The car slammed to a halt on a sunny afternoon. A cloth and metal figure of a child wiggled back and forth following its sudden emergence into the car’s path. Inside, two sets of human eyes stared at the puppet kid’s eyes. The car was watching too.
A moment later, the car’s brake pedal lifted from the floor. The Bosch engineer riding in the car, who hadn’t even moved his foot as the vehicle brought itself to the abrupt stop, now stepped on the brake. Now that the car’s autonomous braking system—a chip that used images from a windshield camera—had concluded that the danger of an accident had passed, it was handing control back to the human driver. Continue reading How Self-Driving Cars Will Sneak Onto Our Roads→
Hilde Janssens currently works as a lab manager in the laboratory of a junior principal investigator (PI) at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain—except when she’s teaching other scientists how to manage their own laboratories. In 2009, Janssens participated in her first lab management course, offered by her institution through the Heidelberg, Germany-based training and coaching company hfp consulting. A year later, the company recruited her as a part-time instructor. Continue reading Lab Management Courses: Becoming a Trainer→
In the middle of the evening rush hour last November 29 more than 1,000 London cyclists staged a “die-in” to protest the traffic deaths of fellow riders and to demand more investment in bike-friendly roads. London’s streets may have grown friendlier to cyclists since the 2010 introduction of its Barclays Cycle Hire bike-sharing system but according to those at the protest, London is still too dangerous. The hundreds of cities that have launched bicycle-sharing systems in the last decade offer similar reasons for doing it: Bicycling reduces car traffic and pollution in city centers and is healthy exercise. But although all road-users benefit from less-crowded streets, a recent study suggests that the health benefits of bike-sharing programs depend on who is doing the riding.London’s bike-sharing program had registered 191,702 users at last count. Public health researcher James Woodcock at the University of Cambridge in England and his colleagues imagined, and calculated, how those riders lives might have been different had they not used the bikes. They examined data from 2.1 million hours of use between April 2011 and March 2012 and compared the health impact of those 2.1 million hours with the alternatives: more walking, public transit use or driving. To their surprise, the team reports in the February 13 BMJ (British Medical Journal), the switch to cycling may not have been helpful for young women. The health benefits also seem to differ by age, with older riders of both genders gaining more benefits than younger ones.
Firing a member of your lab is difficult. Fortunately, it’s also rare. The first and only time cell biologist Samara Reck-Peterson had to do it, in her laboratory at Harvard University, she felt prepared. She had practiced the difficult conversation during a lab management course she’d taken in 2009, and she had a script ready. “Practicing is really the most important thing,” she says. Continue reading Learning to Lead a Lab→
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
