Enlarge (credit: boonchai wedmakawand)

California's electric grid, with its massive solar production and booming battery installations, is already on the cutting edge of the US's energy transition. And it's likely to stay there, as the state will require that all passenger vehicles be electric by 2035. Obviously, that will require a grid that's able to send a lot more electrons down its wiring and a likely shift in the time of day that demand peaks.

Is the grid ready? And if not, how much will it cost to get it there? Two researchers at the University of California, Davis—Yanning Li and Alan Jenn—have determined that nearly two-thirds of its feeder lines don't have the capacity that will likely be needed for car charging. Updating to handle the rising demand might set its utilities back as much as 40 percent of the existing grid's capital cost.

The lithium state

Li and Jenn aren't the first to look at how well existing grids can handle growing electric vehicle sales; other research has found various ways that different grids fall short. However, they have access to uniquely detailed data relevant to California's ability to distribute electricity (they do not concern themselves with generation). They have information on every substation, feeder line, and transformer that delivers electrons to customers of the state's three largest utilities, which collectively cover nearly 90 percent of the state's population. In total, they know the capacity that can be delivered through over 1,600 substations and 5,000 feeders.

Enlarge / EV charger status is coming to Google Maps. (credit: Google)

Google Maps is making itself friendlier for electric vehicles. A couple of years ago it added the option to select different powertrain types when calculating a route—gas, hybrid, electric, and so on. Lower-energy routes with fewer hills are helpful for electric vehicles, but mostly what EV drivers on unfamiliar terrain really want to know about are the chargers: Where are they, how fast are they, and do they work? Soon, that critical information will be available to Google Maps users via a new update.

Live charger status is usually available from the onboard navigation system built into an EV. Better yet, those native nav systems invariably talk to the powertrain, so they know how much state of charge is currently in the battery and how much to expect upon arrival. Add in real-time status on chargers—how many are working, how many are available—and it's not hard to see why plenty of EV drivers stick with the built-in system.

But for some EVs, that built-in system is Google Maps, including EVs from Ford, Honda, General Motors, Volvo, Polestar, and soon even Porsche. These will be the first devices to receive the update, Google says, which will roll out globally in the coming months. After the connected cars, smartphones will be next.

(credit: Velo AI)

Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.

Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber's (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a "pandemic passion project" for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.

While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they're largely radar-based. That means they can't distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.

Enlarge (credit: Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

Wikipedia has downgraded tech website CNET's reliability rating following extensive discussions among its editors regarding the impact of AI-generated content on the site's trustworthiness, as noted in a detailed report from Futurism. The decision reflects concerns over the reliability of articles found on the tech news outlet after it began publishing AI-generated stories in 2022.

Around November 2022, CNET began publishing articles written by an AI model under the byline "CNET Money Staff." In January 2023, Futurism brought widespread attention to the issue and discovered that the articles were full of plagiarism and mistakes. (Around that time, we covered plans to do similar automated publishing at BuzzFeed.) After the revelation, CNET management paused the experiment, but the reputational damage had already been done.

Wikipedia maintains a page called "Reliable sources/Perennial sources" that includes a chart featuring news publications and their reliability ratings as viewed from Wikipedia's perspective. Shortly after the CNET news broke in January 2023, Wikipedia editors began a discussion thread on the Reliable Sources project page about the publication.

Enlarge / A Cruise robotaxi test vehicle in San Francisco. (credit: Cruise)

A law firm hired by the General Motors’ self-driving subsidiary Cruise to investigate the company’s response to a gruesome San Francisco crash last year found that the company failed to fully disclose disturbing details to regulators, the tech company said today in a blog post. The incident in October led California regulators to suspend Cruise’s license to operate driverless vehicles in San Francisco.

The new report by law firm Quinn Emanuel says that Cruise failed to tell California’s Department of Motor Vehicles that after striking a pedestrian knocked into its path by a human-driven vehicle, the autonomous car pulled out of traffic—dragging her some 20 feet. Cruise said it had accepted the firm’s version of events, as well as its recommendations.

Enlarge / Odd radio circles are large enough to contain galaxies in their centers and reach hundreds of thousands of light years across. (credit: Jayanne English / University of Manitoba)

The discovery of so-called "odd radio circles" several years ago had astronomers scrambling to find an explanation for these enormous regions of radio waves so far-reaching that they have galaxies at their centers. Scientists at the University of California, San Diego, think they have found the answer: outflowing galactic winds from exploding stars in so-called "starburst" galaxies. They described their findings in a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“These galaxies are really interesting,” said Alison Coil of the University of California, San Diego. “They occur when two big galaxies collide. The merger pushes all the gas into a very small region, which causes an intense burst of star formation. Massive stars burn out quickly, and when they die, they expel their gas as outflowing winds.”

As reported previously, the discovery arose from the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU) project, which aims to take a census of radio sources in the sky. Several years ago, Ray Norris, an astronomer at Western Sydney University and CSIRO in Australia, predicted the EMU project would make unexpected discoveries. He dubbed them "WTFs." Anna Kapinska, an astronomer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) was browsing through radio astronomy data collected by CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) telescope when she noticed several strange shapes that didn't seem to resemble any known type of object. Following Norris' nomenclature, she labeled them as possible WTFs. One of those was a picture of a ghostly circle of radio emission, "hanging out in space like a cosmic smoke ring."

Enlarge / Trevor Milton, founder of Nikola Corp., arrives at court in New York on Monday, Dec. 18, 2023. Milton is set to be sentenced on Monday after being found guilty of securities fraud and wire fraud in October 2022. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

The disgraced founder and former CEO of the "zero emissions" truck company Nikola, Trevor Milton, was sentenced to four years in prison on Monday, Bloomberg reported.

That's a lighter sentence than prosecutors had requested after a jury found Milton guilty of one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud in 2022. During the trial, Milton was accused of lying about “nearly all aspects of the business,” CNBC reported.

From 2016 to 2020, Milton's "extravagant claims" were fueled by a desire to pump up the value of Nikola stock, The New York Times reported. He was accused of misleading investors about everything from fake prototypes of emission-free long-haul trucks to billions worth of supposedly binding orders for hydrogen fuel cells and batteries that were never shipped. In a sentencing memo, prosecutors said that Milton targeted "less sophisticated investors," the Times reported, engaging "in a sustained scheme to take advantage of" their inexperience.

Enlarge / "Oobleck" is a classic kitchen science example of a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid. (credit: Screenshot/PBS)

Oobleck has long been my favorite example of a non-Newtonian fluid, and I'm not alone. It's a hugely popular "kitchen science" experiment because it's simple and easy to make. Mix one part water to two parts corn starch, add a dash of food coloring for fun, and you've got oobleck, which behaves as either a liquid or a solid, depending on how much stress is applied. Stir it slowly and steadily, and it's a liquid. Punch it hard, and it turns more solid under your fist. You can even fill small pools with the stuff and walk across it since the oobleck will harden every time you step down—a showy physics demo that naturally shows up a lot on YouTube.

The underlying physics principles of this simple substance are surprisingly nuanced and complex, and thus fascinating to scientists. Molecular engineers at the University of Chicago have used dense suspensions of piezoelectric nanoparticles to measure what is happening at the molecular level when oobleck transitions from liquid to solid behavior, according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Toward the end of his life, Isaac Newton laid out the properties of an "ideal liquid." One of those properties is viscosity, loosely defined as how much friction/resistance there is to flow in a given substance. The friction arises because a flowing liquid is essentially a series of layers sliding past one another. The faster one layer slides over another, the more resistance there is; the slower one layer slides over another, the less resistance there is. But the world is not an ideal place.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

A Florida judge, Reid Scott, has ruled that there's "reasonable evidence" to conclude that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk knew of defects in Autopilot systems and failed to fix them. Testimony from Tesla engineers and internal documents showed that Musk was "intimately involved" in Tesla's Autopilot program and "acutely aware" of a sometimes-fatal defect—where Autopilot repeatedly fails to detect cross traffic, Scott wrote.

"Knowing that the Autopilot system had previously failed, had limitations" and, according to one Tesla Autopilot systems engineer, "had not been modified, Tesla still permitted the 'Autopilot' system to be engaged on roads that encountered areas of cross traffic," Scott wrote.

Because a jury could perhaps consider that a "conscious disregard or indifference to the life" of Tesla drivers, Scott granted a motion to seek punitive damages to Kim Banner, whose husband Jeremy was killed in 2019 when his "Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had turned onto the road, shearing off the Tesla's roof," Reuters reported. Autopilot allegedly failed to warn Jeremy or respond in any way that could have avoided the collision, like braking or steering the vehicle out of danger, Banner's complaint said.

Enlarge / These are piles of lithium harvested in Bolivia; Exxon's site in Arkansas will look almost entirely unlike this as it will use direct lithium extraction, not evaporation, to harvest the mineral. (credit: Getty Images)

Earlier this year, new electric vehicle tax incentive rules went into effect. Thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, an EV's tax credit is now linked to the amount of domestic content in its battery pack, an amount that needs to increase year on year.

Automakers had an inkling that would happen, so we've seen a flurry of announcements for new battery plants in the United States that will make the cells and assemble the packs for future EVs, but we've heard slightly less about new local sources of lithium. But today, Exxon revealed it is about to extract the stuff from a rich deposit in Arkansas.

At one point, California's Salton Sea looked like a promising source of lithium, but working with the corrosive brine has proven extremely challenging to industrial equipment.

Enlarge (credit: The Washington Post / Contributor | The Washington Post)

After a viral TikTok trend spurred tens of thousands of car thefts this summer, cops in Washington, DC, started realizing that it was much easier to recover stolen vehicles that could be tracked with Apple AirTags.

Because of this, the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) rolled out a pilot program this week, doling out free tracking devices to residents in DC areas where cops are seeing "the greatest increase in vehicle theft," according to a press release from the office of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.

Over the next few days, MPD will hand out the tracking devices—both AirTags and Tiles—at distribution events, where officers will help residents hide the devices in their vehicles and pair the devices to their phones. Residents will be able to choose whether they want an AirTag or a Tile, MPD said, and once the device is installed, only the resident will have access to tracking information as the sole owner of the device, but they will be required to share data with police if their vehicle is stolen.

Enlarge (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)

Less than three months after the California Public Utilities Commission approved robotaxi-service Cruise's plan to provide around-the-clock driverless rides to passengers in San Francisco, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has shut down Cruise's driverless operations in the state.

Yesterday, the California DMV suspended Cruise's permits for autonomous vehicle deployment and driverless testing "effective immediately" over pedestrian safety concerns.

"Public safety remains the California DMV’s top priority, and the department’s autonomous vehicle regulations provide a framework to facilitate the safe testing and deployment of this technology on California public roads," the DMV's announcement said. "When there is an unreasonable risk to public safety, the DMV can immediately suspend or revoke permits."

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek)

The United States Department of Justice is investigating Tesla after a Reuters report revealed in July that the EV maker secretly created a team to divert customer complaints because it had grossly exaggerated its vehicles' driving range. Reuters' source confirmed that "the directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk."

The driving range was so far below company estimates that many customers assumed their cars were defective. Three customers launched a class-action suit, alleging fraud and false advertising. This mounting backlash over Tesla's overly optimistic driving range estimates came at a tense time for Tesla following an unsuccessful launch of Tesla's Full Self Driving (FSD) Beta—a feature deemed so dangerous that Tesla had to recall 362,758 cars—and a criminal investigation into its Autopilot claims.

The DOJ appears to now be probing all of Tesla's recent missteps. According to a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing from Tesla on Monday, the DOJ has sent requests for information and subpoenaed Tesla for documents related to Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD features, as well as documents "regarding certain matters associated with personal benefits, related parties, vehicle range, and personnel decisions."