Month: May 2018

Enlarge / Aarhus, Denmark - September 14, 2016: Tesla car dealer entrance (credit: Getty Images)

Since Tesla's Model 3 production began in July 2017, the company's quarterly financial results have been very alike. Has Tesla produced the number of cars it said it would last quarter? (No.) Is Tesla burning through a whole lotta cash? (Yes.) Is Tesla still making progress on pushing out cars? (Yes.) Will Tesla be in the black again ever? (CEO Elon Musk offers a date one or two quarters into the future.)

Such is the case today. From a previous press release we knew that in the first quarter of 2018, Tesla did not reach its stated goal of 2,500 Model 3s off the line per week. But it got close enough that investors weren't scared off, delivering 9,766 Model 3s and hitting just north of 2,000 such vehicles in the last week of the quarter. In today's financial statement (PDF), the company said it held that weekly number for two more weeks before stopping production in mid-April to "further increase production."

On the accompanying call, Musk detailed some of the changes that had been made at the factory to speed along Model 3 turnover. "We did go too far on the automation front and automated some very silly things," he said. One example the CEO offered: Originally the Model 3 included "fiber glass mats" of fluff on the top of the battery pack and the company had a "FluffBot" that would pick up fluff and place it on the battery pack. "Machines are not good at picking up fluff, human hands are very well suited for that," Musk said, "FluffBot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff." Tesla ended up testing whether the fluff made any difference in cabin noise, found that it did not, and dispensed with the FluffBot.

Enlarge / Oculus's latest headset prototype, the Half Dome, as revealed at the F8 Developer Conference. (credit: Facebook / Oculus)

Oculus is only one day into the launch of a new, $199 VR headset, but the company has already begun hinting at the future of its higher-end line of Rift products. Wednesday saw Oculus reveal three interesting new developments for the company's possible next headset—and the company gave us a visual hint at what it may look like, in the form of a new "Half Dome" prototype.

Half Dome, as shown at the F8 Developer Conference stage on Wednesday, looks almost identical to the existing Oculus Rift, with more noticeable bumps (likely for the sake of positional tracking, but not confirmed). The new stuff is all on the inside, and the most intriguing feature has never been demonstrated in a commercial headset before: a mechanical assembly that quickly moves lenses closer to and farther from a user's face while they're using a VR app.

Enlarge / Neil Tsutsui out in the field with all the insects. (credit: Neil Tsutsui)

Ants are among the most hated insects on Earth, and bees are among the most beloved. But they have a lot in common. Most are social animals who live in vast hives of workers who must constantly communicate with each other to gather food, care for young, and build their nests. But how do they communicate? That's where Neil Tsutsui's work comes in.

Neil is the Michelbacher Chair of Systematic Entomology at UC Berkeley. He runs a lab that researches ants and bees—their ecology, their evolution, how they communicate, and why they behave the way they do. He works in both the field and the lab, studying chemical communication, behaviors, and the genetics of individuals, populations, and species. Neil has experimented with affecting ant behavior using the insects' own chemical signals. He just completed a study showing that California honey bees have recently undergone profound genetic transformations.

Join Ars Technica's editor-at-large Annalee Newitz in conversation with Tsutsui at the next Ars Technica Live on May 9 at Eli's Mile High Club in Oakland. There will be plenty of time for audience questions, too.

Enlarge / Row of new Dutch houses with solar panels attached on the roofs. (credit: Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

As the price of solar panels has plunged, a strange thing has happened. The panels have gone from being a large fraction of installation costs to a relatively minor component. That means all the other things—permits, labor, supporting hardware, and so on—make up the bulk of the cost of putting panels on your roof. While these costs are going down as well, they're not falling at nearly the same rate as the panels themselves.

All of which raises an intriguing question: if there's a large fixed cost involved in getting panels on your roof, does it make sense to install more efficient panels, despite their higher costs? A collaboration between MIT researchers and people at solar power companies have answered this question with a very qualified "yes." Critically, one of the qualifications is that they assume availability of a technology we haven't developed yet.

Efficiency limits

Currently, thin-film solar panels have efficiency percentages in the teens, while silicon has reached the low 20s. While there's some room for improvements in both of these technologies, progress is probably going to be incremental. There also exist some alternative technologies that have high material costs that aren't likely to drop substantially any time soon. Beyond those, physics sets a hard cap on the maximum efficiency possible at 33 percent.