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Electric vehicles are better for the climate than gas-powered cars, but many Americans are still reluctant to buy them. One reason: The larger upfront cost. New data published Thursday shows that despite the higher sticker price, electric cars may actually save drivers money in the long-run. To reach this conclusion, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated both the carbon dioxide emissions and full lifetime cost - including purchase price, maintenance and fuel - for nearly every new car model on the market. They found electric cars were easily more climate friendly than gas-burning ones. Over a lifetime, they were often cheaper, too.

You may have heard the advice for pregnant women to avoid eating soft cheeses. This is because soft cheeses can sometimes carry the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria, which can cause a mild infection. In some cases, the infection can be serious, even fatal, for the unborn child. However, the infection is very rare, affecting only around 65 people out of 23.5 million in Australia in 2014. That's 0.0003% of the population. Of these, only around 10% are pregnant women. Of these, only 20% of infections prove fatal to the foetus. We're getting down to some very small numbers here. If we talked about every risk factor in our lives the way health authorities talk about soft cheeses, we'd likely don a helmet and kneepads every morning after we get out of bed. And we'd certainly never drive a car. The upshot of this example is to emphasise that our intuitions about risk are often out of step with the actualities. So journalists need to take great care when reporting risk so as not to exacerbate our intuitive deficits as a species.

When Uber and Lyft first entered the market, offering a ride-hailing service that would come to include tens of thousands of amateur drivers, most major American cities had been tightly controlling the competition. New York City allowed exactly 13,637 licenses for taxicabs. Chicago permitted 6,904, Boston 1,825 and Philadelphia 1,600. These numbers weren't entirely arbitrary. Cities had spent decades trying to set numbers that would keep drivers and passengers satisfied and streets safe. But the exercise was always a fraught one. And New York City now faces an even more complex version of it, after the passage of legislation this week that will temporarily cap services like Uber and Lyft. The city plans to halt new licenses for a year while it studies the impact of ride-hailing and establishes new rules for driver pay. In doing so, it renews an old question: What's the right number of vehicles anyway? The answer isn't easy because it depends largely on which problem officials are trying to solve. Do they want to minimize wait times for passengers or maximize wages for drivers? Do they want the best experience for individual users, or the best outcome for the city - including for residents who use city streets but never ride taxis or Uber at all?

Nearly every ad you see online is tailored just for you. These digital ads are powered by vast, hidden datasets that allow advertisers to make eerily accurate guesses about who you are, where you've been, how you feel and what you might do next. While targeted ads may be familiar by now, how they work - and the power they have - often seems invisible. We decided to lift the veil on this part of the internet economy, so we bought some ad space. We picked 16 categories (like registered Democrats or people trying to lose weight) and targeted ads at people in them. But instead of trying to sell cars or prescription drugs, we used the ads to reveal the invisible information itself.

Medicine's decades-long march toward patient autonomy means patients are often now asked to make the hard decisions - to weigh trade-offs, to grapple with how their values suggest one path over another. This is particularly true when medical science doesn't offer a clear answer: Doctors encourage patients to decide where evidence is weak, while making strong recommendations when evidence is robust. But should we be doing the opposite?People in general are not great at evaluating risk. They worry more about shark attacks than car crashes.