Italia’s famed sports-car design house will cease to be countries only remaining contract manufacturer. The announcement is part of a framework agreement that the company is in the final stages of negotiating. Pininfarina has had some hard times over the past years. Amidst loosing its losing its CEO, Andrea Pininfarina in a traffic accident back in August, the company faced a huge loss last year. Now creditor banks have approved a financial rescue for the company that saved it from the equivalent of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the U.S. Currently Pininfarina builds the Alfa Romeo Brera coupe and Spider and the Ford Focus coupe-cabriolet, but the company’s production lines are running far below their capacity. The company will fulfill its existing contracts which expire in 2011 and will not seek any new manufacturing orders. Instead, the company will focus exclusively on building electric cars. In 2010 it will commence production of the B0 electric car. The little EV was developed with Bolloré, a French industrial group. Bolloré provides the lithium-metal polymer (LMP) battery pack that sits under the floor and the supercapacitors that gather and store energy recovered during braking. The cars will be […]
WASHINGTON — Chief Warrant Officer James Brad Smith broke five ribs, punctured a lung and shattered bones in his hand and thigh after falling more than 20 feet from a Black Hawk helicopter in Baghdad last month. While he was recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, his doctor suggested he add acupuncture to his treatment to help with the pain. On a recent morning, Col. Richard Niemtzow, an Air Force physician, carefully pushed a short needle into part of Smith’s outer ear. The soldier flinched, saying it felt like he ‘got clipped by something.’ By the time three more of the tiny, gold alloy needles were arranged around the ear, though, the pain from his injuries began to ease. ‘My ribs feel numb now and I feel it a little less in my hand,’ Smith said, raising his injured arm. ‘The pain isn’t as sharp. It’s maybe 50 percent better.’ Acupuncture involves placing very thin needles at specific points on the body to try to control pain and reduce stress. There are only theories about how, why and even whether it might work. Regardless, the ancient Chinese practice has been gradually catching […]
The income of the 400 wealthiest Americans swelled in 2006, soaring nearly 23 percent from the previous year, to an average of $263 million, according to data released Thursday by the Internal Revenue Service. Since 1996, this group has nearly doubled its share of all income earned in the United States. The top 400 paid just more than $18 billion in federal income taxes in 2006, or an average of $45 million, on a record $105 billion in total income - the lowest effective tax rate in the 15 years since the agency began releasing such data. That compares with nearly $1 trillion paid by all other individual taxpayers in 2006. The gains for the richest took place amid a booming economy, in which hedge funds and private equity firms blossomed and the subprime lending machine went into high gear. The rising wealth of the nation’s richest taxpayers will most likely intensify debate among tax and policy analysts about the equitability of the tax code, which analysts say favors the ultrawealthy. Tax cuts enacted by the Bush administration that benefit the wealthy are set to expire by 2011. ‘Until recently, we had a financial […]
A snake is probably the last thing you’d ever want crawling around your heart. But in the case of a new American-Israeli invention called the CardioARM, this medical ‘snake’ device may one day save your life. The new Israeli-American invention came by way of some brainstorming between Israel’s Dr. Alon Wolf and his American colleague Prof. Howie Choset, when Wolf was working as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. ‘Both Howie and myself are experts in snake robotics,’ says Wolf, who is now based at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. ‘We are working with robotic snakes for search and rescue operations. So we started in the back of our minds thinking: if we can send snakes to crawl inside buildings to look for survivors, then why can’t we send the same snake inside our body to fix it?’ A few weeks later, Choset and Wolf had a eureka moment, and found a way to design a robotic snake small enough, strong enough and flexible enough to fit inside the human body. They partnered with the world-renowned Italian surgeon Prof. Marco Zenati, now at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and formed […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
