The U.S. Federal Communications Commission set new ground rules for carriers seeking to replace their old copper telephone networks. Approved by a 3-2 vote at an open meeting yesterday, the rules require carriers to notify customers in advance and to seek FCC approval before reducing services. 

Home landline service has dropped dramatically with the spread of mobile phones. In 2000, almost every U.S. household had a landline phone. Since then, many have dropped landline service, and nearly 50 million of the remaining lines have switched to Voice over IP, which sends voice calls in the user's broadband data stream rather than over traditional telephony’s copper wire pairs. FCC chairman Tom Wheeler and others have been pushing to shift telephone traffic to fiber optics and the Internet.

Critics have charged that phone companies are allowing their old copper networks to decay to force customers to shift to fiber service. But some 37 million households—many of them headed by elderly people—remain on legacy copper, commissioner Mignon Clyburn noted at the hearing. Other holdouts live in rural areas that lack cellular and broadband service. Some prefer copper connections because they are independent of local power lines, and offer better 911 emergency service.

The FCC ruling requires that carriers notify retail customers at least three months before shutting down a copper network, and provide six-months notice to interconnecting carriers using the old lines. (Clyburn complained that that's much less time than the FCC gave before shutting down analog broadcast television, but voted for the measure anyway.) Carriers also must seek FCC approval if the telephone changeover would "discontinue, reduce or impair" service. Details remain to be worked out, but key issues are voice quality and support for 911 emergency calls, alarms, and medical monitors, sw well as assistive technology for the disabled.  

Two dissenting commissioners complained that the new rules would extend regulations and slow adoption of new technology. But Wheeler said that changing technology should not be "an opportunity to erase the historical reality of the responsibility of network [operators] to the users of those services." 

In a separate vote, all five commissioners agreed to require carriers to offer customers backup power supplies that maintain their phone service during prolonged power outages. Traditional copper phone lines are independent of local power, and have a reputation of being more reliable than power grids. But that hasn't stopped landline users from buying cordless phones that go down with the grid. 

Thermoelectric materials have been a tantalizingly promising technology for producing electricity from heat that would otherwise just be wasted. The basic premise of thermoelectric materials is that an electrical current is generated as a result of a difference in temperature between one side of the material and the other.

This would seem to be an obvious way to generate an electrical current from your computer or your car just based on the heat they produce. But heretofore, the available materials had poor thermoelectric conversion efficiency or were prohibitively expensive for commercial uses—they just didn’t produce that much current for the buck.

But when traditional materials fail, in come the nanomaterials. We’ve covered multi-walled carbon nanotubes for this use, along with nanowires and nanopillars.

Now, researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K.,in collaboration with the company European Thermodynamics Ltd., have called upon graphene to make thermoelectric materials more useful.

In research published in the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces , the joint academic-industrial team added a small amount of graphene to strontium titanium dioxide (STO), a thermoelectric material that, by itself, generates a current only at extremely high temperatures. The graphene made a big difference: STO’s operating temperature was expanded to room temperature.

“Current oxide thermoelectric materials are limited by their operating temperatures which can be around 700 degrees Celsius,” said Robert Freer, one of the lead University of Manchester researchers, in a press release. “This has been a problem which has hampered efforts to improve efficiency by utilizing heat energy waste for some time.

Another handicap limiting the usefulness of thermoelectric materials is that their energy conversion efficiencies hover around 1 percent. But the Manchester team reports that their new hybrid material will convert 3 to 5 percent of heat into electricity. They reason that because a vehicle loses 70 percent of the energy in fuel via waste heat and friction, applying this material for improved thermal energy recovery will lead to a substantial boost in energy efficiency.

We spent most of this week arguing thinking about whether armed autonomous robots are a good thing or a bad thing. I don’t think we should ban killer robots, but lots of people think that it’s very clear that we should. There’s been an enormous debate in the comments of these articles, and on Twitter as well. Georgia Tech’s Ron Arkin weighed in this week, and we’ll have another expert perspective next week. We’re not expecting to reach a consensus here: there’s no easy (or even unambiguously correct) answer. What we’re trying to do, though, is to provide as many perspectives on the issue as possible to help you inform your own thinking. The ethics of robotics is something that we’re very interested in, and we’ll be returning to it in a variety of contexts over this year and next.

Still, that’s all some heavy, heavy stuff, you know? So let’s all just chill out with a bunch of robot videos.

Someone at Telsa must have thought to themselves, “Let’s design a robot that can recharge our electric car as creepily as possible,” because this: