Author: Megan Geuss

Throughout the past year, a number of newly paved roads in and around London were finished without the traditional center lines dividing traffic. According to a white paper published (PDF) by Transport for London (TfL), removal of center lines on roads where the speed limit is less than 30 miles per hour results in a "statistically significant reduction in vehicle speeds.”

Trials in Norfolk and Wiltshire have also supported the removal of the center line to reduce vehicle speed.

The TfL white paper found that drivers tend to slow their driving by up to 4mph on roads with no center lines. But, since the study was only conducted on smooth, newly-paved roads, the researchers at TfL corrected the data to account for the fact that drivers tend to go slightly faster when they feel confident that the road is in good condition. With such corrections, TfL found that the lack of center lines could theoretically reduce average vehicle speeds by up to 8.6mph.

It’s easy to look at your smartphone and think you live in the future. But the past’s imagining of the future promised us a lot more robot butlers.

Robots have slowly made their way into the workplace via telepresence hardware like Double Robotics or Beam, but a company called Savioke recently completed a $15 million series A funding round that will allow it to expand its operations for building the Relay robot—a hospitality-focused ‘bot that brings towels, toothpaste, and Starbucks to guests’ room.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Savioke has 12 Relay robots in hotels in the US and is looking to expand.

On Friday, Volkswagen Group said it would be delaying its annual earnings meeting, originally scheduled for March 10, due to "remaining open questions… relating to the diesel emissions issue.” The annual general meeting of shareholders, scheduled for April, will also be postponed.

The New York Times calls the move “highly unusual” but understandable given that the German automaker could potentially owe “tens of billions” in fines, not including the cost of fixing or buying back the nearly 600,000 diesel vehicles in the US alone that were equipped with emissions-system-cheating software. Worldwide, the number of diesel Volkswagens with so-called “defeat device” software rises to about 11 million.

According to a press release from the company, Volkswagen decided to delay the financial meetings to achieve a "transparent and reliable outcome for its shareholders and stakeholders.” It promised to release the new scheduled meeting dates as soon as possible.

In late January, an elderly woman with lung cancer died in the community of Porter Ranch just north of Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, her family sued Southern California Gas Company (PDF) for wrongful death in connection with a massive natural gas leak that started in the area in late October.

The woman, Zelda Rothman, was diagnosed in spring 2015, several months before the leak started. While the family isn’t asserting that Rothman’s lung cancer was caused by the gas leak, they claim that the leak hastened her death.

Rothman lived less than three miles from the leak, the complaint states, attributing her alleged undoing to her proximity. “Continuously leaking gas exacerbated Ms. Rothman’s condition and disrupted her already fragile health. The gas replaced precious oxygen in the air that she breathed, causing her to suffer from difficult and labored breathing.” Eventually, Rothman had to be placed on an oxygen tank 24 hours a day. The gas also allegedly caused “intense headaches and migraines, among other symptoms.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer said that the company would be exploring "strategic alternatives” for its Web businesses, including a 15 percent cut in staffing, the closure of five global offices, and potentially divesting "non-strategic assets of value."

The announcement happened before Yahoo’s fourth quarter financial call in which the company reported $4.968 billion in revenue for 2015, an 8 percent year-over-year increase from 2014's revenue. Revenue for Q4 2015 was $1.27 billion. Still, the company reported a hit with a one-time $4.5 billion "goodwill impairment charge" in this final quarter, likely a write down from expensive acquisitions.

The company said that it was in need of simplification measures, saying that "a smaller product portfolio emphasizing Yahoo's core strengths will yield better focus, execution, and ultimately clearer value to shareholders, advertisers, and users." In a press release, Yahoo called out Games and Smart TV as verticals that would be shut down in 2016. In addition, the company said that it would engage in "cost saving efforts" to reduce the number of employees to 9,000 and the number of contractors to 1,000 by the end of 2016. Yahoo also said it would close offices in Dubai, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, and Milan within the next three months.

If you don’t pay $99 each year for an Amazon Prime membership, which promises two-day shipping on all orders, regular shipping on Amazon purchases might be slower than it was last year, according to a study from customer service metrics company StellaService.

In an interview with Forbes, StellaService vice president of research Kevon Hills said the company tracks how quickly orders from 40 companies are fulfilled. Amazon fell outside of the top 10 fastest companies for the first time this year, losing ground to companies like BestBuy and Apple.

Hills said the speed of shipments to Prime customers is unchanged, indicating that Amazon is throwing considerable investment at serving its rapidly growing Prime base—which increased by 51 percent in 2015. Although Amazon does not reveal numbers about how many customers are Prime members, analysts have estimated that Prime membership totals at least 46 million people and could be as high as 80 million.

Electricity blog Electrek reported today that a source indicated that Tesla could announce two vehicles in March, instead of the expected single Model 3. Reporter Seth Weintraub noted that he could not confirm the source’s statements, he but referenced a presentation that Tesla gave at a Hong Kong meeting this week, which showed both a sedan and a crossover vehicle.

"Yes, obviously, the artwork is simply a Model X and Model S under digital covers, but the fact that there are two cars to be unveiled adds a little more credence to what I’ve heard,” Weintraub wrote.

While Tesla followers have long expected the Model 3, which is supposed to be Tesla’s more affordable sedan, the crossover vehicle could be the Model Y, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk hinted at in October. Based on some comments from Tesla's chief technical officer JB Straubel, the Model Y will apparently be like the Model X but cheaper and based on the smaller Model 3.

As Volkswagen began its European recall of hundreds of thousands of diesel vehicles with defeat devices, it's also pushing forward with publicity for its forthcoming electric vehicles. A company official recently made a comment to a reporter at Car Magazine to indicate that Volkswagen would be moving forward with a concept design for an electric van that was on display at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month.

According to Car Magazine, Volkswagen’s head of electronic development, Dr. Volkmar Tanneberger, said that by 2020, Volkswagen would start serial production of an electric van using Volkswagen’s “Modular Electric Toolkit” (abbreviated MEB from the German) called the BUDD-e. "You will see a car that looks a lot like this,” Tanneberger said, referring to the car’s “microbus” design.

In a press release at the beginning of January, Volkswagen said that its BUDD-e concept car had a range of 233 miles, based on a drive-cycle estimate using the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines, and incorporated a flat battery with a motor at the front and rear axles. The concept car envisioned a high level of Internet connectivity, with touch panels instead of buttons and digital screens instead of analog mirrors. At the time, Volkswagen said its MEB platform would be the basis for its electric vehicles by 2019, but the BUDD-e vehicle was merely referred to as a concept.

On Tuesday evening, Southern California’s air quality regulator sued SoCal Gas, the company that owns a leaking natural gas storage well just north of Los Angeles. The leaking well has been venting hundreds of thousands of pounds of methane per hour into the atmosphere for the last three months.

The civil lawsuit demands damages (PDF) from SoCal Gas for creating a nuisance for the residents of the nearby Porter Ranch community and for negligently operating the Aliso Canyon storage facility that houses 115 storage wells, including the leaking SS-25 well. The South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) is asking for up to $440,000 per day that the leak continues, based on six alleged violations.

The leak began on October 23, and after several failed attempts to plug it, SoCal Gas began drilling a relief well down to the 8,500-foot-deep reservoir where the natural gas is stored. (The reservoir is just one of many cavities that once held oil and were sucked dry decades ago. SoCal Gas repurposed these reservoirs in the 1970s to store natural gas.) In the meantime, the gas has been venting into the atmosphere.

If you’ve done some world traveling, you may know the frustration of sitting down in an Internet cafe, expecting to type out a message, only to realize that the keys on the computer’s keyboard are nothing like the ones from your home country. That quick e-mail to mom just became a hunt-and-peck chore that will send you back to the cafe’s counter a couple of times to re-up the reservation at your terminal.

This week, France’s culture and communication ministry acknowledged that residents of the country faced similar frustrations when using different keyboards within their own country, a problem the ministry said it would begin trying to solve. In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that the @ symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize accented letters like "ç".

The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words. A report from the ministry asserted that the "hardware limitations" of the French AZERTY keyboard "have even led some of our fellow citizens to think that we should not accentuate capital letters.”