Take a look at 20 facts that may change the way you look at yourself.  Some of them are boring but some of them are quite remarkable.  Did you know that the atoms making up yourself are about 4.5 billion years old,  or that in  a short period of 4 months more than 80% of the atoms in your body will be replaced with new ones?  Scary huh.

It seems Honda is gearing up to be the one of the first major companies to bring a hydrogen fuel cell car to market -- their FCX Clarity is set to go to production in 2008, in a move they're hoping will break the catch-22 dilemma stopping motor companies from engineering cars because there's no hydrogen distribution, and stopping fuel companies from distributing hydrogen because there's no cars that use it.

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Ever heard the saying:

 In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

Well the problem may be a lack of practice.  Things need to be trialed in real life rather than hypothetically to pick up on all the little things you didn't consider in the perfect world inside your head.

MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the creation of a state-run corporation to oversee engineering in high-technology Russian industries, in the latest Kremlin effort to overhaul strategic sectors that have foundered since the Soviet collapse.

Putin's decree, released by the Kremlin, appointed Sergei Chemezov as the head of Rostekhnologia , a holding company that would oversee production and exports of high-technology industrial products.

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We note a recent press release from GM - "GM plans to make hybrids in China" and have a sense of deja vu as we look back to a similar release in 2006 -

"GM to Release Hybrids in China by 2008 (and Maybe a Hydrogen Car by 2020)" ,  obviously they are  keen to keep the story alive and fresh

GM is heavily promoting fuel cells as is evident by a further articles being released which detail GM's  fuel cell development credentials

Fuel cell technology is currently at the forefront of many other research projects such as the work being undertaken at The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Georgia Tech Research Institute

The Beijing Olympics will be an ideal place for manufacturers to showcase there products and Hyundai are amongst many who have also made long standing commitments in this area for environmentally friendly vehicles for Beijing

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Microsoft Office has dominated the landscape for Office suites for quite a while now.  It looks like this could change however.  OpenOffice is maturing into a competitive alternative,  as is Apple's iWork but at the same time we are also seeing a new trend.  As wider access becomes available to hi speed internet,  and as browsers evolve into more capable applications,  we are seeing the emergence of onine office suites that offer an array of advantages.  Collaboration is one of them which many Engineers would find useful.  Google Docs has been around for a while now and works quite nicely,  especially in how they tie it in with their other products such as GMail but there are also others such as Zoho and Thinkfree. 

Now a new contender has entered the market with a product called Live Documents. The product has been developed by Sabeer Bhatia,  who was also the man responsible for Hotmail back in 1996.  It is said to be very close in interface to Microsoft Office and also to have just about all the functionality.

When Walter Mossberg speaks, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the entire consumer electronics industry pay attention. That's because the personal technology guru is fighting a one-man crusade against fiddly mobile phones and rip-off computers.

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There's been a lot of media focus lately on the advances that are being made in nanotech and how it's going to solve every problem we currently face.  Very little attention has been give however to the potential dangers of such technology.  The general public doesn't seem at all too worried about it's use,  scientists however are,  and would like a little more research done into the matter.

It used to be so final: flush the toilet, and waste be gone.

But on November 30, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water--after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals, and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

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Forget inflation and the manufacturing figures. Stop looking at the latest existing home sales figures or the data on non-farm payrolls. One of the most accurate indicators of an imminent recession is in and Americans should start tightening their belts.
Winnebago , the makers of the famous recreational vehicles so prominent on the highways of the US, is expected to post a decline in sales this year for the first time in six years. Buying a motor home is seen as the ultimate discretionary item, and over the past three decades, declines have always heralded a rapid slowdown in the US economy.

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