In today’s Bulldog wrapup of science and technology news:

  • Walmart dives into voice-activated shopping with Google
  • Studies: Automated safety systems are preventing car crashes
  • Lab-made “mini organs” helping doctors treat cystic fibrosis
  • California pollution permits sell at highest price ever

The details:

  • Walmart dives into voice-activated shopping with Google

Walmart is diving into voice-activated shopping. But unlike online leader Amazon, it’s not doing it alone.

The world’s largest retailer said Wednesday it’s working with Google to offer hundreds of thousands of items from laundry detergent to Legos for voice shopping through Google Assistant. The capability will be available in late September.

It’s Google’s biggest retail partnership — and the most personalized shopping experience it offers — as it tries to broaden the reach of its voice-powered assistant Home speaker. And it underscores Walmart’s drive to compete in an area dominated by Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo device.

“Voice shopping is becoming a more important part of everyday shopping behavior,” said Marc Lore, CEO of Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business.

The voice-activated devices are becoming more mainstream as they become more accessible. Even Apple has one coming out this year. Walmart has said Google’s investment in natural language processing and artificial intelligence will help make voice-activated shopping even more popular.

And Lore said the personalization of the partnership means people can shout out generic items like milk, bread and cheese, and Google Assistant will know exactly the brands and the size that the user wants.

Google introduced shopping to Home in February, letting people use voice to order essentials from more than 40 retailers like Target and Costco under its Google Express program. But that was far behind the Echo, available since late 2014.

Walmart, which has more stores than any other retailer and the largest share of the U.S. grocery market, is also working hard to close the gulf online between itself and Amazon.

It has overhauled its shipping strategy and is expanding store-curb pickup for groceries ordered online. But it’s also had to look beyond itself and form partnerships. Walmart announced Monday that it’s expanding its grocery delivery service with ride-hailing service Uber, and it’s been testing same-day delivery service with Deliv at Sam’s Club in Miami.

  • Studies: Automated safety systems are preventing car crashes

Safety systems to prevent cars from drifting into another lane or that warn drivers of vehicles in their blind spots are beginning to live up to their potential to significantly reduce crashes, according to two studies released Wednesday.

At the same time, research by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety raises concern that drivers may be less vigilant when relying on automated safety systems or become distracted by dashboard displays that monitor how the systems are performing.

The two institute studies found that lane-keeping systems, some of which even nudge the vehicle back into its lane for the driver, and blind spot monitoring systems had lower crash rates than the same vehicles without the systems.

The lane-keeping study looked at police crash data from 25 states between 2009 and 2015 for vehicle models where the systems were sold as optional. Lane-keeping systems lower rates of single-vehicle, sideswipe and head-on crashes of all severities by 11 percent, and crashes of those types in which there were injuries by 21 percent, the study found.

Because there were only 40 fatal crashes in the data, researchers used a simpler analysis that didn’t control for differences in drivers’ ages, genders, insurance risk and other factors for those crashes. They found the technology cut the fatal crash rate by 86 percent.

That’s probably high, said Jessica Cicchino, the institute’s vice president for research, but even if lane-keeping systems cut such crashes in by just half it would be significant. About a quarter of traffic fatalities involve a vehicle drifting into another lane, she said.

  • Lab-made “mini organs” helping doctors treat cystic fibrosis

Els van der Heijden, who has cystic fibrosis, was finding it ever harder to breathe as her lungs filled with thick, sticky mucus. Despite taking more than a dozen pills and inhalers a day, the 53-year-old had to stop working and scale back doing the thing she loved best, horseback riding.

Doctors saw no sense in trying an expensive new drug because it hasn’t been proven to work in people with the rare type of cystic fibrosis that van der Heijden had.

Instead, they scraped a few cells from van der Heijden and used them to grow a mini version of her large intestine in a petri dish. When van der Heijden’s “mini gut” responded to treatment, doctors knew it would help her too.

“I really felt, physically, like a different person,” van der Heijden said after taking a drug — and getting back in the saddle.

This experiment to help people with rare forms of cystic fibrosis in the Netherlands aims to grow mini intestines for every Dutch patient with the disease to figure out, in part, what treatment might work for them. It’s an early application of a technique now being worked on in labs all over the world, as researchers learn to grow organs outside of the body for treatment — and maybe someday for transplants.

So far, doctors have grown mini guts — just the size of a pencil point — for 450 of the Netherlands’ roughly 1,500 cystic fibrosis patients.

  • California pollution permits sell at highest price ever

California raised more than $640 million this month auctioning off permits for businesses to emit greenhouse gases as part of a program aimed at fighting climate change, according to state data released Tuesday.

Last week’s auction was the state’s first since lawmakers voted to extend California’s cap and trade program through 2030. It requires businesses, oil refineries and other polluters to obtain permits to be able to emit carbon, with the overall goal of drastically reducing emissions. Money raised through the auctions goes to projects such as high-speed rail, public transit and housing projects.

Demand for the permits rebounded in this month’s auction after more than a year of flagging interest as businesses waited to see if the program would continue.

Permits for near-term emissions sold for $14.75, while future allowances went for $14.55 as companies snapped up permits before prices rise over the next 13 years. The sale price was nearly $1 higher than the price last quarter.