Tesla Motors Repays DOE Loan 9 Years Early U.S. electric vehicle maker Telsa Motors has paid back its 2010 loan awarded by the Department of Energy. Following payments made in 2012 and earlier in 2013, the May 22 payment of $451.8 million repays the full loan amount with interest.
Rumors of US-China Trade Settlement Talks Fuel Solar Stocks If short-term traders really have hijacked the sector, which seems probable, it would mark a relatively big setback for stocks that were once popular among aggressive longer-term investors who liked the strong prospects of solar energy. Of course that doesn’t mean that serious investors will never return to the sector if it ever manages to stabiliz
Geothermal Energy Interests Growing Steadily in Japan Japanese companies are renewing their interest in geothermal energy after the March 2011 nuclear crisis shut down reactors for safety checks and the introduction of an incentive program for clean energy encouraged investment.
A BOOK with the title “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition” does not sound destined to be a bestseller, particularly at $199 a pop. But DSM-5, as it is known for short, is almost certain to become one. Its predecessor, DSM-IV, which was published in 1994, has sold more than 1m copies. DSM-5, which will go on sale on May 22nd, is likely to do at least as well.The reason is that the DSM series, which is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), has become the global standard for the description of mental illness. Indeed, the DSM is treated by many people less as a medical handbook and more as holy writ. Insurers use it to decide whether or not to cover ailments. And diagnoses based on it determine whether people get special services at school; whether they qualify for disability benefits; whether they are stigmatised in their careers; even whether they are able to adopt children. Doctors, patients, drug companies and insurers have all thus been waiting for the latest edition of what has become known as the psychiatric bible.The DSM’s purpose is to set strict criteria for identifying mental disorders. This is supposed to make...
EVEN in rich countries childbirth is not a tidy affair. On an earthen floor in a dimly lit home in Bangladesh it can be a killer. Bangladesh has nevertheless reduced maternal deaths during childbirth by 40%, from 322 per 100,000 births to 194, during the first decade of this century. It has done so in several ways: by encouraging women to give birth in hospitals and clinics; by giving better training to the women who act as informal midwives for those who give birth at home; and by improving obstetric treatment when things go wrong. When exactly things are going wrong, though, is not always obvious. In particular, the blood of a healthy birth can be hard to distinguish from the blood of a life-threatening haemorrhage.An invention by Mohammad Abdul Quaiyum of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka should help to change that by providing a simple indication of whether a woman who has just given birth is in danger of bleeding to death. This invention is a standardised birth mat.Bangladeshi women often give birth on improvised mats, such as old saris. That gives them some comfort and hygienic...
IF A new and deadly strain of influenza were to arise, putting together a vaccine against it in the least possible time would be a priority. To test how quickly that could be done a group of researchers have just had a race with themselves. They have not quite matched the show sometimes given by workers at the Venetian arsenal, who would assemble a galley in a single day in order to overawe visiting foreign dignitaries. But Philip Dormitzer, Craig Venter and their colleagues did create the crucial component of a flu jab in four days and four hours.Dr Dormitzer, who works for Novartis, a drug company, and Dr Venter, eponymous founder of the J. Craig Venter Institute in San Diego, reported their record-breaking attempt in this week’s Science Translational Medicine. It began with the transmission to them from America’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the sequence data for the haemagglutinin and neuraminidase genes of a (to them) unknown flu virus.The team took this information and used it to make DNA that contained both the gene sequences themselves and the genetic apparatus needed to let a cell read those sequences and produce proteins from them. They then put these pieces of synthetic DNA—which were, in effect, tiny chromosomes—into cell cultures derived from dog kidneys, which have been found particularly effective for this...
CHIPMAKERS dislike quantum mechanics. Half a century of Moore’s law means their products have shrunk to the point where they are subject to the famous weirdness of the quantum world. That makes designing them difficult. Happily, those same quantum oddities can be turned into features rather than bugs. For many years researchers have been working on computers that would rely on the strange laws of quantum mechanics to do useful calculations. They would do this by using binary digits which, instead of having a value of either “one” or “zero”, had both at the same time. That might allow them to do some calculations much faster than non-quantum, “classical” computers can manage.Progress has been slow, but steady. And now it may be possible to see how a certain type of quantum computer performs in the real world. On May 15th, at a computing conference in Ischia in Italy, Catherine McGeoch, a computer scientist at Amherst College in Massachusetts, presented a paper describing the performance of a quantum computer manufactured by a Canadian firm called D-Wave.D-Wave has a colourful history. To much fanfare and press attention (including in The Economist...
PALAEOETHOLOGY, working out how long-extinct animals behaved, is a subject whose practitioners can never, definitively, be proved right. But that does not stop them trying. The latest effort, to be presented later this month to the International Symposium on Pterosaurs in Rio de Janeiro, is an attempt by Michael Habib of the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, and Mark Witton at the University of Portsmouth, in Britain, to work out how one of the most peculiar of the flying reptiles of the Jurassic earned its living.Anurognathus and its relatives have been known for 90 years. They were the size of swifts and until now it had been thought that, like swifts, they chased around the sky after insects—a technique known as hawking. Dr Habib and Dr Witton believe this is wrong. They suspect instead that Anurognathus sat in wait for its prey, and then sallied forth to intercept it like a surface-to-air missile.They came to this conclusion by comparing Anurognathus with 36 birds and 20 bats from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Using a mix of...
U.S. electric vehicle maker Telsa Motors has paid back its 2010 loan awarded by the Department of Energy. Following payments made in 2012 and earlier in 2013, the May 22 payment of $451.8 million repays the full loan amount with interest.
First came the Wright Brothers. Then it was Charles Lindbergh crossing the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis. In 1990, Eric Raymond made aviation history to much less fanfare with the first solar airplane crossing of the United States. Now it is Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg making history by flying across America in SOLAR IMPULSE, a 100
If short-term traders really have hijacked the sector, which seems probable, it would mark a relatively big setback for stocks that were once popular among aggressive longer-term investors who liked the strong prospects of solar energy. Of course that doesn’t mean that serious investors will never return to the sector if it ever manages to stabiliz
UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey has warned that Scotland will damage its standing as a prime mover in renewable energy if it votes to become independent.
Japanese companies are renewing their interest in geothermal energy after the March 2011 nuclear crisis shut down reactors for safety checks and the introduction of an incentive program for clean energy encouraged investment.
