A first-in-the-nation bike-sharing program specifically offering cargo e-bikes recently launched in the Boston area.

Why it matters: Bike-share services — like Bluebikes in Boston, Citi Bike in New York City and Divvy Bikes in Chicago — have proven remarkably popular, offering people an alternative transportation option in big cities without the hassles of bike ownership.

• But cargo e-bikes are closer to an actual car replacement, with lots of room for groceries and other goods — or even passengers.

Driving the news: CargoB, the new Boston operation, is starting off with a small fleet of bikes from Urban Arrow, a favorite among cargo e-bike fans.

• It costs $2.50 to unlock a CargoB bike using a dedicated app. Then it's 25 cents a minute until you bring the bike back to its home station. (That's about the same price Boston's Bluebikes charges for single rides on its non-cargo e-bikes.)
• The bikes get about 30 miles of range on a single charge, CargoB says.
• And they're pedal-assist — meaning an electric motor helps push you along, making it easier to go long distances or carry heavy loads.

Zoom in: Locals or visitors can find CargoB's bikes in Jamaica Plain, Cambridge and Somerville, with a downtown location coming soon.

• The company has four bikes on offer so far, with two more on the way.

Caveat: CargoB's bikes aren't free floating, so they must be brought back to the location where you picked them up.

• That makes it easier for the startup's small team to manage its fleet without worrying about the bikes' condition or where they wind up.

Reality check: Riding any kind of bike in the rain or snow — and Boston gets plenty of both — is only for the most dedicated bikeheads, even with Urban Arrow's rain cover accessory.

• But less hardcore users can always plan around the weather.

What they're saying: "We find ourselves white-knuckling our way through our commutes, and so I'm just like — let's just, where we can, hop on a bike and not have to be so stressed out about things," CargoB co-founder and CEO Dorothy Fennell tells Axios.

• "I could be worried about climate and housing prices and all kinds of stuff," adds Fennell, who's also a transportation planner.
• "But I'm like — okay, what can I control? I know cargo bikes, I know transportation policy, and I know how to stack features on a business to unlock barriers to these things. It's a very small thing that could have a massive impact... getting people out of their car."

The bottom line: Pretty much any time a bike trip replaces a car journey is a win, environmentally speaking.

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Paramount Global last week took a $6 billion write-down on its cable TV business, the day after Warner Bros. Discovery did the same for $9 billion.

The big picture: Both companies are struggling to convince Wall Street that their streaming bets will make up for those losses.

• Paramount Global's stock tanked 12% in after-hours trading last Thursday, despite posting a streaming profit for the first time.
• Warner Bros. Discovery's fell 9% to an all-time low after its earnings release.

Between the lines: Both companies were created as a result of mega-mergers, yet neither is considered big enough to compete with Big Tech for streaming dominance.

• CBS merged with Viacom in 2019 to form ViacomCBS, now Paramount. WarnerMedia merged with Discovery to form WBD in 2022.

State of play: Paramount says it's looking for a streaming partner — likely a big tech firm — to scale its Paramount+ streaming service.

• WBD had discussions with Paramount late last year to discuss a merger.
• Wall Street isn't convinced that Paramount has the scale necessary to compete with Big Tech for streaming dominance.

Yes, but: While cable is challenged, analysts believe there will be a loyal set of pay-TV customers — around 50 million households — for the foreseeable future, thanks to cable networks like ESPN that own live sports rights.

What to watch: Entertainment giants are raising streaming prices to ensure that their investments start to break even.

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Self-driving scientific labs are the next AI asset countries are pursuing in hopes of gaining an economic and security edge.

Why it matters: Labs that autonomously run experiments promise to speed up the discovery of new materials, but they're still not sufficiently reliable, reproducible or widely available.

State of play: It currently takes 20 years and $100 million on average to go from the discovery of a new material to high-volume advanced manufacturing.

• "If you're trying to decarbonize the economy by 2050, that is just too long," says Tom Kalil, CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, which connects scientists with philanthropists and foundations that might fund them.
• Self-driving labs could accelerate the process 100 to 1,000 times, says Milad Abolhasani, an associate professor at North Carolina State University who works on the technology — potentially bringing a 10-plus-year operation down to less than a few months and cutting the cost from $100 million to less than $1 million.

How it works: Self-driving labs combine robotics, AI and advanced computing to design, make, test and analyze potential new materials in a loop guided by AI that learns from experiments and makes decisions about what to do next.

• Today they're bespoke setups that mostly carry out relatively easy-to-automate experiments as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
• They've been used to optimize catalytic reactions, for example, gleaning more information in five days than researchers typically can in six months, Abolhasani and his colleagues reported in February.
• They've also run autonomous experiments to more rapidly develop "quantum dots" and find a more sustainable way to synthesize nanoparticles.

Yes, but: Self-driving labs still face engineering and hardware hurdles.

• Some of the challenges: how to make a wider variety of materials and molecules operate under harsh chemical and physical conditions, and carry out reactions with multiple steps — what Abolhasani calls "real chemistry."

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