San Francisco / AP An industry-backed autonomous car lobbying group has urged US regulators to go further to remove speed bumps than what was laid out in guidelines published two months ago. In a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a ‘Self-Driving Coalition’ founded early this year by Google, Ford, Volvo, Uber and Lyft hailed the framework …

  Faye Flam Bloomberg Blind faith in any technology can be dangerous — especially when it comes to areas of forensic science such as DNA fingerprinting. For example, if police have “DNA evidence” against a suspect, most juries will assume that’s proof of guilt. But while the technology for analyzing DNA has become vastly more sensitive since it was first …

  Hochheim am Main / AFP For 15-year-old Mustafa, the trickiest part about learning German is knowing when to use the articles der, die or das. “And the umlaut,” his classmate Majd reminds him, sending both Syrian teens groaning in mock frustration at the vowel alteration, one of the quirks of German grammar. But they’re not really complaining. Having escaped …