Prof. Ryuta Kawashima, who helped develop Nintendo's "Brain Age" games, is teaming up with Toyota to develop intelligent cars that will help seniors drive safely, the researcher said on Tuesday.

"We envision future cars will be able to monitor brain and emotional activity to back up elderly drivers," said Kawashima, a Tohoku University scientist who worked on Nintendo's best-selling "Brain Age" games - and whose smiling image is the guide in the series.

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Polycom's new desktop video conferencing system lets you look colleagues in the eye no matter where in the world they are. The HDX-4000 is built around a 20-inch, 1680x1050 widescreen monitor.

 Above the display is a built-in 5-megapixel webcam that can pan, tilt and zoom. The monitor also has four speakers and two microphones. Low-frequency speakers face downwards to bounce sound off your desk, creating richer bass tones. What really sets this monitor apart is the dial-pad built into the base, allowing you to easily make and receive video calls.

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Doug Ellis of Riverview Monuments is finding that its a hard sell to convince customers to buy Hi Tech Tombstones. Engineered to be Hi Tech and weatherproof, they can show digital images and are powered by a solar cell.  To date,  sales = 0,  but hope springs eternal

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Combining a phone, music player and Web browser, analysts say Apple Inc's iPhone is also gaining ground as a "must have" business tool,  despite the flaws.
Google Inc's search engines in 2007 had the iPhone in the number 1 slot on a list of the fastest rising search terms in the US.  This represents a stunning achievement for a product which was only released last summer in the US.  
As always,  the Apple trademark of innovation and quality engineering is leading the product line, and industry observers see it being a serious challenger to Motion Ltd's popular Blackberry line.

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Disasters happen all the time,  some are larger than others,  some do more damage than others.  Anything on a large scale is fascinating and disasters are no exception.  The top 10 worst engineering disasters probably aren't actually the top 10 but they are all rather interesting and we can possibly learn something from them.

As Norman Simenson states however, "Engineering disasters are always the result of bad management and never the result of bad engineering"

We are always going to be human,  so mistakes are impossible to remove completely,  and nature will always be unpredictable.  We can't avoid disasters but we can plan to help reduce their impact.

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MOSCOW: President Vladimir Putin on Monday ordered the creation of a state-run corporation to oversee engineering in high-technology Russian industries, in the latest Kremlin effort to overhaul strategic sectors that have foundered since the Soviet collapse.

Putin's decree, released by the Kremlin, appointed Sergei Chemezov as the head of Rostekhnologia , a holding company that would oversee production and exports of high-technology industrial products.

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When Walter Mossberg speaks, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and the entire consumer electronics industry pay attention. That's because the personal technology guru is fighting a one-man crusade against fiddly mobile phones and rip-off computers.

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Physicists in China and the UK have put forward a new design for a nanoscale water pump . The device, which is inspired by the structure of channels in living cells, pushes water molecules in one direction thanks to charges on the surface of a nanotube. If engineered, it could find use in a number of important applications, including chemical separation, water purification, sensing and drug delivery.

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When Paul Selmer lost his right leg below the knee in a hunting accident, a doctor fitted him with a standard prosthesis that required a waist belt to swing the wooden foot with each step. Selmer remembers it feeling like a “sandbag.”

That was 28 years ago. The gallery owner and small-aircraft pilot is now a devotee of a high-tech device called a PROPRIO foot , which utilizes sensors, artificial intelligence and microprocessors.

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Chinese companies should encourage innovation, protect intellectual property, become more open and keep learning if they hope to become world-class companies, Chinese entrepreneurs said at a forum at the weekend.

Also, they should improve their competitiveness to ensure that they stay at the top of the ladder, entrepreneurs said at the 5th Global Chinese Business Leaders Summit whose theme was "Growing into World Class Enterprises - Inheritance and Innovation."

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South Korea's Samsung Electronics said on Thursday it has developed a new digital X-ray system which can deliver sharper images and save time and money.

With advanced engineering, the digital X-ray detector uses thin-film transistor technology and is the first of its kind in the world, the firm said.

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High in the Bavarian Alps in the Middle Ages, Benedictine monks came up with an ingenious solution to a serious problem.

The monks had been happily brewing beer in their hilltop monasteries for centuries, keeping their strength up with fresh ale and fulfilling their requirement to be self-sufficient. But, like brewers all over Europe, they had a problem with summer.

The summer months were a nightmare for brewers in those pre-refrigeration days. Stopping beer becoming infected was tricky at the best of times, but when the temperature rose the chances of keeping microbes out of the sweet, sticky ale were slim. The Prince of Bavaria even laid down the law on the matter, ruling that no beer could be made between April and September.

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• How do you effectively manage heat buildup in one of these?
• How do you protect the equiment during transportation?
• How do you adequately secure one of these once on site?
• What about maintenance for broken equipment?
• Being a big hunk of metal,  how is it going to react to a lightning strike?

Seems that there are a whole heap of challenges that an engineer could dive into on this.

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The EU narrowed the productivity gap with the US last year for the first time in well over a decade, the European commission reported today.

Driven by significant improvements in Germany, growth in output per worker last year rose to 1.5% in the EU's 27 countries, outpacing that of the world's most competitive economy where productivity was up 0.9%.

But senior commission officials cautioned that the bulk of the productivity gain could be attributed to the cyclical upturn in the economy since 2005 and the bloc still lagged behind the US in key sectors such as wholesale and retail trade, real estate, ICT and to a lesser extent in financial services.

"We simply don't have enough evidence to confirm a general trend reversal," they said. "The evidence for a structural and, therefore, durable pick-up in productivity growth remains scant to date."

GOETTINGEN, Germany - It may have brought the world aspirin, engineering rocket science, quantum physics and the diesel engine, but Germany's days of scientific glory are long gone and it is now hunting for a new generation of Einsteins.

Decades of underfunding and a distaste for the elitism nurtured by Nazis has meant the world's third-largest economy is trailing its global competitors, causing concern among business leaders and provoking warnings from economists.