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Elle Cayabyab Gitlin

In dry and warm conditions we think this Corvette Stingray would have been a blast at Mid-Ohio. Instead, it was a handful. And yes, that is snow on the headlights.

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Over the past few months I've driven some technically clever cars. But a weekend at the track behind the wheel of a modern classic leaves me wondering if I've committing some deep heresy.

If you haven't driven the most recent Audis, Teslas, and Volvos, you'd be surprised how smart these vehicles have become and how rapidly previous generations become dated. Driver assistance systems aren't quite fully autonomous yet, but if a car's sensors can read the lines on the road, it will do almost everything for you. Got a turn coming up, or approaching a bend too fast? The navigation system can spot either of those and slow the car down for you. Stuck in traffic? You can go hands- and feet-free up to 37mph (60km/h, the legal maximum such systems are allowed to work over in Europe).

As a driver, this leaves you more mental bandwidth to do other things, like looking at the scenery on long and boring road trips. The benefits to driver fatigue are undeniable. For long distance cruising—day or night, rain or shine—this future enabled by Velodyne and Mobileye and Nvidia and Qualcomm is already promising to be a bright one.

Top Marques in Monaco is probably the least conventional car show we've been to in some time. Video shot by Elle Cayabyab Gitlin, edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

MONTE CARLO, MONACO—From time to time we have reason to visit this odd little principality nestled between France and Italy on the Mediterranean. This year our trip happened to coincide with Top Marques, a fittingly Monegasque take on the car show—almost nothing but wall-to-wall supercars.

(credit: UK Film Council )

Mice that can stutter like humans may seem pretty striking. But what really renders researchers speechless is the enigmatic genetic glitch that causes stuttering.

Researchers led by Terra D. Barnes of Washington University discovered that their genetically-engineered mice stutter due to DNA defects in a humdrum “housekeeping” gene. This gene codes for a protein that simply places a "routing tag" on certain enzymes that shred cellular trash. The tag ensures that the shredding enzymes end up in chambers called lysosomes, basically the cell’s garbage disposal. It’s a mundane cellular activity, yet mutations in the same process in humans have also been linked to stuttering—a bizarrely specific condition for such a general gene. And, so far, scientists have no idea why the two are linked.

Nevertheless, the engineered mice presented with similar symptoms as humans who stutter. Though mice obviously don’t talk as humans do, they emit ultrasonic and squeaky whistle-like songs that are coded with information. Researchers have already spent plenty of time studying these songs in detail. In particular, they’ve studied the “isolation calls” belted out by newborn mice when their mothers aren’t around.

(credit: Sergio Ruiz)

Attention, Uber and Lyft drivers! San Francisco wants to rake in money from you.

On Friday, the treasurer for the City and County of San Francisco announced that he had begun mailing out business registration notices to the "nearly 37,000" people who drive for "Transportation Network Companies," the formal name in California for such on-demand companies.

The city says that these drivers are required to pay an annual business registration fee of $91 per year for operating a business in the city—which includes being a driver for a company like Uber or Lyft. Assuming full compliance, the new fee collection would result in new annual revenue of over $3.3 million per year.

Enlarge / All life with complex cells, including us, is part of the little green rounding error in the lower right. (credit: Banfield/Nature Microbiology)

Despite the best efforts of Walt Disney and Elton John, it is the tree of life, not the circle, that remains the primary way that organisms are classified and by which their evolutionary relationships are depicted. The tree was initially made by categorizing life forms with similar features into groups; this method distinguished not only amphibians from reptiles but also protists from amoeba.

Genetic data expanded the tree by allowing us to use similarities in genetic sequences—we didn’t have to actually see anything in order to determine how everyone is related to each other. Now, genomic studies have expanded the tree still further, allowing us to place species we can’t even grow in the lab onto their proper branch.

It is hardly news that most life on Earth is unicellular. But the newest tree of life, published in Nature Microbiology, reveals that most of life's diversity is bacterial and that much of it belongs to a recently discovered branch of especially tiny bacteria that no one has ever grown or seen under a microscope. All we have is their DNA, mixed in with the DNA of everything else that inhabits the same ecosystem.