TOKYO — Honda Motor Co said Wednesday it will start recycling rare earths and other key materials in hybrid auto batteries this year—a key innovation in the Japanese automaker’s effort to be green. Japan is dependent on imports, mostly from China, for rare earth elements, which are essential for making high-tech products, but a steady supply has been periodically threatened over political disputes with China. Honda officials said the company was targeting September or October to begin recycling of rare earths. They said it would be a first for the auto industry. Honda President Takanobu Ito said: “In the long term, we hope to move to renewable energy sources that won’t harm the environment.” Ito outlined Honda’s efforts to reduce pollution and global warming, including experimental projects to combine solar with its fuel-cell cars—what he called the Honda “dream” to derive energy solely from nature and emit just water. Fuel cells are powered by the energy created when hydrogen combines with oxygen to produce water. They are still too expensive for commercial use and remain experimental. Ito said Honda’s roots lie in its determination to develop a fuel-efficient gasoline engine to clear U.S. pollution-control regulations of the 1970s. Honda’s CVCC engine was the first in the world to clear the standard. Japan later adopted similar pollution regulations. Honda recovered from last year's earthquake and tsunami, which disrupted the supply of auto parts and sent sales plunging. January-March profit rose 61% from the previous year, and it’s projecting record global sales of 4.3 million vehicles for this fiscal year.Source: Sam Daily Times
Camelopardalis, or U Cam for short, is a star nearing the end of its life. As stars run low on fuel, they become unstable. Every few thousand years, U Cam coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse. The gas ejected in the star’s latest eruption is clearly visible in this picture as a faint bubble of gas surrounding the star. U Cam is an example of a carbon star, a rare type of star with an atmosphere that contains more carbon than oxygen. Due to its low surface gravity, typically as much as half of the total mass of a carbon star may be lost by way of powerful stellar winds. Located in the constellation of Camelopardalis (The Giraffe), near the North Celestial Pole, U Cam itself is much smaller than it appears in this Hubble image. In fact, the star would easily fit within a single pixel at the center of the image. Its brightness, however, is enough to saturate the camera's receptors, making the star look much larger than it is.The shell of gas, which is both much larger and much fainter than its parent star, is visible in intricate detail in Hubble’s portrait. This phenomenon is often quite irregular and unstable, but the shell of gas expelled from U Cam is almost perfectly spherical.Photo credit: 
