has a contract with NASA to build new RS-25 engines for SLS flights beyond Artemis IV. But the new RS-25s will come at an expense of about $100 million per engine, significantly more than SpaceX sells an entire launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. The engine contract is structured as a cost-plus contract, with award and incentive fees paid by the government to L3Harris.

Important news for Gmail power users: Google is dropping the feature whereby Gmail can collect mail from other email accounts over POP3.

The company hasn't exactly gone out of its way to call attention to this – like actually telling anybody anything. The news appears in a support note with a sign on the door saying "Learn about upcoming changes to Gmailify & POP in Gmail." The article itself is less euphemistic than its title: //

7 hrs
MaFt
Still working for me?
Importing from POP is still working for me. It did, however, stop just before Christmas and I had to change the settings on gMail to use TLS.

So it seems like they're stopping plain text authorisation for POP rather than ALL POP mail retrieval.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced Monday that it would be shaking up the recommended childhood vaccine schedule in order to bring it into alignment with those of other developed nations. As a result, the CDC will now be recommending 10 vaccines for all children, reducing by seven its prior recommendation of 17 vaccinations. //

Watt
4 hours ago edited
I ran this thru chatgpt because even the multiple links already provided by commenters don't clearly lay out the old vs the new. For children, the first 11 are still recommended. The remainder were recommended until yesterday but are now subject to "shared clinical decision making" and no longer outright recommended.

Still recommended (11)
Measles
Mumps
Rubella
Polio
Pertussis (whooping cough)
Tetanus
Diphtheria
Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
Pneumococcal disease
Human papillomavirus (HPV)
Varicella (chickenpox)

Removed from universal recommendation (6)
Influenza
COVID-19
Rotavirus
Hepatitis A
Hepatitis B
Meningococcal disease

The 7th one no longer recommended is RSV. For some reason, it is sometimes counted, sometimes not (at least from what I could figure out).

Usual AI caveats... But this looks right based on the information at the other commenters' links.

Desflurane is a common anesthetic used in hospital operating rooms worldwide. It’s also a climate super pollutant. Now, several decades after the drug was first introduced, a growing number of US hospitals have stopped using the anesthetic because of its outsized environmental impact. On January 1, the European Union went a step further, prohibiting its use in all but medically necessary cases.

Desflurane is more than 7,000 times more effective at warming the planet over a 20-year period than carbon dioxide on a pound-for-pound basis. However, curbing its use alone won’t solve climate change. The anesthetic contributes only a small fraction of total global warming, which is driven by far larger volumes of carbon dioxide and methane emissions.

Still, emissions from the drug add up. Approximately 1,000 tons of the gas are vented from hospitals and other health care facilities worldwide each year. The emissions have a near-term climate impact equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions from approximately 1.6 million automobiles. //

Instead of desflurane, the Yale New Haven Health System now relies primarily on sevoflurane, an anesthetic that is 10 times less potent as a greenhouse gas and approximately half as expensive. The health care system saved $1.2 million annually on anesthesia medications after making the switch, Sherman said. //

USAP physicians and others are also using less nitrous oxide or “laughing gas,” a mild anesthetic and potent greenhouse gas. Nitrous oxide is commonly distributed throughout hospitals via a centralized, leak-prone pipe network. Pipe networks in US hospitals can leak up to 99.8 percent of the gas before it reaches patients, according to a study published in 2024 in the British Journal of Anaesthesia. Using small, portable tanks can reduce losses by 98 percent. //

A paper published in the academic journal Anesthesia & Analgesia in July argued that the climate impact of desflurane emissions was not significant and suggested that more harm may come from withholding the drug from patients. //

j5i7 Seniorius Lurkius
5y
2
As a anesthesiologist, a few points:

• Desflurane does have distinct advantages compared to sevoflurane or isoflurane. It's is faster acting, and faster to wear off. However, clinically, this doesn't matter too much if you adapt to the anesthetic you are using. But it could get a patient out of an operating room a minute or two faster. The more obese a patient, the larger a difference it could make.
• Due to its vapor pressure, Desflurane requires a powered vaporizer that uses electricity on top of its significantly higher CO2 equivilent.
• Anesthesia machines use a circle breathing system. There is no way to strictly deliver anesthetic gases only when a patient is breathing in, but you can get very close.
  Anesthetic waste gases are generally vented through a roof vent in the hospital. There are technologies out there to recapture the anesthetics, but I don't believe any are commercially common.
• A lot of nitrous is lost due to leaks in the pipes. Generally nitrous isn't that useful in anesthesia for adults, but it does have its place in pediatrics.
• You can do anesthesia without any gases and just using medications that go through an IV. These are slightly more expensive, but better from a climate perspective. However, there are medical reasons to choose inhaled gases verses IV anesthetics.
• Finally, commonly used anesthetic gases are NOT flammable. However, oxygen is a great oxidizing agent...