Author: Megan Geuss

A rotor for the i-DCD drive motor, using rare earth metal-free magnets. (credit: Honda)

Honda said on Tuesday that it had created the first commercial hybrid-electric vehicle motor without using any heavy rare earth metals. (Rare earth metals are often divided into “heavy” and “light” categories.) Working with the expertise of Daido Steel Co., Honda’s new motor will appear in this year’s Honda Freed, a hybrid minivan sold in Japan.

Rare earth metals are essential to making a plethora of items, including smartphones, laptops, missiles, and electric cars. Unfortunately, that group of elements are at risk of shortage, and many of them are mined predominantly in China, adding a special political flavor to ensuring a global supply for industry. In 2009, Reuters reported that Toyota, maker of the popular hybrid-electric Prius, risked suffering at the hands of a rare earth metal shortage. And in 2010, China temporarily banned exports of rare earth metals to Japan during a standoff over territory.

The Japanese automaker bristled at that turn of events. Although Honda told Reuters that it started looking into ways to reduce rare earth metal use a decade ago, the recent risk of shortage and the growing popularity of hybrid vehicles spurred the company to look more seriously into ways to "avoid resource-related risks and diversify channels of procurement,” according to a Honda press release.

New energy-efficient buildings contribute to a reduction in energy intensity. (credit: Mariano Mantel)

According to a report from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the world is getting better, on average, at using energy to power its economic activity.

The latest numbers measure “global energy intensity” or the number of British thermal units used for every unit of gross domestic product (GDP) created. A falling energy intensity measurement doesn’t mean the world is using less energy in total—but it does mean that global economic activities are getting more efficient on the whole.

Specifically, the EIA says that global energy intensity has fallen by nearly one-third in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015. “Energy intensity has decreased in nearly all regions of the world,” the EIA says, in developed and developing countries alike.

BamBrogan with the alleged noose.

On Tuesday, Hyperloop One's former CTO and co-founder Brogan BamBrogan launched a broad complaint against the company and many of its executives, alleging labor violations, defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, assault, and breach of fiduciary duty. Among the claims, BamBrogan says that a fellow executive left a noose on his office chair after the former CTO voiced concerns about the company’s leadership to Moscow executives.

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop One was formed two years ago to turn a white paper written by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk into a reality. Musk drew a rough outline of a rail line using magnetic tracks and pressurized tubes to send passengers and cargo 700mph, but the CEO declined to spend resources building the system and made his notes available to any enterprising group. Hyperloop One successfully tested its propulsion system in May in Nevada.

BamBrogan filed the lawsuit along with three other former employees of the company, including former Assistant General Counsel David Pendergast. In the complaint, the plaintiffs name co-founder Shervin Pishevar, his brother and the company’s former chief legal officer for Hyperloop One, Afshin Pishevar, and two other executives involved with the company.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal published Monday afternoon, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating whether Tesla Motors should have disclosed the nature and circumstances of a recent fatal crash to investors earlier than it did. By SEC rules, companies must report “material” events to shareholders, although auto companies do not generally report individual car crashes to investors.

Still, this particular crash has earned so much attention because it involves the first fatality in a car running autonomous functions (although Tesla cautions in its user manual that autopilot features do not make the car fully autonomous and car owners still bear the responsibility for driving the car). The victim was a 40-year-old Tesla owner who crashed into a left-turning truck on a Florida highway in early May.

“A person familiar with the matter” told the WSJ that “the SEC’s inquiry is in a very early stage and may not lead to any enforcement action by regulators.”

You fight for me now.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a settlement on Monday with Warner Brothers Home Entertainment Inc. over the studio’s alleged failure to properly disclose that it had paid top YouTube “influencers” to promote the 2014 game Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. While the FTC’s complaint against Warner Bros. (PDF) does not mention any specific influencer, the commission’s press release calls out PewDiePie, the world's top-earning YouTube video creator, as one of the so-called influencers that took the studio’s money.

The FTC’s complaint says that a third-party marketing team hired by Warner Bros. gave the YouTube game reviewers “cash payments often ranging from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars,” as long as the videos they made about Shadow of Mordor met certain criteria. Among those criteria were stipulations that the video had to be positive about the game; could not show any bugs or glitches that the reviewer may have found in the early release copy they were given to play; could not contain any negative sentiments about the game, Warner Bros., or its affiliates; and had to include “a strong verbal call-to-action to click the link in the description box for the viewer to go to the [game’s] website to learn more about the [game], to learn how they can register, and to learn how to play the game.”

In addition, the YouTube creators also had to make at least one Facebook post or one Tweet to promote the video they made about Shadow of Mordor.

(credit: sonnen)

German battery company Sonnen never made the grand splash in the US that Tesla made with its Powerwall. But the company has ambitions to match its US-native rival. Sonnen opened up its US headquarters in Los Angeles just this past January, at first selling a $10,000 battery called the “eco protect,” which offered off-grid capabilities to homeowners that wanted a backup in case of emergency.

This week, Sonnen announced a new stationary storage battery called the eco compact—a 4kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery that homeowners can buy for self consumption, not just for backup power. The eco compact can be expanded by purchasing additional modules in 4kWh increments up to 16kWh. The base unit costs $5,950 plus installation, which Green Tech Media estimates would fall in the range of $900 to $3,000.

But Sonnen’s base price includes an inverter, and it guarantees the battery for up to 10,000 cycles, which could put it close to competitive with Tesla’s 7kWh Powerwall (which is actually only a 6.4kWh battery, according to the most recent specifications). SolarCity estimates Tesla’s Powerwalls cost about $7,340 after installation and the purchase of an inverter, but Tesla also only guarantees its Powerwall for 10 years or, according to an Australian warranty Green Tech Media cites, just 5,000 cycles. (Of course, this all could change in the coming months—rumor is that Tesla is gearing up to launch Powerwall 2.0 soon.)

PORTLAND, Ore.—In the cool, hushed atmosphere of Portland’s Newspace Center for Photography, a Geiger counter clicks steadily as I orient myself to the room. White walls, wood floors, and the faint, clean smell of an elementary school auditorium. I was here to see the "Reactive Matters" exhibit, a small collection of photography by three artists whose works document nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, and the disasters that have peppered our history of experimenting with radioactive material.

Photographing Superfund sites with buried nuclear waste and old reactor locations doesn’t always make for compelling visual media. Instead, these artists used radioactivity itself to build more interesting and abstract art.

Jeremy Bolen

Vieques #3, Archival pigment print made from buried film, window screen, artist’s frame, fragments of buried film. 36 in x 40 in.

3 more images in gallery

Digging deep

Chicago-based artist Jeremy Bolen told Ars over the phone that he became interested in nuclear energy after he visited "Site A" in the Red Gate Woods on the former grounds of the Argonne National Laboratory. (Argonne still exists in Illinois, but the lab was moved in 1947.) Site A became the first nuclear waste dumping ground in the US after scientists built an early nuclear reactor there in 1943.

(credit: Clever Cupcakes)

According to a contract seen by Recode, Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer struck a deal with Mozilla in 2014 specifying annual payments of $375 million to the browser creator in exchange for Yahoo's search engine appearing in the default position on Firefox. That $375 million price tag will be paid out every year until 2019 one way or another—even if Mozilla doesn’t like the company that buys Yahoo and decides to walk away.

Of course, if Mozilla decides it likes whichever company buys the embattled search giant, then payments continue as before and the new owner of Yahoo’s search engine retains the default position on the browser.

The trick is, then, finding a buyer who is committed to keeping Yahoo’s search product robust, Recode says, at least for the next three years. If a potential buyer was thinking of abandoning search, however, that could come at a very steep price, as it would send Mozilla searching for a better search engine to serve up to its users.

Those aren't side-view mirrors, those are side-view cameras.

Japan’s transportation ministry has approved mirrorless cars to drive on its roads, according to The Japan Times and Automotive News. The country green-lit the new policy after a United Nations’ working group on international auto standards said cameras could replace mirrors on cars if the camera systems met certain standards.

According to The Japan Times, “At first, monitors and the cameras must be positioned in the same place as current rear-view and side-view mirrors and offer the same views.” Transportation Ministry official Maseru Miyashita told the paper, “Getting used to (monitors instead of mirrors) is the main factor to ensure drivers’ safety.”

Mirrorless cars substitute analog rear- and side-view mirrors for cameras and screens. Advocates say that dropping side-view mirrors can make a car more aerodynamic and cameras can have a wider field of vision than a mirror. On the other hand, a mirror is a simple thing, and a camera and screen setup is complex, and, by nature, one is easier to fix than the other. In addition, as Automotive News points out, some in the auto industry have cautioned that although a rear-view camera can go a long way in eliminating blind spots, some drivers rely on the rear pillars in a car to gauge exactly where an object coming up behind the car is.

Last week, rumors floated of a restructuring of Verizon’s data plans, and today those rumors have proven largely correct. The wireless networking company has increased the sizes of all of its data plans, and it has correspondingly increased prices of those plans by $5 to $10 per month. In addition, the company is offering some limited options to rollover data, and it’s introducing a “Safety Mode” that will cut data speeds after the customer exceeds their limit—for an extra $5.

Previously, Verizon offered 1GB for $30, 3GB for $45, 6GB for $60, 12GB for $80, and 18GB for $100 per month. Now the smallest data plan caps out at 2GB for $35, followed by 4GB for $50, 8GB for $70, 16GB for $90, and 24GB for $110.

Verizon’s move to allow limited rollover data is similar to T-Mobile and Sprint’s approach. Verizon’s plan will let you carry your data over for a month before it disappears. The option to carry over data for a month is free on all plans.