Month: September 2024

Enlarge / Lane keeping systems let you take your hands off the wheel while you drive. (credit: Getty Images)

The seductive lure of cars that drive themselves has led to an awful lot of hype over the past decade. Not everyone enjoys driving, after all, and the idea of freeing up the occupant to read their emails or watch a movie as their car grinds its way to their job led to billions in investments and a whole heck of a lot of GPU sales. We're still a long way from being able to buy a car with fully autonomous driving, but every OEM wants to sell you some level of partial automation that accelerates, brakes, and steers for you. There's just one problem—study after study shows these systems make us less safe on the road.

The latest data points come from a pair of studies just published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, one studying drivers using Tesla's Autopilot, the other focusing on Volvo's Pilot Assist. Both found that when drivers use partially automated driving systems, they pay less attention to the road and start multitasking instead.

The studies were conducted by IIHS together with the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT's AgeLab. The studies used Volvo S90 sedans and 2020 Tesla Model 3s, equipped with an array of cameras and sensors to monitor and record driver behavior.

Enlarge / Lane keeping systems let you take your hands off the wheel while you drive. (credit: Getty Images)

The seductive lure of cars that drive themselves has led to an awful lot of hype over the past decade. Not everyone enjoys driving, after all, and the idea of freeing up the occupant to read their emails or watch a movie as their car grinds its way to their job led to billions in investments and a whole heck of a lot of GPU sales. We're still a long way from being able to buy a car with fully autonomous driving, but every OEM wants to sell you some level of partial automation that accelerates, brakes, and steers for you. There's just one problem—study after study shows these systems make us less safe on the road.

The latest data points come from a pair of studies just published by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, one studying drivers using Tesla's Autopilot, the other focusing on Volvo's Pilot Assist. Both found that when drivers use partially automated driving systems, they pay less attention to the road and start multitasking instead.

The studies were conducted by IIHS together with the Center for Transportation and Logistics at MIT's AgeLab. The studies used Volvo S90 sedans and 2020 Tesla Model 3s, equipped with an array of cameras and sensors to monitor and record driver behavior.

Enlarge / Portion of a reproduction of cave paintings in France, showing rhinos (among other species). (credit: JEFF PACHOUD)

For most people, an extinct species is an abstraction, a set of bones they might have seen on display in a museum. For Gennady Boeskorov, they are things he has interacted with directly, studying their fur, their skin, their internal organs—experiencing these animals much as they existed thousands of years ago. Some of the well-preserved Pleistocene animals he has worked with include the mummified remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct form of rabbit (Lepus tanaiticus), and cave lion cubs (Panthera spelaea).

His latest paper also makes it clear that woolly rhinoceroses belong on this list. Boeskorov is a senior researcher at the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. This July, he and his colleagues described the relatively recent discovery of three woolly rhinoceros mummies, one of which is new to science, in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences.

Woolly rhinos (Coelodonta antiquitatis) were stocky, long-haired, two-horned denizens that inhabited Eurasia during the Pleistocene, a period that includes the most recent glacial expansion. They coexisted with woolly mammoths, placing second on the list of largest animals in this ecosystem (behind their tusked proboscidean coevals), and shared a similar dense coat of hair to protect against the cold.

Enlarge / Portion of a reproduction of cave paintings in France, showing rhinos (among other species). (credit: JEFF PACHOUD)

For most people, an extinct species is an abstraction, a set of bones they might have seen on display in a museum. For Gennady Boeskorov, they are things he has interacted with directly, studying their fur, their skin, their internal organs—experiencing these animals much as they existed thousands of years ago. Some of the well-preserved Pleistocene animals he has worked with include the mummified remains of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), an extinct form of rabbit (Lepus tanaiticus), and cave lion cubs (Panthera spelaea).

His latest paper also makes it clear that woolly rhinoceroses belong on this list. Boeskorov is a senior researcher at the Diamond and Precious Metals Geology Institute, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as well as a professor at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk. This July, he and his colleagues described the relatively recent discovery of three woolly rhinoceros mummies, one of which is new to science, in a paper published in the journal Doklady Earth Sciences.

Woolly rhinos (Coelodonta antiquitatis) were stocky, long-haired, two-horned denizens that inhabited Eurasia during the Pleistocene, a period that includes the most recent glacial expansion. They coexisted with woolly mammoths, placing second on the list of largest animals in this ecosystem (behind their tusked proboscidean coevals), and shared a similar dense coat of hair to protect against the cold.

Enlarge / Amazon fulfillment center in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | 4kodiak)

Amazon has told staff they must return to the office five days a week from the start of next year, one of the strictest corporate crackdowns on remote working that has become commonplace since the pandemic.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” chief executive Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees globally on Monday. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Jassy said. He added exceptions would be made for employees with a sick child, family emergencies, or coding projects that needed a more isolated environment.

Enlarge / Amazon fulfillment center in Las Vegas, Nevada. (credit: Getty Images | 4kodiak)

Amazon has told staff they must return to the office five days a week from the start of next year, one of the strictest corporate crackdowns on remote working that has become commonplace since the pandemic.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” chief executive Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees globally on Monday. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Jassy said. He added exceptions would be made for employees with a sick child, family emergencies, or coding projects that needed a more isolated environment.