Brad Tuttle:

Why are young people less likely to purchase cars, or even have driver’s licenses nowadays? One theory has it that the generation that came of age with the Internet and smartphones thinks cars are pretty lame. Automakers prefer to see the situation differently—that young people today love cars just as much as any other group, but just can’t afford them right now.

The auto industry has been in recovery mode over the past few years. Automakers sold 14.5 million new cars and trucks in 2012, a 13% increase over the prior year, and the highest total since 2007. Projected auto sales totals for 2013 should easily beat last year too, topping 15 million. Even so, the comeback has been called a “subpar recovery,” and a prime reason why sales haven’t truly taken off is that younger consumers today aren’t buying cars like younger consumers traditionally have in the car-crazed U.S.

Gen Y has been dubbed “Gen N”, as in Generation Neutral—which is the way some describe how millennials feel about car ownership. Studies have shown that fewer young adults have driver’s licenses, that this group hates the traditional car-buying process more than other demographics, and that they prefer urban living and socializing online and therefore have less need for cars.

The latest data from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) bolsters the idea that younger Americans are much less interested in car ownership than their older siblings, parents, and grandparents. Bloomberg News highlighted data from the study showing that while consumers in the 35-to-44 age demographic were the most likely to be purchasing new cars four years ago, today it’s the 55-to-65 age Baby Boomers buying new cars with the most frequency. In 2011, boomers were 15 times more likely to purchase new vehicles than young millennials (ages 18 to 24), and even consumers ages 75 and up have been buying cars at higher rates than groups ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 34.

I have a preference for Gray Brewing’s Rathskeller Ale.

The terrace view is a bit different in March, particularly when the Statue of Liberty pays a visit.

Magic Touch & DJ Tolerance performed on a beautiful Friday evening in Madison.

AAP:

“Of 280,000 farms in Germany, between 800 and 1,000 use optical sensors,” he says.

However, precision agriculture may have bumper times ahead.
“It offers enormous productivity gains and allows for a reduction of resource use at a time of growing environmental regulatory demands,” said Oliver Neumann, spokesman for agricultural equipment giant John Deere.

A problem is that the equipment still doesn’t come cheap. Some high-tech combine harvesters can cost up to half a million euros.

Mariah Blake:

hen Thomas Shaw gets worked up, he twists in his chair and kneads his hand. Or he paces about in his tube socks grumbling, “They’re trying to destroy us,” and “The whole thing is a giant scam.” And Shaw, the founder of a medical device maker called Retractable Technologies, spends a lot of time being agitated.

One of the topics that gets him most riled up these days is bloodstream infections. And with good reason—while most people rarely think about them, these are the most dangerous of the hospital-acquired bugs that afflict one in ten patients in the United States. Their spread has helped to make contact with our health care system the fifth leading cause of death in this country.

A few years ago, Shaw, an engineer by training, decided he wanted to do something to help solve this problem and quickly homed in on the mechanics of needle-less IV catheters. Rather than using needles to inject drugs into IV systems, most hospitals have moved to a new design, which involves screwing the threaded tip of a needle-less syringe into a specially designed port. The problem is that if the tip brushes against a nurse’s scrubs, or a counter, or the railing of a hospital bed, it can pick up bacteria. And the rugged threaded surface makes it difficult to get rid of the germs once they’re there. Often, the bacteria go straight into the patients’ bloodstream—which explains why, according to some studies, the rate of bloodstream infections is three times higher with needle-less systems than with their needle-based counterparts.