Jefferson County, KY - which includes the city of Louisville - had to cancel school Thursday and Friday and is canceling it again Monday and Tuesday, because of the failure of a new bus routing system based in large part on software from a Waltham company. Read more.
Boston today announced plans to expand its EV charge network beyond municipal parking lots to include streetside chargers that would let even apartment dwellers consider replacing their gas-powered cars with electric models - to meet an ultimate city goal of having chargers within a ten-minute walk of every Boston resident. Read more.
MIT News reports on work by MIT researchers to develop metal-free electrodes, which could one day replace thin metal electrodes to send electrical impulses to various organs - which work, but sometimes at the cost of scarring and inflammation, which are good for neither patients nor the systems. Read more.
The Boston Stupid Shit No One Needs & Terrible Ideas Hackathon is the obverse of events where people get together to create cool new stuff, and it's coming up, on May 27:
A "hackathon" is a social event where people come together for a short period of time to make a project, like an app or hardware device. A "stupid shit hackathon" is an event where people come together to make projects that are terrible, useless, horrifying, and probably should have never been made.
A judge this week ruled the owners of Hood Park off Rutherford Avenue have only themselves to blame for the way a robotic-luggage company pulled out of a seven-year lease and so tossed their $75-million lawsuit. Read more.
Right in front of the Eastern Bank/garage on Dartmouth Street at Stuart Street is this large ad thinge that has two payphones built in. And at least as of yesterday, both generated dial tones when you picked up the receivers.
As always, talking to God - and Bank of America - is free: Read more.
MIT News reports researchers may have figured out how to keep algae from growing on glass surfaces: Coat the glass with "a material that can hold an electrostatic charge, and then applying a very small voltage to that layer," which in turn repels the algae, which have a negative charge on their cell surfaces. Read more.
The Daily Free Press reports the Boston University Center for Computing and Data Science's new policy is that students can use AI "if they properly credit the tool and include an appendix showing where and how AI tools were used." It does quote one lecturer, though, who feels AI is sort of like calculators were back in the day: It's OK for advanced students who already have the basics down, but intro students shouldn't use it to get answers instead of learning those basics first.
BJ's announced today it's going to install hundreds of giant wheeled stalks to roam aisles making sure all its inventory is where it's supposed to be. Read more.
WCVB reports on the case against the guy, charged with using at least $18,000 in town electricity to fuel his operation to "mine" cryptocurrency in a crawlspace under Cohasset High.
Dan Kennedy asked ChatGPT, one of those AI-based online researchy things that are all the rage these days, to write a description of the T that Herman Melville might have written.
It is a system that demands both patience and cunning, for one must be quick of foot and mind to catch the right train, or else suffer the indignity of waiting upon a frigid platform for what seems an eternity.
GBH interviews a Brigham and Women's doctor involved in a trial of Pfizer's flu vaccine, which like its Covid-19 shots, would involve lab-built RNA designed to stimulate an immune response, a technique that could speed delivery of new vaccines.
The Supreme Judicial Court concluded today that "electrons" stored at a Cambridge data center and used to assemble Web pages and feed apps for a California auto-parts retailer do not mean the retailer has a "physical presence" in Massachusetts. Read more.
Pfizer and its German partner today filed a counter claim against Moderna's patent-infringement suit over Covid-19 vaccines, saying that not only didn't they use Moderna's patented technology to develop their own Covid-19 vaccine, they're not a bunch of greedy money-grubbers seeking to re-write the history of mRNA technology - which they say started long before Moderna even existed. Read more.
A couple of guys from Brockton and Rockport were sentenced to federal prison today for a phone-based hacking scheme to steal people's social-media accounts and then use those to grab some cryptocurrency. Read more.
The tray would be empty if the pipette tips of the previous batch met specs, Ginkgo charges.
A South Boston life-sciences company that relies on robotic systems to squirt small amounts of things into tiny containers is suing a company that sold it $3.3 million worth of pipette tips it says kept making its robots stop working. Read more.
Stat reports that researchers at BU's National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories on Albany Street- designed to study killer microorganisms - grafted the spike of an omicron variant of the virus onto one of the OG strains from Wuhan to see whether something on the spike was changing the virus's virulence. Read more.
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