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Enlarge / PITTSBURGH, PA - SEPTEMBER 22: An Uber driverless Ford Fusion drives down Smallman Street on September, 22, 2016 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Uber has built its Uber Technical Center in Pittsburgh and is developing an autonomous vehicle that it hopes will be able to transport its millions of clients without the need for a driver. (credit: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

On Thursday, the San Jose Mercury News reported that Uber applied for a permit to test its self-driving cars on California roads. In December, the company said that it would not apply for the permit, but its Thursday announcement reverses this position.

The news comes after a very public spat between the ride-hailing startup and the California Department of Motor Vehicles. That spat ended with the California DMV revoking registrations for Uber’s test vehicles after Uber refused to apply for permitting. Uber had claimed that its cars were merely equipped with Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS) and didn’t require permitting.

Uber took its cars to Arizona, where the state assured the company that it wouldn’t have to apply for a special permit to test self-driving software.

Enlarge / Subway Founder Peter Buck (credit: Getty | James Marshall)

Update, March 6: Subway has released the lab reports from both of its independent tests. Both Maxxam Analytics in Ontario, Canada and Elisa Technologies, Inc. in Florida used enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) designed for food products to quantify soy in the chicken. ELISA's are a standard type of assay that generally detect and quantify substances based on binding by an antibody. In the assay, antibody binding kicks off a detectable chemical reaction, commonly resulting in a color change. In the case of Elisa Technologies, the lab used an antibody that binds to soy flour proteins and the lab used known concentrations of those soy proteins for comparison to determine the quantity of soy protein in Subway's chicken samples.

In all samples, Elisa detected 3 parts-per-million or less of soy proteins, which is well below one percent of the chicken. Maxxam detected 5.3 ppm of soy protein in the chicken, which is still well below one percent.

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Earlier this week, Ars reported that an investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Marketplace revealed that Subway chicken may only contain 50 percent chicken, with the rest being mostly soy. But, in the fallout from the news, food scientists are scratching their heads at the CBC’s testing methods and interpretation.

(credit: Federal Trade Commission)

Blocking robocalls from spoofed numbers may soon become easier, as the Federal Communications Commission is preparing to give carriers authority to take more aggressive action against this type of scam call.

The FCC in 2015 made it clear that voice service providers can offer call blocking tools to customers, but commissioners said at the time that more needed to be done about Caller ID spoofing. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has now scheduled a preliminary vote for March 23 on new rules designed to solve the problem.

"One particularly pernicious category of robocalls is spoofed robocalls—i.e., robocalls where the caller ID is faked, hiding the caller’s true identity," the proposal says. "Fraudsters bombard consumers’ phones at all hours of the day with spoofed robocalls, which in some cases lure consumers into scams (e.g., when a caller claims to be collecting money owed to the Internal Revenue Service) or lead to identity theft."

BARCELONA—Most pictures you find of Mobile World Congress (MWC) are likely to be the same thing: a picture of a smartphone or tablet tethered to a table. MWC is more than just a collection of smartphones on tables, though. It's always fun to point the camera at all the other things that happen at the big show to bring a bit of the MWC experience home. MWC is full of massive crowds and hundreds of vendors all competing for attention. The need to stand out leads to a crazy atmosphere, with interesting booth designs, LED light shows, sculptures. decorations, and all sorts of fun booth gimmicks.

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos, chief executive officer of Amazon (far left), listens during a technology summit with then President-elect Trump in December, 2016. (credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Until the last year, Jeff Bezos has kept the plans for his rocket company, Blue Origin, largely under wraps. Since then, he has talked about doing suborbital space tourism flights, building an orbital rocket, and now he has begun to open up about ambitions beyond low Earth orbit. And unlike SpaceX and its Mars ambitions, Blue Origin has its focus on the Moon.

The Washington Post first reported on the "Blue Moon" concept Thursday evening, which Bezos has articulated in a seven-page white paper sent to NASA leadership and President Trump's transition officials over the last two months. The proposal outlines a plan to build a lunar spacecraft and lander to deliver supplies to the South Pole of the Moon, where scientists believe there are abundant ice resources and almost continuous solar energy.

Later Thursday night, during an awards event hosted by Aviation Week, Bezos explained the philosophy behind this idea. "We are hoping to partner with NASA on a program called Blue Moon where we would provide a cargo-delivery service to the surface of the Moon, with the intent over time of building a permanently inhabited human settlement on the Moon," he said. "It’s time for America to go back to the Moon and this time to stay. We can do it. It’s a difficult but worthy objective."