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Tesla Motors and Panasonic announced today that they will collaborate to develop next-generation battery cells for use in electric-vehicles.

“Our collaboration with Panasonic will accelerate the development of next generation EV cells, enabling Tesla to further improve our battery pack performance,” said JB Straubel, Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer. “Combining Tesla’s rigorous cell testing and understanding of EV requirements with Panasonic’s cutting-edge battery technology will result in custom cells optimized for use in EVs.”

Tesla said that it will use Panasonic’s battery cells, which are comprised of Nickel-based Lithium ion chemistry, in its new battery packs.

Currently, Tesla’s battery packs are composed of cells from multiple battery suppliers. Tesla says that the new cells will also be compatible with other cell form factors to enable the continuation of its strategy of using cells from other suppliers. Tesla has already delivered more than 900 Roadster to customers in North America and Europe.

– By: Kap Shah

Bikya Masr

The Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities announced on Wednesday that 30 countries that possess ancient Egyptian monuments and artifacts will participate in a conference next April in Cairo to discuss the restoration and recovery of the artifacts, especially those removed after the signing of a UNESCO agreement in the 1970s.

The secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, said, “The conference, organized by Egypt, aims at discussing the conditions returning antiquities stolen after the signing of the UNESCO agreement.”

As for the effects looted by colonial powers in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hawass said, “This is a big issue that cannot be dealt with now, and while we think it will be discussed in this conference, it won’t be the main focus.”

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

by Agence France-Presse

The EPA sees the light.Photo: jordansmall via FlickrWASHINGTON—The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday proposed tougher standards for how much smog can be in the air, a move the agency said would save money and protect health, especially in children.

“EPA is stepping up to protect Americans from one of the most persistent and widespread pollutants we face. Smog in the air we breathe poses a very serious health threat, especially to children and individuals suffering from asthma and lung disease,” EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a statement. “It dirties our air, clouds our cities, and drives up our health care costs across the country.”

The new standards would replace those set by the previous administration,” which many believe were not protective enough of human health,” the EPA said.

Under the proposals, the “primary” standard for smog—the standard to protect public health—would be tightened up to the strictest level ever in the United States—between 0.060 and 0.070 parts per million (ppm) measured over eight hours. The administration of former president George W. Bush in 2008 set the primary standard for smog at 0.075 ppm for eight hours.

The EPA also proposed setting a separate “secondary” standard designed to protect plants and trees from damage from repeated ozone exposure, which can reduce tree growth, damage leaves, and increase susceptibility to disease.

Smog, which is also known as ground-level ozone, forms when emissions from industrial facilities, power plants, landfills, and motor vehicles react in the sun.

Three public hearings will be held on the proposals, starting early next month.

If the new rules are adopted, said the EPA, they would result in health care savings of up to $100 billion; fewer premature deaths, visits to the emergency room, and days off work; and a drop in aggravated asthma and bronchitis cases.

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Region of Rome, Italy | Cultures and Civilizations

Only 17 km northwest of the Eternal City stand the ruins of the rival that almost snuffed out early Roman civilization, long before Caesar or Augustus were born. The great Etruscan city-state of Veii – the big trading power on the Tiber River for centuries – now consists of broken walls, grave-mounds, and rock-cut tombs painted with ancient frescoes.

Veii stands on a volcanic plateau between two streams, at the junction of which stands the “arx” or Etruscan citadel, now call the Piazza d’Armi (“military square”). The city was wiped out by the Romans in 396 BC after a decade-long war.

While much of Etruscan culture is lost to us, visitors to Veio Regional Natural Park can still find plenty to see and wonder at, including the town gates or Porta Ponte Sodo (5th century BC), the Temple of Apollo (7th century BC), the Tomb of the Roaring Lions, and the Tomb of the Ducks (also 7th century BC), which is Italy’s oldest painted tomb.

In addition, the oak-filled park contains notable Roman-era structures, such as the Villa of Livia, as well as the medieval village of Isola Farnese.

But the tombs and their secrets attract more than archaeologists and tourists to the Veii region. Tombaroli – tomb raiders – come in the night to loot the graves of the long-dead, pre-Roman people of Italy.

FluidApp is what’s called a Single Site Browser and is a great way to pull key websites you use throughout the day out of your primary browser and onto your Mac dashboard as standalone applications. It’s super easy for anyone to use. The service has a thriving community of users – I have 10 Fluid browsers running on my computer right now and wouldn’t want to work without them. In fact, I’m writing this blog post from Movable Type inside a Fluid Browser.

In a quiet mid-December move, FluidApp developer Todd Ditchendorf put “most of the code behind Fluid” up on Github under an open source license. That’s very good news – new developments are already coming fast and furious. If you haven’t checked out Fluid before, now is a great time.

Sponsor

There’s something magical about the way single site browsers let you use different web apps. They don’t get lost in tabs. They don’t fall prey to browser crashes. You can put a handsome icon in your doc to jump over to them.

Windows users looking for a similar experience should check out Bubbles or Mozilla’s Prism.

Now that Fluid for the Mac is open source though, it will be very exciting to see what features are added next. Creator Ditchendorf says he has some more exciting plans under his hat but nothing to show off yet. Watch this space.

What’s your favorite Fluid App? One of my favorites is LazyFeed.

Next: 15 Fluid Apps You Can Build For Your Business.

Discuss

The brushed-aluminum LED-lit C9000 is not just the handsomest slender TV at the show, it comes with the most innovative Wi-Fi remote control—one that looks suspiciously like an iPhone and feels suspiciously like a Samsung phone.

Why a Wi-Fi video remote? So you can watch a Blu-ray on your TV while checking out the game in your hand, of course. Maybe you’ve never had that problem, exactly, but this product seems like a step in a new direction, rather than just a “we did it because we could” kind of thing.

The remote connects over your Wi-Fi network to control the TV (also on the Wi-Fi network), much like iTunes Remote works on an iPhone. The screen is vibrant and high-contrast, though it is LCD, not OLED. As you tap buttons on the screen (which I believe is resistive, since Samsung wouldn’t confirm capacitive) you feel a little vibe, haptic feedback that is now common on phones from Samsung and LG. I wish the remote itself felt a little more sturdy; there was a hollowness to it that makes me worry about it sliding off the coffee table. Still, I was impressed by its simple setup and lithe manipulation. It’s like they finally found a good thing to do with all of those feature-phone interfaces nobody needs anymore.

What do you do with it? As you browse channels, it’s actually using the TV’s own tuner to render video, which it downgrades and sends to the remote in more-or-less realtime. If you like something, you just tap a control and its on the big screen. If you want to tap into a DLNA server on your network, you’ll see it and all its bounty. Samsung wouldn’t confirm what kind of files it would decode, but did say that they would support 1080p resolution on video files.

The only problem with the remote is it’s something that could be replaced by an iPhone app in about 12 seconds.

All of this, and I still haven’t gotten to the TV. Sure, slim TVs are kinda old hat by now, but I really like this one, because it has all of its interface engineering built into the base, not some ugly outboard set-top box. Want to wall mount it instead? The base pops off, and attaches to the back of the TV, making it slightly thicker, sure, but not by much, especially so close to a wall.

There’s no price on this baby yet, but since it’s clearly a vanity project—and it natively supports 3D, like most primo TVs at CES this year—you know they’re going to sell it to the celebs and high rollers first.

In an attempt to beef up the performance of its sports cars, Lotus is considering an advanced dual-clutch transmission for future vehicles and is considering the possibility of selling it to other companies.

According to AutoCar, the automaker has submitted a patent application for a lighter, simpler and more compact dual-clutch transmission system.

As seen from the picture, the gearbox will be an 8-speed unit with seven forward gears and reverse. While the application has been submitted by Lotus Cars, sources say that the transmission will be developed by Lotus Engineering, meaning Lotus could be studying the possibility of selling the transmission to others.

As AutoCar points out, the unit could be used on the next Lotus Elise.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: AutoCar

Al Ahram Weekly

With photo.

The early years of the 20th century altered forever Egypt’s political and social life. It was at that time that what is now called “public opinion” came into being. The newspapers and later on the radio were essential in shaping people’s views, but there was something too: the tram.

Mohamed Sayed Kilani, a contemporary historian, elaborates: “When the inhabitants of the capital began to mingle, as a result of the introduction of the tram, public opinion began to take shape and influence the ruling apparatuses.”

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Most people gain weight as they age, but a new study has found that women who live with a mate tend to put on more weight over time than do women who live alone, even if those women don’t have children.

Gain nearly doubles with partner and baby

Women who didn’t have partners or children gained an average of 11 pounds over 10 years, which corresponds pretty well with the general thinking that people gain about a pound a year in adulthood.

But women who lived with a partner and didn’t give birth gained an average of 15 pounds in the same time period, while women who had partners and children gained 20 pounds in 10 years.

There were not enough single mothers in the study, by researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia, to draw any conclusions about how much weight they gained.

Behavior, metabolic changes may be at work

Researchers followed more than 6,000 Australian women for a 10-year period that ended in 2006. The women were 18 to 23 when the study started and completed a lengthy questionnaire about their health and lifestyle habits periodically through the study period.

By the time the 10 years was up, half of the women had at least one child and three-quarters lived with a partner. Researchers said most of the extra weight gain seen in mothers came with the first child; subsequent pregnancies didn’t have as significant an impact.

Researchers said there’s no reason to think metabolic changes happen in people who live with partners to explain why those women would gain more weight than women who live alone, and that it’s likely they gained more weight simply because of behavioral changes. People with partners may go out to eat more often or have a more active social life, and keeping up eating habits that are similar to an often larger man could easily cause a woman to gain more weight.

For women who’d been pregnant, however, there probably were metabolism changes that came about with pregnancy that are difficult to reverse once the child is born, researchers said. And the fact that pretty much all women steadily gained weight as they aged could point to metabolic changes being a factor in some weight gain.

This study didn’t look at men, but previous research has shown higher rates of obesity among men who are fathers.

(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

From the RSS feed of CalorieLab News (REF3076322B7)

Women with partners put on more weight

Gregory T. Huang wrote:

Lost amidst the cacophony of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is a simple message. It has nothing to do with what Microsoft did or didn’t announce—for example, some upcoming “slate PCs,” but no foldable book-like tablet or other rumored gadgetry. It has nothing to do with Google’s Nexus One “superphone,” with HTC and T-Mobile, which was announced outside of CES. It has everything to do with where laptops, netbooks, e-book readers, and gaming consoles are all converging.

Behold the tablet PC. And everything old is new again.

Last night, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave a preview of some of these devices, including a sleek touchscreen tablet PC made by Hewlett-Packard (with Windows 7 and Amazon’s Kindle software) that’s coming out this year. Ballmer’s keynote was described as “disappointing,” “uninspired,” and a “snooze-athon” by people who debate these things for a living. I have to say I disagree, though it was hardly great theater.

It’s true, Microsoft has been pushing tablet PCs since 2000, when Bill Gates first demonstrated a prototype at a similar tradeshow. But now, 10 years later, the form factor and interface capabilities actually make sense to people. (Microsoft can thank Apple and Amazon for that.) And with the cost of touchscreen components falling, it’s finally time for all those great interface technologies—handwriting apps, text-input software, video and image search, augmented reality—to take off. Microsoft looks like it’s trying to get ahead of Apple’s forthcoming touch-screen tablet or slate device, rumored to be announced later this month.

People in the know have been saying for a while that e-book readers like the Kindle are really just a stop along the way to a merged device that will let consumers read books, browse the Web, and run their favorite entertainment apps (games, music, video) on the go. In order to take off, though, tablets will need to replace something else. Nobody wants to carry around yet another device. Phones are safe for now. My long-term money is on the Kindle, iPod Touch, and handheld game consoles like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS to get wiped out. With netbooks and laptops eventually to follow, once the text-input problem is satisfactorily solved.

Your move, Apple.

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Palm showed off 3D gaming on the Pre with the help of EA Mobile. Check out Sims and Need for Speed live demos from Palm’s CES press conference.

2010Jan7: Turkey and Syria agree to the joint construction and management of a dam on the Orontes River, which runs along the Turkish and Syrian border (TRT). Hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners have been displaced because of a 3-year drought, which has devastated the agricutural sector. The scarcity of water has led to resentment by Syria and Iraq against Turkey, which is one of the only countries in the Middle East to have enough water. Turkey is a water superpower, according to Hussein Amery, an expert on Middle East water management and a professor at the Colorado School of Mines. The upper tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are located in Turkey and dams have been built on rivers, reducing the flow of water to Arab countries that are downstream (NPR).

References: NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122365133&ps=cprs; TRT http://www.trtenglish.com/trtinternational/en/newsDetail.aspx?HaberKodu=8904a24c-00fd-4745-9c13-fe7092cc7f9f

Image Description: Orentes River. Credit: syriapath.com Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hama-orontes-river.JPG Image Permission: The copyright holder of this work, hereby releases it into the public domain. This applies worldwide.

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At the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, Toyota will show its U.S. version of the iQ minicar in concept form (it’s the lime green teasers we’ve been seeing for the past couple of weeks). According to Inside Line, the Toyota iQ will arrive on the stateside badged as a Scion with a hybrid setup under the hood.

Power for the Scion iQ hybrid will come from a 1.5L gasoline engine mated to an electric-motor producing a total of 100 to 120-hp. It should return an estimated 60 mpg.

The five-door Scion iQ hybrid will hit dealerships in 2011 with prices starting around $15,000. Scion will also offer the car in three other variants including a sedan, convertible and a gasoline-power three-door.

Toyota Dedicated Hybrid Concept Teaser (2010 Detroit Auto Show):

– By: Kap Shah

Source: Inside Line

The Pixi got even fewer upgrades than the Pre, if that’s possible. The Pixi Plus now has Wi-Fi—which worked well when I tried it out—but the main draw to the Plus is the super-colorful cases.

They’re TouchStone charging-compatible cases, which is a nice addition, but like I said with the Pre Plus it just means you’ll have to spend extra on buying a TouchStone. The cases feel good, rubbery with perforations (on the solid color versions, the printed ones are smooth), and have holes for the camera lens, headphone jack, speakers, right-side buttons and on/off button. They’re swappable, so expect Palm to team up with more designers in future.

Otherwise, like with the Pre Plus, the upgrades are minor. It’s running on Verizon (which showed full bars for reception), and I managed to switch Wi-Fi connections easily—and quickly. The screen could be a little more responsive, but it’s the same fault we found in the original Pixi. It’s very much aimed at the youngsters now, with these cases—but actually, I really like them. Especially the Artists’ Series editions, which will cost $49 and charge wirelessly.

We just did some live video from the Palm lounge where we saw the Pixi and Pre Plus, two improvements to the current WebOS line-up. Notable points? The 3D gaming was quite impressive and the design has been considerably improved in this iteration.

For one, there is no button on either device. Instead, you get a visual cue when in multi-tasking mode that allows you to tap to enter the home screen and slide to move back and forth. The devices have 16GB of memory and are Touchstone inductive charger plates built-in, which means you can use the Touchstone charger without changing the plates.

This model also includes WiFi built-in for both models.

We can expect these to drop on January 25th on Verizon, an interesting development.

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