Month: November 2019

Enlarge / Challenges scale considerably when the battery pack weighs 300kg. (credit: City of San Diego)

Lithium batteries have become incredibly popular for electronic devices, and the emphasis on weight and size for those batteries means that the amount of raw materials tied up in them isn't too large. But that's absolutely not the case for the other growing use of lithium batteries: electric vehicles. These lithium batteries weigh hundreds of kilograms and contain a substantial amount of raw materials, some of which can be quite valuable.

Due to the relative youth of the automotive electrical-battery market, however, an organized recycling industry is only just now developing, and it faces significant technical hurdles before recycling becomes both widespread and economical. In today's issue of Nature, a group of researchers take a look at possible means of recycling and considers how to get the most value out of electric-vehicle batteries after they're no longer performing well enough to run a car.

Before recycling

The authors of the analysis make one thing clear up front: the majority of the cost of a lithium-ion battery isn't in the raw materials. Instead, the cost is in the manufacturing needed to transform those raw materials into something that can function in a battery, then getting them into a structure that combines durability, performance, and safety. Thus, there's more value in having a lower-performing battery than there is in breaking the battery apart to get at its materials.

Enlarge / A selection of some of Arcade1Up's early 3/4 scale home arcade machines. (credit: Arcade1Up)

Back in June 2017, Tastemakers CEO Scott Bachrach was at a meeting discussing a hole in the ever-expanding market for retro games. Specifically, there was no cheap and easy middle ground for a generation of classic arcade fans who wanted an authentic cabinet in their home.

"We looked and said there are 'under $100' solutions, [but they] don't really feel like a real arcade," Bachrach began in a recent phone interview with Ars. "There are $3,000 solutions that feel like a real arcade, but they're $3,000 and 300 pounds. How do we make something that is affordable to the masses but gives you the same play as a real arcade?"

From that meeting, the Arcade1Up line was born. Beginning in 2018, Tastemakers launched a series of 3/4-scale replica arcade cabinets, each with a handful of emulated games and a $300 to $400 price tag. The initial batch focused on Bachrach's personal wheelhouse: '70s and '80s classics from companies like Namco (Pac-Man, Galaga), Midway (Rampage, Defender), and Atari (Asteroids, Tempest). Soon though, the line expanded into the '90s with Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat-themed machines, a move Bachrach called a "natural progression."

Enlarge / Did your mom get a call from "Trend Micro Support"? You might want to check on that. (credit: Getty Images)

Technical-support telephone scams have been around for a long time, with scammers using random technical data to fool gullible consumers into handing over access to their computers and, often, their credit card data. But some customers of Trend Micro were called by scammers with a somewhat more convincing bit of data than some well-known Windows filename—the scammers had their names, email addresses, and technical-support request ticket numbers.

The scammers got that data from a Trend Micro employee who stole the data for 68,000 customers and sold it to the scammers, a company spokesperson revealed today in a statement on the company's blog. While the stolen data included names, email addresses, some phone numbers, and Trend Micro support-ticket numbers for users of Trend Micro's consumer security products, it did not include payment information.

"In early August 2019," the spokesperson wrote, "Trend Micro became aware that some of our consumer customers running our home security solution had been receiving scam calls by criminals impersonating Trend Micro support personnel." The information that was used in these calls led Trend Micro's security team "to suspect a coordinated attack."

Enlarge (credit: NTSB)

Radar in Uber's self-driving vehicle detected pedestrian Elaine Herzberg more than five seconds before the SUV crashed into her, according to a new report from the National Safety Transportation Board. Unfortunately, a series of poor software design decisions prevented the software from taking any action until 0.2 seconds before the deadly crash in Tempe, Arizona.

Herzberg's death occurred in March 2018, and the NTSB published its initial report on the case in May of that year. That report made clear that badly written software, not failing hardware, was responsible for the crash that killed Herzberg.

But the new report, released Tuesday, marks the end of NTSB's 20-month investigation. It provides a lot more detail about how Uber's software worked—and how everything went wrong in the final seconds before the crash that killed Herzberg.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Nurphoto)

A 68-year-old Nebraska woman has become the second human in history to discover parasitic cattle worms wriggling around her eyeballs.

The cringy case—which surfaced just two years after the first case in Oregon—raises concern that the worms may be angling for an uprising in the United States.

In a recent report in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, parasitologists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that the worm—Thelazia gulosa, aka the cattle eye worm—has been in the US since the 1940s. "The reasons for this species only now infecting humans remain obscure," they write. But, "[t]hat a second human infection with T. gulosa has occurred within two years of the first suggest that this may represent an emerging zoonotic disease in the United States."

Fresh off the release early this year of Glass, the final film in his Unbreakable trilogy, director M. Night Shyamalan is back with an intriguing new series for Apple TV+. Servant might be best described as a psychological thriller with supernatural overtones, about young parents who hire a nanny to help care for their newborn infant. But the nanny—and the baby—aren't quite what they seem to be.

It's frankly a surprising move for Shyamalan, who typically avoids working in television. Sure, he directed the pilot episode of limited series Wayward Pines in 2015, but he has said he doesn't like the tight shooting schedule required for TV. "The great thing about the format is it's character-driven," he told the audience at New York Comic-Con last month when the first teaser debuted. "But the amount of content you have to deliver for the amount of time and resources, the math just doesn't work—which is why we can count on two hands every show that has gone from beginning to end with the same quality."

Series creator Tony Basgallop convinced him otherwise. It helped that Servant's 10 episodes are a bingeable 30 minutes each and everything takes place in a single location (the grieving couple's home), giving the series a "play-like quality," according to Shyamalan. Like much of his work, the series is set in Philadelphia and was shot there, with Shyamalan doing the editing in his own home.

Enlarge / Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chairman of the Subcommittee on Aviation and Space, left, and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine talk after a hearing in May 2019. (credit: NASA)

A bipartisan quartet of United States senators has filed a new bill that sets out space policy for NASA over the coming decade. The new authorizing legislation is largely consistent with much of NASA's present activities, but it differs from White House policy in some key respects.

Most notably, the legislation calls for NASA to support the International Space Station through 2030. The Trump administration has sought to commercialize space stations in low Earth orbit by 2024, perhaps by becoming a customer on a privately operated International Space Station or by supporting the development of smaller, private labs.

"By extending the ISS through 2030, this legislation will help grow our already burgeoning space economy, fortifying the United States' leadership in space, increasing American competitiveness around the world, and creating more jobs and opportunity here at home," said Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican who chairs a subcommittee on space and aviation, in a news release.

Enlarge / A black-and-white photograph treated with the mordanҫage process shows characteristic 'veils' deposited on dark areas of the print. (credit: Fudala and Jones/Analytical Chemistry )

Mordançage is a photographic process that yields striking black-and-white photographs characterized by ghostly veiling effects. Scientists from George Mason University have recently figured out precisely what is happening chemically during the process, according to a recent paper in Analytical Chemistry.

Mordançage has its roots in a late 19th-century method of changing a film negative to a positive, first documented by a man named Paul Liesegang in 1897. In the 1960s, French photographer Jean-Pierre Sudre further refined the technique to produce silver gelatin prints and dubbed it "Mordançage." It's also known as "etch-bleaching," because it uses an acid-copper bleaching solution to dissolve the darker parts of the silver gelatin layer so that it partially lifts away from the print. Those areas can either be rubbed away, creating an image reversal, or retained to produce a veiling effect.

The solution is then rinsed off in a water bath (an additional stop-bath step is optional), then the print is redeveloped to restore the black color before being dried and pressed flat. The result: those dark areas that had lifted from the paper during the earlier stage of the process are preserved to produce the ghostly final veils. Sudre's American protegé, Elizabeth Opalenik, is perhaps the best-known photographer who uses the process.