A CRUISE SELF-DRIVING CAR GOT A TRAFFIC TICKET—GM SAYS IT DID NOTHING WRONG
A car from GM’s self-driving car unit, Cruise, received a traffic ticket last week from a San Francisco police officer who said that a Cruise car drove uncomfortably close to a pedestrian. Cruise disputes the officer’s accusation, saying that the vehicle stayed more than 10 feet away from the pedestrian. Source: arstechnica.com
MARS ONE IS A “MONEY GRAB” WHERE EVERYONE LOSES
The space tourism startup Mars One has been called many things over the years, some more flattering than others. Though it’s had the opportunity to fold many times, and in spite of claims it’s scamming its own customers, the project with the stated goal of sending people to Mars has come up with bewildering new techniques to keep its charade afloat.
Read moreFESTO’S NEW BIONIC ROBOTS INCLUDE ROLLING SPIDER, FLYING FOX
We love Festo because every year they invest an entirely appropriate amount of time and money into bio-inspired robots that are totally cool and very functional but have limited usefulness. More often than not, it seems like Festo is able to take some of what it learns from designing and constructing these things and create practical new revenue-generating products. Which is good for them, and means they’ll keep making cool stuff.
Read moreUBER IS RIPPING OFF FREQUENT RIDERS AND HERE’S HOW TO AVOID IT
Uber appears to have the opposite of a rewards program. That is, it appears the more you use Uber as a passenger, the more they’re going to charge you per mile. We know Uber said they were going to experimenton charging different customers different rate, based on a variety of unpublished factors. My current belief is the more you use the service in a way that suggests you can afford more, the more they will charge you.
Read moreTEACHING MACHINES TO SPOT ESSENTIAL INFORMATION IN PHYSICAL SYSTEMS
Two physicists at ETH Zurich and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have developed a novel machine-learning algorithm that analyses large data sets describing a physical system and extract from them the essential information needed to understand the underlying physics. Source: phys.org
HOW WAREHOUSES FOR PERSONAL JUNK BECAME A $38B INDUSTRY
One in 11 Americans pays an average of $91.14 per month to use self-storage, finding a place for the material overflow of the American dream. According to SpareFoot, a company that tracks the self-storage industry, the United States boasts more than 50,000 facilities and roughly 2.311 billion square feet of rentable space. In other words, the volume of self-storage units in the country could fill the Hoover Dam with old clothing, skis, and keepsakes more than 26 times.
Read moreNETWORK OF FORTIFIED TOWNS INDICATES AMAZON WAS ONCE HEAVILY POPULATED
Today we think of the Amazon as a pristine rainforest, sparsely populated by indigenous communities. But in records from the 1500s, Spanish colonizers describe a densely populated region, crisscrossed by canals and sunken roads and dotted with bustling, fortified towns. Unfortunately, fortification couldn’t protect the towns’ inhabitants against European diseases, which devastated South American indigenous populations and left the fortified villages abandoned.
Read moreHOW SHYP SUNK: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN ON-DEMAND STARTUP
That was Shyp cofounder and CEO Kevin Gibbon back in early 2016, chastising some of his fellow entrepreneurs. At the time, he was scrambling to chart a different sort of future for his own venture-backed startup. But that quest ends today. A half-decade after its founding, San Francisco-based Shyp is ending operations and laying off all its employees. Source: fastcompany.com
SOCIAL INEQUALITY LEAVES A GENETIC MARK
In humans, the profound biological differences that exist between the sexes mean that a single male is physically capable of having far more children than is a single female. Women carry unborn children for nine months and often nurse them for several years prior to having additional children. Men, meanwhile, are able to procreate while investing far less time in the bearing and early rearing of each child.
Read moreNEED TO MAKE A MOLECULE? ASK THIS AI FOR INSTRUCTIONS
Chemists have a new lab assistant: artificial intelligence. Researchers have developed a ‘deep learning’ computer program that produces blueprints for the sequences of reactions needed to create small organic molecules, such as drug compounds. The pathways that the tool suggests look just as good on paper as those devised by human chemists. The tool, described in Nature on 28 March1, is not the first software to wield artificial intelligence (AI) instead of human skill and intuition. Yet chemists hail the development as a milestone, saying that it could speed up the process of drug discovery and make organic chemistry more efficient.
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