March 31, 2011 – Bic, the French manufacturer of pens and cigarette lighters, is using recycled polystyrene from old refrigerators to produce a new line of sustainable pencils, according to Waste & Recycling News.

The polystyrene used to make the “Ecolution” pencils is recycled by Axion Polymers in the UK. In its finished form, the pencil can be sharpened in a typical pencil sharpener and is said to have the same feel as cedar—the wood generally used to make pencils.

Because cedar is such a slow-growing tree, it is not a sustainable material for such a short-lived consumer product, Axion director Keith Freegard said.

“Furthermore, the traditional manufacturing process to produce a graphite-leaded, wooden pencil is slow and involves high levels of wood waste,” he said.

Axion said the polystyrene in a single refrigerator can be used to make about 640 pencils, saving 2,300 metric tons of carbond dioxide emissions in the process.

The recycler worked with Ineos Styrenics to develop the recycling process for Bic. Bic has yet to unveil the new product, which will be marketed to environmentally-conscious consumers.

 Retweet This Post

Libyan women protesters carry the effigy of Moammar Gadhafi as they shout slogans during a demonstration in Benghazi, Libya, Thursday, March 31, 2011 (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)

A key Libyan official involved in negotiations on the future of Moammar Gadhafi’s regime said Friday that Tripoli was attempting to hold talks with the U.S., Britain and France to find a mutual end to the crisis.

Abdul-Ati al-Obeidi, a former Libyan prime minister, said Gadhafi’s government was reaching out to those leading the international military campaign in an attempt to halt air strikes against regime targets which began March 19. The claim follows confirmation that a Libyan government aide has held talks in Britain with U.K. officials in recent days.

“We are trying to talk to the British, the French and the Americans to stop the killing of people. We are trying to find a mutual solution,” al-Obeidi told Britain’s Channel 4 News, speaking in Tripoli.

Meanwhile, rebel leaders pressed for a cease-fire on the condition that troops loyal to Gadhafi be pulled from contested cities.

Despite losing ground in the last few days, largely due to a lack of U.N. air support because of weather, outside military observers claim the rebel forces are beginning to become more organized. The rebels were also moving Friday to generate sales of oil from captured production facilities.

Al-Obeidi was involved last month in Gadhafi-sanctioned negotiations with the African Union.

British Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman, Steve Field, said the U.K. has been in contact with a number of Libyan officials over recent weeks, though he declined to give specific details.

“We are sending them all one very clear message, which is that Gadhafi must go,” he told reporters.

Mohammed Ismail, a senior aide to Gadhafi’s son, Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, has met with and also spoken by phone to British officials, who repeated to him their public calls for the Libyan leader to step down.

Two people familiar with the matter, who both demanded anonymity to discuss details, said Ismail had been in Britain to visit relatives, and that, when officials became aware of this, they took the opportunity to hold talks.

Field insisted that Britain had not been involved in negotiating any possible trade-offs aimed at sealing Gadhafi’s exit from power. “There are no deals,” he said.

At an undisclosed location, thought to be in southern England, officials continued Friday to debrief Libya’s ex-foreign minister, Moussa Koussa, who fled Tripoli and flew to England on Wednesday.

Koussa, 62, is the highest ranking member of Gadhafi’s regime to quit so far and had been a longtime aide throughout the tyrant’s 42-year rule.

David Solomont, the U.S. ambassador in Spain, said Gadhafi supporters appeared to be losing confidence in the likelihood he will cling to power. “I think he is becoming increasingly more isolated in his own country,” Solomont told reporters in Madrid on Friday.

A second senior Libyan official, Ali Abdessalam Treki — Libya’s former envoy to the U.N. and also a former foreign minister — announced that he had quit Thursday.

But in a telephone interview Friday with Libyan state TV, the country’s current intelligence chief, Bouzeid Dorda, denied Treki had defected.

Scottish prosecutors are planning to interview Koussa over the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, which killed 270 people — most of them Americans. Libya acknowledged responsibility for the terrorist attack in 2003, and authorities in Scotland believe Koussa may hold vital information on who ordered to plot.

Six Libyans, including a brother-in-law of Gadhafi, were convicted in absentia for their roles in the bombing, and Libya agreed to pay $170 million in compensation, though stopped short of acknowledging responsibility.

 Retweet This Post

Genetic Robots Consisting of cylindrical tubes and ball-and-socket joints, Fraunhofer’s Genetic Robots can be constructed by other robots to perform tasks based on a range of external factors. Fraunhofer IPA

In sci-fi lore, one of the great qualifying events leading up to the eventual war with and enslavement by our machines is the moment when robots begin replicating – that is, they begin manufacturing themselves without help from humans. If that’s the case, then the latest news out of the Fraunhofer Institute should be particularly discomforting. Researchers there have created so-called genetic robots that are created fully automatically from a genetic software algorithm and a 3-D printer, no human intervention necessary.

The notion of genetic robots certainly isn’t new, but the Fraunhofer team has reached a milestone by creating a computer algorithm that can take into account environmental factors, physical laws, the task at hand, and other external characteristics to design -– from scratch – a robot for the job. Using additive manufacturing (3-D printing), the algorithm can design a multitude of possible robots for a job and select the one it thinks is best, all from a few inputs either from a human or from another computer program.

Right now, those inputs and the robots are fairly simple – “build a robot that can efficiently move across this level surface,” for instance – resulting in ‘bots consisting of cylinder-shaped tubes, ball-and-socket-joints, and tiny actuators that drive them. But as they become more sophisticated, it’s not a stretch to think that factories, homes, and (dare we say it?) militaries might be able to design task-specific, on demand robots.

So what’s so “genetic” about these robots? The software takes into account the kinds of tasks and environmental factors a particular robot will face – like whether it will travel over solid ground, swim in water, climb stairs, etc. – but because it can design several possible outcomes from a given set of inputs the results vary, much as they do in the biological world. “The algorithm often spits out surprising variations – ‘mutations’ that would not necessarily have occurred to the designer,” says Fraunhofer industrial designer and product developer Andreas Fischer in a press release.

So these ‘bots can mutate over time, traverse land, AND swim in the water? Clearly the Fraunhofer team hasn’t seen Terminator: Salvation.

 Retweet This Post

A Russian officer stands at the entrance of Russia’s plant for destruction of chemical weapons during an open ceremony of in Pochep, 250 miles southwest of Moscow, Russia, on Friday.

POCHEP, Russia — Russia will miss a 2012 deadline for destroying all of its chemical weapons, officials said Friday as they inaugurated a major new plant to dispose of them.

The facility at Pochep, in the western Bryansk region, is the latest of several plants built in Russia in recent years to dismantle its Cold War-era chemical weapons arsenals — the world’s largest.

As a signatory of the international Chemical Weapons Convention, the country already has destroyed about half of its chemical weapons, according to Russian officials.
Blast kills 50 as anti-Taliban elders gather
A pair of suicide bombers disguised as policemen killed 50 people Monday when they attacked a government compound in northwestern Pakistan, officials said. Full story
Continental convicted in deadly Concorde crash
Iran, world powers hold first talks in a year
Remains of missing U.S. balloonists found
‘Spy’ in U.K. parliament faces deportation

It is facing an April 2012 deadline for destroying all its chemical weapons, but Viktor Kholstov, the Russian Ministry of Industry and Trade’s official in charge of chemical disarmament, said Friday the nation will need two or three more years.
He said the delay had been caused by a shortage of funds in the last two years.

‘Financial difficulties’
The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a similar warning in August, saying that, because of the global financial crisis, Russia had run into “financial and technical difficulties” that would stretch the time required for completing the disposal of chemical weapons stockpiles by up to three years.

The United States has acknowledged it will miss the deadline, too. Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller said at the United Nations last month that the U.S. had destroyed 78 percent of the chemical weapons stockpiles and is on pace to destroy 90 percent of its arsenal destroyed by April 2012.

Pochep is home to a stockpile of 7,500 tons of nerve agent — nearly 19 percent of the chemical weapons Russia is committed to destroy. Col.-Gen. Valery Kapashin, a military official in charge of storage and elimination of Russia’s chemical stockpiles, said Pochep is expected to destroy its stock of chemical weapons by the end of 2014.

 Retweet This Post

Cracked Concrete

Researchers at the University of Newcastle in the UK have created a new kind of concrete glue that can patch up the cracks in concrete structures, restoring buildings that have been damaged by seismic events or deteriorated over time. But the glue isn’t an adhesive or some kind of synthetic material; the researchers have custom-designed a bacteria to burrow deep into the cracks in concrete where they produce a mix of calcium carbonate and a special bacteria glue that hardens to the same strength of the surrounding concreate.

“BacillaFilla,” as the researchers call it, is a genetically modified version of Bacillus subtilis, a bacteria commonly found in common soil. The researchers have tweaked it’s genetic properties such that it only begins to germinate when it comes in contact with the highly-specific pH of concrete. Once the cells germinate, they are programmed to crawl as deep as they can into cracks in the concrete, where quorum sensing lets them know when enough bacteria have accumulated.

That accumulation lets the bacteria know they’ve reached the deepest part of the crack, at which point the cells begin to develop into bacterial filaments, cells that produce calcium carbonate, and cells that secrete a kind of bacterial glue that binds everything together. Once hardened, the bacteria is essentially as strong as the concrete itself, restoring structural strength and adding life to the surrounding concrete.

The bacteria also contains a self-destruct gene that keeps it from wildly proliferating away from its concrete target, because a runaway patch of bacterial concrete that continued to grow despite all efforts to stop it would be somewhat annoying. The researchers hope their BacillaFilla will improve the longevity of concrete structures, which can be environmentally costly to erect. It could also be deployed in earthquake stricken zones to quickly reinforce damaged buildings and reduce the number of structures that have to be razed after a disaster.

 Retweet This Post

Palestinian men work on a construction site in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Maale Adumim, near Jerusalem, Sunday, Nov. 14, 2010. (AP / Tara Todras-Whitehill)

JERUSALEM — Israel would be allowed to finish hundreds of apartments already under construction in West Bank settlements even if it agrees to a U.S.-drafted deal to renew a freeze on new construction, a diplomat familiar with the details said Monday.

he U.S. is pressing Israel to renew a settlement slowdown that expired in September in order to get stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks moving again.

In exchange, it is offering Israel military hardware and veto protection against UN resolutions critical of its policies. The U.S. routinely vetoes resolutions critical of Israel, but such moves are not automatic and are negotiated on a case-by-case basis.

Because of the Obama administration’s perceived toughness on Israel, it was not assumed in Israel that the U.S. would back it against the Palestinians at the Security Council if the Palestinians take their case to the UN in the event that peace talks fail.

Cabinet Minister Dan Meridor told Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Monday that U.S. veto protection against unilateral Palestinian UN initiatives would last for a year.

According to the emerging deal, construction would have to halt for 90 days on hundreds of additional homes begun after the first slowdown expired on Sept. 26. But that freeze would not apply to apartments already under construction that were exempted in the first slowdown, the diplomat said.

Officials had earlier given conflicting accounts regarding the fate of those homes.

“From our understanding, what was allowed under the previous freeze can continue. What was not allowed under the previous freeze cannot continue,” the diplomat said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the deal have not been finalized.

According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, 2,140 apartments were under construction in the West Bank at the end of June, the last period for which there are official figures.

It is not clear how many of those homes have been completed since. But to give a rough idea of the pace of construction, nearly 800 apartments were completed in the first six months of the year.

The Palestinians have not said whether they would accept the deal, whose details they have not yet discussed with the Americans, they say. “Once we see it we will meet and have a response,” said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.

The Palestinians have already expressed alarm that the proposal does not include construction in east Jerusalem, their hoped-for capital, but like the Israelis, would find it difficult to resist pressure from President Barack Obama to sign on to the deal.

The Israeli diplomat said the Americans have not set a deadline for an Israeli response.

Israeli settlement construction has become a major obstacle to peacemaking because the Palestinians see it as eroding their claims to both the West Bank and east Jerusalem as part of a future state that would also include the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. The Palestinians say there is no point in negotiating if the Israelis continue to build homes on captured territory claimed by the Palestinians.

Israel captured all three territories in the 1967 Mideast war. It withdrew from Gaza in 2005 but continues to control the other two areas, where half a million Jewish settlers live.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio that the White House wants to give — not sell — Israel 20 stealth jet fighters in exchange for renewing the moratorium.

The $3 billion will come “from the American administration, not from us,” he said, and not from an additional $3 billion in annual aid that Israel receives from the United States, Barak said in an interview from Paris.

Cabinet minister Yuli Edelstein had said Sunday that the jets would be sold to Israel.

Israel has already ordered 20 F-35 stealth jets — next-generation fighters that are set for delivery beginning in 2015. Barak said the U.S. proposal would provide an additional 20 of the warplanes, which developers say would be capable of reaching as far as Iran undetected by radar.

Barak said the supply of the planes was not contingent on concluding a final peace deal. A broad security arrangement that would involve far more military hardware would require a peace agreement, he said.

In a separate development, Israeli troops raided a house in the West Bank town of Tulkarem early Monday, seizing money and possessions of suspected Hamas supporter, Ali Dadu. More than $600,000 in cash, jewelry, computers and vehicles were seized from his home and business, said his son, Bara Dadu.

Ali Dadu was convicted in an Israeli military court in August of laundering money for Hamas, the militant Islamic group that rules the Gaza Strip, the military said.

The military said it was entitled to seize possessions equal to the value of the money laundered and said the confiscation was a “message.”

His son called the company a “family business.”

 Retweet This Post

Isn’t the thought of living on water and not stepping onto dry land for even one single thing, simply great? Inhabitants of the “Future Floating Village” experience just this. Located in China’s Fujian Province, Sandu’ao is one of few settlements built on water. This massive self-sustaining floating village includes everything from a convenience store to postal service, from a police station to a series of restaurants.

All the houses in the village are made of wood and are built on sturdy pontoons made of bamboo and wood, wired to plastic barrels and pieces of PVC, to ensure buoyancy. To make sure that this unique village had no threat from the dangerous waves, it is built on an area that is cut off from the open sea. Swinging swiftly, Sandu’ao is said to be China’s largest cultivation base of yellow croakers and various other seafood, including shellfish, shrimp, and giant prawns.

This huge floating village was devastated by aerial bombardments, during the Japanese invasion of World War 2 and took almost a decade to sway on the water again. It includes tens of thousands of cages and fishing nets that not only allow sea farming, but also look like a beautiful plantation on the sea.

 Retweet This Post

AP – U.S. President Barack Obama, right, shakes hands with students during a visit to St. Xavier College in …

NEW DELHI – President Barack Obama appealed Sunday for India and Pakistan to resolve their conflict through dialogue, saying that regional instability will only serve to distract India in its rise as a global economic power.

Answering questions at a town hall meeting at St. Xavier College in Mumbai, Obama expressed support for two strong U.S. allies that see each other as archrivals.

Pakistan is an important partner in the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while Obama has called India a vital economic partner and expressed hopes its roaring economy can help create jobs back in the United States.

But mainly Hindu India and largely Muslim Pakistan — both of which developed nuclear weapons as a deterrent against the other — have fought three wars with each other since they gained independence from Britain in 1947 and they remain deeply suspicious of each other’s motives.

Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s spy agency of helping orchestrate the 2008 terror attacks in Mumbai, while Pakistan sees Indian ties to Afghanistan as an attempt to encircle it.

But with Pakistan reeling from extremist attacks, Obama said India had the biggest stake in seeing Pakistan succeed, stabilize and prosper.

“It is absolutely in your interests, at a time when you’re starting to succeed in incredible ways on the global economic stage, that you (don’t) want the distraction of security instability in your region,” he said. “So my hope is that over time trust develops between the two countries, that dialogue begins — perhaps on less controversial issues, building up to more controversial issues.”

 Retweet This Post

Hundreds of Korean family members separated for more than half a century by the Korean War embraced each other in tearful reunions Saturday, a day after troops exchanged gunfire in the Demilitarized Zone dividing the countries.

“I thought you were dead. Mother missed you so much,” 61-year-old South Korean Lee Min-gwan told his 90-year-old North Korean father, Ri Jong Ryol, according to pool reports by local reporters.

“I did not forget (you) every single day for the past 60 years,” Ri replied to his son, who was 100 days old when they were separated during the war.

Foreign media were not allowed to cover the reunions.

Lee was among 436 South Koreans who traveled by bus to North Korea’s Diamond Mountain resort Saturday to take part in the three-day reunions with about 100 North Korean relatives.

The event is the first in a two-part series of reunions. On Wednesday, about 200 North Koreans are to begin similar three-day reunions with their South Korean relatives at the same resort.

Millions of Korean families were separated after the Korean peninsula’s division in 1945 and the 1950-53 Korean War.

The reunions are emotional for Koreans, as most participants are elderly and are eager to see loved ones before they die. More than 20,800 family members have had brief reunions in face-to-face meetings or by video since a landmark inter-Korean summit in 2000. There are no mail, telephone or e-mail exchanges between ordinary citizens across the heavily fortified border.

The North Koreans told their South Korean relatives that they have led a “worthwhile life,” saying all North Koreans “have formed a big harmonious family under the care of leader Kim Jong Il,” North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.

North Korea proposed the reunions – the first in more than a year – in an apparent conciliatory move after tensions flared over the sinking of a South Korean warship. An international investigation concluded that a North Korean torpedo sank the ship, killing 46 South Korean sailors. North Korea, however, denies involvement.

North Korea has also freed the crew of a South Korean fishing boat seized in August. In an apparent response to its overtures, South Korea sent 5,000 tons of rice to North Korea this past week as part of 10 billion won ($8.5 million) in pledged flood aid.

However, in an abrupt reversal Friday of the apparent thaw in tensions, North Korea fired two rounds at a South Korean guard post in the Demilitarized Zone and South Korean troops immediately fired back. No injuries were reported, and the reason for the attack was unclear.

The shooting came just hours after North Korea threatened to retaliate for South Korea’s refusal last week to hold military talks.

The U.S.-led U.N. Command – which oversees the armistice that ended the Korean War – is considering launching an investigation of the incident, a command official said on condition of anonymity because a final decision had not been made.

The exchange highlighted the security challenges South Korea faces as it prepares to host next month’s Group of 20 summit in Seoul, just 30 miles (50 kilometers) from the border.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asked China on Saturday to use its influence with North Korea to keep it from taking any provocative actions ahead of the summit. Clinton made the request to Chinese Foreign Minster Yang Jiechi on the sidelines of a summit of East Asian leaders in Vietnam.

Communist North Korea has a track record of provocations against South Korea at times of internal change, external pressure or when world attention is focused on Seoul.

In 1987, a year before Seoul hosted the Summer Olympics, North Korean agents planted a bomb on a South Korean plane, killing all 115 people on board. In 2002, when South Korea was jointly hosting soccer’s World Cup along with Japan, a North Korean naval boat sank a South Korean patrol vessel near their disputed western sea border.

 Retweet This Post

We’ve received a tip about an unexpected application for the NFC chip Apple is expected to build into the iPhone 5.

Near Field Communication (NFC) is a short-range wireless connection technology that would turn the iPhone into an electronic wallet or security passkey.

NFC is already in use in Asia and is expected to explode here in the next three to five years, especially if Apple adopts the technology. NFC has been rumored for the iPhone 5, and Apple appears to be gearing up for a NFC revolution. It has made a lot of NFC hires, including a a leading NFC expert and has patented a lot of NFC technology.

If the iPhone 5 does have NFC, applications like an eWallet are a no-brainer. But we’ve been told that Apple is also researching NFC for remote computing.
For example, a NFC iPhone will allow users to carry a lot of their desktop data and settings with them — and load that data onto a compatible Mac.

If users wave a NFC-equipped iPhone at a NFC Mac (they need to be in close proximity to interact), the Mac will load all their applications, settings and data. It will be as though they are sitting at their own machine at home or work. When the user leaves, and the NFC-equipped iPhone is out of range, the host machine returns to its previous state.

“The Mac authenticates with the iPhone, which contains a lot of the information the computer needs, such as bookmarks, passwords and other data,” said our source, who asked to remain anonymous. “The system would essentially turn any Apple computer into your own — like you’re actually working on your own computer. Same settings, look, bookmarks, preferences. It would all be invisible. Your iPhone would be all you needed to unlock your Mac.”

Our source continued: “Address book would show their contacts, and the user would have full access to their information in the same manner they would if they were working from home. This same behavior extends to even showing the same desktop picture, mouse and keyboard settings, and would eventually extend tosoftware licenses and passwords for websites such as Facebook.

“When a person walks away with their iPhone and away from the communication link with the Mac, the original settings of the Mac would be restored. All communications and storage of passwords stays on the user’s iPhone, leaving nothing stored on the computer.

“This functionality is extended to access a user’s home folder, which will be stored and accessed either through storage on MobileMe or by using the Back to My Mac feature to connect to the user’s home folder.”

If true, it raises some interesting possibilities. To do this, Apple may have to add online elements to OS X and its applications. Apple obviously is moving into mobile big time with iOS, but there are some indications that OS X Lion, due next summer, will also have cloud elements.

At the recent demo of OS X Lion, for example, Apple said applications will auto save and auto resume — rather like Google docs. The new MacBook Air looks like a cloud machine, and there’s that massive data center on the east coast.

Apple has been looking at building NFC into the Apple TV, and other PC makers are already building NFC into their machines. Lenovo is offering a NFC as an option on some ThinkPad laptops for secure log-in and online banking using contactless smartcards.

Our source says Apple has always been looking for a way for a user to carry their home folder with them, but with ballooning iTunes and iPhoto libraries, it’s become a challenge.

“I don’t know if this information will be stored on the cloud or not, but I do know that smaller bits such as preference files, system settings, documents, keychain passwords, and other items would be stored on the iPhone for fast retrieval,” they said.

Analyst Sarah Clark of SJB Research, who is also editor of Near Field Communications World, said the key advantage of NFC is that it’s a quick and easy authentication system.

“It makes it very easy to connect two devices together so that information can be transferred between them – much easier than Bluetooth, for instance,” she said.

However, she said the data transfer rate isn’t very fast.

“The usual idea is that you would use NFC to set up the link between the two devices and then do an automatic hand over to a different protocol for doing the actual transfer of data – eg Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, TransferJet etc – and that’s what I imagine would be happening here,” she said.

Our source also cautioned that the technology may never see the light of day. Although Apple has been working on the system for some time, there’s a chance it will never be released.

 Retweet This Post