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An artist's approximation of ex-McDonald's CEO Ed Rensi in his Fox Business appearance on Tuesday. (credit: South Park Studios)

For years, economists have been issuing predictions about how automation will impact the world's job markets, but those studies and guesses have yet to make a call based on what would happen if a given sector's wages rose. Instead, that specific guesswork mantle has been taken up by a former McDonald's CEO, who declared on Tuesday that a rise in the American minimum wage will set our nation's robotic revolution into motion.

In an appearance on Fox Business' Mornings with Maria, Ed Rensi claimed that a minimum wage increase to $15 an hour would result in "job loss like you can't believe" before ceding ground to our new robotic overlords. "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday, and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry—it’s cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who’s inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries."

When pressed, Rensi admitted that he thinks "franchising businesses" like fast-food restaurants are already hurtling towards automation, saying that those businesses are "dependent on people who have low job skills that need to grow. If you can't get people a reasonable wage, you're gonna get machines to do the work. It's just common sense. It's going to happen whether you like it or not." He then insisted that an increased minimum wage will make robotic worker adoption "just happen faster."

In 2014, Hewlett-Packard announced that it was splitting into two separate companies: Hewlett Packard Enterprise, selling servers and enterprise services, and HP Inc, selling PCs and printers. That split completed last year at the cost of more than 30,000 jobs. In a surprise announcement today, the company is about to embark on a second split: Hewlett Packard Enterprise is spinning off its IT services business.

The low-margin outsourced IT services business, which HP got into with its $14 billion acquisition of EDS in 2008, is to be merged with Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) to create a new company currently known only as SpinCo. HPE will own half of the new company, HPE CEO Meg Whitman will be on the new company's board, and HPE and CSC will each nominate half of the board members. CSC's current CEO, Mike Lawrie, will become CEO of the new company.

HPE says that the deal will save around $1 billion in operating costs. HPE shareholders will own shares in both companies, owning half of the combined company, with their stake valued at around $4.5 billion. They'll also receive a $1.5 billion cash dividend. Additionally, the merger will see some $2.5 billion in debt moved to SpinCo's books.

Nasdaq officials have told MassRoots, a sort of “Facebook for pot,” that it can't join the exchange.

The Denver-based social network has 775,000 users from the 24 states where marijuana is legal medicinally (including those states where it's also legal recreationally), who use the platform to find like-minded people in their area, learn about nearby dispensaries, and follow pot legalization news. MassRoots has said it meets the criteria for listing on Nasdaq—it has a $40 million market capitalization value and “well over 300 shareholders” through over-the-counter markets, according to CNN Money.

MassRoots alleges that the decision to deny the social media platform a place on Nasdaq was due to the fact that marijuana use and cultivation remains a federal crime. “On May 23, 2016, Nasdaq denied MassRoots' application to list on its exchange for being cannabis-related,” the company wrote. “We believe this dangerous precedent could prevent nearly every company in the regulated cannabis industry from listing on a national exchange, making it more difficult for cannabis entrepreneurs to raise capital and slow the progression of cannabis legalization in the United States.”

Hand design from scan data and 3D modeling.

16 more images in gallery

It all started because Amy Karle wanted to grow her own exoskeleton. But after experimenting with 3D printing bones during an artist residency program through Autodesk's Pier 9 workshop in San Francisco, she set her sights on something a little smaller and more intimate. She decided to grow a human hand.

Karle has a lot of experience with human limbs because she volunteers with a nonprofit group that 3D prints prosthetic arms for children and makes its designs available for free. She also works on medical instruments, and told Ars that she's fascinated by objects that go inside the body, as well as how parts of our bodies can live outside us. With her new project "Regenerative Reliquary," currently on display at the Pier 9 space in San Francisco, she's brought all her obsessions together to create an actual hand grown from human stem cells on a 3D printed trellis.

Working with bioscientist Chris Venter in Pier 9's Bio/Nano Lab and Autodesk materials scientist John Vericella, Karle designed a bone trellis in CAD based on the dimensions of her own hand. This trellis, which looks like a cross between a skeleton and a piece of jewelry, is made from pegda, a hydrogel used as a cellular growth medium in petri dishes and elsewhere. Its structure is modeled on the trabecular structure of the spongy microlattices within bone that make it flexible. For several weeks, she and her collaborators worked on 3D printing a pegda trellis on the Ember printer that would hold together inside a bioreactor where cells could grow. In the gallery above, you can see the hand inside a bioreactor, as well as what the trellis looks like under magnification. Next, she needed a cell line to grow on the trellis. Karle told Ars that she'd hoped at first to harvest her own stem cells, or to use cancer cells from a mouse. But both of those options raised safety issues, so she and the scientists settled for using human mesenchymal stem cells, extracted from bone marrow (of course you can order human stem cells online). Currently, Karle is culturing the cells, and the next step in her project will be to grow them on the hand trellis. Once the project is complete, Karle will post instructions on how to build your own hand on the DiY site Instructables.

Delphi has been testing its 48V mild hybrid system in this Honda Civic turbodiesel. (credit: Delphi)

It's clear that we need to make our passenger vehicles a lot more efficient if we want to avoid some of the very worst effects of climate change. And it's also becoming increasingly clear that diesel—which was once looked at in places like Europe as a panacea for this problem—might not be quite so groovy, what with rampant emissions cheating in the auto industry. Delphi, a major vehicle component supplier, thinks it has a real solution to help us with this, in the form of 48V "mild hybrids."

Climate change is such a big problem that even Donald Trump (who says he doesn't believe in it, publicly) is spending money to defend his properties from sea level rise. Although passenger vehicle emissions are only part of the carbon emission problem, in the US, Europe, and China regulators are taking the problem seriously, with increasingly strict fuel efficiency targets for all new cars. Here in the US, car makers have until 2025 to double their average fuel economy to 54.5mpg, but things are even tighter abroad. China has set 2020 for its deadline, by which time manufacturer averages have to be down to 117 grams of CO₂ per km driven, and the following year the EU requires fleet averages of just 95g/km. And along with those targets come hefty financial penalties for missing them.

Several years ago, we took a deep dive into some of the technologies that automakers are looking at to get themselves out of this bind. These features included variable valve timing, small capacity turbocharged engines, gasoline and diesel direct injection, cylinder deactivation, and stop-start functions. But all of those features are being widely deployed across new vehicle fleets, and it's clear that they won't be enough. Of course, there's also the wide world of electrification, like plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery EVs, but adoption of EVs of all stripes remains insufficient to really move the needle—even accounting for Tesla's gigantic Model 3 presales. That's where the 48V mild hybrid comes in.

(credit: Cole Marshall)

When Charter purchased Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, federal regulators forced the company to agree to some conditions designed to boost competition in the Internet service market. Charter, now the nation's second largest cable company behind Comcast because of the merger, is required to bring broadband of at least 60Mbps to at least 1 million homes and businesses where there's already a provider offering at least 25Mbps.

This is known as "overbuilding," something that happens infrequently enough that many Americans have only one choice for high-speed Internet. But when Charter fulfills the overbuilding requirement imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, it'll apparently do so without actually competing against other cable companies. Instead, Charter will enter the territory of phone companies like AT&T or Frontier, Charter CEO Tom Rutledge said.

Why is that? Because Charter might want to buy more cable companies later. And the FCC is less likely to approve a merger between two companies competing against each other.