Technology

On November 3, 2007, six vehicles made history by successfully navigating a simulated urban environment—and complying with California traffic laws—without a driver behind the wheel. Five of the six were sporting a revolutionary new type of lidar sensor that had recently been introduced by an audio equipment maker called Velodyne.

A decade later, Velodyne's lidar continues to be a crucial technology for self-driving cars. Lidar costs are coming down but are still fairly expensive. Velodyne and a swarm of startups are trying to change that.

On November 7, Waymo announced it would begin regularly testing fully driverless cars—without a safety driver—on public roads. It was a momentous announcement. A technology that had seemed like science fiction a decade earlier became a reality. And the announcement was greeted with a yawn by much of the media and the public—if they noticed at all.

Kubernetes at its core is a container orchestration system. But simply running containers for their own sake has little purpose, as at the end of the day what really matters are applications.

Among the most interesting and often challenging types of application workloads are machine learning ones, which can often be difficult to deploy and operate. On Dec. 21, the Kubeflow project was officially announced by Google engineers as a new stack to easily deploy and run machine learning workloads.

Personal technology is getting a bad rap these days. It keeps getting more addictive: Notifications keep us glued to our phones. Autoplaying episodes lure us into Netflix binges. Social awareness cues—like the "seen-by" list on Instagram Stories—enslave us to obsessive, ouroboric usage patterns. (Blink twice if you've ever closed Instagram, only to re-open it reflexively.) Our devices, apps, and platforms, experts increasingly warn, have been engineered to capture our attention and ingrain habits that are (it seems self evident) less than healthy.

2017 is almost over. For most of us, there are reasons to be nostalgic and there are reasons to be glad we can just move on. That's how we feel about tech from this year, too. We've polled each member of the Ars Technica reviews team about their favorite and least favorite tech products of 2017. Each staffer has made their own selections and written their own explanations.

Apple’s most recent fall event centered on excitement about the iPhone X, face recognition replacing Touch ID, OLED displays, and a cellular-enabled Apple Watch. But instead of “one more thing,” people living in Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and many other places all over the world certainly noticed one missing thing.

Siri learned no new languages, and it’s kind of a big deal.

No metal plates or screws needed: a new 3D-printed ceramic implant mends broken legs by holding the fractured parts together, then turning into natural bone.

The implant has the same strength as real bone, and is made by Hala Zreiqat at the University of Sydney in Australia and her colleagues. In previous studies, they showed the material could completely heal broken arm bones in rabbits. Now, in work yet to be published, they have shown it can also repair large leg fractures in sheep.

Fans and hopefuls in the VR and AR spaces have long wondered when Magic Leap would finally reveal anything to cash in on years of hype and $1.9 billion in investments. Most people who saw the company's first product announcement on Wednesday may still be waiting.

As announced in 2015, Norwegian national broadcasters can now only be heard on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB), as opposed to the more traditional FM radio.

Almost all radios rely on frequency modulation (FM) technology, which was developed in the early 1930s. Radio channels are usually between 87.5 and 108.0 MHz ub bandwidth, which is also known as VHF (very high frequency). FM has been successfully and broadly used for more than half a century.

Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency on a hot streak—plenty of alternative currencies have enjoyed rallies alongside the Epic Bitcoin Bull Run of 2017. One of the most intriguing examples is also among the most obscure in the cryptocurrency world. Called IOTA, it has jumped in total value from just over $4 billion to more than $10 billion in a little over two weeks. But that isn’t what makes it interesting. What makes it interesting is that it isn’t based on a blockchain at all; it’s something else entirely.