news.buyenne.com

Enlarge

Facebook has begun rolling out its “Marketplace” feature to users, allowing people to buy and sell items locally through the app.

Marketplace has existed for some time as part of Facebook Groups. (I've bought and sold some items through a local parents’ group for the last few years, and it works well.) Delivery and payment is handled separately from the app, just like similar ads posted on Craigslist.

The company said in a Monday press release that the feature would be “rolling out to everyone over 18 years old in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android.”

Enlarge (credit: Tokyo Institute of Technology)

Today's Nobel Prize in Medicine has been awarded to Japan's Yoshinori Ohsumi for his work in understanding a fundamental biological process in which the cell digests damaged or unneeded components. Termed "autophagy," or self-eating, the process allows cells to survive periods of stress or starvation or to adapt to changing conditions or needs. Failures in autophagy have been linked to both cancer and neurodegenerative diseases.

As with many past winners, Ohsumi seems to have had the right ideas at the right time. In the 1950s, earlier Nobel winner Christian de Duve identified small structures inside cells that carried lots of digestive enzymes. Others recognized that these structures were involved in situations where cells digested parts of their own internal membranes, liberating raw materials to be reused. A decade later, the term autophagy was coined, and people recognized that it was a normal process within cells.

But over the following decades, progress on understanding how it worked was slow, in part because typical complex, eukaryotic cells are filled with small bits of membrane, and partly because the process was transient, rapidly digesting the material it was fed. We knew it was occurring, but we didn't know when or how it was triggered. This left the field open to Ohsumi, who started working on it in the 1990s.

Enlarge / Two of these EasyMile driverless people movers will be allowed to drive on public roads in a privately owned business park in Contra Costa, California. (credit: EasyMile)

The testing of autonomous vehicles took a leap forward in California on Thursday, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that allows for the testing of self-driving vehicles that lack a driver's seat, steering wheel, or pedals. Before anyone starts freaking out too much, the addition to California's Vehicle Code only applies to a handful of roads in and around a privately owned business park in Contra Costa, and the vehicles must travel at speeds below 35mph.

The new bill is an important step for the state, however. California was one of the first states in the nation to enact legislation that allowed the testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads with the proviso that all such vehicles have a driver's seat and controls. While this hasn't been too much of a handicap for Google, Delphi, and others, it has meant that vehicles like Local Motors' driverless shuttle have been banned from testing their vehicles in California.

EasyMile has already been testing its driverless people movers in Europe. (credit: EasyMile)

Many other states have been waiting on the federal government before crafting their own autonomous driving regulations, and the feds took a first step last month with the release of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Federal Automated Vehicles Policy. That policy guidance includes a section on state regulations. There is a strong desire at the federal level, as well as with stakeholders in the industry, for state guidelines to be harmonized and not in conflict with one another, lest we end up with a patchwork system where cars can legally drive themselves through one state and then have to hand over control to a human driver after crossing a state line.

Nearly everything about Google's Pixel and Pixel XL has leaked in some form or another, but a few more tidbits on the eve of the product launch can't hurt. Carphone Warehouse went live with a product listing a little early for the Pixel and Pixel XL, giving us lots of new images and a dubious spec list.

The press images definitely look like an official Google production and present the Pixel and Pixel XL (which look identical) in all their glory, and they really look like iPhones.

The pictures give us a good look at the sides and the bottom speaker arrangement, which we really haven't seen before. Also interesting is a shot promoting Google Allo and Duo, which seems to indicate that they will be packed-in apps. Will the Pixels also include Hangouts?

Blue Origin's propulsion module lands in West Texas. (credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin has launched and landed its New Shepard booster four times, but the reusable rocket party may come to an end Wednesday morning (Note: Poor weather in West Texas forced the company to delay the test for one day). That's because the company plans an in-flight test of its launch abort system and will intentionally trigger it about 45 seconds after launch at an altitude of 16,000 feet. Such systems are designed to fire quickly and separate the crew capsule from the booster during an emergency.

"The high-acceleration portion of the escape lasts less than two seconds, but by then the capsule will be hundreds of feet away and diverging quickly," Bezos wrote last month. "It will traverse twice through transonic velocities—the most difficult control region—during the acceleration burn and subsequent deceleration. The capsule will then coast, stabilized by reaction control thrusters, until it starts descending."

But the booster will likely not be so lucky. The propulsion module, powered by a single BE-3 engine, was not designed to survive an in-flight escape, as it will be slammed with 70,000 pounds of off-axis force and hot exhaust. At Max-Q, it is not clear whether the propulsion module will break apart. If it somehow survives, the booster will likely be placed in a museum. If not, it's expected to produce some fireworks upon impact with the Texas desert floor.