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Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

Japan Wants 30% Cut In Rare Earth Use In Two Years. To free the country from China's control on rare earths, Japan is planning a 30% cut in consumption of the heavy rare earth dysprosium that's used in electronics and hybrid cars. (The DOE has a plan too.) The government is budgeting $65 million to help companies scale back their needs by recycling existing element or by developing methods to avoid using it entirely. --NS

--Updated 6:40 a.m. 

Google's Chrome App-ed For Android. At long last, Google has announced an app version of their web browser Chrome, for the Google-made mobile OS, Android. For now, the app only runs on the latest version of the OS, Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich, and Google has yet to reveal when the app will be released. --NS

Anonymous Leaks Syrian Government Emails. Hacker group Anonymous accessed and published several messages from the the email inboxes of Syria's president and government aides. The groups also posted the passwords (most of them were "12345") of all the accounts. --NS

Nokia Moving Manufacturing To Asia. Nokia is moving much of its European assembly and manufacturing to Asia, after cutting 4,000 jobs in Mexico, Hungary and Finland. The move is intended to speed up delivery and streamline manufacturing by being closers to their Asian suppliers. --NS

Pinterest Hits 10 Million Users. Pinterest is beginning to do wonders for retailers selling everything from yoga to yogurt, and just passed a milestone of 10 million unique U.S. visitors per month. According to ComScore, Pinterest's the fast growing single site to hit that mark. --NS

--Updated 5:45 a.m. EST

[Image: Flickr user Palinopsia Films]

Yesterday's Fast Feed: Yahoo Board Shakeup, Google Ready To "Solve For X," Brazil Petitions Twitter To Block Speed Trap Tweets, and more!

The Whistler Sliding Centre runs 4,800 feet long and drops 500 feet. You'll need an orientation — and a helmet — before taking the plunge.

Autonomous vehicles are here now, racking up miles on public roads. We talk to six experts about where we go from here.

This under-the-radar Nintendo series, each of which features a variety of challenging but hilarious rhythmic exercises, has heretofore only existed on portable platforms. Rhythm Heaven Fever, to be released for Wii on Feb. 13, is the first to be played on a television.

Very few rappers can switch from rapping about comic books to putting out mixtapes about Parks and Recreation, but Adam WarRock can.

The author Jules Verne, considered to be the father of science fiction, is born in Nantes, France. Many of his technological imaginings, in novels such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and From the Earth to the Moon, will eventually come to be reality.

The 40,000-ton assault ship U.S.S. Wasp can launch deadly sea and air attacks against enemies ashore and afloat. Just don't expect it to load a website in under three minutes.

#toys Everybody loves Lego. But if you have friends or family who think that all that plastic isn't eco-friendly, there's an alternative: earth blocks. More »

#rumors There have long been rumors that Amazon wants to usurp Netflix as the video streaming service of choice. But new reports suggest that Amazon is about to announce a tie-in with Viacom that could make that a reality. More »

Virgin Media's school report for both last year and last quarter has been pretty positive for the Branson-Branded service. It pulled down £4 billion ($6.3 billion) in revenue for the year and made its first ever profit with a tidy £76 million ($120 million). In the last quarter alone, it added 273,000 TiVo subscribers, a figure that doubled its overall figure to 435,000. Favorite shows included Coronation Street, which was most caught-up with and The Vampire Diaries, which was the most binge-watched series. It's also clear that us Britons do love some super-fast broadband, 133,000 users plumped for speeds over 30MB in Q4. Flush with cash, it's going to buy back some shares and double consumers broadband speeds as it promised in January -- which we suppose is a fair way to spend your first profit, even if we'd have preferred to go to Disneyland.

Virgin Media's Q4 2011 report: Brits love TiVo, Fast Broadband, Vampire Diaries originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The motion by Capitol Records for a preliminary injunction against used digital music marketplace ReDigi has been denied. After hearing almost two hours of oral argument by attorneys for both sides, Judge Richard J. Sullivan ruled from the bench (PDF), holding that plaintiff had failed to show 'irreparable harm.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

#monitors At Gizmodo, many of us are fans of the multi-monitor set-up. It's not surprising: it lets us simultaneously keep an eye on breaking news, email, our writing and graphics, too. But is there a limit to how useful multiple monitors can be? More »

Maingear has been tickling us with its gaming PCs for a while, and now it's adding some extra muscle to its catalog. The company's Titan 17 notebook is hitting the operating table for a processor transplant, the previous Intel i7-990X being swapped out for either the i7-3930K or i7-3960X. But what good is an internal update without some external flourish so folk know where you stand on the spec table? Maingear appreciates this, and that's why it's throwing a backlit keyboard into the mix. The souped-up Titan is up for pre-order now, with prices starting at $3,499. Tap the PR after the break for the full specs.

Continue reading Maingear's Titan 17 has a change of heart, keyboard

Maingear's Titan 17 has a change of heart, keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 05:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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#facebook To most people that know him, Max Schrems is a typical law student from Austria. To Facebook, he is a massive pain in the ass. Outsmarting their attorneys, bombarding them with legal complaints and forming activist groups, he plans to transform Facebook's privacy policy in Europe. More »

Late last year, DARPA launched UAVForge -- a competition that invites contestants to create their very own unmanned aerial vehicles, and submit them for voter-based evaluation. The project is far from over, but competing teams have already started sending in their proof-of-flight videos, giving us a glimpse of what's to come. So far, it looks like the GremLion UAV (pictured above) is the early favorite, after coming out victorious in the first round of voting. Developed by a team from the National University of Singapore, the GremLion looks like a bite-sized Death Star and flies around using a coaxial set of rotors that expand tulip-style out of its shell. Also included in the UAVForge showdown is a guy known as X-MAUS -- an Arduino-controlled quadcopter that can apparently transform into a more aerodynamic plane form upon liftoff. And, rounding out the list of notables is a submission from TU Delft known as the QuadShot, which is basically a miniature B-Wing from Star Wars. Except it's real. Hit up the break to see all three in action.

Continue reading DARPA's crowdsourced UAV competition heats up, takes off (video)

DARPA's crowdsourced UAV competition heats up, takes off (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is your current wireless mouse not up to snuff? If that's the case, you may want to take a gander at the Logitech Touch Mouse M600 that lets you do your navigating via a touch surface instead of those ol' clicky buttons. The peripheral is outfitted with the company's Flow Scroll software that touts a similar feel to scrolling on your touchscreen smartphone of choice. From wherever your fingers contact the top of the mouse, you can scroll and swipe in order to keep powering through those Photoshop files. The M600 works just as well for lefties once click areas are reconfigured with Logitech's SetPoint software. If you're thinking about taking the leap, look at the details in the PR below and get ready to shell out $69.99 later this month.

Continue reading Logitech M600 mouse puts you more in touch with browsing for $69

Logitech M600 mouse puts you more in touch with browsing for $69 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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New submitter jjslash writes "The hard disk drive supply chain was hit hard late last year when a series of floods struck Thailand. The Asian country accounts for about a quarter of the world's hard drive production, but thousands of factories had to close shop for weeks as facilities were under water, in what is considered the world's fourth costliest natural disaster according to World Bank estimates. That's on top of the human cost of over 800 lives. TechSpot has monitored a number of mobile and desktop HDDs to get a better overview of how the situation has developed in the last three months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.