Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Nissan)

Driverless cars could imminently be operating on London's streets, after Nissan announced it had been cleared by the UK government to commence limited trials.

While Google has been testing its own autonomous vehicles on public roads near its Californian headquarters, Nissan claimed that its driverless cars will be the first to hit public roads in Europe—if, that is, the Japanese manufacturer receives final approval from an undisclosed local authority in the UK's capital.

Nissan's round of secretive tests will apparently see passengers escorted across a route in a single borough, a spokesperson told Ars, once clearance is confirmed. However, the trials won't be open to all-comers—instead, politicians, regulators, and safety experts will have access to "real-world demonstrations," with backup drivers present in the cars at all times.

Science Advances

The electrochemical masterminds at Stanford University have created a lithium-ion battery with built-in flame suppression. When the battery reaches a critical temperature (160 degrees Celsius in this case), an integrated flame retardant is released, extinguishing any flames within 0.4 seconds. Importantly, the addition of an integrated flame retardant doesn't reduce the performance of the battery.

As you may have surmised from the recent exploding Galaxy Note 7 fracas, one of the few weaknesses of lithium-ion batteries is that they contain a highly flammable electrolyte. If a Li-ion battery undergoes thermal runaway—due to physical damage, or perhaps a fault in the charging/discharging circuit—the result is usually a very big fire, sometimes followed by an explosion.

Enlarge (credit: Thinkstock / Aurich)

When Cathy Corman bought a house in 1998, she didn’t mind that it had no cable service. Corman was finishing a dissertation, her husband was starting a new job, and they were raising five-year-old triplets—they didn’t spend much time watching TV. And to get on the Web, all they needed was a phone line and a dial-up Internet subscription.

But years passed and dial-up Internet became a quaint memory for most Americans. The cable industry that gained its dominance by offering TV service became the top provider of high-speed broadband. For most of 2016, Corman’s house still didn’t have cable, fiber, or any access to reliable, high-speed Internet service despite its location outside of Boston in densely populated and affluent Brookline, Massachusetts.

Corman, a university lecturer and journalist, needed fast Internet service, and the local cable companies, RCN and Comcast, were offering it to nearly all of their neighbors. But for reasons that weren’t totally clear, her family’s house had never been hooked up, and the cable companies wouldn’t wire up the house unless the couple paid for all of the necessary construction and permitting.