Month: March 2025

VW is testing its robotaxis in snowy, icy Norway

A taxi service that only operates in good weather isn’t a good taxi service.

There's a reason that the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, were home to many autonomous vehicle programs: Driving on wide streets in great weather is easy mode for an AV. But a commercial robotaxi service that only works when the sun is shining is a commercial robotaxi service that will never recoup the billions it would cost to develop. That's why Moia—Volkswagen's AV division—has begun testing its autonomous ID Buzzes around the streets of Oslo, Norway, this winter.

For a while, autonomous driving was the hottest thing in tech. That hype has certainly calmed down a lot over the last few years as reality began to bite. Developing an AV that can safely drive around unpredictable humans turned out to be pretty hard, with myriad edge cases needing to be solved differently for each new city.

Startups have shut down, winnowing the field. Uber gave its AV program to Aurora, together with a rather fat investment check; Aurora these days is concentrating on autonomous trucking rather than robotaxis on busy city streets. VW, together with Ford, gave up on Argo AI. And General Motors killed off Cruise AV, seeing no way to make back the large pile of money it had already spent trying to make robotaxis work in San Francisco.

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Who gets ownership of useful genetic data?

Digital sequence information alters how researchers look at the world’s genetic resources.

Cow D lived on a dairy farm in New Zealand. The animal looked like the typical black-and-white cow farmers raise for milk, except for one thing: Researchers had outfitted Cow D with an artificial fistula—a hole offering them a way to reach the microbes inhabiting the animal’s bathtub-size stomach. But it’s what happened next that offers a porthole into the global debate over the use of genetic data.

In the spring of 2009, Samantha Noel, then a doctoral researcher at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, reached into Cow D’s rumen and plucked out a strain of Lachnospiraceae bacterium, later dubbed ND2006. Another team of geneticists sequenced the microbe’s complete set of genes, or genome, and uploaded the information, which was then shared with GenBank, a public database run by the US National Institutes of Health. If genes are the book of life, then this process was like adding a digital copy to an online library. In policy circles, these lines of code go by another name: digital sequence information, or DSI.

Eventually, a section of the sequence found inside Cow D caught the attention of scientists on the other side of the world. The sequence contained a promising new genetic tool for modifying DNA, a CRISPR. Editas Medicine, a Massachusetts-based company focused on commercializing gene-editing technology for medical applications, used these data to build its platform and now holds the license on a portfolio of patents—all without ever interacting with the cow or its microbes directly. The company subsequently developed an experimental therapy, which involved injecting a modified CRISPR-associated molecule into patients’ eyeballs to treat a common form of inherited blindness. Editas billed the breakthrough as the first such treatment “administered to people anywhere in the world.” The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, contain little mention of any sequence data and even less about its origins.

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