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During this week's State of the Union address, President Obama announced that his Vice President Joe Biden will lead a new science "moonshot" to put an end to cancer. According to an article on Medium posted by the Vice President, this will do two things: increase resources devoted to fighting cancer and break down barriers that prevent sharing of information among cancer researchers.

The announcement drew a lot of praise from pundits—the snarkier Twitter commentators out there pointed out that Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) failed to clap at this, marking him as heartless. More funding for cancer research sounds like a total no-brainer, doesn't it? There's just one problem—it's a terrible idea.

At this point, let me give you a little background on where this editorial is coming from. It might be hard to understand why the car editor at a technology website is whining about science funding, but before moving to Ars full-time in June last year, I spent six years working in a policy office at the National Institutes of Health. It's a job that gave me a front row seat into how science policy actually works in the United States. Before that, I spent another six years as a research scientist, during which time I served in a couple of leadership roles with the National Postdoctoral Association (I also used to write science content for Ars, starting back in 2004).

Seagate, after a slightly embarrassing pause, has launched a 10-terabyte helium-filled enterprise-class 3.5-inch hard drive. The drives aren't yet commercially available—they're being sampled to both Alibaba and Huawei at the moment—but they'll probably be around £600/$800 when they eventually arrive.

This 10TB drive marks Seagate's first foray into helium-filled storage devices. The company's primary competitor, Western Digital/HGST, has been selling helium-filled drives since 2013.

While HGST was more than happy to share lots of details about its hermetically sealed helium-filled hard drives, Seagate, rather annoyingly, has only sent us a vague press release. Seagate's 10TB drive has seven platters—the same number as the 10TB HGST drive—and 14 heads. There's no word on spindle speed, but it's probably 7200RPM. The press release says that the new Seagate drive uses the company's PowerChoice tech to reduce power consumption, but falls short of actually providing some numbers. There are two versions of the drive: one with a 6Gb/s SATA interface, another with 12Gb/s SAS.

Audi's Thomas Müller discusses self-driving technology with Ars at CES. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Have we mentioned that self-driving cars were a big thing at CES this year? Among all the drones and connected fridges and 8K TVs, companies like Ford and BMW and Audi were all on hand to update us about their respective visions for autonomous driving. We were fortunate enough to sit down with Audi's Thomas Müller, who heads up autonomous technology at the company, to pick his brain about where the Ingolstadt-based OEM is going with its robot cars.