The second person to receive a transplanted heart from a pig has died, 40 days after the highly experimental surgery, CNN reported. Lawrence Faucette, 58, was dying from heart failure when he received the genetically modified pig heart on September 20. According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the heart had seemed healthy for the first month but began showing signs of rejection in recent days. He lived for nearly six weeks after the surgery and died on Monday.

”Mr. Faucette had made significant progress after his surgery, engaging in physical therapy, spending time with family members, and playing cards with his wife, Ann. In recent days, his heart began to show initial signs of rejection –the most significant challenge with traditional transplants involving human organs as well. Despite the medical team’s greatest efforts, Mr. Faucette ultimately succumbed on October 30,” a statement released by the hospital said. 

Mr. Faucette was a Navy veteran and retired lab technician at the National Institutes of Health. He had been turned down for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when he came to the Maryland hospital.  Without the experimental transplant, the father of two was facing near-certain heart failure.

Mr Faucette’s wife, Ann, said her husband ”knew his time with us was short and this was his last chance to do for others. He never imagined he would survive as long as he did.”

”Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience, so others may be guaranteed a chance for a new heart when a human organ is unavailable. He then told the team of doctors and nurses who gathered around him that he loved us. We will miss him tremendously,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, clinical director of the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program at the University of Maryland School of Medicine said. 

Transplanting animal organs into humans, called xenotransplantation, could offer a solution to the chronic shortage of human organ donations. However, these procedures are challenging because the patient’s immune system attacks the foreign organ. Scientists hoped that genetically modifying pig parts to make them more like human organs would work.

The Maryland team last year had also performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another man. He died two months after his transplant. David Bennett, 57, received his transplant on January 7, 2022, and died on March 8, the University of Maryland Medical System said in a statement.

Two Chinese icebreaker research vessels and a cargo ship set sail today for the Antarctic with more than 460 personnel on board to help complete construction of China’s fifth station on the world’s southernmost continent.

China’s biggest flotilla of research vessels deployed to the Antarctic will focus on building the station on the rocky, windswept Inexpressible Island near the Ross Sea, a deep Southern Ocean bay named after a 19th century British explorer.

Work on the first Chinese station in the Pacific sector began in 2018. It will be used to conduct research on the region’s environment, state television reported.

China has four research stations in the Antarctic built from 1985 to 2014. A U.S.-based think tank estimated the fifth could be finished next year.

The facility is expected to include an observatory with a satellite ground station, and should help China “fill in a major gap” in its ability to access the continent, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said in a report this year.

The station is also well situated to collect signals intelligence over Australia and New Zealand and telemetry data on rockets launched from Australia’s new Arnhem Space Centre, it said.

China rejects suggestions that its stations would be used for espionage.

The two icebreakers, Xuelong 1 and Xuelong 2, the name means “Snow Dragon” in Chinese, set sail from Shanghai with mostly personnel and logistics supplies on board.

The cargo ship “Tianhui”, or “Divine Blessings”, taking construction material for the station, set off from the eastern port of Zhangjiagang.

The five-month mission will include a survey on the impact of climate change.

The two icebreakers will also conduct environmental surveys in the Prydez Bay, the Astronaut Sea in southeast Antarctic, and in the Ross Sea and Amundsen Sea in the west.

The mission, China’s 40th to the Antarctic, will also cooperate with countries including the United States, Britain, and Russia on logistics supply, state media said.

A parliamentary panel on information technology is likely to summon Apple Inc officials over the iPhone notifications row, sources said today. The controversy was triggered yesterday by opposition leaders alleging they received alerts from Apple indicating their devices could have been the targets of state-sponsored attacks.

The issue will be raised in the next meeting of the parliamentary standing committee on IT, sources said. The Opposition MPs are also likely to ask questions during the meeting, sources said.

Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had brushed off Opposition concerns about iPhone hacking yesterday.

“It is election season and people will pull all sorts of things from a hat,” he told NDTV in an exclusive interview. “Many people have got this notification in many countries,” Mr Chandrasekhar told NDTV, but seconded his boss Ashwini Vaishnaw’s comments about the need for an investigation.

Multiple opposition MPs, also including Congress leaders Pawan Khera and Shashi Tharoor, AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, and the Aam Aadmi Party’s Raghav Chadha, posted screenshots of messages and emails they received from Apple on X, formerly Twitter.

The centre has said it expects Apple to clarify several matters, including whether its devices were secure and why these “threat notifications” were sent to people in over 150 countries.

Mr Chandrasekhar in a post on X said Apple has repeatedly claimed their products are designed for privacy, but the centre will investigate the “threat notifications” and also Apple’s claim of being secure and making privacy-compliant devices.

Responding to the claims of hacking alert, Apple yesterday said it “does not attribute the notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker”. The iPhone manufacturer also said “it is possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms”.

In a brief statement drawn from its technical support page, Apple said “state-sponsored attackers tend to be very well-funded and sophisticated… detecting such attacks relies on threat intelligence signals that are often imperfect and incomplete.”

“It is possible some notifications may be false alarms or that some attacks are not detected,” the company said.