Although a number of countries, including China and Russia, have suggested replacing the dollar as the world's reserve currency, the UNCTAD report is the first time a major multinational institution has posited such a suggestion.

In essence, the report calls for a new Bretton Woods-style system of managed international exchange rates, meaning central banks would be forced to intervene and either support or push down their currencies depending on how the rest of the world economy is behaving.

The proposals would also imply that surplus nations such as China and Germany should stimulate their economies further in order to cut their own imbalances, rather than, as in the present system, deficit nations such as the UK and US having to take the main burden of readjustment.

Norwegian oil and gas giant StatoilHydro has inaugurated the world's first floating full-scale offshore wind turbine, paving the way for deep-water wind farms possessing the dual appeal of being out of sight as well as more efficient.

The turbine, known as Hywind, towers 213 feet above the waterline, but the steel spar on which it is mounted plunges another 328 feet below the surface, where it is anchored to the sea floor by three stabilizing cables. The spar is filled with water and rocks to provide ballast that keeps the turbine from capsizing in rough seas. Located about six miles off of Karmoey near the country's southwestern coastline, Hywind will serve as a test bed for offshore technologies over the next two years as engineers work on getting the cost of Hywind down and figure out how best to develop even larger deep-water turbines.

First Solar just signed an agreement with China to build the biggest solar power plant yet, according to a statement released today by the company. The 2-gigawatt plant in the Mongolian desert will generate enough electricity to power three million homes.

That's a heck of a lot of cadmium telluride, the semiconductor they use for their thin film cells.

The largest solar plant currently in operation is a mere 60-megawatt plant in Spain, according to pvresources.com.

First Solar and China officially signed a memorandum of understanding, which is still up for final negotiations. The plan is to start building a 30-megawatt phase this summer, adding more and more until the final phase is complete in 2019.

Earlier this year, First Solar became the first company to produce solar cells at less than a dollar per watt, crossing the boundary thought to make solar power competitive with traditional energy sources.

As part of a greater effort to someday build computing elements at an atomic scale, IBM scientists in Zurich have taken the highest-resolution image ever of an individual molecule using non-contact atomic force microscopy. Performed in an ultrahigh vacuum at 5 degrees Kelvin, scientists were able to "to look through the electron cloud and see the atomic backbone of an individual molecule for the first time," a feat necessary for the further development of atomic scale electronic building blocks.

Atomic force microscopy employs a cantilever so small that its tip tapers to a nanoscale point. As the microscope scans, the cantilever bounces up and down in response to the miniscule forces between the tip and the sample, generating a picture of the sample’s surface. The pentacene molecule sampled consists of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms and measures 1.4 nanometers in length, with the space between carbon atoms registering at 0.14 nanometers, or ha Read Full Story
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A printing technique that could stamp out features just tens of nanometers across at industrial scale is finally moving out of the lab. The new roll-to-roll nanoimprint lithography system could be used to cheaply and efficiently churn out nano-patterned optical films to improve the performance of displays and solar cells.

The most efficient possible display technology would be something that bypasses the eyes altogether and sends information straight to the brain. Sadly, cranial USB ports are still pretty hard to install. The second most efficient possible display technology anyone's devised projects images directly into the eye. The dream of a wearable virtual retinal display, or VRD, has been around for nearly two decades; it's on the horizon, but it's still going to be a while until it gets here.

Merck was in trouble. In 2002, the pharmaceutical giant was falling behind its rivals in sales. Even worse, patents on five blockbuster drugs were about to expire, which would allow cheaper generics to flood the market. The company hadn't introduced a truly new product in three years, and its stock price was plummeting.

In interviews with the press, Edward Scolnick, Merck's research director, laid out his battle plan to restore the firm to preeminence. Key to his strategy was expanding the company's reach into the antidepressant market, where Merck had lagged while competitors like Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline created some of the best-selling drugs in the world. "To remain dominant in the future," he told Forbes, "we need to dominate the central nervous system."

Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing".

"We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again," he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como.

"If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.

China's reserves are more than �" $2 trillion, the world's largest.

Russia has denied a cargo ship whose apparent disappearance sparked an international mystery was carrying S-300 anti-aircraft missiles bound for Iran.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, on Tuesday dismissed a report in a British newspaper that the Arctic Sea was carrying a batch of the sophisticated Russian-made weapons when it was apparently hijacked by pirates.

"Regarding the S-300s on board the Arctic Sea, this is absolutely untrue," Lavrov said.

Russian investigators also announced they had begun inspecting the ship and so far had only found its official cargo of timber.

Cindy Sheehan will be at Martha’s Vineyard beginning August 25 a short way from Obama’s vacation paradise of the celebrity elite but very far from the Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iraq where the body bags and cemeteries fill up each day as Obama’s wars rage on.    She will remain there from August 25 through August 29 and has issued a call for all peace activists to join her there.  For those of us close by in the New England states and in New York City, there would seem to be a special obligation to get to Martha’s Vineyard as soon as we can.

Does bad judgment or rude behavior by any citizen justify the use of force of an electric shock by the police in America?

Here we go again, another officer with poor or nonexistent communication skills using the Taser in a manner unacceptable in a free society. This new report comes from not New York City where you expect rude behavior to be the norm, but from the wild west of Glenrock, Wyoming.

Wasn’t it the Bush Administration that coined the phrase, “Freedom isn’t free.”? I’m left to wonder, free of what; free of excessive force from our own police force? Just going through the airport in America I’m made to feel like a criminal in ways you won’t feel going through airports in Europe. In Russia you get robbed over luggage charges but you expect it. In America we now get not just robbed by Wall Street, but there is a growing trend of being mugged by our own police forces.

Like many of the reports seen on YouTube and Read Full Story
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