Month: February 2021

Enlarge / A Motional self-driving car in Las Vegas. (credit: Motional)

Motional, a joint venture of Hyundai and giant auto parts supplier Aptiv, has begun testing its self-driving vehicles in Las Vegas without anyone behind the wheel, the company announced in a Monday blog post.

Motional isn't ready to launch a driverless commercial service yet. But Motional—which was part of Aptiv before Hyundai's investment—has been operating a commercial self-driving taxi service (with safety drivers) for several years. The service is operated in partnership with Lyft; Lyft customers in Las Vegas can opt to ride in a Motional car during some of their rides. Motional says its vehicles have completed more than 100,000 rides without causing any crashes.

Motional says that it hired the German testing firm TÜV SÜD to examine its self-driving technology. After an 18-month review process, the firm endorsed the technology for driverless testing.

Enlarge / The weather map on February 15. (credit: NASA EO)

Some songs are earworms—catchy whether you like them or not. (I won’t infect the rest of your day with an example.) Some explanations in science seem to be the earworm equivalent: inherently intuitive, making them stick readily in the mind. That’s obviously the case for the hypothesis that a warming Arctic leads to a wigglier jet stream, producing weather extremes in the mid-latitudes like the recent epic cold snap in the central US.

The cold arrived after the spinning “polar vortex” in the upper atmosphere above the Arctic was disturbed in January, unleashing its contents southward as the jet stream detoured from its usual commute. Could this behavior actually be a consequence of global warming? The suggestion has appeared in news articles and Twitter threads across the land. But the idea is stickier than the science says it should be.

Jet setting

Although the specifics vary, the general idea is based on the fact that the Arctic is warming faster than the mid-latitudes. As a result, the temperature difference between them is getting a little smaller. The jet stream forms at the boundary between the Arctic and mid-latitude air, so a smaller temperature difference would weaken the jet stream. And a weaker jet stream is more prone to great, wiggling meanders that can bring you cold air from the north or warm air from the south.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Almost one in four Americans are very concerned about vehicle tailpipe emissions, according to a survey conducted in January by the publication Consumer Reports. Nearly half of survey respondents also said that fuel economy is very important when considering a vehicle to buy or lease, and 27 percent were very worried about car exhaust contributing to climate change.

Consequently, Consumer Reports will now grade cars according to their environmental impact. It has launched a new "green choice" rating, identified by a green leaf icon, to help people quickly identify vehicles with the best fuel efficiency and lowest contributions to atmospheric CO₂ levels and smog formation.

Interestingly, the survey also shows that nearly half of car buyers will use information about a vehicle's emissions to inform their buying—but only if they know where to look. Unfortunately, more than 50 percent are unaware that this information is displayed prominently on the Monroney sticker.

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  Shots from the reverse-engineered version of Grand Theft Auto III showing off the graphical improvements over the 2002 original.

A Github project that generated reverse-engineered code for Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City was taken down over the weekend as the result of a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request from publisher Take-Two.

The project—comprising hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code generated over years of painstaking analysis—did not distribute any of the copyrighted image or music files needed to recompile the game. Those files needed to be sourced from an authentic copy of the PC version of the games, originally released in 2002 and 2003.

This didn't prevent Take-Two from claiming that "the content in the links below consists of copyrighted materials owned by Take Two," as the DMCA notice reads, in part. "The use of our copyrighted content in these links are unauthorized and it should be removed immediately."