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“Why do we need walls and ceilings to do a meeting?” asks Michael Ackerbauer of IBM, who is building the company’s virtual world, called the Metaverse. “We’ve had meetings under water and up in the air. Meetings are where you want them to be.”

There have been some mixed reactions to the unconventional model, Ackerbauer admits.

“Some are saying ‘wow, this is great, I’m ready to go.’ Others are scratching their heads,” he says.

Ackerbauer described the Metaverse project this week at Big Blue’s Manhattan offices, where IBM CIO Mark Hennessy was meeting with analysts and journalists to show off a range of technologies IBM uses to help its employees collaborate.

IBM’s two-year-old Metaverse project is in its early stages and it’s not clear just how extensively it will be used throughout the company, which has 372,000 employees worldwide. While a small subset of IBMers do real work in the Metaverse, some of Ackerbauer’s initiatives are simply experiments to see what’s possible.

That’s where the giant boulder comes in. The greenish rock is several times the height of the virtual world’s human inhabitants, who gather around the boulder like office workers chatting by a water cooler.

“You can kick this boulder about 1,400 kilometers,” Ackerbauer says. “We’re just coming up with goofy games on the fly. Let’s see how far we can kick it … what would it be like in zero gravity?”

The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers.

“It’s not a small improvement,” Cui said. “It’s a revolutionary development.”

The breakthrough is described in a paper, “High-performance lithium battery anodes using silicon nanowires,” published online Dec. 16 in Nature Nanotechnology, written by Cui, his graduate chemistry student Candace Chan and five others.

The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels.

“Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly,” Cui said.

The electrical storage capacity of a Li-ion battery is limited by how much lithium can be held in the battery’s anode, which is typically made of carbon. Silicon has a much higher capacity than carbon, but also has a drawback.

Silicon placed in a battery swells as it absorbs positively charged lithium atoms during charging, then shrinks during use (i.e., when playing your iPod) as the lithium is drawn out of the silicon. This expand/shrink cycle typically causes the silicon (often in the form of particles or a thin film) to pulverize, degrading the performance of the battery.

Cui’s battery gets around this problem with nanotechnology. The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture.

Research on silicon in batteries began three decades ago. Chan explained: “The people kind of gave up on it because the capacity wasn’t high enough and the cycle life wasn’t good enough. And it was just because of the shape they were using. It was just too big, and they couldn’t undergo the volume changes.”

Then, along came silicon nanowires. “We just kind of put them together,” Chan said.

For their experiments, Chan grew the nanowires on a stainless steel substrate, providing an excellent electrical connection. “It was a fantastic moment when Candace told me it was working,” Cui said.

The council of ministers has set December 31, 2009 as “the obligatory implementation date for the introduction of electronic identification (EID) of sheep and goats”.

The system was supposed to be in place this year, but the UK pushed for a two-year delay. Animal Welfare Minister Jeff Rooker said: “We do still have concerns about the cost and practicalities of introducing EID and these are recognised in the Commission’s report. We will continue to work in close partnership with industry to discuss the implementation of EID in a way which is practical and industry can make work.”

Rooker also hinted that old goats, dirty or otherwise, and ageing sheep might be excluded from the scheme altogether, saying: “We will also be seeking further amendments to the Regulation to limit the impact of the introduction of the individual recording requirements which exists for older animals.”

Separating the sheep and the goats has long been a potent image in the Christian world.

Matthew’s gospel describes how Jesus said:

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Crucially, the goats are destined for eternal damnation, while the sheep will enter into the kingdom of heaven, having earned their status through good works – feeding the hungry, clothing the poor and the like.

Portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming comprise Lakota country, and the tribe says that if the federal government doesn’t begin diplomatic discussions promptly, liens will be filed on property in the five-state region. Here’s the news release.

“We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us,” said Russell Means, a longtime Indian rights activist. “This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically Article 6 of the Constitution,” which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land.

“It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the U.S. and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent,” he added during a press conference yesterday in Washington.

The new country would issue its own passports and driver licenses, and living there would be tax-free, provided residents renounce their U.S. citizenship, he said, according to a report from Agence France-Presse.

The Lakota say the United States has never honored the pacts, signed with the Great Sioux Nation in 1851 and 1868 at Fort Laramie, Wyo.

“We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children,” said Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977.

Means said the “annexation” of native American land had turned the Lakota into “facsimiles of white people.”

Mr. Cheney was not there when the fire started about 9:15 a.m.; he and President Bush were in the White House Situation Room for an intelligence briefing. The two were informed of the blaze when they returned to the Oval Office, and later went outside together to shake the hands of firefighters who had responded.

…

But, this being Washington, conspiracy theories and political wisecracks were rampant in its aftermath. When Mr. Bush visited wounded soldiers at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in the afternoon, a reporter asked just how Mr. Cheney managed to be in the president’s office at the time of the fire.

Like the London example, this flyer is genuine. You can find it on the City of Chicago’s website here.

You might wonder why, since twenty years ago the car that got the best mileage in the nation was a real techno-wimp compared to what’s on the road today. It wasn’t even a hybrid. But it got better fuel economy than any car sold now – even the Toyota Prius.

Looking back at the 1987 Honda Civic CRX shows us why cars use so much more gas today and about the trade-offs we’ve had to make.

The CRX HF got an Environmental Protection Agency-estimated 57 mpg gallon in highway driving. Today, the most fuel-efficient non-hybrid Civic you can buy gets an EPA-estimated 34 mpg on the highway. Even today’s Honda Civic Hybrid can’t match it, achieving EPA-estimated highway mileage of just 45 mpg. The Toyota Prius, today’s fuel mileage champ, gets 46 mpg on the highway.
Why then, not now?

One answer for the mileage drop is that the rating system has changed. Beginning with the 2008 model year, the EPA began using a more rigorous fuel economy test that means lower numbers for most cars. But that’s only a small part of the answer.

If the old CRX HF were tested using today’s rules, its highway fuel economy would drop to 51 mpg, according to the EPA’s calculations. That’s still much better than any mass-market car sold today, including hybrid cars.

The bigger answer is that the Honda Civic has changed a lot in twenty years. Honda no longer sells a tiny two-seat version like the CRX. Even Civics with back seats are much bigger and heavier today than similar versions were in 1987.

It’s in the nature of the car business that companies want to offer more – more legroom, more trunk space – with each redesign. As a result, cars get bigger and bigger.

Besides size, American consumers expect a lot more convenience out of a car than they did in 1985. Today, we expect power steering, power brakes, power windows and more.

The base CRX HF did not have power steering or power brakes. (As light as it was, it really didn’t need them.) Air conditioning was optional, as it was on most cars in those days, so it didn’t figure into the EPA’s fuel economy ratings.

Today’s consumers also expect safety. In the 1980s, car companies would sell cars that got one-star or two-star crash test ratings. Numbers like that would now cause car companies fits. Four out of five stars is considered the minimum acceptable rating.

The modern Civic has airbags front and side, electronic stability control and built-in crash protecting structures in the body. That’s why today’s Civic is an Insurance Institute for Highway Safety Top Safety Pick.

Even the CRX’s biggest fans wouldn’t relish the thought of getting into a wreck in one of those cars. While actual crash test results are not available, even a Honda (HMC) spokesman admitted the car probably wouldn’t have fared well by modern standards.

“Without the benefit of modern crash structure and extensive use of high strength steel, cars from two decades ago couldn’t match the crash test performance of today’s Hondas,” said Honda spokesman Chris Naughton.

Instead of eyeing up an undervalued company or distressed asset, David Rubenstein snapped up a 13th century copy of Magna Carta – the only one in private hands – for more than £10m.