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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (74179)	7/25/2006 12:20:34 PM
From: CalculatedRisk	Respond to of 362497

A couple of British cartoons:

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (74179)	7/25/2006 12:34:44 PM
From: manalagi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362497

An Electric Car With Juice Silicon Valley Firm Bets Its Chips on the Speedy Tesla Roadster By Mike Musgrove Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, July 22, 2006; Page D01 Detroit is floundering, gas prices are rising -- now Silicon Valley is stepping in with an impractical-but-cool solution: A sexy, pricey and fast electric car that uses the same lithium ion batteries found in your cellphone or laptop. The Tesla Roadster goes from zero to 60 in four noiseless seconds, has a top speed of 135 mph and can roam for more than 200 miles before needing a recharge. This is not your father's electric car. The $100,000 vehicle, with its sports car looks, is more Ferrari than Prius -- and more about testosterone than granola. Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors Inc. raised $60 million in financing from San Francisco Bay area tech giants to get this car on the road. Those famous Toyota Prius owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- yes, the Google guys -- have invested, as have executives from eBay Inc. and PayPal. The company is headed by entrepreneur Martin Eberhard, the man once behind a gadget called the RocketeBook. That product, sort of an iPod for books, didn't catch on, but Eberhard sold the company in 2000 to the media company Gemstar for $187 million. Fittingly for a car designed in Silicon Valley, the Roadster comes with built-in satellite navigation technology and an iPod dock that allows drivers to control the music player via the car's standard Blaupunkt stereo. Owners will be able to check their service records online, naturally. And, of course, there's a blog. At the Tesla Web site, Eberhard started making his case for the car and his company this week. Bottom line: Electric cars don't have to be for wimps. "Most electric cars were designed by and for people who fundamentally don't think we should drive," Eberhard said in his Wednesday blog posting. "We at Tesla Motors love cars." Unlike most electric cars, the company's literature notes, the Tesla Roadster holds enough juice to make the round trip between Silicon Valley and the Pebble Beach Golf Links. While the flashy two-seater may be too expensive for most buyers to consider, the community of electric car aficionados has received Tesla warmly. David Goldstein, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington D.C., said the Tesla is "the most exciting thing to happen to [electric vehicles] in a long time." "It tells the public that electric cars are not those slow, silly cars that some companies have built in the past," he said. The Tesla Roadster was unveiled this week in Santa Monica. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance and was taken on a test spin -- it was unclear yesterday if Schwarzenegger showed up to the event in one of the gas-guzzling Hummers he has sometimes favored. Tesla Motors started taking orders for the car this week, though a publicist would not say how many customers the company has signed up. The first production models should be delivered next year, he said. A sedan is also on the drawing board, tentatively scheduled for an appearance in 2008. Tesla has plans to open sales locations in Los Angeles and San Francisco this year, and in Chicago, New York and Miami by the end of 2007. Buyers outside those areas will be charged a $10,000 out-of-service-area premium to cover costs for transporting the vehicle for servicing during the life of the car. Only 10 Tesla Roadsters have been built so far. Four are on the West Coast, to charm prospective buyers there, and the other six are in Britain and scheduled for use in safety tests. British carmaker Group Lotus Plc is building the cars at its factory on a contract basis. Lotus submitted a winning concept design for the car and Tesla Motors lured several executives and engineers away from the British company during the three years the Tesla Roadster was secretly in development. At auto aficionado Web sites, first impressions of the car have been highly favorable, though some knocked the car for looking a bit too much like the British carmaker's Elise sports car. Asked one critic, posting at Autoblog.com: "Why not just buy a Lotus Elise and use some of the $40,000+ you save to buy some gas?" washingtonpost.com

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (74179)	7/25/2006 3:33:06 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362497

Space Porn????? China to launch first astronautics breeding satellite Shijian-8, China's first breeding satellite will be launched by "Long March 2"third launch vehicle in early September of this year at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. And the satellite will return to the earth after a 15-day space fly in the outer space, according to Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense on July 23rd in the examination and approval meeting which agrees the satellite will carry on its launch task after it leaves the factory. The breeding satellite, Shijian-8, will be conducted thorough research on astronautics breeding with the combination of China's mature return satellite technology and the mutafacient heredity technology. It will explore the mechanism, the method and the theory of astronautics breeding technology comprehensively and foster fine species with the experiments that unifies the environmental factors of the ground simulation space. By People's Daily Online english.people.com.cn

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (74179)	7/25/2006 3:35:15 PM
From: CalculatedRisk	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 362497

Nice Rats, Nasty Rats: Maybe It’s All in the Genes nytimes.com On an animal-breeding farm in Siberia are cages housing two colonies of rats. In one colony, the rats have been bred for tameness in the hope of mimicking the mysterious process by which Neolithic farmers first domesticated an animal still kept today. When a visitor enters the room where the tame rats are kept, they poke their snouts through the bars to be petted. The other colony of rats has been bred from exactly the same stock, but for aggressiveness instead. These animals are ferocious. When a visitor appears, the rats hurl themselves screaming toward their bars. “Imagine the most evil supervillain and the nicest, sweetest cartoon animal, and that’s what these two strains of rat are like,” said Tecumseh Fitch, an animal behavior expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who several years ago visited the rats at the farm, about six miles from Akademgorodok, near the Siberian city of Novosibirsk. Frank Albert, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is working with both the tame and the hyperaggressive Siberian strains in the hope of understanding the genetic basis of their behavioral differences. “The ferocious rats cannot be handled,” Mr. Albert said. “They will not tolerate it. They go totally crazy if you try to pick them up.” When the aggressive rats have to be moved, Mr. Albert places two cages side by side with the doors open and lets the rats change cages by themselves. He is taking care that they do not escape to the sewers of Leipzig, he said. The two strains of rat are part of a remarkable experiment started in the former Soviet Union in 1959 by Dmitri K. Belyaev. Belyaev and his brother were geneticists who believed in Mendelian theory despite the domination of Soviet science by Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics. <MORE>