ANTING, China: Engineers racing to find affordable ways to make cars environmentally sustainable are zeroing in on polluted, fuel-scarce China to help them engineer clean car concepts from the laboratory to the market.

Mounting alarm over global warming and soaring crude oil prices was evident among automakers showcasing their latest green technologies at the Challenge Bibendum, held this week in Shanghai's "Auto City" - an automaking industrial zone west of the city.

At the 2004 Shanghai Bibendum, named after the puffy mascot of the sponsor, the French tire maker Michelin, the talk was all of phasing in various technologies over decades.

The next time an unexpected comet shows up in the inner solar system, Amy J. Lovell may not get time at the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico to observe it before it swings back out.
With a quarter of its annual budget slashed, to $8 million from $10.5 million, Arecibo will be listening to the universe less often in the coming years. For researchers like Dr. Lovell, a professor of astronomy at Agnes Scott College in Georgia, that may mean her work — detecting radio waves emitted by ions from busted-up water molecules — will take years longer to complete.

Most Americans think they're helping the earth when they recycle their old computers, televisions and cell phones. But chances are they're contributing to a global trade in electronic trash that endangers workers and pollutes the environment overseas.

While there are no precise figures, activists estimate that 50 to 80 percent of the 300,000 to 400,000 tons of electronics collected for recycling in the U.S. each year ends up overseas. Workers in countries such as China, India and Nigeria then use hammers, gas burners and their bare hands to extract metals, glass and other recyclables, exposing themselves and the environment to a cocktail of toxic

After years of running his own business, Paolo Vitelli has decided to commission his own yacht.
"I want to create my own monument," the 60-year-old Italian entrepreneur says as he gazes across the sprawling engineering ship building yard, where a massive crane is getting ready to lower yet another multi-storey motor yacht into the harbour's choppy waters.

Mr Vitelli has chosen a relatively modest yacht; a 103 feet long Azimut sports yacht, with a list price of 7m euros ($10m £5m).

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Samsung says it's work force has declined, for the first time in 5 years, though it's not due to restructuring

The number of engineers and employees at Samsung Electronics has fallen for the first time in five years, the company said Monday, though it emphasized the reductions were not part of any broader restructuring.

Samsung had 1,630 fewer workers as of Sept. 30 compared with the total six months earlier, Samsung spokeswoman Lee Eun-hee said, citing figures reported last week to South Korea's financial regulator. She emphasized, however, that the work force reduction was natural and not part of a larger restructuring as suggested by South Korean media reports.

"It has nothing to do with downsizing," she said, adding that those who left did so voluntarily.

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Six years ago, Indian-born professor Veena Sahajwalla was staring into a steel-making furnace in Indianapolis when suddenly something clicked. What if she tried mixing waste plastic in with the coal at intense temperatures? Could she invent a new "green steel" ?

The science behind the question was elegantly simple. In electric arc furnace steelmaking, coal or coke is needed to trigger carbon reactions at intense temperatures. But carbon reactions, she theorized, could just as easily be generated using plastic that would otherwise be building up in landfills. Steel can't tell where the carbon comes from so the end product would be identical.

An alternative method being explored in Australia , in the race to slash greenhouse emissions from making iron and steel, is by using trees already planted to combat salinity.

Wood has been used to make iron for more than 3300 years and steel for almost 1000 years, and in the 21st century its time may have come again. Iron and steel consume 19 per cent of the world’s industrial energy and generate 26 per cent of industrial greenhouse emissions, representing six per cent of total anthropogenic greenhouse emissions (those caused by human activity). So the hunt for alternative processes and cleaner fuels is accelerating.

Whilst Britain's steelmakers are lobbying the government and the European commission for the steel industry to be given special treatment within the European Union's emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Not a throw back to the age of the Charleston but to the dry old process of setting a price for gold --

LONDON (Reuters) - When gold reached dizzying heights above $800 a troy ounce in recent weeks, it cast a spotlight on a ritual that has taken place in London for the past 88 years.

Twice a day, representatives of five banks pick up the phone to trade physical gold and arrive at the London "fixing" price, which then becomes a benchmark for gold around the world.

As the clock in the vast Barclays Capital trading room in London ticks towards 3 p.m., attention turns to Marc Booker, the bank's head of spot gold trading.

Booker joins a conference call with the four other banks who take part in the fixing. The chairman, from Deutsche Bank, suggests an opening price and Booker relays it to his trading room and customers. Booker and the other participants say whether they are buyers or sellers at that price, and the chairman adjusts the price until the buyers and sellers are in balance.
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King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia said OPEC shouldn't make oil a source of conflict, contradicting Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez who wants the oil exporter group to become an active "political agent".

However oil is a powerful political tool as Brazil discovered with the announcement of the biggest deep water oil field off the southeastern coast which has the potential to transform Brazil into a global energy powerhouse and to reshape the politics of this energy-starved continent.

 While Brazil’s state oil company, Petrobras, has known of the field for more than a year, it only finished assessing its full potential in recent months. It announced on Nov. 8 that the field held some five billion to eight billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas.

The announcement has everyone in the region, and beyond, taking notice. A field that size — the biggest in the world since a discovery in Kazakhstan in 2000 — is a potential political game-changer for Brazil.

THE market spotlight may soon focus on a Chinese stake in the world's fourth largest iron-ore producer, Anglo American, as investors watch how China will respond to BHP Billiton's massive bid for Rio Tinto.

China Development Bank , one of China's richest and most energetic offshore investment companies, told foreign analysts this week that it has taken a stake in Anglo American, rather than Rio Tinto, as had been reported.

So,  BHP looks to the Chinese as it  pursues the Rio Tinto deal and with theOlympics rapidly approaching -

The value of the ore in one bronze medal at the Olympic Games next summer in Beijing? Just $1. A silver medal? $76. Gold? $230. The value of being the first company designated "Official Diversified Minerals and Medals Sponsor of the Games?"

BHP Billiton will soon find out. BHP, the world's largest mining company, is providing all the ore for the 57,000 medals to be awarded at the 29th Olympiad and the Paralympic Games.

Engineers estimate that for that purpose, BHP will be delivering about 13 kilograms, or 28.6 pounds, of pure Chilean gold, more than a metric ton of Australian silver and almost seven tons of copper - also from Chile - to a mint in Shanghai where the metal will be cast and a ring of jade inlaid to forge each medal.

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Captain Kirk and his crew may someday be followed on their travels across the universe at warp speed by the rest of us. If engineers and scientists meeting for a one-day international conference next week have their way, the starship Enterprise's warp drive will no longer be the stuff of science fiction but a viable means of travelling vast distances at faster than the speed of light.

Anyone wanting to boldly go on a trip to a far-off galaxy should not hold their breath though. Engineers and Scientists admit there is little chance of anyone building a warp drive this century, but there is serious academic interest in the subject. 

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GUIYU, China (AP): The air smells acrid from squat gas burners that sit outside homes, melting wires to recover copper and cooking computer motherboards to release gold.

Migrant workers in filthy clothing smash picture tubes by hand to recover glass and electronic parts, releasing as much as three kilograms (6.5 pounds) of lead dust.

For five years, engineers, environmentalists and the media have highlighted the danger to Chinese workers who dismantle much of the world's junked electronics. Yet a visit to this southeastern Chinese town regarded as the heartland of "e-waste'' disposal shows little has improved. In fact, the problem is growing worse because of China's own contribution.

China now produces more than 1 million tons (910,000 metric tons) of e-waste each year, said Jamie Choi, a toxics campaigner with Greenpeace China in Beijing. That adds up to roughly 5 million television sets, 4 million refrigerators, 5 million washing machines, 10 million mobile phones and 5 million personal computers, according to Choi

For nostalgia buffs, it was sixty years ago that two scientists  started a month of experiments which would come to shape the modern world.

The period of work by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain , working under William Shockley, would become known as the "miracle month" and resulted in the world's first working transistor.

"They engineered something that became the basic mechanism for our entire electronic industry," said Dr Art Ramirez of Bell Labs, the location of the 1947 invention.

"They're in aircraft, automobiles, digital cameras and microwave ovens," said Jeff Katz, a guide at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

Welcome to the hilarious and often deeply disturbing world of business viral videos
Think those stories about hysterical company bosses yelling motivational words across huge conference halls are made up? Missing the sharp tongue of the Apprentice's Katie Hopkins? Want to know how not to apply for a job on Wall Street? Or simply wondering which footage gets the best shot of Sir Richard Branson's grimace after that publicity stunt went wrong?

We bring you rapping accountants and Bernanke-bashing, boardroom sniping and a motivational song about a bank merger.

There's even some educational items among the chart in case the boss wants to know why your morning has been spent on YouTube.

An inflatable habitat designed for explorers on the moon or Mars is headed to Antarctica for a test run.

The habitat — engineered by ILC Dover and resembling an inflatable backyard bounce for children — will make its South Pole debut early next year. NASA demonstrated the inflatable prototype on Wednesday at ILC Dover's facility in Frederica, Del.

"We deflated [and inflated] it in about 10 minutes," Larry Toups, habitat lead for NASA's Constellation Program Lunar Surface Systems Office, said in an interview.