Canal route in Nicaragua raises concerns over lake
Managua (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
Now that Nicaragua has picked a path for a Chinese firm to dig a canal connecting the Caribbean and the Pacific, environmentalists are worried about a huge lake on the route.
They fret about the effects of ship traffic on the health of Lake Cocibolca, the largest freshwater body in Central America.
The business community meanwhile has welcomed word of a route being chosen with some skept ...
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Blow for Australia government as carbon tax repeal fails
Sydney (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
Australia's conservative government on Thursday suffered a setback when the upper house Senate voted against abolishing a carbon tax, the central platform of its election win last year.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott went to the polls in September vowing that the divisive pollution levy would go, arguing the cost was being passed to consumers, resulting in higher utility bills.
The tax was i ...
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Tesla slams China trademark action
Beijing (AFP) July 09, 2014 -
Electric carmaker Tesla on Wednesday denounced a Chinese businessman's lawsuit seeking millions of dollars for alleged trademark infringement as an attempt to "steal" its property and "without any conceivable merit".
Zhan Baosheng, said to be the founder of a cosmetics website in the southern city of Guangzhou, registered "Tesla" as a trademark in China in 2009, the China Business News said. ...
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US sues Amazon over charges for kids' online game buys
Washington (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
The US Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon Thursday for charging parents for what their children spent on online games without parental authorization.
The FTC said Amazon let kids playing online games to spend real money from their parents' accounts on virtual items - coins, stars and other items used in the game - without getting the consent of the parents.
It alleged that Amazon, wh ...
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Rideshare vs. taxi: the war flares up in the Big Apple
New York (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
The battle between ride-sharing and traditional taxi service is heating up in New York, with a new rival for ride-seekers declared illegal even before launching.
Lyft, a ride-sharing service that operates in 60 US cities and competes with the likes of Uber, announced plans to launch Friday in the city boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, claiming these communities are "vastly underserved" by exi ...
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China bank denies state TV claims of 'dirty money' transfers
Shanghai (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
The Bank of China (BOC) has denied accusations by state television that it helped clients evade limits on money transfers overseas, in a rare attack by the government broadcaster against a state-backed institution.
In a report, China Central Television compared BOC to an "underground" bank, with a secretly filmed official shown telling a supposed client that the BOC could "launder" your mone ...
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Solar power for facility at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base
Norcross, Ga. (UPI) Jul 10, 2013 -
Solar power use at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base has been enhanced through a contract awarded to Suniva Inc., a maker of photovoltaic solar cells and modules.
The company, based in Georgia, said it has supplied the U.S. base with its high-powered OPTimus modules and that a 700kW ground mount system, developed by World Electric Supply, will power the facility's Navy Exchange Building.
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China to scrap purchase tax on electric vehicles
Shanghai (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
China will exempt electric cars and other types of "new energy" vehicles from purchase tax, the government said, as it seeks to reduce pollution and conserve resources.
The State Council, or cabinet, said that buyers of new energy vehicles - fully electric, hybrid and fuel cell cars - would not have to pay the levy from September to the end of 2017, according to a statement.
The tax is ...
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Phantom tech firm worth billions, inexplicably
New York (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
It has no assets, no revenues and no business plan to speak of. But a company called Cynk Technology has seen its value soar as high as $4.7 billion.
Wall Street analysts have been at loss to explain the spectacular 24,000 percent rise in Cynk, which trades on the lightly regulated over the counter (OTC) market.
While its share price and market value fell at the close of trade, the compa ...
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Maersk in shipping alliance with MSC after Chinese snub
Copenhagen (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
A.P. Moeller-Maersk Thursday announced an alliance with shipping company MSC on some of the world's busiest cargo routes after China scuppered a planned tie-up between the two companies and CMA.
The Danish shipping and oil conglomerate said it had signed a 10-year alliance with Swiss-Italian MSC on routes between Asia and Europe, and across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Maersk said in ...
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Trina Solar to Supply 200MW of PV Modules to Zonergy
Changzhou, China (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
Trina Solar has announced it will supply 200MW of modules to Zonergy Company downstream projects in China, marking its largest single module supply agreement to date in 2014.
Trina Solar will supply approximately 800,000 pieces of its TSM-PC05A modules for Zonergy's downstream projects located across several provinces in China such as Jiangsu, Shandong, Xinjiang, Qinghai and Sichuan.
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SeaRoc makes first maintenance visit to Dogger Bank met masts
Chichester, UK (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
SeaRoc Group has successfully completed the first major maintenance visit to Forewind's Dogger Bank meteorological (met) masts in the North Sea at the beginning of June.
The East (DB-MME) and West (DB-MMW) masts have been installed for 15 and 8 months respectively and scheduled structural inspection, instrumentation and cleaning tasks were undertaken.
The met masts are collecting val ...
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Hunger for vegetable oil means trouble for Africa's great apes
Liverpool, UK (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
The vegetable oil found in your popcorn or soap might not be ape friendly, and the situation appears likely to get even worse, according to an analysis in the Cell Press journal Current Biology.
The growing demand for vegetable oil has already led to the conversion of Southeast Asian forest into oil palm plantations, bringing trouble for orangutans in particular. If guidelines are not put ...
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Speeding up data storage by a thousand times with 'spin current'
Eindhoven, Netherlands (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
A hard drive stores bits in the form of tiny magnetic domains. The directions of the magnetic north and south poles of these domains, which are referred to as the magnetization, determine whether they are a 0 or a 1.
Data is stored by changing the direction of the magnetization of the associated bits. At present this is done using a write head to create a local magnetic field, which makes ...
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RUB chemists develop novel catalyst with two functions
Bochum, Germany (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
Chemists at the Ruhr-Universitat Bochum have made a decisive step towards more cost-efficient regenerative fuel cells and rechargeable metal-air batteries. They developed a new type of catalyst on the basis of carbon, which can facilitate two opposite reactions: electrolysis of water and combustion of hydrogen with oxygen.
A catalyst of this kind might make the storage of wind and solar en ...
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Sophisticated radiation detector designed for broad public use
Corvallis OR (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
Nuclear engineers at Oregon State University have developed a small, portable and inexpensive radiation detection device that should help people all over the world better understand the radiation around them, its type and intensity, and whether or not it poses a health risk.
The device was developed in part due to public demand following the nuclear incident in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, w ...
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Ferromagnetism at 230 K found in diluted magnetic semiconductor
Beijing, China (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
Diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) have received much attention due to their potential application in spintronics, or the storage and transfer of information by using an electron's spin state, its magnetic moment and its charge.
In typical systems based on III-V semiconductors, such as (Ga,Mn)As, (In,Mn)As or (Ga,Mn)N, substitution of divalent Mn atoms into trivalent Ga (or In) sites le ...
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Record levels of solar ultraviolet measured in South America
Mountain View CA (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
A team of researchers in the U.S. and Germany has measured the highest level of ultraviolet radiation ever recorded on the Earth's surface. The extraordinary UV fluxes, observed in the Bolivian Andes only 1,500 miles from the equator, are far above those normally considered to be harmful to both terrestrial and aquatic life. The results are being published in the open-access journal Frontiers in ...
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Using Sand to Improve Battery Performance
Riverside CA (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside's Bourns College of Engineering have created a lithium ion battery that outperforms the current industry standard by three times. The key material: sand. Yes, sand.
"This is the holy grail - a low cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way to produce high performance lithium ion battery anodes," said Zachary Favors, a graduate stude ...
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Silicon sponge improves lithium-ion battery performance
Richland WA (SPX) Jul 11, 2014 -
The lithium-ion batteries that power our laptops and electric vehicles could store more energy and run longer on a single charge with the help of a sponge-like silicon material.
Researchers developed the porous material to replace the graphite traditionally used in one of the battery's electrodes, as silicon has more than 10 times the energy storage capacity of graphite. A paper describing ...
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Saab reports U.S. Army order for radio systems
Washington (UPI) Jul 9, 2013 -
The U.S. Army has ordered more radio systems that boost communication capabilities during training exercises from the U.S. subsidiary of Saab of Sweden.
The contract for the Live Training Transformation Interim Range System. or LT2-IRS, was issued by the U.S. Army Program Executive Office of Simulation, Training and Instrumentation and is worth $10.9 million.
Saab Defense and Sec ...
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West in push to stop flow of jihadists
Paris, France (AFP) July 09, 2014 -
Europe and the United States are drawing up a new wave of anti-terror measures to try to stop the growing number of would-be jihadists from going to fight in Syria and Iraq.
France unveiled a new bill on Wednesday to ban foreign travel for those suspected of being radicalised, after US Attorney General Eric Holder claimed that returning fighters pose a "grave threat".
Nine EU interior mi ...
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Dabiq: the smiling face of Iraq-Syria 'caliphate'
Baghdad (AFP) July 10, 2014 -
Pictures of smiling locals, tales of life-changing experiences, articles glorifying centuries of heritage and predicting a bright future: if the "caliphate" straddling Iraq and Syria had an airline, Dabiq would be its in-flight magazine.
For now, global jihad's latest English-language publishing endeavour is distributed online and the aircraft over Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's dominion are more li ...
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Gazans bury family as Israeli bombs fall
Beit Hanun, Palestinian Territories (AFP) July 09, 2014 -
In Gaza's stifling midday heat, grieving relatives of a family killed in an Israeli air strike sit outside a mosque, weary from their Ramadan fast and nervously anticipating the next deadly blast.
The mourners, most of them men, have come to bury six members of the Hammad family, including a teenager and two women, killed when a missile slammed into their home in the northern Gaza town of Be ...
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Japan military jets scrambled record 340 times in April-June
Tokyo (AFP) July 09, 2014 -
Japan said Wednesday that its military scrambled fighter jets a record 340 times in the three months to June in response to feared intrusions on its airspace, as tensions grow with China.
The Joint Staff of Japan Self-Defense Forces said, however, that around 70 percent of the jet launches were in response to Russian planes approaching Japanese airspace.
The rest were scrambled in respon ...
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