In What Could Be A Windfall for Electric Cars, Diesel Cars Are Dying In Europe. European Car Manufacturers, Who Cheated on Emissions Tests, Are To Blame.

Diesel cars can be banned from German cities, court rules

LEIPZIG - German cities can ban the most heavily polluting diesel cars from their streets, a court ruled on Tuesday, a move likely to be mirrored in other parts of Europe and to force automakers to pay to improve exhaust systems or switch to cleaner vehicles.

 From article, (German cities can ban the most heavily polluting diesel cars from their streets, a court ruled on Tuesday, a move likely to be mirrored in other parts of Europe and to force automakers to pay to improve exhaust systems or switch to cleaner vehicles.

There has been a global backlash against diesel-engine cars since Volkswagen admitted in 2015 to cheating US exhaust tests, meant to limit emissions of particulate matter and nitrogen oxide (NOx), known to cause respiratory disease.

The ban in the birthplace of the modern automobile is a new blow for automakers, and an embarrassment for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which has come under fire for its close ties to the car industry and had lobbied against a ban.

The ruling was praised by environmentalists but angered right-wing politicians, who said millions of drivers faced de facto expropriation of vehicles they could no longer use. Tradesmen and retailers said it could hit their business.

Merkel noted that the ruling did not affect all drivers in Germany, but said the government would discuss with regions and municipalities how to proceed.

The ruling could have wider implications.

Paris, Madrid, Mexico City and Athens have said they plan to ban diesel vehicles from city centres by 2025, while the mayor of Copenhagen wants to ban new diesel cars from entering the city as soon as next year.

Sales of diesel cars have been falling fast in Europe since the Volkswagen scandal, with fears of driving bans sending demand sharply down in Germany in the last year.

The ruling by the country’s highest federal administrative court came after German states had appealed against bans imposed by local courts in Stuttgart and Duesseldorf in cases brought by environmental group DUH over poor air quality.

“This is a great day for clean air in Germany,” DUH managing director Juergen Resch said.

“This is a debacle for the policies of the grand coalition, which has sided with the auto industry,” Resch added, referring to the ruling coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats that Merkel hopes to renew in the coming weeks.

The court on Tuesday ordered the German cities of Stuttgart and Duesseldorf to amend their anti-pollution plans, saying that city bans can be implemented even without nationwide rules.

The shares of German automakers Volkswagen, Daimler and BMW slipped after the ruling, trading down 1.4%, 0.3% and 0.6%, respectively.

The DUH group sued Stuttgart and Duesseldorf to force them to implement driving bans, after about 70 German cities were found to exceed European Union NOx limits. The group is also suing another 20 cities in Germany over air quality.

The court said that Stuttgart - the birthplace of the combustion engine and home of Mercedes-maker Daimler - should consider gradually imposing a year-round ban for all older diesel models, as well as some even older gasoline models.

However, it said cars which meet Euro-5 emissions standards should not be excluded until Sept. 1, 2019, four years after the introduction of the latest Euro-6 standard. Stuttgart should allow exemptions for tradesmen and some residents, it added.)

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Autonomous Cars Could Save Lives, Could Cut Down on Accidents. But to Do So, They Have to Have a Stellar Record, for People, to Trust Them

Self-driving cars will profoundly change the way people live

ROAD TRIPS. DRIVE-THROUGHS. Shopping malls. Freeways. Car chases. Road rage. Cars changed the world in all sorts of unforeseen ways. They granted enormous personal freedom, but in return they imposed heavy costs. People working on autonomous vehicles generally see their main benefits as mitigating those costs, notably road accidents, pollution and congestion.

 From article, (ROAD TRIPS. DRIVE-THROUGHS. Shopping malls. Freeways. Car chases. Road rage. Cars changed the world in all sorts of unforeseen ways. They granted enormous personal freedom, but in return they imposed heavy costs. People working on autonomous vehicles generally see their main benefits as mitigating those costs, notably road accidents, pollution and congestion. GM’s boss, Mary Barra, likes to talk of “zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.” AVs, their champions argue, can offer all the advantages of cars without the drawbacks.

In particular, AVs could greatly reduce deaths and injuries from road accidents. Globally, around 1.25m people die in such accidents each year, according to the WHO; it is the leading cause of death among those aged 15-29. Another 20m-50m people are injured. Most accidents occur in developing countries, where the arrival of autonomous vehicles is still some way off. But if the switch to AVs can be advanced even by a single year, “that’s 1.25m people who don’t die,” says Chris Urmson of Aurora, an AV startup. In recent decades cars have become much safer thanks to features such as seat belts and airbags, but in America road deaths have risen since 2014, apparently because of distraction by smartphones. AVs would let riders text (or drink) to their heart’s content without endangering anyone.

Evidence that AVs are safer is already building up. Waymo’s vehicles have driven 4m miles on public roads; the only accidents they have been involved in while driving autonomously were caused by humans in other vehicles. AVs have superhuman perception and can slam on the brakes in less than a millisecond, compared with a second or so for human drivers. But “better than human” is a low bar. People seem prepared to tolerate deaths caused by human drivers, but AVs will have to be more or less infallible. A realistic goal is a thousandfold improvement over human drivers, says Amnon Shashua of Mobileye, a maker of AV technology. That would reduce the number of road deaths in America each year from 40,000 to 40, a level last seen in 1900. If this can be achieved, future generations may look back on the era of vehicles driven by humans as an aberration. Even with modern safety features, some 650,000 Americans have died on the roads since 2000, more than were slain in all the wars of the 20th century (about 630,000).

To take advantage of much lower operating costs per mile, most AVs are almost certain to be electric, which will reduce harmful emissions of two kinds: particulates, which cause lung and heart diseases, and climate-changing greenhouse gases. Even electric vehicles, however, still cause some particulate emissions from tyre and road wear, and the drop in greenhouse-gas emissions depends on how green the power grid is. The switch to electric vehicles will require more generating capacity (UBS estimates that it will increase European electricity consumption by 20-30% by 2050) and new infrastructure, such as charging stations and grid upgrades. For urban dwellers, the benefits will be better air quality and less noise.

Whether AVs will be able to reduce congestion is much less clear. The lesson of the 20th century is that building more roads to ease congestion encourages more car journeys. If robotaxis are cheap and fast, people will want to use them more. Yet there are reasons to think that the roads would become less crowded. Widespread sharing of vehicles would make much more efficient use of road space; computer-controlled cars can be smart about route planning; and once they are widespread, AVs can travel closer together than existing cars, increasing road capacity.

What is certain is that riders who no longer have to drive will gain an enormous amount of time that can be used to work, play or socialise. “Americans can take back a total of 30bn hours per year that they now spend driving, sitting in traffic or looking for a parking space,” says BCG.

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Yet to think about AVs as a fix for the problems caused by cars is to risk falling into a familiar historical trap. This is exactly how people thought about cars when they first appeared: as a fix for the problems caused by horses. In the 1890s, big cities around the world were grappling with growing volumes of horse manure and urine and the rotting bodies of thousands of dead horses, spreading disease. In 1894 the Times of London famously predicted that by the 1940s every street in the city would be buried under nine feet of manure. By comparison, cars seemed clean and hygienic, a key reason why they were adopted so quickly in the 20th century. “Cars replaced something that was in many ways far worse,” says Donald Shoup of the University of California at Los Angeles.)

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Autonomous Vehicles Could Change the Landscape and Not Just by Doing All the Driving.

Self-driving cars will profoundly change the way people live

ROAD TRIPS. DRIVE-THROUGHS. Shopping malls. Freeways. Car chases. Road rage. Cars changed the world in all sorts of unforeseen ways. They granted enormous personal freedom, but in return they imposed heavy costs. People working on autonomous vehicles generally see their main benefits as mitigating those costs, notably road accidents, pollution and congestion.

 From article, (Cars transformed retailing, giving rise to suburban malls with lots of shops and plenty of parking. AVs, combined with the rise of e-commerce, could transform it again. “The Walmart of the future might be fleets of vehicles ready to drop off anything that you might get at a Walmart,” says Peter Norton of the University of Virginia. Or you might order an AV to take you home from work, and arrange to have your groceries, or a meal, waiting for you when you climb aboard. And why should shops, restaurants or other facilities be fixed in place? Coffee shops or food stands could restock at a central depot and then migrate to business neighbourhoods in the morning and entertainment districts in the evening, suggests Chenoe Hart, an architectural designer at the University of California at Berkeley. Mobile shops selling items such as shoes, clothes or cosmetics could visit particular neighbourhoods on a regular schedule, or when hailed by a customer. “It gives us flexibility to reassign space,” says Ms Hart.

Carmakers are experimenting with delivery vehicles that draw up outside a customer’s home, announce their arrival by text message and allow items to be retrieved from a locked compartment by entering a code. Low-cost deliveries using AVs could stimulate local production of all kinds of things, most notably food. Already, food-delivery services like UberEats, Deliveroo, Seamless and GrubHub have given rise to “ghost restaurants” that produce food for delivery only, centralising food production in a few kitchens. Cheap autonomous deliveries could make this kind of model more widespread.

Another possibility, says Johann Jungwirth of Volkswagen, is that restaurants or retailers might cover the cost of travel to encourage customers to visit them. Fancy restaurants might lay on luxury AVs to ferry sozzled customers home, as part of the cost of a meal. Retailers could offer to pay for shoppers’ rides. Ride-hailing networks have a lot of customer data that could be used to target in-vehicle advertising. Hail an AV to go to one shop or restaurant, and you might see ads for a rival. Riders may be offered cheaper rides with ads or more expensive ones without them.

Moreover, AVs could give rise to new kinds of social activities, just as cars provided teenagers with new social opportunities. Ride-hailing networks might group together people with similar interests or friends in common when assigning rides. Or they might work with a dating app, pairing people up with a potential match when they take a ride. AVs might also function as mobile party venues, or double as sleeping pods on long trips, offering an alternative to hotels and low-cost airlines.)

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Repurposing ZIka Virus to Kill Brain Cancer.

Zika virus could help combat brain cancer

Researchers show that infection by Zika caused death of cells from glioblastoma, the most common and aggressive kind of malignant brain tumor in adults. Scientists foresee the use of genetic engineering to neutralize Zika virus' infectious whilst preserving the viral particles which induce the death of tumoral cells.

 From article, ("Zika virus, which has become a threat to health in the Americas, could be genetically modified to destroy glioblastoma cells," said Rodrigo Ramos Catharino, a professor at FCF-UNICAMP and head of the institution's Innovare Biomarker Laboratory.

Through the mass spectrometry analysis of Zika virus-infected glioblastoma cells, scientists also identified the presence of digoxin, a molecule which induced the death of tumoral cells of skin and breast cancer in previous experiments.

Because digoxin and other cardiac glycosides have been shown to induce cancer cell death, the researchers concluded that infection by Zika triggered synthesis of the molecule in glioblastoma cells and that this phenomenon is probably one of the factors that lead to neuronal cell death. "Digoxin could be the key molecule that activates glioblastoma cell death during Zika infection," Catharino said.

Based on these findings, the researchers suggest that a genetically engineered Zika virus could eliminate the effects of infection and leave only the viral particles that synthesize digoxin. Thus, the virus could be an alternative for the treatment of glioblastoma, which is highly resistant to chemotherapy drugs.

"The use of oncolytic viruses [viruses genetically engineered to destroy tumor cells] is at an advanced stage, especially to treat skin cancer and myeloma [bone marrow cancer]," Catharino said. "Zika could be a candidate for the treatment of glioblastoma.")

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BP Report states that as Electric Cars Replace Internal Combustion Engine Cars, Fossil Fuels will still be in Demand, to Power, the Power Plants, Providing Electricity, Recharging Electric Cars.

BP sees increasing energy sector competition

Free access If you want to make serious inroads in carbon emissions over the next 25 years, then focus on the power sector. That was the message from BP's chief executive Bob Dudley at the launch of the company's Energy Outlook 2018 in London.

From article, (If you want to make serious inroads in carbon emissions over the next 25 years, then focus on the power sector. That was the message from BP's chief executive Bob Dudley at the launch of the company's Energy Outlook 2018 in London.

According to the annually updated report, around 70% of the increase in primary energy demand will come from the power sector. Transport will absorb a declining share, as more electric vehicles (EVs) hit the roads. That will stunt rises in petrol demand, but increase electricity demand.

Under BP's "evolving transition" (ET) scenario, the impact of a 115% increase in global GDP on energy demand between 2016 and 2040—driven largely by Asia, Latin America and Africa—will only be partially offset by gains from greater energy efficiency. The result is a 35% increase in primary energy demand to 17.98bn tonnes of oil equivalent (toe) a year.

The ET scenario is based on the pace of change in energy policy and technological development over recent years being maintained into the future. That pace looks achievable, but it wouldn't be sufficient to meet the goals of the Paris climate change agreement. BP also modelled other scenarios based on more drastic action to tackle climate change, which lead to lower energy demand.

Renewables make the greatest gains in share, increasing 404% under the ET scenario to 2.53bn toe/y, followed by nuclear (a 54% rise), gas (47%) and hydro (36%).

BP also forecasts that 15% of cars on the world's roads in 2040 will be battery electric vehicles or plug-in hybrid. But it says EVs' share of overall distance driven by cars will be much higher, at around 30%, due to the impact of greater use of car sharing and autonomous vehicles. These trends will be skewed heavily towards the EV fleet, rather than vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICEs).)

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Me, "BP Report states that as Electric Cars Replace Internal Combustion Engine Cars, Fossil Fuels will still be in Demand, to Power, the Power Plants, Providing Electricity, Recharging Electric Cars. What should be pointed out is it is better to have the fossil fuels burned in a power plant because it is easier to deal with Power plant pollution there, then in millions of ICE cars and trucks. Second, Power plants come in all shapes and sizes, so While fossil fuels may still power some power plants there may be other power plants, Renewables, Hydro, Wind, Solar, etc., that BP or other energy providing companies may invest in, that will alter how much power comes from fossil fuels. Its an ever changing world. The only way to see what will happen is to live it." 

The Untold Story of Humans and Yeast: What a Symbiotic Relationship.

Yeast and its incredibly important economic role

Yeast, a single celled fungus, is responsible for some of our most important foods and beverages, among other things. Bread, wine, beer, biofuel, and insulin are all made from yeast. We humans have been using yeast for thousands of years, and it has enabled our agricultural and geographical expansion.

From article, (Yeast has been used by humans for a very long time. Grinding stones and baking chambers for yeast-raised bread have been found in Ancient Egyptian ruins. So bread is actually thousands of years old. There has been evidence of 8,000 year old wine and 7,000 year old beer. However, it wasn’t until 1680 that Anton van Leewenhoek, a Dutch naturalist, first looked at yeast microscopically. He didn’t think that it was alive though. Later, in the 1840s, Theodor Schwann realized that yeast was a fungus and attributed fermentation to it. It was Louis Pasteur that figured out why dough rises and why the mix of hops and barley turns into a tasty beverage. In 1857, he proved that living yeast causes alcohol to ferment and that it was not simply a chemical reaction.

 In baking, yeast turns sugars in the dough into carbon dioxide. Little air bubbles then form which cause the dough to expand. When baked, the live yeast dies, but the air bubbles are kept, and give bread and other baked goods their soft, spongy texture. First, the yeast uses oxygen, and produces carbon dioxide and water. Then, when the oxygen is used up, it starts to ferment and produces ethanol but, luckily, this evaporates during baking.

Baking provides $311 billion of American GDP and 1.8 million jobs. Yeast is also used to produce foods which are not baked, such as cocoa beans for chocolate, sour cream, fish sauce, kimchi, miso, Tabasco, and vinegar.

The oldest evidence of beer comes from traces on pottery in present-day Iran, 7000 years ago. Beer production was also enabled by the cultivation of cereals and followed the discovery and use of yeast-bread. There is also ancient evidence of beer in Mesopotamia and China. It was useful, because beer was safer to drink than water since not much water purification went on then.

Different strains of yeast produce different types of beer. Top-fermenting yeasts, such as S. cerevisiae, start to foam at the top and are used to produce ales. Bottom-fermenting yeasts, such as S. pastorianus, are usually used to produce lager beers and ferment well at low temperatures.

The use of yeast in wine-making is perhaps not as obvious as for beer, but it is used to convert the sugars in grape juice into ethanol. Yeast is already on grape skins, but using this wild yeast is unpredictable and therefore not good for the commercial production of wine. Instead, a pure yeast culture is usually added which takes over the fermentation and produces wine reliably. Again, S. cerevisiae is the star, though different yeast strains are used, which affect the flavor of the wine.

Believe it or not, yeast also help millions of diabetics to lead normal lives. Insulin is produced using a genetically modified yeast. Other important medicines and vaccinations are also produced with yeast, such as the vaccine against the human papilloma virus and eye degeneration. Yeasts are also sold as probiotic treatments against a variety of ailments. Not to mention that yeast is used in laboratories all around the world as a genetic model organism. Different topics such as cell development, aging and cancer are studied.

Plant material can be fermented in the absence of oxygen for energy. The ethanol produced this way (about 5-10%) is blended with gasoline to create gasohol. It emits less carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons than regular gasoline. It is also carbon neutral; the CO2 produced when ethanol is burned is offset by the amount taken in by the plants as they grow. Maize and palm oil are most often used for ethanol production. In light of these characteristics, the world ethanol production has increased recently. However, the conversion of natural habitats to palm oil or maize plantations is also not sustainable and a balance needs to be struck.)

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Uber Self-Driving Freight. Yes, Self-Driving Semi-Trucks.

Uber's self-driving trucks have started hauling freight

Uber's fleet of self-driving trucks has begun hauling commercial loads, the company announced on Tuesday. The trucks will operate first in Arizona, a state with famously permissive laws for self-driving technology. The trucks won't be fully driverless-they'll still have human safety drivers behind the wheel.

 From article, (Uber's fleet of self-driving trucks has begun hauling commercial loads, the company announced on Tuesday. The trucks will operate first in Arizona, a state with famously permissive laws for self-driving technology.

The trucks won't be fully driverless—they'll still have human safety drivers behind the wheel. Still, the announcement represents an important step toward the use of fully autonomous trucks in the trucking business.

Uber's driverless trucks will operate as part of Uber Freight, a freight-hauling app and network that Uber launched last year. Just as the regular Uber app lets passengers book a ride with a few clicks, Uber Freight is an app that connects shippers with truckers who can haul their loads.

On Tuesday, Uber released a video to illustrate how this three-stage delivery process, called the "transfer hub model," will work. First, a human driver picks up a trailer full of cargo and drives it to a nearby rendezvous point. In the example shown in an Uber video, a driver drove about 300 miles from Los Angeles to Topock, at the western edge of Arizona.

The driver then meets up with a self-driving truck at a transfer hub in Topock and they trade loads. The self-driving truck gets the conventional driver's load to take it further east, while the conventional driver takes the load that the self-driving truck brought from the west.

The self-driving truck then handles the middle section of the trip. Uber is initially restricting autonomous truck trips to Arizona for legal reasons, so it has been hauling loads between Topock at the western edge of the state to Sanders, Arizona in the east—a distance of around 300 miles. But Uber's goal is for driverless trucks to haul loads much longer distances on trips spanning multiple states.

Finally, the load will be transferred back to another human driver, who will carry it to its final destination and deal with the complexities of handing the trailer off at its destination.

Uber hopes to orchestrate these handoffs so that each truck hands off a trailer to the other one, allowing everyone to make money on both legs of their trips.)

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