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Astronauts put finishing touches on lab

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) — Astronauts on the international space station Monday flexed some of the muscles on a robotic arm attached to a new Japanese lab they delivered and helped install on the orbiting outpost.

The $1 billion lab’s robotic arm got its first thorough checkout during a two-hour procedure where it was fully extended, and all six of its joints were moved.

The 33-foot robotic arm was first moved on Saturday, but only very slightly.

It was such a pretty view, we just wanted to share it with you guys, Japanese astronaut Akihiko Hoshide told flight controllers near Tokyo as he operated the arm.

The view from a video camera on the station showed the arm extended with the bright blue Earth in the background.

Great job, Japanese flight controllers said after the testing was successfully completed.

At the end of the test, the arm was folded up and stored, out of the way of the lab’s windows.

Over the summer, the station’s crew will continue checking out the arm. This will culminate with the arm being used to grapple a storage shed that sits atop the lab. Watch astronauts test the arm

The robotic arm won’t be used for any actual work until after the launch into orbit next year of the lab’s third and final section — a porch for exterior experiments — and a second, smaller robotic arm.

The 37-foot lab, named Kibo, Japanese for hope, was delivered by the shuttle and installed on the space station last week. The bus-size lab is the biggest room at the space station.

Later on Monday, astronauts planned to open up Kibo’s storage shed, which has been sealed up since it was moved last week from a different location on the station to the lab.

The lab’s shed — essentially a 14-foot closet or attic — was delivered to the station by another shuttle crew in March.

Astronauts were going to remove some equipment in the shed that is needed in other sections of the space station.

Emily Nelson, a space station flight director, said the shed will provide something that is often in short supply at the orbiting outpost.

If you can imagine how full your house gets with stuff as you go through your life. But you can never have a garage sale and very infrequently can you take anything away. We have that problem on station, she said. This will provide much needed storage space.

On Sunday, astronauts Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. completed the shuttle mission’s third and final spacewalk on the orbiting outpost, replacing an empty gas tank and collecting a sample of dusty debris from a solar power wing’s rotating joint. Watch the spacewalk

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Nissan to debut ‘clean diesel’ vehicle

TOKYO, Japan (AP) — Nissan said Monday it plans to launch its first clean diesel vehicle in Japan this autumn and will send a prototype to next month’s Group of Eight leaders’ summit, where climate change tops the agenda.

Delegates attending the G-8 meeting in Toyako, in northern Japan, will be able to test drive Nissan’s X-TRAIL diesel, a sport utility vehicle based on technology co-developed with French partner Renault.

The eco-friendly M9R engine can deliver powerful acceleration along with emissions levels low enough to meet tougher Japanese regulations slated for October 2009, Nissan said.

While diesel vehicles are popular in Europe, Japanese and American drivers have largely shunned diesel-powered cars for being too dirty, smelly and loud. Diesel cars comprise less than 1 percent of the Japanese passenger vehicle market, according to Nissan.

But Japanese and German automakers, who have been investing heavily in clean diesel technology, are betting that consumers are ready to give next-generation diesel a chance.

Japan’s third-largest carmaker decided to showcase its new diesel technology in an SUV to maximize its strengths, namely power and good fuel efficiency over long distances, said Yo Usuba, Nissan’s senior vice president for power train development.

People can really enjoy driving, Usuba said of the new X-TRAIL, which can get up to 30 percent better gas mileage than its gasoline-based counterparts and similar torque levels to a six-cylinder, 3.5-liter gasoline engine.

found here.

Turning billboards into bags

(CNN) — Binggirl Clemente has worked in environmental advocacy in the Philippines for the past eight years. Today, she leads a project to recycle old billboards into bags backed by local NGO, the Earth Day Network.

The project also promotes environmental education and funds clean-up projects in the local community. Recently, she spoke with CNN.

CNN: How did you come up with the idea?

Clemente: Last year was the election period in the Philippines and there were a lot of advertising banners and campaign banners actually. It’s really proliferating all over the country and since our advocacy is solid waste management, we already started talking about how are we going to address all this waste around us in the country?

Since my business is in the sewing industry, I thought why don’t we try to sew it and make it into something. So we got one and tried to sew it, if the needle could go through it and it did. So I said maybe we could try to make something out of it, at first it was purses, and then eventually since it was May, and June is the start of the school year suggested why don’t we make school bags out of it for the children in the public schools.

This became a concept in my company, and also be a good corporate social responsibility activity, so we started gathering [the old billboards]. It became a private activity for my company and some of our friends who involved themselves in there. So that’s how it started making school bags and giving it away.

CNN: How did it become a community based project?

Clemente: Somebody came to me, an artist, and said, why are you inverting [the bags], why is it all white? I said it was because we have a white thing so we can print what we want to say, manage waste, goodbye garbage. And one more thing is that we don’t want the faces of the politicians coming out in the bag! Since we’ve been sewing, we’ve been advocating in our environmental group, it’s not only about the environment, it’s also about poverty alleviation, women empowerment and employment.

So when we started this at just a small scale it just struck my mind why don’t we make this as a community based. Instead of us making our bags, why don’t we go out there and see if the women who aren’t working if they’d like to learn how to sew. Teaching is not our business, sewing is our business, but there is a compatibility. I brought it up in the Earth Day Network program. They said, yes that is a brilliant idea It struck me that our priorities are empowerment, employment, poverty alleviation, so that’s how we started thinking about it.

CNN: Why do they call Metro Manila the billboard jungle?

Clemente: Metro Manila is all about billboards and banners, billboards and banners. There is no standard size, you can go as big as you want or as small as you want. But no one wants to go small, they want big. There is no strict regulation as to where to install the billboards, this makes me sad because I came from that industry; I left 7 years ago. It would be nice to have a practice in one industry where there is a strict regulation, but what happened in the Philippines, especially in Metro Manila, there was no regulation at all.

Everybody can just put up their own structures anywhere for as long as they get approval from the land owner. Then it became cluttering, then people put them side by side, then on top of each other. There are a lot already, but that’s not what gave us in concept. It was really the political banners that pushed us to say this is too much.

CNN: What are the greater environmental problems affecting the Philippines?

Clemente: Our problem here in Manila is we just dump our waste, we dump it everywhere. We don’t have proper waste management, we have a law, but it’s not being strictly followed. What we are doing here with the tarp bag is just one of the many wastes that is being generated in the country. Normally you recycle the paper, bottle and cans you can take back to factory, but these billboards have no factory to return to make a new tarpaulin.

CNN: What’s your goal for this project?

Clemente: We’re trying to make this whole system as good as we can, so we can set up others in different provinces, so that we will address the waste where it occurs. We are hoping to duplicate this in different provinces, so that every tarpaulin billboard in every province has its own management system, so it doesn’t have to go back to Metro Manila to us here.

CNN: Who were you first clients?

Clemente: We wanted to touch base with the corporations who are using tarpaulins as their advertising banners, after they’ve used the tarpaulins as their advertising banners we want them to send it over to our village where we will make it into bags back for them. It’s like buying back their waste and they can use them as their corporate giveaway bags.

CNN: How do you support the local community?

Clemente: These communities are being supported by the proceeds that we’ve received, we make the bags, the corporations buy them, we make a little profit, then those profits are used to fund all our projects like today and on Sunday, we will be giving away school bags. It didn’t come from anybody’s money anymore, it came from the money we have already generated, from our own activities.

CNN: What’s the message you’re trying to say with this project?

found here.

Shanghai preserves Jewish legacy

SHANGHAI, China (AP) — Shanghai’s Jewish community celebrated the launch Friday of a database that will document the stories of the thousands of refugees who found a safe haven in China’s commercial capital during World War II.

So far the database lists the names of about 600 of the 30,000 Jews who fled to Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s to escape Nazi death camps and other horrors of the Holocaust.

The database, supported by the Israeli and Chinese governments, is housed in a museum in the city’s former Ohel Moshe Synagogue.

The independent state of Israel emerged out of the ashes of the Holocaust and we have the obligation to document and to keep the stories of the past alive for future generations, Israeli Consul General Uri Gutman told local and foreign dignitaries at the event.

Donations from Israeli companies helped finance the creation of the database, which is just beginning to take shape. Those developing it have names and some other information on some 10,000 refugees.

We hope this database will be further supplemented by all sources from around the world, said Shen Xiaoning, a Shanghai vice mayor.

Shanghai was a major trading center long before the war and had a well-established Jewish community, making it a natural destination for many of those fleeing persecution in Europe. And while in many cases Jews were denied entrance to other countries, China was relatively open to refugees.

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Oil prices retreat in Asia

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Oil prices dipped in Asia on Monday, retreating from a record surge late last week, and traders said the market would remain choppy amid jitters about supplies, growing global demand and a weakening dollar.

Crude futures made their biggest single-day leap ever Friday, soaring nearly US$11 for the day to US$138.54 a barrel, a rise of more than 8 percent that battered Wall Street. That came after an increase Thursday of almost US$5.50, taking oil futures more than 13 percent higher in just two days, easily a record on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Midday in Singapore, light, sweet crude for July delivery was down 79 cents to US$137.75 a barrel. In after-hours trading Friday, the contract rose as high as US$139.12.

We’re likely to see some pullback, said Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin Gertz in Singapore. It’s likely that we’re going to see a choppy period of ups and downs.

So far, there has been little sign of weakening demand for crude oil, despite the slowdown in the U.S. and moves by India, Malaysia and other Asian countries to cut subsidies on gasoline, effectively raising retail prices.

It will take some months to see data showing a decline in demand, Shum said. As we go deeper into U.S. summer driving season, we may see demand drop, and that could help pull back pricing.

But he pointed out that in China, a huge driver of oil demand in Asia, authorities have refrained from raising state-set retail prices in recent months, suggesting that demand may not be affected by the surge in global oil prices.

Friday’s jump came after Morgan Stanley analyst Ole Slorer predicted that strong demand in Asia and tight supplies in the Western Hemisphere could drive prices to a once-unthinkable US$150 by early July.

Asian markets sank Monday, tracking Friday’s declines on Wall Street, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged 394.64 points, more than 3 percent, to close at 12,209.81 — its biggest drop in more than 15 months in both percentage and points terms. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index was down 1.7 percent by midday.

Traders also were unnerved by remarks from an Israeli Cabinet minister who was quoted as saying his country would attack Iran if it doesn’t abandon its nuclear program. Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will disappear before Israel does, the Yediot Ahronot daily reported.

Iran is the second-biggest oil producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and traders worry that any conflict with Israel could disrupt global supplies.

A further weakening of the dollar also helped send oil prices higher by enticing overseas buyers armed with stronger currencies and others looking for a hedge against the greenback. But it also represented a stampede by bullish traders and optimistic computer models betting that prices still have further to rise.

The rally was really driven by investors’ capital coming into oil the last two days, said Shum. You throw in this threat from Israel about attacking Iran on top of the dollar weakening, and oil prices are bound to rise.

It was a wild rally on Friday, he said. I’ve never seen that before.

found here.