Month: July 2024

Enlarge / Nissan's ProPilot Assist was one of two partially automated driving systems to be studied for crash safety improvements. (credit: Nissan)

Driver assists that help steer for you on the highway haven't contributed much to road safety, according to a new study from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute. That's in contrast to other features often bundled together as "advanced driver assistance systems," or ADAS, many of which have shown a marked reduction in crash and claim rates.

"Everything we’re seeing tells us that partial automation is a convenience feature like power windows or heated seats rather than a safety technology," said David Harkey, IIHS president.

However, we should note that, as a follow-up to a pair of earlier studies published in 2021, the new research by IIHS and HLDI focused on two older partially automated driving systems, model-year 2017–2019 Nissan Rogues with ProPilot Assist, and model year 2013–2017 BMWs with Driving Assistant Plus.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto)

Elon Musk's overhaul of the Twitter verification system deceives users and violates the Digital Services Act, the European Commission said today in an announcement of preliminary findings that could lead to a big financial penalty.

The social media platform now called X "designs and operates its interface for the 'verified accounts' with the 'Blue checkmark' in a way that does not correspond to industry practice and deceives users," the EU regulator said. "Since anyone can subscribe to obtain such a 'verified' status, it negatively affects users' ability to make free and informed decisions about the authenticity of the accounts and the content they interact with. There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the 'verified account' to deceive users."

Blue checkmarks "used to mean trustworthy sources of information," Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton said. The EC said it "informed X of its preliminary view that it is in breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in areas linked to dark patterns, advertising transparency and data access for researchers."

Enlarge (credit: UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE)

In the early 2000s, local fossil collector Mohamed ‘Ou Said’ Ben Moula discovered numerous fossils at Fezouata Shale, a site in Morocco known for its well-preserved fossils from the Early Ordovician period, roughly 480 million years ago. Recently, a team of researchers at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) studied 100 of these fossils and identified one of them as the earliest ancestor of modern-day chelicerates, a group that includes spiders, scorpions, and horseshoe crabs.

The fossil preserves the species Setapedites abundantis, a tiny animal that crawled and swam near the bottom of a 100–200-meter-deep ocean near the South Pole 478 million years ago. It was 5 to 10 millimeters long and fed on organic matter in the seafloor sediments. “Fossils of what is now known as S. abundantis have been found early on—one specimen mentioned in the 2010 paper that recognized the importance of this biota. However, this creature wasn’t studied in detail before simply because scientists focused on other taxa first,” Pierre Gueriau, one of the researchers and a junior lecturer at UNIL, told Ars Technica.

The study from Gueriau and his team is the first to describe S. abundantis and its connection to modern-day chelicerates (also called euchelicerates). It holds great significance, because “the origin of chelicerates has been one of the most tangled knots in the arthropod tree of life, as there has been a lack of fossils between 503 to 430 million years ago,” Gueriau added.