New US Asteroid Mining Law Could Violate International Space Treaty

President Obama last week signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, which governs ownership of asteroid resources, possibly triggering a new battle in the commercial space race. Section 5103 of the Act gives U.S. companies the right to resources mined from asteroids, although it does not give them rights to the asteroids themselves. News of the president's signing drew applause from Planetary Resources, a 5-year-old asteroid mining company.

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Massive Hack Attack on Educational Toy Company Exposes Parents, Kids

Officials of several U.S. states on Monday have opened investigations into a massive data breach that occurred last month at VTech. The award-winning Hong Kong-based maker of electronic learning toys for kids on Friday announced that its Learning Lodge database was breached in a hack attack on Nov. 14. Learning Lodge lets customers download apps, learning games, e-books, and other educational content to VTech products. The personal information of nearly 5 million adults and more than 200,000 children was exposed.

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The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) is working to incorporate a headlight-rating segment into its analysis of cars’ safety performance, and it is working to do so soon. According to Automotive News, the research firm is looking to tie headlight performance to a car’s safety rating as soon as 2017. This means that, in order for a car to attain, say, the highest rating of Top Safety Pick +, its headlights must meet yet-to-be-determined criteria. Most likely, expensive technologies such as steerable headlight modules, LED bulbs, and more will be necessary items.
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The implications of IIHS’s move are far-reaching—just look at the results of the recently introduced (by car-development standards) small-overlap crash test—and could force automakers to adopt fancier lighting tech sooner. Currently, an IIHS Top Safety Pick is earned by way of “good ratings in the moderate overlap front, side, roof strength and head restraint tests, as well as a good or acceptable rating in the small overlap front test,” according to IIHS. A Top Safety Pick +, on the other hand, must “earn an advanced or superior rating for front crash prevention.” Most recently, IIHS hung the requirement that cars have front-crash prevention technology (automatic braking and collision warning) around the neck of a Top Safety Pick + rating; as the firm notes, “Top Safety Pick + winners with optional front crash prevention qualify for the higher award only when equipped with the technology.” As a result, we’ve seen a flood of models add that feature.

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• IIHS Adds New Frontal Crash Test, Most Cars Expected to Perform Poorly
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• IIHS Says Rearview Cameras More Effective than Parking Sensors, We Say “Duh”
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• These Are the 9 Most Dangerous Things Drivers Do
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It’s a fair assumption that similar bait will be set with headlight technology. Today, HID headlights are only just starting to become widespread in average-priced cars, while LED headlights and adaptive, steerable lights are still optional and largely the purview of luxury vehicles. We’re all for the democratization of better headlights—and safer vehicles—but it isn’t yet clear what the implications will be for vehicle cost. Nor is it clear whether the IIHS’s upcoming mandate might speed the availability of future lighting technology such as laser lights, matrix-LED lamps, and the like that currently are tied up in U.S. regulatory tape.

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Let’s get this out of the way up front: The litany of breakdowns suffered by our long-term 2014 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray Z51 (C7) was simply appalling. Yes, we know a car is a machine made up of thousands of ­components, and that despite massive leaps in technology and manufacturing that make cars far more reliable today than they were just a couple of product cycles ago, things can and do go wrong. But sheesh. READ MORE ››

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Gadget Ogling: Zippy 3D Printing, Custom-Molded Earphones, and Fast-Food Buttons

One of the current issues with 3D printing is that it can take some time to create physical versions of large or complex designs. Nexa3D's NX1 prints objects as much as 100 times faster than competitors, with printing speeds of about a centimeter in height every minute. It uses light on a certain type of resin to speed up the process. Topping up the resin seems a simpler task than with many other printers, as the NX1 uses a cartridge system instead of a manual refill process, which should help make owners' lives a little less messy.

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As if Formula E didn’t already fail at creating so much as a ripple in the racing community, the all-electric racing series has announced its new opening act: Roborace. Think a bunch of near-silent electric race cars whizzing around a circuit is boring? Just wait until you soak in a Roborace event, which will also use electric cars—but eschew the drivers. That’s right, this is an all-electric, autonomous racing series.

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• Everything You Need to Know About the “Formula E” Electric-Only Race Series
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• Electrifying Bargains: Three Electric Vehicles You Can Own for Less Than $10,000
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• Electric Dreams: EV Start-up Plans to Spend $1 Billion on U.S. Factory
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It seems appropriate that Formula E and its partner, Kinetik, debuted Roborace on Cyber Monday, but we’d wager that online shopping is a more interesting endeavor. The plan so far is to have 10 teams running pairs of identical electric race cars through one-hour races ahead of every Formula E race on the 2016–2017 season calendar. According to Roborace, the cars will “compete using real-time computing algorithms and AI technologies.” Elaboration on this topic will come later, the series promises, yet it is clear that the series will be leveraged to advance self-driving cars’ skills. (A noble cause, given the potential benefit it holds for the honing of roadgoing autonomous tech.) Even so, let’s hope the racing is more interesting than watching a washing machine do its thing.

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-Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but it’s also a safe money grab. If you’re a car company and one of your competitors strikes gold with a niche product, you fill that niche in your own lineup. This author recently called the Ram Rebel “a blatant me-too” on account of it basically being a Ford F-150 Raptor rip-off without the substance. You might also look at the Mercedes-Benz GLE coupe as a blatant me-too. You should. It’s an obvious copy of the BMW X6. READ MORE ››

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