Google today announced that in June its Lexus autonomous sport-utility vehicles got into two accidents. In both cases, the incidents can be chalked up to human error.
Google’s self-driving cars have now been involved in a total of 14 “minor accidents” in 1.8 million miles’ worth of autonomous and manual driving, the company said in the second ever monthly report from its self-driving car project.
The two new accident reports, which were submitted to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, are amusing — but they suggest that self-driving cars can be less likely to cause accidents than people who are behind the wheel:
Google is to start alerting drivers when they approach U.S. railroad crossings to help curb a rise in accidents.
“Grade” or “level” crossings are the points where a railway track intersects with a public or private road. Trains traverse more than 212,000 such crossings in the U.S. each day, according to data from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), which led to around 270 deaths in 2014 — a 9 percent rise on the previous year.
Accidents are typically caused by human error, and with many railroad crossings there aren’t any barriers or lights between the road and the railway track, leaving it entirely up to the visual attentiveness of the driver to spot a road sign.
Google’s Nest Labs announced a new security camera to add to its growing list of home automation products — the $199 Nest Cam.
Nest Cam looks for motion and sends an alert to a phone app if it sees something unusual. Nest says the camera has full 1080P HD video. It also sports 8 built-in LEDs, which gives it a better view of the room, even at night. Nest says the camera has a 130-degree field of view, and can detect objects up to 20 feet away.
La tecnológica presentó esta semana Sidewalk Labs, una firma independiente que se centrará en las Smart Cities y que nace con la misión de reinventar el concepto de ciudad
Google ha presentado esta semana un nuevo proyecto con el que quiere dejar su impronta en las ciudades del futuro. Se trata de la compañía Sidewalk Labs con la que pretende "mejorar las vidas de millones de personas de todo el mundo" innovando en aspectos como el transporte o la eficiencia energética de los núcleos urbanos, según explicó el CEO de la tecnológica Larry Page.
Google has a thing about contact lenses. The company has done a lot of work with contact lenses used in health applications. It’s now patented a technology that employs the contact lens as an identification device.
The new patent describes a contact lens that covers all or part of the iris of the eye, and one or more light sensors embedded in the surface of the contact lens collects reflected light off the iris.
Google has acquired Lumedyne Technologies Inc., a company that has built multiple types of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors, according to a report today.
Google paid around $85 million to do the deal, which ensures that Lumedyne’s employees will be able to keep working at the company’s San Diego office, according to the report from Xconomy, citing unnamed sources.
The company’s technology could be used for several projects Google has been working on.
Jump will be compatible with GoPro cameras, enabling as many as 16 cameras to work together “as one,” Clay Bavor of Google Cardboard told the crowd. The system can work with an array made out any material, including cardboard, Bavor said.
Google today moved deeper into the Internet of Things with the announcement of its new IoT operating system, Brillo, and a new common language for connected devices called Weave.
Brillo is designed to run on connected devices that have small processors and low memory. The OS manages and stores data collected by sensors in the device.
Device makers will be able to bake the OS software onto the chips used in their devices, so those devices can immediately connect with Android platforms.
Keith Larrabee’s farm sits on 4,000 acres of California’s Sacramento Valley, between a coastal range of mountains to the west and the tall Sierra Nevadas to the east. It’s an area that traditionally gets much more rain than most of the drought-stricken state. Even so, Larrabee is always worried about the cost and availability of water for his orchards of walnuts and pecans and his 3,000 acres of rice.
Two years ago he began inserting probes five feet deep into the soil of his nut orchards to measure the water concentration foot by foot.
