Here's some good news for a Friday afternoon: For 2025 through August, global electric vehicle sales have grown by 25 percent compared to the same eight months in 2024, according to the analysts at Rho Motion. That amounts to 12.5 million EVs, although the data combines both battery EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs for the total.

However, that's for global sales. In fact, EV adoption is moving even faster in Europe, which has grown by 31 percent so far this year (Rho says that BEV sales grew by 31 percent but PHEV sales by just 30 percent)—a total of 2.6 million plug-in vehicles. In some European countries, the increase has been even more impressive: up by 45 percent in Germany, 41 percent in Italy, and by 100 percent in Spain.

But despite a number of interesting new EVs from Renault and the various Stellantis-owned French automakers, EV sales in France are down by 6 percent so far, year on year.

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California's legislature this week approved a bill to let renters opt out of bulk-billing arrangements that force them to pay for Internet service from a specific provider.

The bill says that by January 1, a landlord must "allow the tenant to opt out of paying for any subscription from a third-party Internet service provider, such as through a bulk-billing arrangement, to provide service for wired Internet, cellular, or satellite service that is offered in connection with the tenancy." If a landlord fails to do so, the tenant "may deduct the cost of the subscription to the third-party Internet service provider from the rent," and the landlord would be prohibited from retaliating.

The bill passed the state Senate in a 30–7 vote on Wednesday but needs Gov. Gavin Newsom's signature to become law. It was approved by the state Assembly in a 75–0 vote in April.

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On Friday, CBC News reported that a major education reform document prepared for the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador contains at least 15 fabricated citations that academics suspect were generated by an AI language model—despite the same report calling for "ethical" AI use in schools.

"A Vision for the Future: Transforming and Modernizing Education," released August 28, serves as a 10-year roadmap for modernizing the province's public schools and post-secondary institutions. The 418-page document took 18 months to complete and was unveiled by co-chairs Anne Burke and Karen Goodnough, both professors at Memorial University's Faculty of Education, alongside Education Minister Bernard Davis.

One of the fake citations references a 2008 National Film Board movie called "Schoolyard Games" that does not exist, according to a board spokesperson. The exact citation reportedly appears in a University of Victoria style guide, a document that teaches students how to format references using fictional examples. The style guide warns on its first page that "Many citations in this guide are fictitious," meaning they are made-up examples used only to demonstrate proper formatting. Yet someone (or some AI chatbot) copied the fake example directly into the Education Accord report as if it were a real source.

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Even as Nintendo has endlessly mined its classic consoles for nostalgic re-releases in recent decades , the company has seemed to completely ignore the existence of the Virtual Boy—its abortive 1990s dip into the world of early virtual reality . That's finally set to change next February with Nintendo's first-ever official re-release of Virtual Boy games—at least for players who invest $100 in a required Virtual Boy-shaped Switch dock (or a cheaper cardboard holder) to make them work.

Virtual Boy – Nintendo Classics will be available for Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack members on #NintendoSwitch and #NintendoSwitch2 starting Feb 17, 2026! #NintendoDirect pic.twitter.com/VnCO0DiX3S

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) September 12, 2025

Subscribers to Nintendo Switch Online in the US and Canada will soon be able to purchase that $100 dock , which Nintendo says "recreates the form of the original Virtual Boy hardware," or a slender $25 cardboard alternative . Then, starting on February 17, those players will be able to play downloaded Virtual Boy games (included with an Expansion Pack subscription) by inserting a Switch or Switch 2 into one of those retro replicas. The system will presumably display those games in a split-screen mode that can be viewed through special lenses to replicate the Virtual Boy's original 384×224 resolution, four-shades-of-red stereoscopic display.

Nintendo's announcement says you'll "need this dedicated accessory" to play Virtual Boy titles through a Switch, suggesting that flat-screen play on a console without one of the custom docks won't be possible. And while "purchase limits apply" to the plastic Virtual Boy replica (which seems likely to be a collectible available only in limited supplies), the cheaper cardboard model seems designed for wider availability.

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Lots of people are excited about the idea of using plants to help us draw down some of the excess carbon dioxide we've been pumping into the atmosphere. It would be nice to think that we could reforest our way out of the mess we're creating, but recent studies have indicated there's simply not enough productive land for this to work out.

One alternative might be to get plants to take up carbon dioxide more efficiently. Unfortunately, the enzyme that incorporates carbon dioxide into photosynthesis, called RUBISCO, is remarkably inefficient . So, a team of researchers in Taiwan decided to try something new—literally. They put together a set of enzymes that added a new-to-nature biochemical cycle to plants that let it incorporate carbon far more efficiently. The resulting plants grew larger and incorporated more carbon.

Cycles and recycles

In the abstract, incorporating carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the biochemistry of the cell seems simple—you just link up a few of the carbon atoms and you're off. But in reality, it's fiendishly complicated. Carbon dioxide is an extremely stable molecule, so incorporating it requires a very energetically favorable reaction. In the Calvin cycle of photosynthesis, that reaction involves linking the carbon dioxide as part of a reaction that breaks apart a modified five-carbon sugar, creating two three-carbon molecules. Some of those molecules get fed into the cell's metabolism, while others get built up into a five-carbon sugar again, restarting the cycle.

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Nissan provided flights from Austin to San Diego and then to Washington, DC, and accommodation so Ars could drive the Nissan Leaf. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.

SAN DIEGO—The original Nissan Leaf was a car with a mission. Long before Elon Musk set his sights on Tesla selling vast numbers of electric vehicles to the masses, then-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn wanted Nissan to shift half a million Leafs a year in the early 2010s. That didn't quite come to pass, but by 2020, it had sold its 500,000th EV, which went from its factory in Sunderland, England, to a customer in Norway.

Pioneering though they were, both first- and second-generation Leafs were compromised. They were adapted from existing internal combustion engine platforms, with the electric powertrains shoehorned inside. The cars' real handicaps were a lack of liquid cooling for the battery packs. Like an older Porsche 911, the Leaf was air-cooled, albeit with none of the collector value. That's all changed for generation three.

The new Leaf is built on a dedicated EV platform shared with Nissan's alliance partners Renault and Mitsubishi, and which we have previously seen used to good effect in the Nissan Ariya . The benefits of using a platform purpose-designed for electric propulsion are obvious from the space efficiency. The new car is 3 inches (75 mm) shorter from the outside, but offers nearly 9 inches (221 mm) more rear leg room (yes, really), making it a much more suitable place to put adults.

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A former employee of a multinational DVD company was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing hundreds of pre-release DVDs and Blu-rays and leaking blockbuster movies online, the Department of Justice confirmed Thursday.

Back in May, Steven Hale pleaded guilty to spending about a year between 2021 and 2022 stealing discs from his employer and selling them online through e-commerce sites. Among movies that Hale uploaded for illegal download were highly anticipated titles like Dune , as well as sequels to popular films like F9: The Fast Saga and Venom: Let There Be Carnage .

But according to the DOJ, Hale did the most damage by leaking advance copies of Spider-Man: No Way Home . That particular movie, released exclusively in theaters in 2021, became the first movie after the COVID pandemic started to gross $1 billion at the box office. Likely DVD sales were expected to be just as explosive, but for many fans too cautious to return to movie theaters at the time, DVD leaks became too enticing to pass up. Hale wasn't the only one to recognize the high demand online, with illegal downloads of the movie becoming so widespread that ReasonLabs reported that scammers started planting malware in illegal copies of the movie to "lure in as many victims as possible."

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Microsoft has avoided an EU fine after the US tech group offered concessions on how it packages together its Teams and Office products, ending a long-running antitrust investigation by the bloc’s regulators.

The probe, which began after a 2020 complaint from Slack, now part of Salesforce, accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance by tying its video conferencing tool to its widely used suite of productivity applications.

Since the initial complaint, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from Office 365 in the EU, but critics said the changes were too narrow.

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Welcome to Edition 8.10 of the Rocket Report! Dear readers, if everything goes according to plan, four astronauts are less than six months away from traveling around the far side of the Moon and breaking free of low-Earth orbit for the first time in more than 53 years. Yes, there are good reasons to question NASA's long-term plans for the Artemis lunar program — the woeful cost of the Space Launch System rocket, the complexity of new commercial landers, and a bleak budget outlook. But many of us who were born after the Apollo Moon landings have been waiting for this moment our whole lives. It is almost upon us.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

North Korea fires solid rocket motor. North Korea said Tuesday it had conducted the final ground test of a solid-fuel rocket engine for a long-range ballistic missile in its latest advancement toward having an arsenal that could viably threaten the continental United States, the Associated Press reports . The test Monday observed by leader Kim Jong Un was the ninth of the solid rocket motor built with carbon fiber and capable of producing 1,971 kilonewtons (443,000 pounds) of thrust, more powerful than past models, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

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