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The rear window. (credit: Megan Geuss)

When Elon Musk took the stage Thursday night at his Hawthorne design facility, the CEO of Tesla revealed a pre-production prototype of the Model 3, the company’s highly anticipated $35,000 car. The presentation was short and included a summary of Tesla’s history, a status update on the Gigafactory, and a look at how Tesla plans to expand its supercharger stations.

Actual details about the Model 3's specifications were slim. We learned that it will come with top-rated safety features and supercharging, even for the basic version of the car. We learned that all the Model 3s will come with the hardware necessary for autopilot features. (Although certain autonomous functions will require the customer to buy an upgrade.) And we learned the car will go 215 miles on a single charge at a minimum, and it will get from zero to 60 in “less than six seconds.”

Before the event, Musk called Thursday night’s event "Part 1" of the Model 3's debut, later adding that “Part 2 is super next level, but that’s for later…” The Model 3 isn’t due out of production until the end of 2017.

(credit: Oran Viriyincy)

A federal judge is allowing surge-pricing litigation to move forward against Uber's cofounder, Travis Kalanick. The federal judge presiding over the suit, which alleges Uber's technology unlawfully coordinates fares and surge-pricing fares, agreed that Uber's algorithm was "genius."

"Defendant argues, however, that plaintiff's alleged conspiracy is 'wildly implausible' and 'physically impossible,' since it involves agreement 'among hundreds of thousands of independent transportation providers all across the United States.' Yet as plaintiff's counsel pointed out at oral argument, the capacity to orchestrate such an agreement is the 'genius' of Mr. Kalanick and his company, which, through the magic of smartphone technology, can invite hundreds of thousands of drivers in far-flung locations to agree to Uber’s terms," US District Judge Jed Rakoff of Manhattan ruled (PDF) Thursday. "The advancement of technological means for the orchestration of large-scale price-fixing conspiracies need not leave antitrust law behind."

Trial is set tentatively for November. Rakoff has yet to rule on whether the lawsuit (PDF) could grow to represent millions of US Uber passengers in a nationwide class-action lawsuit. For the moment, Rakoff's ruling allows the antitrust case of a Connecticut passenger to proceed. Uber also faces regulatory challenges and lawsuits about the classification of its drivers as contractors and not employees.

The experimental setups can be very complex, with imaging equipment, other sensors, sample handling hardware, and more all accessing the site where the beam comes through. (credit: John Timmer)

Today, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is starting construction on a second X-ray laser that will be even brighter and more intense than its first. The new hardware, based on a superconducting linear accelerator (or linac), will replace about a third of the length of the original accelerator and leave the facility's existing X-ray laser intact.

The SLAC facility is a linear electron accelerator that was originally built to characterize the W and Z bosons. After the frontier of high-energy physics shifted to CERN, the hardware was repurposed to create an extremely powerful X-ray laser.

When charged particles are forced to move along a curved path, they lose energy in the form of radiation. If they're moving at sufficiently high energies, that radiation takes the form of X-rays. At SLAC, an X-ray laser is generated by accelerating electrons and then forcing them through a series of carefully space magnets (called undulators or wigglers) that cause the particles to curve back and forth. The end result of all the radiation they emit is an intense beam of X-rays that can be used for a variety of imaging applications.

Transplantation of the bioengineered, 3D tissue using mouse iPS cells labeled with GFP. (credit: Takashi Tsuji, RIKEN)

For the first time, researchers have coaxed a primordial ball of cells into a multi-layered, transplantable patch of skin, sporting hair follicles and functioning glands.

The mouse-based study, published in Science Advances, brings scientists closer to pulling off the feat in humans, which would provide synthetic skin grafts that could treat burn victims and patients with various skin diseases. “We are coming ever closer to the dream of being able to recreate actual organs in the lab for transplantation and also believe that tissue grown through this method could be used as an alternative to animal testing of chemicals,” lead researcher Takashi Tsuji, of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Japan, said in a statement.

Researchers have been getting better and better and recreating tissues in lab—but for skin, they had gotten stuck at making simplified versions. Fully functioning skin includes three layers: the epidermis, an outermost protective layer that is mostly waterproof; the elastic dermis layer that gives skin flexibility as well as housing oil and sweat glands, hair follicles, nerve endings, and blood vessels; and the subcutaneous fatty layer that provides padding and insulation.

A worker moves crates for batteries on an assembly line at the A123 Systems lithium ion automotive battery manufacturing plant... but maybe someday will move on to lithium-oxygen? (credit: Getty Images)

Battery research is a fraught area to report on. In the lab, researchers manage to show something spectacular, like high current density or excellent recharge characteristics. But the part where the battery catches fire and destroys the lab is left out when the story makes the popular press. I am guilty of this myself, and I'm about to do it again. (Not really.)

Lithium-oxygen batteries are very promising, but most current iterations manage to destroy themselves after a few charge/discharge cycles. A recent publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society shows some progress in overcoming the problems associated with lithium-oxygen batteries.

Why lithium-oxygen?

We all love our lithium ion batteries. Even though they are the best that we have, they still suck pretty hard. To put it in perspective, lithium ion batteries top out at about 200mAh/g, so you need a very heavy battery to get much energy. Lithium-oxygen, on the other hand, promises 1675mAh/g, a very respectable energy density.

The Federal Communications Commission today unveiled new broadband labels modeled after the nutrition labels commonly seen on food products. Home Internet service providers and mobile carriers are being urged to use the labels to give consumers details such as prices (including hidden fees tacked onto the base price), data caps, overage charges, speed, latency, packet loss, and so on.

ISPs aren't required to use these labels. But they are required to make more specific disclosures as part of transparency requirements in the FCC's net neutrality order, which reclassified Internet providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC recommends that ISPs use these labels to comply with the disclosure rules and says use of the labels will act as a "safe harbor" for demonstrating compliance. However, ISPs can come up with their own format if they still make all the required disclosures in "an accurate, understandable, and easy-to-find manner," the FCC said today.

The labels were approved unanimously by the FCC's Consumer Advisory Committee, a group with both consumer advocates and industry representatives. ISPs on the committee include CenturyLink, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, the primary lobby group for the cable industry, is also on the committee.