Month: March 2016

The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan represents an attempt to use the Clean Air Act to limit the US' carbon emissions. But its roots trace back to a lawsuit filed during the Clinton administration and decided by the Supreme Court during the Bush years. Christine Todd Whitman, former governor of New Jersey, was in charge of the EPA when President Bush reneged on a campaign promise and announced he was giving up on any attempt to regulate carbon emissions.

Whitman has stayed involved in environmental issues and is now the co-chair of an organization called the CASEnergy Coalition, which is promoting nuclear power as one of the solutions for limiting our carbon emissions. She recently talked with Ars about climate issues, nuclear power, and those awkward Bush years.

Ars: You were in charge of the EPA when Massachusetts v EPA was moving through the courts. Had you already started looking into carbon emissions and the Clean Air Act?

(credit: tokyoform)

On Friday Japan’s Ministry of Transportation said that it had found discrepancies between lab and real-world emissions measurements for diesel vehicles from Toyota, Nissan, and Mitsubishi. However, the ministry said that it had not found any illegal software on the vehicles and that the automakers had not violated any of Japan’s regulations.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Toyota’s Hiace van and the Land Cruiser Prado sport-utility vehicle, as well as Nissan’s X-Trail SUV and Mitsubishi’s Delica D:5 all emitted between four and 10 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) that is allowed in Japan's real-world driving tests.

Japan has been testing vehicles sold in the country after the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) discovered that diesel vehicles sold by Volkswagen Group were emitting many times the legal limit of NO_x due to illegal software placed on the cars that let them cheat on lab testing conducted by regulators. The ensuing scandal has sent Volkswagen’s stock into a nosedive and has potentially put the company on the hook for tens of billions of dollars in fines.

Sony announced a new research and development group called the Future Lab Program, and a curious video gives us a glimpse of the initiative's first project. Referred to as "N," the prototype is a hands-free wearable that provides "a new way of experiencing audio such as music and sound, allowing the user to receive audio information without having to insert any object into his or her ear."

The video is pretty mysterious, featuring a women floating in water with earbuds falling off of her and disappearing into the black water. She's then transported to the top of a cliff overlooking a city, and we hear a voice talking about the weather and giving positive sentiments about the day ahead.

Only if you look closely can you see the woman is wearing a Sony-branded device around her neck. It's a shiny white gadget that curves over her shoulders, but there's not much else we can deduce about it from this video. N is apparently a product that untethers you from the wired hassle of traditional earbuds. It doesn't fit into your ears either, instead transmitting audio for you to hear. The woman in the video seems to respond to the voice, saying "ready," so it's possible that N has some voice recognition features as well.

Charles Elachi has been director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 15 years. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The fact that Charles Elachi is retiring after 15 years of directing NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in June may have him willing to speak freely. During a hearing Thursday before a Congressional committee, Elachi apparently had no qualms about contradicting NASA's administrator, Charles Bolden.

Bolden has said NASA should fully explore Europa with a flyby mission before building and flying a lander to Jupiter's ice-covered moon, which contains a vast, subsurface ocean. "Our belief is that that is imprudent from a scientific perspective," NASA's administrator told Ars late last year.

During the Congressional hearing, however, Elachi said his engineers could design both a flyby spacecraft and lander that could fly to Europa in tandem. Moreover, Elachi said, to really begin addressing the question of life existing on Europa, such a mission must have the capability to reach the surface. "In order to make sure we have confirmation, we really need to make direct measurements on the surface, to take samples," he said. "Clearly a lander, in my mind, is a necessity to understand the oceans on Europa."

In a scathing editorial in the Guardian, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney has spoken out about Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, calling it a "fiasco" and "the most aggressive move Microsoft has ever made."

"With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem," says Sweeney. "Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem."

"PC UWP can, should, must and will, die as a result of industry backlash."

Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

Managing civil war, excruciating heat, and a ton of GoPro cameras—these were just a few of the challenges of shooting a virtual reality documentary in South Sudan.

When we first spoke to Marcelle Hopkins about her film, On the Brink of Famine, in July 2015, she and her team were in a furious pre-production scramble of choosing gear, finalizing plans, and tweaking budgets. Ultimately, the team decided to shoot on GoPro 3+ cameras, using two special rigs (Hero 360 & Freedom 360) to hold multiple GoPros in the correct orientations needed for immersive coverage.