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Hankook's New Tire Uses Tree Resin to Keep Electric Cars Rolling Oct 10, 2018

Show notes

An electric car is a demanding thing. Sure, it doesn’t need gasoline or oil or nearly as much maintenance as a machine propelled by explosions, but dumping the internal combustion engine in favor of a battery and motors brings up a slew of fresh issues. Key among them, of course, is efficiency—the more miles you can squeeze from each kilowatt-hour, the better.

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How We Learn: A WIRED Investigation Oct 10, 2018

Show notes

That Johannes Gutenberg guy was on to something. He may not have been the first person to print texts on paper using movable type—systems in China and Korea predated his—but his printing press made it faster, and cheaper, to create a record of a thought. One by one, those thoughts spread across Europe, philosophy and science and poetry. They might have been a cause of the Renaissance, or simply a symptom, but ideas grew legs they'd never had before.

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What Are Shorts and Why Does Elon Hate Them? Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

It was a rough week for Tesla’s share price. After bouncing back from a major dip it took when the Securities and Exchange Commission threatened to sue CEO Elon Musk, and him then agreeing to settle, it’s been on a new downward slide. And it seems to be because of Musk’s tweets, as usual. This time he appears to attack the SEC (calling it the Shortseller Enrichment Commision), and reserves his real ire for short sellers of Telsa stock themselves, as usual. https://twitter.

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These Magical Sunglasses Block All the Screens Around You Oct 09, 2018

Show notes

Early last year, Scott Blew was standing in line at a food truck in Los Angeles when he caught the glare of Fox News on a television out of the corner of his eye. This is ridiculous, he thought. He couldn’t even escape the deluge of the news, or the ubiquity of screens, on a jaunt outdoors to get lunch. You could consciously choose to put your phone away, to step away from your laptop, but then some other screen would pop up elsewhere, whether you liked it or not.

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Want to Drive Like a Pro Racer? Hope You Like Numbers Oct 08, 2018

Show notes

Approaching an 85-mph corner at 150 mph, I’m glad my stomach is calm and my bladder is empty. The Audi R8 GT4 race car has a surprising number of nooks and crannies to hold and hide any substances that may escape my body, and my brain has enough to think about already without working a hefty cleaning bill into my finances. I need all the mental bandwidth I can get because I’m tearing around the 24 turns of Southern California’s Thermal Club circuit.

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Uber Writes an Equation to Help Cities Measure—and Manage—the Curb Oct 08, 2018

Show notes

Not sure what your curb has done for you lately? Not to worry. Your answer is arriving now, in the form of an equation devised by Uber and meant to help cities evaluate how efficiently they’re using this increasingly contested space. After years of neglect and scorn, this strip of urban infrastructure, long the sole domain of the meter maid, has gotten incredibly crowded. Bike- and scooter-share companies would love to park their wares there.

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The DOT Says ‘Drivers’ Don’t Have to Be Human Oct 05, 2018

Show notes

The Department of Transportation is getting a little more creative about how it defines “driver,” Secretary Elaine Chao announced Thursday. In the third version of the department’s official stance on self-driving, the department said it would “adapt the definitions of ‘driver’ and ‘operator’ to recognize that such terms to not refer exclusively to a human, but may in fact include an automated system.

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We Need to Change How We Talk About Game Studios Closing Oct 05, 2018

Show notes

We need to change the way we talk about videogame studios. But even more than that, we need to change the way we talk about them when they close. In the past year, according to PC Gamer, 10 major game studios have closed, each employing anywhere from a dozen employees to hundreds. From Capcom Vancouver, the developers of the Dead Rising series, to Visceral, an EA subsidiary responsible for the Dead Space games and working on a highly anticipated Star Wars open-world game, studios keep shuttering.

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California Says ‘Nope’ to the EPA’s Car Emissions Rules Oct 04, 2018

Show notes

The slow motion legal showdown between the feds, the state of California, and its climate-minded allies is on. While President Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency works to roll back clean car regulations, California’s Air Resources Board convened late last week to pass a series of measures that confirm its determination to reduce vehicle emissions in the state, and its willingness to lead the fight—no matter what the federal government says.

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Honda's Helping GM on Its Quest to Deliver Self-Driving Cars Oct 04, 2018

Show notes

Cruise, the self-driving car arm of General Motors, has an unexpected new ally in its bid to keep its corporate master at the forefront of an industry enduring its greatest period of change in generations: Honda. In a deal announced today, the Japanese automaker will help San Francisco-based Cruise and its Detroit owner develop and mass produce a new sort vehicle for a world in which human drivers are no longer needed.

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