Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Traffic jam forms on Interstate 5 north of Los Angeles. (credit: Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News)

The Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of restoring California’s ability to set strict tailpipe emissions limits, according to news reports, while at the same time looking at adopting a version of the state’s stringent rules for heavy-duty trucks in an effort to cut smog-forming pollution.

The EPA’s restoration of California’s Clean Air Act waiver reverses the Trump administration’s revocation, and the new truck rule aims to drastically reduce nitrogen dioxide emissions from trucks.

Nitrogen dioxide pollution can cause and aggravate respiratory diseases, including asthma and certain kinds of cancer. It can also react with water and oxygen in the atmosphere to form acid rain. The last time the EPA updated emissions limits for heavy-duty trucks, in 2001, it cut nitrogen dioxide by 95 percent over 10 years. That caused nitrogen dioxide pollution to fall 40 percent nationwide.

The Wii U eShop as it looked just after launch in 2013.

Nintendo has announced plans to sunset the sale of downloadable games and paid DLC on the Wii U and 3DS platforms early next year.

Players will have until “late March 2023” to purchase any of the hundreds of games available on those eShops. But customers will have to add funds to their shop accounts well before that full shutdown—by May 23 for credit card funding and August 29 for redeeming physical eShop cards. A shared balance with a Nintendo Account wallet (as used on the Switch) will also work on the older platforms up through the March 2023 shutdown.

While new purchases will be cut off, Nintendo writes that players will be able to redownload previous purchases on these platforms “for the foreseeable future.” Online services and software updates will still be supported as well, but free demos and “free-to-start” games will no longer be downloadable on either platform. Switch services will not be affected.

Enlarge / An Audi e-tron prototype on the highway in Europe lights its way ahead with adaptive beam headlights. (credit: Audi)

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is finally poised to legalize adaptive beam headlights in the US. On Tuesday, the NHTSA announced that it has issued a final rule that will update the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, which currently only allow for “dumb” high- and low-beam lights.

Adaptive beam lights use a matrix of projectors, some of which can be turned off to shape the beam so the lights illuminate the road but don’t shine at an oncoming driver. (These are an advancement over the auto-high beam technology that you may have fitted to your current car.) The technology has been around for nearly two decades in Europe and Japan.

Automakers have been asking the NHTSA to update its headlamp rules for some time now. In 2013, Toyota first petitioned the agency to allow for adaptive beam lights, and the NHTSA agreed to begin the laborious and lengthy federal government rulemaking procedure.