Category: Science &Technology

Toyota Motor Corp. and Audi AG are throwing their hats into the ring of potential suppliers of self-driving vehicles.

Both auto makers confirmed on Thursday that they will be demonstrating autonomous-driving features at the Consumer Electronics Show in the coming week, signaling a new effort to raise the technology’s profile among consumers.

In a preview video posted to its website on Thursday, Toyota showed a five-second clip of one of its Lexus brand cars outfitted with various sensors and the caption, “Lexus advanced active safety research vehicle is leading the industry into a new automated era.”

An Audi official also said the luxury-car company will be demonstrating autonomous vehicle capabilities at the Las Vegas show, including a feature that allows a car to find a parking space and park itself without a driver behind the wheel.

Toyota’s prototype vehicle is a Lexus LS 600h fitted with radar and camera equipment that can detect other vehicles, road lane lines and traffic signals, giving the vehicle the ability to navigate streets without a driver.

It also includes what appears to be the same roof-mounted laser that Google Inc. has been using on its autonomous research cars. Google began testing self-driving cars in 2009.

While Google uses many Toyota vehicles in its autonomous fleet, the two companies confirmed that Toyota’s technology wasn’t the result of a partnership, and that each firm is developing driving systems independently.

The Japanese auto maker plans to discuss its autonomous car in more detail next week, according to a Toyota official.

Dave Sullivan, an analyst with research firm AutoPacific Inc., said Toyota’s decision in particular to throw its name behind autonomous driving technology will likely spur adoption.

“To have somebody with the weight of Toyota throwing their weight behind this is impressive,” Mr. Sullivan said.

He added that Toyota has already been spotted testing an autonomous vehicle near its Ann Arbor, Mich., engineering campus.

Building-block technologies at the heart of self-driving vehicles already exist widely, but auto makers have been cautious in adding tools that could take the responsibility out of the hands of drivers.

For instance, adaptive cruise control, available in dozens of vehicles on the market, can allow people to steer their vehicle and avoid touching the brake or accelerator on long trips.

Daimler AG’s Mercedes-Benz is working on technology for its S-class sedan that will handle braking and accelerating in stop-and-go traffic.

There are safety technologies that will gently pull a car back into its lane if the car detects the driver is veering too much.

Meanwhile, auto makers also have developed safety technology designed to protect pedestrians. Toyota’s top Lexus LS, for example, has a radar that can detect people walking in front of a vehicle.

If it sees a pedestrian, the safety system will stop the car, even if the driver continues stepping on the accelerator pedal. Other car makers also offer a similar technology.

Besides Audi and Mercedes-Benz, other car makers are developing autonomous driving technology as well.

Ford Motor Co. Chairman Bill Ford Jr. has said that autonomous vehicles are coming and likely are a good solution to congestion problems because they could be coordinated with traffic information and reroute drivers past traffic jams.

Google has been the most visible proponent of autonomous cars so far. It has released numerous videos of its self-driving cars in action, including putting a blind man in the driver’s seat.

It has also lobbied to legalize computer-controlled cars, recently scoring legislative wins in Nevada, Florida and California.

Toyota has taken a more aggressive approach to new technologies and design under the leadership of Akio Toyoda, the company’s chief executive officer and grandson of the company’s founder.

Aside from its popular Prius gasoline-electric hybrid cars, Toyota has struck a deal to partner with Silicon Valley startup Tesla Motors Co. to make plug-in electric cars, among other things.

Wall Street Journal

Despite sharing 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, humans have much bigger brains and are, as a species, much more intelligent.

Now a new study sheds light on why: Unlike chimps, humans undergo a massive explosion in white matter growth, or the connections between brain cells, in the first two years of life.

The new results, published December 18 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, partly explain why humans are so much brainier than our nearest living relatives.

But they also reveal why the first two years of life play such a key role in human development.

“What’s really unique about us is that our brains experience rapid establishment of connectivity in the first two years of life,” said Chet Sherwood, an evolutionary neuroscientist at George Washington University, who was not involved in the study.

“That probably helps to explain why those first few years of human life are so critical to set us on the course to language acquisition, cultural knowledge and all those things that make us human.”

Chimpanzees

While past studies have shown that human brains go through a rapid expansion in connectivity, it wasn’t clear that was unique amongst great apes (a group that includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans and humans).

To prove it was the signature of humanity’s superior intelligence, researchers would need to prove it was different from that in our closest living relatives.

However, a U.S. moratorium on acquiring new chimpanzees for medical research meant that people like Sherwood, who is trying to understand chimpanzee brain development, had to study decades-old baby chimpanzee brains that were lying around in veterinary pathologists’ labs, Sherwood told LiveScience.

But in Japan, those limitations didn’t go into place till later, allowing the researchers to do live magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans of three baby chimps as they grew to 6 years of age.

They then compared the data with existing brain-imaging scans for six macaques and 28 Japanese children.

The researchers found that chimpanzees and humans both had much more brain development in early life than macaques.

“The increase in total cerebral volume during early infancy and the juvenile stage in chimpanzees and humans was approximately three times greater than that in macaques,” the researchers wrote in the journal article.

But human brains expanded much more dramatically than chimpanzee brains during the first few years of life; most of that human-brain expansion was driven by explosive growth in the connections between brain cells, which manifests itself in an expansion in white matter.

Chimpanzee brain volumes ballooned about half that of humans’ expansion during that time period.

The findings, while not unexpected, are unique because the researchers followed the same individual chimpanzees over time; past studies have instead pieced together brain development from scans on several apes of different ages, Sherwood said.

The explosion in white matter may also explain why experiences during the first few years of life can greatly affect children’s IQ, social life and long-term response to stress.

“That opens an opportunity for environment and social experience to influence the molding of connectivity,” Sherwood said.

LiveScience

The world’s first flight powered entirely by bio jet fuel has raised hopes for cleaner air travel and upped the prospects of a boon for farmers whose oilseed crops could supplant kerosene.

A Dassault Falcon 20 twin engine jet took off from the Canadian capital Ottawa last month to test the new jet fuel, made from 100 per cent oilseed, for engine performance and emissions, aiming to make sky journeys less polluting.

Several engineers were on board, monitoring the engines’ performance and fuel burn, making a round trip to Montreal and back in 90 minutes.

Domestic software has started to attract more Chinese consumers, with some leading developers able to rival their international counterparts in quality, experts have said.

Chinese software and operating systems for servers are meeting the industry’s needs after years of development, as 75 percent of domestic business users are satisfied with the software they are using, said Gao Zhiyang, deputy director of the China Software Testing Center (CSTC).

In terms of certain criteria and standards, a number of domestic developers are nearing or even overtaking their foreign counterparts, he noted.

In the first 10 months of the year, business revenues for China’s software sector surged 25.8 percent year on year to 1.96 trillion yuan ($311 billion), according to a report released by the CSTC.

However, the sector is still dealing with unstable software performance and an inefficient quality management system. Some companies still lack innovation and rely heavily on overseas markets for core technology, he added.

Gao called for more efforts related to copyright protection and a better management system for the healthier growth of the sector.

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