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It has been almost three years since we launched the Cars Technica section here at Ars, during which time we've brought our unique voice and insights to the auto industry. Car coverage at Ars goes back a long way—see this 2000 review of the Honda Insight hybrid, for example—but current tech trends make our coverage more relevant than ever. Car companies are throwing LTE modems into everything with wheels, vehicles are learning to drive themselves, the internal combustion engine has serious competition for the first time in over a century—and that's before we get to buzzwords like "mobility."

The question is how best to cover cars, especially new models with the hottest tech. Launching a new automobile to the media isn't quite the same as introducing a new phone, console, or video game. Cars are big and expensive, and it's not feasible to send "review copies" out to journalists the way one can with a new laptop or smartphone. Instead, the car companies will do the opposite: find a location (usually somewhere they think will be sunny, which frequently means California), then bring in a bunch of journalists to drive the new vehicle. They also bring along a few of the engineers who worked on the vehicle, so we can ask plenty of annoying questions. Sounds good! But there's a catch: the car companies pay for travel, and they nearly always refuse requests to pay our own way.

Pay to play, pay to test

Ars has historically preferred not to accept paid travel for auto reviews or stories. This feels like the best way to offer valuable content to our readers, untainted by questions about "cozy relationships" and quid pro quo situations. When it comes to cars, we have taken three of these paid trips—on especially important occasions—after offering to pay our own way and having that offer refused. (Last September's trip to Munich to learn about Audi's new car tech is the only one that has been published yet.) Such paid travel is always disclosed to readers. In all other areas of our coverage (IT, science, legal, etc.), we simply never do paid travel, and it is clearly not necessary at all (for instance, there are many gaming junkets, and we simply refuse to go).

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Cultura RM Exclusive/GIPhotoStock)

It’s hard to imagine a more sensitive type of personal information than your own genetic blueprints. With varying degrees of accuracy, the four-base code can reveal bits of your family’s past, explain some of your current traits and health, and may provide a glimpse into your future with possible conditions and health problems you could face. And that information doesn’t just apply to you but potentially your blood relatives, too.

Most people would likely want to keep the results of genetic tests highly guarded—if they want their genetic code deciphered at all. But, as STAT reports, a new bill that is quietly moving through the House would allow companies to strong-arm their employees into taking genetic tests and then sharing that data with unregulated third parties as well as the employer. Employees that resist could face penalties of thousands of dollars.

In the past, such personal information has been protected by a law called GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, which shields people from DNA-based discrimination. But the new bill, HR 1313, gets around this by allowing genetic testing to be part of company wellness programs.

Enlarge (credit: Chris Monroe)

Time crystals: I'd hoped I'd never write about them again. A long time ago, there was a theory paper that proposed a new idea—time crystals. I was intrigued, but I was also confused. This either seemed like a trivial idea, or one so deep I didn't fully grasp it. Now, it seems I might not have had a clue, as two research groups have reported producing actual time crystals.

Time crystals are not made of time

A time crystal is almost analogous to the crystals that you may be more familiar with, like salt and sugar. Salt consists of two atoms (sodium and chlorine) that are arranged in a fixed order in space. In any given direction, there is a characteristic length over which the crystal repeats itself. If I were located somewhere in the middle of a crystal and moved in any direction by the characteristic length (or a multiple of it), I would not actually be able to tell that I had moved. That is translational symmetry in space.

This is more important than it sounds. The properties of matter are often dominated by the spatial order of the crystal. When you break that order, cool things happen (melting is an example of breaking spatial order).

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Kodi set-top boxes that allow football fans to stream live matches without a licence will be blocked by the UK's four biggest ISPs, after the High Court approved a piracy clampdown order.

Sky, BT, TalkTalk, and Virgin Media will all be required to block servers that stream Premier League football games.

"The new block will enable a proportionate and targeted restriction of content that would otherwise have been proliferated to unauthorised websites and IPTV devices," said the Premier League after it secured the court order from Mr Justice Arnold on Wednesday.

Andrew Cunningham

PC companies are striving to make their 13-inch laptops ever thinner and lighter, a trend that has been good for our shoulders and backs but not as good for performance. Luckily, 15-inch laptops are there to serve as a counterweight, offering not just quad-core processors but increasingly powerful and desktop-like graphics chips.

Dell’s XPS 15, much like Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro, attempts to straddle the line between svelte and powerful. It’s not the smallest or most powerful laptop, but last year’s model struck a good balance between size and speed even if the best configurations were on the expensive side. This year’s version doesn’t change a lot, but a new more power-efficient GPU, a Kaby Lake CPU upgrade, and a fingerprint reader all make it worth reconsidering anyway.

(credit: NOAA)

Because vaccination introduces some small degree of disease into someone’s system, it’s not safe for anyone who doesn’t have a healthy immune system. For that reason, people undergoing medical treatments that suppress the immune system (like chemotherapy) can’t be vaccinated nor can babies below a certain age.

But vaccines can still protect these people from infectious disease. If enough people around them are immune, the "herd immunity" prevents diseases from moving through the population. An experiment published in Nature Human Behaviour this week explores whether people who get information on herd immunity are more likely to decide to get vaccinated. The results suggest that it could be a worthwhile strategy for promoting vaccines, but it will need confirmation in real-world settings.

Free-riding vs. prosocial vaccination

Is emphasizing herd immunity in public health communications a good idea? It’s not clear. It might boost vaccine uptake rates, but it could very easily backfire. If people are made aware of herd immunity, they might start thinking that they personally are protected whether or not they actually get the vaccine. In the real world, there are also many other complicating factors in whether or not people choose to get their kids—or themselves—vaccinated. People have a lot of preconceived ideas about many vaccines and the diseases they protect against, and it can be hard to change their minds.