In a new, groundbreaking development in the fight against food allergies, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first treatment for children with peanut allergies on Friday.

“Peanut allergy affects approximately 1 million children in the U.S. and only 1 out of 5 of these children will outgrow their allergy,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in a news release. “Because there is no cure, allergic individuals must strictly avoid exposure to prevent severe and potentially life-threatening reactions.”

The drug, called Palforzia, is not a cure but still marks a step forward in reducing allergic reactions for kids ages 4 through 17, who have already been diagnosed with peanut allergies.

Marks noted that even when avoiding peanuts, inadvertent exposure can still happen and that’s what this drug aims to treat. He explained, “When used in conjunction with peanut avoidance, Palforzia provides an FDA-approved treatment option to help reduce the risk of these allergic reactions in children with peanut allergy.”

The FDA acknowledges that peanut allergies are unpredictable and severe reactions can occur from even the smallest trace of peanuts.

The Palforzia pill is administered in three phases and is taken over time, but cannot be used in an emergency situation in the way that a treatment like an EpiPen is used.

The first phase, called initial dose escalation, is consumed on a single day under the supervision of a medical professional, while up-dosing, the second phase, takes place over several months and involves 11 increased dose levels. The first dose in up-dosing would be given under a medical professional’s supervision as well, just to manage any potential severe allergic reactions. After that, the drug can be taken at home, as long as everything goes smoothly. Once the 11 doses in the second phase are completed, the third and final maintenance dose would then be administered daily.

The drug itself is a powder made from peanuts that comes in color-coded capsules for the first two phases. In the maintenance phase, the drug comes in a sachet. The powder can be mixed with semi-soft foods such as applesauce and yogurt before a child consumes it.

The FDA tested both the effectiveness and safety of the new drug in multiple double-blind, placebo-controlled studies with approximately 500 individuals with peanut allergies. Based on those studies, the potential side effects of Palforzia include abdominal pain, itching, tingling in the mouth, nausea, vomiting, cough, runny nose, throat irritation, tightness, hives, wheezing, shortness of breath and anaphylaxis.

While peanut allergy symptoms can vary among individuals, the most extreme response is anaphylaxis. Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening reaction that can cause constriction of the airways, throat swelling, loss of consciousness, and a severe drop in blood pressure, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Doctors who administer Palforzia are required by the FDA to be educated on the risks of anaphylaxis, and the drug will only be available through certified healthcare providers, health care settings and pharmacies to patients enrolled in a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) program, or whose parents or caregivers are.

According to the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology, peanut allergies are the most common food allergy in the U.S. and a 2017 study found peanut allergies increased by 21 percent since 2010. With peanut allergies on the rise, this type of treatment can help prevent more serious reactions.

The European-built Solar Orbiter spacecraft was installed on top of its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 launcher Friday at Cape Canaveral, ready for final charging and checkouts before liftoff Feb. 9 to finally begin a more than $1.5 billion science mission first approved by the European Space Agency nearly 20 years ago.

Scientists are eager for the unprecedented images and data Solar Orbiter will beam back to Earth, including the first-ever views of the sun’s poles.

“It will be terra incognita,” said Daniel Müller, project scientist for the mission at the European Space Agency. “This is really exploratory science.”

“The sun is an extremely dynamic astronomical body,” said César García, ESA’s project manager for the Solar Orbiter mission. “It’s constantly ejecting mass, ejecting charged particles and ejecting magnetic fields into where we are, into the heliosphere.

“The purpose of this mission is looking at these very dynamic phenomena, and trying to determine what makes them happen,” García said.

But it’s been a long wait. Scientists first developed the concept for the Solar Orbiter mission in 1999, and ESA approved the project in 2000 for additional studies. At that time, officials expected the mission to be ready for launch between 2008 and 2013.

After a decade of concept studies, and the start of a new partnership with NASA, ESA formally selected Solar Orbiter in 2011 for full-scale development, with a launch scheduled in 2017.

But technical difficulties in building the Solar Orbiter spacecraft delayed the mission to 2020.

The nearly 3,900-pound (1,750-kilogram) spacecraft was transferred by truck from the Astrotech payload processing facility in Titusville, Florida, early Friday and arrived at ULA’s Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral’s Complex 41 launch pad several hours later. Teams there hoisted the Solar Orbiter spacecraft — already enclosed inside its 4-meter (13.1-f0ot) payload shroud — atop an Atlas 5 launcher.

The Solar Orbiter spacecraft’s mating with its launch vehicle was delayed two days this week, first by a SpaceX launch from the nearby Complex 40 launch pad Wednesday, which prevented the payload transfer to the VIF due to safety concerns because of the close proximity between the pads. Poor weather Thursday prevented Solar Orbiter from rolling out to the VIF on Thursday, but conditions improved for the transfer operation Friday.

The delays in attaching Solar Orbiter to its Atlas 5 launcher forced officials to push back the mission’s liftoff from Feb. 7 to Feb. 9. The two-hour launch window Feb. 9 opens at 11:03 p.m. EST (0403 GMT on Feb. 10).

The launch was originally slated for Feb. 5, but a technical issue discovered during a practice countdown on the Atlas 5 rocket prompted a two-day schedule slip to Feb. 7.

Solar Orbiter has launch opportunities through Feb. 23, or else wait until a backup launch period in October. The mission has limited launch windows because it must depart Earth on a trajectory toward Venus, which plays a major role in reshaping Solar Orbiter’s trajectory around the sun to set it up for the start of its science mission.

Over the past few weeks, teams at Astrotech have loaded the Airbus-built spacecraft with a quarter-ton of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants. Then technicians encapsulated the spacecraft inside the Atlas 5’s nose cone, which is emblazoned with logos for the Solar Orbiter mission, ESA and NASA.

While ESA leads the Solar Orbiter mission, NASA is paying for the probe’s launch, and there is one U.S.-led instrument on the spacecraft.

With the launch of Solar Orbiter, scientists will soon have two spacecraft observing the sun from locations closer than any previous mission.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe launched in August 2018 on a trajectory that takes it closer to the sun than Solar Orbiter. But Solar Orbiter carries cameras and telescopes, while Parker flies so close to the sun that scorching temperatures could damage, or destroy, sensitive imaging sensors.

And Solar Orbiter will circle the sun at a higher tilt than Parker, allowing views of the sun’s poles.

“Solar Orbiter will go into a unique location moving out of the sun-Earth plane and be able to, for the first time, image the poles of the sun, so it’s adding a whole new dimension to what we’re able to do now,” said Nicky Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division.

The first good look at the sun’s poles will come in 2025, when Solar Orbiter reaches a trajectory angled at 17 degrees to the ecliptic plane, the plane in which the solar system’s planets are located. Repeated flybys with Venus will gradually ratchet up the probe’s inclination, or orbital tilt, thanks to the planet’s gravity.

By 2029, after the end of Solar Orbiter’s primary mission phase, the spacecraft should be in an orbit inclined more than 33 degrees to the ecliptic plane, enabling even better views of the sun’s poles.

The Solar Orbiter mission, also known as SolO, is the next in a line of large-scale solar research mission developed in collaboration between the European Space Agency and NASA. It follows the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, mission launched in 1995, and the Ulysses probe launched in 1990 to study the sun’s polar regions for the first time.

Ulysses ceased operating in 2009, but SOHO continues collecting data and imagery to measure the sun’s output and help forecasters predict the impacts of solar storms, which could affect satellite navigation, communication and electrical grids on Earth.

“SOHO has shown tremendous resilience and lifetime,” said Günther Hasinger, director of ESA’s science program. “SOHO is still one of the backbones of space weather prediction. At some time in the future, SOHO will no longer work. There was Ulysses originally, then SOHO. We also have a number of small missions like the Proba 2 and Proba 3 missions, which are dedicated to solar research.

“But Solar Orbiter is clearly a new class in its own,” Hasinger said in a recent interview with Spaceflight Now. “It has loads of instruments, which will go not as close as Parker Solar Probe, but quite close. Solar Orbiter will also have eyes. Parker Solar Probe can only sense and measure the plasma and the magnetic field, but Solar Orbiter also has six instruments that can really look at the sun.”

Fitted with 10 science instruments, Solar Orbiter will swing inside the orbit of Mercury and travel as close as 26 million miles (42 million kilometers) from the sun, about a quarter of Earth’s distance from the sun. Temperatures encountered by Solar Orbiter could reach nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 530 degrees Celsius, according to Anne Pacros, Solar Orbiter’s mission and payload manager at ESA.

“It’s like being in a pizza oven, so you have to make sure that you don’t burn the instruments,” Hasinger said.

Solar Orbiter will see solar heating 13 times that experienced by a satellite in Earth orbit. Engineers developed a heat shield to protect the spacecraft from the hot temperatures, including sliding doors for the probe’s camera and telescopes.

The heat shield is made of several layers of titanium, the outermost of which is covered in a coating named “Solar Black,” which was specifically invented for the Solar Orbiter mission.

“We developed this black coating which is able to withstand about 500 degrees Celsius (more than 900 degrees Fahrenheit),” García said. “It is installed in a way that is separate from the spacecraft so that theres no conduction of heat from the very hot surface on the heat shield to the rest of the spacecraft.”

“What we want to do with Solar Orbiter is to understand how our star creates and (produces) this constantly-changing environment throughout the solar system,” said Yannis Zouganelis, ESA’s deputy project scientist for the mission. “We have big questions we want to answer.”

“There are still mysteries around our understanding of the energy sources in the sun that produces the magnetic field and solar flares,” Hasinger said. “A lot of people now think that some of the mysteries are actually hidden in the poles, which we have never seen. So the hope is that if we are able to observe the poles in a very accurate way, then we may understand better how the magnetic field is created and transported. In particular, the 11-year solar cycle seems to be linked to things that are happening on the poles.”

The Ulysses mission, thanks to a boost into a highly-inclined orbit from Jupiter’s gravity, carried instruments that measured the environment over the sun’s poles. But Ulysses did not have cameras, and it never flew closer to the sun than Earth.

Solar Orbiter will take around a half-year to complete one lap around the sun. At times, the spacecraft’s velocity relative to the sun will closely match the rate of the star’s rotation.

“So it’s almost like a geostationary satellite which always looks at the same spot of the sun for 10 days in a row,” Hasinger said. “That means you can really follow the development much more accurately and see how the magnetic field structures are developing.”

Scientists hope to learn more about the inner workings of stars by looking at the sun. But there’s also a tangible benefit, officials said.

“It is indeed a golden age for solar terrestrial physics,” Hasinger said. “It’s also, I think, an age where we are slowly moving from the scientific analysis to the understanding of space weather, and also space weather forecasting.

“So I think the whole element of space weather will become very important, not just for the environment of the Earth and the technical infrastructure, but also when you want to send astronauts to the moon and to Mars, space weather is a very important element,” Hasinger told Spaceflight Now.

The best infrared eye in the universe has closed, and scientists will need to wait at least a year before any similar instrument is at work again.

NASA turned off its Spitzer Space Telescope yesterday (Jan. 30), ending a 16-year mission. The agency at first stretched the observatory’s tenure to overlap with that of the next great infrared space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. But as that instrument continued to miss schedule targets, with a March 2021 launch currently targeted, NASA eventually concluded that a year’s gap in infrared observations of the universe wouldn’t harm science.

And so yesterday, NASA said farewell to the Spitzer and scientists said farewell to fresh data about the infrared cosmos.

Spitzer launched in 2003, designed for a 2.5-year mission. But like so many other NASA missions, it far outlived its original directive. Even after it ran out of the coolant needed to keep its most temperature-sensitive instrument working, Spitzer continued to gather valuable scientific data.

But Spitzer’s end has been coming since 2016, when NASA conducted a regular review of its missions and decided that it wasn’t worth operating the telescope once its successor came online. “The decision was made that the Spitzer mission should end as the James Webb mission was beginning,” Paul Hertz, director of the astrophysics division of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said during a news conference held on Jan. 22.

To that end, NASA extended Spitzer’s mission twice more, to keep pace with delays in launching Webb, settling on this week’s shutdown after Webb’s launch was scheduled for March 2021. “The time has come for the Spitzer mission to end as we move on to the launch of James Webb next year,” Hertz said.

The gap between telescopes could still lengthen; on Jan. 28, the Government Accountability Office released an oversight document about the James Webb Space Telescope reporting that the observatory had just a 12% chance of meeting the March 2021 launch target. Because of lost padding time in the project’s schedule, a more feasible launch date would fall in July 2021, the agency found.

And once the James Webb Space Telescope does launch, it won’t be quite the same. Although both observatories can sense infrared light, they aren’t quite interchangeable. Spitzer and Webb are targeted to two different ranges of infrared, with Webb primed to see shorter wavelengths — closer to visible light — than Spitzer did.

As you may have heard, Social Security, the nation’s most storied social program, is in a bit of a bind. Despite the fact that Social Security can’t go bankrupt (which is a testament to how the program generates income), the 2019 report from the Social Security Board of Trustees estimates that the program is facing a $13.9 trillion cash shortfall between 2035 and 2093. If nothing is done to correct this widening funding gap, then-current retirees and future generations of retired workers can expect a reduction to their payouts of up to 23%.

The Trustees report, which is published annually, has been warning Congress since 1985 that long-term (75-year) revenue generation would be insufficient to cover costs, yet lawmakers haven’t made any significant strides to overhaul the program. But according to recent commentary from President Trump, this could change if he’s elected to a second term in the Oval Office.

For years, Trump has leaned on the economy to strengthen Social Security

Since taking office three years ago, President Trump has primarily relied on indirect factors to influence Social Security and strengthen the program. Here’s what Trump had to say at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in March 2013, less than four years before winning the presidential election:

As Republicans, if you think you are going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you are going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen … What we have to do and the way we solve our problems is to build a great economy.

This is to say that Trump doesn’t believe direct solutions are a smart move for politicians, given that any direct changes to the program will result in some group of people ending up worse off than they were before. These people could wind up voting elected officials out of office.

Instead of actively angling to change the Social Security program, the president has pushed for measures that he believes will lift U.S. economic growth. The passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) in December 2017 is a perfect example of this. Since Social Security’s 12.4% payroll tax on earned income provides the bulk of revenue for the program ($885 billion out of $1 trillion collected in 2018), a stronger economy should lead to more payroll tax being collected.

For the past two years, the TCJA appears to have provided the U.S. economy with a modest boost, although it’s important to realize that indirect solutions are not a long-term answer to Social Security’s fundamental flaws. That’s what has President Trump considering the possibility of real Social Security reform.

Here’s what Trump said that has Social Security beneficiaries worried

Last week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, President Trump was interviewed by CNBC Squawk Box host Joe Kernen, with the two discussing everything from interest rates to the economy over a 20-minute span (link opens YouTube video of the interview). Toward the end of the interview (17:53 mark in the video, for those curious), Kernen got in one last question about “entitlements,” which includes such programs as Social Security and Medicare.

Kernen asked the president, “One last question: Entitlements ever be on your plate?”

To which Trump replied, “At some point they will be.”

These six words have completely shaken Social Security beneficiaries to the core, especially considering that Trump has been adamant about avoiding direct solutions since his presidential campaign began in 2015. The reason? Existing and future beneficiaries fear benefit reductions.

To be crystal clear, at no point in President Trump’s response did he state or imply that he or his administration would be looking to cut benefits for current retirees or future generations of retirees. Instead, Trump pivoted the discussion (on multiple occasions) to the expectation that U.S. economic growth is expected to pick up in a big way during the second half of 2020.

However, just because Trump didn’t directly say his administration would look to reduce Social Security’s outlays, doesn’t mean the evidence isn’t there.

If reelected, Trump is likely to push for direct Social Security reforms

Should Trump win a second term, there are three factors to suggest he would look to reduce Social Security’s expenditures (i.e., reduce lifetime benefits paid by the program).

First, there’s the core proposal of the Republican Party to fix Social Security, which Trump would be likely to support. Whereas Democrats favor raising additional revenue by increasing taxation on well-to-do workers, members of the GOP believe that gradually increasing the full retirement age to as high as age 70 would be the best move. The full retirement age is the age at which you become eligible for 100% of your monthly payout, as determined by your birth year.

If the full retirement age were to increase from its peak of age 67 in 2022 to say 70, it would require future generations of retirees to either wait longer to receive their full payout or to accept a steeper monthly reduction by claiming early. No matter their choice, the program’s long-term outlays would be reduced, and future generations of workers would receive lower lifetime benefits.

Second, Trump’s presidential budget proposals have previously called for cuts to the Social Security program. In March, the president’s federal budget proposal called for a $26 billion cut (in aggregate) to Social Security between 2020 and 2029. A good portion of this reduction was to come from the Social Security Disability program, with a proposed adjustment that would reduce retroactive pay to six months from the current 12 months. If adopted, this would reduce program outlays by an estimated $10 billion by 2029.

Third and finally, Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has not been shy about his plans to coerce the president to make tough decisions. Mulvaney is a fiscal hard-liner, and he strongly believes that entitlement reform, perhaps including cuts, should be on the table. Mulvaney is one of the president’s top advisors, and his influence could be paramount if Trump wins reelection.

Three important things to remember

While I don’t believe there’s any doubt that Trump’s tendency would be toward reducing long-term outlays when it comes to Social Security, there are a number of other factors that current and future beneficiaries need to consider.

For one, we can’t count our chickens before they’ve hatched. The election is still nine months away, and Trump stated at CPAC in 2013 that it’s akin to political suicide to directly go after Social Security while trying to win an election. Trump would first have to win the 2020 presidential election for any of the above context to have any meaning. In short, don’t get too far ahead when discussing the ramifications of what Trump said this past week while in Davos.

Secondly, even if Trump wins reelection and chooses to tackle Social Security reform, he’ll find the sledding difficult if Democrats maintain control of the House and/or if Republicans don’t gain significant ground in the Senate. Trump will not be able to unilaterally implement changes to the Social Security program, which should give certain beneficiaries a sigh of relief. The fact is that a polarized Congress (at least on party lines) makes Social Security reform highly unlikely in the near term.

Lastly — and I know this is going to sound crazy — the long-term cuts that beneficiaries fear are very much part of the puzzle to fixing Social Security. The addition of new revenue through taxation, as proposed by Democrats, would help solve a lot of Social Security’s near-term funding concerns, while the GOP’s proposals would aid in reducing long-term outlays and counteracting increased life longevity and lower birth rates. In effect, Democrats and Republicans may dislike what their opposition has to offer, but both are very much needed to make Social Security a stronger program.

On a day when the S&P 500 fell the most since October, the world’s richest person got $7.9 billion richer.

Jeff Bezos’s fortune swelled to $124.2 billion Friday as shares of his Amazon.com Inc. surged 7.4%, a day after the largest U.S. e-commerce company stunned investors with a fourth-quarter profit that far exceeded Wall Street estimates. His net worth climbed $9.3 billion through the first month of the year, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Read more: Amazon holiday results crush Wall Street estimates; shares surge

Bezos, 56, owns about 12% of Amazon’s outstanding stock, making up the bulk of his fortune. His ownership of closely held Blue Origin accounts for about $6.2 billion. Friday’s surge pushed Amazon’s market value to $999.96 billion.

His ex-wife, MacKenzie Bezos, 49, owns about 4% of the Seattle-based retailer. The world’s fifth-richest woman now has a net worth of $40 billion.

See also: Elon Musk adds $2.3 billion to his fortune in 60 minutes

Bezos wasn’t the only tech titan whose net worth changed dramatically this week. Elon Musk’s swelled by $2.7 billion since Wednesday, after shares of his Tesla Inc. surged on better-than-expected results and an accelerated timetable for the electric-vehicle maker’s new Model Y crossover SUV.

Mark Zuckerberg’s fortune tumbled $5.9 billion on the week after Facebook Inc. posted its slowest-ever quarterly sales growth.

Around the turn of the millennium, General Motors made a decision: Electric cars were out. Giant trucks were a hit.

So the company abandoned its pioneering electric vehicle — not just stopping production but pulling cars off the road and crushing them. And it went all-in on the gas-guzzling military-style behemoth called the Hummer.

The polarizing vehicle hummed along for a little while, before the recession and skyrocketing gas prices killed it.

Now, the Hummer is making a comeback that once would have seemed improbable, even laughable.

GM is reviving the Hummer brand. But this time it’s going to be electric.

GM is announcing the Hummer’s resurrection in an ad airing during the Super Bowl this Sunday. The vehicle itself — an electric pickup — will be revealed in May, with production beginning in late 2021.

The Hummer carries a hefty load of cultural baggage, says Marty Padgett, an editor at The Car Connection and the author of Hummer.

The brand — descended from the military Humvee and famously beloved by Arnold Schwarzenegger — was made by AM General in the 1990s, before General Motors acquired the brand in 1999. Production of the GM Hummer ramped up as GM was shutting down its EV1 electric car program.

The company had “no foresight to think that maybe they should also keep their electric car programs alive,” Padgett says. In GM’s view, “trucks were selling amazingly well and electric cars were nothing more than an experiment.”

Then GM heavily promoted the Hummer and the slightly less-gigantic H2 as America was launching the war in Iraq.

“Advertisements for the GM Hummer were appearing in between CNN segments on the invasions,” Padgett says. “What other consumer product has launched in such a controversial way, at such a controversial time?”

If the rise of the Hummer was a sign of the times, its electric revival is a sign of how times have changed.

Americans are, once again, wild for giant trucks and SUVs. But Tesla definitively proved that electric cars are not just an experiment. And — inspired by Tesla — carmakers are making electric vehicles and highlighting performance, not efficiency and eco-friendliness.

“I have this theory that the electric car segment is getting bro-ified,” Padgett says. “They’re appealing to a very masculine demographic and they’re doing it overtly.”

In fact, Arnold Schwarzenegger — the epitome of the manly Hummer driver — is an electric vehicle enthusiast who already owns an electric Hummer. It was refitted for him by an Austrian startup.

But the new GM vehicle might look a little different than Schwarzenegger’s custom vehicle — we don’t know much about the appearance yet.

We do know the new Hummer will be a pickup. And it will have a ton of competition.

“There is suddenly going to be a slew of electric trucks, almost as many as … the full-size trucks that exist right now,” says Jessica Caldwell, the head of Industry Analysis at Edmunds. Among them are the Tesla Cybertruck, Ford’s F-150, and the startups Rivian, Lordstown Motors and Bollinger.

Trucks are tremendously popular. The top three best-selling vehicles in America are all pickups. And they’re not cheap.

“We think of them as workhorses, kind of that American icon,” Caldwell says. “But they’re expensive now. The average large truck transacts at almost $50,000.”

Add premium options and you can easily drop more than $70,000 on a pickup, even without an electric motor. So automakers — who are struggling to make money off smaller cars, particularly electric cars — welcome high-margin pickups as a major moneymaker.

“The whole market is going to electrification,” Caldwell says, and automakers like GM “don’t want to lose a part of that very lucrative truck business.”

By putting this new electric pickup in the GMC family and giving it a familiar name, GM is positioning it as a premium pickup, Caldwell says.

So while the cost, like much else about the vehicle, has not yet been announced, expect a hefty price tag — and the possibility that it will make GM a Hummer-sized pile of money.