Month: March 2016

This year it looks like Porsche's 919 Hybrid will once more be the car to beat. (credit: Porsche)

2016's most technologically exciting racing cars have revved up in Europe this month. Of course, we're referring to the hybrid prototypes from Audi, Porsche, and Toyota that will compete in this year's World Endurance Championship. It's no secret that we're gigantic fans of the WEC here at Ars. And we especially love that these carbon fiber testbeds use the crucible of long-distance racing to develop new technology that has a direct impact on the cars we drive on the roads.

The cars were revealed to the world in the days leading up to the WEC's Prologue test at the Paul Ricard circuit in the South of France, which was held on March 25 to 26. There have been a few changes compared to last year's cars, and these tweaks are aimed at making the hybrids even more efficient than 2015. (Bear with us, this may get a little complicated to explain.)

Each car is allowed up to two hybrid systems in addition to their internal combustion engine. These can be motor-generator units that harvest and then deploy kinetic energy to the front or rear wheels, but other systems are also allowed (i.e. a motor-generator unit connected to an engine's turbocharger). Gasoline and diesel engines are allowed, and they can be naturally aspirated or turbocharged.

(credit: Jean-Etienne Minh-Duy Poirrier)

With patches of stem cells on their broken spinal cords, partially paralyzed rats once again reached out and grabbed distant treats, researchers report in Nature Medicine.

While previous studies have shown progress in regenerating certain types of nerve cells in injured spinal cords, the study is the first to coax the regrowth of a specific set of nerve cells, called corticospinal axons. These bundles of biological wiring carry signals from the brain to the spinal cord and are critical for voluntary movement. In the study, researchers were able to use stem cells from rats and humans to mend the injured rodents.

“The corticospinal projection is the most important motor system in humans,” senior author Mark Tuszynski at the University of California, San Diego said. “It has not been successfully regenerated before. Many have tried, many have failed—including us, in previous efforts.”

(credit: Perspecsys Photos)

US government officials from the FBI director down have said repeatedly that the FBI-Apple legal brouhaha was just about a single phone—the seized iPhone used by Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. And just last week, James Comey, the FBI director, said his fight with Apple wasn't about setting precedent; rather, it was about battling terrorism.

But it seems that the storyline has changed.

The Justice Department now says it will not hesitate to invoke the precedent it won in its iPhone unlocking case. The authorities had obtained a court order weeks ago ordering Apple to write code to help the authorities unlock Farook's phone, all in hopes that data on it could stop another terror attack or shed light on the one that killed 14 people in San Bernardino in December. On Monday, however, the authorities said they didn't need Apple's help, asking the judge presiding over the case to withdraw the order because they had cracked the phone and obtained the desired information, all with the help of an "outside" party.

(credit: Erik B)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued Volkswagen Group of America (VGoA) on Tuesday, alleging that VGoA deceived American consumers with its “Clean Diesel” ad campaign. The FTC charged that "Super Bowl ads, online social media campaigns, and print advertising,” targeted environmentally conscious consumers, when in reality, Volkswagen’s Jettas, Passats, Golfs, and other diesel vehicles were the opposite of environmentally conscious.

Volkswagen Group was charged with a Notice of Violation from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in September, alleging that the automaker had installed so-called defeat devices, or illegal software, on its 2009-2015 diesel cars that made them emit up to 40 times the amount of nitrogen oxide (NO_x) as is legally allowed under normal driving conditions. The cars had been certified by the EPA because during EPA lab tests, VW’s software would sense that the car was being tested in a lab and let the emissions control system work properly under those conditions.

Volkswagen later admitted that up to 11 million diesel vehicles were equipped with the software, prompting investigations in the US and Europe. The Department of Justice sued VW Group in January, and the company has been in ongoing negotiations with the EPA and California’s air regulator to find a fix for the cars that would put them in compliance with the Clean Air Act.

We're in a surprisingly warm and pleasant San Francisco for Microsoft's annual developer conference, Build, and we'll be liveblogging the opening keynote.

Festivities start at 8:30 PDT. We're expecting to hear all about the next steps in Windows 10's development, including support for the Xbox One, more HoloLens software to show off Microsoft's augmented reality vision, and according to some last-minute leaks, a new way of running Ubuntu on Windows. We're also hoping to hear just how many people are running Windows 10.

The blue line is the Moon's present axis of rotation, but there's evidence that it used to rotate around the green line—the hot, red portion of the Moon in the right of the image could be responsible for the shift. (credit: James Tuttle Keane)

Billions of years ago, the Moon would have looked larger in the sky, as it has very gradually drifted away from the Earth over time. But in addition to its apparent size changing, the face of our companion satellite has probably tilted a smidgen.

That’s the conclusion of a new study from a group led by Matthew Siegler, Richard Miller, and James Keane, who based their analysis on some old data. In 1998, the Lunar Prospector mission was launched to map, among other things, deposits of water ice expected to exist at the Moon’s poles. Because the Moon’s axis of rotation is nearly perpendicular to the plane of its path around the Sun, it has no seasons, so the ever-dark bottoms of craters at the poles are fiercely cold. With temperatures that cold, any water ice that found its way there could be protected from turning to gas and escaping to space.

But instead of being restricted to a small circle at extreme latitudes, there’s an errant bulge of ice at both poles. If you draw a straight line through the center of the Moon—about six degrees off from its axis—you can connect the two bulges. Was that line once the Moon’s axis of rotation?