Predicting the lifespan of people, or their “Personal Life Expectancy” (PLE), would greatly alter our lives. When will I die? This question has endured across cultures and civilizations. It has given rise to a plethora of religions and spiritual paths over thousands of years, and more recently, some highly amusing apps. But this question now prompts a different response, as technology slowly brings us closer to accurately predicting the answer. Predicting the lifespan of people, or their “Personal Life Expectancy” (PLE), would greatly alter our lives. On one hand, it may have benefits for policymaking, and help optimize an individual’s…

For the first time, the U.S. government’s highway safety agency has approved a company’s request to deploy a self-driving vehicle that doesn’t need to meet the same federal safety standards for cars and trucks driven by humans. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration granted temporary approval for Silicon Valley robotics company Nuro to run low-speed autonomous delivery vehicles that were designed without any accommodations for human drivers. That means no side and rear-view mirrors, windshield wipers, steering wheels or brake pedals. The vehicles previously were subject to federal standards for low-speed vehicles that travel under 25 miles per hour. Those…

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. The Big Idea: The tomato’s path from wild plant to household staple is much more complex than researchers have long thought. For many years, scientists believed that humans domesticated the tomato in two major phases. First, native people in South America cultivated blueberry-sized wild tomatoes about 7,000 years ago to breed a plant with a cherry-sized fruit. Later, people in Mesoamerica bred this intermediate group further to form the large cultivated tomatoes that we eat today. But in a recent study, we show that the cherry-sized tomato likely originated…

In order to develop solar panels that generate electricity at night, you just need them to operate in the exact opposite way solar panels work during the day. One of the problems with solar panels is that they don't generate electricity at night, so we have to store the electricity they generate during the day to power things during the evening. That works fine, but what if we could develop solar panels that did generate electricity at night? It's possible, and the way it works is pretty surprising. Researchers from the University of California, Davis explain in a new paper…