Month: December 2016

Enlarge / Paris as seen through a veil of smog, taken in early October. (credit: Getty Images | PATRICK KOVARIK/AFP)

You have to feel for the Europeans out there who own small diesel-engined cars. For years, car companies and governments have extolled the breed, discounting the fuel and promoting it as the way to achieve economical vehicles with acceptable carbon emissions. Then it turns out that diesel emissions—which include a lot more than just CO₂—are actually really bad for us. Plus, cheating appeared to be rampant within the industry.

After pushing diesel cars for so long, a volte-face is now underway, including measures to ban diesel engines from Paris, Athens, and Madrid (as well as Mexico City, which we do realize is not in Europe).

The plan, announced in Mexico City during the C40 Mayors Summit which took place this week, follows restrictions recently enacted by the Parisian mayor to clean up that city's air quality. Over in Japan, Tokyo actually banned diesel engines at the turn of the century, although advances in engine technology and emissions controls have seen that relaxed in recent years.

Enlarge / You're doing it wrong. (credit: Charles Nadeau)

The current leadership of the US House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has a fraught relationship with climate science. Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who chairs the committee, has used its subpoena powers to target NOAA climate scientists whose temperature dataset he does not like. He has also gone after the attorneys general of New York and Massachusetts, who are pursuing a securities fraud investigation of ExxonMobil related to its public denial of climate change.

On Thursday, the committee’s Twitter account hopped on this anti-climate-science bandwagon. It tweeted a link to a story titled “Global temperatures plunge. Icy silence from climate alarmists” that was published by Breitbart—the hard-right, white-nationalist-supporting news outlet that saw its chairman, Steve Bannon, become President-elect Donald Trump’s chief strategist.

The article was written by James Delingpole, a columnist who has made a career out of insult-laden polemics against climate science. (In an episode of BBC’s Horizon, Delingpole famously admitted that he never reads scientific papers and called himself “an interpreter of interpretations.”) In this case, Delingpole mostly tacked a few put-downs onto quotes from a Daily Mail story written by David Rose—who also has a long history of writing deeply misleading stories about climate science.

Enlarge (credit: Mambembe Arts & Crafts on Flickr)

When 20-year-old Lan Cai was in a car crash this summer, it was a bad situation. Driving home at 1:30am from a waitressing shift, Cai was plowed into by a drunk driver and broke two bones in her lower back. Unsure about how to navigate her car insurance and prove damages, she reached out for legal help.

The help she got, Cai said, was less than satisfactory. Lawyers from the Tuan A. Khuu law firm ignored her contacts, and at one point they came into her bedroom while Cai was sleeping in her underwear. "Seriously, it's super unprofessional!" she wrote on Facebook. (The firm maintains it was invited in by Cai's mother.) She also took to Yelp to warn others about her bad experience.

The posts led to a threatening e-mail from Tuan Khuu attorney Keith Nguyen. "If you do not remove the post from Facebook and any other social media sites, my office will have no choice but to file suit," he told her, according to a report in the Houston Press on the saga.

Enlarge / Uber's iOS popup asking for new surveillance permissions. (credit: David Kravets)

As promised, Uber is now tracking you even when your ride is over. The ride-hailing service said the surveillance—even when riders close the app—will improve its service.

The company now tracks customers from when they request a ride until five minutes after the ride has ended. According to Uber, the move will help drivers locate riders without having to call them, and it will also allow Uber to analyze whether people are being dropped off and picked up properly—like on the correct side of the street.

"We do this to improve pickups, drop-offs, customer service, and to enhance safety," Uber said. In a statement, the company said:

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The Federal Communications Commission has reached a preliminary conclusion that AT&T is violating net neutrality rules by using data cap exemptions to favor DirecTV video on its mobile network.

The FCC yesterday also expressed concerns to Verizon about that carrier's similar data cap exemption policies, but the examination of Verizon is in a slightly earlier stage.

The FCC first raised the issue with AT&T a few weeks ago, and AT&T defended its practices in a response. But rather than satisfying the commission's concerns, AT&T's response "tends to confirm our initial view that the Sponsored Data program strongly favors AT&T's own video offerings while unreasonably discriminating against unaffiliated edge providers and limiting their ability to offer competing video services to AT&T's broadband subscribers on a level playing field," said a letter to AT&T yesterday from Jon Wilkins, chief of the FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.

Enlarge / A screenshot from Racer, the driving simulation software used for the task. (credit: Racer)

Despite how much noise pop psychology makes about being left-brained or right-brained, the brain is really a very cohesive unit. The right and left hemispheres have some differences, but they communicate with each other via dedicated neural connections that bridge the two halves of the brain.

Some people, though, have the two halves of their brains separated as a treatment for severe epilepsy. What’s remarkable is that this has fewer effects than you might imagine. Although there certainly are differences in how a split brain behaves, people who have this surgery tend to behave largely as we'd expect anyone else to, and they're actually better at certain kinds of dual tasks.

These split-brained individuals are interesting because they can help us understand how the brain processes information and how it integrates or separates tasks that are running concurrently. For instance, we know that the two hemispheres in a split brain have to process tasks separately from each other (the connection between them is gone, remember), with each hemisphere unaware of what the other one is up to.