Aura, founded by early Twitter employees, has launched the $499 Ink frame, its first 13-inch color e-paper photo frame. Using Spectra 6 e-ink technology, it offers a cordless design with up to three months of battery life and a subtle front light for better contrast.

Last year, a group of researchers won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize in Physiology for discovering that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus. But as with many Ig Nobel awards, there is a serious side to the seeming silliness. The same group has conducted a new study on the feasibility of adapting this method to treat people with blocked airways or clogged lungs, with promising results that bring rectal oxygen delivery one step closer to medical reality.

As previously reported, this is perhaps one of the more unusual research developments to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated shortages of ventilators and artificial lungs to assist patients’ breathing and prevent respiratory failure. The Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center team took their inspiration from the humble loach, a freshwater bottom-dwelling fish found throughout Eurasia and northern Africa. The loach (along with sea cucumbers) employs intestinal breathing (i.e., through the anus) rather than gills to survive under hypoxic conditions, thanks to having lots of capillary vessels in its intestine. The technical term is enteral ventilation via anus (EVA).

Would such a novel breathing method work in mammals? The team thought it might be possible and undertook experiments with mice and micro-pigs to test that hypothesis. They drew upon earlier research by Leland Clark, also of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, who invented a perfluorocarbon liquid called Oxycyte as a possible form of artificial blood. That vision never materialized, although it did provide a handy plot point for the 1989 film The Abyss, in which a rat is able to “breathe” in a similar liquid.

And Oxycyte was ideal for the group’s 2021 Ig Nobel-winning efforts. The experiments involved intra-anally administering oxygen gas or a liquid oxygenated perfluorocarbon to the unfortunate rodents and porcines. Yes, they gave the animals enemas. They then induced respiratory failure and evaluated the effectiveness of the intra-anal treatment. The result: Both treatments were pretty darned effective at staving off respiratory failure with no major complications.

Credit: Cincinnati Children's/Med

So far, so good. The next logical step was to determine if EVA could work in human patients, too. “Patients with severe respiratory failure often need mechanical ventilation to survive, but these therapies can cause further lung injury,” the authors wrote in this latest paper. EVA “could give the lungs a chance to rest and heal.”

The team recruited 27 healthy adult men in Japan, each of whom received a dose of non-oxygenated perfluorodecalin via the anus. They were asked to retain the liquid for a full hour as the dosage slowly increased from 25 to 1,500 mL. Twenty of the men successfully completed the experiment. Apart from mild temporary abdominal bloating and discomfort—which proved to be dosage dependent and resolved with no need for medical attention—they experienced no adverse effects.

“This is the first human data and the results are limited solely to demonstrating the safety of the procedure and not its effectiveness,” said co-author Takanori Takebe of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and the University of Osaka in Japan. “But now that we have established tolerance, the next step will be to evaluate how effective the process is for delivering oxygen to the bloodstream.”

Med, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.medj.2025.100887 (About DOIs).

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Microsoft has decided to retire a version of Office Online in an effort to focus on cloud-first solutions like Microsoft 365. Read more...

Yours truly, yesterday:

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

Actual email, from actual reader D.B. today:

Anecdotes to support your point about normal customers not knowing which power adapter to pick, I’ve had both my mother and a mid-level IT director at my work complain that their Macs no longer hold a battery. In both cases, they were using a 5 watt USB-A charger.

It’s hard for people to understand that not all USB chargers are the same.

And from actual reader D.K.:

My mother in law called me to ask why her MacBook Air no longer turned on. She had called AppleCare and they told her to bring the computer to a store for repairs. Turns out she was using a very old 5 watt USB-A iPhone charger.

And of course, the real danger isn’t using an underpowered charger. It’s thinking you can save a few bucks by buying a cheap high-watt third-party charger and then burning your house down.

Hello and welcome to Regulator.

Of all the strange, unintended consequences stemming from major lawsuits, I never thought that the Trump administration's power to force Apple to remove ICE-tracking mobile apps from its stores could have been connected to a legal battle over Fortnite V-Bucks.

Yes, we are talking about the in-game digital currency that Fortnite players can use to buy taco hats and trending zoomer dance emotes for their avatars. Yes, they're the ones you can purchase as gift cards at CVS for a 9-year-old's emergency birthday gift. But at one point, they were the subject of two major lawsuits filed by developer Epic Games, a …

Read the full story at The Verge.