Month: January 2017

The all-new eighth-generation Toyota Camry. (video link)

DETROIT—Several things come to mind when I think of the Toyota Camry. They're reliable, competent, ubiquitous even; the Camry has topped sales charts for a decade and a half now. But it's not the most exciting thing on four wheels, a car sometimes referred to as a driving appliance. Toyota has evidently decided to do something about that. At the launch of the eighth-generation Camry at this year's North American International Auto Show, the company announced the new car has gained "emotionally charged design and performance experience."

In other words, it's supposed to be fun to drive and has gained some needed visual flair.  According to the car's Chief Engineer, Masato Katsumata, "In order to create something that stirs people’s soul, we’ve laid out the concept of a new sedan that provides fun and excitement behind the wheel." The new Camry uses the same Toyota New Global Architecture platform as last year's Prius, and it's now lower, wider, and more sleek than the outgoing car.

Geneticist Michael Snyder, wearing seven biosensors. (credit: Stanford Medicine, Steve Fisch)

There’s been plenty of hope and buzz in the recent years that wearable technology will upend healthcare as we know it. Commercial devices strapped to our persons will—makers promise—empower individuals to monitor and control their own health, plus they'll help guide the care people receive by medical professionals.

But so far, there’s been a rather noticeable gap between the data we collect on our little devices and better health and healthcare for most. Does your doctor really care about or know what to do with your Fitbit data? Is your Apple Watch making you healthier?

Often, when people use wearables, “they get all excited for about three months, and then they stop looking at them,” precision medicine expert Michael Snyder of Stanford told Ars.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. (credit: FCC)

In his final speech before leaving the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Tom Wheeler today made the case for why net neutrality rules are working and said that Republican commissioners won't necessarily have an easy time overturning the rules.

"Contrary to what you might have heard, reversing the Open Internet rules is not a slam dunk," Wheeler said at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC. "The effort to undo an open Internet will face the high hurdle, imposed by the Administrative Procedure Act, of a fact-based showing that so much has changed in just two short years that a reversal is justified."

The speech's full text is available here.

(credit: Amy Marbach)

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had finalized the rules governing fuel efficiency for vehicles made until 2025. The rules ratchet up the fuel efficiency numbers that automakers must meet over the span of the next eight years. By 2025, automakers will have to hit an overall 51.4 mpg average efficiency rating for their fleet, which translates to about 36 mpg in real-world driving conditions—a bump of 10 mpg from what US fleets get today.

The decision comes just a week before the Trump administration takes office. President-elect Donald Trump has not commented on the EPA’s fuel efficiency guidelines, but automakers had been hoping that the EPA would delay signing off on this rule so that his administration might relax fuel efficiency standards out to 2025. Trump has denied the existence of climate change—a factor in the EPA’s fuel efficiency decisions—despite the preponderance of evidence showing that climate change is real and human-caused.

Although a Trump administration could reverse the EPA’s new rules, doing so will be significantly harder than if the EPA had left the process for finalizing its December recommendations up to the new administration.

Enlarge / Virginia State Capitol in Richmond. (credit: Getty Images | Joe Daniel Price)

Virginia lawmakers are considering a bill called the "Virginia Broadband Deployment Act," but instead of resulting in more broadband deployment, the legislation would make it more difficult for municipalities to offer Internet service.

The Virginia House of Delegates legislation proposed this week by Republican lawmaker Kathy Byron (full text) would prohibit municipal broadband deployments except in very limited circumstances. Among other things, a locality wouldn't be allowed to offer Internet service if an existing network already provides 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 90 percent of potential customers. That speed threshold is low enough that it can be met by old DSL lines in areas that haven't received more modern cable and fiber networks.

Even if that condition is met, a city or town would have to jump through a few hoops before offering service. The municipality would have to pay for a "comprehensive broadband assessment," and then issue a request for proposals giving for-profit ISPs six months to submit a plan for broadband deployment. After receiving proposals from private ISPs, the local government would have to determine whether providing grants or subsidies to a private ISP would be more cost-effective than building a municipal broadband network.

An artist's concept of Moon Express' MX-1 lander on the surface of the Moon. (credit: Moon Express)

Any organization wishing to accomplish a major spaceflight goal must address two basic sets of problems—rocket science and political science. And while the technical challenges of spaceflight are considerable, it’s arguable that political science remains the greater of these two hurdles. Building spacecraft and rockets requires lots of money, after all, and due to international law they can’t just be launched from anywhere to anywhere.

So it is no small achievement for the private, US-based Moon Express to have conquered the political science part of sending a rover to the Moon. Last August, after a lengthy regulatory process, the company received permission from the US government to send a commercial mission beyond low Earth orbit. And on Friday, the company announced that it has successfully raised an additional $20 million, meaning it has full funding for its maiden lunar mission. “Now it’s just about the rocket science stuff,” said company co-founder and Chief Executive Bob Richards. That, he realizes, remains a formidable challenge.

Moon Express is one of five entrants in the Google Lunar X Prize competition to finalize a launch contract. Each of the teams is competing to become the first to send a rover to the lunar surface by the end of this year, have it travel 500 meters, and transmit high-definition imagery back to Earth. First prize is $20 million.