Chengdu will be the next Chinese city to get a metro. First line construction begin in 2005 and is expected to be opened by October 2010, according to this
15km and 15 stations
Long term plan 250km+ 8 lines
Official website: http://www.cdmetro.cn/
Being a pirate was probably every boy’s dream at some point, especially as Johnny Deep presents a rather cheerful and adventurous perspective of the outlaw life in the Pirates of the Caribbean series. But the times of legendary pirates like Blackbeard are gone.
Nowadays terror has a different form, that of Somali pirates capturing ships in the Gulf of Aden. The last ship captured by the pirates on January 1 carried on board 2,388 cars from Hyundai and Kia, says bloomberg. Despite … (read more)
While most manufacturers felt the full blow of the economic downturn, at least one of them has gained rather than lost in the year that passed. The Japanese from Subaru announced today the company managed to break all records in 2009, as they sold 216,652 units, an increase of 15 percent over 2008 and some 16,000 units above the previous 200,703 units record set in 2006.
"We really owe this tremendous success to both our retailers and employees, who executed the business pla… (read more)
Luke Timmerman wrote:
There’s no denying that Ambrx CEO Steve Kaldor is a competitor. Still, when I visited him in his San Diego office a few weeks ago, Kaldor was happy to tip his cap to a couple of trail-blazing competitors who have done a lot over the past year to make his life easier.
Ambrx ended the year with about the same number of employees (80), the same amount of cash in the bank as it did a year ago (about $60 million), a new partner in Pfizer, and enough money to operate for multiple years. And while some of that is certainly Ambrx’s own doing, Kaldor sent out a big thank you to Roche and Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN).
Why? Those companies have built up a body of evidence that suggests they may have the first “empowered” antibody for cancer that has a chance to become a commercial hit. The drug, called T-DM1, combines the ability of an antibody to seek out diseased cells, with a potent toxin that gives the treatment extra tumor-killing kick. This is supposed to be one of the new frontiers in the world of antibody drugs, which have been around more than a decade and have created a market worth an estimated $30 billion a year. While scientists have dreamed for three decades about making more potent versions of plain antibodies, most efforts have fizzled, usually because the toxin broke off and floated in the bloodstream before it could get to the target, causing side effects.
Ambrx has been around since 2003 and has raised more than $106 million in venture capital to engineer protein drugs with new properties that can make them last longer in the blood, or enable them to carry those potent little toxins. But this was the year Ambrx amped up its effort to make so-called “empowered antibodies” that are sometimes called antibody drug conjugates. About one-third of Ambrx’s staff are now working on empowered antibodies, and half of the company’s resources are going toward antibodies, Kaldor says. One of the reasons is that pharma companies have seen the T-DM1 data and want to find a partner who can help them get in the game, too.
Steve Kaldor
“It’s been amazing to see. T-DM1 is floating a lot of other boats,” Kaldor says.
He adds: “It’s been a long haul, but across the industry, people are coming to the realization that if they want to be in the second-generation antibody space, they have to do antibody-drug conjugates.”
One other company, Bothell, WA-based Seattle Genetics, has offered some more evidence to support the “empowered antibody” approach. That company (NASDAQ: SGEN) has produced some compelling data that its drug can cause complete remissions in Hodgkin’s disease patients. The data was strong enough that Seattle Genetics was able to retain 100 percent of the U.S. commercial rights to the drug, while enticing Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company to pay $60 million in upfront cash for co-promotion rights in all countries except the U.S. and Canada.
“Seattle Genetics clearly had a lot of leverage,” Kaldor says. “People are really craving to get into the space.”
Ambrx doesn’t say much specifically about how this is really affecting its business. The latest …Next Page »
The 2010 season of the Nationwide Series will bring some new changes in the championship’s rule book, as confirmed by NASCAR via a press release on Tuesday. Following the addition of one more verification tire test for the new car – set for May 18-19, at Daytona International Speedway – NASCAR also tweaked some rules a little bit.
Consequently, beginning with the 2010 season-opening race at Daytona on Feb. 13, the NASCAR Nationwide Series will institute crew member limits similar … (read more)
First line opened the 28th of September 2004
For the moment only 10 kilometres long
But line 2, line 4, and line 1’s extension is under construction. Aparently they plan to open the new lines by 2010 🙂
Long term plan, 12 lines and 530km
http://ctdsb.cnhubei.com/html/ctdsb/…dsb270844.html
Official website:http://www.whrt.gov.cn/
For the average visitor to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, a stroll through the museums halls, crowded with ancient statues, papyrus, mummies, and gilded relics, offers an unparalleled journey into the visual splendour of Ancient Egypt.It is a journey that has been, until recently, off limits to the sight-impaired or blind.
But a recent program offering guided tours for the blind or sight impaired by tour guides who are similarly handicapped is now, for the first time, giving them proper access to the greatest treasures from the times of the Pharaohs.
Found under: Google, Android, Nexus One, Launch,
Read more in mobile format
The quest for a DRM solution that works for consumers instead of against them continues, with the forces behind the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (48 companies now) and Keychain (so far, just Disney) trading announcements. While the DECE has added 21 new members to its fold, agreed on a common file format, selected a vendor for the authentication service that ideally will keep you viewing legitimately purchased content at your liesure and approval of several DRM systems, without full specs available or any hardware or content specifically mentioned, it’s still just so much vapor. Meanwhile Disney promises additional content partnerships are “coming soon” and that it’s negotiating with content distributors, cable and telco companies, but we suspect until the promise of a “DVD collection in the cloud” is reality and not just a spec, most users will stay close to their torrents and disc ripping programs to get play-anywhere ease right now.
DECE & Keychain both laying claim to friendly DRM of the future title originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Continue reading Rollei rolls out Flexline 100 inTouch digital camera
Rollei rolls out Flexline 100 inTouch digital camera originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Eco Factor: Zero-emission electric vehicle powered by solar energy.
A team from the University of South Australia is preparing a solar-powered car to participate in the first zero-emission car race around the world. The race will commence in June where the competing teams will make use of renewable energy to cross 20 countries on three continents in about 80 days.
Heritage Link (Owen Jarus)
One of the most perplexing mysteries that Egyptologists and Aegean experts are tackling is that of the frescoes of Tell el-Dab’a, also known as Avaris.This site was used as the capital of the Hyksos, at a time when they ruled much of Egypt, from 1640 – 1530 BC. It is on the Nile Delta and would have provided access to the Sinai, Levant and southern Egypt.
The site appears to have been abandoned for a time after the Hyksos were driven out. However, by the end of the 18th dynasty (when the Egyptians were back in control of their land), the site was in use and sported with three – yes three – large palaces. They were ringed by an enclosure wall. The whole complex was about 5.5 hectares in size.
Two of those palaces were decorated, for a very short period of time, with Minoan frescoes. These include drawings of bull-leaping scenes – which are well known from the Palace of Knossos in Crete.
Site excavator Manfred Bietak published a book in 2007 that discussed these frescoes and compared them with the more famous scenes at the Palace of Knossos.
There is no question that the frescoes at Tell el-Dab’a are Aegean influenced, and it seems likely that the artists are from Crete. Dating them is tricky but from the stratigraphy and pottery they seem to date to around the time of Thutmosis III.
Ford is the only large US-based manufacturer that hasn’t applied for financial support from the American government and it looks like the company is performing pretty impressive in Canada as well. And we’re not the ones saying it, but the latest figures rolled out by Ford of Canada.
To get straight into details, Ford is the best-selling brand in Canada, after overall sales increased 25.5 percent with total car sales up 9.5 percent and total truck sales growing 30.1 percent compare… (read more)
Alongside these little beauties, Sling has also unveiled the Sling Touch Control 100 which, although it sounds like some kind of pervo pantyhose, it ain’t. Shucks. And it’s only available via your cable or satellite provider. Double shucks.
Thanks to a post on AWOL for the link to the above project website.
The Prosopographia Ptolemaica is one of the long-standing research projects of the department of Ancient History at the University of Leuven.The Prosopographia Ptolemaica started as a list of all inhabitants of Egypt between 300 and 30 B.C., from Greek, Egyptian and Latin sources, both authors and documents. It is now being extended to the Roman and Byzantine periods.
The automatisation of the Prosopographia Ptolemaica has been greatly advanced through a grant of the Kiessling Stiftung in 2008.The Prosopographia Ptolemaic has been integrated in the papyrological framework of Trismegistos, http://www.tismegistos.org/. It is also set up in close collaboration with the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis and the Duke Database of Documentary Papyri.
Luxor News Blog (Jane Akshar)
With the lecture on Ankhtifi next week you might find this interesting. Sent to me by Michael on the roof.Precis of Bill Manley’s lecture on Ankhtify. It will be interesting to compare with next Saturday’s lecture.
Dr Bill Manley
Egypt in chaos: explaining the end of the Old KingdomRather like ‘the causes of the first world war’ we probably think we know the reasons for the end of the Old Kingdom and the fall of Egypt into disorder and chaos; the old and feeble Pepi II losing control, the rise in power of regional rulers, foreign invasion, climate change and poor inundations resulting in famine, even the strain on resources from building vast pyramids.
Not so. In this interesting talk by Bill Manley we were made to rethink the First Intermediate Period in the light of recent research and reinterpretation of excavations. In the first place, the First Intermediate Period lasted about 150 years. It was only in the last 40 or so that there was the disruption of civil war.
(Oxford, November 21st 2009)
Filed under: BES, news, report — Charlotte Tupman @ 10:13
Paper delivered at the British Epigraphy Society Autumn Colloquium, November 21st, 2009, Oxford. Report by Charlotte Tupman.Claiming Space and Memory: the Development of Priestly Inscriptional Practices in Late New Kingdom Egypt (ca. 1190-715 BC)
Elizabeth Frood, Oxford, November 21
Dr. Elizabeth Frood of St. Cross College, Oxford, began with a paper which showed that although “epigraphy” does not exist as a discrete discipline within Egyptology, and there are elements to the study of Egyptian texts which do not pertain to the study of inscriptions in Greek and Latin, there is much that is familiar to the classical epigrapher.
Frood introduced a new project, currently in its development phase, to study the epigraphy of Egyptian temple environments. There were three elements to Frood’s paper: an overview of epigraphy in a temple context; a description of the nature and range of this inscribed material; and a case study of one particular inscription that could affect the way in which we understand Egyptian temple environments.
It’s finally here, the worst kept secret in the tech world of late, the Google Nexus One smartphone. As with anything from Google these days, it got its fair share of hype and many were quick to claim that it would be the revolution all have been waiting for, the true iPhone killer and so on. Turns out, the phone itself isn’t exactly a revolution, but what might be is the way Google is selling it, online and free of contract with the option to select the carrier you want, a dream come true for those in the US. Right now, though, the store holds more in promise than it actually delivers, but this should change soon enough.
“[T]oday we’re pleased to announce a new way for consumers to purchase a mobile phone through a Google hosted web store. The goal of this new consumer channel is to provide an efficient way to connect Google’s online users with selected Android devices. We also want to make the overall user experience simple: a simple purchasing process, simple service plans from operators, simple and worry-free delivery and start-up,” Mario Queiroz, VP of Product Management at Google writes about the new online store.
Hosted at www.google.com/phone, the site is pretty much what you’d expect from Google, design wise. A clean, simple interface and a well laid out functionality. At thi… (read more)
