In an amazing display of honor and integrity possibly extinct amongst American businesses, Toyota Motor Corp. CEO and President Akio Toyoda declined to accept an award from the Japanese Government for the Prius model’s energy efficiency. The Prius was one of 3 products selected this year to receive the Grand Prize for Energy Efficiency and Ecological Quality from Japan’s Trade Minister.

Referring to the recent voluntary recall of 437,000 Prius for possible brake problems, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said, “We declined to accept the award because we thought it was not appropriate.” Toyota made the decision to recall the Prius amongst the recent recall of a total of 8.5 million other Toyota autos after receiving only 200 complaints total in both the U.S. and Japan of the hybrid experiencing a braking delay in very specific cold weather conditions over very bumpy roads.

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Bidding starts at 12pm noon today on a very large collection of props and artifacts from the likes of Amelia Earhart, Michael Jackson and Stan Winston. We’ve included a more complete list below, but some particular items worth noting are Gus Grissom’s space flight suit, Michael Jackson’s glittery white glove, a full-scale male T-Rex head from Jurassic Park, multiple Terminator endoskeletons, Kirk’s Starfleet uniform from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Stormtrooper helmet from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Michael Keaton’s Batman costume, a 17-foot Bumblebee from Transformers, and even Predator, Ghostbusters, He-Man and Freddy Kreuger memorabilia.

The list goes on and on. If you’re rolling in dough and want to pick out something to wear Trick-or-Treating early this year, the auction ends tomorrow (Oct. 9) so head over to this link to place your bets. (If you’re looking for a little more affordable memorabilia and reproductions though, we recommend you checkout some of the amazing stuff from Sideshow Collectibles.)

More pictures follow and from the press release, here is what’s on the block:

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Today in New York Microsoft is hosting an open house showing off all its goods it intends to offer consumers this holiday season, including a new generation of cellphones it hopes will grab the attention of users it lost to Apple’s iPhone.  Still relying on various 3rd party manufacturers to provide the hardware, the new operating system, creatively dubbed Windows Mobile 6.5, will need to do most of the talking. One of the biggest improvements Microsoft has made to the new OS is the internet browser which has been notoriously slow, unwieldy,  and unable to scale well or handle most Web 2.0 applications. They have also surrendered to touchscreen interaction rather than staying focused on the bottom left and right anchor buttons which they insisted was necessary for one-handed use of all applications -but severely restricted developers.
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The BMW Lovos concept car, which runs on solar generated power, looks like it just escaped from some far-future racing videogame or Transformers 3. It also looks like it would hurt like hell to be a pedestrian in the way of this beast. So what are all those strange metal plates? Those are the solar-cells; solar-cells that can turn and follow the sun for maximum efficiency.

From Autoblog:

The exterior of the Lovos – which stands for Lifestyle of Voluntary Simplicity – concept is theoretically constructed from just one fully exchangeable part that recurs 260 times. Each exterior piece is covered in solar photovoltaic cells and can hinge on a substructure underneath to follow the sun or act as individual airbrakes. We can only assume the concept would be powered by electricity.