Month: December 2015

Apart from the sensor bar on the roof, this Ford Fusion Hybrid looks just like a normal car. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Even more robots are coming to California's roads next year. Yesterday, Ford announced that it will start testing its autonomous Fusion sedans in the state now that it is officially enrolled in the California Autonomous Vehicle Testing Program. The company opened a new R&D center in Palo Alto at the beginning of the year, which among other projects has been working on virtual simulations of autonomous driving as well as sensor fusion to improve the way its cars perceive the world around them.

Ford is the 11th group to obtain a California driving license for its autonomous cars, joining other OEMs (BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, Nissan, Tesla, and Volkswagen Group), tier one suppliers (Bosch and Delphi), and tech companies (Cruise Automation and Google).

A condition of the self-driving car regulations requires companies to provide California's DMV with a report any time one of their cars is involved in a collision. Since the rules went into effect in September 2014, there have been a total of 10 incidents. The first, in October 2014, involved one of Delphi's test vehicles, although it was being driven by a human at the time. The nine other incidents all involve Google's cars, seven of which were being driven autonomously.

(credit: Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock)

A week after saying the US should disrupt the Islamic terrorist group ISIS' online recruiting by "closing that Internet up in some way," Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was given a chance to clarify what he meant at last night's GOP debate.

"You talk freedom of speech. You talk freedom of anything you want. I don’t want them using our Internet to take our young, impressionable youth," Trump said at the debate. "We should be using our brilliant people, our most brilliant minds to figure a way that ISIS cannot use the Internet."

Trump's "our Internet" phrasing referred to the fact that Americans invented the Internet, but he said he doesn't want to shut down the Internet in the US—only in other countries.

Detective David Edward Abbott.

The Virginia police officer who wanted to photograph a 17-year-old boy's erect penis in connection to a juvenile sexting case committed suicide Tuesday as authorities went to arrest him on pedophilia-related charges. Those charges were not connected to last year's sexting case that received global media coverage.

Detective David Edward Abbott, a member of the Northern Virginia-Washington DC Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force, last year had obtained a warrant to inject a young boy with a drug that would cause an erection. Abbott wanted to photograph that erection and compare it with photos found on a 15-year-old girl's phone. Amid a public outcry, the Manassas City police eventually decided against doing that. The 17-year-old boy got a year of probation for sexting his teen girlfriend.

Abbott then sued the boy's attorney. He claimed Jessica Foster caused him "severe emotional distress" when The Washington Post reported that "Foster said Detective Abbott told her that after obtaining photos of the teen's erect penis he would use 'special software to compare pictures of this penis to this penis. Who does this? It's just crazy.'"

A zebra finch, commonly used in neurobiology experiments. (credit: Georgia Tech)

Many neuroscience studies in animals involve some type of short-term (or acute) manipulation of the brain, followed by behavioral tests. When manipulations of a specific brain circuit are followed by behavioral changes, neuroscientists generally conclude that the circuit contributes to the behavior that's been changed.

But brain circuits are very densely packed and highly interconnected, so it’s hard to manipulate one without influencing others. This makes it particularly challenging to know if the behavioral effects are caused by the part of the brain that was targeted or by some other part that happens to be closely connected to it.

A paper published in Nature shows that short-term alterations and long-term damage can have different effects on behavior. The findings raise a significant caution about the cause-and-effect nature of manipulating the brain and provide a reminder that the brain can sometimes work its way around damage.