Month: April 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Leon Neal)

Amazon is constantly thinking of new ways it can cut costs and revolutionize the shipping and delivery industry. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon formed a team about a year ago of a dozen employees to focus on driverless-vehicle technology and develop the company's plans to use self-driving cars to better its business.

Amazon doesn't plan on building its own self-driving cars for now. Instead, this newly formed team is tasked with figuring out how the company can use autonomous vehicle technology to deliver packages more quickly. Not only could self-driving cars be used to deliver packages to customers during the final leg of the shipping process, but Amazon could use autonomous cars, trucks, forklifts, and drones to move goods in and around warehouses and elsewhere.

Shipping and delivery costs continue to rise for Amazon as it delivers more categories of products. Autonomous vehicles could cut those costs, especially considering that they don't have the same time restrictions that humans do. Humans, specifically truck drivers, have a 10-hour limit before they need to stop for rest. A shipment that originally took a few days to move across the country in a human-driven vehicle could take half the time with a self-driving car. According to the report, Amazon is particularly interested in autonomous trucking.

Enlarge / Oh, there's that cure I was looking for. (credit: Getty | Harold M. Lambert)

Tried, true, and FDA-approved drugs for cancer and depression—already in medicine cabinets—may also be long-sought treatments for devastating brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other forms of dementia, according to a new study in Brain, a Journal of Neurology.

The research is still in early stages; it only involved mouse and cell experiments, which are frequently not predictive of how things will go in humans. Nevertheless, the preliminary findings are strong, and scientists are optimistic that the drugs could one day help patients with progressive brain disease. Researchers are moving toward human trials. And this process would be streamlined because the drugs have already cleared safety tests. But even if the early findings hold up, it would still take years to reach patients.

In the preliminary tests, the two drugs—trazodone hydrochloride, used to treat depression and anxiety, and dibenzoylmethane (DBM), effective against prostate and breast tumors—could shut down a devastating stress response in brain cells, known to be critical for the progression of brain diseases. The drugs both protected brain cells and restored memory in mice suffering from brain diseases.

Enlarge / A truck from Idaho arrived at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at night. (credit: WIPP)

The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in Carlsbad, New Mexico, began accepting shipments of transuranic waste (PDF) this month for the first time since February 2014 when an explosion of a drum of plutonium and americium waste halted all deliveries.

WIPP is the only facility that accepts waste from the nation’s Cold War-era nuclear weapons production sites. The waste has been kept at those production sites for decades and includes “contaminated items such as clothing, tools, rags, residues, debris, soil.” The New Mexico facility, carved into a 2,000-foot-thick salt bed in the 1980s, is intended to be a long-term storage solution (a very long-term solution) for all the waste that's distributed at facilities across the country.

The 2014 accident at WIPP occurred when a worker packed a shipment of waste in the wrong kind of kitty litter, which started a “complex chemical reaction” causing “white, radioactive foam” to explode from the drum, according to the Los Angeles Times. No one was in the WIPP shafts at the time of the explosion, so no one was hurt, and workers on the surface were only exposed to minimal radiation. But the facility’s state-of-the-art ventilation system was damaged, meaning shipments to the facility couldn’t continue.

Finding out the price for Internet service shouldn't be this difficult.

Verizon's rollout yesterday of a $70-per-month gigabit Internet plan was pretty confusing.

The Verizon announcement said the gigabit service would be immediately available to more than 8 million homes and did not say that the $70 price would only be available to certain customers. But it turned out that the $70 price was only for customers who don't have Verizon FiOS service today. Existing customers who tried to upgrade yesterday were told that the standard price was as much as $200 a month.

After exchanging many e-mails throughout the day yesterday with a Verizon spokesperson, we now have a better understanding of what went wrong and what should happen next. Verizon promised a "revolutionary speed and a revolutionary price." But there's more than one price.

Behold: It's No Game, written by an AI and starring the great David Hasselhoff. (video link)

Last year, director Oscar Sharp and AI researcher Ross Goodwin released the stunningly weird short film Sunspring. It was a sci-fi tale written entirely by an algorithm that eventually named itself Benjamin. Now the two humans have teamed up with Benjamin again to create a follow-up movie, It's No Game, about what happens when AI gets mixed up in an impending Hollywood writers' strike. Ars is excited to debut the movie here, so go ahead and watch. We also talked to the film cast and creators about what it's like to work with an AI.

The scenario in It's No Game is sort of like Robocop, with about 20 hits of acid layered on top. Two screenwriters (Tim Guinee and Walking Dead's Thomas Payne) are meeting with a producer (Flesh and Bone's Sarah Hay), who informs them that it doesn't matter if they go on strike because the future is AI writing movies for other AI. As evidence, she shows them Sunspring, gushing about how it "got a million hits." The fact that Sunspring did in fact get a million hits in real life, and that there really is a writer's strike threatening Hollywood, make this movie even more of a reality distortion field.