Eideard

The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening Jan. 4 in the skies over the Houston area flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars.

I would love to visit either.

Even as China prepares to open bullet train service between Beijing and Shanghai by July 1, its steadily expanding high-speed rail network is being pilloried on a scale rare among Chinese citizens and the news media. Complaints include the system’s high costs and fares, the quality of construction and an allegation of self-dealing by a rail minister who was fired this year on grounds of corruption.

Often overlooked amid all the controversy are the very real economic benefits that the world’s most advanced fast-rail system is bringing to China, and the competitive challenges it poses for the United States and Europe.

Just as building the interstate highway system in the United States a half-century ago made modern commerce more feasible on a national scale, China’s ambitious rail rollout is helping to integrate the economy of this sprawling, populous nation. In China’s case, it is doing so on a much faster construction timetable and at significantly higher travel speeds than anything envisioned by the United States in the 1950s…

Zhen Qinan, a founder of the stock exchange in the coastal city of Shenzhen and the recently retired chief executive of ZK Energy, a wind turbine producer in Changsha, said that high-speed trains were making it more convenient to base businesses here in Hunan Province — a populous region that has long provided labor to the factories of the east, but whose mountain ranges have tended to isolate it from the economic mainstream…

Throughout China, real estate prices and investments have risen sharply in the more than 200 inland cities that have already been connected by high-speed lines in the past three years. Businesses are flocking to these cities, now just a few hours by bullet train from China’s busiest and most international metropolises.

Meanwhile, a shift in passenger traffic to the new high-speed rail routes has freed up congested older rail lines for freight. That has allowed coal mines and shippers to switch to cheaper rail transport from costly trucks for heavy cargos.

Because of this shift, plus the further construction of freight rail lines, the tonnage hauled by China’s rail system increased in 2010 by an amount equaling the entire freight carried last year by the combined rail systems of Britain, France, Germany and Poland, according to the World Bank.

The bullet train bonanza, and the competitive challenge it poses for the West, is only likely to increase with the opening of the 1,320-kilometer Beijing-to-Shanghai line, which will create a business corridor between China’s two most dynamic cities. The Ministry of Railways plans 90 bullet trains a day in each direction…

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FedEx could learn today [Friday] what happened to a package containing radioactive materials that went missing a day before.

The company said it is searching in the Tennessee area and that the item is safe as long as nobody tampers with the protective packaging around it.

The item is a cylinder containing rods used for hospital machinery that were being sent to a person in Knoxville, Tennessee, said Sandra Munoz, a company spokeswoman. “The rods are used for quality control calibration,” Munoz said. “We have lots of experience in handling this kind of shipment.”

Munoz said the company may learn more Friday morning when two employees who handled the shipment return to work.

Uh, no one swiped the bar code in transit?

My experience, memory of screw-ups like this – unfortunately – usually ends in tragedy. Often, someone walked off with the radioactive marker source, putting themselves and their families at serious risk.

Phew! They found it. It had been double-boxed and the outer box with shipping info went to the destination. The inner box containing the radioactive rod inside a protective tube – was left aside because of no shipping info – in a FedEx terminal in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Not even officers from Israeli security service Shin Bet can escape the scourge of lost [and stolen] luggage it seems.

A bag belonging to agents travelling with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was mistakenly put on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, not to Washington. Alarmingly the bag contained four 9mm Glock handguns, which are now missing…

The Israeli officers were accompanying Mr Netanyahu to Washington for White House talks with President Barack Obama.

NBC News reported that the handguns had, in accordance with security procedures at New York’s John F Kennedy airport, been placed inside checked luggage. The luggage was then supposed to be put on a connecting flight to Washington however, American Airlines workers at the airport instead sent it right across the country to LAX in Los Angeles.

By the time the luggage was located and recovered, the guns had disappeared, and are presumed to have been stolen.

Hey, life in the fast lane – in 21st Century America.

Not only did Ford reveal the all-electric version of the Transit Connect Electric at the Chicago Auto Show this week, but they also pulled the electric vehicle (EV) into the snowy Chicago streets and allowed us to take it for a quick spin. After our five minutes behind the wheel, we can say that, if your company needs a sensible delivery vehicle that doesn’t have to travel all that far each day, then this should be your electric van of choice. Well, depending on how much these vans will cost, a number we won’t get until later this spring.

The most noticeable thing about the Transit Connect Electric is that this is a fully realized EV. Based on a very popular model – the standard gasoline and diesel Transit Connects have sold around 655,000 units since going on sale in Europe in 2003 and the van won the North American Truck of the Year after its introduction here in 2009 – the Transit Connect Electric feels like a utility car, electric or otherwise, should feel. Ford and its partner on the project, Azure Dynamics, have created a winner.

From what we can tell, the Transit Connect Electric will operate like any other Transit Connect, except that running costs should be far lower than versions that burn CNG or gasoline (or, in Europe, diesel fuel)…

The logistics of building the Transit Connect Electrics look like this. The bodies will be built in Turkey and shipped as rolling chassis to southeast Michigan. There, in a city and plant to be announced later, they will be upfitted with the Force Drive powertrain by Azure…Azure is buying the vehicles from Ford and doing the EV powertrain work themselves, so it will fall to Azure to actually sell the vans…

One of our local electronic geniuses has the first of the turbo-gasoline models in town. He’s averaging ab’t 26mpg. On a typical day, he travels too far for the EV version of this critter.

He loves everything about it. It replaced a truck that averaged 14 mpg. What he might consider – that you will see when you RTFA – is the CNG/LPG version designed for taxis. Since our local public transit buses are powered by natural gas, we already have CNG filling stations in town.

Tracey O’Leary’s new police uniform was barely wrinkled when she made her first arrest this week.

The 39-year-old suburban mom, who took a job with the transit police on a lark, arrested a man for indecent assault during her first day on the job.

“It’s exciting,” said O’Leary, who blushed at the media attention her arrest garnered yesterday. “I really helped somebody,” she said. “That’s why I’m here.”

The arrest came Thursday just under five hours on the job, before O’Leary and her partner, field training officer, Patrolman Tim Ingersoll had even gone to lunch. The pair were above ground in a patrol car when they were dispatched to the Downtown Crossing subway station where a woman told subway personnel she had been groped by another passenger on the Orange Line.

O’Leary said yesterday that the woman, who was irate and not having any of it was very determined to see her assailant arrested. She approached O’Leary directly and told her what happened.

O’Leary said yesterday that after years working in sales and as a stay-at-home mother, she decided to pursue a job in law enforcement. She said she took the civil service exam on a whim with a friend. When an opening came up with the transit police a year and a half later, she took it. O’Leary ended her shift around 2 p.m. Thursday and called her husband of 10 years on her way home to Salem. Her children wanted to know if she used her handcuffs. She did.

Patrolwoman O’Leary – good for you. A welcome addition to the force.

This new green technology 40-foot bus features a high-strength stainless steel body and chassis and a hybrid power system that drives the bus primarily with stored electrical energy. This approach reverses the paradigm of conventional parallel hybrid designs that use electric energy only to supplement the acceleration and torque requirements of a diesel engine.

At the heart of the bus is a chassis made of Nitronic 30, a nitrogen-strengthened stainless steel that is stronger and stiffer than conventional steel. These attributes translate into less material required for a chassis, resulting in reduced weight.

“Nitronic stainless steel is incredibly durable and enables our chassis designs to have significantly longer service life vs. ordinary steel vehicles,” said Bruce Emmons, president of Autokinetics which developed the bus. “The fact that stainless is also 100 percent recyclable and more environmentally friendly to produce than aluminum makes this an ideal green raw material for vehicle structures.”

“The benefits of improved strength-to-weight performance quickly compound to all other vehicles systems such as smaller tires, lighter brakes, batteries, motors and so on,” Emmons said. “By optimizing the total vehicle we have been able to cut the weight almost in half, which has led to performance improvements, most notably fuel economy gains…”

Improved vehicle safety for passengers, lower cost, reduced noise are a given. The decisive factor for local transit systems will be cost to operate.