Cruise said Thursday evening it has paused all driverless operations, a decision that comes just two days after the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's deployment and driverless testing permits effectively ending its robotaxi operations in the state. The action means that driverless operations in Austin, Houston and Phoenix where the company was charging for rides, has ended. Cruise has also ended driverless operations in Miami, where just yesterday the company had quietly launched, according to sources familiar with the company's activities. Cruise said in a post on social media site X that it will take time to examine its 'processes, systems, and tools and reflect on how we can better operate in a way that will earn public trust.' The GM self-driving subsidiary said it was taking the action to rebuild public trust and added it was not related to any new on-road incidents. 'We think it's the right thing to do during a period when we need to be extra vigilant when it comes to risk, relentlessly focused on safety, & taking steps to rebuild public trust,' the company posted....

We’re going to need to mine a huge amount of metals like cobalt and lithium to electrify the world’s automobiles. But things would be easier if car batteries didn’t have to be so big. To a large extent, automobile makers building the next generation of electric vehicles (EVs) are competing on range, putting big, powerful batteries into their cars so they can travel farther between charges. That means mining and refining more minerals to build those bigger cars, and thus a bigger impact on the landscape, and a larger environmental footprint. The reason for all that is that EV batteries don’t charge very fast, so the assumption is that people will only buy cars that they can drive for a long time without the inconvenience of a long charging stop. But that paradigm might be about to change....

Now, a new test by MIT and colleagues promises to make testing so cheap and effective that people could potentially do it every day. Researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, along with their collaborators at the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and the Ragon Institute have devised a CRISPR-based diagnostic for COVID-19, called STOPCovid, that can achieve results in 30 minutes to an hour. “We need rapid testing to become part of the fabric of this situation so that people can test themselves every day, which will slow down outbreak,” said Omar Abudayyeh, an MIT McGovern Fellow working on the diagnostic. The researchers tested STOPCovid on 402 patient samples (202 positive and 200 negative) and found that the test detected 93% of the positive cases as determined by PCR tests for COVID-19. In addition, the test is made to be simple enough to carry out without the need for any specialized laboratory equipment....

Within three years of Tesla’s founding in 2003, Elon Musk had invested $55 million of his own money in the company. And yet things were not going as planned. CEOs were leaving after short tenures. The company’s first model, the Roadster, was experiencing cost overruns. In response, in October of 2008, Musk appointed himself CEO. “I have so many chips on the table,” he explained. “I need to steer the boat completely.” “Prior to Tesla, no domestic manufacturer had entered the U.S. automotive market at scale since the Second World War,” said Donald Sull, a senior lecturer in innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan and one of the case study’s co-authors. “This case, which includes rich data on the industry, customers’ willingness to pay for electric vehicles, and Tesla’s financial situation, explores whether Tesla’s strategy of establishing a beachhead in the luxury segment and out-innovating its competitors can trump the challenging fundamentals of the auto industry.” Tesla went public in June 2010 at a price of $17 per share. Eight years later, the stock was trading at $335, making Tesla the most valuable car manufacturer in the U.S. But the company had only posted two profitable quarters by that point. Investors were skeptical of its long-term viability, and media coverage wasn’t helping: the mass-market Model 3 was woefully behind schedule, lost in “production hell,” while a series of errant tweets by Musk brought SEC scrutiny and an eventual fine. The company has continued along a bumpy road, with a record $312 million of profit between July and September of 2018, followed by a plunge in stock prices, followed by a slump in sales, followed by promises of a driverless taxi fleet by 2020....