Month: March 2018

Enlarge (credit: Waymo)

Waymo, Google's self-driving car company, is moving beyond driverless taxis. The company announced on Friday that its self-driving trucks have begun hauling real cargo in the Atlanta area. A safety driver in the truck will take over if anything goes wrong.

"Over the past year, we’ve been conducting road tests of Waymo’s self-driving trucks in California and Arizona," Waymo wrote in a blog post. Now the trucks are going to haul loads to Google's data centers in the state of Georgia.

Waymo already announced in January that it was expanding testing of its self-driving taxi service to the Atlanta area.

(credit: White House)

Although he has kept a low profile since leaving office, former President Barack Obama may soon have a new high-profile project on his hands. According to a report by The New York Times, both Barack and Michelle Obama are reportedly in "advanced negotiations" with Netflix to produce exclusive content for the streaming service.

While the types of shows or number of episodes are currently unknown, people familiar with the matter claim the Obamas may produce shows about "inspirational stories." Other possible show ideas include one in which the former President moderates discussions about topics including health care, climate change, and voting rights, and one in which Michelle Obama highlights topics such as nutrition, something that she emphasized during her time as First Lady.

It's also reported that Apple and Amazon are also interested in "talking to Mr. Obama about content deals." It's unclear if the Obamas would sign content deals with multiple streaming services, but the prospect seems unlikely. The Netflix deal in question emphasizes that content produced by the Obamas would be exclusive to its streaming service, only available to Netflix's nearly 118 million subscribers around the globe.

Enlarge / Medical illustration of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae. (credit: CDC)

For the first time, researchers have discovered strains of a deadly, multidrug-resistant bacterium that uses a cryptic method to also evade colistin, an antibiotic used as a last-resort treatment. That’s according to a study of US patients published this week by Emory University researchers in the open-access microbiology journal mBio.

The wily and dangerous bacteria involved are carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae or CRKP, which are already known to resist almost all antibiotics available, including other last-line antibiotics called carbapenems. The germs tend to lurk in clinical settings and can invade the urinary tract, bloodstream, and soft tissues. They’re members of a notorious family of multidrug-resistant pathogens, called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), which collectively have mortality rates as high as 50 percent and have spread rapidly around the globe in recent years. A 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were more than 9,300 CRE infections in the US each year, leading to 600 deaths. Both the CDC and the World Health Organization have listed CRE as one of the critical drug-resistant threats to public health, in need of "urgent and aggressive action."

That’s what we knew about CRKP before this week.

Enlarge / During the recent California wild fires, there were several reports of drones interfering with firefighting attempts. (credit: Photo by Ronen Tivony/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Switzerland is on the cusp of becoming the first country to formally integrate drones into the air traffic management system which controls its airspace.

The limited integration is the first to be launched under a broader European initiative called U-space, which seeks to create a digital infrastructure that would allow millions of small drones to safely operate beyond line-of-sight in approved airspace. A similar, though more modest, model in the US called Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management (UTM) has been developed by NASA. Managing and tracking small drones is key to opening the commercial market for drone services.

Starting in June, Swiss air traffic control operator Skyguide will begin merging its own data and traffic management applications with a software platform developed by Santa Monica, CA-based AirMap Inc. The software is called AirMap which, as the name implies, is a digital airspace-mapping platform.